Chapter 6

Wren

Six weeks in, Wren had learned to fix a roof, snare something bigger than rabbit, and stop flinching when Ezra barked orders in a tone that used to remind her of every reason she'd hated pack hierarchy back in Blackthorn. Six weeks in, she'd also stopped waking up reaching for a chest wound that wasn't going to heal on its own, which she counted as the closest thing to progress she had, even if the ache itself hadn't actually gone anywhere.

She'd started to know the others, too, in the specific unglamorous way you get to know people you work alongside every day. Milo followed her around the way younger pack members sometimes attached themselves to whoever seemed least likely to send them away, and she'd stopped minding it somewhere around week three. Petra spoke maybe six words a day, all of them to Sable, none of them to Wren, and Wren had decided not to take that personally — trust, she was learning, worked on its own schedule out here, same as everything else. Rennick and Dara kept mostly to themselves, but they'd started nodding to her in the mornings, which in a pack this small counted as practically a parade.

She was hauling water back from the creek, thinking about nothing more urgent than whether they had enough salt left for the week, when she heard it — three wolves, unfamiliar scent, moving fast and not bothering to hide it. Rogues didn't usually bother hiding when they'd already decided a pack was too weak to fight back, and something cold and immediate dropped through her stomach at the recognition, because she knew, with total certainty, exactly what this was going to require of her.

Ezra was two miles out checking snare lines. Petra couldn't shift anymore, hadn't been able to in years. Milo was twelve, all elbows and no training. That left Wren and Sable and whatever the two of them could manage against three rogues who'd clearly done this before — the loose, confident formation of wolves who'd tested weak packs and won often enough to stop being careful about it.

"Get Milo inside," Wren said, already moving toward the tree line, already shifting before she'd fully decided to, the water bucket forgotten somewhere behind her.

Sable was already three steps ahead of her, knife drawn, shifting halfway through the motion of drawing it, which was either reckless or exactly right depending on how the next few minutes went.

Wren had fought before. Every pack trained its omegas at least enough not to be completely defenseless, some rudimentary self-defense drilled in alongside everything else she'd been taught not to expect to need. But she'd never fought like this — with nothing behind her, no pack line to retreat to, no warriors a howl away — and when the first rogue broke from the tree line, low and fast and already committed, she understood with total clarity that she was probably going to lose this.

He came in high, jaws already open for her throat in the kind of lunge that didn't leave much room for a mistake on either side, and Wren threw herself sideways with more instinct than plan, half-certain she'd feel teeth before she felt the ground.

She felt neither, for one impossible half-second. The rogue's jaws snapped shut on empty air a full foot from where she actually was, and he stumbled past her like he'd genuinely lost track of a target he should have had dead to rights — like the scent trail he'd been following had simply stopped existing between one stride and the next.

Wren didn't understand what had happened. She didn't have time to. She used the half-second his confusion bought her, twisting back in fast and low, and by the time Sable reached her — knife flashing, already shouting something that might have been Wren's name, might have been a warning — there were only two rogues left standing, both of them backing off now, uncertain in a way rogues who'd already won three fights that season had no business being. They didn't stay to find out what had happened to the third. Neither of them stayed long enough to become a fourth casualty on Nightshade ground.

Ezra found her twenty minutes later, still shaking, still in human skin because she'd lost the thread of how to shift back somewhere in the adrenaline crash, sitting in the dirt with blood on her hands that wasn't entirely her own. Sable stood a few feet off, arms crossed hard over her chest, watching Wren with an expression that hadn't quite settled between fear and something closer to awe.

Ezra looked at the tree line. He looked at her. He didn't ask if she was alright, which she appreciated more than she could have said out loud.

"That rogue," he said slowly, crouching down to her eye level, "the one who came in first. He had you dead, Wren. Should've had you dead — I've seen that exact lunge a hundred times in my life, and it doesn't miss, not against someone your size with no training to speak of." Something careful moved across his face, careful in a way she hadn't seen from him yet, not even the day she'd shown up on his doorstep half-starved. "What did you do?"

"I don't know." It was the truth, and it scared her more than the fight itself had. "I didn't do anything. He just — lost me. Like I wasn't there at all."

Ezra didn't answer for a long moment. When he finally spoke, his voice had gone quiet in a way she hadn't heard from him yet, careful, like he was handling something he wasn't sure wouldn't break in his hands. "There's an old story about this pack," he said. "About what Nightshade blood used to be able to do, generations back, before it thinned out to nothing worth mentioning. Wolves who could go somewhere a scent couldn't follow. I always figured it was exactly that — a story. The kind every dying pack tells itself to feel like it used to matter." He studied her the way he might have studied a stranger all over again, like the last six weeks hadn't happened. "I'm starting to think I was wrong about that."

"That's not — I'm not from Nightshade blood. I'm Blackthorn."

"Are you sure about that?" He said it gently enough that it didn't feel like an accusation, more like a door being opened onto a room she hadn't known was there. "Bloodlines wander further than people like to admit, over enough generations. Might be worth asking your mother, next time you've got the stomach for that conversation."

Wren didn't know what to do with that, so for the moment she didn't do anything with it at all. She just sat in the dirt, hands shaking, chest still aching with a wound that had nothing to do with the fight, and understood, distantly, that whatever she'd just found in herself, it was the first thing in six weeks that had made her feel less like someone's leftover and more like someone who might, eventually, be worth being afraid of.

Sable finally crossed the distance between them and dropped down beside her in the dirt, shoulder to shoulder, not saying anything for a while. Then, quietly: "For what it's worth — I always thought there was something in you nobody back home bothered to look for. Might've just found it."

Wren decided she liked the feeling more than she wanted to admit. She decided to hold onto it, whatever it turned out to be.