Feral Claimed (Feral Academy at Frosthaven #2)

Chapter 1

Chapter one

The floor is cold.

Shockingly cold, the kind that hits skin that was just wolf-warm and bites immediately.

Linoleum under my cheek, the seam between two tiles pressing into my jaw.

I catalogue it the way I always catalogue things, starting with the edges, working in.

Cold floor. My own weight. My hands, which are hands again.

I come back into myself in pieces.

Sound comes first, the low hum of the building, someone’s breath nearby, the heavy stillness of a room where everyone has stopped moving at once.

Then sensation, my body reassembling itself around me, every nerve ending checking in.

I wait for the wrongness, the hangover that should follow something like that, and it doesn't come.

I feel fine.

Not fine like I'm lying to myself. Fine like something that's been slightly off my entire life just stopped being off. Like a hitch in my stride I'd stopped noticing, gone. I press my palms flat against the floor and push up to sitting, and my arms hold my weight without argument, and I think: huh.

The hallway is too quiet.

I register it before I fully lift my head. This corridor had bodies in it thirty seconds ago, staff, a handful of Gold House residents, Leo. All of them frozen now. Every single wolf in this hallway is down.

Not hurt. Not unconscious.

Down.

On knees. Heads dropped, throats bared, the full-body submission response, involuntary, no one choosing it.

Their wolves made the call and their brains followed after.

I don't recognize all the faces. A Gold House guy I've never spoken to is flat on the floor with his hands over his head.

Torres is folded against the wall with his forehead damn near touching his knees.

Under different circumstances, it would be funny.

These are not different circumstances.

I look at my wrists.

Three arcs. Dark and permanent against my skin, no longer glowing, no longer anything except there, like they always were, like they were always going to be. The shift didn't leave a wound. It left a fact.

I close my hands. Open them. Still mine.

My ribs feel different. My skin feels different. Like the dimensions of something shifted while I wasn't in it.

Leo is the closest. On one knee, head bowed, both hands braced on the floor in front of him.

The amber is burning in his eyes even with his face angled down, and the bond registers him immediately, warm and present and not afraid.

His pulse in the back of my throat. The heat of him across the distance like something living.

He lifts his head. Just enough. Finds my face.

"Hey," he says. Low. Like we're the only two people in the hallway.

I almost laugh. Swallow it.

The second arc reaches for Gray. He's not here, somewhere else in the facility and the bond finds him anyway, stretched thin across the distance but present.

He felt it. Whatever I just did moved through the building and hit him from far away and I can feel his response like a hand pressed flat against a closed door. Steady. Holding.

Then I look at the man I ran into.

He pushed away from me before the shift finished.

I remember that, I remember the exact moment I lost the thread of upright and the thread of human, and I remember him moving, and I thought he's leaving with a clarity that had nothing to do with wanting him to stay and everything to do with the third arc going cold with it. He didn't leave.

He's against the wall. On one knee, same as everyone else.

Not the same as everyone else.

Everyone else has their head down. Everyone else is showing throat to whatever I am now, reflex overriding everything, their wolves making the only decision available when something bigger walks into the room.

He's looking at me.

Directly. The only one in the hallway who is.

His eyes are dark and steady and I can't read what's in them from here except that it isn't fear, and it isn't the blank reflex of involuntary submission.

The third arc, the one that branded itself into my wrist in the lodge hallway when we collided, when his hand closed on my shoulder and the world reorganized itself around the contact — pulls toward him with a faint insistent heat.

I look at him.

He looks back.

Neither of us moves.

Running footsteps break it. Then Sven rounds the corner and stops.

He takes in the hallway in one sweep, bodies on the floor, Leo on his knee, the Gold House guy with his hands over his head, Torres and his forehead.

His gaze lands on me, sitting in the middle of it all, marked and human again and looking up at him with what I can only assume is an extremely compelling expression.

His eyes go wide. Just once, just a fraction, before his face locks back down.

He recovers in under two seconds. Of course he does. He's Sven.

"On your feet," he says.

The register in his voice drops into something I haven't heard before, command layered under command, the kind of voice that moves bodies before the brain catches up.

Every wolf in the hallway stirs. Slowly.

Carefully. Not one of them moving fast. They reassemble themselves into something like standing with the careful deliberateness of people coming out of a fugue state, and they do not look at me, and I let them not look at me, and Sven steps over Torres's ankle like it's a perfectly normal Tuesday.

He reaches down and offers me his hand.

I take it. Stand. My legs work fine. Everything works fine.

"Medical," he says.

"I'm fine."

"Alex." Same tone.

I want to argue. The argument dies somewhere between my brain and my mouth because Sven is already steering me toward the exit with the efficiency of someone who has already decided where this is going and is simply waiting for my body to agree.

His hand doesn't grip my arm — it's just present, a light pressure at my elbow, and I think about what it means that he touched me without hesitation when everyone else in this hallway went to their knees.

At the corridor's end I stop walking.

He doesn't push. Just waits.

I look back.

Leo is on his feet, the amber fading from his eyes, watching me go with his hands at his sides.

The stranger is on his feet too, watching me leave with that controlled, precise expression, something underneath it that I recognize.

The third arc pulls faintly in his direction and I press my wrist against my thigh and keep looking.

Then I turn around.

Behind me I hear Sven's voice, quiet and iron: "You. Office. Now."

I don't look back to see who moves.

The compound is cold. Morning light, thin and flat, hitting the snow between buildings.

My breath fogs. The air smells like pine and frozen ground and somewhere underneath it the facility smell, industrial, and institutional.

I've been breathing it for months. It hits differently right now, from the outside of the building, in a body that isn't quite the same one that went in.

We cross the open ground and I notice the way the two staff members we pass give us a wide berth, not rude, not afraid exactly, just a widening of the path. A step back. Eyes that don't quite land on me.

Word travels fast in a building full of wolves.

I keep walking. I have never felt this good after a shift. I have never felt this good at all, and I don't know yet what to do with that.

***

The medical bay. A doctor I don't know. Vitals. Questions I answer in monosyllables. She writes things down and I let her and stare at the ceiling and try to locate myself inside what just happened to me.

She's careful with me. No unnecessary contact. Instruments placed rather than pressed. When she takes my wrist to check my pulse she holds it at the edge, two fingers, and she doesn't look at the arcs even though I can feel her not looking at them. Her jaw is set.

My wrist is in my lap.

Three arcs. I've been looking at them since the hallway and they still don't look like mine. Not because they're wrong because they're too right. Too settled. Like they've been there longer than a morning.

The first arc is Leo. Somewhere nearby, warm and present and okay.

The second arc is Gray. Stretched thin across the distance but holding. He felt the shift. I can feel that he felt it.

The third arc is the one I keep pressing my thumb into.

New. Faint. Branded into my wrist when I rounded a corner and hit a stranger and the world made a decision I wasn't consulted about.

He's somewhere in this building right now because Sven sent him somewhere, and the arc has a direction to it — not strong enough to be specific, just present and pointing.

There. Like a compass that found north and is waiting for the rest of me to catch up.

He got back up.

I turn that over. Every wolf in that hallway went down and didn't choose it, their bodies made the call and their brains followed after. He went down too. Same knee, same bared throat. But he looked at me, and looking required choosing, and he chose it.

What I saw in his face when our eyes met wasn't the dazed coming-back of the others.

It was assessment. He was reading me the way I read rooms, fast and methodical.

He was working out what I was and what that meant and what to do about it.

No panic in it. Like a man who has walked into unexpected situations before and learned to process them without losing his footing.

I want to know why he's here.

Not for me, it can't be for me, the bond didn't exist until minutes ago and he walked into this facility with a reason already in his pocket.

Somewhere in the building, further out and differently shaped than any of the three arcs, there's something else. Not a bond. RJ is in his room somewhere behind me, the shift having moved through the building and reached him and changed something in the air between us I can't name yet.

I press my thumb into the third arc and don't move.

The door opens.

Gavin doesn't knock. He never knocks, it's his facility, his door. He crosses the room, pulls the chair out from the wall, and sits down across from me with the file in his hands.

The file is thicker than the last time I saw it. It's always thicker. I look at the thickness of it, the extra pages added since my last review, the documentation of everything I've done and failed to do and been suspected of doing.

He opens it. Looks down at something I can't read from this angle. Then he looks up.

"We need to talk," Gavin says, "about what you are."

The third arc pulses once against my thumb.

I put my hands in my lap and meet Gavin's eyes and wait.

He closes the file and stands. "My office."