Liam's POV
The marketplace smells like bread and sweat and animals. Liam hates it here, but his mother comes every Tuesday to sell her healing oils, so he comes too. He's supposed to help carry things. Mostly he just stands around trying to be invisible.
Today he's losing at invisible.
Cole sees him first. Cole is fourteen, tall like a stretched-out tree, and he's always looking for someone smaller to mess with. Today that someone is Liam.
"Hey, bastard," Cole calls out across the busy market. His friends laugh around him, three other boys who think Cole is the funniest thing alive.
Liam keeps his head down. He's learned this lesson a hundred times. Don't react. Don't look. Don't give Cole anything to work with. His mother says that people like Cole are just looking for a reason to feel powerful, and if you don't give them one, they'll get bored and move on.
Except Cole doesn't move on.
He walks straight over to where Liam is standing near a wooden crate stacked with vegetables. "I'm talking to you, you little freak."
"Leave me alone," Liam says. His voice comes out smaller than he wants it to.
"Leave me alone," Cole mimics in a high, whiny voice. His friends crack up. "You know what you are? You're a bastard child. Your father didn't even want you."
Something hot builds in Liam's chest. Something angry and tight and dangerous. He's heard this before. Kids at school say it. Kids at the market whisper it. Sometimes adults do too when they think he's not listening.
But hearing it doesn't make it hurt less.
"Your mom's a whore," Cole continues, and that's when Liam loses it.
"Don't you dare talk about my mother," Liam says. His voice shakes. Actually shakes.
Cole grins like he's won something. "What are you going to do, bastard? Cry? Run home? Your father doesn't want you. That's why he left."
The anger comes so fast it's like lightning. It starts in Liam's chest and spreads down his arms, down his legs, into his bones. His vision blurs and turns gold, like he's looking at the world through honey. His teeth hurt. Actual, physical pain shoots through his jaw.
He doesn't understand what's happening.
Cole shoves him backward toward the crate. It's not a gentle push. It's the kind meant to knock someone down, and it works. Liam stumbles, trips, and hits the wooden crate hard on his back.
Pain explodes across his shoulders.
That's when everything breaks.
His skin feels like it's tearing. Not actually tearing, but like something underneath wants out and his body can't hold it anymore. His bones crack and shift. He can hear them moving, hear the wet sound of his body rearranging itself. His hands clench and his fingers stretch wrong, way too long, and hair explodes across his skin thick and dark and wrong.
His scream gets stuck in his throat because his throat is closing, expanding, changing into something that isn't a throat anymore.
The shift is fast. It's violent. It's completely out of his control.
One second he's a skinny twelve-year-old boy falling backward onto a wooden crate. The next second there's a massive wolf lying where the boy was. Fur black as midnight. Teeth like daggers. Eyes pure gold.
The wolf is huge. Way too huge. Adult-size. Alpha-size.
The marketplace goes dead silent.
Liam can still think. He can still feel like a person inside this body. He can feel the panic screaming through his mind because this is wrong and impossible and everyone is staring and his mother taught him to be careful and hidden and safe and he just shifted in the middle of the marketplace in front of at least twenty people.
Cole is on the ground. He fell backward when the wolf appeared, landed on his butt hard. His face is white. His mouth is open but no sound comes out.
Everyone else is frozen. A woman with a basket of bread stares. A man selling fish stares. Kids. Adults. Vendors. Shoppers. Twenty pairs of eyes locked on the impossible wolf that just appeared in their normal Tuesday.
Then someone screams.
It's a high, terrified sound that breaks the silence into a thousand pieces. Suddenly everyone is screaming. Suddenly people are backing away, pushing, trying to get away from the monster in the marketplace.
Liam tries to shift back. He focuses as hard as he can on his human form, on being a kid again, on making this stop. But his body won't listen. The wolf stays in control. The wolf is too scared. The wolf thinks it needs to fight or run.
The wolf lunges forward.
"Liam, no!"
His mother's voice cuts through everything. Liam recognizes it before he recognizes anything else. That voice has been his whole world for twelve years. That voice told him he was loved even when no one else did.
Daphne Crawford pushes through the crowd like she's moving through water. She's smaller than the wolf. Way smaller. But she doesn't hesitate. She doesn't back away. She runs straight at her son and grabs him by the scruff of the neck the same way you'd grab a dog that's out of control.
"Shift back," she says. Not a yell. Just a calm, steady command. "Liam, shift back now."
Something in her voice reaches the part of him that's still a boy. Liam pulls back from the panic. He focuses on his mother's face, on the way she's holding him like she's not afraid, like she's done this a hundred times before even though he knows she hasn't.
His bones crack and snap and twist back into human shape. His fur disappears. His teeth shrink. His body compresses down into a terrified twelve-year-old boy again.
Liam collapses against his mother, breathing hard, shaking so bad his teeth chatter.
Daphne wraps her arms around him and turns to face the crowd. Her eyes are sharp now. Her jaw is set. Her whole body is tense like a wolf ready to fight.
"Show's over," she says to the crowd. "If anyone has a problem with what they just saw, they can come talk to me."
No one moves. No one talks. People just stare at the boy and the woman and the space where a massive wolf just stood.
Daphne keeps her arm around Liam's shoulders and starts walking. She doesn't run. She walks steady and calm like nothing impossible just happened. Like her son didn't just shift in the middle of the marketplace in front of everyone.
But Liam can feel her shaking. Her arm is locked around him so tight it almost hurts.
They make it about ten steps before the whispers start.
One voice. Then two. Then three. Whispers spreading through the marketplace like fire through dry grass. Things like "Alpha blood" and "hidden heir" and "someone has to know about this."
Daphne pulls Liam faster toward the edge of the market, toward home.
But Liam knows what those whispers mean. He's heard his mother talk about pack politics. He's heard her say that secret things have a way of getting out. And once they're out, everything changes.
The market is already pulling out phones. Someone is definitely calling someone important.
By tomorrow, everyone will know.
By tomorrow, everything will be different.
Liam doesn't know how, but he knows it the same way he knows his own heartbeat. Something huge is about to crash into their quiet life in Moonvale Village. Something that will shake everything apart.
His mother is walking faster now, practically dragging him through the crowd.
And in the distance, so far away Liam almost doesn't hear it, another sound starts up.
The sound of a wolf howling.
Then another wolf joins in.
Then another.