It’s not a choice. There’s no decision point between human and wolf. One second, I’m standing on two legs, the next I’m on four, and the world has gone sharp and silver. My clothes shred. My bones remake themselves in a sequence of cracks that sounds like a tree splitting in a storm. The shift is fast because my wolf was already at the surface, already coiled, already furious.
I put myself between Cameron and the center pair and meet the first attacker mid-stride.
The impact is a freight collision. Jaw to shoulder, fangs finding fur and muscle. I drag the wolf sideways with my momentum and throw him into the fence. Wire snaps and posts crack. The second center wolf tries to get around me. I catch him across the muzzle with a claw strike that opens his face to the bone. He howls and falls back.
But the flankers are closing on Cameron from both sides, and I can’t cover all the angles.
“Run!” I snarl. It comes out as a bark, but Cameron understands wolf. He turns and bolts toward the pasture.
Not fast enough.
The left flankers cut him off. One of them—a lean brown wolf with scarring across her shoulders—lunges for his legs. Cameron dodges, stumbles, goes down in the wet grass. His hands hit the ground, and the magic detonates.
Fire blows outward from his palms in a ring that scorches the grass to black. The brown wolf catches the edge of it and screams—a sound no wolf should make. She rolls, smoking, and her partner skids to a halt, suddenly unsure.
I catch movement at the pasture’s edge. Warrick is already running—not toward the fight, but away from it, flat out toward the ranch, arms pumping, faster than I’d have given a teenager credit for. He read the situation and made the right call. The girl with braids has dropped into the grass and frozen, low and invisible, waiting it out. Also the right call.
Someone’s been teaching these two. They’re not panicking. They’re surviving.
Cameron is on his knees in a circle of charred earth, hands planted, fire crawling up his forearms. His face is white. The magic isn’t controlled; it’s reactive, defensive, his body doing what his mind can’t coordinate. The fire pulses with his breathing, expanding and contracting.
The gray wolf with the torn ear—the leader—circles wide around Cameron’s fire ring and comes at me from behind. I spin, but he’s fast for his size, and his jaws find my flank, ripping down to rib bones. Pain rips down my side. I twist, grab the scruff of his neck, and throw him. He tumbles, recovers, comes again.
Three on me now. The two I injured have regrouped, and they’re working together; one high, one low, the classic pack takedown. I block the high attack, and the low one tears into my hind leg. My blood hits the grass, bright red on green.
I’m losing this. Three-to-one odds with a fourth circling, and I need to get to Cameron, but I can’t break free. My pack is back at the ranch. Too far to hear the fight, too far to respond in time.
“Rook!” I howl. Full alpha command. The sound carries across the valley. If he’s in range, he’ll come. If. That’s a big goddamn if.
The torn-ear gray drives in again. I meet him head-on, jaws locking around each other’s throats. We twist and slam into the dirt. He’s strong, an older wolf, experienced, built for this kind of grinding combat. His teeth scrape against the scar on my jaw, the one I earned in my battle for alpha status, and something about that contact unlocks a gear I keep locked for good reason.
I stop fighting smart and start fighting mean.
I break his grip with a twist that costs me fur and skin, get under his guard, and close my jaws around his foreleg. Bone snaps. He howls and pulls free, dragging himself sideways. One down. Two still on me.
Cameron’s fire is growing. The circle of charred ground is expanding, pushing the remaining attackers back, but the boy is losing it. His eyes have gone full copper, no white showing, and the flames are climbing his arms toward his shoulders. If this doesn’t stop, he’s going to burn everything within fifty yards. Including himself.
The sound reaches me before I see her. Not from the ranch. From the ridge. From above.
A wolf, running flat out down the hillside through the timber. Moving with a speed that shouldn’t be possible on that gradient. Not running so much as pouring down the slope, liquid and lethal, a dark blur through the trees.
She hits the fence line without breaking stride. Clears it in a bound that carries her ten feet past the wire. Lands in the south pasture already locked onto the nearest target.
Silver-and-copper fur. Smaller than me, built lean, built fast.
White fire burns around her.
The white fire stops me cold. Not Cameron’s wild, reactive blaze; this is controlled. Precise. It traces the wolf’s outline in tight lines and flares outward in directed bursts that hit exactly where she wants them and nowhere else.
Old magic. Trained magic.
My wolf goes very still.
I know that fire.
The thought arrives before I can stop it, comes from somewhere below reason. I shove it down before it can form into anything coherent.
She’s dead. I know she’s dead.
