Page 35 of Fate, Interrupted

The motion is clean. His balance breaks forward before he understands what has happened, arm locked in my grip, and he yelps, a sharp surprised sound.

“Bad choice,” I tell him as I bend his wrist back until I hear the satisfying snap of a bone separating. His scream resonates through the small space.

The second man moves immediately. He’s fast but not thinking clearly. I drop the first man’s wrist, seeing it before he commits, the shoulder drop that telegraphs the swing. I slip under it and drive my shoulder into his chest, putting all my weight behind it. Air leaves his lungs in a burst.

The third man comes in low.

Here is where it stops being simple.

My vision sharpens at the edges, the color of the world moving slightly toward the heightened contrast of full wolf awareness: sharper lines, deeper shadows, movement surfacing at a speed that makes everything else feel slow. My hands are faster than they should be. My grip is stronger than it needs to be. That’s the danger—the point where the wolf stops being an asset and becomes a liability.

I move toward the door, driving my elbow into the first man’s ribs, moving us onto the sidewalk and out of the Norah and her friend’s vicinity. My hit is measured, enough to end his participation without ending him. He folds with a wet choked sound. The second man grabs my jacket from behind, yanking. I twist free and put my fist into his jaw. His head snaps back, and he goes down.

The third man hits me at the waist, and we go into the side of the delivery van parked at the curb, metal ringing under the impact. He drives a knee toward my ribs, but I catch his leg, and flip him into the street with enough force that he doesn’t immediately try to get up.

The first man is on his feet again, broken wrist and all.

His face has changed. The performance is gone. What’s underneath it is uglier and more honest.

“Freak,” he spits.

The word hits my wolf like a spark hits an accelerant.

My eyes change. I feel it happen, the physical sensation of the shift, the green going wolf-gold, luminous, nothing human left in it. There’s nothing I can do about it because it’s forward enough that controlling the shift is the battle I’m fighting and it’s taking everything I have. My pupils narrow. The light in my eyes is wrong, too bright, too focused, the kind of wrong that a human notices even if they can’t name what they’re seeing.

I grab the second man by the collar and put him into the van. The metal dents. He drops.

The third man has gotten up. He hesitates.

I hit him once, a final punch designed to take him out without killing him. He goes down onto the pavement and stays there.

The first man charges, the decision of a man who has run out of options and is substituting anger for strategy. My punch lands across his jaw. He spins almost in slow motion and drops onto the sidewalk. Around us, the street stops moving.

My chest is heaving. My hands are shaking with the tremor that comes from holding my wolf back. Keeping it from what it wanted to do, which was considerably more than what I actually did. Blood runs from the corner of my mouth, warm and copper-sharp. My eyes are still wrong. I can feel it—the brightness that isn’t human, my wolf still close enough to the surface that I can feel it at the edges of everything.

Otto approaches from the doorway, carefully, like he hasn’t entirely decided the situation is finished.

“Silas,” he says. “They’re out.”

I know. I can hear their heartbeats. Two fast and erratic, one slower and steadier.

But alive.

I wipe the blood from my mouth with the back of my hand and push the wolf back, bit by bit, like closing a door against the wolf when it doesn’t want to retreat. It resists. It recedes. The brightness in my eyes drops by degrees as I force my breathing to slow, my pulse to drop, the wolf-sight fading back into the ordinary limited vision of a man standing on a sidewalk in the morning.

And then I catch it… Different from everything else in the air. Softer. Warmer.

My head turns.

Norah has moved across the street.

She’s standing very still beside a sandwich truck, one hand braced against the metal counter, looking at me with an expression I cannot read from here but that I can feel from here. Beside her, the woman she came in with has both eyes fully open, her mouth parted on a breath she appears to have forgotten to complete. She’s taking in the three men on the pavement and me standing over them.

Norah is not doing that.

Norah is completely still.

She saw all of it.