Sophie's POV
The pain hit at exactly midnight.
Not slowly. Not with a warning. It slammed into Sophie's chest like someone had reached through her ribs and grabbed her heart with both hands.
She was lying in bed, staring at the ceiling, still a little full from the birthday dinner her mom had made. Twenty-one years old. Nothing special. Nothing magical. Just another Tuesday that happened to have candles on a cake.
Then her skin caught fire.
Sophie sat up so fast she knocked her phone off the nightstand. She pressed her hands to her arms and gasped. Her skin felt like it was boiling from the inside. Like something underneath it was trying to get out. She told herself it was nothing. Too much food. Too much excitement. A weird dream she hadn't fully woken up from yet.
Then her bones moved.
Not broke. Not cracked. Moved. Shifted. Like they were rearranging themselves into something different.
Sophie opened her mouth and screamed.
The sound that came out didn't sound like her. It was too loud. Too raw. It shook the walls of the small apartment and Grace came flying out of her bedroom so fast she almost tripped over the rug.
Grace stood in the doorway with her hair going everywhere and her eyes half-open and her hand gripping the door frame. She took one look at Sophie and froze completely.
Sophie was on her knees on the bed. Both hands pressed flat against her chest. Her whole body was shaking. She could feel her teeth grinding against each other and she couldn't stop it.
"Sophie." Grace's voice was very quiet. Too quiet. "What's wrong with your eyes."
Sophie didn't have time to answer because the next wave of pain knocked her sideways off the bed.
She hit the floor and the impact barely registered because everything else felt so much worse. Her spine was burning. Her fingers were burning. The bones in her face felt like they were stretching in directions they weren't supposed to stretch.
Grace dropped to the floor beside her and grabbed her shoulders. "Sophie talk to me. I'm calling an ambulance."
"Don't." Sophie grabbed Grace's wrist. She didn't know why she said it. She just knew with absolute certainty that an ambulance was wrong. That whatever was happening to her wasn't something a hospital could fix. "Don't call anyone."
Grace looked terrified but she listened.
Sophie pressed her back against the bed and breathed through her teeth and tried to hold herself together. It wasn't working. Something inside her kept pushing outward like it wanted to burst through her skin.
And then she heard it.
Grace's heartbeat.
Not the sound of the apartment. Not traffic outside. Not the refrigerator humming in the kitchen. Grace's actual heartbeat. Clear and fast and loud as a drum pressed directly against Sophie's ear. Ba-dum. Ba-dum. Ba-dum. She could hear the exact moment Grace's pulse sped up with fear.
Sophie stared at her best friend.
"Sophie your eyes." Grace's voice cracked. "They're doing something."
Sophie looked down at her hands. For one second, maybe two, the skin on her fingers rippled. Like something alive was moving just beneath the surface. She yanked her hands back and pressed them against her chest and squeezed her eyes shut.
She could smell everything.
The chicken her mom had cooked three hours ago and left in Tupperware on the counter. The rain that was starting outside three blocks away. The pine trees at the edge of the city. The forest beyond that. The mountain beyond that. She could smell all of it at once, layered on top of each other like someone had turned up every sense she had to the maximum.
And underneath all of it, something else. Something wild. Something that made her stomach drop and her hands go cold.
She smelled wolves.
She didn't know how she knew that's what it was. She'd never been near a wolf in her life. But something deep in her chest recognized the scent the same way her lungs recognized air.
"Bathroom." Grace was already pulling her up. "You need cold water. Come on."
Sophie let herself be dragged across the apartment. She focused on Grace's hand around her wrist. Real. Solid. Human. Normal.
The bathroom tiles were cold under her bare feet and Grace turned the shower on and pushed Sophie toward the sink instead. Running the tap cold. Cupping water and pressing it against Sophie's face.
Sophie lifted her head and looked in the mirror.
She almost didn't recognize herself.
Her eyes were gold.
Not hazel. Not light brown. Not some trick of the bathroom light. Pure molten gold. Glowing like two coins heated in a flame. The color pulsed. Like a heartbeat. In and out. In and out.
Sophie pressed her hands flat on the sink and stared at herself and the girl staring back looked like a stranger wearing her face.
Grace was behind her in the mirror. Looking at the same thing. Neither of them moved.
By two in the morning, Sophie was sitting on the bathroom floor with her knees pulled to her chest and her back against the cold wall. The worst of the pain had stopped. Replaced by a deep ache in every bone, like she'd run a marathon without knowing it. Her skin had stopped rippling. Her eyes were slowly returning to something closer to normal. Grace was sitting across from her with a towel pressed in Sophie's hands and her phone face-down on the floor between them.
They hadn't spoken in thirty minutes.
Finally Grace said, very carefully, "That was not a fever."
Sophie didn't answer.
"Sophie."
"I know."
"Your eyes were glowing."
"I know."
Grace wrapped her arms around her knees. "Are you going to tell me what's happening to you?"
Sophie looked at her hands. They looked normal now. Just hands. Twenty-one years of hands she thought she knew everything about. "I don't know what's happening."
And she meant it completely. She genuinely had no explanation. No answer. No framework to put around any of what had just happened to her body.
But something had changed. She could feel it sitting in the center of her chest like a stone that hadn't been there yesterday. Heavy. Warm. Almost alive.
Her phone buzzed on the bathroom floor.
Both of them stared at it.
It was her mom.
Not a text. A call. At 2:18 in the morning. Sophie's mother did not call at 2:18 in the morning. She went to sleep at ten and never deviated from that.
Sophie picked it up.
Before she could even speak, her mother's voice came through the phone with a sound Sophie had never heard from her before. Not worry. Not concern.
Pure fear.
"Sophie." Her mom's voice was shaking. "Is it happening. Tell me right now. Is it happening."
Sophie's mouth went dry. "Mom what are you talking about."
The silence on the other end of the line lasted exactly two seconds. Then her mother said something that turned Sophie's entire world upside down.
"I should have told you years ago. Baby I'm so sorry. I should have told you what you are."
Sophie stood up slowly. Her legs were unsteady. Grace was watching her face and whatever she saw there made Grace get up too.
"What I am." Sophie said the words slowly. "Mom. What am I."
Another pause. And in that pause, from somewhere outside the apartment window, from somewhere deep in the forest at the edge of the city, a sound broke through the night.
A howl.
Then another. Then another. Three separate howls from three different directions. Not sad. Not hunting.
Calling.
Sophie pressed her hand flat against the bathroom wall because her knees nearly gave out. The stone in her chest suddenly blazed like someone had lit it on fire. And underneath her skin, something stirred awake like it had been sleeping her entire life and had just heard the alarm go off.
Her mother was still talking. Still apologizing. Still trying to explain in careful terrified words.
Sophie wasn't listening anymore.
Because she could feel it. Three points of heat in the dark. Three invisible threads pulling tight inside her chest. Like ropes. Like hooks. Like hands reaching through miles of forest and city and night, grabbing hold of something inside her that she hadn't known existed until right now.
Something was coming for her.
Three somethings.
And the terrifying part, the part that made her press her hand harder against the wall and squeeze her eyes shut, was that her body didn't feel fear.
It felt like it was going home.