Born Wild

by Nikki Jefford

“Uh, yeah,” he mumbled, back to his usual articulation. He backed away from Elsie, turning before the waters slipped below his hips.

  Water sloshed past Zackary’s legs as he hurried out of the pond and kept walking once he reached shore, dripping over the trail as he disappeared into the foliage.

  Jack waded out next.

  “Thank you, ladies, for allowing us to join you.”

  “Anytime.” Elsie lifted a dripping hand and waved cheerfully.

  After the males were both out of sight, she turned to Kallie, lower lip pouting.

  “Too bad the boys couldn’t stay longer.”

  Kallie chewed on the inside of her cheek. “Um, Elsie, you are aware of Zackary’s history with Tabor, aren’t you?”

  The bright smile that had lit Elsie’s lips vanished like the sun behind a heavy cloud.

  “Yes, I know,” she said somberly. “I suppose you’re going to tell me I ought to stay away from him just like Jordan did.”

  Kallie scowled. The last thing she wanted was to mimic Jordan.

  “I’ve never cared much about past actions,” Elsie continued. “I see what’s right in front of me.”

  Kallie smiled at the half-shifter. She liked Elsie. She was a lot different than her other friends—in a good way.

  “That’s refreshing,” Kallie said. “I like that.”

  Elsie didn’t smile back. She looked into Kallie’s eyes, studying her in a way that reminded her of Flora’s with her wizened gaze.

  “People can change,” Elsie said. “Wizards, shifters, and humans. Past mistakes and mistreatment can be overcome.”

  Kallie’s heart thudded inside her chest as her mind leaped to Wolfrik. Could the wild wolf ever be tamed? Domesticated? Could he learn to love another she-wolf?

  Elsie nodded as though following her thoughts like smoke signals.

  “Some say you have to believe in yourself, but my father once told me there’s nothing more powerful than someone else believing in you. That’s all anyone really needs.” Elsie’s grin returned and with it Kallie could have sworn the pond shimmered with possibility.

  “Has anyone ever told you how wise you are for your age?”

  Elsie lifted her chest out of the water and planted her hands on her hips.

  “And don’t forget I can take down beasts four times my size.”

  Kallie splashed her.

  Elsie laughed and splashed her back.

  “Four times your size. What kinds of beasts are those?”

  Elsie’s smile dropped.

  “Bears.”

  chapter five

  From a disjointed tree branch, a crow squawked at the skinny human stumbling past brambles and jagged terrain that tried to trip her with every step. Fresh mountain air rasped in and out of her lungs. Every muscle in her body ached, reminding her that she was alive—whether she liked it or not.

  Sparrow had imagined killing herself hundreds of times. Death consumed her even as she trudged on deeper into the wilderness in a blind attempt to save herself.

  Before throwing herself into this journey, she’d died a hundred-thousand deaths.

  In one of her myriad fantasies, she walked from the compound to the pit right before one of the wolf fights and jumped in ahead of the shifters, lifted a gun to her temple, looked up at her brother on his platform—Satan’s pedestal—and blown out her brains in front of the bastard. Then there was the one where she snuck into Hawk’s bedroom and stabbed herself in the heart for him to find later, sprawled across his bed the same way he’d left Eric for her to find on her bed.

  She choked out a sob. Her throat closed up. If only it would squeeze off all the oxygen and end her misery. But, no, air coaxed its way through grief’s chokehold, feeding her overactive mind and forcing her broken heart to pump.

  She was constantly jumping back and forth between shooting herself in the pit and stabbing herself in Hawk’s bed. Both left a poetic impression, but she tended to favor death in the pit—to die where Eric had come to his end. Maybe together they’d come back and haunt the fields and entire complex. No, if she were a spirit, she’d fly far away from that cesspit to some beautiful sliver of the world like the hollow Wolfrik had spoken of so fondly after gradually opening up to her. But if she were to take her life in the pit and Hawk continued the fights, he wouldn’t be able to look down into that abyss again without recalling how she’d ended her life—the reflection of the gun blast forever imprinted on his shaded gaze.

  One last chance to defy him.

  The crow’s caw nattered through her thoughts as though in reprimand. Her winged tormenter flew to the next tree she passed, cawing insolently as it landed. Its talons dug into the branch’s bark, and its beady black eyes glared at her as though imagining it were her fragile skin he was clawing.

  A bad omen. How long before her brother’s men caught up and dragged her back to purgatory? Would they beat her unconscious again?

  Affection had never existed between herself and Hawk, but he’d made it plain to all his underlings that no one was to touch her.

  That was before she and the wolf shifter fell in love. Their affair had been a brief flicker that never had a chance to catch fire. But she’d loved Eric as she’d never loved anything or anyone. He’d been the only light in that dark bottomless pit she’d been born into.

  Hawk could not allow her such happiness.

  That ghastly scene played itself over in her head on endless repeat. The lifeless wolf laid out sideways on top of her blankets in the pale flicker of candlelight. “No! Please, no.” Her mind screamed while her heart had briefly stopped. Let it be any other shifter so long as it wasn’t her beloved wolf-man.

  She’d thrown herself onto the bed and wrapped her arms around Eric. His fur had been soft but his body cold. She’d buried her face into his coat, soaking his fur with her sobs. Her tears poured out like blood from a punctured artery. The pain of grief had been just as fatal. By nightfall her soul had died. If only it had taken her body with it. No matter. She could take care of it herself. That’s when the morbid fantasies had taken hold, but before she took her life she’d take something of value from Hawk—the shifter he prized above all others.

  And so she’d drifted down to the cells to release Wolfrik.

  She knew Hawk would be furious. She didn’t care. Eric was dead and soon she’d join him, finally free of this forsaken world.

  Hawk had stormed to the cells after Wolfrik cleared the compound. Her brother’s face had contorted, the anger in his eyes a beautiful sight to behold. Sparrow sat with her back against the deadly shifter’s open cage, sick satisfaction swelling inside her like a ripening bruise.

  She’d lifted her head and flashed him a venomous smile. “I set your prizefighter free.”

  As though there’d been any doubt, but confessing out loud gave the mutinous act a feeling of completion.

  A vein had throbbed in Hawk’s slender neck. He wasn’t muscular or mature in years, but his cold, calculating cruelty kept his gang in check.

  His iron gaze had moved from the empty cell to the hard floor, and he’d shaken his head.

  “My dear sister. I would have allowed your indiscretion with that filthy animal to slide, but you should have never released Cujo. He killed two of my men, and I lost my favorite dog.”

  Sparrow had shot to her feet and snarled at her brother. “Eric wasn’t an animal. He was a man of honor and strength—something you’ll never be.”

  Hawk’s jaw had tightened and eyes flashed in the gloom of the corridor.

  “A shifter is not a man. I don’t care how far civilization has fallen. I will not allow my sister to debase herself to bestiality.”

  Her fingers twitched. She wanted to slap, smack, punch, and claw at him. “That’s not what this was, you sick son of a bitch.”

  “You leave me no choice, Sparrow.
You have to be taught a lesson.”

  Hawk had looked over her shoulder and nodded. That’s when three of his men jumped her and dragged her, twisting and cursing, down the corridor.

  “No broken bones or any permanent damage,” he called after them as though issuing a dinner order. “And no violation unless you want to meet a similar fate to Benji’s.”

  “Fuck. You. Hawk!” Sparrow had screamed. “Damn you to hell, brother.”

  Hawk’s men had dragged her back to her room where they’d taken turns punching and kicking her while her dead lover grew cold on her bed.

  Ironically, it was the beating that made her grasp onto life. Anger overcame sorrow. It became a wall, pieced together with broken sticks, blocking a swelling dam.

  Sparrow wouldn’t give Hawk the satisfaction of a grand finale. She’d disappear. It would infuriate and drive him mad. The men would share looks, and the women would whisper about Hawk’s own sister fleeing from him never to be seen again. Oh, how that would fester inside the maniac’s head. Hawk loved nothing more than control. Without it he was vulnerable and weak. Without it he was a disgrace.

  So she bided her time, resting and healing, regaining her strength. She squirreled away dried foods for her journey. Stealing a gun and ammo had been more challenging. She’d once had her own weapon, but Hawk had taken it from her room, probably the day they put Eric’s body on her bed—just to be sure she didn’t end herself right then.

  She stuffed her pack with as much as she could: food, gun, three boxes of ammo, knife, fire starter, cup, spoon, rain jacket, hat, gloves, an extra pair of pants, three extra shirts, and several extra pairs of underthings. It was still summer, but it wouldn’t last forever, and she’d need extra layers to protect herself from the elements.

  She waited until the Full Hunter Moon when there would be some light to travel by and Hawk and his men would be busy forcing the shifters to breed. The practice had revolted every cell in her body. Every female shifter Hawk had captured was forced to submit to his chosen male shifters—the strongest of the bunch. Eric had told her that Hawk had started sending most of the females to Wolfrik because he wanted to start keeping better track of who fathered the pups. Eric had also said it had been many months since he’d been forced to breed with a female, but Sparrow wondered if he’d only told her that to spare her feelings. It wasn’t just the thought of him having sex with another female; it was the entire disgusting operation. It ate away at her insides like termites chewing her bones to dust. She wished there was some way she could stop her brother. She’d lain awake for hours every night trying to come up with a plan.

  In the end she hadn’t even saved Eric, her one true love.

  But she had freed Wolfrik.

  One wolf. Better than none.

  She laughed bitterly. The crow cawed, and she laughed harder.

  “You think you frighten me? I am beyond fear!”

  She squared her shoulders and walked with renewed vigor. The trees’ leafy canopies shaded her from the sun’s increasing heat. After traveling the wasteland, carefully avoiding Hawk’s campsites and the abandoned suburbs, she’d reached the mountains. Here the ground morphed into a lush green carpet supporting thickets filled with vivid, bold, natural colors and vegetation in full bloom. Rich soil cushioned her steps, a welcome respite from cracked concrete and the hard, barren, dusty ground that made up the wasteland. Nature’s reminder: Leave me alone and I will thrive.

  Here, the sun seemed to shimmer over the land rather than beat down ruthlessly.

  “The hollow is heaven, and this place is hell,” Wolfrik had once told her.

  Eric hadn’t spoken much about his life before captivity. Their conversations had been declarations of love and devotion, along with plans to escape and live together in the wild. Eric hadn’t wanted to return to his pack. He said they were brutes, which is why he’d left them in the first place.

  But Wolfrik had painted a lush, shimmering picture of utopia: Wolf Hollow.

  “Rivers and streams that run so clear you can see straight through to the bottom. Waterfalls and ponds to quench your thirst with cool, clean, refreshing taste and lakes to bathe and play in. Mossy knolls to laze on in the summer and caves to keep warm in the winter. Fields of tall grass and forest that go on for hundreds of miles.”

  She’d fallen in love with the idea of Wolf Hollow at the same quick speed she’d felt her heart yearn for Eric.

  Past the suburbs and the vast sandy wasteland. Beyond the hills at their base, Wolfrik had said.

  Sparrow had overshot the suburbs by three days to the east, hoping to throw Hawk’s men off her trail. Every day Hawk didn’t find her was a victory. She’d headed straight for the mountains and kept going, climbing that great hulking mass to its summit where she’d given a whoop of triumph because, despite heartache and torment, she’d scaled a mountain for the first time in her life.

  And now she was making her way down the other side, backtracking to the west for three days before heading north into the woods and—if fate stopped being a bitch for two seconds—into the sanctuary of Wolf Hollow.

  For the first time in her life, she was free.

  chapter six

  Sun radiated Wolfrik’s bare chest, heating his scars and baking his legs in the jeans soon after putting them on. He slipped into the shade of the forest, keeping to the trail. He was already well on his way to the glade when the dinner gong rang out across the forest. Moon above, he’d missed that sound. Ironic since he’d once bemoaned the custom to Sasha, grumbling that wolves weren’t dogs to be called to dinner.

  “We’re not just wolves,” Sasha had said. “We’re shapeshifters—part human. And we’re not just a pack; we’re a community. Even a tribe out in the wild needs order and routine.”

  Sasha always seemed to have the perfect response to everything. Now she was giving her comfort and council to a half-breed. She’d moved on, which maybe had been for the best; Wolfrik doubted even Sasha could handle his demons.

  In the glade, a short line formed at the cauldron and shifters began dishing themselves the usual mush of vegetables, grains, and meat. As more pack members arrived, they headed for the line and milled around in small groups, chatting amongst themselves.

  Wolfrik didn’t care much for conversation, but he did like listening in and making comments—especially the kind that got under other shifters’ skin. There weren’t a whole lot of other ways to entertain himself.

  But tonight he wasn’t listening in so much as looking for a certain she-wolf who owed him a shirt.

  If she knew what was good for her, she’d stick to the safety of the den and never go wandering off alone in the middle of the night again.

  What had she really been doing? Wolfrik didn’t buy her story about stretching her legs and taking in the fresh air. She looked like she was running away.

  What in the world did she have to run from?

  It wasn’t his problem, but he couldn’t help feeling intrigued. Perhaps the hollow wasn’t one big happy family that had moved on without him. Perhaps he wasn’t the only one who felt like an outsider. Why not dig a little deeper? Misery loved company, after all—a saying he’d picked up at the compound. Perhaps it explained why hundreds of humans swarmed to the crumbling city as though it were the mother hive.

  Wolfrik chose a spot on a mound of earth beneath some trees, watching each shifter as they arrived. He tapped his foot the longer he waited. Soon a full line had formed at the cauldron, and the clearing filled with the clamor of a couple dozen voices speaking at once.

  So, Kallie had stayed away.

  Heavy disappointment sank like a rock down Wolfrik’s throat then settled inside his gut.

  It wasn’t as though females had ever flocked to him even before he’d become a savage beast. His impending claim on Sasha had been as clear as the waters that ran throughout the hollow, not to mention he
’d always held himself above the rest of the pack. In short, he’d been a pompous prick. Now he didn’t know how to be anything else.

  “Careful, Cujo,” Hawk had once told him. “Pride will be your downfall.”

  “And I will be yours,” Wolfrik had promised, teeth gleaming.

  A man with a whip had come by his cell that night and given him ten lashings, but it had been worth it to see the twitch in Hawk’s eye.

  Standing shirtless, Wolfrik’s lashings were displayed for the whole pack to see. It didn’t matter that no one was looking at him. They were thinking about it and avoiding him even more than they had before. Wolfrik folded his arms across his chest. Did Kallie think she could hide from him forever? Hold on to his shirt like some kind of keepsake?

  He ground his teeth together and descended the mound with half a mind to storm into the den and demand his shirt back—rip it from Kallie’s body if she was foolish enough to still be wearing it.

  Beast. Savage. Wild wolf.

  He couldn’t change what he was any more than a rabbit could grow claws.

  A flash of yellow caught his eyes from across the clearing, like the sun had sprouted legs and taken a walk through the woods, coming closer as though drawn in by the heady scent of wild game and fresh harvest.

  She had full breasts and hips that were accentuated by the smooth fabric. Thick waves of brown hair tumbled past her shoulders, following the dips and curves of her body. Wolfrik remembered everything he’d seen beneath the dress in vivid detail. Her shapely legs moved with slow grace. He barely noticed her limp.

  Strands of copper and gold caught in the firelight as she passed the bonfire. In her hands, she held Wolfrik’s shirt folded into a tidy square, and her eyes were in constant motion—as though searching for something…him?

  Wolfrik’s groin tightened. She was only returning his shirt. Why then did he feel like she was about to offer him a gift?

  He stood his ground. Let her look a bit longer. Try to find him hidden among the trees. He liked watching her search him out.