Chapter 9 - What She's Becoming
587 Words
Three weeks out of Shadow Pack, and Kaela was changing.
She wasn't sure when she'd started noticing it exactly. It had been gradual. At first, she told herself it was a change. Stress did things to the body. Eating often, sleeping alone, and spending only a few hours on others' needs helped too.
But this was not adjustable.
She healed too fast.
A kitchen burn that should have blistered was gone by morning. A gash on her arm from a broken crate, cleaned and wrapped before bed, was gone by dawn. Not scabbed. Gone. Smooth skin where the wound had been.
She moved faster than she should have.
Not always. Sometimes, like when I reached for something at the bar or caught a dropped glass, the motion felt odd for a moment. It was too fast or too precise.
And the sensing. She had always been observant, had always tracked the room, but this was different. She knew when someone became upset before they expressed their feelings. She knew when the door was going to open before she heard the latch. Twice, she stepped aside before someone rounded a corner. She avoided a collision that hadn’t happened yet.
She had started researching.
Ashfen had a small library. It was next to the village record hall. Most of the books were practical, but there was also a section of older material in the back. She went there on her days off. She worked through the older texts, following different threads.
Wolf history. Pack genealogy. Shifter taxonomy.
And then, in a text so old that we had to handle it with both hands and read it in the right light:
Lycan.
Not the word as she'd heard it before, whispered, occasional, half-mythological. Lycan as a biological designation. Lycan is the original form. It’s the ancestor line and the source of all wolfkind. Lycan is the reason wolves shifted at all.
She read for three hours.
She went back to the inn, sat on the edge of her bed, and thought for a very long time.
In the morning, she went back and read more.
What she found was not frightening, exactly. It made her rethink almost everything she knew about herself. This was more disorienting than scary.
She did not have a wolf.
She had the wrong category.
She was something that hadn't existed, according to the texts, in over three centuries. A hybrid. Half the old line, half the new. A combination that seemed impossible was, in fact, her.
She sat with this.
She was still sitting with it when the letter came.
Bera brought it up herself, which meant she had taken it straight from someone, not pushed it under the door. "The courier came. Wouldn't say who sent it."
Kaela looked at the envelope.
No name. A compass rose, stamped in old ink.
Her hands were very steady when she opened it.
Inside: one line, in clean, careful script.
Your father is alive; come south.
She read it twice.
She folded it and pressed it flat between her palms. Looking at the ceiling of her small room, she felt a strange, dizzying shift beneath her. It was as if the ground had never been as solid as she believed.
Her father.
Alive.
She thought of Voss. Whatever you discover when you leave, she thought of the merchant. If you end up needing help understanding what you are.
She thought of her hands, full of golden light, in the dark before she left.
She began to pack.
- Writer
