The fifth moon came in April and he chose it, smooth and easy as a decision about anything else. The sixth in May, on a warm night when the woods were full of that specific Pacific Northwest green that is almost too green, like the forest is performing vegetation. The seventh in June, the first week of summer vacation, on a night that started clear and rained halfway through and he ran in the rain and felt the water on his fur and thought: this is a thing I get to do. This is actually a thing I get to do.
By June the changes had stabilized, as Callum had said they would. The construction site had finished its work. He was five foot six and a half — he'd gained another inch after the third moon — and he was seventeen and he was learning to drive (his mother, white-knuckled but committed) and he had started working two mornings a week at Fog & Ground, which he had always liked and which now liked him back in the form of free coffee and the specific camaraderie of people who take coffee seriously.
He and Rook ran together on non-moon nights sometimes, just the two of them, short runs along the deer paths at the edge of the Backs. Not transformations — just running, human form, in the dark, faster than they should have been able to go, jumping roots and stones with the ease of something that knows how to use its body. Running without destination, just for the pure fact of movement.
"I used to hate running," Marco said, on one of these nights, sitting at the base of a big fir to catch his breath. "In gym class. I always felt like I was in the wrong gear."
Rook sat beside him. "And now?"
"Now I'm in the right gear." He tipped his head back against the bark. "It's embarrassing how much of my life was just — being in the wrong gear."
"Most people spend their whole lives in the wrong gear," Rook said. "Some people change gears at sixty."
"How old were you?"
"Fifteen." He was quiet. "I had the bite at fourteen. The shift started at fifteen. It took another year before I had language for it." He looked at the sky through the firs. "You were fast. The change read you clearly."
"Callum said the same thing. That I needed it."
"Did you?"
He thought about the mirror in September, the inventory every morning, the sense of filling out the wrong form. "Yeah." He exhaled. "Yeah, I needed it." A pause. "I'm glad it was here. That the pack was here."
"The Backs were always here." Rook bumped his shoulder. "You found them."
"The Backs found me."
"Maybe both."
They ran back to the edge of town in the dark, faster than the deer, slower than the wolf, exactly what they were.