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metaphysical leper to every Were I come across. That’s a good way to get dead, or have you forgotten?”
    “I am not the one who has forgotten something! Carriers of Neuri are Were.”
    “No! We aren’t! We’re prey, that’s why there’s so goddamned few of—”
    I stopped because something rippled over my skin, something that raised the hair on my arms, on the back of my neck, and sent chills down my spine. Something liquid and dark and compelling. I stared up into eyes that were no longer blue, but brilliant, inhuman chartreuse. I tried to turn away, but hard fingers bit into my arms.
    “Not Were, Lia?” he murmured. “Then you don’t taste the wind in the back of your throat? Don’t see the night light up for you, with every branch, every blade of grass crystal clear and vibrating with life? Don’t hear the earth under your feet, whispering to you, revealing its secrets?”
    I was running, light as the wind ruffling the tops of the trees. It was almost dark, but I could see every stone, every bit of life scurrying, slithering or darting, quick and startled, out of my path. Every tiny tremor in the earth that bore my weight, every scent on the breeze that flowed around me, carried stories of friends and enemies, of water and food, of mile after mile of fascinating, vivid ground to be explored.
    The forest came to life with sleek, dark shadows. They ran close enough that I could feel the heavy, nonhuman heat of them, smell the rich, heady scent of Clan, see the slide of fur over 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