Cold moisture seeped through the denim of my jeans as my hand sank into the wet earth. The throbbing pain dimmed and fell into the background as I stared into Matt and Ryan's hungry eyes, my heart banging against my ribcage while my lungs struggled to catch air.
The moment hung suspended for what seemed like an eternity but was probably only seconds.
Then Ryan took a step forward. Matt's eyes snapped from me to him so fast I didn't have a chance to blink. Ryan turned back just as fast and snarled.
And then all hell broke loose.
I hadn't managed to see who attacked first. In a blur too fast to follow, they crashed together with a force that didn't belong to teenage boys. Ryan staggered sideways into a tree trunk hard enough to shake several pinecones loose. Matt came after him immediately, all civility gone, and Ryan answered with a roar that sounded too deep for any human throat.
The others simply froze, suddenly looking lost. They stood there and watched, chests heaving, eyes reflecting fading scraps of light like coins on the bottom of a fountain.
My hand went to my thigh on pure instinct. There it was, still in my pocket.
Grandpa Gerard's knife.
I'd been carrying it every day like a charm and had almost forgotten about it. I remembered it now. I felt the shape of it through the fabric, small and hard and terribly, absurdly inadequate. Hope hadn't even had the chance to form before it drowned in despair.
Because I knew that if they came for me now, I would never get it out in time. And even if I did manage to take it out, there were too many of them for it to matter.
My thoughts were cut by a tearing sound that split the air.
Fabric first. Then bone.
I looked up. And for the first time, I truly saw .
The truth I had been avoiding, hiding behind words and abstract thoughts and the huge dark shape of my father behind the cracks between the wooden planks of the barn wall. All things I could turn away from until my mind shaped them into something acceptable.
I couldn't escape this. Not anymore.
It happened too fast for me to follow clearly. One second Matt and Ryan were locked together in a mess of fists and teeth and momentum. The next, their bodies convulsed into something bigger, older, unnatural.
Their backs arched with a series of sickening cracks. Limbs lengthened. Heads changed shape mid-snarl. Fur surged across shoulders and flanks like river rapids over stones. The sounds of it, wet, snapping, grinding, threw my mind back to the barn.
So this… this was what had been happening to Dad.
I couldn't look at it. My stomach couldn't take it. It was too horrific, too violent. My eyes shut on their own until the snapping stopped.
When I dared open them again, two enormous wolves stood where boys had been.
Except they were not wolves. Not in any way I knew a wolf to look. They were bigger than any natural wolf had a right to be, broad through the chest and shoulders, heavy with a kind of prehistoric authority that made ordinary predators seem almost diminished by comparison. In the failing light, their bodies looked too large for the forest, as if the trees themselves should have shrunk to make room for them.
One was lighter in color, heavier. Matt, I thought.
The other was leaner, but no less terrifying. Ryan, probably.
They hit each other again with a force that shook the ground under my knees.
I scrambled backward on instinct, dragging my bad shoulder uselessly, and slammed into the base of a young pine. Needles brushed my hair. Sap and damp bark filled my nose.
The other boys still hadn't moved.
One by one, they stopped watching the fight and turned their attention to me, eyes black, glassy orbs, chests heaving. One licked his lips without seeming to know he was doing it.
I pressed my hand harder against the outline of the knife in my pocket. I would use it if I had to, even knowing it would probably do nothing. But I was not going to go down without a fight.
The brawl in front of me turned into pure crashing noise. Jaws snapped, heavy bodies slammed against each other. Dry pine needles, twigs, and pieces of soil and moss exploded upward as furious snarls tore the air apart. Matt drove Ryan back several steps. Ryan twisted and came in low. Teeth flashed. Fur darkened wetly at one shoulder, and I didn't know whose blood it was.
Then, all at once, every head turned.
The fighting wolves. The males around me. All of them now looked toward the same point in the shadows.
At first, I heard nothing over the pounding in my ears.
And then, suddenly, something crashed through the undergrowth, fast and direct, not bothering with stealth. Branches broke in a series of sharp snaps while bushes split open.
The boys closest to me stiffened.
A second later, it hit the clearing like an avalanche.
I barely saw it before impact.
A huge dark shape moving in a blur. Black fur that seemed to glint blue in the low light. Bigger than Matt, it launched low and hard enough to send him rolling sideways. Ryan turned with a startled snarl that cut off in a yelp as the newcomer slammed into him too.
The entire clearing erupted.
The rest of the boys changed almost at once, as if whatever had burst out of the trees had stripped the last human layer off all of them. Bones cracked. Fur tore through fabric.
I could not breathe. I could not think.
All I knew was that the lupine that had come out of nowhere moved through them with terrifying purpose.
There was nothing graceful or heroic in the way it moved.
It was an apocalypse in fur and teeth.
It didn't pause, or even make a sound. Not a growl, a snarl, or any kind of threat. It wasn't there to warn, but to execute. It was obvious in the sheer violent determination with which it moved. It hit, tore, wheeled, and hit again and again and again.
One wolf went down with a shriek and came up limping. Another lunged for his flank and got thrown aside so violently he crashed through a rotten log. Matt came in from the right, tearing into the newcomer's shoulder. It snarled then, vicious and low, jaws closing into Matt's scruff and tossing him a few feet away. Half a breath later, Ryan attacked from the side, digging claws into the dark wolf's rear leg. It turned and bit into Ryan's shoulder so hard I heard the bone snap just as Matt surged again.
For one awful second all three shapes locked together in a chaos of snapping jaws and heaving muscle so brutal my brain could not separate one from the other. Bones snapped, flesh tore, blood sprayed across the moss.
I had to get away. Hide.
Frantically, I looked around, searching for the nearest hiding place. I couldn't get far in my condition, so I had to find something close, fast, while their focus was elsewhere.
And there it was, an old pine tree to my right, its trunk more than twice the width of my body.
I pulled myself up, biting down on the pain until the thick trunk finally stood between me and the nearest rush of bodies.
Bark scraped my back. My shoulder protested. I pressed both hands over my mouth to keep any sound from slipping out.
The forest was a nightmare of noises.
A thud that shivered through the ground.
A bone snapping clean in half.
A yelp cut short.
And then, at last, a snarl so deep and furious it seemed to come from the earth itself.
When silence finally fell, I dared to peek from behind the tree.
The black lupine had Matt by the throat, pinning him down without mercy. I could see Matt's chest moving in shallow, rapid breaths while his body lay still. He was still alive.
Ryan limped sideways through the brush, one foreleg dragging for a step before it found purchase again. Another male had blood darkening the side of his head where one ear was missing. A third crawled backward outright, tail low, eyes wide, head bent in submission.
The clearing reeked of wet earth and fresh blood.
The huge wolf's head turned, and its eyes met mine, inhuman pupils throwing the meager light back.
And then I felt it.
The pull.
It hit me so hard I gasped.
The beast in front of me didn't look like anything I could recognize.
And yet everything inside me knew.
Ethan.
He let Matt drop. His head hit the earth with a weak yelp. The others didn't wait to be told twice. They fled.
Some in limping half-runs. Some crashing through the undergrowth in full panic. Ryan stopped only once to look back, bleeding and panting, eyes bright with pain and head bowed in submission, before disappearing into the trees after the others.
Matt struggled to rise, and I noticed half of his left rear leg was gone, the part beneath the knee ending in a bloodied stump.
I would've felt sick if I wasn't so frightened.
Ethan's gaze was fixed on Matt with sharp focus as he watched him rise. A low growl emanated from his chest. Not loud. A warning.
Head bowed, Matt trotted backward, giving both Ethan and me one last look before he disappeared into the underbrush.
In the aftermath of their departure, silence bled back slowly, under the drip of disturbed foliage and the sound of heavy paws hitting the earth until it was swallowed by the wind moving through the branches.
I still stood behind the tree.
Ethan, if this was him, stood in the middle of the clearing like the aftermath of a hurricane given form.
Blood clotted his fur in more than one place. One foreleg didn't take his full weight. His sides moved too fast with each breath.
He was bigger than I could ever have imagined. Bigger than my fear had known how to picture. It reminded me of the outline in the barn cracks, and somehow that thought made everything worse, because it joined the two images together in my mind until Jack's voice rose clear, as if he were standing beside me.
In that state, instinct has no measure.
The wolf in the clearing took one step toward me.
I flinched before I could stop myself.
He stopped.
The space between us seemed to split open.
My pulse beat everywhere. In my throat. In my wrists. In my ears. Behind my eyes. I could still feel the knife in my pocket, useless and small against my thigh.
His eyes never left mine.
The pull was still there. So was everything else.
The size of him. The blood. The terrible, panting force in his chest. The fact that whatever he was, right now, had just torn through half a dozen unstable males and come out standing.
I remembered Jack's torn sleeve. Elise's tight face. The dreadful certainty in their voices whenever they spoke about instinct outrunning thought.
Ethan took another step.
My back hit bark.
Don't run.
The words that had haunted me since the night I learned the truth rose to the forefront of my thoughts.
His breathing grew heavier.
And with the last of the daylight draining from the clearing, I looked into those huge reflective eyes and knew exactly who he was.
I just couldn't know which part of him would recognize me first.