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starburst of searing pain—and he could feel the strange, dark, transformative magick of the ancient Death god’s bite flowing outward from those points. Taking him. Stripping him of his humanity. Struggling against his other nature. But what that other nature was, Fennrys himself didn’t even fully comprehend in that moment. He was dead—had died—and he could feel those shades and shadows starkly now with a wolf’s heightened senses wrapping around him like the heavy, gold-furred pelt he now wore as his skin. And he feared that his previous death had somehow warped Anubis’s were-curse. Tainted it and twisted it, shaping it in a way that it was never meant to be shaped.
    He could smell the fear clinging to the other members of Rafe’s pack. It was intoxicating. It fueled his hunger and he lunged, longing to tear the fear from them with his teeth and swallow it in great raw chunks. But the slender silver chain Maddox had looped around his throat kept him from doing that. The silver burned like acid. In spite of the pain he still struggled, thrashing and scrabbling with long claws at the stone floor, and the sweat that dripped from Maddox’s brow onto Fennrys’s muzzle as the Janus Guard fought to keep him leashed would, he thought, taste so much better if it was blood.
    No. No no no . . . not my thoughts .
    Maddox was his friend. The pack was there to help.
    He was not a killer.
    Yes you are .
    And so much more than that.
    In the back of his throat, Fennrys could suddenly taste . . . the sea? Salt spray, ocean tang. Cold and ice-fog sharp. Beneath him, he could feel waves rolling, as if he lay on the deck of a ship. He could hear the snapping of sails in the frigid north wind. He could taste it in his mouth, and deeper than that—in his heart.
    Like a memory .
    Or a premonition.
    What in all the hells in all the worlds is happening to me? he wondered. And the answer came back to him: You’re becoming the monster you always knew you were .
    Yes, he was. A monster. A beast. And now he was—couldbe—a faster, stronger, thousand-times-more-dangerous one. A brutal, four-legged weapon. Mindless bloodlust fogged his mind with gray and black and red. His flanks heaved, shoveling breath in and out of his lungs like a forge bellows, hot air surging through his quivering nostrils. He felt the human heart that was still beating in his chest—the one that Ammit the Soul Eater had, in her blindness, decided to let him keep—swell and transform, its shape, and its purpose, altered.
    â€œFennrys?”
    That voice again. His heart lurched, twisted. Changed back . . . remembered its real purpose. Remembered the things it had been filled with before the trident had pierced it. Before the love that had filled it had flowed out onto the ground in a pool of his blood. Before the white feather had turned red.
    He remembered.
    And his body began shifting in the other direction.
    Smells dulled, sights dimmed.
    Hands. Not paws. Not claws . . .
    His wolf’s eyes looked down and saw the flesh of his arms rippling beneath his fair human skin. His wolf’s voice cried out against it. So close. The chains of his frail, mortal, human shell were stretched to breaking. Waves of yearning slammed through his mind like the pounding of a riptide.
    So close.
    To what?
    The sensations were slipping away. The prize, the goal . . .
    What goal?
    . . . it had been there. In his grasp. Within reach of his snapping teeth.
    I don’t understand .
    â€œFenn.” That voice. “It’s me. It’s Mason.”
    Wolf-song choked into an aching sob, deep in his throat. And Fennrys collapsed back into a golden-furred heap on the cold marble floor.
    â€œI’m here . . .”
    He wondered if he should be comforted by that. He was weak. Wounded.
    Vulnerable .
    â€œYou’re going to be fine. You’ll be okay.”
    Anything but, really