The bonds don’t hum anymore—they scream.
Five distinct frequencies vibrating at the edge of pain, harmonizing into something that feels less like gravity and more like a trap closing slowly around my ribs. Grogan’s protection coils tight as rusted wire, cutting into my sternum. Rhett’s warmth burns fever-hot, branding my lungs with every breath. Theron’s honeyed danger drips with electric warning, coating my tongue in copper and ozone. Jarek’s crystalline clarity has shattered into jagged static, scraping behind my eyelids. And Hrollok—fierce, devoted, feral—paces at the edges of my consciousness like he’s hunting something that’s hunting me back.
I’m changing. Not just emotions. Not just connection.
My body is rewriting itself.
I’m faster now. Stronger. Too strong. This morning, I crushed a drinking glass in my bare hand without feeling the ceramic break, blood welling up between my fingers—hot, wet, smelling of iron and salt—while the others stared. I hear conversations across the settlement—whispers in locked cabins, the rustle of conspiracy in the underbrush, the snap of a twig three hundred yards east. Yesterday, I caught the scent of rot three hours before we found the dead deer in the eastern woods, its belly swollen with gases that smelled like sweet fermentation and spoiled milk.
"Your cellular structure is destabilizing," Jarek observes, appearing silently while I train. He watches me shatter another heavy bag, eyes narrowed with worry that masquerades as science. "The sealed bonds are feeding you power your human framework isn’t designed to contain. Without a wolf to channel it, the energy is... pooling. Accumulating in your soft tissue."
I stare at my hands. They look the same—short nails, calluses from Sera’s training—but they feel wrong. Heavy. Pulsing with a subterranean thrum, like gloves filled with bees. When I flex my fingers, joints pop like wet wood splitting.
"The wolf," I say, my voice sounding hollow, reverberating in my own skull. "Still nothing."
"Nothing," he confirms, and for the first time, his clinical detachment cracks into something like fear. "Which should be medically impossible. You should be shifting involuntarily by now. Coma. Organ failure. Something."
I hit the replacement bag. It explodes. Sand rains down like gray ash, coating my sweat-slicked skin with grit that smells of quartz and dust.
"Something’s wrong," I whisper, tasting the stale air of the training grounds. "Something’s been wrong since the beginning."
Grogan gathers them at twilight. The ritual clearing smells of pine resin and cold stone. The place where Sera tried to teach me to bleed.
"All five bonds are sealed," he says, his voice too steady, too careful. "The network is complete. If the wolf exists anywhere, it must answer to the full constellation."
They arrange around me—not a pentagon, but a containment circle. Rhett’s bulk blocking the north wind, which carries the scent of snow from the upper peaks.
Theron’s restless energy crackles at my back, raising the hair on my neck with static electricity. Jarek’s ice-cold focus presses against my temples, clinical and sharp as a scalpel.
Hrollok’s fierce heat radiates from the shadows, his scent—pine smoke, male musk, something dangerously sweet—flooding the clearing.
Grogan stands before me, silver hair luminous in the gathering dark, his hands trembling as he takes my shoulders. His skin against mine feels feverish, papery, ancient.
"Reach," he commands, his breath smelling of clove and old books. "But carefully. If there’s damage—if the wolf is injured—"
"It might hurt you," Theron finishes, his voice hard as flint striking steel.
I close my eyes.
The bonds flare instantly, blindingly bright—five supernovas exploding in my chest, leaving afterimages of silver, gold, amber, blue, and green dancing on the insides of my eyelids. I don’t gather them gently this time. I grab them like lifelines made of live wire, copper heat burning my palms as I pull myself down into the meat and marrow of my own existence.
Deeper than before. Past the scar that throbs with a dull, infected ache. Past the heartbeat that sounds like tympanic drums underwater.
Past the architecture of bone—rough, porous, tasting of calcium and dust—into the cathedral of my own darkness.
And there—
God.
There.
Not a void. Not emptiness.
A prison.
I slam against it at full speed, consciousness striking iron bars that taste of rusted metal and childhood terror, cold and vibrating with eleven years of accumulated rage. The impact tears a scream from my physical throat—I feel hands grabbing me, rough calluses against my biceps, fingernails digging into my shoulders as they hold me down, but I can’t stop, can’t retreat, because behind those bars—
It’s raging.
My wolf.
Not pacing patiently. Not waiting to be found. It’s throwing itself against the inside of the lock, foam flying from its jaws in ropes of saliva, eyes burning phosphorescent yellow with madness and starvation. It’s been trapped here for eleven years, beating its skull against the walls of a cage it never understood, growing rabid with isolation. The smell hits me next—wet fur, copper blood, and the acrid ammonia of urine-soaked concrete. The sound is deafening: claws scraping on stone, teeth gnashing, a high-pitched whine that vibrates in my teeth.
"She locked it away," I gasp, blood filling my mouth from where I’ve bitten my tongue, metallic and thick. "She didn’t just seal it—she’s been feeding on it. The barrier is made of my wolf’s own power, twisted into bars. It’s eating itself to stay locked, cannibalizing its own magic."
"Abby, pull back," Jarek shouts, but his voice is underwater, distorted by the rushing in my ears like tidal noise.
I press closer to the bars, reaching through, and the wolf lunges—not to hurt me, but to warn. Its teeth snap inches from my face, fetid breath hot and wet against my skin, smelling of raw meat and desperation. And I see through its eyes for one terrible, crystalline moment:
Seven-year-old me, screaming in a farmhouse kitchen that smells of lavender and burning fat. Margot’s hands on my shoulders, her nails crescent moons cutting into my collarbones, holding me down on the kitchen table. Cold metal—a knife, an athame, something that hummed with wrongness—against my collarbone. Words spoken in a language that scraped like fingernails on slate, each syllable burning my nostrils with sulfur and ozone. The pain—white-hot, holy, wrong—as something vital was carved out of me with surgical cruelty and sealed away behind iron and spite. The taste of my own tears, salt and snot, running into my open mouth. The smell of my own blood hitting the linoleum—bright, coppery, steaming.
I snap back into my body with the force of electrocution.
My eyes fly open. I’m on my knees in the dirt, vomiting bile that burns my throat, Grogan’s arms banded around my chest, Hrollok snarling at the empty air, the others shouting in panic that sounds like birds screaming.
But I’m not looking at them.
I’m clawing at my collarbone. The scar. The old, raised tissue that’s burned intermittently since the bonding began. It’s glowing now—sickly green-black, the color of rotten meat beneath the skin, pulsing with a heartbeat that’s not mine.
And suddenly I understand the geometry of my own ruin—Grogan didn’t choose this spot randomly when he marked me in the forest. His fangs had struck exactly here, seeking out the weakness in Margot’s seal like water finding a crack in stone.
The bite had fractured the lock, splintering the magic enough to let the bond cascade through and attach to all five of them simultaneously, but not enough to release the wolf itself.
The impossibility of my situation wasn’t random chance; it was physics. A broken dam doesn't choose which water flows through.
"The scar," I choke out, my voice unrecognizable, broken by the memory of pain from eleven years ago, my fingers digging into the raised flesh. "Margot said I fell. But I didn’t. I remember the knife. I remember the smell of her perfume masking the grave-magic. I remember her words while I screamed."
My fingernails tear at the scar tissue, trying to rip open the lock with my bare hands, feeling the squelch of skin and the sting of fresh blood welling up, hot and wet.
"She knew," I whisper, the horror finally, fully crystallizing into a diamond-sharp point in my chest. "She knew what I was. She knew I wasn’t fully Holloway."
And she knew the seal was damaged when the five bonds formed.
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