White light detonated across the training field.

The shift took six seconds.

It hurt so viciously Serena’s vision whited out.

The necklace worked like a charm from hell. Dark magic thrummed against her collarbone and ate every scrap of pain before it could reach either matebond. Isolation was the bill. She paid it in full without complaints.

The light faded.

A white wolf stood in the center of the training field.

Her coat burned white with a glow that pulsed faintly with each breath, throwing light across the dirt in a radius that made the ground around her look moonlit. Her golden eyes opened. Her chin lifted.

Aurelia surveyed the field the way a queen surveys a throne room she has already decided belongs to her.

Serena was gone. That was how the shift worked, most of the time. Yesterday, during the final session, Serena had been present alongside Aurelia for the first time, both of them conscious, both of them sharing the wolf’s body like two passengers in the same vehicle. There had also been a few sessions where it was Serena alone, no Aurelia at all, just a woman inside a wolf’s body trying to figure out four legs.

But the default was this. Aurelia in, Serena out. One mind, one wolf, zero human co-pilot.

Tiberon had figured that out early. Mindlinks required Serena’s consciousness to function, and when Serena was gone, the mindlink went dark. He could send a command but it would hit dead air. So he gave every instruction verbally. Every correction, every command, every adjustment delivered out loud.

The only people Aurelia could mindlink were Xeon and Aegon. Both of whom kept getting removed from training.

The field went silent.

Two hundred soldiers looked at the white wolf and forgot how speaking worked.

The silence lasted three full seconds before a buzz erupted.

Somewhere in the back row, a soldier whispered “holy shit” at a volume that was not a whisper, and the not-whisper gave everyone else permission to start breathing again.

A soldier in the second row grabbed the arm of the man next to him. “I fucking told you.”

“Told me what?”

“White wolf. The Knotty Omega. Issue four. I told you she had a white wolf and you said it was horseshit.”

“I did say that.”

“And what is THAT?” He pointed at Aurelia.

The soldier stared. Swallowed. “That is a white wolf.”

“That is a white wolf. You owe me five silvers and an apology, Brannick.”

“You read the Knotty Omega?”

“I do. Proudly.”

“You told Colonel Morholt you’d never heard of it.”

“And I will continue telling Colonel Morholt that. Five silvers. Tomorrow.”

Across the field, Thor’s wolf opened the pack mindlink at maximum volume because Thor Crushturn had never had an internal thought in his life and his wolf was no different.

Thor: Eleven out of ten. I am looking at the most beautiful wolf I have ever seen in my life and I have seen myself so that is saying a lot.

Every wolf on the field heard it. Dexmon heard it and closed his eyes. Tiberon heard it. Halvek heard it. Two hundred soldiers with active pack links heard it. The mindlink equivalent of a man standing on a table in a crowded room and announcing his intentions through a megaphone.

Aurelia could hear none of it.

Without Serena, the mindlink was a wall.

But she caught the crowd’s reaction. Her ears twitched. Her head tilted. Golden eyes blinked three times, confused, the way a wolf blinks when she can tell there is a conversation happening and she is excluded from it and the exclusion is confusing rather than offensive.

Thor’s wolf took the confused blink as encouragement.

He dropped into a play bow. Front legs flat against the ground, hindquarters up, tail wagging at a speed that suggested his tail had its own cardiovascular system. He held the bow. Wiggled. The wiggle was aggressive, full-bodied, his entire back end swaying with the enthusiasm of a wolf who believed this was charming and had never been given evidence to the contrary.

Aurelia stared at him.

Her head tilted the other direction.

She had never been play-bowed at. The gesture meant nothing to her. Wolf body language, the canine nonverbal communication that every wolf was born understanding, Aurelia didn’t have. To be fair, this was a very weird thing for a wolf to do.

She regarded the play bow with the same polite, total incomprehension a cat reserves for a dog that has just lost its mind in public.

Thor’s wolf wiggled harder. The harder wiggling was intended to clarify the message. The message was not unclear because of volume. The message was unclear because the recipient did not speak the language, and increasing the volume of a language someone doesn’t speak is not a translation strategy.

Off to the side, Dexmon dragged a hand down his face.

Aegon: Mate just mindlinked me. She does not understand what that means. Mate is cute.

Of course she wouldn’t know what a play bow was. Of course. His mate’s wolf had the social instincts of a housecat. A play bow was also wildly inappropriate. That was mate play. The bow, the wiggle, the sustained eye contact. Those were the things wolves did when they were courting, and Thor’s wolf was doing them on a military training field in front of two hundred soldiers and both of her actual mates.

Aegon: We bite him now.

Dexmon: Stand down. We are doing nothing.

Aegon: He needs a corrective bite. He is doing that to our mate.

Dexmon: I have eyes. He has made zero contact with our mate, so relax.

Aegon: The bow is contact. The bow is a proposition. I am going to rip his tail off and feed it to him.

Dexmon: You are going to stay exactly where you are and do exactly nothing.

Aegon: One bite. One small, corrective, educational bite.

Dexmon: No.

Next to him, Fin’s eyes strobed gold-hazel like a short-circuiting warning light, the visual of an Alpha locked in combat with a wolf that had already cast its vote and was now losing hard to the discipline containing it.

Xeon: He is WIGGLING, Finnick.

Fin: I have eyes. You are not getting us kicked out of training again.