POV Theron
Wrongness wakes me.
Not a sound—the cabin is silent, the night pressing thick and black against the windows, heavy as wet wool. Not a movement—the sheets are tangled only around my own restless legs, damp with sweat that smells of sour adrenaline. It’s something deeper, something that lives in the meat of my chest where the bond resides.
The golden pulse that connects me to Abby—usually steady, warm, reassuringly present against my ribs—suddenly screams.
It’s not a metaphor. The bond shrieks, a psychic nails-on-chalkboard sensation that jackhammers through my sternum. I bolt upright, gasping, my hand flying to my chest as if I can physically clamp down on the connection, crush the terror flooding through it. My heart hammers a frantic arrhythmia that echoes hers—too fast, too fluttery, the heartbeat of something cornered and bleeding.
Her fear hits first—sharp as broken glass shredding my veins, metallic and cold. Then the pain crashes through, wet and specific, a phantom blade slicing across my abdomen so vividly I taste copper on my tongue, feel the ghost of blood welling against my skin.
"Abby," I choke out to the empty room, the name tearing my throat raw.
I’m moving before conscious thought catches up. Bare feet hit cold floorboards that splinter slightly under my heels, the shock of pine needles and dust barely registering as I crash through the cabin door into night air that tastes like ozone and coming snow—sharp, metallic, charged with the electricity of disaster.
The other bonds flare in my awareness like struck matches in dry tinder. Grogan’s silver light snaps awake with a shockwave of panic that tastes like old books burning. Rhett’s steady gold roars to emergency brightness, thick and heavy as honey gone rancid. Jarek’s ice-blue crystallizes into surgical sharpness that prickles behind my eyes. Hrollok’s green—always burning, always angry—turns murderous, coating my tongue with the taste of pine smoke and wet ash.
Doors slam. Wood splinters. I smell them before I see them—fur and sweat and the acrid, ammonia scent of fear pheromones spiking into the air so thick I can taste them.
"What—" Grogan starts, his aristocratic composure shredding visibly, his silver hair wild from sleep, his eyes blown wide and black.
"It’s Abby." My voice sounds like gravel and broken glass grinding together. The bond screams again, a high-pitched whine that rattles my teeth, and I double over, gasping, clutching my chest. "She's hurt. She's dying."
"Where?" Rhett demands, his massive frame trembling, his scarred throat working around a growl, the damaged tissue pulling taut as wire.
I close my eyes and reach.
The bond stretches between us like a rope fraying under too much weight, individual fibers popping one by one with audible psychic twangs. She’s distant—northwest, high in the mountain peaks where the air thins to ice and the wind carries the scent of granite and death. She’s weakening. The connection flickers, gutters, a candle in hurricane wind threatening to extinguish and plunge us all into darkness.
"Mountains," I gasp, my voice breaking, cracking into a register I don’t recognize. "North ridge. She's—"
Another wave crashes through me—a specific, localized explosion of agony that spikes through my lower back in perfect phantom reflection of whatever wound she’s suffering. I stagger, catching myself on a fence post, rough wood splinters digging deep into my palm. Blood wells, hot and wet and real, but I barely feel it against the echo of her pain.
"She's dying," I rasp, looking at them—my pack, my brothers, my rivals, their faces painted pale by moonlight. "She’s dying and she knows it."
No hesitation. No discussion.
We shift.
The change rips through me like wildfire through dry grass—bones crackling, popping, reshaping in waves of golden agony that white out my vision. My spine elongates, fur bursts from pores in a burning wave that smells of ozone and wet dog. I hit the ground on four paws, claws digging into frozen earth, the Blackpelt corruption in my blood singing hunt hunt hunt with a voice older than my trauma, older than my humanity, a genetic imperative that overrides everything civilized.
I run.
The forest blurs into streaks of shadow and silver bark. Wind screams past my ears, cold enough to freeze the moisture on my eyes until they water and ice over, creating crystalline sheaths that crack with every blink. Snow stings my muzzle, melts on my tongue, dilutes the taste of Abby’s fear that coats my throat like oil. Through the bond, I feel her consciousness transforming into something worse than terror—acceptance. A resignation that tastes like grave dirt and cold stone. She thinks she’s going to die alone on those rocks. She thinks we’re not coming, that we’ve abandoned her, that the bonds were lies and she was always meant to die alone—
No. Not again.
Elena’s face flashes behind my eyes—my sister, seventeen, laughing that last morning before the hunters came, her hair the color of summer wheat. My mother’s gentle hands braiding my hair, humming a song I can’t remember the tune of. The packmates screaming my name while I stood frozen in the farmhouse doorway, muscles locked by terror so profound it rewired my nervous system, turned love into paralysis, made me a statue of cowardice while they died screaming.
Blackpelt cowardice. The corruption that destroyed my bloodline. I’d failed them. I froze while they burned.
Not this time.
I push faster. Lungs burning like I’m inhaling broken glass shards. Muscles screaming, micro-tearing, rebuilding in realtime. I outpace Grogan—centuries older and usually quicker. I outpace Rhett’s crushing bulk, outpace Hrollok’s berserker rage. I run like the devil is on my heels, because he is, he always has been, the family curse whispering you'll freeze, you'll fail, you'll watch her die like you watched them die, like father watched mother die.
I run until the whisper becomes meaningless wind, until there is only the bond pulling me like a magnet through fog, a golden thread growing thinner and weaker with every second.
The scent hits me halfway up the north ridge—blood. Abby’s blood. That specific copper-sweet scent that identifies her as mate, as mine, as the center of my gravity, mixed with the bitter almond smell of her pain. But there’s something else beneath it: foreign wolves, musk and aggression, and cutting through it all—Sera’s sharp jasmine perfume turned rancid, mixed with the iron tang of active betrayal.
Trap. The realization hits like ice water—Sera took her up here to kill her. The training, the friendship, the toxic almost-kinship, all of it poisoned bait leading to slaughter.
I crest the ridge and see them—a line of five wolves blocking the path, massive silhouettes against the snow, eyes glowing hostile amber in the dark, haunches low, fangs bared and dripping anticipation.
They don’t get to finish their growls.
I hit the first one like a golden missile, my shoulder impacting his ribcage with a wet crack that vibrates through my skull. We go down in a tangle of fur and snapping jaws, snow flying, blood—hot, copper, not hers, not Abby’s—spraying across my muzzle as I close my jaws on his throat, feeling the pulse stutter and stop beneath my teeth.
Behind me, the others crash into the fray—Grogan’s silver fury, Rhett’s crushing bulk, Jarek’s surgical precision, Hrollok’s berserker rage. Screams tear through the night. The wet sound of tearing flesh, the snap of bone, the copper stench of enemy blood mixing with snow.
I don’t stay to watch them win. I don’t wait to see if they survive.
I break through first, claws scrabbling on icy stone, chest heaving, blood—mine and theirs—matting my golden fur into dark, sticky ropes. The bond pulls me around an outcropping of black rock, urgent, desperate, flickering like a strobe light in my chest—
I see her.
Abby lies crumpled on the shale, limbs twisted at wrong angles that make my stomach lurch with sympathetic agony. A pool of blood spreads beneath her body like a dark halo, steaming slightly in the freezing air, smelling like pennies and rain. Her chest rises in shallow, fluttering movements—too fast, too weak, the breathing of something preparing to stop, to give up, to die.
Sera stands over her.
The she-wolf is in half-form, beautiful and terrible, her dark hair wild around shoulders that have sprouted lethal claws. Blood drips from her fingertips—Abby’s blood, dripping onto the rocks with a sound like a leaking faucet, tap tap tap—and her expression is twisted into triumphant cruelty, lips peeled back from teeth that have already tasted flesh, her eyes glowing with a madness that smells like ozone and rotting flowers.
She looks up as I crest the ridge. Smiles.
"NO!"
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