Chapter 79 Mira
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Mira
The night they turned me, the Glowwood burned violet.
The transformation chamber sat beneath the castle, carved into the volcanic rock that formed Veyndral’s foundation. A stone platform stood in the center, the space around it was marked with symbols I didn’t recognize.
“Old language,” Lucian said. “Blessings for safe passage.”
Orinne had cleared me two days ago. Full recovery from the birth.
The babies were eight weeks old and thriving: Mireille had graduated from screaming when put down to screaming when Rheda put her down, which was progress.
Percius still slept through everything. Solian still watched everything, and Solomon had started narrating his council work to the boy strapped to his chest because Solian cried when the narration stopped.
I’d left them with Altun and Rheda for the night. Even Farmon volunteered to babysit.
They were so excited that I wondered if I should be worried.
“Walk me through it one more time,” I said.
Lucian stood to my left. Solomon to my right. Percy behind me, his hands on my shoulders, thumbs moving in absent circles.
“Quick question first.” I held up a finger. “Does this make me a werewolf?”
Percy snorted behind me. Lucian’s expression didn’t change, which meant he was taking the question seriously.
“No.”
“Because from where I’m standing, a man is about to bite me and I’m going to turn into a wolf. That’s the textbook definition. Even you said that was the difference.”
“Werewolves are human bodies cursed with a wolf affliction.” Lucian’s hand found mine.
“You’re bonded to three lycans. The bond isn’t just emotional or physical.
It carries a thread of the goddess’s blessing.
Every fated mate has a wolf soul already inside them.
It was placed there the moment the bond recognized you as ours. ”
“So there’s been a wolf inside me this whole time? Do you know how funny that is?”
Percy laughed. The only cultured one who understood why that was hilarious.
“Sleeping,” Solomon said, ignoring my quip. “The bond sustains it. The bite wakes it.”
“Basically... reincarnation?”
“Close,” Lucian said. “Reincarnation implies death and rebirth. This is more of an awakening. The wolf has always been part of you. It just hasn’t had a body to run in yet.”
“That’s kind of terrifying.”
Lucian’s thumb traced my knuckle. “The bite triggers the shift. My bite, specifically. The prime alpha bond carries the catalyst.”
“How long?”
“A shift is minutes for a born lycan. For a turned human...” He paused. “Longer.”
Percy’s hands squeezed my shoulders. “We’ll be here the entire time. All three of us.”
“I know.”
“If it gets bad...”
“It’s going to get bad. That’s the point. I’m trading one life for another, and transitions don’t happen quietly.” I turned and looked at all three.
My mates. My king, my enforcer, my knight.
“I’m not scared.”
“Your heart rate says otherwise,” Solomon observed.
“Well, don’t listen to it.”
I lay on the platform. The furs were soft beneath my back and the obsidian ceiling caught torchlight in patterns. Lucian knelt beside me. His hand cupped my jaw, tilting my face to his, and the gold of his eyes was the steadiest thing in the room.
“I love you,” he said. “Whatever happens in the next few hours, remember that. When the pain gets bad, find the bond. We’ll be there.”
“Sentimental.”
“Occasionally.” He kissed me. Slow, thorough, the kind of kiss that said goodbye to the woman I was and hello to whoever I’d become. Then his mouth moved to my throat.
To the claiming mark.
“Ready?” he breathed against my skin.
“Do it.”
His teeth sank in.
The pain was immediate and total. Each cell in my body ignited at once, and the scream that left my throat was involuntary, the sound of a body being rewritten from the inside out.
I thought I was ready for it but what echoed in my mind was curses.
MOTHER OF EVERY GOD IN EVERY REALM INCLUDING THE ONES I HAVEN’T VISITED YET.
My back arched off the furs.
Hands gripped mine: Percy on the right, Solomon on the left, anchoring me to the platform while my bones rearranged themselves beneath my skin. I could feel it happening. The molecular shift that Lucian had described.
The bond flared.
“Stay with us,” Percy said. “Mira. Stay here.”
I couldn’t speak.
The transformation had reached my throat and the muscles there were doing things muscles weren’t designed to do. My vision blurred. Colors shifted. The torchlight that had been amber was now a spectrum I didn’t have names for, the world expanding beyond human perception.
Smell hit next.
The chamber that had smelled of stone and warmth now carried layers I hadn’t known existed:
The pain peaked.
I screamed again. Or tried. The sound that came out wasn’t fully human. The vocal cords of a creature that existed between forms, and the vibration of my own voice in my transformed throat was the strangest sensation of the night.
Then it stopped.
All at once, as though someone had thrown a switch. The pain vanished and what replaced it was a stillness so complete I thought I’d died.
I hadn’t.
I was lying on the platform, breathing in a body that felt both familiar and entirely new.
My senses were screaming with input: the texture of every fur fiber beneath my back, the exact temperature between the air and the stone, the heartbeats of three men positioned around me in a formation that I could now map without opening my eyes.
I opened them anyway.
The chamber looked different.
I could see the grain of the obsidian walls at twenty feet. The individual flame components inside each torch. The pupils of three pairs of eyes staring down at me with expressions ranging from relief to awe.
“Hey,” I said. My voice was different. Still mine but deeper.
“Hey yourself,” Percy said. His voice cracked.
I sat up. Looked down at my hands. They were the same hands. But the nails were longer, pointed, and when I flexed my fingers I felt a presence coiled beneath the surface.
A presence that had been sleeping behind the bond for months and was now wide awake.
My wolf.
“She’s there,” I said. “I can feel her.”
I looked at Lucian. At Solomon. At Percy.
“Guide me.”
The first shift hurt. Less than the transformation. More than I’d expected.
Bones breaking and reforming, muscles stretching and contracting, my body folding into a shape that I hadn’t known I was capable of. But beneath the pain was a second sensation. The sensation of a lock finding its key, a puzzle piece clicking into place.
Of becoming what you were always meant to be.
When it finished, I stood on four legs.
The chamber was massive from this vantage point. Every scent amplified, every sound crystallized. My paws pressed into the fur-covered stone and I could feel the volcanic warmth through the pads.
Three wolves faced me.
Lucian’s black wolf, enormous, gold-eyed, radiating authority. Solomon’s gray wolf, controlled, precise, silver eyes tracking my every movement. Percy’s brown wolf, lean and fast, tail actually wagging.
Percy’s wolf was wagging his tail. At me.
I took a step, wobbled. Took another, steadier.
The wolf body moved with an instinct my human brain hadn’t learned yet, as though the knowledge had been waiting in the bond all along.
Lucian’s wolf moved first. Crossed the chamber and pressed his muzzle to mine. The bond exploded, the rumble in his chest vibrating through my skull, his recognition of me in this form pouring through the connection with a possessiveness that made my wolf’s ears flatten.
Then his voice. Inside my head, carried through the bond with a clarity that made spoken language feel clumsy by comparison.
‘There you are.’
I startled. My wolf ears pinned back and my legs scrambled on the stone.
‘We can talk?! In here?’
‘Wolf to wolf.’ His gold eyes held mine. ‘The bond has always carried emotion. With your wolf awake, it carries words too.’
‘You’re telling me I could’ve been yelling at you telepathically this entire time and I missed that?!’
‘It doesn’t work that way with humans. The bond needs years to develop speech, sometimes never does. Between wolves, it’s instant.’
‘So turning was the cheat code.’
‘If you want to call a sacred goddess-blessed transformation a cheat code, yes.’
Solomon’s wolf circled. Assessed. Then pressed his flank against mine, a gesture that I understood instinctively meant protection, pack, mine. The contact sent a cascade of warmth through the bond that settled into my bones.
‘Your vitals are stable. The shift completed cleanly.’ Solomon’s voice in my head was exactly the way he sounded out loud: measured, completely himself. ‘How does it feel?’
‘Ask me something harder. I can’t describe this.’
Percy’s wolf tackled me.
Full body, no ceremony. He knocked me sideways and I went down in a tangle of legs and fur, and his tongue was on my face before I could process what had happened.
‘Hi!’ Percy’s mental voice was exactly as loud as his physical one. ‘You’re a wolf. A hot beautiful wolf and I’m going to lick your entire face!’
‘Percival, get OFF.’
‘Never. This is the best day of my life.’
My wolf, apparently, found this delightful, because a sound came out of my throat that was unmistakably a wolfish laugh.
We ran.
Out of the chamber, through the castle tunnels, into the Glowwood where the violet bioluminescence painted us in colors that didn’t exist in the human world.
Four wolves running through a forest that existed on the other side of a portal from everything I’d known, and the speed was intoxicating.
The world blurred past in a stream of scent and sound and sensation that was, without qualification, the most alive I’d ever felt.
We circled back to the castle as dawn approached. Shifted in the private courtyard, human forms resuming under a sky that was just beginning to lighten.