Chapter twenty
Jessica
The whole freshman class is packed along the old stone terraces above the training ground, and below us, the field is full of wolves.
Real ones. Enormous, shifted, fast — a dozen upperclassmen tearing across the grass in their fur, breaking apart and crashing back together in bursts of controlled violence while the instructors bark corrections from the edge.
I've got my forearms on the cold stone rail and I can't look away.
The only shift I'd ever seen was Jon's, at orientation — careful, slow, a lesson.
This is not a lesson. It's teeth and muscle and speed, close enough that I feel the heavier hits land in the stone under my elbows.
"The grey one's showing off," Renzo says beside me, narrating like it's a match he bet on. "Look at him. That's a peacock in a wolf costume."
"Positions." An instructor's voice carries down the terrace. "You watch. Nobody sets foot on that field during a live shift — you break formation, you put every wolf on it in danger. Clear?"
Clear. Watch, learn, stay put. I can manage that.
For about ten minutes, that's exactly how it goes. Sophia shushes Renzo. Freya studies the footwork like she's taking notes. Torres is a few feet down the rail with his arms crossed, and somewhere on the upper terrace I know Luke and Soren and Ander are watching too.
Then one of the wolves stops fighting.
I feel it before I understand it—the rhythm changes.
Two wolves are sparring near our end of the field, and one of them, a heavy dark one, stops moving like this is practice.
His partner breaks contact the way you're supposed to.
The dark wolf doesn't. He rounds on him, hackles rising, and an instructor's voice cracks across the field, sharper than any correction we've heard.
The dark wolf isn't listening. His head swings toward the terraces. Toward the freshmen. Toward the nearest, easiest target.
Toward Renzo, who has his arm around Sophia.
Renzo goes rigid beside me.
The instructors are shouting and running, but they're across the field, seconds away, and seconds are exactly what we don't have.
I hit Renzo with my whole body and shove.
They both goes sideways off the low edge of the terrace, out of the line — and the space where they were standing, where I'm standing now instead, is the space a very large wolf is already launching toward.
Someone screams my name.
The wolf lands where Renzo was, claws raking stone, and rounds on me, and for one suspended second I'm looking straight into the eyes of a fully shifted, out-of-control wolf the size of a small horse, and every instinct I own is screaming at me to run.
I don't. I don't run and I don't freeze, and a distant part of me is amazed — because six months ago a fist coming at my head shut my whole body down, and now there's a monster three feet away and my hands are already up, my weight settling back exactly the way Luke drilled into me a thousand times. Don't flinch. Move.
The wolf lunges. I throw myself off the line of it, and its shoulder clips me hard enough to spin me, pain flaring white up my side — but I stay up, I stay moving. I hear my own voice drop, low and even. Easy. Easy.
It doesn't work. It rounds again, faster, and this time I'm out of room and out of moves, and there's a flash of teeth, and one cold, clear thought cuts through everything:
Not again. Not like this.
Then two things hit me at once. Hands. From both sides. At the same instant.
Torres slams in from the left and gets a fistful of my arm. Luke crashes in from the right and grabs the other, both of them dragging me back, out of reach—and the world detonates.
Heat explodes in the center of my chest and blows out to my fingertips, followed by pressure and a hard pull, like two hooks sinking into my sternum and dragging in opposite directions. For one second I can't tell if I'm being saved or torn apart.
The inside of my wrist lights up.
I feel it more than see it—a searing warmth—and when I glance down there are two lines of light burning up through my skin, bright and impossible, curving.
What the—
Then someone yanks me clear, my feet leave the stone, and the moment shatters.
The wolf is still coming.
It twists after me even as I'm dragged back, and I feel Luke let go of my arm — and then Luke isn't beside me anymore.
Luke is changing.
I've seen a shift. Jon's, careful and slow, a lesson.
This is the opposite. Instant and violent, a man becoming a wolf between one heartbeat and the next with no grace and no restraint — and then there's a massive wolf planted between me and everything else, and it is furious.
Hackles ridged down its spine. Teeth bared.
Body angled square between me and the thing that tried to take me apart.
When the feral wolf presses forward, Luke's wolf snarls — a sound I feel in the stone, in my teeth — and the feral one checks, hesitates. Instructors' wolves are closing from the sides now, three of them, and Luke holds the center and drives the thing back with nothing but the promise in his body.
I'm on the ground where they set me down, and I should be terrified.
I'm not. Not of this one. There's a snarling, half-mad wolf two feet from me with its teeth out, and I know — deeper than thought — that it will not touch me.
Then Luke's wolf glances back. His eyes — green, his eyes, unmistakable even in that face — find mine. And something in it changes. Still furious. But not at me. Never at me.
I have no idea why I'm that certain. I just am.
"Jess. Jess."
Torres is crouched over me, hands on my shoulders, and he's not looking at my face. He's staring at my wrist.
I follow his gaze. The light is sinking back under my skin, but it's leaving something behind — two dark curved lines where there was nothing this morning.
"What?" My voice comes out shaky. "Torres, what is that—"
He doesn't answer. He just stares, and it's the face of a man who's been knocked flat off his feet.
"Torres."
He finally looks at me. "I don't know."
"You look like you absolutely know."
His eyes drop back to my wrist, then flick to the snarling wolf standing guard over both of us.
It's Jon who comes toward him.
He crosses the field at a walk — slow, hands loose and visible, because everyone with any sense has stopped moving toward me. They've worked out what I already know: getting near me right now is a bad idea. Nobody commands Luke's wolf.
But I can.
"Luke."
His wolf's ear turns toward me.
"Luke. Hey. I'm okay — look at me. It's over. You can stand down." I push up to sitting, ignoring the scream of my ribs, keeping my voice as warm and steady as I can make it. "I'm okay."
The wolf turns its head. Those green eyes fix on mine, and I hold them, and I don't look away.
"I'm okay," I say again, softer.
And muscle by muscle, he settles. The hackles drop. The snarl dies. Then Luke shifts back — down on one knee, human, breathing hard. His eyes never leave me.
He's furious — I can see it, at himself, at the loss of control. But when he crosses to me, none of that is on his face. It's just fear, barely leashed, as he drops down and checks me over, hands quick and careful at my ribs, my arms, my head.
"Are you hurt. Where are you hurt."
"I'm okay. He clipped me. Bruised, that's all." I catch his wrist. "Luke. I'm okay."
He goes still under my hand.
I lift my arm. "But — what the hell happened to my wrist?"
Luke sees it. And his whole face changes—recognition and shock, there for half a second before the mask drops back into place. But I've spent weeks reading this man across a training mat. I know what I saw.
"You know what this is," I say slowly.
Luke doesn't answer. But the way his jaw sets, the way his eyes cut from my wrist to Torres and back, tells me everything. They all know something I don't. It's about me. And it's sitting on my arm.
I fully expect to be expelled.
I entered the field during a live-shift exercise. I did the one thing they told us twice not to do. So when the instructors pull me aside after the medics finish poking at my ribs, I brace for the deduction and the lecture on top of it.
Instead the lead instructor — a scarred woman I've seen running the upper-year drills — studies me for a long moment.
"You saw him lose control before anyone on that field did," she says.
"You put yourself between a feral wolf and another student, and you kept your feet long enough for help to reach you.
You broke formation. We'll talk about that, and in a different situation it could've gotten you killed.
But you read the field faster than three trained instructors and you saved Moretti.
The academy minds that a great deal less than it minds the rule. "
Then she names a number of Merit Marks that snaps my head up — enough to haul my ranking out of the danger zone and into the middle of the pack in one afternoon.
I don't say anything clever. I just stand there, sore and stunned, because after a whole year of Celeste Faris taking marks off me two at a time for helping people, someone with authority just handed me a fistful for the same instinct and walked off like it was obvious.
It's late by the time I'm finally alone.
The adrenaline's long gone, and my body feels like it lost a fight with a mountain, which—accurate. I shower until the hot water runs out, pull on soft clothes, and I'm about to fall face-first into bed when I lift my arm and stop.
The marks are still there.
Two dark arcs on the inside of my wrist. I know what my bruises look like — I've collected enough of them — and these aren't bruises, and they aren't scratches. They're clean. Two smooth curves side by side, precise in a way no accident manages, like someone tattooed me while I wasn't looking.
I rub them with my thumb. Nothing. I scrubbed at them in the shower without thinking, and the soap did nothing, the water did nothing. I press one, half-expecting pain, and there isn't any. I scratch at the edge, and it doesn't smudge or lift.
"What the fuck," I tell my empty room, turning my wrist under the light.
My brain helpfully replays it. Torres grabbing one arm.
Luke grabbing the other. Both at once. That soundless explosion in my chest, the heat, the pull.
The light burning up through my skin. Luke's face when he saw it.
Torres, thrown for the first time since I've known him.
Two men who very clearly know more than they're telling me.
I grab my phone and take a picture. The flash washes the arcs out, so I take another without it, and there they are, undeniable. My thumb hovers over Torres's name. I start typing. Do you have any idea what the hell this is, because I —
A knock at my door.