Page 65 of Claimed By The Tracker

"West is compromised," Gideon said. "They've got something new—readings I don't recognize. Whatever it is, it's not standard suppression gear."

"Roan, west," Tara said, not looking up from the anchor lines. "Now."

I heard it before I understood it—a sound like a gunshot wrapped in something colder, and then Jace's voice through the bond wasn't words anymore, just alarm, sharp and absolute. I broke my hold on the anchor and ran.

By the time I reached the porch, Roan was already between Jace and the weapon—a canister launcher, silver-white vapor hissing from a broken housing on the ground, the kind of device Tara had warned us Voss might eventually risk using: a suppression compound bonded to silver at the molecular level, designed to interrupt a shifter's control mid-change and lock the transformation wherever it caught them.

It had been aimed at Jace, mid-shift, vulnerable in the half-second between forms. Roan had put himself in the path of it instead.

The vapor caught his left forearm as he shoved Jace clear. He didn't make a sound at first—just went rigid, his whole body locking around the point of contact, and then the sound that did come out of him was worse than a scream would have been: quiet, controlled, a man working very hard not to let his body's alarm become anyone else's problem.

"Get him inside," Tara was already moving, medic-focused, shouting orders at Maddox before she'd fully processed what she was looking at. "Now, before it sets further."

We got him to the kitchen table. His forearm had gone wrong in a way I didn't have language for yet—skin darkening along old scar lines, fur pushing through in patches that shouldn't have been possible outside a full shift, claws at his fingertips that wouldn't fully retract no matter how hard I watched him try. The silver-bonded compound had caught him exactly between forms and frozen something there, permanent, refusing to let the rest of him catch up.

"Tara." His voice was tight but level. "Talk to me."

"Give me a minute." Her hands moved fast and sure over his arm, testing, assessing. "The compound's already bonded at the cellular level. I can slow the spread, stabilize it—but this isn't reversing. Not tonight. Maybe not ever."

"Define ever."

"I don't know yet." She met his eyes, steady even with what she was telling him. "What I do know is it's stopped spreading past the elbow, and you're not losing the arm, and you're not losing the use of it. You're going to have a hand that doesn't fully shift back. That's the version of this we're dealing with."

The kitchen went very quiet. Outside, the last of the vehicles were pulling back—Maddox's voice on comms confirming the retreat, the immediate threat receding even as the new, permanent one sat on the table in front of us.

Roan looked at his own hand for a long moment—half his, half something else, claws that wouldn't sheath, fur that wouldn't recede—and something moved behind his eyes that wasn't quite grief and wasn't quite acceptance yet either.

"I'd do it again," he said finally, to no one and everyone. "Just so we're clear."

Jace crouched in front of him, still breathing hard from the change and the fight and the half-second he'd nearly lost. "You didn't have to."

"You were mid-shift. Half a second from locked open in the worst possible way, and she—" Roan tipped his head at me without finishing the sentence, but I understood it anyway. He'd put himself between the compound and the man who mattered to me, and by extension, between it and me.

"Thank you," I said. It felt small against what he'd actually done, but it was the truest thing I had.

"Don't thank me." He flexed his changed hand, testing the claws that stayed, the strange new permanence of it. "Just don't waste what it bought you."

Jace's hand found mine under the table, and I held on, and outside the wards hummed low and steady, holding for one more night against everything still coming for us.

"How long until we know the full extent of it?" I asked Tara.

"Days, probably. The compound settles in stages. What you're seeing now might not be the final shape of it." She didn't look up from Roan's arm, still working, still cataloguing. "I'll know more by morning."

"And if it spreads past the elbow after all?"

"Then I'll be having a very different conversation with you tomorrow," Tara said. "Tonight, it's stopped. That's the only promise I'm making."

Roan looked at the claws that wouldn't sheath like a stranger had been introduced to his arm without asking. "For what it's worth," he said, "I've had worse partners than a hand that won't fully behave."

"That's not funny," Jace said.

"Wasn't trying to be funny. Trying to be fine." Roan's eyes found mine, steady despite everything. "Don't make this into something you carry. I made the choice. You didn't put that compound in the air."

"I know that," I said. "It doesn't make it weigh less."

"No," he agreed. "It shouldn't. Just don't let it turn into something it's not."

Gideon set a tablet on the table—readouts, stabilizing numbers, the compound's spread finally leveling off in a chart none of us had wanted to need. "Whatever he sends next, he's shown his hand. We know what he's willing to use now. That's not nothing."