Page 69 of Legacy Elite

"Shift."

Everyone starts pulling into wolf.

It's fast. It's stupidly fast. Torres goes first because Torres has been doing this since before any of us knew wolves existed, and then Renzo, and then Sophia with a little shake at the end like she's settling a coat, and Declan takes about four seconds because Declan is enormous.

And I stand there.

Being a person. In a forest. Again.

Here we go.

Because this is the part where I do what I've done in every training block since October — close my eyes and reach for something that isn't there and stand very still while the world goes on around me.

Freya's already moving out ahead as a wolf, nose down, cutting the slope.

There's a woman called Ines sitting on a rock somewhere with a bad leg. It's five degrees. She's been out here since twenty to nine and the ground ahead breaks up into scrub that's going to need noses, not hands.

And they need me.

That's all it is. Not I need to shift. Not everyone's watching.

They need me and I'm standing in a clearing being a person.

I don't close my eyes.

"Oh, fuck you," I say — not to Freya, to my own body — and I go after them.

And it comes.

It comes like a door opening. Heat rolls up under my skin, the base of my skull clamps tight, and then the world drops — down and impossibly loud, a thousand smells arriving at once and sorting themselves into things with names. Wet stone. Deer. Sophia. Someone's soap. And under all of it, thin and clear and unmistakably a person, a line of scent going away up the slope like a wire.

I've got four legs and I'm standing over a fallen log I remember having to climb.

Everybody stops.

Oh.

Sophia sits straight down on her back end, which I did not know wolves could do in a way that conveys emotion, and makes a noise.

Torres comes and puts his shoulder against my chest and stands there for a second, which is the only thing anybody does about it, and it's exactly enough.

Freya, from thirty feet ahead, does something with her head that means are we continuing.

We continue.

Here is what nobody tells you about being enormous.

It's inconvenient.

I can smell everything, which turns out to be the least useful thing that's ever happened to me, because I have no idea which of the four hundred things I'm smelling matters. Freya knows. Freya is moving in a way that says she has one thread and is following it. I have four hundred threads and no hands.

I'm faster than all of them, which means I keep arriving places before I've decided to and then having to come back.

I'm louder than all of them. Substantially louder. Freya moves through this forest like a ninja. I move through it like a wardrobe falling downstairs.

And then I find a person.

At least, I'm pretty sure I do. Human scent cuts through everything else, clear enough that I finally understand what Freya's been following, and I put my head down and go.