I stopped dead.
The wolf snarled, lips pulling back from teeth meant to end things.
The bear hesitated. Not confused. Assessing.
Two predators, both fully awake, both deciding whether the fight was worth the cost. The wolf didn’t look at me.
But every inch of him was angled to keep the bear from reaching me.
The bear recovered faster than either of us. It dropped back to all fours, reassessing this new threat, and let out a roar that echoed off the peaks.
James answered.
The sound that came from his throat was nothing I could have imagined. Low at first, building, becoming something primal and massive. A growl that saidI am not prey. I have never been prey. And you have made a terrible mistake.
The bear charged.
James met it.
He moved on pure instinct—no training, no experience, just animal drive taking over where human thought had failed. He dodged the first swipe of claws, snapped at the bear's face. The bear was bigger, stronger, more experienced.
But James was faster. And he was fighting to protect something, even if he didn't know what.
They clashed again and again. Blood appeared—a gash on the bear's shoulder, a wound on James's flank. The snow churned beneath them, stained red in patches.
"James!" I shouted. "Drive it back! Don't engage—just push it away!"
His ears flicked toward me. Something registered.
He changed tactics. Stopped trying to fight and started trying to intimidate, using his speed to charge, snapping and snarling without fully committing. The bear was injured now, confused, facing an opponent that refused to behave predictably.
It made a decision.
With one final roar—frustrated, almost petulant—the grizzly turned and retreated. It lumbered behind the boulder it had emerged from, and the sounds of its movement faded until only silence remained.
James stood in the middle of the churned-up snow, sides heaving, head hanging low.
Then he turned to look at me.
The hum exploded.
I'd suspected. Of course I'd suspected. Frosthaven was a latent shifter academy—every student there carried the potential, even if they didn't know it. And the bond between us, that persistent hum that flared every time he was near... mate bonds didn't form with humans. Some part of me had known since orientation what James might be.
But suspecting and seeing were different things.
He stared at me with those wolf eyes.
He looked down at his paws. Back at me. Down again. A sound escaped him—not a growl, not a whine, something in between. Something that sounded like a question he couldn't form.
What happened to me?
He didn't know. That was the part that cracked my chest open. He'd come to Frosthaven like so many latent shifters—told it was an elite wilderness academy, never told the real reason he'd been recruited. Never told what he might become.
And now he was standing in blood-stained snow in a body he didn't recognize.
Chapter sixteen
The wolf that was James stood frozen in the churned-up snow, sides heaving, eyes wild with a terror that had nothing to do with the bear.
