The broken wolf

chapter two: The second wolf

Don't scream, and don't run.

Every part of me wanted to do both.

The growl came again, closer this time, sliding out from the dark space between the biography section and the wall, low and wet and utterly wrong for anything that should exist in a small-town bookstore at seven in the morning. Kade didn't take his eyes off it. He shifted his weight, angling his body fully between me and the shelves, and I realized with a jolt that he wasn't posturing. He was afraid.

"Kade." My own voice came out thin. "What is that."

"Someone who shouldn't be here." He said it without turning around, like he could track the thing by sound alone. "Get behind the counter. Now."

I didn't move. My legs had gone strange and heavy, rooted to the floor the way they sometimes were in the dream, in the moment right before the silver wolf turned to look at me. Some small, rational corner of my mind was screaming that this was insane, that I should be dialing 911, that men who appeared out of nowhere and warned you about growling things in the dark were not men you trusted — and yet.

And yet the coiled thing under my ribs had gone taut as a wire, humming, awake, in a way it had never been awake before. It didn't feel like fear. It felt like recognition.

A shape peeled itself out of the shadows between the shelves.

It wasn't a wolf. Not fully. It walked upright, on two legs, but everything about the proportions was wrong — too tall, shoulders too wide, hands ending in something closer to claws than fingers, a face caught halfway between man and animal, lips pulled back over teeth that had no business fitting in a human mouth. Coarse dark fur ran along his forearms and up the back of his neck, and his eyes, when they found mine, were a flat, hungry yellow.

I should have screamed. My throat only made a small, strangled sound.

"There she is," the thing said, and its voice was almost human, almost reasonable, which was somehow worse than if it had simply snarled. "The little broken thing everyone's been hunting for twenty-one years. Didn't expect you to be so easy to find, sweetheart. Guess the wards finally cracked."

"Torvin." Kade's voice had dropped into something I hadn't heard from him yet — flat, lethal, a warning with no room left for negotiation. "Walk away. This is your only chance."

Torvin laughed, a wet, rasping sound. "You know what she's worth, Kade. You think I'm walking away from a payday like this because you asked nicely?" His yellow eyes slid past Kade, back to me, and I felt it like a physical touch, like something crawling under my skin. "Come quiet, little wolf, and I might not break anything important."

Little wolf.

The words hit something in me I didn't know was there, some old wound with no memory attached to it, and the coiled thing under my ribs surged, hot and violent, up through my chest and into my throat. For one terrifying second I thought I might actually growl back.

Kade must have seen something change in my face, because he said, low and urgent, without looking away from Torvin, "Ivy — whatever you're feeling right now, hold it. Not yet. You're not ready, and if it comes out wrong here, it could kill you."

Kill me. The words didn't make sense and yet some part of me believed them completely.

Torvin didn't wait for either of us to finish talking. He moved — impossibly fast, faster than anything with that much mass should move — and the space between the shelves and the counter simply wasn't there anymore, and then he was.

Kade met him halfway.

What happened next didn't look like a fight so much as a controlled explosion. Kade's coat tore at the shoulders as something underneath him shifted, muscle and bone rearranging with a series of wet, cracking sounds that turned my stomach, and by the time he collided with Torvin he was no longer entirely a man either — taller, broader, a dark ruff of fur bristling along a neck that had thickened into something built for tearing. They hit the nonfiction shelf together and it went over with a crash of falling books and splintering wood, hardcovers scattering across the floor like startled birds.

I did the only thing my body would let me do. I ran for the office — not away, not out the front door like any sane person would, but toward the small kitchenette where we kept the fire extinguisher, because some part of my brain that was apparently still capable of thought had decided that was useful. My hands were shaking so badly I nearly dropped it twice.

Behind me, something roared, deep and furious, and the front window cracked from the force of a body hitting the wall beside it.

I turned back in time to see Torvin — still mostly wolf-shaped now, hunched and monstrous, dark fur matted with blood that I hoped wasn't Kade's — pin Kade against the checkout counter, jaws snapping inches from his throat. Kade's clawed hand was locked around Torvin's throat, holding him back, but his arm was shaking, and I could see, even from here, that he was losing.

I didn't decide to move. My body simply did it, the extinguisher already swinging up, and I brought it down as hard as I could across the back of Torvin's skull.

The impact rattled up my arms and into my teeth. Torvin staggered sideways with a howl of pain and rage, releasing Kade, and for one heartbeat those flat yellow eyes swung toward me instead, full of a fury that promised I would regret that.

"Run," Kade said — no, roared, in a voice that barely sounded human anymore. "Ivy, RUN—"

I didn't run.

I don't know what happened in the next three seconds. I know that Torvin lunged, claws extended, close enough that I felt the wind of the movement against my face, and I know that something in me answered — not thought, not choice, just pure animal reflex breaking through twenty-one years of locked doors all at once. Heat exploded up my spine and out through my hands, and the extinguisher canister in my grip burst, metal shrieking and folding like paper, and Torvin was thrown backward as if something far bigger than me had struck him.

He hit the far wall hard enough to crack the plaster and didn't get up.

Silence rang through the store, broken only by my own ragged breathing and the soft patter of dislodged books settling on the floor. My hands were empty — the extinguisher was gone, in pieces, scattered across the tile like shrapnel — and they didn't look like my hands anymore. Not entirely. My nails had lengthened, darkened, curved at the tips into something that was not human and not quite claw either, caught somewhere terrible in between.

I stared at them. My chest heaved. The coiled thing under my ribs had gone quiet again, retreating as fast as it had surged, leaving me shaking and hollow and more frightened of myself than I had been of either monster in this room.

"Ivy."

Kade's voice, human again, rough with exertion, close behind me. I turned. He was mostly himself once more, the strange rearrangement of bone and muscle folding back into the shape of a man, though his eyes still burned that same impossible blue, brighter now, fixed on my hands like he'd just watched something impossible happen.

"What," I said, and my voice cracked down the middle, "what is happening to me."

Something that might have been relief, or grief, or both, moved across his face. "You're waking up," he said quietly. "Three days early."

Behind him, Torvin's crumpled body twitched — and began, horribly, to laugh.

"Oh," the rogue wheezed, blood-slicked and grinning through broken teeth, "they are going to love this. The Broken Wolf isn't broken anymore." His yellow eyes rolled toward me, gleaming with something like triumph even in defeat. "Every pack from here to the coast is going to know your name by nightfall, little wolf. And not all of them are going to send someone as polite as him to fetch you."

Somewhere in the distance, faint but unmistakable, sirens began to wail — and I realized, with a cold drop in my stomach, that I had absolutely no idea how I was going to explain any of this to the two police officers who were about to walk through that shattered front door.