Page 15

"Kellan—"

I tell myself I need space to finish the shift back fully, and time to think through how to explain something that doesn't have an easy explanation. Both of those things are true.

The larger truth is simpler and harder to face. I'm terrified. Not of the bear, not of whatever's still out there watching Zoey from the shadows. I'm terrified that the one honest, uncomplicated thing I've let myself have in seventeen years is about to end the second she fully understands what I am, terrified that the same fear that killed my parents is about to cost me the first person I've let matter since.

I circle wide through the trees, giving myself distance to finish the shift back and steady my breathing, and by the time I've regained enough control to head back toward where I left her, I still don't have a single word ready that feels like enough.

She deserves the truth. All of it, not the careful, incomplete version I've been giving her for weeks.

I just don't know if I have the courage to give it to her, even now, even after everything we've already survived together.

13

ZOEY

He comes back through the trees fifteen minutes later, fully human again, though something in the way he moves still carries traces of whatever I watched happen to him. I'm sitting exactly where he left me, arms wrapped around my knees, replaying those four seconds over and over until I'm no longer sure what I actually saw and what my mind's filled in trying to make sense of the impossible.

"You're still here," he says, stopping a few feet away like he expected I might have run.

"Where would I go? I don't know these woods as well as you apparently know how to turn into something that isn't entirely human." My voice comes out steadier than I feel, some old instinct for composure kicking in even now. "I need you to talk to me, Kellan. Right now, not in some vague future when you decide I'm ready."

He opens his mouth to answer, and that's when I hear it. Voices, low and controlled, moving through the trees somewhere below us on the slope, along with the distinct metallic click of something I recognize immediately from every security briefing I sat through after the attack. A weapon being checked.

Kellan goes rigid beside me, head turning toward the sound with an intensity that reads as pure animal alertness even in his human body. "Get down," he says, voice dropped to almost nothing. "Now."

I drop into the brush beside him without arguing, heart hammering as the voices grow slightly clearer. Two men, maybe three, moving in a coordinated pattern that doesn't sound like hikers or hunters. One of them says something about a perimeter sweep. Another mentions checking the ridge before dark.

"They're looking for something," I whisper. "Or someone."

"Both, probably." Kellan's eyes track the movement through the trees. "We need to move. Quietly, and fast."

We start working our way up the slope, staying low, and for a while it seems like we might actually get clear without being seen. Then a branch snaps under my foot, sharp in the quiet forest, and the voices below go instantly silent.

"Movement, ridge line," one of them calls out, no longer bothering to stay quiet. "Converging."

"Run," Kellan says, already pulling me up the slope. "Straight line, don't look back."

We run. I've never moved through forest terrain this fast in my life, branches tearing at my arms, my lungs burning within the first thirty seconds, and behind us I can hear them closing the distance with the kind of trained efficiency that makes it clear these aren't amateurs. A shout goes up when they spot us properly, and then something cracks past close enough that I understand, with a cold, immediate certainty, that whoever these people are, they're not here to talk.

Kellan shoves me behind a fallen tree hard enough that I go down, and by the time I look up, he's not human anymore.

The wolf that used to be Kellan is enormous, easily the size of a man on all fours, and it moves toward the approaching threat with a speed and purpose that should terrify me and somehow, impossibly, doesn't.

I watch him meet the first man before the man can even properly aim, watch him move with a controlled brutality that disarms rather than kills, watch him take a graze along his shoulder from a second shot without so much as slowing down. It's the most frightening thing I've ever witnessed and also, somehow, the most beautiful, this massive animal fighting with everything he has to keep me alive, no hesitation in it at all.

The remaining attackers break off within a minute, retreating through the trees rather than risk whatever they're facing, and the forest goes quiet again except for my own ragged breathing and the low, wounded sound the wolf makes as the adrenaline starts to fade.

I don't run. I don't scream. I crawl out from behind the fallen tree instead and move toward him slowly, hands out, the same way I imagine he'd approach something wild and frightened.

"Kellan," I say quietly. "It's me. I'm not afraid."

The wolf watches me with eyes that are unmistakably his, gray and familiar even in this impossible shape, and something in his posture eases slightly at the sound of my voice. I kneel beside him, careful of the wound along his shoulder, and rest my hand against his fur without a single moment of hesitation.

"You saved my life. Twice now, if you count the bear." My voice shakes, but not from fear. "I don't care what you are. I care that you just fought off armed men to keep me breathing."

He stays there a moment longer, then slowly, the shift reverses, fur receding, bones and muscle resettling until he's human again, kneeling in front of me with blood soaking through the shoulder of what's left of his shirt.

"You should be running," he says, voice rough. "Not touching me like nothing just happened."