Celeste reaches me. She's moving slower than she should. Her hand presses against her side.
"You're hurt."
"I'm not." She drops her hand. "Just winded."
She doesn't get winded. Now her skin is flushed, and the heat coming off her is wrong for a vampire at night. The same heat I felt on her wrist this morning. The same heat I've been tracking since we came home from Thessivane, each time a fraction warmer than the last.
I've cataloged every anomaly in her biology since the springs. The warmth. How her body cycles through exhaustion differently than any vampire I've known. Konstantin's modifications are still expressing in ways none of us fully understand, and every new symptom could be another layer of what he built into her. Her biology has never followed the rules.
Police radios crackle across the field. An officer is walking the perimeter with a flashlight, checking faces. SWAT is setting up a command post near the medical tent.
"We need to go," Celeste says. "Now."
Near the playground fence, a child is standing on the grass. A girl. Pink jacket. Sneakers with the laces untied. She's holding a woman's hand, and the woman is pulling her toward the parking lot. The girl isn't moving. She's looking at me.
She's looking at me with steady, absorbing focus.
The woman pulls harder. The girl turns and walks. She looks back once over her shoulder. Her pink jacket disappears between two cars.
We run.
We're at the compound in minutes. Conference room. Marcellus across the table, Celeste beside me. Julian on comms, already working the media angle. Erik arrives shortly after, human form, shirtless, three of his wolves at the gate. His face is tight, his eyes are scanning the room, and he walks straight to me.
"Six of mine were on camera," he says. "Full shift. A wolf tearing out a feral's throat on a livestream that hadforty thousand viewers." He pauses. "It's not coming down, Maximus."
"I know."
"My pack is exposed. My people."
"I know."
His jaw works. He looks at Celeste. Back at me.
"What do we do?"
Julian's voice on comms. "I'm watching the feeds. The Piedmont livestream has four million views. The news footage aired live on three networks. One of them has a still frame of a wolf midshift. Half the internet is calling it a hoax. The other half is calling it real. Both are trending." A breath. "And someone got a cell phone video of you, Maximus. Appearing out of nowhere. Standing over a body. Then gone. The comments are already asking what you are."
"Julian. The footage. Can it be contained?"
"No." No hesitation. "It's shared, screenshotted, archived. Every platform. But we have two things working for us. The footage is dark and shaky. Night race, phone cameras, everyone running. Nothing clean enough to hold up frame by frame. And we have the race." A breath. "The 5K gives us the narrative. Unauthorized guerrilla marketing action. A zombie and monster themed promotional stunt that crashed the event. The race organizers are furious. They're suing. The actors went too far, people got hurt, the trained animals were unlicensed. I need the race organizers' cooperation. If we can get them on record condemning the stunt, the institutional weight competes with the footage in the news cycle."
"Get them. Buy them, compel them, negotiate. Whatever it takes."
"Already working it. But the direct witnesses saw what they saw. The cover story holds in the press. It won't hold face to facewith someone who watched a wolf shift from fur to human in front of them."
"Lanthar's Fae."
"Lanthar's in north Georgia moving four hundred people through the Veil. He's not available tonight."
"Then get me a list. Every direct witness. Every first responder. Every course photographer. Names, faces, phone numbers. When Lanthar's done, we hand him the list and his Fae work through it."
"And until then?"
"Julian runs the cover. Race organizers, venue management, city permits. Build the scandal. Make it loud enough to drown out the questions."
"That buys hours," Julian says. "Maybe a day before someone credible pushes back."
"Then we have a day."
