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Then bodies. In the water. Multiple, moving with the coordinated efficiency of people who had been waiting here, who knew exactly where to be, who had rehearsed this. Viktor Volki would pay with his life.

I got my hands on the nearest one of his men. The man doubled over with a splash as my claws sank into his throat. I was already reaching for the next one when something closed around my throat from behind. An arm. Expert placement, the lock of someone who understood that a chokehold wasn't about the air as much as it was about blood flow.

I threw myself backward. The grip held.

I drove my elbow into whatever was behind me. The grip tightened.

My hands found the arm, and I pulled. The arm did not give because there were other hands now. On my wrists. On my legs. Multiple bodies in the black water holding the lock in place while I fought it.

Nell.

I needed to get to Nell.

My vision went gray at the edges. The chokehold was working. My body was doing what bodies did when the blood stopped reaching the brain. The gray spread inward from the periphery. The sound of the water became distant. The cold of the river receded into something that was almost warm, which meant it was almost over.

I fought it.

I fought it with everything. The wolf roared against the inside of my chest. The image of Nell being taken away from me drove my limbs past what they should have been able to do. My fingers found something — an arm, a wrist. I applied pressure until I felt the bone begin to bend⁠—

The arm tightened one final time.

The gray became black.

Everything went dark.

CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

NELL

Iwas small. Toddling through the tall grass. Behind me, I heard the padding of something large following. The shadow let me get just far enough ahead to feel the thrill of almost-escape before⁠—

It pounced.

The gentlest possible version of a pounce, which was still considerable given the size of the thing doing it. I went down into the warm weight of black fur. Heard myself giggling, which was not something I did as a grown woman. This was the helpless, whole-body giggling of a child who had not yet learned to contain joy.

The tongue found my face. Wide and warm and rough, the same tongue I had felt on my cheek in the cabin dream. The same tongue I had felt on my palm in the dream forest of palm trees. I grabbed fistfuls of black fur, buried my face in it, and felt completely, unreservedly safe.

The black wolf picked me up by the scruff of my neck. I dangled in its mouth and giggled louder. Then I was deposited into a lap.

My mother's lap.

She was young. Younger than I had ever known her. Her face unlined. Her eyes bright. Her hair loose around her shoulders in a way I had only seen in sepia photographs taken by missionaries during the time she lived in the witch colony with my grandmother. She was laughing. The full version of her laugh that I had heard so rarely in waking life. It started in her chest and arrived on her face entirely free and unburdened.

She gathered me up and cuddled my small body against her. I felt the warmth of her. I pressed my face into her neck and breathed.

"Will you be upset if she never shifts, Jabari?"

The answer was a low growl. The grumble communicating that the great black wolf couldn't care less. The beast came closer. My mother reached out. She cupped its face in her palm — the enormous black face, the bronze-gold eyes — and she looked at it the way I had watched Fenrir look at Mei Ling across a kitchen. The way Vidar looked at Addie, ignoring everyone else in the room. The way Magnus had looked at me in the dark of my apartment in the small hours when he thought I was asleep.

Love. Unguarded, complete, entirely her own.

The wolf's eyes closed under her hand. Something in its enormous body settled; the same settling I had felt when Magnus pressed his lips to my temple. The animal's recognition of being exactly where it was supposed to be.

Wolves mate for life.

Magnus's voice, from somewhere outside the dream, came to me. There will be no other woman for me.

The black wolf began to fade. My mother's smile followed it. She held me tighter as the wolf became less present. Her arms around me changed in quality from joy to loss. The grief she had carried my whole life was back.