Author's Preface
Lyra.
6:45 pm
Two and a half hours.
That was how long it took for the rage to burn down far enough that the fear could get in.
I skidded to a stop, paws scattering wet leaves, and stood there in the dark trying to remember how to think. My chest was heaving. The trees around me looked exactly like the trees behind me which looked exactly like the trees to my left and my right and I had absolutely no idea where I was.
That was problem one.
Problem two was the silence.
Bastian’s voice had been in my head for the first hour, sharp and commanding: get back here, Lyra, I’m ordering you to get back. The alpha tone that turned most wolves’ legs to water. I had run through it like it was nothing, which was either brave or catastrophically stupid depending on who you asked.
I hadn’t heard it in a long time now.
The pack link went quiet past Ashveil’s borders. Every wolf knew that. It was the kind of thing you learned young and filed away under information you think you will never personally need.
The cicadas screamed around me in the dark.
Please be unclaimed territory, I thought. Please, please, please—
Anywhere that’s not Shadow Creek.
The name dropped into my head with the weight of an answer I hadn’t wanted.
no.
Anywhere but there.
‘Poison .’ My mental voice came out embarrassingly unsteady. ‘Tell me we didn’t just run into Shadow Creek territory.’
Poison said nothing.
I looked down at myself, really looked, and took stock of the situation as fast as I could. Omega wolf. Pup-sized even at full growth, low to the ground, not built for anything that could generously be called intimidating. Five months pregnant in human form, which in wolf form meant my belly was approximately four inches from the forest floor. I was shaped, if I was being accurate about it, like a very determined barrel with legs.
Running from my own binding ceremony.
Into unknown grounds, potentially enemy territory.
‘Let’s run,’ Poison said abruptly. ‘We should keep running—’
‘We should stop running, that’s how we got here —’
‘Forward running. Different running.’
‘Poison —’
‘Lyra.’
I felt it at the same moment she said it: that fray at the edges of the shift, like a grip loosening finger by finger on something very heavy. Transforming on a moonless night was alpha work. Beta work on a good day. I had been holding this form for two and a half hours on sheer stubbornness and heartbreak and both of those things had a limited fuel supply.
My legs were starting to notice.
I pressed on anyway, pacing in tight circles while the trees stared back at me unhelpfully in every direction.
Think, Lyra. Think like a person.
Thinking like a person meant thinking about this afternoon and thinking about this afternoon meant—
Bastian’s back. Isolde’s face. The particular sound that had been coming through the door before I opened it, the smell, the way time had gone slow and strange while my brain tried to be kind to me—
Yesterday night. His hands in my hair. His mouth on my neck. I can’t wait to make you mine . Said like he meant it. Said the way he always said things, with that low certainty that I had spent four years organizing my entire sense of reality around—
Maybe Elder Constance was right.
I stopped pacing.
The thought was small and it was awful and I hated myself for letting it exist.
Maybe I overreacted. Maybe Isolde deceived him somehow. Maybe there was something I didn’t understand, maybe if I went back and let him explain—
‘Weak,’ Poison spat.
One word. Flat and final.
I flinched. “Take that back.”
She didn’t take it back.
We had never done this before — never sat on opposite sides of something, never looked at each other across a disagreement with real edges on it. Poison had always been difficult in ways that made certain pack members nervous. Headstrong for an omega wolf. Too much something, always too much something, which was apparently a trait we shared.
But she had never turned that look on me before.
It landed somewhere low in my chest and sat there, heavy and new.
My free paw drifted toward my stomach before I remembered I didn’t have hands right now. The movement happened anyway — some instinct that didn’t care what form I was in, just needed to check, just needed to know that part was still okay.
We’re still here, I told the flutter, or tried to. I haven’t figured out the rest of it yet but we’re still here.
Nothing came back.
Too much running. Too much adrenaline. Too much everything.
The nausea arrived without warning and I stood very still and breathed through it while the cicadas continued their completely unnecessary commentary and the dark pressed in from every side and my mental grip on the shift slipped another fraction.
Asher’s face. Maren’s hands on mine, pressing down with that specific weight. Neither of them saying a word.
Go back, something said.
Go back and do what?
I didn’t have an answer. I didn’t have anything except the absolute physical certainty that walking back into Ashveil meant seeing his face and I could not — my legs would not—
‘Lyra.’ Poison’s voice changed entirely. The argument dropped out of it, replaced by something sudden and alert. ‘Left. Through the trees. Look.’
I lifted my head.
Far away — further than I wanted to think about in my current condition — a warm flicker moved steadily between the dark shapes of the trees. Small from here. Almost nothing.
But steady.
Steady meant deliberate. Deliberate meant people. People meant water, meant warmth, meant not being alone in the dark in unknown territory while my body staged a quiet and increasingly convincing revolution.
‘I can smell smoke,’ Poison added. The smugness was back, thin but present. ‘You’d never have caught that in human form.’
‘Don’t .’
‘I’m just— ’
‘I heard you .’ I was already moving. ‘Don’t start .’
~~~
What was supposed to be a ten minutes walk took thirty.
There was no dignified way to describe what my body did during those thirty minutes. I moved and it complained and I moved anyway and it complained louder and somewhere around the twenty minute mark Poison stopped talking entirely and just pushed — her will underneath mine like a hand at my back, keeping the shift intact through sheer stubbornness while my legs did their level best to quit.
The pain under my ribs had a name now. It introduced itself properly around minute twenty-five.
One more minute, Poison said.
I didn’t answer. Answering required energy.
Through the trees they sharpened slowly — two figures around a fire. One adding wood to the flames. The other talking, low enough that I couldn’t make out words, just the unhurried rhythm of it.
Almost there , I told it. Almost .
Something moved in the trees to my left.
I didn’t see it. I didn’t smell it. I didn’t hear it. It was just suddenly there — a blur of movement that my exhausted brain registered approximately three seconds after the hands had already arrived.
It was a rough grip from calloused hands. Firm and precise in a way that felt calculated. One hand catching me by the scruff and lifting like I weighed nothing, the other pressing something cold and flat against my side before the sound I was making had finished leaving my throat.
I threw myself against his grip.
The grip didn’t move.
Then he spoke from above me. Low. Unhurried. With something dangerous living very comfortably underneath the surface of it.
“A wolf on a moonless night.”
A pause. The blade stayed exactly where it was.
“Who the hell are you.”
There had been someone in the trees. Right there, within distance, and I hadn’t smelled them or heard them or felt them at all. Five years of pack training. Two and a half hours of running on pure animal instinct.
I had walked directly into a perimeter I hadn’t known to look for.
The mental hold gave out.
All at once — the shift unwinding from the outside in, bones remembering their original shape, the man’s grip going suddenly uncertain as whatever he was holding became something considerably different from what he’d grabbed.
He made a sharp startled sound.
The ground came up fast.
My last coherent thought, in the half second before the dark took everything—
I’m naked.
Of course I’m naked.