Adult humans were sometimes bitten by clans that wanted to adopt them, although that was less common than most people thought, as few outsiders were deemed good enough.But it did happen, and I’d never heard of any of them having this much trouble.But I was, I very definitely was, and all of this was so sudden and so unexpected that I had no idea what to do about it.
And neither did Sophie.
But her leopard did, and it wasn’t backing down any more than my wolf was.What had started out as a minor correction from a leading packmate to a junior one was now a full-blown, no-holds-barred fight, and that was dangerous.Hell, that could be deadly!
Even worse, it looked like the old rumors about Naguals being able to kill in spirit form were right on the money, because my wolf howled in pain and fury as claws raked down our back.Blood spurted, fur flew, and my jaws barely missed closing on the creature’s throat after I threw it off.They snapped shut millimeters away, and not because I’d managed to rein in my beast, but because hers was as swift as the smoke it currently resembled.
But it could be hurt, too, despite its appearance.It passed easily through a support column, old with flaking white paint but still solid enough, yet my own claws stopped it when the cat sprang back at me.Blood in the form of a shower of gray-black smoke scattered in the air, and Sophie and her beast screamed as one.
“Get her out,” I managed to growl at Caleb.“Get them all out!”
And he was trying.Caleb wasn’t just one of the best war mages I’d ever known; he was one of the few brave enough to stick out an assignment with a crazy bunch of Weres and the assorted other oddness that made up my clan.But my wolf wasn’t giving him time.
She threw the Nagual against the front windows so hard that it passed through the building to the outside, where it screamed as soon as the sun touched it.And then she spun on Caleb.I yelled a warning because I couldn’t stop her, and a split second later, I was watching a senior war mage’s shield be slashed to ribbons by… not a wolf.
Wolves couldn’t do that; nothing could do that!
Nothing except—
“Aughhhh!”The human in me screamed, and the wolf howled as something hit us.It wasn’t Caleb.He had just used up a week’s worth of magic to reinforce his shields rather than attack his partner.But something was happening to me nonetheless, something bad, and I didn’t have time to figure out what before the damned Nagual returned.
It landed on my back, only it wasn’t my back anymore, or even that of my wolf.I had a split second to glimpse it in what remained of the windows, and it wasn’t even something that looked like a back anymore, but rather a hunched and horrible shape pushing up out of my flesh like a mountain of muscle.I was changing, despite the fact that I was already Changed, but this was taking it further.
Much further.
Huge haunches replaced my formerly sleek ones, covered with black fur, but not anything like mine.This looked like it had come from an old taxidermy animal: coarse, matted, and patchy, revealing bare, knobby skin underneath.Massive arms pushed out of my withers, extending far longer than my previous ones and ending, not with elegant paws, but with giant, oversized hands.
They looked more like a human’s than a wolf’s, if hideously elongated, yet were covered in fur and tipped with curved, dagger-like claws as long as rulers.And my height was shooting up at the same time, my body growing ridiculously tall, even as it flooded with muscle I’d never had, even in wolf form.What washappening?
I blinked, disoriented and confused, as something roared incoherently in my head, loud enough to scatter my thoughts and make me clutch whatever misbegotten face I now had.While an even more confused and horrified Caleb stared up at me.And despite a height that exceeded six feet, he now looked puny and defenseless and—
Prey.
“No!”My brief paralysis broke, and whatever was left of me inside the monster I had become screamed and clawed and fought with everything I had.It was such a savage internal struggle that it might have worked—except for the Nagual.It had Changed, too, into something far more powerful than it had been a moment ago, and was now carving great furrows into my hide with its claws and savagely biting the thick ridge of flesh guarding the back of my neck.
The pain, plus the prey drive, was too much.I leaped, but the few seconds I had managed to buy Caleb was a long time to someone of his experience, and he’d used them.The entire back wall of the old brick structure we were in suddenly blew out, and the kids scattered, while Caleb threw enough magic at me to at least slow me down, only not nearly as much as it should have.
I found my leap finishing in the blaze of a Vegas day, another howl tearing out of my throat as I hit burning sand and blinding light.The Nagual screamed too—it didn’t seem to like the sun—and vanished a moment later in a puff of black smoke.But my more substantial form didn’t go anywhere, and my eyes adjusted all too quickly, scanning the bare earth and tiny scrub and narrow snake of a blacktop until—yes.
There.
I jumped for Caleb again, claws out and horribly elongated jaw gaping, and was hit by a blow that sent me staggering, because he was no longer on the defensive.But a shake of my head and I was back, despite the magic still snapping over my form.I could feel it as we circled each other, and there was enough playing over my skin to have laid out a platoon, yet it was distant to me, annoying rather than intimidating, a sign of weakness.
If that was the best he could do, he was dead, and we both knew it.He was talking now, saying something I couldn’t focus on, just sounds with no meaning behind them to my new ears.But the stench of fear coming off him, I read loud and clear.
PREY.
I jumped, but this time, there was a different sort of howl erupting from my throat.It wasn’t like the others, full of pain or anger, but held a note of desperation instead, a terrified plea because I didn’t want to gut my old friend!It also held something else.
Something magical.
I had used one of the calls of theUlfheðnarin Tartarus, but it wasn’t the first time.I’d used another by instinct a month ago to save Jen’s life, screaming a note lost to time and forcing a Change on her attackers at Wolf’s Head.It had caused them to abruptly tumble back into human form, whether they liked it or not, and a Change like that is often debilitating for moments, if not hours afterwards.
We were about to discover whether the same thing was true for me.
And it seemed so, because I landed on Caleb, not as a creature out of legend, but as a buck ass nude woman, stunned and incapable of anything except bearing us both to the ground by my momentum, which was still that of the beast I had been a second ago.We landed hard, and then the pain hit, a full-on wave of it overriding training and pulling scream after scream out of me, as the full extent of my injuries slammed into me all at once.Followed by a wave of dizziness and darkness, with the last thing I saw being Caleb’s freaked-out face.
“Thefuck,Lia?”
