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Then I looked past her.

Kaelen was standing at the rail directly above me, both hands wrapped so tightly around the iron that the bones showed beneath his skin. His face had gone white, and there was something almost feral in the way he stared down at me. His eyes were gold and fixed entirely on mine.

The ache in my chest ignited.

Until then, it had been nothing more than a deep, stubborn pressure, the same strange hurt I had carried since the courtyard and the same thin vibration I had sometimes felt moving through the stone walls of my tower at night. Now it became something else entirely. Heat burst outward from the center of my chest and raced through every nerve in my body.

My back arched off the sand.

Then my bones began to break.

I felt every one of them.

I tried afterward to explain what happened, but there was never any language that fit it properly. My arms twisted and shortened. My jaw dragged forward. My skin burned so fiercely that I thought it was tearing open, and then something dark forced its way through it, thickening into black fur. I screamed, or I thought I did, until the sound coming out of me changed into something lower and rougher that no longer belonged to a human throat.

I could not see clearly. I could not breathe properly. I had no control over any part of it. Whatever was happening had taken possession of my body and was remaking it without asking me.

Then, with the same violence with which it had begun, it stopped.

I was standing.

I had four legs.

Everything around me had changed.

The Pit seemed impossibly large. I was suddenly aware of every inch of it. Smell came at me with such force that it was almost another form of sight. I could smell my blood soaking into the sand, hot and metallic. I could smell the sweat of three hundred people crowded onto the stone benches. Delphine's fear was sharp enough to pick out from everything else, and beneath it I caught the lemon soap the Warden in the box had used on his hands.

Then another scent cut through all of it.

Cedar. Cold air. Snow.

Kaelen.

The realization hit me with such force that I forgot Delphine for a second.

I smelled like him.

The fur covering my body carried his scent. My own breath carried it. Whatever I had become, whatever black wolf now stood in the middle of the Pit, there was something of Kaelen in it so deeply embedded that I could smell him on myself.

Delphine hissed and reared.

She struck.

I never made a conscious decision to move. My new body reacted before thought could catch up with it. Something ancient and certain took control, driving me forward beneath the sweep of her white wings. My jaws closed around the long, pale column of her throat.

I held her there.

I did not bite.

I could have. Her pulse hammered beneath my teeth, quick and terrified, and I could feel how little pressure it would take to crush the fragile structure of her neck. The smell of her blood was close now, warm beneath skin and feathers, and every instinct in the wolf wanted me to close my jaws.

I did not.

I kept my grip firm and still until her entire body went rigid. A moment later, the feathers beneath my mouth began to change. They drew inward, softened, and disappeared as skin returned beneath my teeth.

Delphine Marrow lay naked on her back in the black sand, shaking violently, with the teeth of a black wolf resting against her throat.

Her face had lost all its color. Her blue eyes were wide with terror.