Chapter 2

Josephine POV

This was where they belonged to both of them, together again, beneath these trees. I pressed my fingers around the pendant and let the quiet of the forest settle over me before I let go of it.

I crouched in front of the azalea bush and didn't care about the mud soaking through my jeans. For a moment I just held their faces in my mind and really held them, the way you have to when you know the memory is going to fade no matter how hard you try to stop it. "Neither of you should've left when you did," I said, my voice small against all that green. "I love you, Dad."

My eyes stung. I opened the box and released the ashes slowly, letting the wind decide where they went. Some settled around the roots. Some drifted off into the trees. I stayed on my knees until the pressure in my chest had eased enough to breathe around.

I stood on stiff legs, dirt pressed into my skin from the knees down. I didn't bother brushing off. I wiped my face with my sleeve and stood there a second longer, just existing in that spot. A wind moved through the pines, slow and unhurried, pressing briefly against my back like a hand between my shoulder blades. I didn't try to explain it. I just let it be.

Then a branch cracked somewhere behind me.

I still went. Not the thoughtful kind of still the animal kind, the kind where your whole body stops making noise before your brain has finished processing why. The birds had gone quiet. Even the insects. The whole forest had pulled inward, like something was pressing against it from the other side.

The hair on my arms lifted.

I turned slowly, reading the spaces between the trunks. Nothing visible. No movement, no shape. But the feeling didn't leave; it thickened. My instincts were not interested in being reasoned with. They had one message and they were repeating it: move.

I started back down the trail, pendant wrapped in my fist. My father's voice came back to me in pieces.

Remember your strength. Honor your dual nature.

I was soft in this skin. Breakable. My wolf was neither.

I stepped off the path and stripped quickly behind the nearest wide trunk, tucking my clothes at the base. The necklace stayed on the chain long enough to hold through the shift. Then I let go of the human shape.

The change moved through me fast and painful, the way it always did bones finding new angles, muscles rewriting themselves. And then it was done, and I was low to the ground and twice as awake.

Everything sharpened. I pushed my ears out and listened. Somewhere far off, the river. Close: nothing but my own breathing and the drip of moisture off pine needles. I lifted my nose. Leaf rot, wet soil, something floral I couldn't place. Squirrels up in the branches. No threat in any of it.

Maybe nothing. Maybe I'd spooked at a deer.

But I didn't believe it. I broke into a run.

I was halfway back toward where I'd left the truck when I saw a streak of tawny fur cutting between trees on my left. Then another on my right, tracking parallel, matching my pace.

They'd been downwind the whole time. I walked straight into it.

The scent hit me a half-second too late: sharp, electric, underlaid with something acrid. Not wolves. Not anything close to wolves. I knew the smell of magic but this version of it felt wrong, like something burned.

I pushed harder. By sound alone I counted four, maybe more. I kept my eyes forward and didn't waste energy looking. Even one-on-one with a shifter was a gamble I didn't love. Four-on-one in unfamiliar territory was a different kind of math entirely.

I caught a glimpse over my shoulder and felt my stomach drop. Feline. Big. Moving with the loose, unhurried precision of things that knew they had you.

Mountain lions. In Louisiana. Shifter ones.

I'd never even heard of that.

The pines came at me in a blur. I cleared a rotting log without breaking stride, tore through a low curtain of ferns. The trail I thought I knew had dissolved I'd been running blind, navigating by instinct and the distant sound of water. The truck should've been behind me by now. It wasn't.

I had a chance to look back. No sign of them. Either I'd actually pulled ahead or they were letting me think I had.

This had been stupid. A human girl alone in the woods would've at least had enough sense to stay on a marked path. I'd assumed my wolf made me safe. I'd been so worried about running into people that shifters never even entered the picture. I hadn't met another shifter in my life.

Ahead, the sound of water turned into something louder. Rougher.

The trees broke open and I skidded to a stop at the bank.

The river was a mess white water driving hard over exposed rock, churning itself into foam. Crossing it in this form would be a coin flip. Crossing it in skin would be worse.

Behind me, the forest floor shook with the impact of paws.

I turned.

Five of them came through the tree line, not four. They were huge, the way shifters always ran bigger than the natural version of the animal. All muscle and intention, moving with their weight low. Five sets of amber eyes caught the light through the canopy and threw it back.

I planted my feet and growled low, from the chest, a warning and not a performance. I wasn't fighting until I had to. Maybe there was a reason for this I didn't understand yet. Territory. Mistaken identity. Something.

I shook my head slowly: back off.

They kept coming.

My hackles rose the rest of the way. I growled again, lips pulling back. I thought about what my father had taught me, every drilling session in the yard, every correction delivered without cruelty but without softness either. He'd wanted me ready for something. Maybe this.

I will make this hurt for you before it's over.

The smallest one gave me no more warning than a crouch and a snarl before it launched. I caught its leg mid-air and wrenched, teeth finding bone, and flung it sideways before it could get purchase on me. It was the only clean move I got. The rest closed in immediately, claws finding my ribs, teeth dragging across my flank. I thrashed and bit and held on, but five was five.

Pain lit up my whole side. I let out a howl, long and ragged, not a call, not really. Just the sound a body makes when it's running out of options.

And then, from somewhere deep in the trees, an answer came back.