Chapter 12: First Shift

I drove my elbow into Ramsay's ribs, and he let go with a grunt.

I ran.

I went through the ring of torches and the shouting Alphas, and past a gray-braided woman who stepped neatly aside.

I ran down the slope behind the hall, into the pines, with the dark opening up in front of me.

Trudy yelled my name.

I heard Rowan's voice under hers, and I couldn't stop.

I didn't want anyone to see my face yet.

The trees closed over me.

Sorrel was in my chest, so big now there was no room for my lungs.

She had waited ten years in the dark, and there wasn't a wall left to stop her.

"Now," I said out loud, and let go.

It hurt.

My spine bent and cracked, my hands hit the needles and weren't hands, and the world turned to smell.

Pine, cold water, rotting leaves, a deer a mile off.

Under all of it ran a thread I knew, smoke and warm skin.

I ran, and the wolf ran with me.

For the first time in ten years there was no cuff on either of us.

I found the creek and the cold air above it and stood with my paws in the water, panting.

I heard him come.

A big brown wolf stepped out of the pines and stopped ten feet away.

He lowered his head and turned his ears down.

He was asking.

I went to him.

We ran together till the moon was high, along the ridge and down to the water and up again.

We snapped and shoved at each other, my wolf and his.

When we finally changed back, we were in a hunter's lean-to by the creek.

It held a pile of old blankets and a stove nobody had lit in years.

I lay on my back on the planks, naked and cold and shaking with the wildest joy I had ever felt.

Rowan knelt at the other end with his chest heaving.

He didn't touch me.

"He cut it," I said. "The mark."

"I heard him." His voice was a rasp. "Wolf ears.

"So did the gray-braided Alpha. She was standing on the far side of that stone, and she's told the others."

"It was never his."

"No."

"It was yours."

"Hazel." He swallowed. "I'm not going to take anything you don't want to give."

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