I'd outrun wolves before.Not many, and not comfortably, but enough times to know my limits and how close I could push them before those limits pushed back. My hybrid blood gave me an edge I'd never been able to fully explain—something between the wolf's speed and the vampire's preternatural stillness, a kind of controlled urgency that let me move fast without burning out, without the telltale crashing sound of someone panicking through undergrowth.
But the heat was making everything harder.
Every hundred yards, my body staged a small revolt. The fire under my skin was spreading in waves now, rolling up from somewhere deep and biological and completely indifferent to the fact that I was currently running for my life through a forest at six in the morning with an alpha on one side and unknown wolves on the other. My vision kept sharpening and blurring in turns, my senses swinging between overwhelmingly acute and uselessly scattered, and the scent I was throwing into the cold air behind me was absolutely not helping.
I was essentially running through the woods trailing a supernatural distress flare.
The howl came again from the east, closer this time, and then a second one answered from the north, and I understood with the particular clarity that comes from genuine fear that they were coordinating. Whoever these wolves were, they weren't just passing through Garrett's territory. They were moving in a pattern, sweeping in a wide arc that was going to funnel me somewhere specific if I wasn't careful.
I pulled up behind an oak wide enough to hide behind and pressed my back against the bark, forcing myself to breathe slowly through my nose, cataloguing what I could smell.
Garrett's wolves, still back toward the settlement—agitated, territorial, trying to figure out what the strangers wanted before committing to a confrontation.
The eastern wolves—unfamiliar scent, disciplined, organized in a way that rogue packs never were. This wasn't a raiding party. Raiders were messy and loud and smelled like adrenaline and bad decisions. These wolves smelled like purpose.
And underneath everything, bleeding through the cold morning air like ink into water, my own scent. Warm and dark and layered and absolutely impossible to miss.
I pressed the back of my hand against my forehead and it came away damp. The heat was climbing faster than it had any right to, faster than it ever had in the three years I'd been managing it with pills and careful routines and sheer stubborn refusal to let my own body betray me.
My mother had warned me about this. When I was fourteen and she was still alive, she'd sat me down at our kitchen table in the dingy apartment above the laundromat where we lived and explained, in the careful, quiet way she explained everything important, that there would come a time when the biology would win. When the hybrid heat would be too old and too strong for any suppressant to touch. When my body would do what it was built to do and announce itself to every supernatural creature within range whether I wanted it to or not.
She'd told me to be somewhere safe when that happened.
She had also been dead for seven years, so her advice had a certain tragic timing to it.
The sound of movement through the underbrush snapped me back. Not from the east. From directly ahead—maybe thirty yards and closing, deliberate footsteps that weren't bothering to be quiet anymore because whoever it was already knew exactly where I was.
I stayed very still and thought about my options, which were limited in the way that all options are limited when you're overheated and outnumbered and your body is actively working against you.
I could run south. The forest thinned out toward the highway two miles down, and humans meant complicated, but complicated was sometimes better than the alternative.
I could climb. The oak behind me was climbable, and wolves in human form had a complicated relationship with tree-climbing that occasionally worked in a fugitive's favor.
Or I could stand my ground, which my survival instincts categorically rejected but which some other part of me—the older, stranger, deeper part that I tried very hard not to listen to—was pointing out might be the only option that didn't end with me exhausted and caught anyway.
The footsteps stopped.
The forest went very quiet.
And then a voice came out of the shadows between the trees, low and even and carrying the particular weight of someone who was accustomed to being obeyed.
"We're not going to hurt you."
I said nothing. In my experience, people who opened with that were always lying, but arguing the point seemed counterproductive.
"We've been tracking your scent for two days," the voice continued. A man. Young, maybe, or at least not old—there was something in the timbre that suggested someone who hadn't yet fully settled into the authority he was wielding. "We didn't come from the settlement. We came from the Crescent Shadow territory, northeast. Do you know it?"
I knew of it. Everyone in the rogue network knew of the Crescent Shadow Pack—one of the oldest and most powerful in the region, answering to an Alpha King whose reputation for ruthlessness had a way of traveling ahead of him into every conversation. Not the kind of wolves you ran from casually. Not the kind of wolves you ran toward either.
"What do you want?" I asked. My voice came out steadier than I felt, which was the one small victory the morning had offered me.
A pause. Then: "Our Alpha sent us. He felt something shift in the supernatural balance two days ago. A new hybrid signature, strong enough to register all the way back in our territory."
My stomach dropped.
"He wants to meet you," the voice said.
"I'm not interested in meeting alphas," I said.
"That's fine." Another pause, this one with a different quality to it—careful, like someone choosing their next words with precision. "But the heat you're going into right now is a full hybrid heat, not a partial suppressed cycle. You know what that means. You've been managing this for years, which means you're smart, and smart means you already know that without a bond anchor, a full hybrid heat will—"
"I know what it does," I said sharply.
I did know. My mother had told me that too. A full hybrid heat without a bond anchor didn't just hurt—it escalated, feeding on itself, intensifying in a feedback loop that could last days and left the hybrid either broken or burning from the inside out in ways that the supernatural community discussed in careful, clinical terms that did absolutely nothing to make the reality less horrifying.
I'd been managing the partial heats for three years specifically to avoid this.
And now here I was.
The man stepped out from between the trees. He was younger than his voice had suggested—maybe twenty-five, lean and dark-haired, with careful eyes that were currently doing the particular thing wolves' eyes did when they were working hard not to let them go gold. He was keeping his distance deliberately, I realized. Staying far enough back that his scent didn't carry to me strongly, minimizing the way it would interact with mine.
Considerate. Which was either genuine or calculated, and I didn't have enough information to know which.
"My name is Cole," he said. "I'm a scout for Kael Draven's pack." He held both hands slightly out from his sides—the universal gesture of a wolf trying to look unthreatening, which worked about as well as it always did, which was partially. "The Alpha King is prepared to offer you shelter. Resources. A safe place to get through the heat."
"In exchange for what?" I asked, because nothing in the supernatural world was free, and I'd stopped believing in charity before I was old enough to read.
Cole's expression didn't change, but something in his eyes shifted. Something that looked, if I was being honest with myself, uncomfortably like pity.
"He'll discuss terms when you arrive," he said.
Which was not an answer. Which was, in fact, the specific non-answer that people gave when the answer was something they didn't want to say out loud in the middle of a forest to a woman who was already on the edge of bolting.
The heat rolled through me in another wave, stronger than the last, and I pressed my hand flat against the oak bark behind me and focused on the rough texture of it, the realness of it, while my vision went briefly white at the edges.
When it cleared, Cole was watching me with that careful expression, and I understood, with a clarity that the heat hadn't managed to burn away entirely, that my options had just collapsed into something much simpler.
I could run. Burn alone in the forest. Hope I made it to the highway and found help before the heat made me someone else's problem in the worst possible way.
Or I could go with the wolves from the Crescent Shadow Pack and find out what an Alpha King wanted badly enough to send scouts two days out from his own territory.
Neither option was good.
One of them was survivable.
"How far is it?" I asked.
Something moved in Cole's expression—relief, I thought, carefully contained.
"Two hours by vehicle," he said. "We have an SUV at the eastern road."
Two hours. I looked at the sky through the canopy. Thought about the heat building in my blood and my mother's voice warning me about bond anchors and feedback loops. Thought about Garrett back at the settlement, already knowing something was wrong with me. Thought about the seventeen different ways this could go badly and the two or three ways it might not.
"If anyone touches me without my permission," I said, "I will make them regret it in ways that are creative and permanent."
Cole nodded, serious as a grave. "Understood."
"And if this Alpha King of yours thinks whatever he's offering covers the right to touch me, he's wrong."
"I'll pass that along."
I pushed off the oak tree. My legs were steadier than they had any right to be, which I chose to take as a good sign even though I suspected it was just adrenaline lying to me.
"Lead the way," I said.
Cole turned and started moving east. I followed, and the forest moved around us, and somewhere behind me the Ironwood settlement was waking up fully now, Garrett's confused anger spreading through it like smoke.
I didn't look back.
I never looked back.
But as I walked deeper into the trees, following a stranger toward a pack that had no reason to want anything good from me, the heat climbed higher in my blood, and underneath the fear and the exhaustion and the grim practicality of survival, something older and stranger stirred.
Something that felt, against every piece of evidence I had, like recognition.
Like I was walking toward something I'd already been waiting for.
I told that part of me to shut up.
It didn't listen.