You dream like the window is a lung. It inhales the night and exhales the city across your skin—cool air, wet metal, wet leaves, the hush, that comes right before a choir decides to sing.
Sheets twist around your legs. The curtains breathe. Somewhere far, farther than a siren and nearer than a heartbeat, a sound threads the dark: a long, clean howl that climbs a note your body knows without learning.
Another answers. Then a third, lower stone under water.
You toss in the sheets, turning your face to the open window and the moon lays a silver strap over your mouth, a priest's finger on a vow. The wind kisses the hair at your nape, and you feel it—something in you standing up inside the dream.
Stop, you tell the night, and the air stills for a breath as if it heard.
The ground under your sleeping feet becomes pine needles. Your blood takes its own rhythm, heel-to-toe, paw-to-earth, the mathematics of pursuit. You run without moving. You hunger without hunger. The city peels away like wet paper and there are trees, and the trees are ribs around a heart that is not yours but at the same time IS.
Darren Vale runs.
The forest has kept his scent and uses it against him. Black pines stitch the moon into strips; the earth gives and then refuses. He is massive even for his kind—Scatter Clan-bred, old blood from the wastes where restraint is a joke told with teeth and claws. In full form he is a shadow with golden eyes, dire wolf-big, breath steaming like a furnace losing an argument.
He has been running for hours inside a circle he doesn't know someone else has drawn.
Behind him, three sets of paws keep the time.
Thorne is the metronome—ash-gray, low to the ground, every stride a sentence. Elara is the absence of sound between strikes—black with silver along the spine, fast enough the night forgets she was there. The third an Elder, heavier from the lack of hunts, watching more than chasing: iron-gray, copper eyes measuring not prey but predators.
Cassian Dray does not hunt Darren Vale. He hunts the Hunt.
When the wind shifts, the smell hits first: cold metal, rain on marble, a clean winter that burns the lungs on entry. Vale hears a fourth presence and nearly breaks his own legs to stop.
The Silver is near.
He bolts. Branches whip his muzzle. Somewhere behind, Thorne's snarl cuts a line through the dark and the line feels like law. Vale veers left, then left again because panic doesn't know new directions. He bursts into a cut of clearing shaped like a knife and the world goes quiet enough, he can hear his own blood.
A wolf stands between him and the trees.
Silver, not white. Not gray. Moon hammered into fur. He is too big to be possible and somehow exactly the size the night always promised. His eyes are glacial blue, not a color so much as a verdict. Scars cross his shoulders in faint, brighter lines, an old script written by something that lost and was allowed to live.
Atlas does not growl. He doesn't need to. The forest grows still around him, the same way a congregation stills, when the priest opens his hands.
Vale's lips peel back. He lowers his belly, tries to make threat into apology. The silver wolf takes one step, and the step is the end of all the ways this could have gone.
Elara and Thorne ghost the clearing's edges. Cassian hangs just inside shadow, copper eyes unblinking.
Atlas shifts.
It is not spectacle. It is subtraction: wolf evaporating into man without a seam to catch, fur becoming shadow, becoming skin, and then he is upright in the clearing's center, bare to the waist, breath even, rain beading on scars like mercury. His eyes remain almost the same blue. He tips his head and the motion reads as both question and sentence.
"Darren Vale," he says, voice low enough to make the ground remember gravity. "You are in my woods."
Vale's jaws click shut. He shifts because fear wants hands. He lands in a man's body that doesn't understand how to stand in front of him. Mud streaks his face. Blood—his, others'—turns his palms ancient.
"You're not a God," he spits, the old insult that always fails to do new work.
"Good," Atlas says, and walks forward as if he were stepping onto a balcony. "Gods don't have to clean."
Thorne moves when Atlas does, a shadow that prefaced a sentence. Vale charges the side where mercy might be and finds none. Elara is already there, the absence of air, a jerk of wrist and forearm and then Vale is on his knees, his shoulder explaining why. She does not look at his face. She looks at Atlas.
Cassian watches the Alpha, not the prey. His nostrils flare once, a minute reading of the air the way a gambler reads fingers. His mouth makes a private line.
"Alive," Atlas says, and the pack obeys the way the body obeys the spine.
They take Vale down so quietly the birds don't get offended.
You wake like you were thrown up from deep water—gasping, furious at the surface for being where it is. Your sheets are a knot the size of another person. The window is open wider than you left it and the room smells like wet bark.
Your hands are dirty.
You sit up too fast. The world wobbles and catches itself. Dirt rims, crescents your nails. You close your fist and grit answers.
"Not possible," you tell the empty dark, because the empty dark would never lie.
On the table by the couch, the little phone Elara left shivers once and lights its cold square face. No message. Just a line of text scrolling across, institutional and indifferent.
Solstice Moon—Phase High.
You do not touch the phone. You stand, barefoot, and walk to the window. The city lifts its pale collar to the rain and it is beautiful in the way of things that do not care to be seen. Far away and far below, something howls. Another answers, lower. The sound strokes your bones like a gloved hand.
You close the window..... slowly, like closing a book on a line, you aren't ready to finish.
When you lie down, you leave one hand above the covers the way you might, for someone else's hand to find. You pretend you're doing it for the air.
Sleep comes back like a tide that refused to be denied.