One of the townies reached for Jude. I got there first, stepping between them. The townie—twenty-one or twenty-two, too old to be at a high school party and too stupid to know it—barely managed to stop himself from ramming his knuckles into my face. Jude was a head and a half taller than me, six foot two to my five foot nothing. He was gangly.

I was small and dangerous.

“Well, well, well,” the townie said, looking back at his friends, bleary-eyed and clearly amused. “What do we have here?”

I said nothing, but I could feel a familiar emotion unwinding inside of me, an old friend come out to play. These idiot boys didn’t know what it was like to fight tooth and nail for survival. They didn’t know what happened when you cornered an animal in its lair.

They didn’t know that the biggest dog wasn’t always the one in charge.

“Man,” one of the other townies said, laughing, “I’d watch out for this one, Dave. She has the crazy eyes.”

I didn’t move, didn’t stop staring at the lot of them, didn’t so much as blink. All around us, the other partygoers began to realize what was going on. If Jude’s assailants had been a few years younger, they might have realized, too.

I had a bit of a reputation.

“Gentlemen,” Jude said behind me, “this is what is known as a situation. I would suggest that you take a step or two back, and then I can assure you with an entirely moderate degree of accuracy that this will probably not get ugly.”

The party had gone completely silent, except for the music and the distant sound of the river down below. We were maybe ten feet from the edge of the ridge, a hundred feet above the river, 9.6 miles as the crow flew away from the ravine where Cady had found me eleven years before.

“And if we don’t step back?” one of the boys taunted.

My upper lip wanted to pull back. Only years of social conditioning let me push down the urge to growl.

“Seriously,” one of the townies said to Jude, a note of nervousness creeping into his tone at the expression on my face. “What’s wrong with her?”

“Nothing’s wrong with Kira,” Jude said cheerfully. “I mean, who among us doesn’t have anger management issues and difficulty socializing in the human world, am I right?” He laid his hand on my shoulder, a warm and steady weight. Familiar. Home. And just like that, I was five years old again and six and seven, and Jude was the one person in this world that I trusted. Back then, I wouldn’t have stared down the bullies. Back then, I would have attacked.

“Dude,” one of the townies said under his breath, “is she the one who…”