For a heartbeat after the bite, nothing moved.
Luke remained on one knee, head bowed, blood slipping from the neat crescent of the Alpha's teeth and pattering onto the leaves. Riven held him a breath longer, then released and stepped back with the clean efficiency of a man returning a blade to its sheath.
"Rise, Delta," Riven said.
The words landed like a stone in a still pond. Ripples moved through the clearing.
Luke pushed to his feet. His human body hadn't changed; he was still the lean, scarred young man Elara knew, shoulder torn and eyes raw with pain. And yet—something had shifted. His posture set around a new centre. His gaze steadied. Even the way he breathed felt measured, controlled. Presence, not height, made him seem taller.
Wolves responded first. Amber dipped her head, not dramatically, but with the precise weight of acknowledgement. Garrett lowered his massive skull—barely, but unmistakably—gold burning steady in Elara's sight. At the tunnel mouth, where the wall of omegas held the ferals at bay, throats flashed white in brief submission before jaws snapped shut again and the killing rhythm resumed. A murmur of approval—half growls, half breath—ran along the pack like wind through grass.
Humans reacted next.
Caleb flinched as if the sound of the Alpha's words had struck him. "Respect? After he—" He couldn't say bit him. The word stuck behind his teeth. He shook his head hard, fury and bewilderment grinding together. "This is madness."
Torvee, jaw set, didn't look away. She had the child balanced on one hip and her knife in the other hand, knuckles white. "That wasn't punishment," she said, voice low. "It looked like it, but it wasn't." Her eyes flicked to Luke, sharp and assessing. "It was… naming him."
The child peered over Torvee's shoulder, cheeks tear-bright. "He looks the same," she whispered, confused.
Elara's vision answered the child's doubt. Luke's aura had changed tone—no longer the diffuse, submissive grey she'd first seen, but something clearer and steadier, as if drawn with a firmer hand. Not Garrett's hammered gold; not yet. But a step toward it. Her skin prickled, silver rising as if to meet the new shape. She felt, almost physically, the way the pack's attention shifted around him, accepting the weight like a joint learning a new load.
Riven did not ask the pack for assent. He had it. He turned to practicalities.
"Omegas hold," he said, glancing once to the mouth of the passage. "Garrett, take two to sweep the near ground and clear stragglers. Gamma—" his eyes slid to Amber "—set our march. We move within the quarter hour."
Amber nodded. "Aye." She stepped back and began snapping quiet orders. Wolves peeled off and flowed to positions without crowding the humans: flankers in the ferns, rear guard by the fallen pine, a point scout ghosting at the edge of the treeline. It was eerie how little they spoke. Feet, shoulders, eyes did most of the talking.
Garrett limped one pace—Elara saw now how he kept weight light on his hind leg even in human stance—and jerked his chin at two deltas. "With me." The three moved off, quick and businesslike, to check the leaf-mould for tracks, sniff the wind, and make sure no feral had slipped the omega wall by some hidden crack.
Luke stood very still, blood running down his arm in a slow curve that dripped from his knuckles. He hadn't looked at the humans yet. He seemed to be listening inward, or outward along a line of sound that Elara couldn't hear. When he finally moved, it was toward Riven, not away: one step, a shallow bow, the smallest flick of eyes upward seeking permission—to speak, perhaps, or to shift.
Riven flicked two fingers.
Luke's body flowed like a river finding a deeper channel. Bones stretched and reshaped; tendons snapped and re-knit; fur broke through skin in a dark rush. It was not the sprawling agony Elara had expected. It was swift, almost efficient, and when the grey wolf stood where the young man had been a heartbeat earlier, Elara's breath left her chest in a soundless oh.
He was larger.
Not grotesquely so. Not suddenly great as Garrett. But larger, broader across the shoulders, legs thickened, chest fuller. His coat had the same ash-on-iron colour, but it seemed to drink more light. His eyes—Saints—his eyes burned clearer, quicksilver bright.
The humans saw it. Torvee sucked a breath between her teeth. "He wasn't that big before."
Caleb stared, anger derailed by unease. "What did he do to him?"
"He named him," Torvee said again, as if laying a piece on a board.
Luke shook himself once and looked to the tunnel mouth, then back to Riven. A low whuff left him—a question.
Riven shook his head: Hold.
Luke bowed his head and half-shifted back in a ripple of skin and fur that stopped at the edge of man, leaving him crouched, human again, breath frosting in the shade as if his body hadn't yet decided which shape it preferred. He swayed slightly; blood loss dragged at him.
Elara took a step toward him on reflex, then stopped. He was not hers to steady. And yet—
"That's enough," Riven said. "See to your shoulder." It wasn't softness. It was a recognition of limits. Luke nodded, jaw tight, and pressed a palm hard over the torn place to slow the flow.
It should have felt like an ending. It didn't. A ragged thread in the clearing tugged Elara's attention sideways. She turned—and the bottom dropped from her stomach.
"Caleb," she said, voice breaking, "she's not—"
Caleb was already moving. He'd been standing too still; now he was on his knees, hands on Corin's face, his fingers leaving pale smears on her skin. "Corin." His voice made of gravel and prayer. "Corin, look at me."
Corin didn't. Her lashes fluttered, then lay still. Her breaths were so shallow Elara thought she'd imagined them.
Elara fell to the ground beside them. Her silver surged, blazing behind her eyes, and Corin's aura leapt up to meet it—green, vivid, alive. Not the rancid yellow creep she'd seen in the kitchens and the barracks when men had turned. Green, fierce and full as spring leaves pressed to sunlight.
Relief hit Elara so hard she had to grab the earth to anchor herself. "She's not turning," she said. "Caleb—I swear to you—she's not turning." Her voice shook and steadied. "But she's losing blood."
Caleb looked up as if dragged. His face was salt and fury. "Make her noble," he said hoarsely to Riven, who had already pivoted back toward them. "Do it now. Bite her. Make her like you so she doesn't—" He couldn't finish die. He swallowed it and glared like he could kill death with the set of his jaw. "Please."
Torvee shifted the child higher on her hip and added, hard and practical, "If it saves her—do it."
Riven's eyes glanced over Corin's wound once, then settled on her face. He might as well have been studying a ruined wall. He didn't kneel. He didn't touch. "There is no need," he said.
Caleb surged to his feet. "No need?" It came out a ragged snarl. "She's bleeding out!"
"She will not turn," Riven said, flat as iron.
Torvee frowned. "What do you mean?"
"She is fae." Riven didn't raise his voice. "She carries immunity in her blood."
Silence. The word dropped like a spark into dry tinder.
Caleb blinked, slow. "No." He shook his head. "No, you're wrong. She's—she's just Corin." He looked down helplessly at the girl on the ground, as if her face would back him. "She would have told me. She—" His voice thinned to nothing.
Elara saw the denial try to take root and fail. She put a hand on his arm. "I can see it," she said, steady. "It's green. It's strong." She didn't say it's beautiful because the word felt like a betrayal of what the blood on the leaves meant. "She won't turn."
Corin's lashes trembled. Her lips parted. "Fae?" The word was a ghost dragged over stones. "No… I'm not…" Her eyes rolled slightly and the light went out of them again as pain hauled her under.
Caleb's face cracked. "She didn't even know," he whispered, and grief and anger warred across the ruin of him. He turned on Riven. "You knew."
Riven's gaze didn't waver. "It is not my concern what she knew," he said; then, because he wasn't vicious, merely exact, added, "It is my concern that she is not a risk."
Caleb's hands curled to fists. The child flinched at the heat in him. Torvee shifted her stance, prepared to step between him and an Alpha if she had to—madness, Elara thought, and loved her for it anyway.
Riven tipped his chin the smallest degree toward Corin's shoulder. "She is not immune to bleeding," he said.
Amber was moving before the sentence finished. "I'll take her to the healer." It wasn't a request.
Elara blinked. "Healer?"
Amber slid her blade home, stooped, and gathered Corin with a care that looked foreign in a body built for violence. "There are few who can close this fast enough," she said. "And fewer who know how to handle fae blood without wasting what matters."
"Handle—what?" Caleb stepped forward, then pulled up as Amber's golden stare touched him. He wasn't afraid of wolves. But he had learned to respect them in the last hour.
"She needs a surgeon's hands and a lorekeeper's head," Amber said. "You've got neither. Let me pass."
Caleb swallowed and moved aside. He touched Corin's hair as Amber lifted her; his hand came away red. "Don't let her—" He couldn't name the fear. Amber didn't ask him to.
The pack opened like water—no jostling, no noise. Amber carried Corin into the green gloom. Two deltas ghosted after her as guard without being told.
The child whimpered. Torvee kissed her hair, muttered something profane and comforting in the same breath, and kept her eyes on the trees until Amber vanished.
"What healer?" Elara asked Riven quietly. Not demanding. Needing the shape of the world to make more sense.
Riven's answer was uncomplicated. "One of ours," he said. "She lives where the ground runs sweet. You will meet her if you live long enough."
Elara almost laughed. It came out a breath that hurt. "That's very reassuring."
"I have never attempted reassurance," Riven said, and for the first time she thought she heard the remnant of something like tiredness in the bedrock of him.
The line at the tunnel mouth bucked. A feral found a seam and tried to worry it wide; six omegas leaned and jammed and the seam vanished under fur and teeth. One omega sagged, slashed open along the flank; another shouldered him back into place until a third could drag him clear. No one howled for the wound. The wall did not break. It was terrible and it was beautiful.
"We move," Amber's voice called back a minute later from the trees—carrying without strain. "Trail is clear. South and east, then over the run."
Riven nodded once. "You heard her." He cut a look to Garrett, who trotted back into the clearing with blood to his knee and satisfaction in his eye. "Rear with me. Delta—" he didn't look at Luke when he said it, didn't need to "—you'll take the left flank."
Luke's chin dipped. "Yes, Alpha." The words sat differently in his mouth now—like a tool he had been taught to use.
Caleb stood very straight, as if standing could keep him from coming apart. "I'm going with her," he said to no one in particular and everyone at once.
"You're with me," Elara said, surprising them both with how easily the words came. "If they falter behind us, you will turn and fight. If they don't, you will walk and breathe and keep your feet where I tell you." She didn't raise her voice. She didn't need to. Something had shifted in the air around her too, and she didn't know what name to give it. She would refuse Luna until the day the word fit her in the mouth. But this—this she could carry.
Caleb looked at her, something raw in his face, and nodded once. The shape of obedience wasn't submission. It was trust.
Riven marked the exchange with a flick of eye and gave no comment. "Torvee," he said, and the girl snapped her attention like a salute. "Carry the child. If she slows you, hand her to one of mine."
"She won't," Torvee said. "She's a scrapper." She bounced the little girl carefully. "Aren't you?"
The child's answer was a small nod into Torvee's shoulder.
The first rank of wolves flowed into the trees soundlessly. Humans followed in their wake like debris in a current, then more wolves behind to box the shape in. It wasn't a march. It was a moving organism that had decided on a direction.
Elara took one last look toward the tunnel. Smoke rose faint through the light. The omegas' wall was still holding, a living barricade between Ravenholt's ruin and what she loved. She couldn't see the faces of the men she had sharpened arrows with that morning. She didn't look for them. She would break if she did.
"Walk," Riven said.
They did.
Luke drifted to the left flank as ordered, human again, forearm pressed to his torn shoulder to keep the bleeding slow. He moved differently now—still deferential to Garrett and Riven, still careful not to crowd the humans—but the wolves who slid past him angled their bodies a fraction lower than before. Deference had changed shape. When he glanced back, his eyes met Elara's for a beat. There was pain there, and pride he hadn't chosen, and a question he didn't yet know how to ask. She gave him the smallest nod. I saw. I understand enough. He nodded in return and vanished between two pines like smoke.
They hadn't gone twenty paces when Caleb's control cracked. "He knew," he said—quiet, to Elara, because shouting at the Alpha felt like trying to shove a cliff. "About Corin. About what she is." The last word burned his throat. "How long? How long have they known more about us than we do?"
"Long enough to keep us alive," Elara said. It wasn't comfort. It was a sorting of facts. "And not long enough to save everyone." She felt, rather than saw, the way he folded that answer into himself. It didn't make the hurt smaller. It made it bearable.
Branches closed overhead. The forest swallowed the clearing like a mouth. Behind them, the omegas held the door. Ahead, somewhere through the sweet run Riven had named, a healer waited with steady hands and stranger knowledge.
Elara's silver guttered and steadied. They would live through the next hour. After that—she didn't look that far yet.
They walked.