Page 73 of Legacy Found

"...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.