Page 88 of The Fanged One

Yes, her wolf snarled, all teeth now. There. Bite. Ours.

"Do it," Linnea begged, the words torn out of her. "Claim me. I'm choosing it. Claim me, and I'll claim you right back."

Fenris's teeth sank into the meat of her shoulder, the sting of it lighting up every nerve, and the bond snapped taut between them like a struck string. No one had ever loved her as he did in her whole life; it was a flood, with nothing at all held back.

Linnea turned her head and bit down hard on his throat, and the bond between them locked shut at both ends. His whole body shuddered and came apart above her. He spilled into her on a broken sound that she took straight into her own chest, her own release tearing through her and dragging him over the edge with it, the two of them claiming each other in the same breath.

When Linnea came back to herself, he was there. Not beside her but in her like a second heartbeat. Down the new thread between them came his relief, wonder, and naked terror at how much he wanted this, laid as bare as if he had said every word of it aloud.

Linnea sent her own back the same way, everything she had never once had the courage to say, and it landed in him hard enough that his arms locked around her like he might come apart without them. Magic and love ran both ways until she was drowning in it. She could no more be a passing warmth to him than he could be to her. They were equals, down to the root.

Fenris's hand found hers, their fingers twining together, and lifted them to kiss her hand over and over. Linnea remembered the horrible moment on the path when he had offered his hand, and she had refused him. She vowed never to do that to him again, no matter how angry they were with each other.

For a long moment, she lay spent and shaking on his chest, both their hearts going like war drums. Magic danced through her, and for a moment she thought it was the mating bond settling again.

"Linnea, what's wrong?" Fenris asked, already feeling it.

"I…don't know…" Linnea pushed up off Fenris's chest and moved back on the furs onto all fours, her hair falling around her face, a surge of power coming through her like a tide filling a bay.

No one was reaching for a leash. No one was making her do this or forbidding it or deciding it in her place. For the first time in her life, there was only her, the wolf, and a choice that belonged to no one else.

"I accept you," Linnea said to the creature that had lived starved in her dark. She put her hands on her chest, and tears slipped down her cheeks. "I accept you. I love you. I'm so sorry I kept you locked away for so long."

Yours, it breathed, gone soft for the first time in her life.

Yours, she replied and let go.

There was no pain in the shift because nothing was being forced through her against her will.

One breath, she was a woman on her hands and knees in a nest of furs, and the next her spine rolled, her bones slid, and she landed on four paws on the floor. It was like shrugging off a too-tight coat she had been made to wear since birth.

Linnea twisted her head and looked down the length of her own foreleg. The fur on it was a shimmering gray-silver, the same color as Fenris's scarred eye, with every hair tipped in black.

The world came to her sharper through the wolf's eyes, closer and drenched in scent, and nearly all of it was him. Forged steel and silver dust, magic, and the salt of the two of them together.

Fenris sat up slowly on the bed. The god who had been feared by everything that had ever laid eyes on him stared at her in silent wonder, as though the sight of her had stopped his voice.

She stood beside him. His match. His equal. Not his creature and not his to command, a wolf that had walked out of her own cage on her own four feet because she chose to.

Linnea lifted her head, and every ache and every stolen year and every not-enough that had ever been laid across her shoulders poured out of her. She tipped her muzzle to the ceiling of Hel's little hall and howled.

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Fenris opened the door of the bedroom and shifted in the same breath, the change rolling over him in a rush of heat as his mate darted past and into the hall. She was all gray-silver fur and a tail that wouldn't hold still, too pleased with herself to stand and wait like a sensible creature.

The ward Linnea had set on the outer door still hummed across it. Her magic reached out from her with no hand to guide it, free and unafraid, and pressed against the seal. The door blew wide open on a gust of gold light, and the two of them poured out through it into the country of the dead.

The uncanny darkness that had closed in on them in an ambush was gone. Overhead hung a sky scattered with stars, a low white moon riding over the black pines.

The dark still stood in the trees. There was nothing left in it that wanted them. Whatever had reached for them out of every shadow had let go of its grip the moment they had mated, and Linnea walked out of her own cage, and the country had gone quiet and enormous and almost kind.

Was it all another trial of some kind? Fenris tried to scent any danger but found none. Linnea didn't wait for him to make sense of it. She bolted.

She sped across the open ground in a streak of silver, low and fast, drunk on it, and he went after her because nothing in him could have done otherwise. She ran like a mad thing. No fear. No looking back. She ran because she could, because her body was finally her own. Fenris ran at her flank and let her set the pace, infatuated as a puppy.

She wheeled without warning and slammed her shoulder into his, a bratty glancing check that nearly took his legs out, then peeled away with her tongue lolling, daring him. His wolf surged up, joyful and stupid.

Mine, it said proudly. Ours. Look at her.