Page 96 of Nikolay
Sage found me before I had fully chosen a spot to stand.
“Ready?” he asked.
I looked up at him and grinned before I meant to, because by then the answer was so far beyond yes it barely fit language.
“Oh, hell yes.”
I stripped without ceremony.
Henley over my head. Joggers down. Bra, underwear, shoes. The night hit my bare skin cold and immediate, nipples tightening, the moon laying silver over breasts, belly, thighs. For one second I stood naked among strangers and discovered I was not ashamed at all. My body was a wolf’s body. Built for running. Built for shifting. Built for no one’s approval.
Then I let my wolf out.
The change took me like surf.
Bones drew and bent. Muscles seized and remade themselves. My spine rippled under the force of its own rearrangement. Heat blasted through me, then relief, then that impossible tearing-open sensation that always came right before the world tilted and settled into its truer shape. My jaw shifted. Hands became paws. Skin vanished under fur.
And there I was.
Thank the Goddess.
The first breath in wolf form hit like salvation. The night exploded outward in scent and texture and electrical clarity. Pine. Damp soil. Old bark. Prey-trace far off. Children. Wine on breath. Male wolves, female wolves, age, rank, health, kinship, arousal, smoke from the house, moon-cold water somewhere in the distance. It all came at me whole, and my wolf surged with a joy so acute it bordered on grief.
I had missed this.
Goddess, I had missed this.
I shook once from nose to tail, a full-body shiver of release, and the world locked properly into place beneath me.
Sloan was already gone—a gray streak tearing for the treeline with another wolf at her flank.
I bounded after instinctively, then checked because a larger shape moved in close behind me.
Sage’s wolf.
He was enormous. Black as Bronc’s, though different in the set of him—leaner through the middle perhaps, but no less powerful for it. Moonlight slicked over his coat in blue-silver flashes. His eyes found mine for a brief beat, bright and intelligent and unmistakably him even in fur.
Then he lunged forward in invitation.
I took off.
The first stretch of the run almost made me dizzy with pleasure. Cold air tore through my lungs clean and wild. The ground gave beneath my paws in soft, forgiving layers of needle and earth, then firmed where roots crossed under it, then dipped where ferns and old leaves hid hollows. My body knew what to do before thought ever formed. Shoulders lengthened into stride. Spine flexed. Hindquarters drove. Every part of me woke.
We hit the trees in a rush.
The pack spread through the forest around us in a living wave—black, gray, tawny, silver bodies threading between trunks, scattering pine scent, disturbing sleeping birds into muttered complaint overhead. Some ran in pairs. Some in small groups. Some alone but never isolated, always with the larger motion of pack all around them like current around a swimmer.
My wolf recognized it and settled into it with the deep, exact relief of a key finding its lock.
That was what got me.
Not merely movement. Not only speed. The fit of myself among others running under the same moon. The way my senses stopped bracing and started trusting. This wolf to my left belonged. That scent trail ahead belonged. Those pups at the outer safer line were watched. That older female falling back after a short burst had three younger wolves subtly adjusting around her without breaking pace. Pack. Pack. Pack.
Sage came up on my right and nipped lightly at my flank.
I snapped back on pure joy and veered, launching through low underbrush just to make him work for it. He followed at once. We tore downhill, then cut left around a fallen trunk furred with moss. His shoulder bumped mine. I darted ahead, then twisted and doubled back under the arch of an old root system, making him overshoot by a stride before he wheeled, black body clean and fluid in the moonlight.
I was laughing in the only way a wolf could—open-mouthed, tongue lolling, breath thrilled through my chest.
