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To say I was surprised to realise I was taking one breath, then another, was an understatement.

Flick!

My name was shouted a million times in chorus, the sound deafening, but even when I put my hands over my ears, it didn’t stop.

Because it came from inside me, deep in this pool I hadn’t realised I possessed.

And as if in noticing it, the sounds, that feeling of holding something deep and infinite grew.

Initially, it felt like sunlight on your skin.

Just those gentle, shifting, dappled points of light as you lay under a tree on a warm day, each one caressing your skin like warm fingers, covering your whole body.

Then it swelled, growing more insistent.

I was raised up, pulled from whatever darkness I lay within, drawn up and up, until my eyes flicked open.

“This is not the way!” one of the matriarchs hissed at us, her face screwed up into an expression of pure venom. “Look at his eyes! This interloper! Where is his mother? She has a case to answer to.”

I struggled to make sense of it, this cold, clinical box of a room with all its harsh reflective surfaces. Everything in here hurt my eyes to look at, but I blinked rapidly, trying to stop the ache.

Because everything did. My body was limp now, I realised, held by strong arms, other hands roaming my skin. They were the spots of light I recognised, my eyes threatening to close again.

Flick…Flick…Flick…

My name no longer a shout, it was a beat, tugging my heart along, forcing it to keep a regular pace. It came from those hands and the chest I was held against. They grounded me, kept me from floating away. Had always done so, I realised.

I felt the drops of water on my skin, and it soaked each one up as its due, a curious energy filling me with each one.

“Let me…” A voice the sound of a heart being crushed slowly in a vise pleaded. The hands around me, the arms that held me were reluctant, covetous, but they opened and I was moved. Pulled close, draped over someone’s body like a doll.

“My Flick…” he whispered, his words lighting upon my skin, working their way under it and into the core that beat within me.

“No, love. This isn’t what I wanted. You can’t…

” His voice broke on the pleas, unable to force anymore out.

It didn’t matter, I felt them, dropping like depth charges inside me, the subsequent explosions radiating out through every cell. “Come back to me. Come back to us.”

So much unwitting power in those words, that they knew not what magic they wrought. They were a call to action, as more arms surrounded me, interlinking with my bearers until I was contained in a cocoon of them, their combined weight sparking a heat.

“Come back to us, Flick.”

This voice was different, holding a steely core, one that would not be denied.

“Flick, come back. Never leave us. Be our pack. Come back, love. You promised us ‘but.’ I need a chance at ‘but.’”

It wrapped itself around me, this insistent voice, grabbing me in a grip of iron and tugging me out of the darkness I floated within.

Which brought him.

He was just a pair of red lights in the darkness, that soon resolved themselves as eyes. Eyes that burned with an unearthly light, the largest black wolf I’d ever seen.

I am death, entropy, decay.

I couldn’t reply. I was only a consciousness, able to observe, but no more.

I am endings where she is beginnings. I am power, violence, aggression. I am force. I am anger.

That disturbed my unnatural calm, the word dropping into the pool I held within me, sending ripples out.

I am raging against the dying of the light. I am the death of light. I am chaos, the breaking down of rules and barriers, and the stifling construction of them.

And I’m sick of your fucking litany , I replied finally. Live, love, pray? Seriously, you sound like a fucking five-dollar wall hanging from Kmart.

The beast’s head jerked up at that, then his jaws fell open, his red, red mouth panting.

Let me go , I said, all my prior life’s wishy-washiness blasted away in the furnace of whatever the fuck this was.

They are pulling me home, to be with them, to raise my child.

To put that cunt, Rick, into the motherfucking ground.

You want a sacrifice like she did? I will cut his fucking throat, then spread the blood on the ground in your honour.

By the flare of those red eyes, that idea pleased him greatly.

You will do that anyway. It is written in every cell.

I was treated to a rapid flicker of scenarios.

Me holding a gun out as Rick stormed our house, blood staining his skin, then bursting from his forehead as I shot him.

Slamming a knife my searching fingers found in the chaos of the dining room floor into his neck as he thrust himself into me, showering me with blood.

My pack emerging like shadows from the darkness around the house, padding after him as he approached Kade’s window, hand on the screens, our claws extended.

Will you surrender to him? Will you let him have his way?

Never.

Then I accept your sacrifice, but I want more.

Of course you fucking do. You’re a man, aren’t you?

No, not yet. The balance was broken when those two became our avatars. It must be restored. If you ask this of me, to release you back to the world, this burden will become your community’s. They will restore the balance.

Being around the Great Black Wolf helped me claw back a kind of savage selfishness. I nodded, the first time my body had been able to move. At that, the big paw I hadn’t realised was standing on my chest was taken off, the sensation of being reeled up dizzying.

You will remember. You will make your sacrifice.

“This is absolutely the way,” a man said, forcing his way through the mass of people in the room and taking a place next to a pregnant woman.

The look of love passed that between them as he took her hand was so pure and intense, it felt intrusive to watch it.

“We defeated Lonen in the form he was in, but we had no idea where he went. The Black Wolf swallowed him and…?”

“I saw them, the way they were manifested by Branwen and Lonen in Wolflantis,” the pregnant woman said.

“Oemis, love.”

“Whatever. Just as we manifest our Tirians on the full moon, I think they did the same at special events. The Great Black Wolf is free now, but who manifests him?”

“That we even speak of such a beast is an abomination!” one woman spat.

I coughed, unable to do anything else, a splutter of fluid erupting everywhere.

“What the actual fuck!”

“Flick! By the goddess…”

“Let me through!” A cool hand was placed on my forehead, a bright light shone in my eyes.

“Ouch,” I said, blinking against it.

The debate continued to rage around me, but that dark certainty inside kept me quiet. Now wasn’t the time. Instead, I lay where Aidan had, my pack surrounding me.

“Flick…” Peter contained so much in the few words he said, the tone tearing at me.

I resisted it for a moment, that hard black seed inside me ready to protect me, armour me against the world if I’d just let it.

Instead, I reached up with a clumsy hand, taking his hand, and his squeezed mine painfully in response.

But I had to like the pain. Why else would I scan each of their faces, see the devastation I’d wrought spelled out plainly there?

“You’re…” Noah couldn’t get the words out, his eyes, his throat, clogged with tears.

But Sen, he remained stock still, staring at me with red eyes, his stillness an excellent copy of the Great Black Wolf’s.

His grip on my arm hurt as he hurt, his gaze going on and on, as if that was all that held me here.

“Flick… This isn’t what I wanted,” Aidan said, shouldering forward. “I…I did it for you.”

“And I did it for you,” I forced out, ending with a spluttering of coughing.

“Mum? Mum!”

My head whipped around as fast as it would go on my leaden body and looked beyond to see a small figure smashing through the swinging doors, arrowing through the chaos and masses of people towards me.

“Kade,” I said, and forced my arm around him when his body collided with mine.