Sheryl sat at her kitchen table in her robe, her phone screen still lit from the article she’d read three times. The headline read: “Two Alleged Robbers Mauled to Death in Thomas Evans Park.” Below the fold: Police suspect a coyote attack.

  She put the phone face down on the table.

  “Coyote,” she said to the empty kitchen. “Always a coyote.”

  Two years. That had been the gap between last night and the last time she had looked down at blood on her hands. Two years of moon-only shifts, of the swamp, of controlled exits from the city before the turn hit her. She had built the discipline one full moon at a time, and it had held until two men with guns and a dark stretch of trail had taken it apart in under three minutes.

  A knock at the front door, and then Derek came through it without waiting, backpack on one shoulder, already reading her face before he’d cleared the threshold.

  "You look bad," Derek said. Accurate, not unkind.

  “Good morning to you, too.”

  He set the bag down and glanced at her phone. "What happened?"

  Sheryl pushed the phone toward him. He picked it up, read it, and set it back down.

  “I was at Thomas Evans,” she said. “Running. Two guys came up on the trail with guns. The report on the news? Yeah, that was me…”

  Derek pulled out the chair across from her and sat.

  “They knocked me down. Put boots into me for a while.” She turned her coffee cup in both hands. “I came back up.”

  “Half-form?”

  “Yeah.”

  He paused. "Did you shift before they saw?"

  “One of them had already gotten close enough. He would have seen enough.”

  Derek leaned in. "That's self-defense. Two armed men, and you were down. No DA would press charges."

  “That assumes they know what actually happened. The report says coyote.”

  "It always does." Derek leaned back. "Mom, you didn't look for this. You defended yourself. Those are the facts."

  She exhaled through her nose. “Those were my first human kills in two years.”

  “I know.”

  “I had it under control.”

  “You still do. One incident under direct physical threat is not losing control. That’s being in a situation where control has a ceiling.” He held her gaze. “The benefits of what we are outweigh the risks. Last night was one of the times it did.”

  Sheryl looked at him for a moment and then picked up her coffee. “When did you start giving speeches?”

  “You called it a TED Talk last time.”

  “I was being charitable.” She almost smiled. “Thank you.”

  He stood and grabbed his bag. “Tonight’s the full moon.”

  “I know. I’m already planning.”

  “Call me before you head out.”

  “Love you, son.”

  “You too.” He pulled the door shut behind him.

  Sheryl looked at her reflection in the dark screen of her phone for a long moment, then got up and poured the rest of her coffee down the drain.

  Lycara sat with both hands resting flat on the armrests of the iron throne, her back straight, her eyes open. In the stillness of the chamber, the green light in the sealed window pulsed at its slow interval, throwing color across the floor in a wide arc that reached the far wall.

  She raised her right hand, palm upward, and a projection assembled itself in the air above it. Green and white light arranged itself into images pulled from the architecture of Karen Stewart’s memory: a birthday party at a round table, six people laughing with Karen at the center, wearing a paper crown someone had put on her head. A work ID badge on a lanyard at Ochsner Medical Center. A parking garage with Karen’s car in the same spot across forty separate recollections. Sheryl Brown’s face across a restaurant table, candlelight between them. A younger face beside it, a man in his mid-twenties, broad-shouldered, watchful behind the eyes. Derek Brown.

  Lycara studied both faces with her head tilted slightly forward, taking inventory of the jaw on the younger one and the steadiness in the older woman’s eyes.

  “These two carry the scent of balance,” she said, to no one in the room. “Predator and protector, bound by blood.”

  She lowered her hand, and the projection dissolved into dispersing mist.

  Karen Stewart had been the right choice. The Compound 47 suppression had kept the Lycan strain dormant for two years, but dormant was not gone. When Lycara had entered her, the divine current running through her own essence found the buried strain and pulled it back to the surface. Karen’s body now carried both strands simultaneously: the goddess’s will and the wolf’s capacity. She was more than a vessel. She was a rebuilt instrument.

  Lycara leaned back against the iron and looked at the ceiling, where the green light moved in its slow, rhythmic pulse across the plaster.

  The pack needed to be rebuilt. That was first. Everything followed from that.

  At Cypress Ridge, Paul and Gwendolyn Harris had spent the weeks since closing on the house unpacking boxes and arguing pleasantly about where to put the couch. The housewarming had been Gwendolyn’s idea from the beginning. Paul had been the one to call people.

  The kitchen was running a full spread by six-thirty: fried chicken from Gwendolyn’s mother’s recipe, red beans and rice in the big pot on the back burner, a cheese board on the counter that Carl Sims had been quietly working through since he arrived. Jazz played through the speaker on the bookshelf at a volume that let people talk over it without raising their voices. The chandelier above the dining room table threw warm light across everything.

  “Did you hear back from Karen?” Gwendolyn asked, pouring herself a second glass of red.

  “Called her twice this week,” Paul said. “Went to voicemail both times. But she’ll show. She always does.”

  “I don’t know,” Michelle said from the other side of the island. “She was fine at work on Monday. Nothing seemed off.”

  Carl reached for another piece of cheddar. “She probably forgot to call back. Karen’s not a phone person on her days off.”

  The conversation moved. Paul was describing the drainage problem the previous owners had covered with mulch and not disclosed when Carl looked up from his plate.

  “Did y’all see the news about Thomas Evans Park? Two guys were found dead on the trail. Police are calling it a coyote.”

  Gwendolyn set her glass down.

  “One of them had his throat opened up,” Carl said. “That is not a coyote. That is never a coyote.”

  Paul frowned. “There hasn’t been anything like that since the lab explosion.”

  “Don’t,” Gwendolyn said, pointing at him.

  Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

  “I’m just saying.”

  “I know what you’re saying, and I’m asking you not to say it in my house on the first night we have people over.” She picked her glass back up. “That whole situation gave me nightmares for six months.”

  The doorbell rang.

  Paul brushed a crumb from his shirt and went to the door, already grinning. “Told you she’d make it.”

  He opened it.

  Karen Stewart stood on the front porch under the overhead light, her straight black hair falling loose to her shoulders. She wore a black leather bodysuit cut deep at the chest, the neckline a sharp V that ran to the sternum, the leather fitted close across her shoulders and ribs with structured seams that traced her frame from collarbone to hip. Gold-plated rectangular studs ran in parallel rows along the torso and down the outer thigh panels in a chevron pattern, and where the leather left gaps at the midsection, black lace panels connected the sections in interlocking floral cutwork. A hammered gold chain rode at her hip from one side to the other, attached to the leather at both ends. Black cuffs of thick, structured leather covered both wrists to mid-forearm. The heeled boots were black and came to the knee, and each step she took across the threshold hit the hardwood with a settled, deliberate weight.

  Paul stepped back to let her in.

  “Karen, hey. Uhm…wow. You look…stunning. Glad you made it.” He waited for a response. She passed him without giving one, her green eyes moving across the entry hallway and into the living room with a methodical sweep that touched each surface, each piece of furniture, each person, and moved on.

  He turned and followed. “Everything okay?”

  She crossed the living room toward the center of it, and the group near the kitchen island watched her. Carl leaned toward Michelle and said, low, “Where is she going dressed like that?”

  Michelle said nothing.

  Paul came around to her right side and extended a glass of wine. “Here, I poured this for—”

  She turned her head toward him. Her eyes, green and lit from within with no variation of shade across the entire iris, found his face. Paul’s arm held where it was, extended, the glass not moving.

  She turned back to the room.

  Her hands came up at her sides, palms out and fingers spread. Her jaw opened, and the teeth she had walked into Ochsner Medical Center with on Monday morning were not the ones she had. They were longer, the canines extended past the lower lip to a curved point, the enamel carrying a faint phosphorescent quality under the chandelier light.

  “Karen.” Paul’s voice came out quieter than he intended. “What is happening to your face right now?”

  She opened her throat, and the sound that came out was neither a voice nor a howl. It was built from below the range that ears parse as sound and rose through the chest cavities of everyone in the room before breaking into the audible as a concentrated shockwave. The wine glass in Paul’s hand shattered. The bottles on the counter were lined up in a row. The chandelier above the dining table swung on its mounting, and the bulbs blew out in sequence. Michelle hit the floor, covering her ears with both hands. Carl went backward over a dining chair.

  Lycara opened her throat again and let the second wave through, longer and deeper than the first, until the last light in the house went out and everything was dark and quiet.

  She stood over the people on the floor for a moment. Then her body dissolved from the edges inward, black vapor rising from her outline, pushing through the gap at the front door and spreading into the night air.

  Sheryl drove out of Bayou Mounds at nine-fifteen with Karen’s name at the top of her unanswered call log and the full moon already high enough to be visible through the windshield above the treeline. She took Highway 90 east until the commercial corridor thinned out, then turned north on a state road that became a parish road and then a gravel track she followed for another mile and a half until the gravel ended at a rusted gate she’d cut the lock off eighteen months ago.

  She parked, shut off the headlights, and sat in the dark for a minute listening to the engine tick as it cooled.

  The clearing was four hundred yards in through scrub pine and low cypress. She’d found it the previous spring when the park had gotten too busy with trail runners, and she’d needed somewhere without witnesses. Nobody used this part of the refuge. The sinkhole event from the storm had pushed research teams two miles east, and the recreational traffic had followed them. Out here, it was just water, trees, and the moon pulling through the canopy.

  She got out of the car, took the path through the brush by memory, and came out into the clearing at nine thirty-two. The moon sat directly overhead, white and hard-edged against the clear sky. The lake at the clearing’s south end was flat and black. The grass under her feet was still soft from the storm drainage.

  She dropped her robe at the clearing’s edge.

  She stood with her face turned up and waited for the pull to begin, which it always did within thirty seconds of direct moonlight on bare skin. The first sign was always the same: a tightening across her shoulder blades, the muscles going dense and resistant before the change moved through them.

  She heard footsteps behind her.

  She turned.

  Karen walked out of the tree line at the clearing’s north edge, barefoot on the wet grass, straight black hair loose at her shoulders. She walked across the clearing with her chin level, her arms at her sides, and her eyes running green from edge to edge, with no white remaining.

  Sheryl went still.

  “Karen.” She kept her voice flat from the effort. “I have been calling you since yesterday.”

  Karen stopped ten feet away and looked at her with a patience that Karen Stewart had never owned. “And why the hell are you dressed up like that?”

  “Karen is not here anymore,” the voice said, pitched below Karen’s register and carrying no accent that belonged to any geography Sheryl could name. “She is the vessel. I am what she carries.”

  “Who are you?”

  “You already know the name. Say it.”

  Sheryl’s jaw tightened. Suddenly, her mind ran fast and comprehended.

  “Lycara.”

  “Yes.”

  “Get out of her.”

  “That conversation has no useful destination.” The figure tilted her head. “I read her memories. She trusted you completely. She walked into your kitchen and ate your food, and you told her everything about the wolf, and she still called you the following week to plan a trip to Sumlin.” She held Sheryl’s gaze without blinking. “She loved you. I want you to know that I know that, and I want you to understand that it changes nothing about what is happening.”

  “You need to leave this clearing,” Sheryl said. “Right now. I am about to turn, and if you are standing in front of me when that happens—”

  “I am about to do the same.” The green in her eyes brightened two degrees. “That is why I came here. I wanted the first meeting to be honest.”

  Sheryl felt the pull hit her shoulders hard, the muscles thickening against her will, the first crack of bone as it realigned in her upper spine. She had maybe thirty seconds of full speech left.

  “Lycara. I am not your enemy tonight. But if you shift in this clearing, I will not be able to hold that line.”

  “I am not asking you to hold a line.” She spread her arms at her sides, and the green light in her eyes pulsed outward through her skin in faint bioluminescent veins running up her forearms and across her collarbones. “I am asking you to choose a side.”

  Sheryl’s knees buckled as the next wave hit her thorax and she went down on all fours, her spine pushing through its ridges with the grinding compression of bone against bone, and whatever answer she had was lost to the snarl that came out of her instead.

  Sheryl’s hands hit the wet grass, and her fingers stretched and darkened, the nails pulling long and curving into black claws that gouged the soft earth. The fur rose through her skin in a dense wave that moved from her shoulders down her back and arms simultaneously, jet-black and thickly coated. Her jaw stretched forward and down with the cartilage audibly resettling, the teeth pushing through the gum line in two rows until the fangs crossed below the jaw. The yellow built in her irises from the pupil outward, burning amber and then gold, until the whole eye was lit from within. She stood to her full height: eight feet of black-furred muscle, chest wide, arms hanging to mid-thigh, claws still flexing open and closed against the ground.

  Across the clearing, Lycara’s transformation moved differently. The green light in her skin brightened first, the bioluminescent veins spreading from her forearms across her shoulders and up her neck until her entire surface ran with it beneath the skin. Then the form expanded outward from the spine, the bones of her back widening and extending in measured increments, the muscle layering on top of the new frame before the next group began. The fur came last, black across the full body but threaded through with green filaments that ran with the grain of the coat and were only visible when the moonlight caught them at the right angle. Her snout extended slowly, and when her eyes opened in the new form, they were burning green, deeper and more saturated than anything her human face had carried, throwing their own illumination four feet across the grass in front of her.

  Two black-furred figures stood in the clearing under the moon.

  Sheryl’s eyes are gold. Lycara’s green.

  Lycara circled left along the clearing’s edge, and Sheryl rotated to face her, both moving in low crouches with their claws dragging lines in the wet grass. Lycara’s chest ran a low continuous vibration that wasn’t quite a growl, and Sheryl answered it with her own, the two sounds layering and canceling each other in standing waves that moved through the ground.

  Lycara stopped circling.

  Sheryl lunged.

  She crossed the ten feet between them in a single flat stride and drove her shoulder into Lycara’s chest, both of them going off their feet and crashing through the reed bed at the clearing’s edge in a tangle of limbs and thrashing claws. They hit the open ground past the reeds, and Lycara got her hind legs between them and kicked Sheryl clear, the force sending Sheryl skidding backward through the wet grass on her side. She came up on all fours and charged again before Lycara had fully risen.

  Lycara caught her by the throat with both hands and drove her into the ground. The impact sent a visible shockwave through the grass, spreading outward from the point of contact. Sheryl’s claws raked up both of Lycara’s forearms, tearing through the black fur and drawing three parallel lines across each arm that ran fluorescent green before the coat closed over them.

  Lycara released her and stepped back, looking at her own forearms.

  Lycara came forward and swung her right arm in a wide arc at Sheryl’s head. Sheryl ducked under it and drove her claws into Lycara’s ribcage on the left side, burying them to the second knuckle and wrenching sideways. But instead of rising, Lycara dissolved, her body unraveling into thick, black smoke, spreading across the lake before vanishing into the mist.

  Sheryl bared her fangs, scanning the woods. She dropped to all fours, sniffing the air, huffing through the mix of earth, blood, and sulfur. Her tail flicked. Her claws sank into the soil.

  Nothing.

  She was gone.

  Sheryl slowly stood upright, fur dripping, chest heaving. Her glowing eyes lifted to the moon, and then he roared.

  The sound was colossal, half-wolf, half-lion, shaking the trees and rolling across the valley like thunder. Birds scattered into the night sky. Animals fled into the dark.

  Somewhere in Bayou Mounds, glass rattled.

  The war had begun again.