The forest welcomed him the way a mother welcomes a child, with comfort that didn't ask for speech, or thought, or regret. It sang a soft lullaby, made of scent and feel.

  The smell of pine, wet earth, and rain lay like a balm over raw nerves.

  Gabriel ran.

  His body didn't need his mind to know where to place itself. It knew how to angle through thickets without snagging fur, how to leap a creek without breaking stride, how to lower his shoulders and become smaller when the undergrowth turned into a tunnel.

  Time loosened in the forest. Minutes slid into hours, hours into nothing.

  Only running remained.

  The world was simpler this way, reduced to scent, the feel of cold air, the sound of birds chirping in the distance.

  When thirst hit, he drank from the stream. When hunger struck, he hunted. Killed. No thought, no emotion, no regret.

  No grief, no shame.

  Better that way.

  A shard of mind would push through. A face, framed by the golden halo of afternoon light. Blue eyes, blue as the sky in sunlit winter, smiling. A gentle hand on the back of his head.

  Her laughter, mixed with his until he couldn't tell where he ended and she began.

  He knew her name, he did, because it was half of his soul once, buried into the marrow of his bones.

  He reached for it, and the blue eyes widened in fear.

  Who are you?

  No, he wanted to shout. No, I'm not what you think. I'm still—

  Her voice whispered between the branches. Maybe you weren't. But now you are.

  Perhaps it was only wind.

  The forest remained as it always was. Dark. Silent. It didn't condemn and it didn't forgive.

  He skidded to a halt in a patch of ferns, breath coming in thick, steaming puffs. He stood there, rigid, ears pricked, nostrils flaring. The world was a map made entirely of scent.

  Wet bark. Rotting leaves. Fox. Deer. A rabbit that had passed recently, heartbeat still echoing in the air.

  And under it all, faint and maddening, the fading trace of home.

  The scent of lemon cookies. The giggles of children.

  Children. Pups.

  His pups.

  The word struck his mind like a thrown stone, and for one unbearable second his thoughts aligned, his body and mind snapping in the same direction like an arrow finding its target.

  The human part of him, the thin remnant of the man who had learned to smile and speak in gentle tones and burn waffles on Saturdays, rose like a drowning hand and grabbed at the thought.

  Blue eyes opened again, narrowing.

  I gave them to you and you hurt them.

  He sank lower, belly brushing the fern tips, as if he could press the thought into the dirt and smother it.

  Another face surged, pale in the moonlight, eyes full of fear.

  Pup. Pup!

  What was her name?

  Don't run.

  He remembered the despair, the panic as she bolted.

  The reflex kicked in before his mind could catch up, a violation instantly cut down by another instinct, stronger, with roots that reached to the core of his being.

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  Protect.

  His mind had split down the middle.

  He stopped.

  He remembered the exact moment his muscles locked, his teeth clenched so hard pain flared along his jaw. He remembered trying to inhale and failing, because the air had turned into fire in his chest.

  The shame crawled up his spine and lodged behind his eyes, hot and choking.

  Gabriel jerked into motion again, not toward home, not toward the faint trace of his children, but away. Deeper. Farther. Into places where the trees grew tighter and the light thinned.

  Run. Run until you can't find your way back. Run until you can't hurt anymore.

  He ran through night that became dawn that became night again, or maybe it never became dawn at all and his mind was just imagining light between the branches.

  Sometimes he stopped in a hollow beneath a fallen log and tried to shift back.

  The urge to be a person pressed at the edges of his mind like a prayer. If he could get his hands, if he could find words, if he could think, he could go home. He could look his parents in the eye. He could tell Kelsey he was sorry. He could go upstairs, sit on the edge of Hailey's bed, and let her crawl into his arms the way she used to after nightmares.

  He could do it.

  But every time he tried, his bones moaned in white hot pain. And, within the pain, blue eyes.

  Diane.

  The name burned like an open wound.

  It wasn't her memory that hurt, but the absence that sucked him like a void.

  He would push toward the clarity of a human thought, and it would fold in on itself, because the moment his mind became clear enough to form language it also became clear enough to remember what he'd lost, and what he'd almost destroyed.

  The guilt didn't let him shift. It held him in the wolf like a cage.

  He could live in the forest, because the forest didn't ask for anything. It didn't demand he look at his daughters and see their fear. The accusation. The fact that they were right.

  It was easier to be an animal than a man who had failed.

  Sometimes, in the thickest hours of night, he would stop and lift his head and listen.

  And he would hear, faint and far, the answering howls of other lupines.

  Others, somewhere deeper in the forest, somewhere older.

  It made his hackles rise. It made him run again.

  He didn't know if they were real.

  He only knew the forest was not empty.

  ***

  One night, or one day, it didn't matter, the wind shifted.

  A new scent reached him. It seared through his spine like an electrical surge.

  His head snapped up so fast his neck muscles ached. His body froze, every nerve suddenly charged, every thought narrowing into a single point.

  For a moment, their names cut through his mind like sunlight through the fog.

  Kelsey. Hailey.

  Than panic. No. No. Too close.

  His heart surged. A keening sound tore from his throat before he could stop it. Instinct roared awake, loud enough to drown everything else.

  Pups in the woods. Danger. Protect. Protect. Protect.

  He launched into a sprint, paws tearing through leaf litter, breath ripping out of his throat. The forest blurred. Branches whipped his flanks. Thorns scratched his muzzle. He didn't slow.

  He would get to them.

  He would keep them safe.

  He would make sure nothing touched them, nothing looked at them, nothing breathed near them without permission.

  The words were not words. They were pulses of force that drove his muscles.

  The closer he got, the stronger the scent grew, the more his body tried to twist, tried to climb out of wolf skin, tried to become hands and voice and human shape. Because his pups needed the man, not the beast.

  He felt it, the pressure along his spine, the change trying to rise.

  For a moment, his mind cleared.

  His name is Gabriel. He is a person. He has two daughters.

  He has to stop running. Shift back. Go home. Apologize. He mustn't frighten them. Never, never frighten them.

  Then another scent hit him.

  Not the girls.

  His parents.

  The realization struck like ice water dumped over flame.

  He skidded, paws digging deep furrows in the soil. He stopped so hard his shoulders jolted. His head whipped side to side, nostrils flaring again and again.

  The scent was old, stale, cold. He didn't see them, didn't hear them.

  The pups weren't really here.

  It was a trap.

  A lure.

  The beast in him snarled, insulted, furious. The man in him recoiled.

  Diane's voice rose again, sweet and clear as a summer breeze.

  They think you have become something that needs bait. Do you see now? Do you see the truth?

  The man you were went away with me.

  All you can offer them is this shell of a beast.

  Blue eyes turned sad. You couldn't keep that one last promise.

  The guilt and shame flooded him so fast it made his vision blur.

  He backed away from the bundle lying in the grass, the clothes abandoned like offerings. His body trembled. The urge to shift flickered again, weaker now, drowned under the old ache that lived behind his ribs.

  He couldn't go to them like this. He couldn't let his pups see him like this. He couldn't let Father look at him with disappointment. He couldn't let Mother look at him with that careful, controlled grief that said she had already said her goodbyes.

  He turned and ran.

  Because love and shame and guilt can be links of the same chain.

  Time broke completely after that.

  The forest became an endless corridor of trees, every direction the same, every patch of ground repeating.

  Sometimes he saw Diane.

  Not her, not truly, but flashes: her hair, her hands, her mouth shaping words he could not hear. Sometimes he saw Kelsey, small, with eyes too old for her face. Sometimes he saw Hailey, crying into Mr. Winkle, asking where he was.

  The images sliced through him, and each slice pushed him further into the instinct, because instinct didn't know words like blame.

  He was standing in a low gully when another scent hit him, close and heavy. Dominant. Familiar.

  Gabriel's head lifted. His body stiffened. Hackles rose along his spine like a ridge.

  A part of him, deep and ancient, recognized authority and bristled. Another part recognized something else, something close, and wanted to sink into submission like a pup. It knew this scent once meant safety.

  His tail twitched, confused between lowering in submission and lifting in challenge. The two impulses crashed, leaving him frozen.

  He just stood, breath ragged, eyes fixed on the shadows between the trees as he watched another lupine emerge from the darkness.