Chapter twenty-five
Jessica
The bear is down and I am still moving.
That's the first thing — that my body doesn't understand the fight is over. Everything in me is roaring, wound tight, ready for the next thing, and it takes a long, strange moment standing over the dead weight of the animal for the message to reach whatever's driving me: done. Won. Alive.
Then the world floods in.
I have never had senses like this. The forest isn't quiet anymore — it's loud, a thousand layers of it, the drip of blood off leaves and the wind a ridge over and the frantic scatter of small things fleeing.
I can smell the bear's sickness, sour and wrong, and pine sap, and — under it all — fear.
Human and wolf fear, coming off the tree line in waves.
And I can feel them. Luke and Torres, down the bond, far and frantic and flooding with something that isn't fear anymore — relief, so violent it nearly buckles me, both of them feeling me alive across all those miles and straining toward me still.
Alive. I send it back without meaning to. Alive. I'm alive.
I'm alive.
For one wild, soaring second, it's the best thing I've ever felt. I survived. My body finally, finally became enough, and I stood over the thing that was going to kill me, and I won —
Then I notice the silence.
Not the forest. The people.
The instructors have arrived — the whole wave of them.
They're just standing there. Staring.
I'm breathing hard, sides heaving, blood in my mouth, and I look around expecting — I don't know what. Someone rushing to help. Someone saying are you hurt. Someone doing literally anything except standing frozen at the edge of the trees with an expression I can't read.
Nobody moves. Nobody speaks.
My first thought, stupid and small, is: did I do something wrong?
I killed the bear. The bear that murdered a man and was going to murder me. That's — that's the right outcome, isn't it? I fired the flare like the rules said. I survived. So why is nobody moving?
I know some of these faces.
Professor Voss, the combat instructor, mountain-broad and unshakeable, who I have watched treat charging students like mild weather. The wilderness instructor from the navigation station. Professor Faris, of all people, near the front, immaculate even out here.
And more are still arriving, breaking through the trees at a run — and every single one does the same thing. They come in fast, ready for an emergency. They see the clearing. They see the bear.
And then they see me, and they stop dead.
Eyes widening. Feet planting. That same frozen stillness rippling through each new arrival like a stone dropped in water.
Nobody comes closer.
I don't understand it. I take a step toward them — just one, cautious, because I want someone to say something, because I'm starting to be afraid and I want a person to tell me it's okay —
and several of them step back.
I freeze.
My stomach drops all the way through the ground, because it lands, then, what I'm actually looking at. They're not braced because of the bear. The bear is dead. It hasn't twitched in a minute.
They're backing away from me.
My hearing is a knife now, and it catches the whispers even though they think they're too quiet, even though half of them are barely moving their lips.
"...impossible..."
"...no. No, that's—"
"...can't be, they were wiped out—"
"...extinct. That line's been extinct for—"
"That's not possible," someone says, low and flat, to no one. "That's not possible."
I look down at myself, trying to see what they see.
And I can't — not really, not all of it.
I can see my paws planted in the bloody dirt, and they're massive, bigger than any paw has a right to be.
Long claws. Dark fur down my forelegs. I can feel the size of me — I realize, glancing at the shapes of the instructors' wolves gathering at the edges — bigger than them.
But I can't see my own face. I can't see the thing they're all seeing, the thing that has some of the most powerful wolves at this academy standing frozen and whispering extinct.
I look at Faris.
Celeste Faris, who deducts Merit Marks in a voice that never rises, who has never once looked anything but perfectly, coldly in control — Celeste Faris is staring at me with her hand pressed flat to her chest, and her face has gone bloodless, and I know that expression because I've worn it, I wore it looking at a rabid bear.
She's afraid.
Faris is afraid of me.
The last of the adrenaline drains out and pure panic rushes in to fill the space, and I can feel it feeding back through the bond, Luke and Torres both catching the spike of it and hurling themselves against the miles between us — and there's nothing they can do, and there's nothing I can do.
Then someone pushes through the wall of them.
Jon.
He comes through the frozen instructors and stops when he sees me, and even him — even Jon — I watch it hit him. His whole face opens with it. Disbelief. Something like wonder. And under both, fear, but not the same fear as the others; theirs is fear of me, and his, I understand, is fear for me.
He lets out a long, slow breath, like a man steadying himself. And then I watch him decide something.
He starts walking toward me.
The reaction is instant.
"Professor—"
"Matthias, don't—"
"Stay back, you don't know what—"
Jon doesn't so much as glance at them. He doesn't stop. His eyes never leave mine, and he keeps coming, one step after another, into the space every other wolf in the clearing is desperate to keep between themselves and me.
Some far-back part of me, the part that's still Jessica under all this fur and terror, thinks: of course. Of course it's him.
He stops a few feet away and raises one hand — empty, palm open, held out low where I can see it. Every movement slow. Deliberate. The way you'd approach something wild.
And then he speaks, and his voice is the exact voice I remember from his classroom — calm, warm, unrushed, like we have all the time in the world and nothing at all is wrong.
"Jessica."
My ears swivel toward him before I decide to let them.
His face eases at that, just slightly. "There you are," he says softly.
I make a sound I don't have a name for, low in a chest that isn't shaped like mine.
"I know you're frightened," Jon says. "That's alright. It makes perfect sense to be frightened. But you're safe now. The danger's over — you ended it. Nothing here is going to hurt you." Another slow step. "You're safe."
My breathing — great, heaving, animal breaths — starts, fractionally, to slow.
"There you go." He keeps his voice level, keeps his hand open, keeps his eyes on mine. "You're doing beautifully. Truly. But I need you to do one more thing for me now, and then you can rest."
Another step. He's close enough now that I could reach him. Close enough that not one other person in this clearing would dare to be.
"I need you to come back," he says.
Come back. The same two words. Luke said them to me last night with his thumb over the mark on my wrist, and now Jon is saying them here, and something in me — the Jessica part, the part that's tired and terrified and so far from home — reaches for them like a rope in the dark.
"Come back to me, Jessica," Jon says gently. "I've got you. Come back."
I don't know why I trust him. I can't explain it, standing in a body I don't understand, in front of a wolf world that just looked at me and said extinct.
But I trust him more than anyone else in this clearing, more than my own racing heart — and I let myself stop looking at all of them, all those frightened faces, and I look only at him.
I let myself focus on his voice.
And somewhere deep under the fur and the fear, something enormous loosens, and begins, slowly, to let me go.
Grab book 2, Legacy Elite and find out what Jessica shifted into—and why everyone at Luftis Academy is terrified of it.
Get your exclusive Professor Jon Mattias bonus scene and find out what went through his head when Jessica barged into his cottage to see Pickles—and just how close his wolf came to claiming his mate.