Chapter 27: Surely She’ll Stop Before—

A fire-trailing, four-legged, fuck-the-rules princess was sprinting through sacred forest with a silver-cuffed slave on her back and the mandate rules had nothing to say about it.

The Ancestral Grounds opened up ahead of them through the thinning canopy and Nova’s breath caught in her chest. It was enormous. Far larger than the arena.

A large hill rose from the center of the clearing, ancient and wide, and at its peak was the sacred flame. It was unnaturally tall, green, and shifting and curling with a rhythm that didn’t follow wind patterns.

Around the hill stood hundreds of men, organized by pack with the respective Alphas at the front.

The draftees stood in their own section in neat rows.

The ceremony looked like it was just beginning. And Nova had made it. That fact alone deserved a moment. She gave it half a second because the other half was about to become a problem.

Maria did not slow down.

The sparks trailing behind them changed. What had been a ribbon of fire following in their wake began climbing forward, rolling over Maria’s haunches, up her spine, across her shoulders, until her entire wolf was engulfed. The crimson fur disappeared beneath a layer of flame so total and so bright that the wolf beneath it became a silhouette running inside a bonfire.

Nova should have been terrified. She should have screamed. She should have launched herself sideways off the back of a burning animal and rolled into the dirt and questioned every decision that led her to this moment.

She wasn’t burning.

The heat surrounded her like a cocoon but it wasn’t touching her. The flame licked against her jumpsuit and her sleeves and her tucked-in cuffs and all of it passed around her like water around a stone. Maria’s fire was choosing who it consumed and it had chosen to leave the girl on its back alone.

A casual "by the way, my fire won’t kill you and I am going to make it big" would have been nice. But Nova wasn’t going to complain.

Maria ran full speed into the clearing.

Every head snapped.

Hundreds of wolves and every Alpha at the front turned at the same time as a ball of fire exploded out of the tree line at a speed that should have belonged to a meteorite and was currently belonging to a princess from Emberclaw who apparently had a flair for the dramatic. Understatement. Maria was a flame-flinging, fuck-all-the-rules fireball who was about to turn a sacred ceremony into her personal red carpet.

The flame covered them both so completely that the wolf looked riderless, a crimson inferno tearing across the sacred ground like the forest had caught fire and decided to attend the ceremony.

Then the shift happened.

Nova had seen wolves shift. The sound was always the same. Bones cracking. Joints popping. The wet, grinding noise of a skeleton rearranging itself inside its own skin. This was not anything close to that.

Maria’s shift was a single red flame that expanded outward and roared. The sound was massive, deep, resonant, the kind of noise a bonfire makes when you throw something sacred into it and the fire approves.

It was also much louder than it was earlier. Adding gasoline to the spectacle in case anyone missed the visual. Nova almost laughed.

No cracking. No grinding. No violence. Just flame, and then two women standing where one wolf had been.

Nova was on her feet. As if the shift itself had known where to place her, as if Maria’s wolf had calculated the dismount on the way in and set Nova down the way you set down a glass you don’t want to spill.

The red flame was still circling both of them. A wall of fire spinning slowly around two women who were standing shoulder to shoulder in the middle of a sacred clearing while every wolf and every Alpha and every elder on the hill stared at the place where a fireball had just arrived.

Nova couldn’t see past the flame. The fire was a curtain and the curtain was still up and for one second the audience didn’t exist.

Then they walked through it. Because walking through fire was the logical next step. It didn’t burn her when she was on the wolf. Why would a wall of it burn her now? Sure, why the fuck not.

The fire waterfalled around Nova, splitting at her shoulders and rejoining at her feet.

Then the two of them emerged from the wall of fire side-by-side, in sync, stride matching stride, like a special delivery fresh from hell.

Nova knew it looked incredible. She was not going to deny it. If looking like she’d just walked through fire unburned in front of every pack in Helix was the reward for getting this far, she was taking it with both hands and zero apology.

The elders stood there like scandal-stunned statues watching centuries of tradition go up in literal smoke while the crowd visibly gasped. Every mouth in the clearing opened at the same time.

At what? Coin toss. The flame, possibly. Every Alpha bloodline carried some form of unique ability, and the Emberclaw fire was known but rarely seen at this scale. So it might have been that. Or it might have been the fact that Nova had been riding a wolf, which was not normal and not done and not something anyone in recorded history had attempted at a Moonfire Rite. Or it might have been the fact that a princess had helped a slave, which was a violation of approximately everything the social hierarchy was built on.

Shouts came from the crowd.

"VIOLATION! THAT IS EXTERNAL HELP!"

"SINCE WHEN DO SLAVES RIDE WOLVES?"

"SOMEONE GET AN ELDER, THAT IS NOT LEGAL!"

That answered that. Nova counted the voices and there were only a few. Loud, but few. The rest of the crowd was still buffering because the flame wall was still up behind them.