To the claiming mark.
“Ready?” he breathed against my skin.
“Do it.”
His teeth sank in.
The pain was immediate and total. Each cell in my body ignited at once, and the scream that left my throat was involuntary, the sound of a body being rewritten from the inside out.
I thought I was ready for it but what echoed in my mind was curses.
MOTHER OF EVERY GOD IN EVERY REALM INCLUDING THE ONES I HAVEN’T VISITED YET.
My back arched off the furs.
Hands gripped mine: Percy on the right, Solomon on the left, anchoring me to the platform while my bones rearranged themselves beneath my skin. I could feel it happening. The molecular shift that Lucian had described.
The bond flared.
“Stay with us,” Percy said. “Mira. Stay here.”
I couldn’t speak.
The transformation had reached my throat and the muscles there were doing things muscles weren’t designed to do. My vision blurred. Colors shifted. The torchlight that had been amber was now a spectrum I didn’t have names for, the world expanding beyond human perception.
Smell hit next.
The chamber that had smelled of stone and warmth now carried layers I hadn’t known existed:
The pain peaked.
I screamed again. Or tried. The sound that came out wasn’t fully human. The vocal cords of a creature that existed between forms, and the vibration of my own voice in my transformed throat was the strangest sensation of the night.
Then it stopped.
All at once, as though someone had thrown a switch. The pain vanished and what replaced it was a stillness so complete I thought I’d died.
I hadn’t.
I was lying on the platform, breathing in a body that felt both familiar and entirely new. My senses were screaming with input: the texture of every fur fiber beneath my back, the exact temperature between the air and the stone, the heartbeats of three men positioned around me in a formation that I could now map without opening my eyes.
I opened them anyway.
The chamber looked different.
I could see the grain of the obsidian walls at twenty feet. The individual flame components inside each torch. The pupils of three pairs of eyes staring down at me with expressions ranging from relief to awe.
“Hey,” I said. My voice was different. Still mine but deeper.
“Hey yourself,” Percy said. His voice cracked.
I sat up. Looked down at my hands. They were the same hands. But the nails were longer, pointed, and when I flexed my fingers I felt a presence coiled beneath the surface.
A presence that had been sleeping behind the bond for months and was now wide awake.
My wolf.
“She’s there,” I said. “I can feel her.”
