Chapter 5 The Change Begins

The woman's hand was warm, her grip firm - not a welcoming handshake, but a clasp of initiation. A promise.

As soon as Abby touched her, something surged through her body, a low, electric hum that raised goosebumps along her arms.

The others circled closer, forming a loose ring around her.

No one spoke.

There was no need.

Abby could feel it now, the way the forest seemed to lean in, the way the very air around her thickened, pulsing with life. Instinct flared hotter inside her, crowding out her doubts. She was no longer merely a visitor at Wolf Harbor. She was a participant - maybe even a prize.

The woman with the dark curls released her hand and stepped back.

"Name's Marla," she said. "You'll want to remember it."

Abby opened her mouth to answer - to say I'm Abby, to ask what was happening - but a violent shudder wracked her body before she could get the words out. Her knees buckled and she dropped into a crouch, gasping.

"Easy," Marla said, voice gentler now. "Breathe through it."

The forest tilted around Abby. Heat flooded her veins, hotter than before, burning through her muscles and sinew like wildfire. Her bones ached - no, shifted - deep inside her. She pressed her hands to the ground, fingers clawing at the dirt instinctively, desperate for something solid as the world spun.

She dimly heard someone - maybe Marla - muttering soothing words, but it barely registered.

All Abby could focus on was the feeling of her body unraveling and reweaving itself, guided by forces she didn't understand but somehow trusted.

Her senses exploded outward:

She smelled the resin bleeding from a wounded tree twenty yards away.

She heard a mole tunneling beneath the soil.

She felt the throb of the earth itself, alive and ancient.

Another jolt wracked her, and this time she heard it - the low, snarling growl that tore from her throat, utterly inhuman.

She should have been terrified.

Instead, she felt a savage, aching relief.

As if she were finally - finally - becoming who she was always meant to be.

The change didn't complete, not yet. It wasn't a full shift into something else, like she had half-expected from horror movies and fairy tales. Her body remained mostly human - but her muscles were different now, coiled tighter beneath her skin. Her hearing and sight were sharper. Her heart pounded slower, deeper, stronger.

And inside her chest, something vast and wild uncoiled, stretching lazily like a beast awakening from centuries of slumber.

When Abby finally raised her head, Marla and the others were watching her with careful approval - not dominance, not pity.

Recognition.

"You're strong," Marla said. "Stronger than most, this early."

Abby stumbled to her feet, unsteady but unbroken.

"What... what am I?" she rasped.

Marla's smile widened into something almost proud.

"You're becoming."

One of the others, the scarred man, spoke for the first time, voice low and rough. "The blood recognizes its own."

Marla nodded. "Wolf Harbor isn't a resort, Professor. It's a crucible. A place to burn away what the world made you - and find what you were born to be."

Abby's mind reeled, but her body - her new, awakened body - accepted the truth even faster than her thoughts could catch up.

"Welcome to the Pack," Marla said.

"Now the real work begins."