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Once.

Again.

Harder this time.

The wolf’s head snapped up.

It stared toward the darkness to the east, where I could see nothing, and the fur along its spine lifted.

A second later, it turned and bolted away from the river.

From the direction it had gone came a snarl so deep that I felt the vibration of it in my jaw. Something crashed through the undergrowth, followed by a single high yelp that ended abruptly.

Then there was silence.

I remained beneath the bank for a long time, shaking hard enough to disturb the reeds around me. When I finally allowed myself to breathe properly, a laugh escaped before I could stop it. It was breathless and disbelieving, and I muffled it against my wet sleeve.

The wolf had been directly above me. It had been close enough that I could have reached up and touched it. With the Moonfever sharpening its senses, it still had not found me.

Unfortunately, even the best plan involving an icy river eventually came up against the basic problem that an icy river could kill you.

I knew the symptoms. I had written them on the whiteboard at work often enough for trainees: shivering, loss of coordination, confusion, and eventually the frightening moment when the shivering stopped altogether.

By what I guessed was around two in the morning, my shivering had become violent enough to knock my teeth together. My fingers no longer moved properly, and more than once I caught myself thinking, with perfect calm, that lying down for a short sleep would be pleasant.

That was when I abandoned the river.

I crawled up the bank on my hands and knees and emerged into a clearing filled with bracken and moonlight. I told myself I would walk for ten minutes, just long enough to get my circulation going again, and then return to the water.

The thought sounded completely reasonable.

That frightened me more than the shivering did.

I was not going back into the river.

I had just managed to stand, swaying slightly with my arms wrapped around myself, when something dropped from the tree above me.

It struck me hard enough to throw me backward into the wet bracken and knock the breath from my lungs. A heavy, burning-hot weight pinned me down, with two enormous paws planted against my shoulders and a face directly above mine.

A cat’s face.

Broad and golden, marked with black rosettes, with long white whiskers, enormous teeth, and bright eyes fixed on mine.

A jaguar.

Its breath was hot against my frozen cheeks, and beneath the animal musk I caught the scent of cinnamon and sun-warmed stone.

I knew that smell.

The jaguar stared down at me, and its eyes widened.

Then it began to change.

Watching it from this close was worse than seeing a shift from a distance. The fur receded beneath the skin as the muzzle shortened and the shape of the skull altered. The paws pressing into my shoulders lengthened into hands, broad and warm and visibly trembling.

The transformation took only a few seconds.

When it ended, Jax Rivera was kneeling astride my hips in the bracken, completely naked, breathing hard and staring down at me.