I glanced over my shoulder. I was already turning, my skin lined with fur from head to toe. Ayden was trailing behind significantly now, and rightfully so. I knew what he was doing. If he got too close to me, I might unintentionally rip him to shreds.
I couldn’t stop myself. It was like a primal urgency, a hunger in my mind that spread throughout my body. The force of nature worked both for and against me when I was in my werewolf form.
I clenched my jaw shut as I looked to my side and saw people tucked safely behind the glass windows of pubs and bars that were still open this time of night. I ducked and dodged down every darkened alleyway and side street, appreciating the lack of city lamps overhead. The shrouded streets were less likely to have a lot of foot traffic at this hour.
My method was simple, really. In my brain, I knew it was wrong to seek out innocent people and kill them, but my wolf body had other ideas. I squeezed my eyes shut and groaned.
Not here, not now. I will make it out of this village without attacking anyone.
It was a vow I had made to myself a long time ago, and a promise I intended to keep. The villagers already had enough to be frightened over without me adding werewolf problems to the mix.
“You’re almost there,” I told myself as I quickly hurtled across the street without looking at the cars waiting at the stoplight.
“Don’t glance their way,” I reminded myself. “Don’t give in to the temptation or you will have blood on your hands, Cameron. Do you really want that?”
Talking to myself and engaging in mental pep talks were the only ways I could slide through this mess and still come out the other side without having to do any damage control the next morning.
It had all started with a curse from my old Master back at the castle in his village. He had despised me, and if I hadn’t been able to escape, he would have killed me eventually.
My life had been a living nightmare in the dungeons of my particular Master’s castle. He would have his shifter slaves unleash their spells on me, one of which was, of course, the werewolf curse.
My Master hadn’t been as clever as he had originally assumed, however. He didn’t realize the danger of turning me into a monster nightly, from midnight to daybreak. He didn’t expect my werewolf to be force to be reckoned with, a terror that couldn’t be tamed. My Master had inadvertently set in motion his own torture when he forced those other shifter slaves to curse me.
The joke was on them, because that night, all of them died, including my Master. As soon as it was midnight and my animal form took over my body, I chewed through the lock on my cell door and let myself out. I roamed the hallways of the castle, taking out each of the men who had enchanted me. I didn’t feel any remorse at the time, and I had no regrets even to this day.
I clawed their eyes out. I sank my teeth into their necks. I watched them bleed and scream. By the time I had reached the gates on the perimeter edges of the castle property, all the guards were shaking with fear at my very presence.
I was able to run right out of there without a second glance. None of those guards wanted to chase after me, and I was certain that they were too stunned to react to what was unfolding in front of them.
That was a couple of years ago, and here I was, still in captivity but in a different way. I was free, yes, from the burden of a Master who would beat me and dominate me every chance he got.
But I was still locked into this curse every night. I couldn’t even sleep in a real bed like a normal person. Every night at ten until midnight, my friends brought me outside and locked me out of the bunker because I was unsafe even to them.
It pained me to know that my friends viewed me as a threat to their lives, even though it wasn’t something I could change. I just learned to cope, night after night. If I ever met anyone who could reverse the curse, then it would be the best day of my life.
I couldn’t get my hopes up. It was a pipe dream to ever assume that I would meet someone who could take this torment away, who could turn me back into someone wonderful and normal.
My skin itched and burned as the hair began to sprout off of every surface of my body. My nails were as sharp as daggers. If any unfortunate soul were to cross paths with me now, when I was on a rampage in a hurricane of shifting, then it would be the end of them.
I made it to the edge of the tree line. I stopped to take a few deep breaths, lungs heaving as I clutched the side of a tree and felt a stitch in my gut. I glanced over my shoulder again, feeling somewhat paranoid.
Luckily, on this night when I had been so close inside the center of the village, I hadn’t bumped into any innocent bystanders or pedestrians.
“Thank God,” I mouthed under my breath as I peered up at the yellow crescent moon that was playing hide and seek beneath the pine trees.
“And at least Ayden knows better than to catch up with me.” I chuckled internally.
If Ayden knew what was right for him, he would just stay in the village overnight where he knew it would be safe.
Werewolves were rare, but even so, we were seen in a negative light because we inevitably wanted to kill anyone who came into view. I guessed that my idiot with mush for a brain Master hadn’t realized that when he thought he was doing something powerful by turning me on that fateful night.
I was rabid in this physical state, but all wasn’t lost. There were some perks to being a werewolf during the night hours. I was able to spend most of the night patrolling the woods surrounding our bunker.
I found it my personal duty to fulfill the role of watchman at night. I figured I might as well make myself useful, because all the shifter refugees in the bunker had jobs to do, myself included. They had lookout shifts inside the bunker too, but I loved knowing I was the reason they were sleeping snugly in their beds without harm.
If I made everyone feel safer by being located outside of the bunker during sleeping hours, then so be it. I would show them that I could keep the terrors of the darkness away. I would make it my goal to ensure no guards or Masters approached anywhere near this bunker where we lived and worked.
So far, we had been in the clear. We hadn’t seen any suspicious activity up here in these woods since we found the empty bunker and decided to make it our safe haven. We knew we weren’t safe, though, and danger always lurked around every corner. We just had to keep our bearings and wits about us and we would be just fine.
I tromped through the woods, still thankful that I hadn’t encountered anyone on my breakaway through the village. I held onto the trees as my eyes attempted to adjust to the darkness swallowing everything around me.
The crescent moon wasn’t doing me any favors tonight. There was no path illuminated for me as I scurried further into the thickness of the forest.
I trekked up the steep incline of the mountainside in the direction of the bunker that I knew I wouldn’t be able to enter until morning. My thighs ached in protest, but I kept going, further distancing myself from the village and the innocent people down below. I wasn’t cold, even though my breath was a thick fog in front of my face that plumed like smoke and then rapidly disappeared into the air again. I didn’t mind the frigid temperatures when they descended after dark. I had my fur to keep me warm, and I was always on the move anyway.
I knew that the brisk weather was bound to keep me alert and awake, even though I did choose to rest occasionally throughout the night.
I plopped down on a slick gray rock next to the river that flowed through the mountain and downward to form a reservoir in the valley down below. The water was moving violently fast tonight, making a rushing sound as gravity forced it down.
On the surface of the flowing river, the faint shimmer of the moon made it appear as if the moon itself was running downstream and bouncing along the rocks as it went.
I sighed and propped my back against the scratchy bark of a pine tree trunk behind me. I glanced up at the leaves on the branches that swayed delicately in the gentle breeze. I laughed ironically.
“Who wou
ld have ever thought I would end up like this?”
I was speaking to the wind of course. No one was there to respond to me. The breeze took the emptiness of my words and carried them away, as if trying to relieve me of my burdens, but it only helped a little.
The close call in the village had left too much adrenaline pumping through my veins. Restless, I stood, following the river and its current. I walked along the edge of the water, making sure not to step into it because it would be like icicles of wrath stabbing at my skin through my fur.
That water rarely got much above freezing, but when it did, my fellow bunkmates and I would sometimes come down here and splash around, me in my human form and them in their shifted, animal forms.
We enjoyed carefree moments when we could, and we would absorb every enticing second of that happiness because it was always fleeting. There was too much responsibility and caution going around the bunker for anyone to be at ease all of the time.
Aside from Ayden, maybe. He was the most laid back of all of us, the most confident. We always joked around with him and told him that if he didn’t stop looking in the mirror, then one day he might find himself staring straight into the face of an enemy behind him.
Ayden had vanity, but he was a good soul at heart. I knew he would do anything for us if it came down to it. We liked to poke fun at each other lightheartedly. It was just how we managed to stay sane in such tight quarters.
As my mind began to wander through the darkness, my thoughts also began to ambush me. It happened from time to time. Once a flashback started, there wasn’t much I could do to derail my mind into thinking about something else.
My Master had placed this werewolf curse upon me because he wanted to punish me. He was insanely jealous of a relationship I had with another female prisoner in his castle, a foreign and mysterious woman named Amber.
She had spoken with an accent, but she never would tell anyone where she had originally come from. Her chestnut hair had fallen in feathery waves halfway down her slender back and she had been one of the only companions I could trust and rely on during the time of my captivity.
My Master was madly, desperately in love with her. It was hopeless, but he never gave up the fight. The more she resisted him, the harder he tried. The more ruthlessly he would beat her and force himself upon her.
It enraged me to witness the brutal way he had physically and emotionally abused Amber, but we were all in the same boat. None of us were free from the anger and hostility of a frustrated Master not getting his way.
Amber was just the one who had received the brunt force of his rage because she was his favorite. It seemed to be the way it always went, and I felt sorry for her. She would cry on my shoulder and I would rub her back and try to console her with gentle words.
The words were all transparent, of course, because at the time I knew that we would never escape.
But I did manage to escape, and I couldn’t believe I had been living in freedom, aside from the curse, for a little over two years now. I wished I knew what happened to Amber and how she was faring.
It had all happened so fast. In my werewolf form, I knew that if I had gone to try and rescue her and set her free, that I would have ended up just massacring her. I didn’t want to maul someone I cared about so deeply.
I pushed Amber to the back of my mind. I knew that it wasn’t meant to be because if it had been, she’d be with me right now. Maybe there was someone else out there who was my soulmate above all the rest, who would take my flaws and turn them into something magically beautiful.
I wanted someone who would see me for who I was and not view me as a monster. A gentle and compassionate woman who would never leave my side. That’s what I wanted.
I kicked at a pebble and it went flying through the air and landed somewhere unknown in the shadows.
I sighed profoundly, trying to lift the weight of the world off my shoulders as I roamed in solitude and tried to shuffle through my boredom. Out here in the wilderness, my thoughts were my own worst enemy.
I had too much time on my hands to muddle through the woes of my past. There were no distractions, just the occasional sound of the breeze floating through the air, an owl hooting in the distance, and the river streaming past.
I envisioned the human me crouching down and taking a stick from atop a bed of soggy leaves. He’d begin drawing pictures of the sun and houses in the village into the soil with the stick.
I imagined a better life out there for us all, without the rotting infiltration of the Masters and their guards. I attempted to remember a time when everyone lived carefree lives without glancing over their shoulders all the time or being afraid of their own shadows.
Monsters lived among them, and it was time to take them out. It was time to slam the door shut on the enemies that creeped among us. The signs of the uprisings were good news, but it wasn’t promising enough to hold weight until I actually saw with my own eyes the raids happening in the castles.
I smiled at the thought and drifted off to sleep. It wouldn’t last long, and I would soon awaken from being uncomfortable, but I needed to take a snooze when I could get one. I never stayed in the same place in the woods overnight for long. It was a rookie mistake, too dangerous. If someone was looking for me, I had to keep myself going to throw them off.
A little while later, I knew that the sun would start to brighten the sky once more and replace the moon. I knew that I would be allowed back into the bunker to have a shower and breakfast in my belly. I just had to hold on for a little while longer.
In this body of mine, patience was a virtue.
11
Sophia
The ride back to the castle was mental torture. Thom hadn’t been in the car on the way back with me. He stayed to party with his elite friends and socialite acquaintances. I didn’t mind. It just meant that I had some time to stall before he got back to the castle and took his festering anger out on me.
At the same time, I wanted to just get the abuse over with so that I could put it behind me for now and I wouldn’t have to sit in my cell fretting anxiously about what he was going to do to me later. I wrung my fingers together nervously and periodically wiped an anxious and clammy sweat from my palms.
After what had seemed like not enough time for me to collect my fraying composure, the driver rolled up to the circular driveway of the castle on the hill.
“Get out of the car,” one of Thom’s guards snapped at me as he jerked the back door open. He yanked me aggressively by the arm. “Move, now.”
“I’m going as fast as I can,” I said.
“What did you just say to me, you little wench?” The guard gave me a sneer as he leaned down and inspected me. We were almost nose to nose.
His breath was hot on my cheek and his eyes were cold and dark.
“Nothing.” I swallowed hard and shook my head. “I didn’t say anything.”
The guard chuckled mockingly. “That’s what I thought. Now come on, get moving like I told you before.”
I took a deep breath as he nudged me in the back with his elbow. The guards were not supposed beat slaves unless Thom was present and able to watch in glee as the action unfolded.
This guard was pushing his luck and he took it almost to the borderline, but he knew what was best for him. He knew that I would tell on him if he touched me out of turn, no matter how badly it was gnawing at him inside to do so.
We made it inside the castle and I took the walk of shame back down the hallway into the bottom dungeon. The other slaves were locked away in their own cells. They glowered at me and hissed as I passed them by.
I kept my head down and stared at the ground as I walked along with the guard behind me to keep me going at a pace he approved of.
“What happened?” A male slave said as he craned his neck outside of his cell. “You weren’t the most beautiful princess at the gala after all?”
A few other neighboring prisoners cackled in response.
Hot tears stung m
y eyes, but I sniffed and kept moving, refusing to give the slave a reaction. I lifted my chin and squared my shoulders. I had control over my own mental anguish and they didn’t deserve to see any of it exposed.
“All right,” the guard escorting me said with a bored sigh. “In you go.”
I walked into my cell and stood at the door as I watched him lock me in.
“I suggest you get some rest before the Master comes back,” he said with a bellowing laugh. Then, as he walked away, he called over his shoulder, “If you know what’s good for you, that is.”
I balled my fists and clenched my jaw. I felt the tears spilling over my cheeks, but I made no effort to wipe them away. I just stood there in the shadows cast over my tiny room, staring at the darkened hallway until my legs were too tired to stand anymore.
I walked over to the edge of my bed and plopped down, sagging into the mattress and holding my head in my hands.
What was going to become of me? Surely nothing good.
I stood, too antsy to stay still. I was a nervous wreck on the inside and it was showing by the way I paced in a circle around my tight quarters.
“I’m going to be in for it with Thom,” I whispered to myself. “But I am a survivor. I always have been and always will be.”
In my defense, I didn’t really have much of a choice at the time of the incident. It was only natural that my first instinct would be to flee the scene when people began to throw their food at me.
I cringed and whimpered at the memory of the food hitting my exposed skin and dirtying my beautiful dress. It wasn’t often that I got a chance to get dolled up for a fancy party, and I couldn’t even enjoy the moment before I crashed down to reality once again.
Thom hadn’t given me permission to exit the dance floor, which was why I was so worried about what my punishment was going to be. All the slaves, not just me, had to ask for permission to do anything and everything, practically breathe. If we didn’t, trouble and viciousness awaited us.
“There’s nothing you can do about it now. It is what it is.” I attempted to calm myself down.
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