Chapter 22: The White Wolf

It did not hurt the way I had always been told it would.

It felt like every muscle in me letting go at once.

My bones lengthened and folded, and my skin ran with fur, and the world rushed up around me in colors I had never seen.

The ring went sharp.

I could smell every wolf on the wall, a hundred scents, and I could smell the blood on my arm, which had already closed.

I could smell Alasdair above everything, cedar and smoke and fear.

I stood on four white paws in the dirt, and my head came up past the grey wolf's shoulder.

He stared at me.

I had never been looked at that way.

It was not scorn, and it was not pity.

It was the look of a wolf who had been told my line was extinct.

I lowered my head and showed him my teeth.

My wolf was in me and I was in her.

For the first time in twenty-eight years we were one body and one voice.

She said, mine.

I said, I know.

He lunged.

I moved before I thought, and his jaws closed on air.

My shoulder met his flank and drove him sideways.

He was bigger and older, and he had fought a hundred ring fights.

I had a lifetime of silence behind me, and it came out all at once.

He snapped at my throat, and I turned my head, and the teeth skated across my ruff.

I bit his foreleg.

I felt bone under my jaw, and he screamed.

He tried to roll me, and I held on.

He tried to throw me, and I dug my back claws into the dirt and held on.

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