Prologue
Isle of Skye
Tamsin Drake
The morning started with a light sheen of mist.
It always did out here, the sea breathing fog over the hills like a dragon guarding its hoard of golden treasure. The heather was wet under my boots and the wind smelled of salt and peat smoke. When I stepped out of our shelter, the cold kissed my cheeks hard enough to make my eyes water.
Camp was tucked into a shallow dip above a rocky inlet, hidden from the open coastline by a crooked line of birch and gorse. We’d chosen it because you couldn’t see the sea unless you knew where to look, and because the cliffs behind us rose like the spine of a sleeping giant.
For our people, it was safe, at least safer than most places anyway.
The shifters called it Haven sometimes. We humans just called it Skye. A patch of stubborn green that the Collapse hadn’t swallowed whole, where wolves and humans shared fires and watch rotations and dried fish racks without looking at each other like mortal enemies.
Here, the wolves didn’t go feral.
Here, no one went missing in the night.
I tugged my braid over my shoulder and started toward the firepit, the soles of my boots soft on the damp ground. Someone had already stoked the coals. Orange light winked between stones, and the kettle hanging over sent steam up into the air like a rising cloud.
My mother was humming.
She always hummed when she was trying to pretend that she wasn’t excited about something. Her hands were busy with the oatcakes, flipping them on a flat stone, her fingers quick and sure. Her dark hair had come loose from its tie and the wind kept stealing strands and slapping them against her mouth.
“Happy birthday,” she said without looking up, but I could hear the smile in her voice. “Fifteen now, huh? You’re practically ancient.”
“I’m practically dead,” I muttered, stepping close enough to steal one of the warm cakes.
She slapped my wrist with the flats of her fingers, laughing. “Wait, or you’re going to burn your tongue. If you do, don’t come crying to me.”
My father sat on a log near the edge of the firelight, sharpening a tool with slow, careful strokes with his pocketknife. When I looked closer, I saw that it was a bone hook for pulling nets.
He glanced up at me and his eyes softened. “Fifteen,” he echoed, like the number meant something big. “Your gran would’ve—”
He didn’t finish.
We all had people we didn’t finish sentences about.
A shadow shifted behind him, tall and broad-shouldered, moving like he belonged everywhere at once. Griff dropped into a seat by the fire, and I glanced up at him.
He was smiling, which was always a warning.
His hair was tied back with a leather cord, the wind catching loose strands and turning them into a mess around his ears. He wore a patched coat that had once been military. The scars on his knuckles looked older than I was.
“Birthday girl,” he said, voice warm as the fire. “You ready?”
“For what?” I asked automatically, because with Griff, the answer was never nothing.
He tipped his chin toward the others gathering in the morning light.
They came in twos and threes from the shelters and from the perimeter, drawn in by the smell of breakfast and the excuse of celebration. Aunt Moira with her hands stained green from herb poultices. Wee Finn, who wasn’t wee anymore, carrying a coil of rope like it was his own personal treasure. Eira, one of the wolves, shifting from her four-legged form into human with that smooth ripple that still made my stomach tighten even though I’d grown up with it. Someone passed her a set of clothes and she pulled them overhead, covering herself.
My mother wiped her hands on her skirt and finally turned to face me properly. “Come here,” she said, and the way she said it made my skin prickle.
I moved to the center of the circle they were making, the fire at my back. Heat licked up my spine. The air felt charged, like the moment before lightning struck and set the forest aflame.
“Stop looking like you’re about to bolt,” Griff murmured under his breath as he stepped in close behind me, his presence solid and familiar. “It’s just your birthday, Tam.”
“You’re the one who said, ‘you ready’ like I’m about to be stabbed,” I shot back, turning to face him.
He chuckled. “If anyone stabs you, it’s gonna be me. And only if you deserve it.”
“Comforting.”
“That’s my job,” he said easily, but his gaze flicked beyond me, scanning the tree line reflexively before it settled back on me.
My father stood and set the hook aside. He reached behind the log and pulled out something wrapped in an old tartan. The vintage cloth had faded to the color of a stormy sky.
My mother stepped forward and placed her palms on my shoulders. “We wanted to give you something special this year,” she said softly.
My father’s mouth twitched. “You’ve been eyeing my belt knives for two years,” he said.
“I have not,” I lied.
He raised a brow.
I shut my mouth and grinned, because he was one hundred percent right.
He offered the bundle to me, and for a heartbeat my hands didn’t want to move. Superstition. Fear. The part of me that knew gifts always came with strings attached even when people pretended that they didn’t.
Then Griff nudged my elbow. “Take it, Tam.”
So I did.
The cloth was soft and worn, smelling faintly of smoke and rosemary. My fingers fumbled with the rope knotted around it, suddenly clumsy under everyone’s watchful eyes. I heard my mother make a little pleased hum, like she could already taste the moment I realized what it was.
The cloth fell away.
Steel winked in the firelight.
It was a blade.
It wasn’t big, like some heroic sword out of a story. It was practical, balanced, the blade leaf-shaped and slightly curved, made for cutting and skinning and the quick, clean work of survival. The handle was dark wood wrapped in a dark brown braided leather, fitted to a grip that felt like it had been measured against my palm while I slept.
I ran my thumb along the spine, careful not to touch the edge, and swallowed hard.
“This—” My voice broke. I cleared my throat and tried again. “This is mine?”
My father nodded. His eyes were too bright, and it made my heart tighten behind my ribs. “Griff and I made it,” he grinned. “Scrap steel from an old boat. Took us a month to get the balance right.”
Griff lifted one shoulder like it was nothing, but he looked awfully pleased with himself. “Your dad’s better at the fine work. I just hit things until they do what I want.”
“You did the sheath too,” my mother corrected, and her mouth curved with pride. She stepped in and held up a strip of leather. “And this.”
She handed me a beautifully stitched sheath with a loop that would sit snug against my thigh. The leather was stamped with a simple mark on it, a small crescent, like a sliver of moon.
“The old symbol,” Aunt Moira murmured quietly from the edge of the circle. “For safe hunting.”
I breathed out slowly, the knife warm in my hands from the fire and from the weight of everyone’s attention. It felt… right. Like it had been waiting for me for all my life.
“Go on, Tam,” Griff said, leaning in a little. His voice dropped, softer. “Try it.”
I slid the blade into the sheath. The fit was perfect, that satisfying whisper as steel met leather. I pulled it free again, watched the edge catch the light of the fire, then tucked it back home.
A tremor ran through me, part excitement, part anticipation. Growing up, I’d learned how to track rabbits in the bracken, learned the patience of snares and the silence of stalking. I knew that this knife would be the next step in learning how to take care of myself.
“I love it,” I said, and meant it so hard it hurt.
My mother kissed my forehead. My father cleared his throat like he was swallowing his own emotion. Someone clapped me on the shoulder. Someone else shoved a warm mug into my hands. It was tea, black and strong.
For a few minutes, we were just a family.
Griff started telling a story about the first time I’d tried to fish and fallen into the inlet fully clothed, and everyone laughed, even me. Finn mimicked my flailing arms and nearly tripped over a log himself, and my mother’s laugh rang out clear as wedding bells.
I remember thinking, stupidly, at that moment, that maybe this could last. That maybe Skye really was a pocket the world couldn’t ever reach.
I’d been wrong.
A terrified shout cut through the wind.
The laughter died like someone had snuffed out the fire.
A figure burst through the trees, stumbling into the clearing with sand clinging to his boots and panic carved into his face. It was one of our lookouts, Rowan, wide-eyed, and his chest was heaving so hard he could barely speak.
“Ships,” he gasped. “Off the shore—down by the south inlet. British ships. Guns. An army—”
He swallowed, staring at us like he was begging someone to tell him he was wrong.
“—and they’re coming here.”
For half a heartbeat, no one moved. The fire still crackled. The kettle still hissed.
My father was already moving.
“Get in your positions,” he barked, voice steady with the kind of calm that only comes from having survived too much. He snatched the bone hook off the log and looked to Griff. “Get the west ridge. If they’re landing just south of us, we won’t have long to prepare.”
Griff’s grin was gone. He was suddenly all purpose.
“On it,” he replied, and then his gaze snapped to me. “Tam.”
“I’m coming,” I blurted, because the knife at my thigh felt like permission and because my legs had started to shake and the only way to stop them was to move.
“No.” Griff grabbed my shoulder hard enough to hurt. “You’re not going.”
“I’m not a child—”
“You are fifteen,” he cut in, voice practically lethal.
My mother caught my face between her palms, forcing my eyes to hers. Her thumbs swept quickly beneath my cheekbones as if she could wipe my fear away with nothing more than her fingers.
“Listen to me,” she exclaimed, words tight. “Go to the hollow by the birch line. You remember?”
The hollow. The emergency burrow behind the fallen tree, lined with old blankets and kept stocked with dried meat and water. The place they’d shown me when I was eight, when I’d asked why we needed hiding places if Haven was safe.
I remembered laughing back then.
I didn’t laugh now.
“I don’t want to—” My voice cracked and I hated myself for it.
My father stepped in close, hand cupping the back of my head, pressing his forehead to mine. He smelled like smoke and salt and oats.
“Tam,” he murmured, and the softness in his voice made my stomach twist. “You hide. That’s an order.”
Orders. I could do orders.
I nodded because I couldn’t speak.
Griff released me like he was forcing himself to. “Go,” he commanded, and his eyes flicked down to the knife at my thigh. “And if you have to use it… use it.”
My throat tightened around a sound that wanted to be a sob.
Then the first gunshot cracked across the wind from the southern inlet, loud as thunder.
The camp exploded into motion.
Humans grabbed bows and spears and anything that could become a weapon. Someone shoved Finn toward the north path with two smaller kids in tow, their faces pale and their voices silent.
Wolves shifted at the edges of the clearing, bones breaking with that familiar, awful music. Fur erupted. Bodies lengthened. Their eyes flared gold in the dim morning light.
No one screamed yet.
That came later.
I ran.
There was no room for thought, no room for anything, just wet ground and pounding breath and the weight of my new knife thumping against my thigh. I sprinted past the racks of drying fish, past the smokehouse, past the shelter where Aunt Moira kept her herbs. The wind snapped my braid against my neck. My lungs burned with cold air.
Behind me, the sea boomed with a deeper sound than the constant drum of waves. Engines.
When I reached the birch line, I risked glancing back.
The southern cliff edge had become a moving line of dark figures, spilling up from the beach like ants from a disturbed nest. Men in uniforms, rifles held high, bayonets glinting in the weak morning light. A flag snapped above one of the ships rocking in the wind, red and white.
It was the British.
Not the ragged scavengers we’d fought off years ago. Not the desperate bands that sometimes stumbled onto Skye and turned tail when they saw wolves standing beside humans. This was organized. This was planned.
This was an army.
A shot split the air and a man near the firepit jerked backward, arms flinging wide, and for a second my brain refused to name what I was seeing.
Then my mother’s voice rang out in the quiet.
“Tam! Go!”
I turned and ran harder.
The hollow waited beneath the fallen oak, its roots clawing up toward the sky like ribs. I dropped to my knees and crawled inside, dragging damp leaves and grit with me. My hands shook so badly I scraped my knuckles on the bark.
Inside, it smelled like old wool and earth. Someone had hung a small charm from the root ceiling, a crescent carved from bone. It was supposed to bring safe hunting. I prayed it would bring me safety now.
I pressed my palm over my mouth and listened.
Gunfire. Screams. The thunder of boots.
And above it all, the deep, furious roar of angry wolves.
I squeezed my eyes shut until sparks danced behind my lids.
Don’t think. Just breathe.
I tried to breathe.
Minutes passed, or maybe hours. Time turned syrup-thick, slow and choking. Every crack of a rifle felt like a physical blow. My knife was clutched in my hand without me remembering I’d drawn it.
A child sobbed somewhere nearby, but the sound was muffled, someone smothering the sound the way I was. Then that sob cut off, swallowed by distance or fear or something worse. I couldn’t be certain.
A heavy crash shook the roots above me, dirt raining down on my hair. Voices came closer.
“Search the tree line!” a man shouted. “They’ll try to run north!”
Another voice laughed, ugly and bright. “Bloody savages, living with beasts. Burn it. Burn all of it.”
Fire crackled somewhere outside.
Smoke seeped into the hollow, sharp and bitter. My eyes watered. My throat tightened.
I couldn’t stay here.
I sheathed my knife, crawled backward and found the narrow gap at the back of the hollow, the escape tunnel that led to the ravine. Griff had helped dig it years ago, cursing the roots the whole time. I’d complained about the mud, and he’d flicked it at my face and told me survival wasn’t tidy and clean. I’d made a face at him and flicked some right back. It had turned into an all-out mud fight by the end of the day, but we’d gotten the job done anyway.
Now I shoved myself through it like a worm, scraping my shoulders on packed earth. The tunnel opened into the ravine, and I pushed out into gray daylight and froze.
The ravine wasn’t empty.
A British soldier stood at the top of the slope, rifle swinging as he scanned back and forth. He was young. I could see that his helmet was too big for his head, and his mouth was twisted in irritation.
I accidentally stepped on a twig and his gaze snapped down, locking onto me.
For half a heartbeat, neither of us moved.
Then his lips curled into a grin.
“Well, what’s this?” he called out, clearly amused. “Found a pretty one.”
My body went cold and hot at the same time.
Run, my instincts screamed.
But the ravine was a bowl. The only way out was past him and there was no path I could take where I would be out of the trajectory of his gun.
He lifted his rifle, aiming at my chest like it was nothing.
I didn’t think.
My hand went to my thigh.
Steel whispered out of leather.
I moved the way my father had taught me to move when stalking rabbits, low, fast, and quiet. I darted sideways, slipping behind a boulder as the rifle cracked.
Stone exploded where my head had been.
My ears rang. My heart tried to crawl out of my throat.
He cursed and started down the slope, boots skidding on wet dirt.
“You little—!”
I clutched the knife with both hands, forcing myself to breathe through the panic.
He rounded the boulder too fast, too confident, his rifle swinging down to club me and I stepped in before I could think of anything else.
I drove my blade forward into the gap beneath his ribs. It sank in deep. His eyes went wide, shocked more than anything, like he couldn’t understand how a young girl in a braid and muddy boots had become dangerous all of a sudden.
He dropped the rifle.
I snatched it before it hit the ground, hands clumsy around the metal. I staggered back, clutching the rifle to my chest, and the soldier collapsed to his knees, one hand pressed to his side, breath ragged. He stared at me like I was a monster.
Maybe I was.
My stomach lurched. My mouth filled with spit. I swallowed hard and forced my feet to move.
I scrambled up the opposite slope, slipping on mud, the rifle heavy and wrong in my arms, the knife still in my fist. Behind me, the soldier wheezed one last time and then stopped breathing.
At the top of the ravine, I gasped at the horror of what was waiting for me.
Smoke curled up from our shelters in thick black ribbons. The firepit had been trampled into ash. The fish racks were splintered. Bodies lay scattered—some human, some wolf—dark shapes in the wet grass. I couldn’t make my eyes stop counting the corpses.
I saw Aunt Moira’s shawl, torn and half-burned, caught on a bush.
My legs went weak.
I pushed forward anyway, because the only way through grief is movement, and because I couldn’t let myself stop.
Then I saw my father.
He was on his knees near the birch line, one hand braced against the ground, the other clutching his side. Blood soaked his shirt. His face was gray with pain, but his eyes were open.
He looked up and saw me.
“No,” he mouthed silently, and the word hit me harder than a bullet.
I staggered toward him. “Da—”
A crack split the air.
My father’s head jerked.
He slumped forward like a puppet with cut strings.
I made a sound I didn’t recognize. Something animal. Something broken.
I dropped the rifle and lunged, catching his shoulders, trying to hold him upright like I could force him back to life by sheer force of will.
“Da, no—no, no—”
His eyes stared past me at the smoke-filled sky.
Someone grabbed the back of my coat and yanked hard.
I whirled, knife flashing as I drove it upward.
Griff.
I diverted the blade at the very last second.
He was covered in blood, some of it his. His face was slashed open along one cheek. His eyes were wild. Furious. Terrified.
“Tamsin!” he roared, voice cracking. “Move!”
“I can’t—” I choked, clutching at my father.
Griff grabbed me by the shoulders, shaking me once, hard. “You can. You fucking will.”
My knife trembled in my hand. My throat burned.
“My mum—” I tried and couldn’t finish.
Griff’s gaze flicked past me.
I followed it.
My mother lay near the firepit, half-hidden by smoke. Her hair was spread like spilled ink. One of her hands was outstretched as if she’d been reaching for me and I wanted to reach back. There was a puddle of dark blood pooling beneath her.
My vision narrowed until the world became a tunnel.
Griff’s hand closed over my wrist—not the knife hand, the other one—and he wrenched me up off my knees.
“Tam,” he said, and his voice was suddenly terribly quiet. “Listen to me. They’re sweeping. They’re rounding up anyone left. If you stay, you die.”
“I don’t care,” I spat, because the words were easier than the truth.
He leaned in until his forehead nearly touched mine, breath harsh. “I do.”
His eyes flicked down to the knife in my hand.
“You used it?” he asked, and there was a strange pride buried under the horror.
I nodded once, numb.
“Good,” he rasped, and then his expression hardened. “Now we run.”
A shout rose from the southern slope.
“Over there! I see two more!”
Griff shoved me behind him like he could shield me with his body alone. Then he shifted into a wolf.
Bones cracked. His spine bowed, shoulders broadening, hair erupting into fur. In a blink, the man was gone and a massive wolf stood in his place, dark-coated, powerful, eyes bright with intelligence and rage.
He didn’t hesitate.
He launched himself toward the incoming soldiers with a snarl that shook the air.
The report of a rifle took my breath. Then another. Bullets bit into dirt and bark as Griff moved like a storm, slamming into one man and knocking him sprawling. He snapped his jaws, not to tear, not to kill, but to drive them back, to make them flinch, to buy us precious seconds so we could get away.
Seconds. That was all we got.
“Tam!” someone screamed—maybe Rowan, maybe Eira—somewhere in the smoke.
I didn’t answer.
I ran.
I sprinted toward the northern path, toward the cliffs, toward the narrow goat trail that only locals knew. My lungs burned. Tears blurred my vision until the world smeared into gray and black and flame.
Behind me, Griff’s howl ripped through the air. Then he was beside me again, shifting mid-stride in a way that made my stomach flip. One moment he was a wolf, the next, a man.
He grabbed my wrist and hauled me onward, dragging me through trees and rock as bullets cracked behind us.
“Don’t look back,” he panted.
I did anyway.
Smoke swallowed our camp. In the haze, I saw soldiers moving like shadows with guns. I saw a wolf fall and not get back up. I saw a body I couldn’t name because if I did, I’d stop running.
A scream cut off too quickly.
My legs almost buckled.
Griff’s grip tightened like a vise. “Tam,” he snarled, voice thick with panic and fury, “move!”
I moved.
We plunged into the rocks above the inlet, scrambling up a narrow cut in the cliff face where sea wind whipped hard against my face. Griff shoved me ahead, shielding me with his body whenever the path opened to the shoreline.
We climbed until my hands bled and my knees shook.
And when we finally dropped into a hidden crease between boulders—a place where the trees grew thick and the rocks blocked sightlines—Griff pressed a hand over my mouth and held me still.
We listened.
Boots passed by above us. Then there were voices. A dog barked.
Then the sound faded, swallowed by wind and distance.
Griff’s forehead dropped to my hair, his breath shaking.
I was still holding my knife.
My hands were smeared with blood that wasn’t mine.
I swallowed hard and forced the words out through Griff’s palm, muffled and broken.
“They killed them.”
His eyes shut. His jaw clenched until a muscle jumped. When he finally spoke, his voice was a rasp that sounded like it scraped his throat raw.
“Aye,” he whispered. “They did.”
In the silence that followed, with smoke still staining the sky behind us, I realized several things at once.
Skye was gone.
My parents were dead.
And my world was never going to be the same again.
[divider]Chapter One
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.
[button color=”red” size=”small” link=”https://www.stormynightpublications.com/product/shared-mate-a-dark-wolf-shifter-romance/” ]Read More Info and Buy![/button]