"The shift. It wants to come. He's holding it back."
Leo's first shift was involuntary — the yard, the fence, the tri-contact circuit. His body ripped itself open without his consent and he screamed through the entire thing. Since then he's been carrying the wolf under his skin without letting it surface. Days of holding a door shut while something on the other side pushes.
He sees me. His eyes find mine across the yard and the amber flares — bright, hot, the wolf looking out through his face. His whole body shudders. The shift pressing harder because I'm here, because the bond turns the voltage up.
"Leo," I call.
He shakes his head. Sharp. Don't come closer. His hands are shaking. He stops pacing and stands rigid, every muscle locked, fighting it with the only tool he has — his stubbornness.
"He needs to let it happen," Stone says. "If he keeps fighting, it'll tear him up coming through."
"Then tell him that."
"He won't listen to me." Stone looks at me. Something careful and deliberate in his expression. "He might listen to you."
Stone steps back. Ten feet. Enough to give me space but close enough to intervene. He's making a choice. The same kind of choice he made when he walked me past Gray's window.
I walk toward Leo.
His head snaps up. "Don't. Alex — stay back. I can't —" His voice breaks. Cracks in the middle, the sound dropping an octave, his throat reshaping around the words. "I can't hold it if you're close."
"Then don't hold it."
"If I shift, I don't know if I come back."
There it is. Not the pain of shifting — the terror that the wolf will take over and the boy won't return. That he'll drop into theanimal the way RJ did and spend years with no language and no way back.
"You'll come back," I say.
"You don't know that."
"I know because I'll be here." I stop six feet from him. Close enough to feel the heat pouring off his body, the shift pushing against his skin like something trying to hatch. "You came back last time. You'll come back again."
His eyes are fully amber now. The brown gone. His jaw is extending — the bones shifting under the skin of his face. His hands curl and the fingers are wrong, longer, the nails darkening.
"Stop fighting," I say. "Let it come."
"I can't —"
"Leo. Look at me."
He looks. Amber eyes, wild, terrified.
"I'm right here. I'm not leaving. Let go."
He lets go.
The shift takes him.
It's different from Torres in the common room — that was a quiet surrender, a body slipping between forms. Leo's shift is a war that he just stopped fighting. His body drops to his knees. The sound that comes out of him isn't a scream this time — it's a groan, deep and sustained, the sound of a body being reorganized at the structural level. His spine curves. His shoulders widen and drop.
His face changes last. The jaw extends fully. The nose broadens. The eyes stay amber but the shape around them shifts, the skull elongating, the human features draining away and the wolf emerging underneath.
When it's done, a wolf is on the ground in front of me.
Not a dog. Not anything you'd see in a nature documentary. Bigger. The shoulders hit my waist. The paws are the size of myspread hand. The fur is dark — black-brown, thick, winter coat. His eyes are the same amber. The same Leo.
He whines. Low, uncertain.
