MoonRise
Page 18
Chapter 17
There’s a kind of intoxication in fear. Just a tingle of excitement that leaves a catch in the breath, a chemical reaction that spikes the endorphins and leaves you with the sigh of relief as the tickling jitters pass. The scent of fear that cocks the head of a wolf, sensing prey and the thrill of the chase rushing through the spirit, like a hot flush of blood to the veins. That’s what was overtaking me now.
I was ready. It was time, past time. I had to change. I’d put it off too long.
The shift was upon me.
My head snapped back, my back bowed, and my legs collapsed under me as I slid to all fours. A ripple through my belly heaved and I heard my bones crack and felt the slice of pain across every aspect of my synapses. I dry-heaved and the wave of nausea washed the pain through me as my skin slit and slid over my flesh and my muscles took on a meaner and leaner look.
The wolf came over me in waves, like the mirage on a horizon, rippling hair and fur and blood and bone. My feet elongated and it seemed like my fingers splayed from hands to claws and back again. When I thought I couldn’t take it anymore, my head snapped out and I screamed as the muzzle slid into place, replacing mangled flesh. I howled and a hundred thousand howls called back. I crouched and shook my pelt, sending blood and gore flying all directions as once again, I was reborn.
I knelt, my forepaws in the grass, then sprang.
On my feet or my paws, whatever word described them best today, I raced along the edge of the patch of forest, past blurring brush and trees. Smells surrounded me, overrode me for a while and humanity deserted me for at least a mile.
I ran.
I ran until I could comprehend what I was once again.
Ashlee Scott. Werewolf. Writer. Sister. Twin. Mate of Will Stenfield, though he didn’t know it yet. Nor did my human half, but the bitch part would work on that.
My eyes saw into every shadow. They pierced the depths of the dark with a fluorescence that human vision cannot. I’d forgotten the joy of truly being free. As a wolf, my only responsibility was to my belly, to my heart, to my family.
I thought of my mate asleep back at the hotel room and smelled him on my fur. I licked him from my skin and tasted him upon my lips once again. The musky scent of mown lawns, the rich loam of moist earth, his tangy sweat and salty acrid taste until he showered, all melted into earthy scents of cedar, pine and Vetiver grass.
My man, I marked him and I found myself upon his trail. We’d walked here today, I thought as I bolted out of the trees near the hotel’s pool.
Night full of shadows, I slipped beneath the gate to the pool house where I’d left a spare change of clothes earlier that day. As I’d given them a great review, the staff at the Claremont gave me more access to the workings behind the scenes. This served me now as I knew the areas that were often overlooked in the quiet dead of night. I told myself I could just sleep in a corner underneath the benches inside the locker room until the dawn, when Ashlee would take over and the wolf would slip away once again.
My mind seemed so much clearer when I let out the wolf, like cobwebs being swept out of my brain. Everything distilled into its simplest forms. Love. Eat. Sleep. Pray and thank God above that I was what I was.
Right then, I wanted nothing else.
Unfortunately what my mind wanted, what the rational human me said, didn’t make the wolf bitch happy at all. She wanted to run and hunt and run some more, to smell and taste and howl and mate under the looming moon. She wanted Will to be there with her. She wanted him to be what she was.
The she, the I, the whoever we were took over and, despite best intentions, ran us out of the pool house, back under the gate, and off into the night of the hills above Berkeley.
Tilden Park and other state and local lands formed a wall against development to the east, and so I ran northeastward along the ridges and hills all the way to San Pablo Reservoir. In that peculiar pellucid state my two minds melded, the animal and the woman, into something more than either.
I knew what I was doing quite clearly. The animal did not control me now, not after threescore or more changes, but neither did I control it. Instead, I was just myself, in a different state of mind.
Have you ever been consumed by desire or other strong emotion – anger, grief, depression? You were still yourself, but changed, different. That’s what it was like for me.
In human form the thought of chasing down an animal and sinking my teeth into its warm flesh would have revolted me, but now it seemed like the most reasonable and desirable thing, and I had to have what I desired. If I could not have Will in this form – and oh, wouldn’t that be a surprise, a hundred-pound furry wolf bitch leaping into bed with him – then I would hunt, kill, and eat.
I picked up the trail of a yearling buck, full of power and life. He would be small – this part of California was too hunted out of really big racks to ever see the magnificent stags the Pacific Northwest boasted – so I had no fear of being gored. There was a good reason wolves in the wild hunted in packs: not even a great grey male could take down something like a full-grown caribou by himself, much less a beta bitch like me, but this one smelled hardly larger than I was.
He’d meandered here and there, nibbling on shoots and low-hanging branches, dropping scat and leaping small streams. I leaped them too, closing in on the buck until I spotted him in a thicket of Manzanita.
When he spooked, I was after him, and over a short sprint I was faster, with my ranging lope eating up the ground between us. In the night, my senses outmatched his, my strength the greater, my hunger tipping the balance. I sank my teeth into his haunch, and when he shook me off I snapped and hamstrung him. After that, it was a mercy to open his throat and let his life spill out on the ground.
Don’t weep for the buck, dear reader. He has his place in the great web of nature. Without him we would have no children of the night, no songs to the moon of wolf and cousin coyote, no grace of puma or, in times long past, no great grizzly or even tribes of Man. And without those ferocious predators, the trees and bushes and all the growing plants would be stripped of their flowers and shoots and bark, and all would soon fall under the predations of the herds of millions of grazing creatures.
Nature is a balance, and for this one night, I was truly part of that.
If you want to weep for something, weep for yourselves, who have never known this kind of life.
Once I had eaten my fill, I left the kill for the others that would come – the bobcat and the vulture and the condor and the other carrion-eaters that must also feed: nature’s garbage crew, who would render death into new life in a never-ending cycle.