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Chapter One

Lark, Before

“Wild wolf prowls,

Wild wolf dances,

She knows who she is down to the finest points of her being.

Wild wolf stands under the light of Mother moon and praises.

All of us admire—

The way she hunts,

The way she moves.

All of us respond to her call.

Wild wolf won’t be tamed, won’t submit.

We rejoice in the sway of her fur,

And the touch of her paws upon the soft dirt.

Even her mate must show their reverence,

For the wild wolf is above all.

Above all of us.”

I hold my breath and stare down the audience, waiting for the finality of my words to sink in.

A few people snap in support, and then the voices begin to murmur, picking up conversations lost when I took the stage and commanded their attention.

I make sure my legs are strong and sure as I stand from my stool, smoothing out my black sweater and bowing my head toward them all, thanking them for their time, almost forgetting to collect my bag before I settle back into my small booth in the corner. I’m eager to watch the next poet take the stage, excited for them to share their art.

I know I don’t really fit in here, I’m way younger than this mostly college-aged crowd, but nobody at my school is into this at all. My parents know where I am and will be picking me up in a little bit, but this coffee shop is one of the few places that feels comfortable to me.

A lot of my friends think that performing at an open mic poetry night is weird, but I don’t let it get to me.

“This seat taken?”

The breath escapes my lungs as I lift my eyes up to find two men, clearly shifters, staring down at me with reverence. Shaking, I set my coffee down before I spill it everywhere.

I don’t know anything about these strangers, but my wolf insists they’re ours.

I shake my head, unable to speak.

They scoot in carefully so as not to spook me, one on either side of me. The small booth suddenly feels about a million times smaller, and the oxygen has been completely removed from it.

“We liked your poem,” the one on my left tells me. His hair looks freshly buzzed, close to his skull, and aside from the shiny piercing in his nose, the thing that is most memorable about him is the sharp line of his brow above eyes about the same color of the now tepid coffee I’m pretending to still be interested in.

“Pretty brave to put yourself up there in front of all these strangers,” the other guy nearly growls as he looks about the room, scooting closer to me.

I fight a smile at his show of possessiveness, because this is the moment I’ve always dreamed of. Human laws and customs don’t always overlap with those of shifters, so my being so much younger than them isn’t too unusual.

When the one with longer hair tied up seems satisfied no one is looking at me, he throws an arm around the back of the booth and smiles down at me, his hazel eyes crinkling at the corner. “I’m Ivan. That’s Trevor. You know who we are, right?”