by Jayla Kane
There were still too many. I jumped, wishing I didn’t have to; I could stand there and fight until the end, I guess, until one of them took me down. But it’s not in my nature, and I still didn’t trust the Sheriff. All I had to do to get my back up again was remember Baby, standing over in the thick of them, the woman next to her with her green moonlit eyes blinking in the dark.
So I had only one other choice: end it. The hard way.
I jumped back into the thick of the young wolves before they recovered from my disappearance and snatched one out of the air, taking the chance that it would land with me, alone, across the pen. It did. I’d been able to transport people before, but it seemed like a dicey proposition clutching a squirming 170 pound wolf. Sure enough, we landed and I cracked him, hard, right across the face, then leapt back before the others knew what was happening. I moved so fast back and forth across the pen that the older wolves stopped circling and waited, biding their time, and let me tire myself out on the younger ones.
I got three more bites, one of them deep and likely to scar. The young ones were reckless, but well-trained; they aimed for my right side too, and now my dominant hand was good for nothing unless I wanted to start digging in with my claws. Which I didn’t.
I switched my stance and geared up for a southpaw attack.
At this point, I wasn’t functioning the way I normally did in a fight; I never really wanted to hurt anybody, not worse than I wanted to be hurt, if that makes any sense. I like a good fight. I like a little blood, and sometimes I even like a lot. I’m not afraid of breaking a couple fingers or splitting my lip. But I had a hard time imagining my life in this town if I did any real damage to one of the people here, where everyone could see. Where everyone watched what I was, what I did, and how fucked up a creature I’d become.
I was getting a little scared. Not of being hurt; I had Baby in my corner, after all. But as my temper flared and I realized it was going to be me against four real fighters—people I might’ve thought twice about crossing out in the real world, people who, for all intents and purposes, were more experienced and just as ruthless as me—I faced the fact that I might get taken down myself. The freak in their midst, the one that jumped around and got his ass handed to him when it came down to it.
So I have a little pride I guess, and my ego was battling with my concerns about belonging here, living here. And it was throwing me off—making me hesitate when I normally wouldn’t, distracting me when I should be making a clear hit. I jumped all the way across the pen after I finally got the last two young wolves down and leaned over, hands on knees, sucking in air. My ribs hurt; my right hand wouldn’t close all the way. That bite on the back of my leg worried me. And I stank of blood.
Fuck this, I thought, rage welling inside of me. Fuck it. If they wanted to see if I could fight, they’ll fucking find out now. I stood up and shook my head, hard, the way I did when I got a ringer on the field, usually covering the quarterback’s lazy ass. This was a very fucking different game.
I heard a sound from the back of the crowd when I stood up that gave me gooseflesh all over my body. I craned my neck, looking over at them, picking out the wolves who surrendered early, the young ones that fought hard, and snarled. They were fucking howling.
Howling for the rest to take me down.
“Come on, you bastards,” I said, but it came out as a series of growls, low and menacing. It did the trick. The four wolves that were left loped easily around the pen, fresh as fucking daisies after watching me fight off almost fifty of their brethren, and then they struck.
I had no idea how fast they would be. I thought it would be like the other attacks, an even tide of teeth and claws. But this was an assault by lightning. Before I even understood what was happening I was missing another chunk of my right arm.
“Motherfuckers!” I spat blood at them and jumped behind the one that bit me, then used all my strength to heave him up and over my head. BAM! Snow dropped off of the trees, he hit the ground so hard. I tried to jump before he landed, but one of them tagged my ankle and I was sinking towards the ground when a third snapped his teeth at my throat. I jumped behind him and didn’t bother with a good wrestling hold—I grabbed him by the haunches and hurled him, like a rock, using both hands. When he landed I jumped to where he lay splayed in the slush and let my claws graze his throat, this time. His remaining two friends stayed where they were. One of them had my blood running down his chest, the white fur he was covered in glistening in the moonlight. The other one stared at me with blatant hatred, my ability to read emotions on an animal’s face sudden and intense.
Two down, I thought, watching the one under my claws slump in resignation. The other one, the one I threw first, hadn’t moved yet. I couldn’t get worried about it now. I stood up, snarled, and jumped between them.
They were faster than me, that’s for damn sure. The white one dropped his front feet immediately, as if he knew what I was going to do, and tore into my left ankle with no mercy. Whatever had gone before, this was real. This wasn’t about pack placement any more, and it was beyond the Sheriff to stop it. I backhanded him but he didn’t let go, and the other wolf immediately latched on to the wound on the back of my other leg. I couldn’t jump—I’d just take both of them with me, maybe even making the tears worse with the momentum. I had to fight them off.
I punched the grey wolf, knocking him loose, then kicked out at him as I twisted, feeling my left ankle crunch as the white wolf dug in harder. When the grey wolf backed off I hammered the white wolf’s head until he finally let go, but then—
Then—
The grey wolf leaped at my back—I knew he would, I knew he would do it, but I only realized at the last minute what was going to happen when I spun towards him, claws out—
My right hand sank into his chest to the knuckles, blood sliding down my arm in heated waves.
The white wolf knew this was his chance. He did the same as his friend, leaping with the grace of a buck through the air, his canines aimed for my bared throat—
I saw him coming. I did the only thing I could.
And then I had two dead wolves hanging off of my hands.
The ring was silent again. No howls, no panting, no quick intakes of breath or cheers or claps or anything, nothing, no sound at all.
I could hear my own heartbeat.
It took another thirty seconds for my face to transform enough to make more than wolf sounds, for some of the teeth to disappear and other ones to cut through my gums. It didn’t hurt any more, not with the weight of two dead men on my hands. I scanned the crowd for her beautiful face and found her, her gold skin the color of ashes, staring out at me with wide eyes. “Baby,” I said, barely able to speak. “Please.”
She ran towards me, clearing the top of the fence in the space of a breath.
Chapter Thirteen
Baby
“It’s alright,” I murmured as I galloped up to Hunter, reading him from across the field instantly. He didn’t want to do it. He was outnumbered, and he couldn’t back down from a fight. I could practically hear him thinking it wasn’t supposed to be like this as he looked down at their bodies. It was supposed to be easy—they acted like it would be easy.
This wasn’t going to be easy. Not at all.
I don’t know how to do this, I thought, wishing to god I understood anything about this stupid power; it didn’t matter whether or not I did, though, because I would try anything to help Hunter. The mud stank like blood and the slush sank under my boots as I crouched down, surveying the damage. I took a deep breath and laid my hands on the first wolf, the grey one, then sank my fingertips through the thick fur so I could touch bare skin. It wasn’t the same as Hunter had been, the first time I did this; I could feel her, still in there, flickering like a candle in a high wind. I swallowed and concentrated, trying to ignore the gore covering Hunter. He was my real priority. He was covered in wounds, scratches, cuts, some of them really fucking deep. But I knew he would brush me o
ff completely until I fixed this. Knew all too well.
The wolf was savable, I just… I needed some fucking anatomy lessons, I realized, gritting my teeth and trying to remember every single episode of Grey’s Anatomy I ever watched. I’d been working on frickin’ trees this whole time! “Hunter… Try to pull your claws out, but really, really slowly. Like, centimeter by centimeter, okay?” I couldn’t heal all the wounds—I was too worried I would do something wrong, stitch some tiny artery to a vein or something, but then I closed my eyes and let my magic just… Dig. Dig into her. It found the places where she was split open in her chest and knitted everything back together, the fresh ruin left behind as Hunter’s claws retracted easy for me to follow and mend. Nothing older—nothing that might rot or be infected. But this… Each tiny retraction of his claws left a space for me to fill with what was right there, so I did, praying that I didn’t seal in any dirt that her body’s immune system couldn’t handle.
When I healed the worst of her wounds, she started to fire up on her own. Her system pulled back out of shock almost immediately, and she danced away from me, nostrils flaring at us, as if she’d just woken up.
The white wolf was dead. “He’s gone,” the girl beside me whispered; I hadn’t realized she followed me. Her red hair swept across his body, her eyes spilling tears.
“Not for long,” I said, hoping I wasn’t telling a big fat lie, and then I asked Hunter to do the same thing—that very slow, painfully slow, inch by careful inch retraction. His claws went clear through the wolf’s throat, and when I finally sealed everything off—esophagus, windpipe, all the muscles and tendons, every bit of it back to normal—the wolf laid limp in the dirty snow, body still. Fuck, I thought, and tried to remember what Tristan told me when we saved Hunter. “Hey,” I told her, “hold my hand, alright? You know him?” She nodded, teeth worrying her lip, then knelt beside me as we laced our fingers together. “Hunter, I need you to touch me,” I murmured, trying to find a way to use the girl’s energy to find the wolf. He was only gone for five minutes, I told myself; Hunter was dead for a lot longer than that.
But Raven was the one who found him. How did she do it?
I couldn’t see them, the way I thought she could—I could feel things, feel the lingering electricity in their nerves, feel the thrum of their blood when their hearts started again. But it wasn’t necessarily the same thing as finding the person they were before they died.
But he had to still be in there—right?
Hunter’s power surged through me as I held tightly to the girl’s hand and prayed that would somehow help bring the wolf back—not just to life; I knew I could do that, could already feel the steady snap of his heart as the valves whistled and stirred the blood that was trapped in its chambers, felt his lungs heave as he sucked in a breath. The girl was a wolf, I thought; I could feel that in her, too, but I didn’t understand how. I tried to find a mirror in him, somewhere in his mind, and dug into his brain with my power until I heard her gasp and glanced up to see him glowering at me out of yellow eyes.
“I don’t know if he’ll remember,” I said slowly, then watched as his tongue slid out of his mouth, his gaze snagging on Hunter. Raven had been the one to make sure someone woke up as who they were before. I’d done my best, but… “He might, but I’m not sure.”
“He remembers,” she said, dropping my hand so she could run her fingers through the thick fur covering his rib cage. He was covered with a dozen gouges and nicks, his fur rust colored where he’d bitten Hunter and been stabbed. But she seemed satisfied. I grabbed her arm, though, and pulled her face down so we were looking one another in the eye.
“I mean it,” I said carefully. “I don’t know—he was really gone. He could be… Different, okay? Really different.”
“He’s not,” she said again, shaking her head as more of the crowd began rushing towards us; a couple people lingered by the big black wolf Hunter had thrown first, and I wended my way through the crowd, everyone immediately stepping back as I towed Hunter with me, and leaned down to look at it. Another male, very heavy, and it was a quicker fix than the others. Broken back. I didn’t tell Hunter, just reached down and mended it; it wasn’t even difficult, not after sewing that other guy’s throat back together and bringing him back to life. The wolves were quiet now, watching us through wide eyes.
“Witches,” I heard someone mutter, so I stood up straight to glare at them, turning in a circle with my hands on my hips.
“Damn straight, werewolves,” I snapped, and luckily someone laughed.
It might have been the Sheriff. He strode over to us, and the crowd parted the same way it had for Hunter. Who was limping, full of bites and covered in blood. He made a low rumbling noise at the tall man’s approach, his canines ripping out of his mouth again, and everybody took a big step back.
Except the Sheriff. “Brawler, eh?” He slapped Hunter’s back like they were fishing buddies. I think Hunter was too shocked to growl again. “Nice! That was quite a show.” He didn’t cut his eyes towards me, keeping them locked on Hunter. “I have to say, we thought you’d be good for a round or two. But Beta… Well, that’s something else.”
“He can’t be Beta,” I said, immediately terrified there’d be a registry or something that the Guild might see. “He—”
“He’s not,” the Sheriff said comfortably, “unless he says he wants to be. He took out my best fighters right there,” he said, his tone nothing but amiable, “but he made it pretty clear his loyalties lay—”
“He’ll fight for you any time,” I said, my breath coming fast. They wouldn’t make him leave, would they? “He just… I mean, he can’t—”
“Is he mute when he wears the man suit?” The lady who asked was about forty five years old, her eyes mischievous beneath a shock of red hair reminiscent of the younger girl who helped me with the white wolf. “Can he speak for himself?”
“He’s… He’s not much of a talker,” I said, not willing to point out the obvious difficulty of speaking through a mouthful of shark teeth.
“He doesn’t want to be in the Pack?” This from a boy, no older than seven. He stared up at me, dirt on his cheek. “But that’s the whole point of Moondown. That’s why he had to come.”
“Moondown?”
“Yeah,” the kid said, and the woman rolled her eyes behind him but I couldn’t tell if she was impatient with him or with me. “Moondown. It’s the only time all of us can fight, if we want to. That’s the point—you gotta figure out where you belong. How would you know otherwise if you could—”
“Marlow, we don’t follow those rules,” the Sheriff cut in sharply. “You stay with your mama, boy. That’s the deal in Buckeye. Got it?”
“But I’m a good fighter,” he protested, and I saw a small, dark haired woman behind him reach out and grasp his shoulder; he shook her off and stuck out his bottom lip. “When I’m eight, I’m going to fight. I bet I’m not bottom, neither.”
“No shame in being bottom,” the Sheriff said, his tone mild. “Bottom is always relative, anyway—maybe you’re on the bottom when you’ve got a thorn in your paw but climb up to third during the next Moondown, like Winter over there.” He pointed at the white wolf, bristling off to the side. “Doesn’t matter what one wolf is, regardless,” the Sheriff said, leaning down to look in the kid’s face. “Bottom is Pack. Alpha is Pack. It’s all Pack, and the pack is what matters.”
The boy’s face twisted as he considered these words, but then he took a step away from the Sheriff and crossed his arms over his chest. “But Alpha Joe said—”
“Shhh, now, hush,” the woman whispered, tugging on him again, and he started to pull away when the Sheriff reached down and put his big hand on the boy’s shoulder.
“That’s not your pack now, son,” he said softly, and for some reason there was an undertone in his voice that gave me goosebumps, something animal beneath the spoken words. “Alpha Joe shows up around here, I won’t even let Winter get him. I’ll feed him to Gra
ndma Willis,” he said, pointing at the woman with the wild red hair. She waggled her eyebrows at the boy, and he hid a smile behind his mud encrusted hand. “Or maybe we’ll give him to the witches over there, for experiments or something--they can turn him into a frog and we’ll put him in a stew. What do you say?”
“Don’t give him to that one,” the little boy said, taking another step away from Hunter. “He’s not pack. He’s… He’s…”
“He’s Hunter,” I said, my voice firm. The old redhead in the back gave me a sly grin.
“Apt,” she said, then clapped her hands. “Listen up, you buncha no-good Yankees. I made cheddar biscuits and rib-eyes and more fried chicken than you’ve ever seen in your miserable no-count lives. Get on over there and eat.” The pack slowly started to disperse, moving away from the filth of the field; two more wolves came by and gave me forlorn looks until Hunter awkwardly clasped one of my hands and placed it on their shivering pelts, showing me what they needed, where they were hurt, and afterwards he pointed to a slim wolf limping towards the spread on the tables. I startled her when I ran up, but she skipped off once her shoulder was healed, shooting me what I could only guess was a grin before she did.
Then it was just the massive black wolf, the white wolf, the Sheriff and us. I felt out of place. The chicken smelled really good but… I didn’t think we were actually welcome, no matter the surprisingly peaceful turn-over at the end.
