CHAPTER 5: THE WILD

The forest wanted to kill me. It didn't waste time being subtle about it.

Within an hour of leaving the gate, I had tripped twice on roots I couldn't see, sliced the bottom of my left foot on a rock that jutted from the dirt like a tooth, and walked face-first into a branch that whipped across my cheekbone hard enough to draw blood. The cut stung for three seconds. Then it closed. Same as always.

The moon was three-quarters full, spilling silver through the canopy in broken patterns that shifted with the wind. Beautiful. Useless. The light created more shadows than it killed, and every shadow looked like something crouching. Every rustle in the undergrowth sounded like teeth.

I followed the stream I could hear but not see, heading east by instinct and the faint sound of water over stones. East meant the gap between pack territories. East meant no-man's land. The lawless strip of wilderness where no Alpha claimed authority and no pack law applied. It was full of rogues and ferals and things that survived by eating things that couldn't fight back.

I was barefoot, unarmed except for a kitchen knife, and running on half a piece of bread and the fumes of the worst night of my life.

But I was free.

The word felt strange. Hollow and enormous at the same time. Like a room too big for its furniture. Freedom was supposed to feel like flying. It felt like falling with no idea where the ground was.

The bundle pulsed against my hip. Steady, rhythmic warmth that matched my heartbeat step for step. My mother's last gift, wrapped in faded cloth and tied with a leather cord, burning gently through the fabric of my sack like a coal that refused to go out. I wanted to open it. My fingers itched to pull the cord and unwrap the cloth and see what my mother had thought was important enough to plan for on the night she died.

But Mama Sira said I would know when to open it. And this wasn't it. Not yet. Not while I was stumbling through dark forest with blood on my cheek and no plan beyond survive until sunrise.

I walked for hours. The temperature dropped. My fingers numbed first, then my toes, then the tips of my ears. The stained tunic and fraying trousers that had been adequate inside the pack house were nothing out here. The cold seeped through them like they weren't there.

I shifted.

The change came slowly, the way it always did. My wolf was small, barely larger than a dog. Silver-white fur, short, not thick enough for the cold but warmer than bare skin. My senses sharpened until the forest went from dark and muffled to vivid and electric. I could smell everything. Damp earth. Pine resin. The metallic trace of my own dried blood on my cheek.

And something else.

Something rotten. Sweet and wrong, like meat left in the sun. It was faint at first, carried on the wind from the east. Then it grew stronger. Closer.

My wolf's ears flattened. A low vibration started in my chest. Not the bond. The bond was dead. This was instinct. Ancient, primal, hard-coded into the animal brain that knew what that smell meant before my human mind caught up.

I heard them before I saw them.

A growl. Low, wet, broken. Then another from a different direction. Then a third.

They came out of the trees like smoke.

Three wolves. But wrong. Matted fur caked with mud and dried blood. Ribs jutting through their skin. And the eyes. Flat yellow discs with nothing behind them. No thought. No recognition. No wolf. Just hunger in a shape that still knew how to hunt.

Ferals.

The largest one was directly ahead. Twenty feet. It peeled back its lips and I saw cracked yellow teeth and gums black with disease. The other two circled left and right. Flanking. Even without minds, the predator instinct remained.

My wolf was too small to fight. Too slow to outrun three of them. There was nowhere to hide.

The largest feral lunged.

I dodged. Barely. Its jaws snapped shut so close to my throat I felt the wind of it across my fur. I scrambled sideways and shifted back to human on instinct, my body knowing before my brain did that I needed hands. I needed my knife.

I pulled it from the sack with shaking fingers. A kitchen knife. Four inches of blade. Against three feral wolves who weighed twice what I did and felt no pain.

The second feral hit me from the left. Its weight slammed into my shoulder and I went down hard. Claws raked across my upper arm, four lines of fire from shoulder to elbow. I screamed. My bare foot connected with its jaw and it stumbled back, snarling.

The third was already coming. I could hear it crashing through the brush behind me.

I was going to die. Alone. Barefoot. Less than a day out of Silver Ridge. Nobody would find my body. Nobody would look.

My hands caught fire.

Not flame. Light. The same warmth that had pressed against the stone floor of the great hall. The same heat that closed cuts before I could bleed. It erupted from my palms like something that had been caged for twenty-one years and the cage had finally shattered. Golden-white light poured between my fingers, bright enough to turn the dark forest into noon, bright enough that all three ferals skidded to a halt and squinted and snarled at something they couldn't understand.

I couldn't understand it either. I stared at my own hands and they were incandescent, pulsing, radiating a warmth so intense that the cold air around them shimmered like summer pavement.

The ferals held their ground. Confused but not afraid. Hunger was stronger than fear in things that had nothing left to lose.

The largest one gathered itself. I saw the muscles coil. I saw the flat yellow eyes lock onto my throat. It was going to charge through the light because light couldn't bite and light couldn't kill and I was still just a girl with a kitchen knife and burning hands and no idea what was happening to her.

It lunged.

Something whistled through the air.

A blade. Thin, fast, spinning end over end with a sound like an angry wasp. It buried itself in the feral's neck mid-flight. The wolf crumpled and hit the ground three feet from me, sliding through the dead leaves with a sound that was final.

I looked up.

A woman stepped out from behind a massive oak. Tall, lean, dark-skinned, with close-cropped hair and leather armor stitched together from mismatched pieces. Twin blade sheaths crossed her back. One was empty.

Her eyes were clouded. Both of them. Pale, milky grey.

She was blind.

She tilted her head toward me, listening to something beneath the surface of the sound. Then she tilted it toward the two remaining ferals.

"Stay behind me," she said. Her voice was calm. Bored, almost. Like she was sorting laundry instead of standing between a bleeding stranger and two mindless predators.

"Who are you?" I managed.

The blind woman drew her second blade and smiled.

"Alive," she said. "Which is more than you'll be in about ten seconds if you don't shut up and let me work."