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He approached, slow and measured in his gait, yet he was on me way too fast.

“This is why the Volken kept me for so long. Seers come and go. If you kill them, they’re quick enough to respawn, hopefully in a more biddable form.

Can’t kill me though,” he said, pulling his hair up into a man bun, and then he turned around.

Before I could snicker something about hipsters, I saw it—small but perfectly formed, a black wolf stood out on his skin, staring at me with shining red eyes.

“Cool tattoo,” I said with a shrug. “Not enough to make me want to engage in cardio drunk though.”

He hissed in frustration.

“You blunder through this whole thing, preoccupied with your relationships and your groin, with no clue what you’re dealing with.

That woman they keep in isolation, they imagine her to be some kind of link between the Great Wolves and the Uldariel, but she’s not.

” My view of Sylvan wavered, replaced with the increasingly desperate moves of the woman.

Her dance steps included large sweeping kicks, to keep the surging men back, to maintain however briefly the space around her.

“She’s just a woman who gets to enjoy being left alone on her hill, only to have to come down each Longest Night and pay the price. ”

There were no young people left, no serving girls or wives or girlfriends.

Everyone who had one had slipped away to their huts, presumably to lock their doors tight against what was coming.

Her face was twisted in a sneer, but the previously defiant set of her shoulders was beginning to sag.

The men edged in closer. I searched for mine in the group, seeing some of Aaron’s men, but my view was limited.

My heart pounded, my head aching now as the fear shot through me.

Just what was the final dish of this ‘feast’?

“She’s no more a conduit for the Great Wolves than that outhouse, but me and you…” Sylvan fought the idea, I could see it in the twist of his neck, the wary way he watched me. “We are.”

I laughed at that, the sound cutting through the still night. Linked to a god-wolf? I might have some weird visions when getting laid, but my life was otherwise fairly prosaic, when alien wildlife wasn’t chasing me around.

“All this time, right under my nose. This wasn’t how it was supposed to be, Julie. You were just a step towards her. I had no reason to hurt you or your pack, I just needed you to get to her, but now…”

He took a step towards me, then another.

“And now?” I said, no idea what I was asking.

The woman had stopped all semblance of dancing now, as the fur headdress fell to the ground, no longer important.

Her fists were raised, and she lashed out increasingly erratically, the sneer dropping in favour of open-mouthed fear.

All religious pretence was kicked to the curb. This was the beginnings of a gang rape.

“For tonight, you’re Branwen, not that woman, and it’s my job to hunt you down.”

“But that woman…”

“Nothing can be done for her now. This is her role here. You’d have to face down every single male here to stop this.”

Good fucking idea , I thought.

The shift into Tirian form came without thinking.

My humanoid form couldn’t do much against that many warriors, but this…

I snarled, venom dripping from my teeth at the seer, but that wasn’t what froze him to the spot.

I glanced over my shoulder, where his eyes burned, and saw that my fur had changed.

I was pure white, just like Finn. Well, cool coat change and all, but it wasn’t going to save that woman.

Sylvan’s face became a mask of anger as I took off, his lips peeling back from the fangs that knew me all too intimately.

I streaked down the alleyway, blinking when I arrived in the better-lit square.

Hands were on armour and belt buckles, ready to unleash their dicks on the poor woman.

I growled as I strode over to the fire, and men jerked out to the way, then clambered to get as far away as possible when they saw me.

This only grew more marked when I leapt over the fire to where the woman shrank against one of the houses.

She was as much cringing away from me as the men, but that was OK.

My body was a buffer the lot of them weren’t likely to cross. Then came the howl.

Ralnor fought his way to the front of the group, his white hair mussed, his eyes burning with an unnatural light.

“Brothers, Lonan hunts Branwen tonight! Mount up, for we join the hunt!”

Well, fuck.

My eyes scanned the crowd to look for my men, but the bloody albino elf fucks were too numerous to see past. I tentatively tried to pull on what I felt was the sense of them in my head, but didn’t get a reaction.

Another howl came, closer now. Fucking hell.

Chase me, Sylvan had said. I snarled at the woman, herding her away with lunges, until she stumbled off into the night as I followed after her.

I headed straight for the central gate, not wanting to chance jumping over the palisades ringing the village.

I strode past the woman, then veered towards her, thinking maybe I might be able to put her on my back like my Tirian had me in my change induced visions, but she just screamed and ran away.

The howl came again, and when I looked over my shoulder, I saw the glowing red eyes of Sylvan’s wolf form, his fur blending with the night.

Chase me and then what? Ralnor’s voice rang in my ears.

Is this the year when Lonan brings his mate to ground, swallowing the light forever?

If the fucking seer thought I was Branwen for some stupid reason, I needed to run or fight.

For a moment, a violent flashback to the way his fangs had felt when he dug them into my shoulder shot through me, my fangs clamping tight on the whines that froze in my throat.

Venom pooled in my mouth at the thought of getting my own back on him, of biting down on that pale flesh and marking him as he marked me.

But I had no idea how to fight, in this form or my human one.

Run , my Tirian insisted. Run fast. So I did.

I would like to describe the chase, but it was all a mess to me.

I ran out of the village and onto the dark plains beyond.

I was no longer really in the driver’s seat, merely watching as my Tirian instincts took over.

She knew what she was doing, perhaps because there was a somewhat preordained feel about all of this.

My heart may have pounded, my eyes darting for signs of pursuit, yet it all felt oddly familiar.

We swerved out to the left, the great empty flatlands opening up before us, and the moon hanging in the sky, as if to tell us which way to go.

Our eyes lifted to it as we ran, then another howl rang out.

There were sounds of hoofbeats and calls from the man things, but they weren’t what I paid attention to.

It was him. I could hear his paws eat up the distance between us, as if they were my own, getting closer and closer.

My body lengthened, paws snatching at the ground now, thrusting our body faster and faster.

For a moment, there was that feeling of the machinery of my body working in perfect tandem with my mind—I told it to run and it did, so very fast.

But there was a spanner designed to be thrown into the works, a deliberate one, now I thought about it.

We guests were given our own bottle of mead to share, something I’d put down to politeness, but the first time the ground felt like it shifted under me, I knew.

I stumbled and managed to rally, but it cost me precious seconds.

They knew it too, the Uldariel, their whoops too loud, too practised for this to be an accident.

Where were my mates? The fact that they weren’t here was telling enough.

My head spun now from the effects of the alcohol, the previous sharpness I’d gained from fear and anger bleeding out as my body churned through its stores of adrenalin.

I veered right sharply, then swerved left as I tried to correct.

Sylvan’s howl grew louder, and the men’s shouts became hard to comprehend as my paws seemed to forget how to move together.

Something’s wrong , my Tirian said, as if from very far away. I just nodded in response, my legs now moving haphazardly. The moon seems to waver in the sky, but it's what I stared at as I collapsed to the ground. I studied the strange craters and pock marks as they approached.

“I got the black one with a tranquilizing arrow,” a voice said.

“Good, good. Go back to the village and bring the carts. We’ll take the ancillary men to the Volken first, then this one and her pack.”