"You run with us. Dean stays on the porch."
"Ok."
"Jen." Thaw's gold eyes come to me. "We need to shift. Two hours. East of the creek, on the ridge. Dean will guard you the whole time. Tell me yes or tell me no."
I do not have to think about it.
The bond at my sternum is throbbing with how badly his body needs this. The three of them are about to come out of their skin and the only thing in this cabin that can give them the ground they need is the word from me.
"Go."
Thaw crosses the kitchen to me. He does not pick me up. He puts his palm flat against the side of my jaw and tips my face up and presses his forehead to mine and breathes once.
"Two hours. If you need me. You push the bond and I come. I will hear it. You will not have to call twice."
"I know."
Crull stands. He crosses the kitchen and stops in front of me and his huge palm covers my whole shoulder. He does not press. He just rests it there for a long moment, the weight of him steady through his hand, his amber eyes on mine. Rough, careful, the rebuilt voice: "Back in two."
He lifts his hand. He lets me go.
Harek comes to me last. He does not speak. He grabs me and kisses me. The rumble in his chest is at its lowest register and it is going straight into me. Then he goes.
I follow them as far as the porch.
Thaw goes first.
He stops at the edge of the porch boards. He pulls his shirt over his head in one motion and drops it on the boards. His pants go next. He does not look at me while he does it. He is not putting on a show. He is stripping because the alternative is shredding clothes this cabin does not have replacements for, and the patterning under his skin is already moving in a way that says the shift is going to happen with or without his cooperation.
I look anyway.
I realize that I have slept with this man and I have never seen all of him. His back is scars layered over scars. His body is the body of a man who has been a weapon for somebody for twenty years.
He steps down off the porch into the clearing.
The dirt gives under his bare feet. He walks ten paces out, faces the tree line, and breathes once — the long deliberate scenting breath — and then he changes.
The patterning that has lived under his skin as faint texture comes up, full plates, gold-bronze and overlapping, sliding into place along his throat and his arms and his ribs and down both flanks. His body lengthens. He drops onto his hands and his hands are not hands anymore — they are dragon-claws, four-pointed and black and sinking into the dirt of the clearing. His shoulders thicken into something that does not belong on a human frame. The gold of his eyes is all gold now, no white at the edges.
He is eight feet at the shoulder. Twelve feet nose to tail. A long muscled wolf-shape made of dragon-plate, and the air around him warps with the heat coming off his body. The dirt under his claws darkens, a thin line of smoke rising where the ground is starting to scorch.
He turns his head and looks at me.
The gold eyes are mine. The bond at my sternum is wide open and pouring and the thing in the clearing is Thaw, and the way he looks at me is the way he has looked at me since the corridor.
I breathe in sharp, he is gorgeous.
He blinks once — a slow blink, the inner lid coming across the gold and going back — and then he walks out into the center of the clearing and waits.
Crull is next.
He pulls his shirt off. He has to use both hands because the shirt does not move easily over his shoulders. The slate-gray of his skin is mapped with scars I have only seen patches of through collars and sleeves — across his pectorals, down both arms, a long curved one over his ribs that looks like it should have killed him. He folds the shirt twice and sets it on the porch railing. He steps out of his pants. He does the same with them. Folded. Set down. Considerate.
I think about looking away. Because the man is six-foot-eight in human form and he is going to be larger in a minute and I am going to spend the rest of my life knowing that.
He steps down off the boards.
The dirt of the clearing settles under his weight. He walks past Thaw to a place his body can have, faces the tree line, and changes.
