RABID (Iron Fang Reapers MC #18)

Prologue

Stellan

The poker chips were still scattered across the floor of the common room when I finally got myself back.

I stood in the corner in wolf form — seven feet of silver-gray fur, chest heaving, claws sunk two inches into the hardwood I'd been promising Fang I'd refinish since March.

The table I'd been sitting at forty seconds ago was in two pieces, split clean down the middle like something had taken a blade to it.

Grim's full beer had somehow launched itself onto the ceiling, where it clung upside down, defying physics, dripping slowly onto the floor.

I still couldn't explain that one.

My wolf didn't want to settle. It paced and snarled inside me, snapping at nothing, burning with an energy that had no target and no release.

That was the worst part. Not the shift itself — I'd been shifting since I was seventeen, I knew the mechanics of it by now.

It was the blind, purposeless desperation underneath it.

Like something in me was screaming in a language I hadn't learned yet.

I forced myself back. It was ugly. It hurt in the specific way that a premature shift always hurt — bones folding wrong, joints screaming, the sensation of my own body betraying its natural rhythm. I hit the floor on my hands and knees with a grunt that bounced off every wall in the room.

My t-shirt was soaked through the moment I had one again.

The common room had cleared, except for Grim.

He stood ten feet away with his arms crossed and his expression carefully blank in the way that meant he was genuinely alarmed but wouldn't show it, because Grim never showed anything that could be used against him in an argument.

He looked at the split table. He looked at the beer on the ceiling. He looked at me.

"Third time this week," he said.

"I'm aware."

"Table's done."

"I know."

"Fang's going to want an explanation."

"Grim." I looked up at him from the floor. My arms were shaking. "I know."

He didn't push. That was the thing about Grim — he understood the architecture of silence, knew when to fill it and when to leave it standing. He pulled a fresh beer from the refrigerator behind the bar, walked across the ruined floor, and handed it down to me without a word.

Then he walked out.

I sat on the hardwood and drank his beer and tried very hard to think about anything except the fact that I was losing my mind.

That had been shift number one.

Shift number two happened four days later on the Ironridge switchbacks, twelve miles outside of town.

I'd been riding — just riding, no reason for elevated adrenaline, no full moon for another nine days, no external trigger I could identify.

The mountain road curved through Douglas firs older than the town itself.

The afternoon light was doing that amber thing it did in October, where everything looked like it was made of warm glass.

I was completely fine.

And then I wasn't.

The wave hit me mid-curve, fast and merciless — a surge of something feral and hot that turned my vision gold and my fingers to claws on the handlebars before my brain had finished registering the threat.

I hit the brakes hard. The bike fishtailed.

I managed to get the wheel onto the gravel shoulder before my body stopped cooperating entirely.

The shift took me right there on the side of the road.

I came back to myself in the tree line twenty minutes later, panting, pine needles in places pine needles had no business being, with clear evidence that I'd chased and apparently caught a rabbit during my lost time. My wolf seemed smug about this. I did not share its satisfaction.

My bike was still on the shoulder, untouched. The couple in the minivan who'd apparently driven past during the whole spectacle had left, presumably to file a report about unusually large wildlife on Highway 9.

I sat against a pine tree and stared at the sky for a while and thought about what a controlled, stable shifter was supposed to look like and how far I was from that description.

Then I rode back to the clubhouse, told no one what had happened, and went to bed.

Shift number three was, objectively, the most embarrassing.

I was in the shower. Not the full moon. Not a fight.

Not a territorial violation or a chemical trigger or any of the documented provocations for involuntary shifting.

I was washing my hair with the two-in-one shampoo Howl kept making fun of me for buying, thinking about nothing in particular, when my wolf simply decided it was time.

I came back to myself in the hallway of the second floor. Soaking wet. Naked. The shower curtain had been reduced to four uneven strips of fabric. Water was running freely across the bathroom tile and starting its migration toward the hallway carpet.

Phantom was standing at the end of the hall, holding his coffee mug, watching me with the particular expression he reserved for things that were beneath his dignity to comment on but too strange to ignore.

"The curtain start it?" he asked.

"Don't."

He lifted his mug in a gesture that might have been peace or might have been pity, and retreated back into his room.

I stood in the hallway and dripped on the carpet and tried to identify the emotion I was feeling.

It wasn't anger. Anger had been the first response, months ago, when the uncontrolled shifts started. Then it had moved through frustration, then denial, and now it had settled somewhere quieter and colder that I didn't have a good name for. Something adjacent to defeat.

I was twenty-eight years old. I'd been a wolf since my body decided to become one at seventeen.

I'd been riding with the Reapers for three years, wearing my cut for eight months.

I was the newest patched member of one of the most respected shifter clubs in this territory, and I couldn't get through a shower without destroying the plumbing.

The brothers called me the chaos variable.

I knew about that. I was supposed to not know — it was said in the fond, exasperated way that clubs adopt their most volatile members, the way a family names the kid who keeps setting things on fire — but I had wolf hearing and a habit of being in places no one expected me.

Fond or not, it wasn't a nickname I'd chosen.

Poppy found me after the shower incident. She always found me when I least wanted to be found, which I'd come to understand was not coincidence but strategy.

Poppy was Grim's mate, a wolf shifter herself, and she had that quality that some of the older wolves developed — where she looked at you and seemed to be reading something written directly on your nervous system.

It was useful when I had a knife wound that needed cleaning.

Less useful when I was trying to maintain the fiction that everything was fine.

We sat in the kitchen. I made coffee because making coffee was something to do with my hands.

"Your wolf is searching," she said.

"My wolf is broken."

"Those aren't the same thing."

"They feel like the same thing from the inside."

"I know." She waited while I poured two mugs.

"The pattern you're describing — the escalating frequency, the unprovoked triggers, the energy that doesn't resolve — it's not a malfunction, Stellan.

It's a signal. Some wolves go through this when their mate is near but not yet found.

The wolf senses the possibility before the human can identify the source. "

I set her mug in front of her. "I don't have a mate."

"You don't know that."

"I've had three different healers tell me—"

"Tell you what? That they couldn't diagnose it?

That the symptom picture didn't match the standard profiles?

" She tilted her head. "Because that's consistent with what I'm saying.

Mate-seeking behavior doesn't present the same way twice.

It doesn't show up in the standard diagnostic frameworks because it's not a pathology. "

"Poppy." I sat down across from her. The coffee was too hot and I drank it anyway. "I've been on the road since I was twenty-two. Six years. Two packs before this one, twelve states, more towns than I can name. If my mate existed and was somewhere I was going to find her, I'd have found her."

"Or she was somewhere you hadn't been yet."

I didn't have an answer to that. I didn't want to have an answer to it.

The mate question was the kind of thing that could swallow you if you let it.

I'd watched brothers go through the mate bond — watched Grim transform from the most contained man I'd ever met into someone who brought wildflowers to breakfast. Watched Phantom, who didn't trust anything that couldn't be tactically assessed, become soft around the edges in ways he didn't seem to mind.

I wasn't opposed to it, in theory.

In practice, hoping for something I had no evidence for felt like the fastest route to the particular kind of grief that came from expecting a thing that never arrived.

Three healers. That was the accounting.

The first one, an older wolf named Calder out of the eastern territory, had run diagnostics for two hours and given me a bundle of herbs and a breathing protocol. The herbs smelled like carpet and the breathing protocol worked exactly twice before my wolf started ignoring it.

The second one had been a younger woman, trained in both shifter biology and human neurology, who'd spent forty minutes telling me that my fight-or-flight response had been conditioned to operate at a hair trigger and that I needed to reduce environmental stressors.

I'd looked at her and gestured at my cut and my life in general.

She had not had a follow-up recommendation.

The third healer had been the most direct.

He'd looked at the pattern — the escalation, the failed controls, the gap between my cognitive intention and my wolf's behavior — and said that some wolves were simply wired with a narrower margin between human and animal than others.

That management, not resolution, was the realistic goal.

He wasn't wrong. I just hadn't been ready to accept it yet.

The fear lived under all of it. I didn't name it often because naming things gave them weight, and this thing had enough weight already. But it was there, in the quiet between shifts — the fear of feral.

In shifter communities, going feral was the thing you didn't say out loud.

The wolf that broke free completely and didn't come back.

The animal that forgot the human underneath it.

I'd heard the stories — a bear up north who'd walked into the wilderness one winter and never found his way home.

A wolf from a pack in the Cascades who'd been in wolf form for eleven months before his mate found him, and even then, the return had been incomplete.

It happened. Not often. But it happened.

And I was on a trajectory I didn't like the look of.

The night before the Fall Festival, I lay in my bed and stared at the ceiling and ran an honest accounting of where I was.

I'd had thirty-one uncontrolled shifts in the last four months.

The interval between them was shrinking.

The duration was lengthening. The threshold — the amount of stimulus required to trigger one — was dropping.

I was losing ground.

I wasn't going to tell anyone that. Not Grim, who would immediately involve Fang.

Not Fang, who would immediately make decisions about my value to the club.

Not Howl, who would bet on it, because Howl bet on everything.

Not Poppy, who would look at me with that expression that felt like being turned inside out.

Instead, I'd do what I always did. I'd be the loudest person at the Fall Festival.

I'd charm the locals and hand out chili samples and make the Reapers look approachable and human, which was ironic on multiple levels.

I'd be Rabid — the chaos variable, the live wire, the guy nobody worried about because he was too busy being a spectacle to be a problem.

I turned the wooden bead on my neck between my fingers. The healer in the eastern territory had given it to me. Focus, he'd said. Something to anchor intention.

My wolf didn't respond to intention. My wolf responded to whatever it wanted, whenever it wanted, and my job was to survive the fallout.

The moon was half-full outside my window. My wolf paced in the darkness behind my ribs, restless, that searching energy running circuits I couldn't map. Looking for something. Always looking.

I didn't believe it was a mate. I didn't believe in that kind of thing for me — the struck-by-lightning moment, the scent recognition, the instant certainty that some wolves described and that had always sounded, to my pragmatic ear, like a very elaborate rationalization for chemistry.

I believed in what I could verify. I believed in the cut on my back and the brothers at my table and the road under my wheels. I believed in the Reapers and in Ironridge and in the life I'd built in the shadow of these mountains.

I wasn't ready to lose it.

My wolf finally stilled as exhaustion won out over restlessness. I slept.

I dreamed about a scent. Layered and warm, precise and complex — the way expensive things were always more interesting the longer you sat with them. It hit something in my chest like a key turning in a lock I hadn't known was there.

I forgot it the moment I woke up.

The festival was in four hours. Grim had texted me six times about the chili booth setup, which was more texts than Grim had sent in the entire previous month.

I lay there for a few minutes and ran the morning inventory.

Wolf condition: elevated but not acute. Shift probability in the next four hours, in a controlled public environment with minimal external stressors: manageable.

My breathing protocol was loaded and ready.

The wooden bead was on the cord at my neck.

I'd worn the same henley for two days and it smelled like the mountain air, which my wolf found settling.

I was going to be fine.

I was going to smile at every family that came to the chili booth and charm every skeptic and be exactly the version of Rabid that the Reapers needed in public, which was the version that looked like the chaos variable was a choice rather than a condition.

Then I was going to get through the afternoon without destroying anything important.

One day at a time. That was the protocol.

I got up. I splashed water on my face and pulled on my cut and checked the mirror.

The man looking back at me was grinning.

He was very good at that.

He'd been practicing for years.