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"What are you doing?"

That was my voice. My human voice, one that I still barely recognized as my own after so long without it. It sounded wrong, though. Broken. Shattered into as many pieces as my memories.

"This is what you agreed to. You're going to change everything."

Another flash, then nothing but blinding light and pain, more pain than a human body should be capable of handling. Other faces flickered at the periphery, people I couldn't name even if I wanted to, there and gone in a haze of twisting, writhing agony.

More faces, more screams. First from me, then later from them.

Then, a chance. An opportunity. Their control slipped, just for a second, and our human mind took our chance. We ran.

Something chased us, tore into our wings, but we were faster. We'd always been faster.

Then nothing. Nothing until the woods. We'd hunted the skin-changer until it hid where we couldn't reach it. Knowing we had it trapped, we hunted for food instead. The beast was in full control, and the human part of me, the part that would have known the danger we faced so close to a town, wasn't strong enough to push through. Then the humans came with their guns and the skin-changers with their teeth, ripping into our fresh injuries. We could have killed them, though. We could have used our tail and brought them all low, but then we caught their scent.

The other.

The one like us, but not. It had found us again, and now we were no longer the predator. We were prey, hunted by something that should have joined us. Our wings hung in tatters from its claws and teeth, blood dripping down our body from bullets and fresh bites. We couldn't outrun it this time, so we took a risk and veered toward the town.

It didn't follow us. We escaped and found Quinn. The memories of the other slipped away, and we let ourselves believe we were safe.

We were wrong.

In the seconds it took for those memories to hit me, the man moved. He unlocked the truck, and I realized too late why it was so large. It had to be, to hold him.

The other jumped down to the ground, his eyes zeroing in on me. He bristled, hackles going up and golden wings flaring. His hooked beak clicked and his talons dug into the ground, rending deep furrows in the frozen dirt. Rather than the thick, dark black-red tail I had, his was a sickly yellow, slender and flexible but no less deadly.

A thick collar circled his throat, a tiny box blinking a baleful red light. Unlike me, his will wasn't his own.

Another flash of memory, of my own claws ripping at my throat, slicing through the collar that choked us and forced us to obey. Lightning bolts of white-hot agony seared through every nerve, a desperate attempt to make us stop, but there would be no freedom while their chains held us.

The collar around the other was different. Weak sunlight glinted off the metallic surface, where it had once been thick, near-impenetrable fibers. He wouldn't be able to rip through his like I had.

"This has gone on long enough, Ibarra." The man's voice still made me flinch, grating over something in my head that wanted me to listen and obey. Forgotten years of feigned camaraderie clashed with my few weeks of freedom and thinking my own thoughts for once.

I couldn't give in, though. If I lost here, there would be no one left to protect Quinn. The skin-changers were winning their fight with the two men, but they didn't stand a chance against the gold monster at the man's side.

"Krenshaw! Help us!"

The desperate plea of his companion went ignored, the man's sole focus on me.

Krenshaw.

The name pierced the fear trying to take hold of me as memories flashed through my mind. Elden Krenshaw. That was his name. I couldn't remember when he'd come into my life, but more and more, I could remember the day I thought he'd left it for good. The day the beast and I escaped, he'd been there, and we'd nearly thrown away our narrow escape window for just a chance at ripping his throat out.

We wouldn't waste this second chance.

"This only goes one of two ways, you know," he went on, cold eyes never leaving me. "You come along quietly and we'll forget this little town exists. Or you fight, you lose, and we'll make sure every single being that helped you gets a room at the Enclave."

Visceral, primal fear curdled in my gut, even before the shattered slivers of my memories of the Enclave stabbed into me. White walls. Barred windows. Food that left a bitter aftertaste and left us dazed, too weak to fight.

The silver table with the lights that seared our eyes. The needles. Feeling our flesh tear and split and pull against the stitches keeping us in one piece.

I might not trust these skin-changers, but no one deserved to end up there.

The beast wanted to lunge at Krenshaw, to tear him into pieces like we should have done the day we escaped, but I yanked back the reins, keeping us still.

We couldn't win this fight. It pained me to admit it, even in the privacy of our own mind, but it was impossible. Our injuries still slowed us down, creating massive weaknesses for the other to exploit. One swipe to the worst wounds on our back leg or a bite to our wing and he would cripple us for good. The other was strong, rested, and wouldn't stop until he was dead. Krenshaw wouldn't let him.