Fastest Wolf Alive

"You don't have to do this," Coach Renner said, and I wanted to throw my water bottle at his head.

"I do, actually," I said. "It's kind of the whole point of a championship."

He didn't laugh. Nobody on the Vale bench ever laughed at my jokes. They just watched me the way you watch a plate wobbling on the edge of a table, waiting for the crash.

I finished tying my left shoe for the third time. My hands wouldn't stop shaking, and I told myself it was adrenaline and not fear, even though I knew better. The stadium was already roaring, ten thousand wolves packed into stands that smelled like sweat and pine, all of them buzzing with a hunger I had felt my whole life and never once satisfied.

The National Pack Championships. My fourth attempt. My last one, if my father had his way.

He hadn't said it outright. My father never said things outright. He'd mentioned, over breakfast three weeks ago, that the Vale training budget could be better spent on my younger cousin, who had shifted at twelve and already medaled twice. He said it while buttering toast, like it cost him nothing. I told him I only needed one more championship to prove the money wasn't wasted. He hadn't argued. He also hadn't looked up from his plate.

Behind me, a girl in a Ridgeback singlet laughed loud enough for it to count as an insult. "She's still trying," she said to no one in particular. "Bless her."

"Careful, Priya," I said without turning around. "Jealousy's bad for your split times."

"I don't need luck. You need a miracle."

I didn't answer that one. There wasn't a clever response to the truth.

"Lila." My mother appeared at the edge of the tunnel, arms crossed, mouth already pressed into the shape she wore whenever she talked about me to people who weren't me. "Your form was sloppy in warmups."

"Good morning to you too."

"I'm serious. You're pulling your shoulder in on the turns again."

"I know, Mom. I've known for six years." I stood and stretched my calves against the wall, ignoring the tremor climbing up from my knees. "I've got it."

She didn't believe me. I didn't fully believe myself. That was the problem with being the only wolf in the Vale line who had never shifted. Everyone in my family ran on four legs when it mattered. I had two legs, a body that trained harder than anyone else on this track, and nothing underneath it that made a difference when the gun went off.

I had spent six years trying to outrun that fact. Tonight I wanted, more than anything, to prove it wrong in front of the only people whose opinion I still cared about pretending not to care about.

That was when he walked past.

Kael Thorn didn't so much enter a room as rearrange it. Wolves stepped back without seeming to notice they'd done it. Coaches straightened their clipboards. He had his headphones around his neck and a towel over one shoulder, and when his eyes passed over me they stopped, just for a second, in a way eyes weren't supposed to stop on someone like me.

"Vale," he said, like he was testing the shape of my name in his mouth. "You're in heat four."

"I know where I'm racing."

Something that wasn't quite a smile moved across his face. "Good luck."

"I don't need luck. I need everyone to stop watching me like I'm about to fall down."

That earned an actual laugh, low and short, gone almost before it started. "Fair," he said, and walked on. I stood there feeling like I'd swallowed something too hot to hold, and I didn't understand why, and I hated that I didn't understand why.

Coach Renner was watching me watch him go. "Don't," he said.

"Don't what?"

"You know what."

"I was just standing here." I bent down and pretended to check my laces again. "Kael Thorn wouldn't notice me if I set myself on fire in the middle of the track."

"Good," Renner said, in the flat voice he used when he meant the opposite. "Focus on heat four."

I had seen Kael Thorn a hundred times. He was undefeated across three seasons, the fastest shifted wolf the sport had ever ranked, already being called the next Alpha of the Northern Circuit before he'd turned twenty-five. What was new was the way my pulse had just tripped over itself for no reason I could name, the way my skin still felt warm where his gaze had touched it and moved away.

I told myself it was nerves. I had a race to run.

The call came twenty minutes later. Heat four, lane six. My stomach dropped the way it always did, hope and dread tangled together. I walked out into the light and heard the murmur that followed my name over the speakers, the particular murmur reserved for me. Not excitement. Curiosity. The kind you'd give a three-legged dog that insisted on entering the race anyway.

I found my lane. Six lanes over, in lane one, Kael crouched at his blocks, and even from that distance I felt it, some thread pulled taut between us that had no business existing.

I looked down the track instead of up at the stands. Ninety meters of rubber and paint, the same ninety meters I had run in my sleep for six years, in rain, in the cold before dawn, in the empty hours after everyone else had gone home. I had earned the right to stand here even if I never earned the right to win.

The starter raised her gun.

"Runners, set."

I dropped into my stance. My thighs burned before I'd even moved. Around me, five other wolves settled into their blocks with the loose, coiled ease of bodies that had a second form waiting under the first, ready to drop and run on four legs the moment the gun went off. I had only ever run on two. I had trained four extra hours a day for six years to make up the difference, and I still didn't know, standing there, whether it would ever be enough.

The gun cracked.

I came off the blocks harder than I ever had, and for one impossible stride I felt something under my skin I had never felt before, a coiled and furious heat low in my chest, like a second heartbeat trying to force its way into rhythm with my own. I stumbled. Actually stumbled, mid-stride, in front of ten thousand wolves and every camera in the Northern Circuit.

Above the stadium, the clouds split apart in a way clouds should not have been able to split, all at once, deliberate, and a light poured down with no source I could name. It didn't touch the other runners. It didn't touch the track. It touched me, and it touched Kael Thorn six lanes away, and ten thousand wolves went silent at exactly the same moment. Somewhere in that silence, I heard my mother's voice break on a single word.

"No."

I looked down at my own hands. They were glowing.