Page 64 of Legacy Ascended

"My wolf and I have an understanding," Jon says.

I shake my head and then stand in the snow with my hand flat on my sternum, and find that I'm not moving.

The last time I shifted was violence and danger.

My heart is going like I've already run.

Soren comes around the wall but leaves plenty of space between us, hands loose at his sides.

"Do you want me to say it?"

"Yes."

"Don't overthink it," he says. "Just go."

So I find the heat, and I go.

I shift. There's no fight in it at all — no flat place where the drug used to sit, nothing to push through. My spine lengthens and my shoulders drive up and forward, my hands are feet and they're wrong and then they're right, and the whole thing happens fast.

Then the world opens.

Cut grass and cold. Wet stone. The kitchens across the grounds, doing something with onions again. Sheep on the far hill. Somebody's laundry.

And four bonds, all at once, going from clear to blazing.

I take a few careful steps, then a few more. The ache stays exactly where it is and doesn't get worse, and my legs — these ridiculous legs, this reach — feel great.

Jon crouches at the fence with his forearms on the rail and watches me walk, and then says, "No shortening. She's not favoring it," to nobody, in the satisfied voice of a man whose afternoon has been justified.

Then they come around the wall, and I get to watch it properly for once, with nothing on fire.

Luke first, and he doesn't hurry. Deep mahogany, near-black where the wall's shadow falls across him, long-legged and clean-lined, those green eyes startling in a dark face. He stops at the corner and takes the whole field in before he commits to a step — gate, treeline, the slope, me — and then comes at an angle he's evidently decided on, and arrives at exactly the spot where he can see all of it and me at the same time.

Torres doesn't stop at all.

Solid black, thick through the neck and chest, built like something you'd struggle to move with a vehicle. Those amber eyes are on me before he's clear of the wall. He comes straight across the ground and swings in against my good side — deliberately the good side, he's thought about it — and then circles me once, nose up, taking the whole of me in through the air, and what comes down the bond is so uncomplicated and so glad that my chest aches with it.

Soren doesn't come around the wall so much as appear at the end of it.

Iron-gray, darker along the spine, and enormous. He crosses the top of the field without any wasted movement and stands where the ground is highest, and then comes down to me and puts his head briefly alongside my neck, and steps back, and shakes himself out like a man taking his coat off.

And Ander.

Golden-tawny with darker honey down his back and sapphire-blue eyes. Even as a wolf, Ander looks polished. He moves with easy balance, completely at home in this body.

What he can't do is stand still.

He comes three steps into the field and stops, and the bond flicks toward me. Then he adjusts a little left. Flicks again. Then decides on somewhere else entirely, and the whole time it's there she is, still there, still there.

Torres, who misses nothing, goes over and shoves him with one shoulder.

Ander nearly sits down.

We walk first, because I've been told to, and because it turns out walking is hard when you haven't been allowed out of your own body for two weeks.

Up the long side of the field, along the top, down past the gate where Jon is leaning on the rail with a flask. Luke keeps pace on my left. Torres ranges out and comes back.

By the time we've come around again the ache has settled into background noise and my legs want more.