The Alpha Rejected the wrong luna

First Blood, First Shift

Talon put himself in front of her before she could argue, blade already up, and Wren understood from the set of his shoulders that whatever was coming through the trees, he didn't think they were going to talk their way past it.

"Get behind me," he said. "Whatever you do, don't run. Running is what prey does."

"What is it?"

"I don't know yet. That's the problem."

The thing that broke through the treeline a second later was wrong in a way Wren's mind struggled to file anywhere useful. It moved like a wolf and stood taller than any wolf had a right to, fur gone the color of old iron, and where its eyes should have caught the morning light they held something closer to embers, dull red and constant, like coals that had been burning for longer than the forest around them had existed. It didn't look at Wren first. It looked at the blade in Talon's hand, and a sound came out of its chest that wasn't quite a growl, lower than that, something that vibrated through the ground under her boots.

"Put the blade down," Wren said, because some instinct she didn't have a name for was screaming at her that the weapon was the only thing standing between them and whatever came next getting much worse.

"Are you out of your mind?"

"Put it down, Talon."

He didn't. The wolf lunged.

It moved faster than anything that size should have been able to move, and Talon barely got his blade up in time to turn the angle of the strike instead of taking it head on, and even turned aside it threw him ten feet into the base of a pine hard enough that Wren heard the air leave his lungs from where she stood. The wolf rounded on him again, and Wren's body moved before her mind finished deciding anything, throwing herself into the space between the creature and the man who'd just saved her life for no reason except that he'd promised someone seventeen years ago that he wouldn't stop looking.

The wolf's head came around toward her instead, close enough that she could feel the heat coming off its breath, and Wren braced for the last thing she'd ever feel.

It didn't come.

The creature went still, ember eyes fixed on her collarbone where the mark had settled into a steady low glow, and the growl in its chest changed register into something that sounded almost like confusion. Wren held perfectly still, understanding on some level below language that this was the only reason she was still breathing, and then the fire under her own skin answered whatever it was reading off her, and the pain that followed made the burning from the ceremony feel like nothing at all.

It started in her hands.

Her fingers curled in on themselves without her permission, joints grinding into shapes they weren't built for, and Wren heard herself make a sound she didn't recognize as her own voice, something between a scream and a growl that cracked halfway through. Behind her, Talon was shouting her name, dragging himself upright against the pine, and the wolf backed away from her now instead of toward her, ember eyes widening like it hadn't expected this either.

"Wren." Talon's voice cut through the roaring in her ears. "Wren, look at me. You need to breathe through it, whatever's happening, you cannot fight it, do you understand me, fighting it is what tears people apart—"

She couldn't answer him. Her spine had started following her hands, curling and cracking into an alignment no human back was meant to hold, and the pain of it whited out everything except the animal need to make it stop, to force it back down the way she'd forced everything down her entire life, small and quiet and safe.

"Don't fight it," Talon said again, closer now, close enough that she could feel his hand hovering near her shoulder without quite touching, like he wasn't sure touching her was safe anymore. "Seventeen years of it wanting out, and you're going to fight it now? Let it happen, Wren. Let it happen or it kills you trying."

The ember-eyed wolf let out a sound that might have been warning or might have been recognition, backing further into the treeline as whatever was happening to her body reached something it seemed to understand better than either of the people watching it.

Wren stopped fighting.

The moment she did, the pain didn't vanish, but it changed shape, became something closer to momentum than agony, her body reorganizing itself with a speed that should have killed her and somehow didn't, and the last coherent thought she had before the world dropped away into something wider and sharper and entirely unfamiliar was that she had never, not once in nineteen years, felt anything take up this much space inside her own skin.

When her vision cleared she was looking at Talon from several feet closer to the ground than she should have been, and her hands weren't hands anymore, and somewhere behind her someone else's blood was still soaking into the dirt where the guards had fallen, and the ember-eyed wolf stood at the treeline watching her with an expression she had no way of reading on a face built entirely of teeth and iron-colored fur.

Talon dropped to his knees in front of her, close enough now to touch, and his voice had gone rough with something that wasn't fear anymore.

"There you are," he said. "I've been looking for you since the night they told me you were dead."

Behind him, deep in the trees where the ember-eyed wolf had retreated, three more sets of the same dull red eyes opened in the shadows, watching.