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This was an attack.

Drayce was at the northern approach. Maelin held the right flank. Pike was halfway down the cliff path, fully engaged with the first contact, and Tor could hear him from twenty feet away. “I want the record to show,” Pike announced, driving a modified creature back toward the cliff edge, efficient and creative, like a man who’d been doing this too long to find it alarming, “that I was here before Drayce.”

“The record shows you ran two red lights.” Drayce, without turning his head.

“Those were amber.”

“They were not.”

“Five,” Maelin cut in, silencing both. “All modified. They’re using emotional tactics: grief, fear.” Tor stood at the cliff edge and took in the formation.

They were bigger. Faster and more deliberate than the modified creatures from the last fight, and they moved like things that had been trained rather than driven. A generation further along. And they were not going for the ward line. They were going for the residential boundary behind it.

She’s in the residential zone.

Tor shifted.

Not a partial. His wolf, fully out: no calculation, no measuring. The full shift was not a professional tool. It was made of bone, and it didn’t take requests. He went through the first creature before it finished recalculating. The second dissolved. The third tried the grief tactic and found nothing to grip. He had one orientation right now: the direct line between him and the threat. That line was short, and every creature on it was going over the cliff. On his left, Drayce took the fourth apart with the efficiency Tor had grown up around. It always seemed slightly personal with Drayce. The creature went down cleanly.

The fifth was the problem. It went for Maelin.

Not random. Not proximity. The fifth creature angled for the right flank the moment Drayce committed to the fourth, while Tor was still closing and the formation was stretched thin. It had waited.

Someone told it when to go.

Maelin read the angle and moved right, the correct call. The creature moved faster sideways than anything they’d fought before, and it caught him mid-pivot, left shoulder, full impact. The sound carried over the ocean. Maelin went down on one knee and came up in the same motion, because this was Maelin, but the shoulder hung wrong from thirty feet away, and Tor could already call the outcome. He went for the fifth creature. His wolf stopped calculating and became a single direction. He drove the creature into the basalt, his full weight behind it, and it dissolved. He shifted back to his human form and stood on the cliff in the dark, chest heaving, his left arm bleeding. Same arm, same approach, same cost, and he hadn’t felt it happen. He had tracked the creatures, the formation, Maelin’s flank, the residential line, and somewhere in all that, his own body had stopped counting.

That had never happened before.

Maelin was cataloging his own shoulder damage when Tor reached him, which was the most Maelin thing possible: sitting on the cliff at midnight, running an internal assessment and not making a sound about it. “Rotation?”

“Two weeks. Possibly three.” Flat. A data point.

“Three.”

“I’ll do the scan and decide.”

“Fine. Two if the scan supports it.” Maelin glanced up. “It will.”

“We’ll see.”

“I’ll see. I’ll report.”

Pike spoke from behind Tor. “I enjoy watching you two negotiate. It’s like watching two cliffs decide whether to be cliffs.” Pike went ignored.

“That checks out,” Pike confirmed to himself, and stopped talking. This was Maelin claiming jurisdiction over his own injury timeline, and he was right. Tor respected it enough to drop it. Pike materialized at his elbow, post-fight checks done, eyes already settled on Tor’s left arm. They brightened with delight before he visibly decided to sit on it. He’d put the teasing on hold. Eleven years meant Tor could read that too. “Are you running a behavioral analysis on me in the field?”

“I’m your deputy. It’s my job.” He said this with complete sincerity. “Also, it’s interesting.” Drayce arrived. Took in Maelin. Took in Tor’s arm. Took in the cliff approach, where the modified creatures had deployed in a formation no ambient creature had ever managed. “They knew the rotation.”

“Yes.”

“Four people had the revised schedule.”

One long stare from Drayce. “Start there.”

She stood at the residential boundary again. Farther back than last time: she’d held at the edge of the cobblestones instead of the cliff path, a concession Tor would count as progress. She was still right where he’d have told her not to be, if he’d had five seconds to tell her. He hadn’t. The alert moved faster than any warning could. Everything in him that had run hot since the shift went still when he saw her. Mirelle’s eyes flicked to his arm, then to his face. He registered that.

Her mouth flattened like it did when she’d decided to form an opinion and was working out how to express it. She studied the wound with the focused attention she reserved for information she intended to act on. Her hands were at her sides. She wasn’t reaching for him.