Chapter Five_Run or Reveal

Neris POV

Run.

It's the only thought I have left. So I run.

Branches open thin, stinging lines across my face and arms that I barely feel. Roots grab at my boots. The ground is uneven and wet, and every stride feels like the one that finally puts me down.

Behind me the creature moves with terrible purpose. Heavy, fast, and far too quiet for something that size. It isn't crashing through the undergrowth the way an animal would. It's choosing its line, cutting angles, closing the gap like it already knows where I'll be standing in four seconds.

It isn't hunting the forest. It's hunting me.

I look back once and nearly lose my footing. The glowing eyes are closer than they were half a minute ago. One armored shoulder scrapes a trunk hard enough to strip the bark away in a long pale scar, and it doesn't slow down for that either. It doesn't roar again. It just comes.

"Keep moving," I tell myself through my teeth. "Just keep moving."

My lungs are burning. My legs have stopped asking permission. And the wolf under my skin isn't restless anymore, it's demanding, throwing itself at every wall I've spent months building. I feel it in my bones, in the way my vision keeps sharpening and blurring, in the way my hands want to be something else. Claws. Weight. Speed that could put this thing behind me instead of barely staying in front of it.

Not yet. Not here.

I shove the thought down and run harder.

A low branch catches my shoulder and spins me half around. I take the impact on a trunk, push off, keep going. The pack slams against my back with every stride, and the empty pocket where my flare should be feels like an accusation. Off to the left another student crashes through the brush, and then there's a scream that stops in the middle.

I don't stop. I can't.

The creature is still behind me and gaining. I can hear the drag of its claws through the dirt now, and underneath that, the wet working of its breath.

It's faster than I am. It's smarter than anything the instructors have ever put in this forest. And it has decided that out of two hundred students, it wants me.

The trees end without warning. One moment I'm cutting between trunks in near total dark. The next the ground stops existing and I skid so hard my boots plough two deep grooves in the dirt. Stones spill over the edge ahead of me, and I don't hear them land for a long time.

A cliff. Sheer. Forty feet down to black rock and water that looks colder than the air. No path along the rim, no slope, no fallen tree lying conveniently across anything.

Nowhere left to go.

I turn around.

The creature comes out of the tree line and slows. Almost polite about it. Its head tilts, and the glowing eyes go over me the way a person looks at a locked door they already know how to open. A sound rolls out of its chest, not a growl, not a roar, something older than either. Patient. Entirely certain.

The drop is at my heels. My pack is dead weight. My flare is in some boy's team bag, and nobody knows I've been driven this far off the marked path. The silver boundary lines are somewhere behind all of this, in a part of the night that feels like it happened to a different person.

It takes a step closer. Then another.

My wolf surges so hard I nearly go down on one knee.

Let me out.

Not words exactly, but there's nothing unclear about it. It presses against the inside of my ribs, against the base of my skull, against every place I've spent years teaching myself to stay small.

I have survived by being powerless. By keeping quiet in the Virek house. By letting them call me wolfless and maid and charity case and never once opening my mouth to correct them. If I let even a thread of this out, that ends tonight. Ysolde will know. The instructors will know. Every student who has laughed at me since the gates opened will know I've been lying to all of them from the first hour.

And if I don't, I die on this cliff, alone, and the only thing anyone will say about it is that the wolfless girl was never going to last the night.

The creature's shoulders bunch. The plates along its back shift and settle. Its claws dig in for purchase.

It lunges.

Time stretches out in the worst possible way. I see the claws, black and curved and longer than my forearm. I see the jaws open and the wet shine of teeth built for things much larger than me. I see the eyes fixed on mine like the ending has already been agreed on somewhere I wasn't invited.

There's no room left to dodge. The cliff is behind me and the dark is coming, and the only choice I have is the one I've been refusing since the morning I turned eighteen.

I close my eyes.

"I'm sorry." A whisper, to the careful silence. To the girl who thought being invisible would be enough to keep her breathing. To every version of me that believed if she stayed quiet long enough, the world would eventually get bored and leave her alone.

Then my wolf answers me.

The voice isn't mine. It's older and deeper and completely without doubt, like something that has been waiting underneath stone for a very long time and has finally been given leave to stand up.

No more hiding.

Something ancient opens inside me.

The power comes up from a place I didn't know I had. It doesn't ask and it doesn't wait for me to be ready. My bones shift with a deep cracking pressure that should be agony and somehow isn't. My senses blow outward until I can hear the creature's heart hammering behind its armored chest, every branch breaking for half a mile in every direction, and three sets of footsteps running flat out toward this clearing from three different directions at once.

Heat floods my arms and legs. Strength comes in behind it, so much that the ground under my boots feels suddenly thin.

Silver light tears out of my skin, out of my eyes, out of the air itself, and rolls outward in a wave that turns the nearest trees to pale silhouettes and shoves the darkness back off the ridge.

The whole forest goes white with it.

And I stop running.