So I was running through a forest at six in the morning while my body was actively trying to betray me.
Great birthday so far.
The heat was climbing in waves now—not constant, which would've almost been easier to deal with, but in rolls, like something building pressure before it broke. Every time one hit, my vision did this thing where it sharpened almost painfully before blurring at the edges, and my senses kept swinging between too much and not enough, and the whole time I was throwing my scent into the cold air behind me like a supernatural emergency flare.
I was not, to put it mildly, in peak escape condition.
I pulled up behind a wide oak and pressed my back against the bark, forcing slow breaths, trying to sort through what I could smell. Garrett's wolves were still back toward the settlement—agitated, territorial, trying to figure out the strangers before they committed to anything. The eastern wolves smelled unfamiliar and disciplined in a way rogue packs never were. No adrenaline. No chaos. Just—purpose. Whatever that meant.
And me. I could smell myself most of all, warm and strange and impossible to miss, which was a problem I had no immediate solution to.
My mother warned me this would happen. When I was fourteen and she was still around to warn me about things, she sat me down at our kitchen table—this wobbly little thing above the laundromat we lived over, the one with the leg she'd fixed three times with increasingly creative solutions—and told me in her quiet, serious way that there would come a point where the biology won. Where the heat got too old and too strong and no pill on the market would touch it.
She said to be somewhere safe when that happened.
She'd been dead for seven years, so the advice had a certain tragic irony to it.
The footsteps coming through the underbrush ahead of me were not trying to be quiet. Thirty yards out, maybe, and closing deliberately, which meant whoever it was already knew exactly where I was. I stayed still and thought hard and fast about my options.
South to the highway—two miles, humans, complicated.
Up the tree—possible, and wolves in human form had a complicated relationship with climbing that occasionally worked in my favor.
Stand my ground—every survival instinct I had said no, but the older, stranger part of me that I tried hard to ignore pointed out that running tired was just getting caught slower.
The footsteps stopped.
The forest went quiet in that specific way that means something's watching you.
"We're not going to hurt you."
Male voice. Young. Carrying the careful weight of someone using authority they hadn't quite grown all the way into yet.
I said nothing, because in my experience people who open with that are always lying, but arguing seemed counterproductive when I didn't know how many of them there were.
"We've been tracking your scent for two days," he said. "Crescent Shadow Pack, northeast territory. Do you know it?"
I knew of it. Everyone in the rogue network knew of the Crescent Shadow Pack. Alpha King with a reputation that traveled ahead of him into rooms. Old pack. Powerful. The kind of name that made other alphas careful about their phrasing.
"What do you want?" I asked.
"Our Alpha felt a shift in the supernatural balance two days ago. A hybrid signature strong enough to register all the way back in our territory." A pause. "He wants to meet you."
"I'm not interested in meeting alphas."
"That's fine," he said, and something in the way he said it made me think he'd been told to expect exactly this answer. "But the heat you're going into right now—it's a full hybrid cycle. Not partial. Not suppressed. You know what happens with a full hybrid heat without a bond anchor."
"I know what happens," I said.
I did know. My mother had covered that too, in the same quiet serious voice, the same wobbly kitchen table. A full hybrid heat without a bond anchor didn't just hurt. It escalated. Fed on itself. Got worse in a feedback loop that could last days and ended one of two ways, neither of them good.
I'd been careful for three years specifically to avoid this.
Here we were.
The man stepped out from between the trees. Younger than his voice—mid-twenties, dark-haired, careful eyes that were working very hard not to go gold. He was keeping his distance deliberately, I noticed. Far enough back that his scent didn't reach me strongly. Considerate, which was either genuine or calculated and I didn't have enough information yet to know which.
"My name is Cole," he said. "I'm a scout. The Alpha King is offering you shelter. A safe place to get through the heat." He held his hands slightly out from his sides, the universal wolf gesture for I am trying very hard to look unthreatening right now. "He'll discuss terms when you arrive."
"Terms," I repeated.
"Terms," he said, which was not an elaboration.
The heat rolled through me in another wave and I pressed my palm flat against the oak bark and focused on the texture of it, real and rough, until my vision cleared. When I looked back at Cole he was watching me with something that looked uncomfortably like pity.
I hated that more than I hated almost anything.
"How far?" I asked.
The relief on his face was carefully contained but not quite careful enough. "Two hours by vehicle. We have an SUV at the eastern road."
I looked at the sky through the canopy. Thought about the heat and the feedback loop and my mother's voice and the seventeen ways this could go wrong and the two or three ways it might not.
"If anyone touches me without permission," I said, "I will make it creative and permanent."
"Understood."
"And if your Alpha King thinks whatever he's offering includes the right to put his hands on me, he's wrong."
"I'll make sure he knows that."
I pushed off the tree. My legs held, which I decided to take as a good sign even though it was probably just adrenaline running its mouth.
"Lead the way then," I said.
Cole turned east and I followed, and behind me the settlement was waking up fully now, Garrett's confusion spreading through it like smoke.
I didn't look back. I never looked back.
But as I walked deeper into the trees toward a pack I didn't trust and an alpha I'd never met, something underneath all the fear and exhaustion stirred. Something older. Something that felt less like dread and more like—
Recognition.
Like I was walking toward something I'd already been waiting for without knowing I was waiting.
I told that part of me to shut up.
It didn't listen.