Three days later, the moon began to wax full.
The winter solstice brought a bitter, killing frost to Highrove. It also brought the fever. The castle preparations for the solstice feast were frantic, and the human servants were pushed to the brink of collapse.
Bridget was dying. She could feel it. The wolfsbane paste she had secretly consumed to suppress the impending full moon shift was failing. Her tolerance had grown too high. The poison was destroying her liver, but it wasn't strong enough to keep the wolf asleep anymore.
Every joint in her body felt like it was packed with shattered glass. Her vision blurred, washing out into stark monochrome before snapping back to color. Her gums throbbed so violently she could barely close her mouth.
"You look like a corpse," Greta muttered, passing Bridget in the lower kitchens. "Go to the crypts, fetch the old winter potatoes. It's freezing down there. Might bring your fever down."
It was a kindness. Greta was giving her an excuse to hide in the dark.
Bridget nodded stiffly. She grabbed a burlap sack and stumbled toward the heavy iron door that led to the cellars and the deep crypts beneath the keep. The stone steps were slick with ice. She had to cling to the wall, her breathing ragged, steam pluming from her lips in the freezing air.
Just make it to the dark, she told herself. Just lock the door and wait it out. Let the bones crack. Let it pass.
She reached the bottom of the stairs, stepping into the cavernous vaulted cellar. It smelled of earth, decay, and frost.
"Well, well. Look what scurried into the dark."
Bridget froze. The voice was slurred, heavy with ale and arrogance. Corvin stepped out from behind a stack of wine casks. The massive general grinned, his jagged teeth flashing in the dim light of a single wall torch. He had a flagon in one hand. He was bored. When lycans got bored, humans suffered.
Bridget kept her head down, clutching the burlap sack. "My lord, I am just fetching potatoes for the feast."
She tried to step around him. Corvin shifted, blocking her path. His bulk was a solid wall of muscle and fur-lined armor.
"The feast," Corvin mused, taking a slow sip from his flagon. "You servants eat our scraps, sleep under our roof, and yet you always look at us with such disgust. Look at you, trembling like a beaten dog."
Bridget wasn't trembling from fear. She was trembling because her spine was attempting to reconfigure itself. A sharp cracking sound echoed in the cellar.
Corvin paused. "What was that?"
"Nothing," Bridget choked out. She tasted blood. A canine tooth had just split her gum, elongating in her mouth. She kept her lips sealed tight. "Please let me pass."
Corvin dropped the flagon. It shattered on the stone. He grabbed Bridget by the throat and slammed her against the freezing wall. The impact knocked the breath from her lungs. Pain lanced through her skull.
"I don't like your tone, human," Corvin snarled, leaning in close. His breath was hot and rank with fermented grain. "You don't smell right. You smell sick. You smell like—" He sniffed her neck, his brow furrowing. "Ash and poison."
Above them, the heavy iron door at the top of the stairs groaned open. Boots sounded on the stone.
"Corvin."
The voice was cold, sharp, and carried the absolute weight of a mountain. Garrick stood on the stairs. He wore a heavy black fur cloak, his eyes piercing through the gloom of the cellar. He had come down for wine, or perhaps a moment of silence away from the sycophants in his hall.
Corvin didn't let go of Bridget, but he turned his head. "My king. Just disciplining a disrespectful scullery maid."
"Let her go," Garrick commanded. It wasn't a request.
"She was creeping around the cellars."
"I said, let her go." Garrick took a step down.
Corvin scowled. His pride stung. He didn't release Bridget. Instead, he tightened his grip on her throat, squeezing hard enough to crush her windpipe. "She needs to learn her place."
That was the mistake.
The pain in Bridget's throat was the final strike against the cracked glass of her control. Her human consciousness snapped. The cage shattered. Twenty years of suppressed fury, agony, and instinct exploded all at once.
It wasn't a magical, seamless transition. It was brutal, horrifying.
Bridget's head snapped back. A guttural, demonic sound ripped from her throat, a sound no human vocal cord could produce. It was the sound of a beast climbing out of hell.
Corvin's eyes widened. He tried to pull back, but he couldn't.
Crack. Bridget's arm snapped at the elbow, the bone jutting out before instantly reknitting, thickening, covered in a sudden explosion of dense silver-black fur. Her hand, pinned against Corvin's chest, elongated into a massive, heavily padded paw tipped with razor-sharp obsidian claws.
Before Corvin could even shout, those claws sank effortlessly through his boiled leather armor and deep into his chest.
Garrick froze on the stairs. The alpha king, who had fought in a hundred wars, stood paralyzed by the sheer impossibility of what he was witnessing.
Bridget's body warped, tearing through her drab gray dress. Her spine arched violently, vertebrae popping with the sound of pistol shots in the echoing cellar. She grew. She didn't just turn into a wolf. She became a monster.
Most lycans shifted into wolves the size of ponies. When Bridget's skull finally elongated, her human face tearing away to reveal a terrifying silver-furred snout, she was massive. She stood a full head taller than Corvin in her quadruped form. Her fur was the color of a thunderhead, streaked with stark white.
She let out a roar that shook the dust from the vaulted ceiling.
Corvin screamed, finally releasing her throat as he clawed blindly at the monstrous paw embedded in his chest. Bridget didn't hesitate. Her jaws, large enough to crush a heavy oak barrel, snapped forward. She locked her teeth around Corvin's shoulder and tossed him.
The general, a man weighing over two hundred and fifty pounds, flew across the cellar like a rag doll and smashed into the stone wall. He slumped to the floor, unconscious, bleeding heavily.
Silence descended on the cellar, thick and suffocating.
The beast stood in the center of the room. She was panting, her hot breath pluming in the freezing air. Blood dripped from her silver muzzle. Slowly, the massive wolf turned her head. Her eyes were not the gold or amber of a normal lycan. They were a piercing, luminescent ice blue, and they locked directly onto Garrick.
Garrick stood on the stairs. He didn't draw his sword. He didn't shout for his guards. His heart pounded in his chest, a heavy, primal drumbeat.
The scent hit him then, stripped of the lie, the garlic, and the wolfsbane. Her true scent crashed over him like a tidal wave. It was rain on hot iron. It was midnight snow. It was the most intoxicating, terrifying thing he had ever smelled.
It was the scent of an alpha female. An equal. A mate.
For the first time in his life, the king of the Iron Veil forgot how to breathe.
The beast bared her bloodstained teeth, letting out a low, bone-rattling growl, and took a step toward him.