Not Alone...

Tessa

I wait to feel it.

The impact. The claws. The part where everything goes dark and stops hurting.

I wait.

And wait.

And—

Nothing.

I crack one eye open.

The wolf that launched at me is not on top of me. It's across the path, scrambling back on its haunches, and it looks — frightened. Actually, genuinely frightened, which is not a thing I have ever seen on the face of a half-shifted Alpha wolf and I'm not entirely sure I'm not hallucinating it.

I open both eyes.

And then I see why.

There is a wolf standing in front of me.

A pink wolf.

Not brownish-red. Not auburn. Not any shade of nature that has ever occurred in the natural world. Pink. Vivid, unhinged, unapologetic pink, with streaks of black running through the fur like even in wolf form she couldn't resist the aesthetic. She's smaller than the four on the path — most Alphas run big, brutal, built for dominance — but the way she stands makes up for every inch she lacks. Head low. Shoulders up. A snarl rolling out of her chest that sounds like it was designed specifically to make the thing hearing it feel like prey.

The four wolves look at each other.

She takes one step forward.

They run.

All four of them, just — gone, into the dark, like they were never there. Like the most humiliating possible outcome of a full moon was to get run off by something that looks like it belongs on a birthday cake.

I exhale. The sound comes out shakier than I'd like.

The pink wolf turns around.

She looks at me.

I look back at her.

Even through the shift — even with the fur and the jaw and the glowing eyes — I can read her expression perfectly. Because some things transcend biology, and Levana Ashcroft's I cannot believe you right now face is apparently one of them.

"Hey," I say weakly.

She growls.

"I can explain."

She growls louder.

"Okay, I can't explain, but—"

She rolls her eyes. She is a wolf and she rolls her eyes at me, which I think says everything about the kind of person Levana is even when she isn't a person. Then she turns, presenting her back, and looks over her shoulder with an expression that clearly means get on.

I blink. "You don't have to—"

She huffs.

"Right." I push myself up from the ground, palms stinging, knees protesting. Everything hurts in that low, bone-deep way that comes from hitting stone. I move to her side and as gently as I can I shift my weight onto her back.

She's solid. Warm. Her fur is softer than it has any right to be.

"Sorry," I murmur.

I barely settle before I'm already wincing — not from pain, just from the awareness of how little of me there is to distribute. I've never been big. Not since I was small, not since the portions got smaller and the shifts got longer and I learned to make nothing feel like enough through sheer stubbornness.

Levana doesn't flinch. She adjusts slightly beneath me and then she walks.

The grounds are quiet. Whatever wolves were still out have either shifted back or moved on, and the ones she scared off are probably still running. I slouch against her neck and let myself breathe for the first time in what feels like hours.

When we reach the side entrance of the dormitory block she crouches low and I slide off, landing on both feet.

I turn and crouch down to her level. Even shifted she's looking at me with that expression — the concern she'd never admit to and the irritation she'd never bother hiding.

"Thank you," I say quietly. "Seriously, Lev."

She headbutts me. Not hard. Just firmly, square in the chest, like shut up, of course I did.

I press my hand briefly against the side of her jaw. She allows it for exactly two seconds before she pulls back and shakes herself like she has somewhere more dignified to be.

Then she pads back into the dark and disappears.

I watch the space where she was.

Then I go inside.

Our room is small and cold and exactly the same as I left it, which is somehow both a relief and deeply anticlimactic given the night I've had.

Levana's side is chaos as always — clothes on the chair, her textbooks stacked in a tower that has no business still standing, three different lip glosses on the windowsill for reasons she has never explained. My side is bare. Neat. The kind of neat that comes not from preference but from not owning enough things to make a mess.

I sit on the edge of my bed and look at my hands.

Scraped palms. Dirt on my knees. A mark on the inside of my wrist that wasn't there this morning.

I think about Knox.

I've heard of Alphas marking things — territory, property, debts. It's not unheard of. But Knox Hale doesn't mark things. Knox Hale doesn't need to. His name alone is enough of a warning, his presence enough of a claim. He moves through this world like it already belongs to him and he simply hasn't gotten around to collecting all of it yet.

But he marked me.

Didn't hesitate. Didn't explain. Just took what he decided he was owed and told me to get out, like I was a problem he'd filed away to deal with later.

Consider yourself marked.

I press my thumb to the inside of my wrist. The skin there feels different. Warmer than it should.

I stand and move to the window.

Outside, the grounds are finally still. The moon hangs enormous in the sky, white and relentless, the kind of full that makes everything look like a different world. In a few months I'll be done here — my contract with the academy ends in spring and I have a plan, a small and carefully constructed plan, and I have been holding onto it for two years like a rope over a very long drop.

Soon, I think. Just get through soon.

I look down at my wrist.

The mark glows.

I blink. Look again.

It's faint — barely there, like an ember trying to decide if it's dying or catching — but it's glowing, orange-gold against my skin, pulsing in a rhythm that feels almost biological. Like a heartbeat that isn't mine.

What—

The pain hits before I finish the thought.

It starts at the base of my skull and moves fast, too fast, spiking up through the back of my head like something is pressing in from the outside. I grab the windowsill. The moon blurs. The mark blurs. Both of them bleeding together at the edges until I can't tell where one ends and the other starts.

"Stop," I say out loud, to nothing.

It doesn't stop.

The room tilts. I squeeze my eyes shut and that makes it worse — behind my eyelids the light is still there, gold and white and swirling, and underneath it I hear something.

A baby crying.

Small and sharp and desperate, the sound cutting through everything else like it's coming from inside my own chest.

Then laughter.

Low, mocking, close enough that I spin around even though I know the room is empty—

"Stop—"

I'm gripping the side of my head now, back hitting the wall, sliding down it, the pain cresting into something I don't have a word for. My eyes are burning. Everything is burning. The necklace against my chest is—

Warm.

No. Not warm.

Glowing.

I look down and the diamond is lit from the inside, white-gold light pulsing through it in the same rhythm as the mark on my wrist. Like they're talking to each other. Like they've always been talking to each other and I just wasn't awake enough to hear it.

I drag myself upright. Grab the edge of the desk. Make it three steps to the mirror on the back of the door.

I look at my reflection.

My reflection looks insane.

My hair is a wreck, wild in a way that goes beyond just the running and the falling. My face is pale — paler than usual, which takes effort — and my expression is exactly the expression of someone who is one second away from completely losing it.

And my eyes.

My eyes are red.

Not pink. Not irritated. Red. Deep and vivid and bleeding at the edges, like the colour is seeping out from somewhere behind the iris, and I watch it happen in real time — the red spreading, consuming, until there's barely any brown left at all.

"What," I breathe.

My reflection doesn't answer. It just stares back at me with those impossible red eyes and that wrecked hair and I feel like I'm looking at someone I don't know standing in a body I thought was mine.

And then—

Movement.

Behind me. In the mirror.

I go still.

There's something there. Not Levana — Levana is outside, Levana is pink fur and irritated huffs and I know exactly what she looks like. This is different. This is a shape in the shadows at the far end of the room, tall and still, and I can't make out a face, can't make out anything except—

Eyes...

Silver eyes....