No—beingpulled apart.
“Tamsin.”
The word came from very far away, stretched thin and warped, as if it had to fight through water and blood and mud to reach me. I tried to answer, but my mouth wouldn’t move. My tongue felt too big. My body felt… wrong. Heavy and light all at once.
The world tilted.
I was back on Skye.
Mist clung to the heather, soft and silver, and the sea whispered in a slow, patient rhythm below the cliffs along the shore. My boots were muddy. My hands were small again, scraped and nicked from climbing where I shouldn’t have.
“Tam,” my mother said, smiling back at me. “Come eat before it gets cold.”
My father stood by the firepit, working on some tool that caught the light just so. Steel. Familiar. Safe.
My knife.
“I need my knife,” I told them urgently. The words felt important. Essential. “I need it.”
Griff laughed from somewhere behind me, warm and easy. “You always do.”
Then the sky split open.
The mist turned black and the sea roared, and I heard a howling sound, but it was wrong, twisted, too many voices folded into one. The ground shook. My parents blurred, their faces smearing like wet paint.
“No,” I whispered. “No, no?—”
Pain ripped through me, sharp and blinding.
I screamed.
My eyes flew open.
Bright light from a set of windows burned into my skull. The air reeked of antiseptic and metal and old fear. The surface beneath me was hard but padded, cool against my overheated skin. My body arched involuntarily, a sob tearing out of my throat before I could stop it.
“Easy—easy, don’t move.”
Hands pressed me down. Strong hands. Familiar hands.
“Tamsin, look at me.”
I couldn’t. My vision swam, edges bleeding into each other. The ceiling fractured into too many shapes, and my heart was trying to punch its way out of my ribs.
My blood was on fire.
Not metaphorically.
Literally.
I could feel it, boiling heat rushing through me. There were two different forces tearing through me from the inside, clawing for dominance. One was wild and agonizing and screaming. The other was deep and heavy and… possessive.
Lycan.
Wolf.
They were fighting inside me.
“No—” I gasped, my voice raw. “Please.”
