Her birthright, her gift. One she now believed had a connection to the three goddesses. Maybe she’d write a paper on it, she thought as she undressed, send it to the council. It could be someone had more information there. Information that might add to the whole.

Naked, she sat down on the floor in front of the fire as the sun sank in the west, over that cold Atlantic sea.

She felt it building, that rush, the breathless inevitability. Snaps of power, the first hints of pain. Alone, secure, she flowed into it, absorbed it, accepted.

Bones shifted, stretched. Pain, pressure, and a kind of joy.

Her spine arched as she rolled to all fours, as the dark pelt sprang up along her flesh.

She smelled the night, the fire, the smoke, her own sweat.

And with the night came the fierce triumph.

I am.

The wolf became, and inside it the woman rejoiced.

Fierce and free, she raced through the open doors, leaped over the rail into the cool night air, into the shimmering dark.

And landed on the ground, body quivering with impossible energy. Throwing her head back, she howled at the sky, then all but flew into the thick shadows of the woods.

She could run for miles, and often did in the first hour. She smelled deer, rabbit, squirrel, each scent as distinct and vivid as a photograph.

Even had she been starved, she would neither hunt nor feed. The wolf fasted.

She kept to the trees, instinctively veering away whenever she caught the scent of man or exhaust, heard the rumble of a car on a road. Though they would see only a wolf—what many would take for a large dog.

Lycans weren’t the stuff of horror movies, shambling around on furry legs with nightmare faces and crazed eyes, desperate to rip the throats out of wayward humans.

As much as she loved popular culture, most werewolf movies and books bugged the crap out of her.

Whatever the roots of that lore, they’d been dug up long ago, when lycans had civilized, when rules were set. And any who broke those sacred rules were hunted in turn and punished.

At last she slowed, the manic energy burned off by speed so she could walk and enjoy the night. She explored as she went. Perhaps the forest held secrets or clues.

An owl called, low and long, a nocturnal companion. As she looked up, she saw its eyes gleam back at her. Above the trees, the moon sailed full and white. She let go her own call, just once, honoring it, then turned to take the journey back to Bran’s house on the cliff.

She could have run and explored for hours yet, but dawn came early, and she’d need rest before it did. She thought of her family, her pack, so far away, and missed them like a chamber of her heart. Their scents, their sounds, that elemental bond.

Through the trees she saw the glimmer of lights, caught the scent of peat smoke, of roses. Everyone would be asleep by now, she thought, but they’d left lights on for her. Unnecessary, of course, but considerate.

She cast a glance back, tempted to get in one more run, watched the owl swoop over the path, its wings spread wide in the moonlight. It pulled at her, as did the night. She nearly turned, raced back, but she caught another scent.

It, too, pulled.

So she moved to the edge of the woods, looked through the shadows to where Doyle stood in his family’s graveyard.

The wind kicked just enough to billow his long coat while he stood, still as a statue in the drenching blue moonlight. His hair, dark as the night, tumbled around a face roughened by a few days’ growth of beard.

In wolf form, where everything was heightened, she felt the lust she managed to tamp down otherwise. She could imagine his hands on her, hers on him, a tangle of hot bodies giving in to the animal and taking, just taking in a frenzy until needs were met.

And imagining, those needs clawed and bit inside her.

She quivered with it, shocked, angry at the intensity, at her inability to shove it down again.

She’d run after all, she thought, but before she could move, he whirled, the sword on his back out of the sheath and into his hand with a bright shiver of metal.

His eyes met hers. Hers, keen, caught the embarrassment, then the annoyance in his before he controlled it.

“You’re lucky I didn’t have the bow. I might’ve shot a bolt.” He lowered the sword but didn’t sheathe it. “I thought you’d be inside by now. It’s past one in the morning.”

As if she had a curfew.

“Bran dealt with the door, so you can get in on your own. And as you didn’t think of it yourself, Sasha opened your bedroom door, shut the ones to your balcony.”

He wanted her to go—she could plainly see—and her preference was to give him what he wanted, as she wanted the same. But he looked unbearably lonely standing there, the sword shining in his hand, with his family buried under his feet.

She moved toward him, through the headstones, over the uneven grass.

“I’m not after company,” he began, but she simply stood, as he did, looking down at the grave. Lichen had grown on the headstone, pretty as the flowers beneath it.

Aoife Mac Cleirich

“My mother,” Doyle said when she sat beside him. “I came back and stayed until she died. My father, there beside her, died two years before her. I wasn’t here for her when she lost him.”

He fell into silence again, finally slid his sword back in its scabbard. “At least you can’t talk me blind or argue.” Doyle lifted his brows when she turned her head, stared coolly. “You do just that, at every possible opportunity. You see there she was sixty-three when she died. A good long age for the times she lived in, for a woman who’d birthed seven children. She outlived three of them, and each who left the world before she did left a hole in her heart. But she was strong, my mother. A strong woman.