I'd tried this four times before and failed all four, so when the pain started without asking my permission, my first thought wasn't final. It was oh no, not again, not like this.

Rowan had said something about my mother two hours earlier, something about how she talked about me like I was a project that hadn't shipped yet. I'd left the pack house before I could say anything I couldn't take back. Now I was alone in the tree line behind the old grain silo, palms flat against a birch, trying to breathe through what felt like someone slowly turning a key in every joint I owned.

It didn't feel like the books said. Nobody mentions that your ears go first. Sound arrives thick and strangely directional, half a second before anything else changes, so you hear the field mouse under the leaves before you understand you're about to become something that hunts field mice.

I went down on one knee. Then both.

My hands stopped being hands somewhere around then. Ugh. There's no dignified way to describe your fingers deciding to be something else. My spine bowed, my jaw ached and lengthened, and every rule I'd rehearsed over four failed attempts. Breathe, don't fight it, let it come left my head at once.

"Not now," I told my own body, whatever in me had picked tonight to finally work. "Come on. Not now."

Nyx didn't answer, and that was the first wrong thing. She always had something to say when I was scared. Smug, mostly, unhelpful commentary about how humans overreact to pain. But she'd gone quiet the second my hands hit the dirt, and silence from Nyx had never once meant calm.

Everyone at pack dinners had a story about their first shift. Nobody ever seemed to remember the middle. I get that now. I remember before, and the smell of wet bark very close to my face, and then after: four legs, low to the ground, my skull ringing like something had struck it.

And Nyx was there. Not as a feeling this time. As a voice, clearer than she'd ever been.

Get up, she said. Get up, get up, get.

She stopped.

I felt her go still inside me, the way you feel a room change when someone walks in. Not fear, exactly. Recognition. Whatever she'd noticed mattered more to her than my scraped knees had a second ago, and that scared me more than the pain had.

Then I smelled him. My first guess was a deer, which tells you how much use my new instincts were. Then the smell sharpened: woodsmoke, wet leather, something underneath I had no word for. I lifted my head, and a man was standing at the edge of the clearing, perfectly still, watching me.

His hands were in his coat pockets, and he kept them there. I noticed that before anything else, before his size, before his stillness. He'd found somewhere to put his hands where they'd have no reason to reach for me. Or where I couldn't see what they were doing. I honestly couldn't tell which, and I didn't like that I couldn't.

Nyx surged.

One second I had four legs and my own thundering thoughts. The next I was somewhere behind them, watching my body take a step I hadn't chosen. Hackles up. A low sound in my throat that I'd never made and wouldn't have known how to make on purpose.

Stop, I told her. Nyx, what are you doing?

She didn't stop. She also didn't attack, which I only worked out later was its own kind of answer. She held there, coiled, staring at him like he owed us something. Like we had unfinished business eight feet away in the dark.

"You're alive," he said.

Not hello. Not all of you are right. Not any of the things a stranger says to a shaking, half-feral girl he's just found in the woods. His voice cracked on the second word, and that was the first thing about him that made him seem like a person instead of a threat. Though a person isn't the same as safe, I reminded myself.

I got my legs back and hauled myself into my human shape, badly, more scramble than shift, until I was upright on two shaking legs again and able to speak. "Who are you?" came out rough, not quite my voice.

He didn't answer. He just kept looking at me the way you look at something you're not sure is really there. For one stupid, disorienting second I thought he's going to cry, and then thought why would I think that, and then Nyx said the only clear thing she'd said to me all night.

Run.

I want to be clear that I didn't run because she said so. I looked at him once more. His hands were still buried in his pockets, and something was happening on his face that I had no name for. Here was a man who knew something about me that I didn't. Here was a wolf inside me who knew something about him and wouldn't say. I couldn't tell what he was, or what he wanted, or whether that stillness was patience or a trap, and I had no way to find out without staying.

So I picked the only move that didn't need an answer.

I ran, on legs that didn't feel like mine yet, tripping once over a root I'd normally have seen from a mile off. I didn't look back until the trees had swallowed the clearing and the woodsmoke had thinned into ordinary night air.

Behind my ribs, where Nyx lived, something was still trembling.

Who was that? I asked, once I'd stopped and my lungs were burning in the ordinary way.

Nothing.

She had never refused to answer me before. Not like this, with the door shut and locked and something on the other side she clearly didn't want me near.

I didn't know his name. I didn't know what he was to me, or what I'd apparently been to him, or why two words from a stranger had left my chest feeling like I'd missed a step in the dark.

Nyx knew. That much was obvious now. And for the first time since I'd met her, I understood that knowing her wasn't the same as knowing everything she was keeping.