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Someone trained them for this.

He intercepted it before it reached twenty feet. Drove it over the same cliff edge. The ocean took that one too. The last was bigger and faster, and it went around Maelin as if it had thought about it first. Which creatures were not supposed to do. It cleared the right flank and headed south at full speed.

South was the ward pillar at the residential boundary.

South was everything on the other side of it.

Tor ran.

His wolf screamed for the full shift: full wolf, full speed, full everything. He gave it enough to run faster than his body should have been able to, holding the rest back with the thinnest thread of control he’d had since his first year. The gap between him and the creature closed. Not fast enough. The creature slammed into the pillar, and Tor hit it half a second later, driving it down into the warded ground as the pillar took the hit and the creature dissolved.

The creature’s claws raked his left arm on the way down. Three lines, deep enough to bleed freely down his forearm, which he felt but ignored because a cracked pillar stood in front of him and he had bigger problems. From thirty feet away, the fracture in the pillar would have passed for a hairline. In his partial shift, he could see it ran clean from the impact point to the base stone, straight through the warding inscription like a sentence cut short.

Tor stared at it. Everything in him went quiet, and not the good kind. Drayce came up beside him, took in the pillar, and did not say anything long enough for the silence to say it for him.

“How long?”

“Unknown. It’ll hold for a while. Not forever.”

“Supplementary rotation.”

“Starting tonight.”

“The Council —”

“I’m calling them.” Tor’s eyes fell on the fracture. The ward line was compromised. Not broken, which was worse, because broken things you could see coming. “I don’t care what time it is.”

“Neither do I.” Drayce pulled out his radio.

He found her pressed against the cliff rock thirty feet back from the residential boundary. Not running. Not gone. Right where the ward line ended and the residential street began, the cliff wall at her back, taking everything in from that spot. Of course she was. Mirelle never went away from the thing if she could go toward it instead.

She was fine. She was right there and fine.

He needed a few seconds before he walked over there.

He gave himself two and walked over. His eyes had not fully settled, the gold lingering as the partial shift retreated in its own time, and she tracked his approach with her head tilted, taking in all sorts of new information and revising fast. He stopped in front of her. Too close, he felt. But he did not move. “The line went wrong,” she said, before he could ask. “I felt it from my kitchen. The hum dropped like a note going flat, and I couldn’t sit there waiting for someone to tell me what it meant.” A pause. “I didn’t plan past walking out the door. I’m aware that’s a pattern.”

“You stayed.”

“I was going to leave.” Her gaze stayed on his eyes. “And then I wasn’t. Those are —”

“Settling.”

“Right.” She held steady while the gold faded back to gray and let it happen. “Gold. That’s — is that the wolf?”

“Partial shift.”

“Partial.” A statement.

“Yes.”

She studied him for a moment. “What does the full shift look like?”

“I’ll show you sometime when I haven’t just driven two modified creatures off a cliff.”

“Fair enough.” Her eyes went past him to the pillar, then back, and then her gaze dropped to his left arm and stayed there. “You’re bleeding.”

“It’ll close.” He glanced at it. Three lines from wrist to elbow, dark in the low light, already slowing. “Shifter healing. In forty-eight hours, it’ll look like nothing.”