Nova's POV
The smell hits her first. Stale beer and sweat and something rotten underneath. Nova knows that smell. Marcus again.
She keeps her head down, wiping down the counter at Ruby's Diner even though her shift ended twenty minutes ago. The fluorescent lights buzz overhead. Her feet ache. Her tips jar sits under the sink with maybe two hundred dollars saved, and art school is still so far away it feels like a dream someone else had.
"Nova, baby," Marcus slurs from the corner booth. "Come here."
She ignores him. The other waitress, Jade, has already disappeared into the back. Coward.
Marcus is a regular. Comes in three times a week, orders coffee he doesn't drink, and stares at Nova until her skin crawls. Usually he just talks too much and leaves bad tips. Usually he is just pathetic.
Tonight something is different.
He stands up. His movements are loose and dangerous. He has been drinking harder than usual. Nova sees it in the way his eyes don't focus right, the way his mouth hangs open.
"I said come here." Not a request anymore.
Nova wipes her hands on her apron, her jaw tight. "Kitchen is closing soon, Marcus. Sorry."
She turns away. Big mistake.
His hand clamps around her wrist. Hard. His fingers dig into her skin and she feels something inside her snap like a branch underfoot.
"Don't walk away from me."
Pain shoots up her arm. Not regular pain. Something deeper. Something that makes her bones feel like they are on fire. Nova tries to yank free but his grip is iron. He drags her toward the storage room in the back. The place is dimly lit and empty and suddenly so small.
"Let go," she says. Her voice sounds strange. Like there is something else underneath it trying to claw its way out.
Marcus shoves her against the shelves. Cans of beans and tomato sauce rain down. He brings his other hand up to her throat and presses her against the cold metal.
And something inside Nova breaks.
Heat explodes through her entire body. It is not like anything she has ever felt. Her skin is burning. Her bones are splitting apart. She opens her mouth to scream and a sound comes out that is not human. It is deep and primal and full of rage.
Her body changes.
It happens all at once and it is agony. Her fingers break and reshape. Fur erupts from her skin. Her face stretches and reforms. She is falling and rising and her vision shifts to something sharper and brighter and completely alien. The world smells like a thousand things at once. Marcus's fear smells like copper. The diner smells like grease and coffee and sadness.
She is on four legs now. Huge. Her paws sink into the linoleum. Looking down at them, silver fur catches what little light filters through the storage room, and for one suspended moment Nova does not understand what she is looking at.
Then Marcus screams.
He backs away so fast he trips over his own feet. His mouth opens and closes like a fish. The sound he makes is not even a word, just terror pouring out.
Nova feels the power radiating off her in waves. She can feel it pressing outward like a physical thing, like something alive and hungry. It fills the storage room and pours out into the diner beyond.
The windows explode.
Glass shatters outward in a spray of glittering shards. The sound is deafening. Dishes crash. Customers outside the diner scream. Nova watches it happen like she is dreaming and feeling her own terror at the same time.
Marcus has backed himself into the corner. He is making a sound like a hurt animal. Nova's new body responds to that sound. A growl rumbles from her chest, so loud the walls shake.
She did not mean to do that. She did not mean to do any of this.
The storage room door explodes inward.
Three figures stand in the wreckage. They look human but something about them is wrong. Their eyes glow in the darkness. One of them steps forward and his body shifts. Muscle and bone and fur transform faster than Nova can track. Suddenly there is a massive wolf where a man used to be.
The wolf drops to his belly.
Then the other two do the same thing. They are on the ground, chests low, bellies exposed, eyes down. Submission. Nova knows this word without understanding how she knows it.
They are afraid of her.
Her wolf brain likes that. It likes it too much.
More footsteps. A woman appears in the doorway, stepping over the wreckage of the door frame like she has seen this a thousand times. Her leather jacket creaks. Her eyes are cold and empty. She looks at Nova the way someone might look at a problem that needs solving.
"Well," the woman says softly. "This complicates things."
She reaches into her jacket. Nova's legs bunch under her, ready to run.
"Come quietly or we drag you." The woman's voice does not change at all. "Either way, you are coming with us. The Alpha will want this one alive."
Something about that word makes Nova's blood go cold. Not the human part of her. The wolf part. The part that screams danger.
The woman pulls out silver chains from inside her jacket. They shimmer under the broken fluorescent lights.
Nova runs.
She crashes through the storage room wall instead of bothering with the door. Wood splinters. Her shoulder hits the brick of the alley outside and keeps going. The chains rattle behind her. She does not know how to run on four legs but her body seems to know. It remembers things her mind has never learned.
The alley is dark but she can see in it. She can see in ways that should be impossible. Every detail sharp. Every scent a color or a texture. She runs faster than anything living should be able to run.
Behind her, the woman's voice carries through the night. "Fan out. Surround the territory. She cannot go far."
But Nova is already far. She has made it six blocks. She is flying through streets she has known her whole life and nothing about them is familiar anymore. The asphalt burns her paws. The streetlights feel like they are stabbing her eyes even though she sees perfectly.
She turns a corner.
Four more of them are waiting. They are human shaped but their movements are not human. They spread out in a semicircle and block her path. Growls rumble from their chests. Threats.
"The tracker said she is dangerous," one of them calls out. "Should we take her down?"
"She is ours," another answers. "Bring her breathing if you can."
They shift. All at once, three men become three wolves. They are large and dark and scarred from fights. Trained. Professional. Dangerous.
Nova's wolf brain screams at her to submit. She is smaller. She is new to this. She should roll over and make the sounds of surrender.
Her other half, her human half, remembers Marcus's hands on her throat.
Power explodes outward from her like a shock wave. It comes from somewhere deep in her bones, somewhere ancient and vast and angry. The three wolves yelp and stagger backward. One of them drops flat, trembling.
"No, no, no," one of the men yells as he changes back, gasping for air. "Get nets. Get nets now. She is too strong to take down manually."
Nets drop from above. Silver nets that burn like fire where they touch her fur. Nova screams, a sound that echoes off the buildings and makes car alarms shriek to life. She thrashes. The nets tighten. The silver burns and burns and burns.
The world goes dark.
The last thing she hears is a voice, deep and cold and somehow familiar in a way that makes her wolf howl.
"Careful with her," the male voice says. "Something that powerful is either a weapon or a threat. Bring her to the lower cells. No one goes near her without my order."
Then there is nothing but darkness and the taste of silver and the feeling of falling.