I stare at him. “What?”
He lets go of my hands. The cold rushes back in immediately, and I have to clamp my jaw to keep my teeth from chattering. He stands, takes two steps back from the sofa, and looks at me with an expression I’ve never seen on his face before. Open, unguarded, absolutely terrified.
“Don’t run,” he says. “Please.”
“Roan, what are you?—”
He changes.
There’s no other word for it. One moment, he’s standing in my living room, a tall man in a dark jacket with fear in his golden-brown eyes. The next moment, his body folds in on itself, bones reshaping with a speed that defies everything I know about skeletal structure, and the man is gone and in his place is a wolf.
Thewolf.
It fills my living room the way a boulder fills a stream, massive and undeniable and impossible to look away from. Dark fur, grey shading to black along the spine, lighter at the throat. Broad skull. Powerful shoulders. Paws the size of my spread hand, planted on my carpet as if they belong there.
And the eyes. Gold shading to amber with flecks of darker brown, looking at me with an expression I’ve seen exactly once before, on a blood-soaked morning in a forest clearing.
My lungs stop working.
I don’t scream. I don’t run. I sit on my sofa with my hands gripping the cushion so hard my knuckles ache, and I look at the wolf that was Roan that was the wolf, and my brain, my poor overtaxed brain that has been holding the rational world together with both hands for weeks, finally lets go.
“It was you,” I say. My voice sounds like it’s coming from somewhere else. “In the forest. That was you.”
The wolf dips its head. The same deliberate motion I watched from my knees in the bloodstained grass. Yes.
“The wounds. The claw marks. The healing.”
Another dip.
“You were fighting something. In the forest that night. That’s whyyou were hurt.”
Yes.
I’m cataloguing. I can feel it happening, the vet brain switching on because it’s the only part of me that’s equipped to handle this. I’m noting the mass distribution, the bone structure, and the way the musculature has rearranged itself from bipedal to quadrupedal in a way that should be structurally impossible. The skeleton has fundamentally restructured. The soft tissue has adapted in real time. The total mass appears unchanged, but the architecture of it, the proportions, the density distribution, none of it follows any biological principle I’ve been taught.
It’s impossible. It’s standing in my living room.
“Can you change back?” I ask because I need to see it happen in reverse; I need to see that the process works both ways, that Roan is still in there and can come back.
The wolf watches me for a moment. Then the shift reverses, fast and fluid, bones folding back into a human frame, and Roan is standing in my living room again, fully clothed, looking at me like I’m a bomb that might go off.
“How,” I say. It’s not a question. It’s a demand.
“I don’t know how. Not in terms you’d accept. It’s biological, not magical, but the biology is beyond anything human science has mapped.” He hasn’t moved from where he stands, keeping the distance between us as if he understands that closing it rightnow would be a mistake. “I was born this way. My father, my pack, and everyone you met at the bonfire. We’re wolves.”
“Werewolves.”
“If you want to use that word.”
“What word do you use?”
“Wolves. Shifters. Pack.” He pauses. “People who turn into very large dogs, if you want the least dignified version.”
A laugh escapes me. It’s involuntary and slightly hysterical, and I press my hand over my mouth to stop it because I’m not ready to find any of this funny. But the fact that he’s standing there looking mildly embarrassed while admitting he turns into a wolf is so absurdly human that it cracks something in the wall of shock I’ve been building.
“The bonfire,” I say. “Everyone at the bonfire.”
“Most of them. Not all. Maggie isn’t. Lucy isn’t.”
