REBORN ALPHA

The silver blade went in between my ribs, and I knew the hand that held it.

"I'm sorry, Kael," Draven whispered against my ear. My own brother. "There can only be one Alpha."

I tried to shift. My bones refused. The wine, I realized, the wine Seraphine had poured me with her soft, smiling hands. Wolfsbane. Of course.

She stood in the doorway of the Alpha hall, wearing the Luna's silver circlet I had never given her. She didn't look away as I fell.

"You should have chosen me," she said.

The floor rushed up. The world went black.

And then it didn't.

I woke up choking on mud.

Cold rain hammered my back. My lungs burned. Somewhere close, a dozen wolves were howling, and not the howl of a hunt. The howl of a kill.

I shoved myself up. My hands were wrong. Thinner. Scarred in places I had no scars. I glanced at my reflection in a puddle and a stranger stared back: lean, hollow-cheeked, maybe twenty years old.

I was alive. In someone else's body.

And I was about to be dead again.

"There he is!" a voice roared. "The runt is awake! Get him!"

Six wolves burst through the treeline, teeth bared, eyes burning gold. They were Ashfang pack. I could smell the smoke and iron on them, and they were running straight at me.

I had no time to think. My body did.

I threw myself sideways as the first wolf's jaws snapped shut where my throat had been. I rolled, came up, and drove my elbow into its skull. It dropped. Strong, I thought. This body is weak, but the instincts are mine.

The second wolf hit me in the chest and slammed me into a tree. Pain exploded through my ribs. I felt claws rake my shoulder, hot blood spilling down my arm.

"Alpha Brutus said bring him back alive," someone snarled. "Not unbroken."

Alpha Brutus? I'd fought that name before. In my old life, he was a rival pack leader I'd driven back from my borders. And he was somehow the Alpha of whoever I'd become.

I had no time to wonder why. Three wolves circled me. Three more closed in behind. No way out.

So I did something no weak, dying runt should have been able to do.

I reached deep inside, past the pain, past the fear, to the place where my wolf had always lived. I expected an echo. A shadow.

I found a furnace.

"Stand down."

The words left my mouth in a voice that shook the trees. The Alpha's command. The voice I had been born with.

The six wolves froze. Their eyes went wide. Two of them actually whimpered and dropped to their bellies.

One of them, a scarred brute at the back, forced his head back up and laughed shakily. "That's... that's not possible. You're an omega."

"Was," I said.

I had them. For three heartbeats, I had them.

Then the scarred wolf's eyes flicked past my shoulder, and he smiled.

"Too late, runt," he said. "You already used up your only miracle."

A branch cracked behind me.

I spun around, and a gun barrel was pointed at my face.

The man holding it wore the Ashfang crest. He wasn't a wolf. He was a hunter. And the bullet in that chamber was silver.

"Nothing personal," he muttered, and fired.

A blur of grey fur hit him from the side.

The shot went wild, tearing bark off the tree beside my head. The hunter screamed as a huge wolf drove him into the dirt, jaws locked on his gun arm. The weapon spun away into the dark.

The wolf released him, turned, and shifted in one fluid motion, fur melting into skin, until a woman crouched in the rain, barefoot, wild-haired, a fresh scar splitting her eyebrow. She wiped blood from her mouth and grinned at me like we were old friends.

"You," she said, "are the first omega I've ever seen make Brutus's whole squad pee themselves."

I stared at her. "Who are you?"

"Someone who's been waiting for you to wake up." She snatched the fallen gun and tossed it to me. "Can you shift?"

"I don't know."

"Learn fast."

The wolves behind us had broken free of my command. Their snarls rose in the dark, and now there were more of them, dozens of eyes glowing between the trees. Brutus's whole pack had arrived.

She stepped in front of me, bloody and unafraid, and raised her chin at an army.

"Run when I say run," she told me quietly. "Not before."

A tall figure stepped out of the shadows at the front of the pack. Even through the rain, even in a stranger's eyes, I recognized the silhouette. The way he walked. The way he held his shoulders.

My blood turned to ice.

"Hello, Rowan," said my brother Draven, smiling. "Or should I say, Kael."

He knew.

He had always known I'd come back.

And the girl beside me, the fearless stranger who'd just saved my life, turned slowly to look at me, her face unreadable.

"Kael?" she whispered. "The Kael?"

"Run," I said.

She didn't. She smiled.

"Oh," she said, "this is going to be fun."