Chapter 1
Present day
The Isle of Man
Tamsin
The first thing I felt was fire.
Not the clean, crackling kind from a hearth or a signal blaze on the cliffs, but a fire inside me, crawling through my veins like it was alive and furious. It burned and froze at the same time, a wrongness that had no edges, only hunger.
I was sinking.
No—floating.
No—being pulled apart.
“Tamsin.”
The word came from very far away, stretched thin and warped, as if it had to fight through water and blood and mud to reach me. I tried to answer, but my mouth wouldn’t move. My tongue felt too big. My body felt… wrong. Heavy and light all at once.
The world tilted.
I was back on Skye.
Mist clung to the heather, soft and silver, and the sea whispered in a slow, patient rhythm below the cliffs along the shore. My boots were muddy. My hands were small again, scraped and nicked from climbing where I shouldn’t have.
“Tam,” my mother said, smiling back at me. “Come eat before it gets cold.”
My father stood by the firepit, working on some tool that caught the light just so. Steel. Familiar. Safe.
My knife.
“I need my knife,” I told them urgently. The words felt important. Essential. “I need it.”
Griff laughed from somewhere behind me, warm and easy. “You always do.”
Then the sky split open.
The mist turned black and the sea roared, and I heard a howling sound, but it was wrong, twisted, too many voices folded into one. The ground shook. My parents blurred, their faces smearing like wet paint.
“No,” I whispered. “No, no—”
Pain ripped through me, sharp and blinding.
I screamed.
My eyes flew open.
Bright light from a set of windows burned into my skull. The air reeked of antiseptic and metal and old fear. The surface beneath me was hard but padded, cool against my overheated skin. My body arched involuntarily, a sob tearing out of my throat before I could stop it.
“Easy—easy, don’t move.”
Hands pressed me down. Strong hands. Familiar hands.
“Tamsin, look at me.”
I couldn’t. My vision swam, edges bleeding into each other. The ceiling fractured into too many shapes, and my heart was trying to punch its way out of my ribs.
My blood was on fire.
Not metaphorically.
Literally.
I could feel it, boiling heat rushing through me. There were two different forces tearing through me from the inside, clawing for dominance. One was wild and agonizing and screaming. The other was deep and heavy and… possessive.
Lycan.
Wolf.
They were fighting inside me.
“No—” I gasped, my voice raw. “Please.”
Someone cursed beside me. I wasn’t sure who.
“Her fever’s spiking again,” a voice said and I vaguely recognized it as Eamon’s, or at least I thought it was. He sounded calm, clinical, but threaded tight with worry. “Her temperature’s climbing. Heart rate’s increasingly erratic.”
Boots scraped closer. A presence settled near my head, steady as a wall. When a hand brushed my hair back, my entire body reacted, arching, trembling, a low, feral sound ripping from my chest.
“Tam…”
It was Griff. His voice cut through the chaos like a blade through smoke.
“I’m here.”
The fire surged in response, the wolf in my blood rearing up at the sound of him. It recognized him. Claimed him. Wanted him.
I hated how good that felt.
“Griff,” I croaked. “Griff—”
“I’m here, Tam.”
His voice was rougher than I’d ever heard it, like he’d sandpapered it raw with fear. A hand closed around mine, big and callused and grounding.
“Don’t you dare leave us,” he growled. “You hear me?”
I tried to squeeze his fingers. I couldn’t tell if I succeeded.
Something wet slid down my temple, sweat or tears or blood, I didn’t know.
The room blurred again.
Time fractured.
Sometimes I was awake.
Sometimes I wasn’t.
Sometimes I was running through forests that weren’t real, chasing something that smelled like iron and rot and hunger. Sometimes I was trapped in my own body, aware of every nerve screaming as the heat built higher and higher.
I heard them around me—voices overlapping, breaking apart.
“She’s burning up—”
“—can’t sedate her too deeply, not with the shift—”
“—this isn’t normal—”
“—maybe she’s going feral—”
I tasted blood.
The lycan part of me howled in triumph, surging, stretching, trying to tear free. It wanted teeth. Claws. Violence. It wanted to hunt.
The wolf in me answered, but not with chaos.
With need.
A different kind of hunger bloomed, just as brutal. Not for flesh, but for them. For grounding. Anchors.
For my mates.
My body shuddered violently, muscles clenching hard enough to draw a scream from my throat.
“I can’t—” I sobbed. “I can’t hold on.”
“Tamsin, listen to me.”
It was Bishop’s voice this time, his English accent almost musical. He was close.
“You’re not alone,” he said. “You’re going to survive this.”
“I’m not,” I gasped. “I can feel it. It’s tearing me apart.”
The heat crested again, white-hot, obliterating my every thought. My back arched off the bed, a hoarse, animalistic cry ripping free as a piece inside me snapped and surged—
—and stopped.
Because then their hands were on me.
Griff’s palm pressed down on my left shoulder, firm and unyielding.
Nox’s presence flanked my other side, lethal and coiled, his hands like a lifeline that cut through the madness.
Bishop’s fingers curled around my wrist, pulse to pulse, grounding me in the rhythm.
Eamon knelt at my feet, voice calm as his hands wrapped around my ankles.
“Tamsin,” Eamon stated calmly. “Stay with us. Breathe with me.”
I dragged in a breath. Then another.
The wolf surged again, responding to them all, reaching for something it recognized as mine.
Mine.
The lycan screamed in rage, thrashing, but for the first time it didn’t feel alone in my body. It felt… crowded.
I turned my head weakly, vision swimming, and found Elias watching me from the edge of the bed. His expression was carved from stone, eyes full of concern, jaw tight with restraint.
“You bit me,” I whispered. “You’re a wolf.”
“I am,” he answered softly.
Another wave slammed into me, and I whimpered, fingers clawing weakly into my palms.
“It hurts,” I begged. “Make it stop.”
I fumbled, lifting my hand with monumental effort, pointing, first at Griff, then Nox, then Bishop, then Eamon.
“I need—” My voice broke. “I need you. All of you. The rest of you. Mark me. Please.”
Griff swore under his breath.
Bishop inhaled loudly.
Nox’s eyes narrowed.
Eamon closed his eyes for a brief second, and then opened them again, his gaze hardening.
“She’s right,” he thought aloud. “It may be the only way. She needs more wolf in her blood to combat the lycan bite.”
I couldn’t tell if it was my blood that was screaming or my bones or even me.
Maybe it was all three.
The room swam in and out of focus. Every breath scraped my throat raw. Every blink felt like I was opening my eyes into fire.
I’d never been afraid of pain.
This was not pain.
This was my mind being turned inside out, the world warped into scent and sound and instinct until I couldn’t tell where I ended and the monster began.
“Don’t,” someone said. It was Griff. “Tam, don’t—”
I grabbed him.
My hand shot out like it didn’t belong to me, fingers clamping around his shirt at the collar. I yanked him down toward me with a strength that felt wrong for a girl that was practically half-dead on a med bay cot.
His eyes widened, startled, then softened in that way that always made me want to punch something.
He was being protective right now.
I didn’t need protective.
I bared my teeth at him, lips peeling back in a snarl.
“Mark me,” I rasped.
His jaw clenched. “Tam—”
I pulled harder, forcing his face closer, forcing him to look at me, to see me, to see the edges of me fraying.
“Mark me,” I demanded again, and it came out as a snarl.
He still hesitated. I tightened my grip on him and hissed right in his face.
“Mark me, you beta bitch.”
For a heartbeat, the room went dead silent.
Griff’s expression flickered with shock, then fury, then something darker that made the hair on my arms rise even as sweat slicked my skin.
“Careful,” he murmured. “You don’t get to call me that unless you mean it.”
“I mean it,” I breathed, and my voice cracked on the truth. “I’m—” A tremor rippled through me. My vision stuttered. “I’m losing to the lycan venom. I can feel it. Please…”
That last word did it.
Griff’s eyes darkened and he leaned in. For a second he didn’t look like the man who’d watched out for me my whole life.
He looked at me like a predator deciding what to do with his prey.
“I’m here for you, Tam,” he whispered hoarsely.
Then he lowered his mouth to the side of my throat.
I felt his breath first, hot against skin that was already burning. I felt the press of his lips, almost gentle. Then his teeth sank in.
It wasn’t a savage tear. It was controlled. Intentional. A bite meant to mark, not maim.
Pain flared, then spread outward in a rush that made my breath catch in the back of my throat. I gasped, the sound breaking into a strangled moan I hated myself for.
Griff’s hand slid behind my neck, holding me still, keeping me from jerking away as my blood surged and screamed and answered.
The wolf in me lunged toward him like it had been starving.
Mine.
Mine.
Mine.
The lycan venom shrieked in protest, thrashing, trying to drown the feeling in violence, but Griff’s bite anchored me for the briefest of moments. He lifted his head, blood at the corner of his mouth, his eyes locked on mine with a fierce, broken kind of relief.
“Elias was the first. I’m the second,” he said hoarsely.
I couldn’t speak. I could only breathe, shaking, as the fire in my veins shifted again. I still burned, but the fire was no longer directionless.
Someone else moved in.
It was Nox.
I didn’t need to see him to know. I could feel him. He hovered over my other side, his fingers brushing my jaw to tilt my face just enough.
“Look at me,” he said quietly.
I tried. My eyes found his through the blur. There was no softness there. No hesitation.
Only devotion sharpened into a weapon.
“Whatever you need,” he murmured. “I’m here for you.”
Then he bit me too.
Not on the throat, but lower, at the junction of my shoulder and neck. Pain flashed, and this time my body shuddered.
The wolf in me surged again, hungry for the mate bond like it was oxygen.
The lycan venom lunged, furious.
For a second, my vision went black at the edges.
“Three,” I heard someone say, maybe Griff again, maybe Nox. I wasn’t sure.
Hands held me down as my body bucked.
Bishop was next.
I knew before he touched me. His presence was calming, like a hymn whispered into the screaming chaos. He lifted my wrist and pressed his mouth to the inside of it in a gentle kiss that made my throat tighten.
“You’re sure?” he whispered, voice rougher than I’d ever heard it.
I managed a single jerking nod.
“Yes,” I rasped.
His teeth sank in.
Hot pain at my pulse point, and then a rush of order.
The fire inside me wavered, startled, as if it had expected only violence and found discipline instead.
“And me fourth,” Bishop breathed, and his mouth lingered for one impossible second, like he hated pulling away from me.
Eamon came last.
“This will hurt,” he told me softly.
“Everything hurts,” I whispered back.
A shaky sound left him. Then he leaned in and bit my other shoulder almost tenderly. The pain bloomed…and then the strangest thing happened.
The heat inside me shifted, like a storm changing direction.
The wolf inside me surged up. The lycan venom screamed and fought, but it didn’t have as much room anymore. It couldn’t stretch my mind open quite as wide as it could only minutes ago.
Because there were anchors in me now.
Five tethers pulling me back every time the lycan part tried to drag me under.
Elias.
Griff.
Nox.
Bishop.
Eamon.
All five of them were holding me.
My breath faltered.
My vision cleared for half a second, and in that sliver of lucidity I saw them all five of them around me.
Then the room lurched.
Heat spiked one last time, hard enough that I screamed, back arching as the two beasts clashed in my veins, one trying to burn me into something monstrous, the other trying to hold me in a shape that still resembled me.
Griff’s hand cupped the back of my head.
“Breathe, Tam,” he whispered. “That’s it. Come back to us.”
I sucked in a ragged breath.
The fire roared.
Then, like a wave cresting, something inside me snapped and finally released. My muscles went slack so suddenly that it felt like I almost fell off the edge of the world.
“Tam!” Griff’s voice was distant now, frantic.
Hands caught me.
The ceiling rushed away.
My eyelids fluttered.
For the first time in what felt like a lifetime, the heat stopped climbing.
It broke like a storm finally deciding it had done enough damage.
I exhaled, long and shaking, and as the darkness took me, the last thing I felt was Griff’s mouth brushing my forehead.
“Stay with us,” he whispered. “Please… just stay.”
Then I let go.
And the fire, finally, began to cool.