Choked Wolf, Golden Eyes

Bronislava “Slava” Ignatova

The lead rogue’s howl cut through the roar of the blizzard, a jagged sound that vibrated straight into the frozen dirt beneath my head.

Five massive, rabid beasts padded out of the dark, paws sinking into the drifts as they circled my paralyzed body. Yellow tinged saliva dripped from their jaws, steaming where it hit the snow. Their eyes burned mindless and red, the mark of wolves who’d eaten human flesh and given themselves over completely to the rogue path.

My heart slammed against my ribs like something trying to break out of a cage. Every survival instinct I had screamed at me to get up, to run, to fight.

Shift! I screamed inward, turning my frantic focus to the dark, quiet spaces of my own soul. “Shift right now, or we die.”

I reached for everything I had left, calling for my wolf.

Every shifter child grows up being told the wolf is just an extension of you, a second heartbeat, a coil of raw muscle waiting to tear through the skin the moment your life is on the line. On your eighteenth birthday, the wall between human and beast is supposed to dissolve, and after that the shift is supposed to come as easily as breathing.

I reached for her. For the fur, the claws, the ancestral power that was supposed to be mine now, the power that was supposed to save me.

Instead I hit a wall of thick, suffocating black liquid.

Diving into cold tar would have felt like this. Deep in my chest, right where my wolf’s spirit should have lived, I felt her, not sleeping, thrashing, whimpering under an invisible collar that was slowly choking the life out of her one breath at a time.

“Why can’t I reach you?” Tears spilled over, freezing instantly against my cheeks. “Please. Just give me claws. Give me something.”

I pushed with everything I had left, forcing it. My spine seized in a violent spasm. For one fraction of a second my bones creaked, threatening to break and reshape, the skin along my forearms burning like a brand, and a small, pitiful growl scraped out of my raw throat.

Then the leash yanked back.

Acidic, excruciating pain exploded behind my ribs, not the clean pain of a shift, but something heavier, chemical, something that flooded my blood and smothered the surge before it could take hold. My wolf let out a strangled whine and folded back into the dark.

I gagged, coughing a drop of dark blood onto the snow.

“It’s not that I’m weak,” the realization hit me so hard my breath caught. “I’m not broken. I’m being strangled.”

For eighteen years, every time I’d tried to train, every time I’d reached for my wolf, I’d met this exact same crushing fatigue and called it my own failure. I’d spent my whole life believing I was born wrong, a useless, half made Omega who couldn’t even grow claws.

But this wasn’t nature. This was a cage. Someone had built it inside me and locked my wolf in the dark, and I had spent eighteen years blaming myself for a door I never had the key to.

The lead rogue took a slow step forward, jaw dropping open as it loomed over me, the stink of rotting meat and wet fur rolling off it in waves. It set one massive, scarred paw on my chest and pinned me to the frozen ground.

Black claws pressed straight through the thin linen and into my skin. Blood welled up, trickling warm down my ribs against all that cold.

The instant my blood hit the air, all five rogues froze.

The lead beast’s red eyes went wide with something that looked almost like fear. It dipped its snout toward the small pool of blood spreading beneath me, sniffed once, and recoiled like it had breathed in fire, yelping, scrambling backward with its ears flat against its skull.

The other four backed off with it, muzzles lifted to the wind, and a strange static began to build in the trees around us.

The temperature didn’t drop. It fell.

The wind cut out mid howl. Snowflakes hung suspended, frozen in place, in a silence so total it had weight. The old trees groaned as something pressed down out of the sky, heavy as a mountain about to land.

My heart stopped.

This wasn’t my wolf. It wasn’t the rogues.

Something else was coming, something so massive, so dark, that even blood mad beasts were shaking.

Above the black pine canopy, the clouds tore open.

A deep, mechanical roar split the sky, engines and the thunder of enormous wings beating the air. I forced my head up, straining to see through the dark.

A single figure dropped through the freezing fog, lit white by the spotlights of an imperial war skimmer above.

No parachute. No rope. He fell straight out of the sky and hit the ground fifty yards off with a crack that split the bedrock under the snow, throwing up a wall of ice and shattered pine.

When the snow cleared, he was already standing.

A man in a heavy, fur trimmed black cloak, uncoiling to his full height in the center of the crater he’d made, six and a half feet of him, hair white as frost under the moon, shoulders wide enough to fill out the silver plated tunic he wore like it weighed nothing. Runic tattoos, old and Nordic Slavic, crawled up the side of his throat.

He turned his head toward me.

His eyes weren’t red like the rogues. Weren’t brown like Kirill’s.

They burned amber gold, and there was something in them I didn’t have a word for yet, something ancient, something that expected to be obeyed.

The rogues didn’t even try to fight. They turned and ran.

He didn’t draw a blade. He took one unhurried step forward, lifted a hand, and let out a low growl that I felt in my own chest before I heard it.

“Yield.”

The word landed with so much weight that all five rogues went down flat against the ice at once, like something had reached out and simply switched them off.

Silence again.

My breath caught as his gaze left the fallen wolves and found me.

He crossed the snow toward me slowly, boots crunching, every step deliberate, every step carrying a kind of pressure that made something in me want to shrink. When he reached me he knelt, and his eyes dropped to the blood freezing beside me on the ice.

His breath caught too. I heard it, sharp, and the gold in his eyes flared bright enough to throw shadows against the trees. The tattoos at his throat shifted, like something under his skin had just woken up.

He reached out with one leather gloved hand and cupped the back of my neck, lifting my head like I weighed nothing at all.

“I found you,” he said, and his voice, deep, rough, was shaking in a way that didn’t match the rest of him. “After ten years. I finally found you.”