MOONBURN

FENRIR

THALRIC'S POV

Thalric woke with his claws already out.

Not literally — not yet — but his hands were curled so tight against the sheets that when he finally forced them open, four small crescents remained pressed into his palms, red and stinging. His heart was going like he'd just finished the third period of overtime. Sweat cooled along his spine. Outside his window, the Ashwood campus lay dark and quiet, the kind of quiet that belonged to a Tuesday in late July when half the dorms sat empty and preseason was still three weeks off.

"Get it together," he told himself, and underneath the thought, low and rumbling, came the other voice, the one that was always there, closer to a season than a summer, older than the two of them combined.

"Something answered us," Fenrir said.

"It was a dream."

"It was her."

Thalric sat up, pressed the heel of his hand against his sternum, where a heat still lingered like a coal someone had set against his chest and only just removed. He'd had strange dreams before every wolf did, especially young ones still settling into what they were but he'd never had one that left an actual mark. He pulled his collar aside and found nothing there. No burn. No bruise. And yet the ache remained, phantom and insistent, radiating from a point just left of his heart.

"She's close," Fenrir said. "Closer than close is comfortable."

"She isn't anything. We don't know what we saw."

"I know what I scented. Moonlight and something underneath it. Something that shouldn't exist."

Thalric didn't answer that, because he didn't have an answer, and because some part of him, the human part, the part that captained a hockey team and sat through Contracts and kept his face carefully unreadable in a pack full of people who read faces for a living didn't want one yet.

He got up. Pulled on shorts. Went for a run before the sun was fully over the tree line, because it was the only thing that ever quieted Fenrir when he got like this, restless and low-voiced and certain.

---

Ashwood's campus in late July belonged mostly to the wolves.

Not literally the human students didn't know that, would never know that, that was the entire structure the pack had built its life around but the ones who stayed through summer, running conditioning drills and settling territory disputes and keeping half an eye on the woods that bordered the east side of campus, were almost all Thalric's. Pack. Future teammates on the ice, current subjects in every sense that mattered. His father, Alpha Callum Vargthorn, ran the wider territory from the family estate twenty minutes off campus, but here the university, the team, the delicate human-facing performance of it all that was increasingly Thalric's to hold.

He ran the tree line first, out of habit, out of the low simmering need to know his borders were intact.

Kael was waiting at the halfway point, leaning against an oak with the particular loose posture of someone who'd been up all night and didn't especially care who knew it.

"You look like hell," Kael said.

"Thanks."

"No, I mean it. You look like you saw a ghost." Kael fell into step beside him, easy and unbothered the way he always was, second-in-line and proud of exactly none of the responsibility that came with it. "Bad dream, Captain?"

Thalric didn't answer right away, and that, more than anything he could have said, told Kael everything.

"Huh," Kael said. "Fenrir giving you trouble?"

"Tell him," Fenrir said. "He'll understand."

"It was nothing," Thalric said instead, and picked up his pace until conversation became inconvenient.

He didn't believe it was nothing. He hadn't believed it was nothing since the dream had ended and he'd lain there in the dark turning over the details like stones — the forest that wasn't a forest he knew, the moonlight where there'd been no moon, the eyes that had found him across all that impossible distance. Hazel eyes. Human eyes, except for the way they'd gone bright at the edges, silver bleeding into hazel like ink dropped into water.

He'd scented her. That was the part he couldn't explain to Kael, couldn't have explained to anyone, because scenting someone in a shared dream wasn't something that happened, not to wolves who'd built their whole understanding of the world on the reliability of a nose.

Moonlight. Something warm underneath it. And beneath that — faint, buried, almost swallowed whole — something that smelled like *wolf* wrapped inside something that smelled entirely, unmistakably, human.

**Mate,** Fenrir said, and this time Thalric didn't argue, because arguing with certainty that absolute had never once worked, not for any wolf in the history of the pack, not even an Alpha's son who told himself he had better control than that.

---

He didn't tell his father. Not yet.

He told himself it was because there was nothing to tell a dream, a scent that could have been anything, a heat under his sternum that had faded by breakfast into something he could almost convince himself he'd imagined. He told himself the semester hadn't even started. Move-in wasn't for another six weeks. There was time.

But that evening, alone in his room with the window cracked and the sound of the pack's evening runs drifting up from the tree line, Thalric found himself standing at the mirror, shirt off, checking his chest one more time for a mark that wasn't there.

"She's coming here," Fenrir said, with the flat certainty of something that had already happened rather than something that hadn't yet. "Six weeks. Maybe less."

"You don't know that."

"I know it the way I know my own name. She's coming, and when she does, everything you've spent your whole life being ready for is going to matter a great deal less than what your heart decides to do about her."

Thalric turned from the mirror, jaw tight, and told himself the way he'd told himself a hundred things over the years that he needed to believe in order to keep functioning as the person everyone required him to be that whatever this was, whatever it turned into, he would handle it the way he handled everything.

With control.

He didn't yet know that control was the first thing she was going to take from him, without even trying, the moment their eyes actually met.