A whistle. A projectile cutting through the dark from the tree line behind us.
“Solomon!” Percy’s voice cracked the night.
Percy moved. Faster than I could track, he released Mira and launched himself sideways, slamming into Solomon’s frame and driving them both to the ground. The projectile hit Percy in the shoulder with a wet thud.
It wasn’t a bullet but a dart. Black-feathered, the shaft buried two inches into the muscle above his collarbone.
Percy hit the dirt, rolled, and came up on one knee. A growl ripped from his throat, guttural and inhuman. His eyes blazed gold, his canines fully extended, and blood poured from the wound in a steady stream that soaked through his shirt. He clamped one hand over the puncture and crouched low, every muscle locked.
“Percy!” Mira’s scream tore through the clearing. She lunged toward him, her hands finding his face, the dagger forgotten on the ground.
Solomon was already at his side. He pressed his palm over Percy’s hand on the wound, checking, assessing. “Stay down. Don’t pull it out.”
“Wasn’t planning on it,” Percy gritted through clenched teeth. The gold in his eyes pulsed, his wolf surging toward the surface. “Burns. Whatever’s on it burns.”
I realized right away, it was laced.
The dart was laced with a special substance. The same way her tea was drugged with a component that erased her memory. This one is not an ordinary substance either.
My blood went cold.
I let the wolf surge forward, felt my eyes flood gold as I scanned the tree line. Every shadow, every rustle of leaves. Searching for the presence my instincts insisted was there.
Solomon’s warning from days ago echoed in my skull. There were others that had been following her, watching her.
And they’d gotten close enough to take a shot.
“Someone else is here,” I said.
The words settled over the clearing. Percy bleeding, Solomon crouched with Mira on her knees beside them. And somewhere in the dark beyond the tree line, a shooter is targeting her.
A branch snapped to my left.
Hudson.
I turned.
He was running. Scrambling through the undergrowth on broken ribs, blood trailing behind him and gaining distance with the desperate speed of a man who sensed his only chance at survival.
I could chase him as a man. Cover the distance in seconds, bring him down, drag him back.
But the shooter was still out there. Mira was exposed, Percy was down. The human part of my brain that calculated odds and weighed risks screamed that I needed to end this now, in one motion, without a miss.
My eyes met Solomon’s and I ordered, “Stay with them. Don’t let her out of your sight.”
I stopped thinking.
My wolf didn’t tear out of me. I let it out.
In an instant, my bones crack, my spine elongate as my muscles reshape around a frame that was twice the mass of the man who’d been standing there a second ago. The shift ripped through me in a wave of heat and pain and savage, righteous fury.
Four legs hit the ground. Claws dug into the earth.
The world exploded into scent and sound and the copper tang of blood, and Hudson’s heartbeat thundered through the forest ahead of me, panicked, erratic,prey.
I howled and ran.
The distance dissolved. Thirty feet became twenty became ten became nothing. Hudson heard me coming, turned, and his face in that final second was the only thing I allowed myself to enjoy.
