The ash-wolf slammed into her like a runaway boulder.
Birdie hit the ground hard, the beast’s weight crushing the air from her lungs. Hot drool splattered her face. Jaws snapped shut an inch from her throat. She wrenched sideways on pure instinct, shoulder screaming, and the teeth sank into dirt and ash instead.
“Get off me!”
Her hand scrabbled blindly and closed around something sharp—a jagged length of bone, yellowed and broken at one end like a crude dagger. She drove it upward with every ounce of strength left in the broken body.
The bone punched into the soft flesh under the wolf’s jaw. Hot blood sprayed across her chest. The beast shrieked, a sound like tearing metal, and reared back. Birdie rolled, gasping, and stabbed again—higher this time, aiming for the throat. The bone sank deep. The ash-wolf staggered, thrashing, claws raking deep furrows across her thigh.
Pain exploded white-hot. She screamed through clenched teeth and twisted the bone harder.
The creature convulsed once, twice, then collapsed sideways with a final wet gurgle. Its glowing eyes dimmed. One last twitch of a hind leg, and it went still.
Birdie scrambled backward on elbows and heels until her back hit a rock. Her breath came in ragged, sobbing heaves. Blood—hers and the wolf’s—soaked what remained of her shift. The gash on her thigh pulsed in time with her heartbeat, pouring freely. Her ankle was already swelling to twice its size. Every part of her hurt.
But she was alive, for now.
A strange double-awareness slammed into her skull like a second impact. Memories that didn’t belong to this body flooded in—lab lights, the smell of solvents, the roar of collapsing concrete, the final thought of I wasn’t finished yet. Dani Raziel. Environmental engineer. Dead at twenty-nine. And now… here.
Birdie. That was the name of this skinny, scentless, discarded girl. The original owner’s last terrified moments still echoed faintly. Fenrir’s voice, the cold wind, the fall.
“I’m… not her,” Birdie whispered, voice raw. “But I’m not fully me either.”
No time to spiral. The bleeding thigh would kill her faster than any identity crisis. She tore a strip from the bottom of her ruined shift with shaking hands and bound the wound as tight as she could. It soaked through immediately.
Fire. She needed fire, heat to cauterize, light to see, smoke to keep other predators guessing.
Her hands moved on memory and desperation. She scavenged dry stalks of some dead, brittle plant, a length of flexible root, and a flat piece of bark. Modern knowledge of friction fire-starting collided with the body’s weak, untrained muscles. She worked furiously, palms burning, breath hissing.
“Come on, come on—”
A thin curl of smoke rose. She fed it ash-dry fuzz from the dead wolf’s undercoat, then tiny twigs. A tiny flame licked to life. She nearly cried.
She heated the bloodied bone dagger until the tip glowed dull orange, bit down on a leather scrap from the wolf’s discarded collar, and pressed the searing bone against the worst of the thigh wound.
The smell of cooking flesh filled the air. Her scream came out muffled and animal. Tears streamed down her face. She did it again on the deeper puncture. Black spots danced at the edges of her vision.
When it was done she slumped beside the small fire, shaking so hard her teeth chattered. The bleeding had slowed to a seep. Survival, temporary.
Then something inside her chest flickered.
A strange resonance, like a tuning fork struck against her sternum. For one heartbeat the world sharpened. She felt the soil beneath her—exhausted, poisoned, but not entirely dead. She felt the tiny spark of her own life force answering something old and buried in the vale. A whisper of possibility, of catalysis.
Resonance Catalysis.
The knowledge arrived fully formed and then vanished, leaving only a faint aftertaste and the certainty that something had awakened.
Birdie stared at her blood-streaked hands. “What the hell are you?” she muttered to whatever had just stirred.
The fire popped.
A low, ominous crack sounded directly beneath her.
She froze.
Another crack. The ash-packed ground shivered. Her little fire tilted.
“No—”
The earth gave way with a rotten roar.
Birdie plunged downward in a cascade of bone, ash, and dirt. She landed hard on a sloping pile of skeletons—animal, beastman, things she couldn’t name. Pain lanced through her already ruined ankle and freshly cauterized thigh. The fire tumbled after her, scattering embers across the hidden chamber.
She coughed, waving away dust, and pushed up on her hands.
Faint moonlight filtered through the hole above. It was enough.
The sinkhole was lined with bones. Hundreds of them. And in the center, half-buried in the macabre heap, lay a massive black shape.
A panther.
Bigger than any big cat she had ever seen in her old life. Sleek midnight fur matted with dried blood and a dark, oozing poison that glowed faint sickly green along a deep gash in its side. Its chest rose and fell in shallow, labored pulls. One gold eye cracked open at the noise of her fall, locking onto her with pure predatory hatred even as the body failed.
Still breathing, still lethal.
The poisoned black panther’s lips peeled back from enormous fangs, and a low, death-rattle growl filled the bone-filled dark.