Page 95 of Nikolay

Then he moved ahead of me, angling toward the front of the broad clearing the paths were feeding us into.

The place opened suddenly out of the trees—wide and moon-drenched, the ground soft with layers of pine needles and old leaves and late-season fern pressed low around the edges. Moonlight spilled silver over the open space and made pale ghosts of dropped breaths.

I slowed at the edge of it.

There were so many of them.

No one seemed uncertain about where to stand. The pack settled by instinct and repetition into a shape it had made before. Sage at the front. Others naturally giving him room. Not out of fear. Out of recognition.

I found Sloan three bodies to my left. She flashed me a quick grin, moved to my side, and bumped my shoulder once with hers before facing forward.

Then Sage spoke.

He did not shout. The clearing did the work for him. Moonlight, silence, expectation—those were amplifiers enough. His voice carried cleanly over the gathered wolves, low and sure and intimate in a way that made everybody lean inward without physically moving.

“We run tonight as our ancestors ran,” he said, “under the same moon, with the same blood in our veins, with the same duty to remember what we are.”

The clearing answered him with a murmur of approval, deep and communal.

I felt it travel through my body.

He went on, speaking of tradition, of old ways, of wolves who had endured because they had kept close to each other and refused to dissolve into a world that asked them to become less distinct than they were. He spoke about culture as inheritance, about blood as continuity, about pack as more than convenience or contract. There was beauty in the way he framed it. That was the problem. He made preservation sound holy. He made boundaries sound like devotion instead of fear.

And then he said, purity.

Not once. More than once.

Pack pure. Wolf culture pure. Blood kept strong by honoring itself.

The words should have gone down wrong at once. Iron Valor had wolves mated to vampires; one mated to a witch/angel hybrid now. Wolves allied with vampires, witches, a fallen angel, and Goddess only knew what else before this whole season of my life was done. And Iron Valor was one of the finest packs I had ever known. Loyal. Fierce. Loving. Ours. There was nothing diluted about us.

I knew that.

I knew it.

But standing there in the clearing, held inside the swell of a hundred-plus wolves listening with shining eyes, with moonlight on all of us and the old instinctive part of me drinking in every note of communal certainty, his words slid past the sharpest part of my mind and landed lower instead. In the body. In the part built to respond to alpha voice and group emotion and the immense comfort of being told that belonging could be protected.

That frightened me, though not enough to break the spell in the moment.

Then he looked at me.

Mid-speech. Mid-clearing. With all those wolves around us and the moon making silver out of everything sharp in the world.

He smiled.

It was not broad. It was not social. It was brief and private and so direct it almost hurt to meet head-on. Something hot and strange moved through me at once, as if being singled out under that gaze had lit a wick somewhere my body preferred not to discuss in public.

The cheers started before he was done.

First low. Then rising.

The crowd took his final words and threw them back to him with full wolf-throated force when he said, “Shift at will—and run like the wind.”

The clearing erupted.

There was no civilized way to describe what happened next, because civilization had very little to do with it. Clothes came off in practiced motions; boots kicked free, shirts dragged over heads, laughter breaking under the first sounds of transformation. Some shifted almost instantly, bodies folding and dropping and reforming in bursts of fur and bone and breath. Others stripped first, speaking another word or two to whoever stood nearest before giving themselves over to the change.

The air filled with it all at once—the wet crack and slide of shifting limbs, the exhaled grunts, the rustle of discarded clothing hitting fern and needle, the first excited barks from wolves already down on four legs.