She opened her mouth to tell him she was still alive, and to her surprise, no longer suffering. Her first word came out like a growl, and she clamped her hand over her mouth in shock. The second time she tried, she got the same thing. It took four tries to say his name in English, and when she did, Chase jumped up, looking around wildly.
“I think…Chase, I think it’s over.”
He pulled her into his arms and kissed her. “How do you feel?” he asked when he broke their kiss. “What hurts? Anything?”
“Actually, I feel great. Better than I can ever remember, really.” He moved in to kiss her again and she put her hand up to stop him. “You might want to wait for me to brush my teeth. It’s a swamp in there.”
He moved her hand with a growl and crushed his mouth against hers. He didn’t give her any tongue, though. Smart man.
Her first attempt at shifting came late that night after she’d scrubbed herself thoroughly and eaten a meal fit for three men, courtesy of Gypsy. Chase took her deep into the woods far from the cabins, thinking she’d enjoy her first time more without worrying about anyone watching. He was right.
As it turned out, shifting was harder than it looked. She couldn’t just think shift and have it actually happen.
“That comes later,” Chase said, “after you’ve been doing it for a while and your brain learns to work with your new body. For now, think about how your body needs to change. Concentrate on shifting your muscles and bones.”
The first thing she managed to get right had nothing to do with her muscles. She’d been wondering what it would be like to have Chase take her while they were both in wolf form and her canines descended.
“Good! Keep going.” Chase looked thrilled beyond description at that tiny victory.
“Okay, I’m trying.” She willed her body to change, imagined herself as a wolf, and even tried thinking like a wolf. It didn’t work. “I didn’t think it would be this hard.” None of her heroines ever had trouble shifting for the first time.
“I have an idea.” He stepped in closer and stroked the side of her face with his thumb before leaning down to kiss her. It was a sensual kiss, starting as just a stroke of his lips and ending with him claiming a fistful of her hair as he tasted her tongue.
For Avery, every kiss felt like the first time with him, and her body, deprived of his during the change, promptly sparked to life. The heat that started at her core had nothing to do with any fever. It was a living hunger only he could quench. “We could try again later,” she offered, when he released her mouth. “I can think of other ways to occupy our time.”
“Just try again.”
She watched as he moved a few feet away and shifted into his wolf form. “Show off.” He made it look effortless.
Her big, black wolf walked over and butted her gently with his head, then sniffed at her. That didn’t surprise her, but he caught her off guard when he fastened his jaws lightly on her arm.
He applied the slightest bit of pressure, then let go and licked the spot.
Avery laughed. She got it. Chase wanted to play, and something inside her seemed to scratch its way to the surface, wanting to join him. She tried again, focusing on Chase, his smell, and the way his tail thumped on the ground when he sat. All the while, she willed her body to move, transform, shift.
White fur sprouted from her skin, and Avery got so excited she shrieked and lost her focus. Taking a deep breath, she tried again. That time, she managed more fur and some claws. It wasn’t easy, but on the fifth try, she finally did it. The wolf within made her appearance.
Breathing deeply, she took in the scents around her, then let her tongue hang out to taste the air. Her nose had been more sensitive since she’d come out of her horrible fever prison, but once she’d shifted, the world came alive with smells. Her surroundings looked different, and she knew she had sharper vision to thank for that. She couldn’t wait to explore with her new senses.
Pouncing at Chase, she produced a bark that sounded strange coming from her body. She bumped heads with him, then turned and raced away, hoping he would understand her.
Chase was after her in an instant, and she ran hard, enjoying the feel of her muscles working and the fresh air in her lungs. She’d make him work for it, but she knew he’d eventually catch her. Avery couldn’t wait.
Chapter 14
A little over a week after her first shift, Avery and Chase had packed up her things for the return to Deep Valley. The initial time after her change had been an ordeal. First, Roscoe had acted weird with her, probably scenting her change, but had been all too willing to give Chase his love. It had taken a lot of coaxing, some tears, and plenty of treats, but eventually the dog had decided she hadn’t been body-snatched and became her best friend again.
She hadn’t been overly thrilled about having Liam as a houseguest, but he seemed to make an effort to give her space. He’d also welcomed her into the pack and pledged to protect her as he did all the other pack members. When she’d returned from shifting for the first time, he, Gypsy, and Noah were gone.
She’d had to convince Lila and Gus that they could handle White Oak Run on their own. They’d pretty much been doing so anyway. Avery gave them both raises, and Gus agreed to move into her cabin to provide on-site management. Lila would continue to commute from town. With good-byes said and tears shed, Avery left most of her furniture behind, opting to take only her desk, all of her technology, her personal items, and the first piece of furniture she’d ever owned. She and Chase would start fresh, with not only a new home but also furnishings they chose together.
The period after moving to Deep Valley with Chase had passed like a whirlwind. Avery had met every one of his pack members and still couldn’t remember all of their names or even all of their faces. Most welcomed her with open arms, but there remained a few among them who didn’t seem to be her biggest fans. Avery had tried to win them over by being extra-friendly but had since decided to let it go. After years of being different, and not always in the best of ways, she’d learned to adopt a can’t-please-everybody philosophy.
She still hadn’t warmed up to Liam, and she still questioned whether he truly believed her story. The fact that she had become one of them seemed to have eased things somewhat, but he still hadn’t apologized. Gypsy insisted that Liam had accepted her as one of them but needed longer than most to warm up.
That was two months ago, and they were still living in Chase’s home with his brothers. There were a few empty homes they could have moved into in town, but Avery was in the grip of a crippling attack of indecision. For the first time in her life, she had what felt like a family. Chase’s mother and father had taken her under their wings and Gypsy became the little sister she’d never had. With the exception of Liam, Chase’s brothers were as playful with her as they were with Gypsy, and as protective. Staying in town would allow her to remain just a quick walk away from them as well as a bunch of other wolves she was beginning to call friends, but Chase had also offered to build a cabin for them deep in the woods, which was where she felt most at peace.
“Just remember, whatever you decide doesn’t have to be forever,” Chase said.
They’d been having their umpteenth conversation about her choice anxiety. He’d been patient about it, but she knew he wanted the decision made, so they could start making a real home together. She wanted that, too, and living with his brothers did have its downside. She didn’t want them listening to her vocals every night. Chase wasn’t the kind of man she could make love to silently. Since she refused to make love to him if doing so meant embarrassment the next morning, she spent a lot of nights with his hand clamped over her mouth as she came. She’d bit him once in the heat of the moment. It hadn’t been pretty.
Sighing, she leaned back against his chest. They were attending the pack’s end-of-summer gathering in a beautiful, grassy clearing dotted with weeping willow trees. It reminded her of White Oak Run.
Living among the pack had taken some getting us
ed to for Roscoe, but you would never know it watching him at the gathering. The pups loved him, and Avery smiled as she watched him run and play with a group of little ones.
“I guess I’m greedy,” Avery said. “I want both.”
“Then we’ll have both. We’ll live in town, and I’ll build a cabin we can go to whenever you want, like a retreat.”
She turned in his arms to look up at him. “We can do that? You’d do that for me?”
He shrugged. “Why are you surprised? I love you. There’s nothing I wouldn’t do for you, except let you guzzle that disgusting drink first thing in the morning.”
It was a running battle with them. Chase had something serious against soda, especially since she drank diet. He didn’t seem to care that she was now likely to live what felt like forever to her. Apparently, he couldn’t stand the thought of her putting it into her body. Their first real fight happened when he poured her stash down the sink. Avery had needed her morning fix and had been pissed enough to slap him over it. Gypsy had bought a couple of cases for her after that. Unfortunately, it hadn’t been diet, so she now spent most mornings hopped up on sugar as well as caffeine. She’d have to fix that the next time she went shopping on her own.
“I love you, too, Chase.”
Her lips had just parted for his kiss when a female voice interrupted them, and Avery looked up into a face she didn’t recognize. Liam had invited a few other packs to the gathering, so Avery had been meeting people all day. More faces and names to forget. Too bad becoming a shifter hadn’t improved her ability to match faces with names.
“Do you remember me?” the woman repeated.
Avery twisted forward and got to her feet, brushing the grass off her ass. “I’m sorry. Have we met before? I’m really bad with names.” God, how many times was she going to have to say that? She needed a cheat sheet or something. The woman was striking, with her deeply tanned skin, red hair, and green eyes. Somehow Avery thought she would at least remember her face if they’d met before.
“It’s okay. We knew each other…a long time ago.” She held something out to Avery, some sort of book. “Open it.”
Curious, Avery took the book from her. It was lightweight, some sort of scrapbook. It looked and felt old, so Avery flipped the first page open carefully. What she saw made the whole world tilt. She couldn’t speak. For a moment, she couldn’t even breathe.
Chase stood up and looked over her shoulder. “Is that you?”
The little girl in the picture at the top of the page was definitely her, but she’d never seen the photo before. She looked happy, wearing a bathing suit and covered in mud. Below it was another photo. This one held three smiling children, similarly covered in mud. Avery was in this one, too, with what had to be the woman who’d handed her the book, given her coloring and hair. The third child was a little boy in a pair of shorts. The boy from her nightmare. The caption listed three names, Avery, Ryder and Billie.
“What is this?” Avery asked when she finally recovered her voice. Chase wrapped an arm around her, and she was grateful for the support. Her legs felt like rubber. She flipped to the next page, and her heart almost stopped. There was a photo of her mother and father, and another of the four of them together, Avery on her father’s lap, the little boy in their mother’s arms.
The tears came without warning. So many years without seeing their faces, only ever seeing them in a dream that everyone told her was a fantasy. And the little boy? She really did have a brother!
Seeing her parents again was amazing. Her aunt and uncle had claimed not to have a single photo of her parents, so she’d had nothing to hold onto.
“I’m Billie, Avery. The one in that photo on the first page. We were friends.”
Her brother’s name was Ryder then. Avery needed to sit down, and that’s exactly what she did, grateful for the earth under her ass to ground her. Billie didn’t seem to find that weird and plopped down opposite her.
Chase asked the questions she couldn’t form yet. “How and when did you know Avery and her family?”
“When I was a pup, we lived with the Red River Pack. I only became a member of the Moon Valley Pack after I mated. There was a family there with a male shifter, two human females, and a half-breed little boy—your family, Avery. I became friends with you and your little brother. My parents, like most shifters, weren’t real big on cameras, but your mom was always snapping photos of us. I took the ones in there where your whole family is together. They’re not great because I was only nine at the time, but…keep looking. It’s mostly photos of the two of us, but there are a couple more of your family in there.”
Avery could hardly see for the tears in her eyes. “How did you know I was here?”
“Your alpha sent men to our pack to pass your photo around. They wouldn’t say why or how you were important, but something about your eyes stayed with me. I thought, at first, that it was crazy to think you were the same Avery, but the more I thought about it, the more I believed it could be you. So…I brought my scrapbook with me today. I made it not long after you disappeared.” She glanced at the crowd behind her. “I showed it to your alpha when I got here, and he grilled me like a common criminal. Then, he pointed you out and said I should come over and show you. He told me you couldn’t remember much and said to tell you I’m his apology, whatever that means.”
“What do you know about her family?” Chase asked. “And how they died?”
“Like I told your alpha, who says he plans to question me further, by the way, I don’t know much. From what I remember, your father was a human who’d been attacked by one of our kind. He completed his change and had a pretty rough time adjusting, according to my parents. You were a baby at the time, and your mother refused to go through the change. At some point, my pack took your parents in. I don’t know why, just that it happened. Ryder was born later.”
Avery fought past the huge lump in her throat, unable to stop looking at the photos of the family she’d lost. “What happened to them? I mean, was there really a fire?”
“You really don’t remember any of it?” Billie asked.
Avery looked at her, shaking her head. “No. I remember an argument, a very loud one. My mother was scared. She told me to run and take my little brother with me, but it was too late and I ended up by myself. Someone picked me up and ran with me, and that’s all I remember.”
“All I can tell you is there was a fire in our village one night. It took forever to put out. I woke up to the sound of yelling as the pack dealt with it, but my parents wouldn’t let me out of the house to see what was going on. I learned the next morning that the fire was at your house. I was inconsolable. You were my best friend.”
Avery wiped at her eyes as tears gathered in Billie’s. She knew what she had to ask next, but she couldn’t. She just couldn’t.
“The bodies?” Chase asked for her.
“Just one confirmed,” Billie said. “The pack insisted you were all dead anyway. Our alpha said there was no way anyone else had survived, but I never really believed it. I hoped it wasn’t true, that you’d managed to escape somehow.”
A chill raced through Avery’s body as she struggled to process everything she’d just heard. The pain at the loss of her parents and the brother she hadn’t even been sure existed had dulled over the years, but now it felt fresh. Even so, Avery was glad for it. The hurt came with hope, and she had Chase and his family, Billie, and even Liam to thank for it. They’d only found one body, which meant she could hope. One body meant two had survived.
Epilogue
Avery looked up from her laptop, taking in the welcome sight of flowers in bloom. It had been a long winter, and she was pleased to see the return of warmer weather. She’d taken to working outdoors whenever she could. Since her change, she found it hard to spend long hours inside during the day, which made the cold days of winter a lot less fun. It was funny that her wolf didn’t seem to take issue with spending the nights inside, though. Chase made the night
s interesting.
Her life had changed in many ways since she’d met Chase. She’d been content before, but now she couldn’t imagine her life without him or his crazy family. Too bad she couldn’t write about them. Liam had been firm on that point. She could continue her writing as long as she didn’t reveal anything real. The pack, their customs, and the truth about wolf shifters in general were all off-limits. At first she’d balked at that. It seemed a cruel trick of fate that just when she learned the truth, she was also forbidden from sharing any of it, but she was one of them now, and that meant obeying the alpha.
Avery’s ears pricked up at the sound of running at the same time that her nose picked up a familiar scent. Logan.
The huge black-and-gray wolf skidded to a halt just beyond the porch stairs, shifting amidst a cloud of dirt he’d managed to kick up. “We found him. We found Ryder!”
Avery stood so fast her laptop fell to the ground. Logan’s news was beyond anything she’d ever expected. “Are you sure it’s him?”
“Yes. He’s a half-breed going by the name Ryder Montgomery. Chase sent me to find you. We have him at the border, but he didn’t come quietly. Liam is hoping seeing you will help, so we don’t have to drag him back here like a prisoner.”
She doubted that. He probably didn’t remember her. Still, she was already tearing at her clothes, the first time she wasn’t embarrassed to strip in front of someone other than Chase. There was no time to waste on modesty. “How did you find him?”
“Gypsy,” Logan said.
After months of practice, shifting had become effortless for Avery. Taking her wolf form, she barked at Logan to lead the way, grabbing her sundress in her jaws as she followed him. She’d find out what Gypsy had to do with finding her brother later.
Avery and Her Wolf [Shifters Revealed 1] (Siren Publishing Classic) Page 14
