Inked

heavily muscled bodies. Their eyes filled with the lambency of living jewels as they howled, sending an unearthly chorus floating out over the valley below us. It tightened my skin, pulled at my heart, set my breath to racing until it tore out of me in a cry of pure delight.
    Then Sebastian let me go.
    The lights came on and the sounds of the busy medical facility rushed back—gurneys rolling over tile, nurses gossiping, the fridge humming. And the world went flat, like it had lost a vital dimension. The colors were just colors, washed out and lifeless, and although Sebastian’s arms were around me, I felt them less than I had the whisper of that scent on the wind. He sat, regarding me with a faint smile, even as part of me grasped for something rare and precious that was no longer there. And mourned its loss.
    I’d seen my mother return from night runs, panting and out of breath, her eyes glowing, her cheeks flushed, more alive than she ever was between four walls. And I’d never understood until now. She’d never shown me what she saw, what she experienced. Maybe because she’d known how cruel it would be when I realized I could never reach that place myself.
    The part of me that was wolf was trapped by my disease. It lived crippled and caged inside a prison of a body that couldn’t flow, couldn’t reform, couldn’t let loose the magic of its other self. I’d never even seen my wolf, and I never would.
    Until today, I’d been at peace with that.
    “That foolish doctor,” Sebastian was saying. “Pitying us for our ‘primitive’ anatomy, when we are privy to an entire world he will never know!”
    “ You’re privy!” I gasped, so angry I could barely see. “You did that!”
    “Yes, but I could not have formed a memory bond with a human. Carriers of Neuri are Weres, Lia,” he repeated. “They simply do not change.”
    “Then they aren’t Weres!” He was the head of my clan and I owed him big-time. So I didn’t curse him into next week. But it was close. My whole life I’d struggled to be accepted, had battled against the tide of prejudice from both sides. I wasn’t human enough for the Corps, wasn’t Were enough for the Clan. And always, always, there was Neuri, that damned disease that wouldn’t let me truly be either. But at least I hadn’t fully understood what I was missing.
    For the first time, I realized the truth of the phrase I’d said so many times: I really wasn’t Were. And God, how it hurt.
    “Many of us have spent much of our lives in human form,” Sebastian said—calmly, damn him. “It does not invalidate what we are. It does not make us less Clan.”
    “But if you choose to stay in human form, no one cares! They don’t try to kill you for being what you are!”
    “Perhaps not. But I regularly run into difficulty with the leading clans for trying to work with the humans instead of isolating ourselves in our own little world—and thereby limiting our voice and our power. I choose not to let someone else dictate the decisions I make or how I define myself.”
    “But that’s just it. You choose ,” I said, furious that he couldn’t see that simple but so important difference. “The Corps hates me for having a Were mother; Lobizon hates me for not changing when that’s the one thing I’m physically unable to do! I never had a choice about any of it!”
    “And if you had?”
    “What?”
    “Would you have preferred a different mother?”
    “Of course not!”
    “A different father then? One who was Clan, so you would never have had to face the uncertainty of Neuri?”
    “When Lobizon sent the squad to change me by force,” I told him, fighting to keep my voice steady, “my father stood by me against a dozen Weres. Despite the fact that every single one of them was faster, stronger…”
    I broke off because I was once again back in those dark streets, watching a mass of shadows slink around a wall, expanding in a blink into larger, more graceful, and more deadly shapes. It had been the beginning of the worst night of my life, as they chased us for blocks, almost overpowering us a dozen times. And the whole time, I’d been certain that, just days after losing my mother, I was about to lose my father, too.
    “He could have been killed. He almost was killed,” I finished, quietly furious. “He could have left me—they didn’t want him, they’d have let him go—but he stayed anyway. He risked everything for me.”
    “You seem to admire the man a