Chapter 446
Celine paused before following her. She looked at me with seventeen years old in her face and the expression of someone who’d been crying recently and had made a decision to stop.
“Bring her home,” Celine said.
“That’s what Kael is doing right now,” I said. “He’s going to bring her home.”
Celine nodded and went to help Margo.
I turned back to the combatants.
“Andrew,” I said. “Ready?”
Andrew stepped out from the group.
He was a large man, built for the kind of wolf he probably was – broad through the shoulders, grounded, the quality of someone who’d been strong for a long time and had stopped thinking
space I’d about it. He looked at me across the ten feet of
put between us, and his expression was the expression of someone who was about to do something difficult and had already made peace with doing it.
“If my wolf tries to kill you,” he said, “I want you to know that I personally am not trying to kill you.”
“I understand the distinction,” I said.
“I’m just saying,” he said. “For the record.”
“It’s noted,” I said. “Try not to. Either of you.”
He shifted.
—
the shift without mindlink support It was painful to watch. That was the thing about it wasn’t the smooth thing I’d seen in pack documentation, the fluid transition of someone whose animal half and human half were in functional communication. This was effort and resistance and the body doing something it hadn’t been designed to do without infrastructure, the wolf coming through in pieces rather than all at once. Andrew went to his knees, then down onto his hands, and the change took him with the rough quality of something that was
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happening despite obstacles rather than with their cooperation.
The wolf that stood up where Andrew had been was very large.
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Dark coat, almost black in the hall’s lighting. The yellow eyes of an animal that was fully present and had not yet received any information about why it was here or what it was supposed to be doing.
It looked at me.
I had approximately one second before the decision was made.
The wolf launched.
—
I sidestepped left the training dodge, the one that was in my muscle memory from the specific number of times Ivory had pushed me through variations of it – and brought the shield up around the wolf in the same motion. The white light of my moon shield expanded outward in a bubble, encircling the wolf before it could redirect its momentum, and the wolf hit the inside of the shield and bounced.
It snarled. The sound filled the hall.
It threw itself at the inside edge of the bubble, full force, the weight of a large wolf moving at speed, and the shield held the way it had been holding all day – absorbing, steady, the gift doing its work.
“Hm,” said someone in the hall.
“That’s a big wolf,” Priya said, in the tone of someone making a factual observation.
“Andrew was always big,” Louis said.
“I meant relatively,” Priya said.
I stopped listening to them and found the anchor.
The anchor was warm and present and had been working all day through things that should have been harder than this, and I pulled it forward into full active presence and aimed it at the wolf in the bubble. Not at the surface of it – not the feral yellow eyes and the snarling and the systematic investigation of the shield’s edges. Deeper. The same way I’d reached into the bond’s other direction in the east courtyard and found the space where something human still lived underneath the wolf’s noise.
I reached.
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The wolf felt it.
It stopped throwing itself at the shield edge.
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It stood in the center of the bubble and looked at me with an expression that was changing the pure feral quality shifting into something more complicated, something that had recognition in it.
I pushed.
—
Not a command yet
—
not asking for anything. Just presence. Just: I’m here, I can hear you, you’re not alone in whatever this is. The same way the bond connection felt when it was working – not pressure, offered hand.
The wolf sat down.
The hall went completely silent.
Then Andrew’s wolf said, in the unmistakable shape of human speech forced through an animal’s vocal equipment, rough and strange and absolutely clear: “That is very strange.”
The hall erupted.
—
Not panic the opposite of panic, the specific noise of thirty-something people who had been very afraid of the outcome of this test and had just received information that the outcome was going to be different from what they’d feared.
“He’s talking,” Louis said. “Andrew is talking.”
“I can hear him,” Sam said, with the expression of someone who’d been told this was possible and was still surprised that it was possible. “I can hear him in my-” he touched his temple. “I can hear him.”
“Everyone can hear him,” Santos said, and his voice had the quality of someone who was trying to maintain professional composure and was not fully succeeding.
“I can hear all of you,” Andrew’s wolf said, through the anchor, through the link that was holding. The voice came through in the specific way of the mindlink – not ears, something else, the communication channel that ran beneath normal speech. “This is deeply unsettling and I am choosing to view it as functional.”
“How do you feel,” I said.
“Like myself,” Andrew said. “Which is the important thing. I am myself. The wolf is here but I’m also here and we’re—” a pause, the pause of someone describing an experience they don’t
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have established vocabulary for, “-communicating. It’s different from before the curse. It’s not the old mindlink. But it works.”
2
“Drop the bubble,” Santos said to me.
I dropped the shield bubble.
Andrew’s wolf stood free in the hall and did not attack anyone. It looked around at the assembled combatants with the specific attention of a wolf that was home and knew it was home and was taking stock of the situation with human intelligence operating through animal
senses.
“Right,” Andrew said, through the link. “Let’s shift the others. We’re wasting time.”