by Elena Lawson
I had to be getting close by now.
Just a little further, I urged myself, imagining the warm hearth in Clay and Jared’s living room. My cozy bed. Viv and Layla pulling me into a warm hug, so glad to find that I’m alright.
Except…they didn’t even know I was missing.
If Devin had succeeded in keeping up appearances—no one did.
My face pinched as my chest tightened and I rested for a moment against the peeling bark of a thin birch tree, finding the soft texture and scent so incredibly soothing that I found myself wanting to curl up at its base and sleep. I was so so tired.
Just a little break. Five minutes. I just needed five minutes and then I can keep going.
It was a lie. I knew even as I pressed my back against the base of the tree and settled my bottom against the damp ground that I wouldn’t be getting back up. At least, not much more than five minutes.
But you have to…
I tipped my head back to rest against the tree and looked up at the sky between the branches of the forest’s canopy. It was so beautiful. The forest was so peaceful. If I closed my eyes, I could just drift—
An eerie tremble rolled up my spine and I straightened, bringing my head off the bark with slow, measured movements. I wasn’t even breathing.
The forest had been peaceful. Filled with sounds I’d grown used to falling asleep to over the past months. The rustle of leaves. The skitter of small animals in the underbrush. The crickets and other insects.
There was none of that. It was spine-tinglingly silent. Not even the wind dared interrupt the miasmal sense of foreboding that slithered over my mud caked body like a serpent scenting its prey with its forked tongue flicking before scaled lips and shining black eyes.
But the eyes I saw in the wood were not beady. And they were not black.
They were brightest emerald. And they were trained on me with an unwavering focus.
The wolf strode from the shadows with a hunter’s grace, its massive paws silent against the mossy carpet of the forest. Its canine lips were curled back over shining white teeth. Its hot tongue snaked out from its jaws as it neared, a low growl reverberating out from its muscled chest.
This wolf was not Jared. And it was not Clay.
I whimpered, pressing my back into the tree. My hands clenched fistfuls of crackling brown leaves as I braced for an attack.
I had the presence of mind to want to feel around for a weapon on the ground, but I couldn’t peel my gaze from the beast stalking ever closer. I was afraid that if I did, he would lunge.
“P-Please,” I croaked. “Don’t.”
He was only a few feet away now, his deep gray and brown fur rippling as he blew steam from his nostrils and planted his front paws firmly against the earth.
The wolf that was Devin lifted its head to the sky, its wide green eyes reflecting the full moon against their glassy surface. When those green eyes fixed themselves back on me, it was with an apology and I knew what he was trying to say without the need for a human voice box.
It’s time.
I screamed.
I screamed loud and hard, shocking myself with the volume I was able to manage even though the sound was raw, and scratching and my chest twinged from the pressure.
The scream was cut off midway when Devin lunged. His eyes were sharp and wild. His jaw agape. I threw my body to the side and rolled. A wolfish yelp told me he’d hit the tree and I was up and running, fueled by pure unfiltered adrenaline.
My vision was no longer dull. My body no longer ached. I felt nothing except for the wind in my hair and the passage of my feet over earth, my heart bleating out a thudding rhythm in my ears. For three blissful seconds, it was like I was flying—until I wasn’t.
I was pushed forward and sailed five feet before I landed on my chest, splayed like a goddamned starfish in the dirt. Devin was on me before I could blink, and pain exploded through my shoulder. His jaws clamped down and warm liquid ran over my skin as I cried out, trying unsuccessfully to buck him off me.
All the while inside I was screaming.
No. No. No.
Please god no.
My eyes stung with the welling of hot fat tears as I silently pleaded, not for the pain to stop, but for whatever was in his stupid magical wolf saliva to not work.
There came a savage snarl to my right a split second before Devin’s weight was shifted off of me. Without the pressure of him on me, my lungs rushed to fill with air, inhaling a mouthful of dirt and debris. I coughed, scrambling to get myself on my feet. My hand went up to staunch the blood flow from my shoulder.
The jacket was slick with blood and I pulled my injured hand threw the sleeve so I could remove it from that arm and get a better look. My shirt was torn and wet and I ripped it more, needing to see the damage, as though if I were able to see the bite mark itself, I would somehow know if I was going to shift.
My tiny, gasping breaths halted as I assessed the wound. It was so gross I had to stifle the urge to be ill. But the torn and puckered skin, the welling of blood, and smattering of dirt made it look mundane. It could have been a dog bite. It was nothing. It would heal.
I was going to be alright—
The strangled keening of an animal had me coming back to myself, finding the source of the cries just as a howl shattered the air somewhere behind me. I pressed myself against a tree, breathing heavily.
A wolf—a shifter—had his jaws around Devin’s throat, squeezing as it held him down with a strong paw. It was bigger than Devin. Bigger even than Clay’s black wolf. This one was matte gray with black markings around its hate-filled orange eyes. I knew without seeing his human form—it was Ryland. Jared and Clay’s pack alpha.
I whirled, emitting a startled chirp as a blur of black barreled into the small clearing, growling at Devin’s wolf and then at Ryland, restless as it drug its claws over the ground, turning up dirt. At first, I thought the wolf was wanting to protect Devin, but when it lunged to take a bite out of him itself, I realized it just wanted the chance to tear Devin apart.
Its great black head caught the moonlight and I saw its icy blue eyes. Clay—my heart gave a little start.
A white wolf sped into the clearing as though a bow loosed from an arrow, surveying Ryland as he pushed Devin’s canine head into the earth and bit down harder on the scruff of his neck with unrelenting jaws. Then taking in Clay with a low whine. And then…its amber eyes. One shining with the glow of a sunset, and the other with a fleck of green in the lower left corner.
“Jared?” I choked and the wolf sped to me, skidding in the dirt as it stopped, whining high in its throat as it pressed its big furry head into my belly, almost knocking me over. I buried my bloodstained hand into his fur, dropping to my knees to pull his head further into my chest. I tried to loosen my fist in his fur, but couldn’t, and he didn’t seem to mind. His cold nose nudged a spot under my neck, as though trying to lift my head.
I lifted it to look into pain-filled eyes, wide and searching.
“I-I’m alright,” I told him. It wasn’t exactly the truth. But I was alive, and that was a win in my books.
Jared sniffed my throat and I felt his canine body go rigid beneath my fingers. Reflexively, my hand fell away and he broke free of my embrace, sniffing a trail along my breastbone and up to my collarbone, and eventually, to the wound in my shoulder.
He barked, his hackles rising as he jumped a foot backwards, his amber gaze sweeping over me in horror.
My jaw tightened. I was about to reassure him that the bite didn’t have any effect when three other wolves flew past us from behind, moving to inspect the scene. My pulse pounded in my ears. They were all shifters. They had to be. They were too big to be normal wolves.
Two of them watched me curiously, making low noises in their throats, while the other took over for Ryland, wrapping his jaw around Devin’s throat so Ryland could retract his.
Devin yipped and then went still under the pressure of the larger wolf atop him, givin
g in to the dominance of the other wolf. For a fleeting second, I wished the wolf atop him would just tighten its jaws a little more.
No, not just tighten his jaw…I wished he would tear the fucker’s throat out and leave him to bleed out over the drying moss.
I gasped a little at the malice of the thought and tried to shake off the feeling, finding my vision had begun to blur again.
Ryland stalked over to where Jared still stood rigidly in front of me. Clay was still snarling and looking back at Devin every few seconds, but he followed Ryland until the three wolves had formed a line in front of me.
“Th-Thanks,” I murmured, not knowing if they were able to understand me in this form. I thought they could, though. “I need—”
I curled over, clutching my stomach as a stabbing sensation stole my breath away. I moaned, curling my fingernails into the earth as the aching spread. Colorful spots dotted my vision and I heard Jared whine.
Squinting, I looked up at him. He was trying to come closer, to help me, or maybe to comfort me, but Ryland stopped him with an outstretched paw and a short growl.
Clay’s wolf watched me with a stony expression, as though he was watching something he’d rather not see, but that he had no power to stop.
I looked past them to the other three wolves. All were watching me. I cried out as another wave of pain like a thousand knives tearing me apart from the inside out washed over me. My eyes blurred with tears, and my body heaved with a great tremor and a sudden wash of intense nausea and burning heat.
My chest felt like it was on fire. The back of my neck burned. The heat raced through me like my veins were filled with gasoline instead of blood and I shuddered, falling to the ground to curl up into a ball.
“P-Please,” I begged through the searing agony, not even sure what I was asking for. My head was spinning, or maybe it was the earth that was spinning. Whatever the fuck it was, I needed it to stop. I couldn’t take it.
The pain stopped for one blissful second and I slitted my eyes open to see the wound on my shoulder had healed. Not fully, but the bleeding had stopped, the tears in my flesh had closed. All that remained was the puckered ridges of four large holes and two smaller ones. As if the bite had happened months ago, instead of minutes.
A slap of pressure and sizzling pain like a punch to my chest made me flip onto my back. The moon stared down at me from her perch in the black sky and my eyes widened as though I was seeing her for the first time.
The air had a sudden crystalline quality. I could see every speck of dust like tiny shining specs of gold and silver in the moonlight. I could hear the scurrying of a critter that had to be half a mile away. The trees groaning in the bend of the wind felt louder than it ever had before.
My heart in my chest felt larger, it’s beating harder, louder, and faster than was humanly possible.
A scream tore from my throat as the first bone snapped. The rest followed in a symphony of torment. My screams warped. Changed. And before I had time to consider the inhuman quality of my own voice, the pain stopped in a blinding flash of pure white over my eyes and I scrabbled to my feet, a soft whining sound coming from somewhere close by.
I spun, searching for the sound, but it wasn’t anyone else. The sound had come from me. My great sides heaved to draw in a breath. Breath that clouded in front of my jet-black snout. My heart was still thudding like the beating of war drums in the deep. But now it beat within the chest of an animal.
I bowed my head, moving back as I whined, until I backed into a tree and yelped, scampering away as though scorched by its cool bark on my flank. It happened.
Holy fucking shit.
Oh god.
Oh no.
How do I turn back?
Disjointedly, I realized I could still have rational thought. I was still here, I just had very little control over my animal urges. The whining sound was still pressing out through my jaws, but I wasn’t aware that I was doing it, and I was powerless to stop it.
I saw my clothes laid in tattered ribbons over the dried leaves and had the gripping sense of being naked. I flinched back, realizing how ridiculous the feeling was since I was covered in a coat of thick fur.
With my sharper canine eyes, I took in my surroundings. When my jerking gaze fell on Devin, still pressed hard into the ground, my wolf lunged. A terrifying growl thundered out of my chest, viciously savage even to my own ears.
One of the other wolves blocked me, knocking me back to land hard on my side until I managed to get my footing back under me. I growled at him.
Devin whined, and I looked at him again, this time seeing just how pathetic he looked subdued by the other wolf. His green eyes met mine and I felt nothing but an overwhelming fury that my wolf had to work to contain with nasally snarls and chuffs, knowing I would only be rebuffed if I tried to attack again.
But my wolf was difficult to contain. As though she was a completely separate entity, she prowled and pacing, eager for the taste of his blood on her tongue.
The creak and snap of a twig behind me drew my attention away from Devin and my wolf reared back in anticipation of an attack.
Two wolves, one white and one black drew forward while the other larger gray wolf remained sitting sentinel behind. I knew they were Jared and Clay, but they were something else, too.
A roaring voice not unlike my own echoed in my skull. Mine, she said as she watched them approach somberly, with measured steps as though approaching a beast much larger than I was.
I met Jared’s amber eyes and the breath whooshed from my lungs as though sucked out by a cosmic vacuum, and I tipped my head back and howled long and loud into the night as my heart expanded in my chest until I thought it would burst from the pressure.
Jared’s howl rose to meet mine, the duet creating a haunting harmony of sound that filtered down deep into my ear canals and reverberated through every nerve ending in my body.
When I lowered my head, my skin bristled, sending my fur rippling over my body as something I could not name settled into the marrow of my bones.
Jared moved in closer, and though I wanted to retreat, I found I couldn’t. My wolf wouldn’t budge. And when Jared pressed his head against mine, rubbing it as though in an animal embrace, my wolf shivered at the sensation and something warm spread through her belly. Mine, she growled again.
Mate. Jared’s unmistakable voice flooded my thoughts and I perked up, searching his eyes. Mate, he spoke again in my head.
Mate, my wolf responded, as though agreeing.
Movement from the edge of my periphery sent a chill skating down my spine.
Mate, a separate voice entered my thoughts. This one gruff and deep with a reverberating timbre that pressed down on me like a physical weight. When I lifted my gaze to Clay and our eyes locked, I whimpered, feeling the same breathlessness as my body awakened to him.
Unable to help myself, no matter how hard I tried to fight it, head bowed, and teeth bared, the howl tore out of me. It ripped from my chest, even louder than before, twisted with the anguished sounds of my resistance.
But as Clay’s howl diminished with mine, there was no doubting the settling of something else in my bones. Jared bent his head and upper torso low, growling furiously at Clay. Clay only watched him with a steely indifference and made no move to return Jared’s challenge.
Ryland and the other wolves were watching from the shadows, and it was like I could hear their thoughts.
Impossible.
Not right.
Two tails?
But when Clay, ignoring Jared’s snarling from only a few feet away, moved in, I buckled under his stare. His bright blue eyes glittered dangerously, and he bent his head to me, as though unwillingly bowing to a queen.
No. I don’t want this.
I don’t want any of this.
I managed to get a modicum of control back and though my inner wolf was chanting Mate! Mate! Mate! The part of me that was irrevocably still Allie took hold of the reins.
My
strong hind legs launched me over Clay’s bowing form. Past Jared’s coiled beast. And away into the night.
No one followed, and I let the gravity of what’d happened finally sink in. I cried out inside and my wolf let out inhuman sounds that matched what I felt within…until I pushed it all away, unable to think about it anymore. Not yet. Not right now. I didn’t want to ever think about it. Didn’t want it to be real.
I focused instead on my light footfalls. The cold air in my lungs. The burn of my pumping muscle.
The wind whipped past my lithe body as I raced over the earth. It filled my ears and funneled through channels of my fur.
If I told myself all of it was a dream. That I was still Allie and still my own, I could almost pretend I was flying. It was the tiniest thread of bliss in a tapestry woven of dread.
It was enough…for now. To keep going until I figured out how to live as something less than human.
Follow Allie’s story in SHIFTED SOUL, the wolves of Forest Grove book two!
Get it here: http://mybook.to/shiftedsoul
Bonus
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