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Even if Dair whispers encouragement into my hair as he kisses my head.

Even if gentle hands that smell like fresh fir heal my body.

The thing inside of me waits for me to slip.

I hold on with both hands.

I grit my teeth.

I’m sorry.

I slip.

Pain.

Burning hot pain.

My throat tears with the force of the scream that erupts from my chest.

But the echo?

It sounds like a howl.

And I am starving.

[ 60 ]

DAIR

Northern Pacific Territory

In my dream, the stars shift, and then I wake. A howl echoes through the mountaintops surrounding the Lunar Mother’s cabin where we’ve been staying until Ferris is well enough to travel northwest to my own territory.

I sit up in bed, my heart pounding out a beat I can’t understand. Raine is swaddled in the blankets from our nest, only her little nose sticking out from her cozy bundle. Seeing her does not ease the adrenaline icing my veins because I quickly realize that Ferris is gone.

I tear out of bed, not bothering with clothes, and sprint out of the cabin into the crisp, thin night air. Before my bare feet even touch the ground, my wolf emerges from my skin and begins tracking Ferris’s scent. He’s left a trail leading from the porch, down the stairs, and into the wooded area around the cabin. My wolf breathes deeply, nose pressed hard into the dirt. He takes a moment to orient himself, and then he crashes across the clearing and into the trees.

Where are we going? I ask.

Hunt, is all he says.

Immediately, it becomes obvious that something large ran through here. The understory is flattened in some places, ferns bent at the ground at unnatural angles. The forest is quiet too, which normally wouldn’t be too unusual at night, but the eerie silence feels more like danger than rest.

We prowl through the trees, tracking Ferris’s scent through the destruction. The further we get into the woods, the more worried I become. Sure, I can’t smell the telltale burning rot of Biters, but why else would he be running away into a foreign wilderness, and how did he trample the plants as thoroughly as he has? When he woke, why didn’t he wake us up?

My wolf suddenly stops and crouches low in the wild undergrowth, breathing as silently as he can. I feel his ears on a constant swivel, listening for every little snap and pop. His head whips to the right, where the terrain begins to slope down the mountain, and when I focus in, I can just hear a body running through the trees, far more agile now than at the start of this journey. Except, it’s not running toward any of the other shifter or human inhabitants of this clan—it’s running away.

We follow, my wolf snarls, and so we do, jumping and sprinting to catch up with the body that has to be Ferris.

Before we can lay eyes on him, a terrified screech pierces the air, followed by guttural, animalistic growls. Faster, I plead, and my wolf digs in deeper, nearly flying toward the sounds of massacre. Gods, what if Ferris was scared that he was still going to turn and bolted, and now he’s weaponless, trying to fight off one of the many large predators that call these lands their homes? What if he gets injured like I did all those years ago?

My wolf skids into a small clearing, the hair on his back standing at attention, ready to take on any threat against our mate. Except, what the moon illuminates stops us in our tracks.

There’s a trail of blood from where we stand at the edge of the clearing, leading to where a deer has been run down and killed by a massive brown wolf with black streaks in his fur and a gnarly scar on his shoulder. The wolf is ripping the deer apart, gorging itself on the fresh organs and meat. As our scent seeps into the clearing, the wolf senses us and raises its bloodied face to stare with glowing amber eyes.

Eyes that I have seen catch flame and melt into pools of liquid copper. Eyes that have looked into mine as their pupils contracted and expanded in waves of pleasure.

Eyes that have followed Raine and me across the continent.