“You need to sleep, and I need to change your bandages.” Blood dribbles down the side of his ribs. He’s overextending already, causing more damage.
He looks up for a second. He blinks, as though trying to remove the dream filaments from them. The attempt fails, because he’s now kissing me again.
Deeply.
Passionately.
I respond, opening my mouth, welcoming his tongue, which he pushes into me. I have dreamt of this for so long, and it feels so familiar. His kisses are deep, his tongue dancing around mine, exploring my entire mouth as he straddles me.
He’s hard. Very hard.
I’m surprised by how intense he is. And by how much I want him. This is more intense than in my dreams.
His lips leave mine, giving me a moment to breathe.
“Eron, you’re hurt,” I gasp out.
He doesn’t hear me. He doesn’t react. He’s pushing down my pants, his passion turning into a palpable need.
“Eron!” I say, and try to pull away. He doesn’t notice. His skin is so cold against mine. Hewill pop his stitches and bleed out if the herbs don’t kill him first.
He flips me on my front. I’m on all fours, trying to crawl away, but he holds me fast. My pants are down, and so are his.
I feel his cock looking for entry into me.
I’m shocked at how forceful he’s being, driven by fever, and I’m even more shocked by how my body reacts.
I lower my head, push up my ass, to grant him access. He takes it, pushing deep inside of me.
A yelp escapes my throat, which turns into a moan. I’ve dreamt about this for so long, and now…
He’s pushing wildly into me, groaning at the effort, his arms surrounding me, his body against mine.
Then he’s kneeling, holding my hips up as he thrusts in deeper. I’m on all fours, pushing my ass back against him, my breasts moving with each of his thrusts.
My moans echo in the cave as he pushes harder. He sounds like he’s growling, the sound forming deep in his throat with each thrust.
I lower my head, but he’s holding my hips up with no intention of letting me go. My knees hurt from the stone under them, but still, I hold my ass up and scream as I come, hard.
He comes moments later, holds up his head and a sound more like a wolf’s escapes his throat.
We collapse, still tangled in each other. I’m shaking. I’m exhausted.
Eron is out cold. Is he still breathing?
“Eron?” my voice trembles.
I push him off of me and check his wounds. He’s hot now, practically red.
Did I kill him with my medicine? I fight the tears of exhaustion and worry as I re-bandage his wounds, using none of my medicine this time.
It might be safer and wiser to let Eron’s body fight this on its own.
“Don’t die,” I whisper, terrified that he might be gone by the morning as his skin turns colder again. I dress myself and lie beside him, hoping my warmth will keep him alive until the morning.
Exhausted, I fall asleep, my body still shaking from the climax. The climax that still echoes in my body, thanks to Eron. It was like so many other times, except this time, it had been real, not just in my dreams.
Chapter 13
Eron
The air is crisp. I can smell the earth. Not my land, but this new land with its strange smell of decay. It doesn’t smell quite like decay anymore to me. It smells like hope. Like life hiding underneath the darkness, waiting to sprout again, to become new.
My body hurts. The beast took chunks out of me and I can feel them still, but I’m healing quickly as well. Quick-healing is one of the many positive aspects of being a werewolf.
I take a moment to realize where I am. I’m in the cave. Sybil!
I jerk awake and sit up, groaning at the pain in my ribs. I lie back down, take a deep breath, open my eyes.
“Don’t move too quickly,” I hear. “You’re going to be sore for a bit.”
I look at her. She’s sitting there, making a small fire, preparing some food for us, foraged from I don’t know where. Maybe she’d brought it with her. I should have paid more attention. There’s a lot that I should have paid more attention to.
I suddenly remember the break between my dream and reality. I groan. I’d taken Sybil. So often in my dreams, and now in reality, without even meaning for it to happen... I hope she doesn’t hate me. I hope I didn’t hurt her.
“Are you… are you okay?” I ask hesitantly. I’m looking for any sign of anger or pain or disappointment, but I don’t see any. She gives a little shrug.
“I am. Are you?”
“I think my wounds are healing well,” I reply. “Thank you for taking care of me.”
“You’re welcome,” she says. “You would have done the same. You were trying to protect me. Thank you for that.”
I move more slowly and manage to sit up. My side is on fire, but there’s no fever, at least none that I can feel. My shoulder aches, but is mostly healed. I’ll be ready to start moving again soon.
“Look. About last night, I didn’t mean—” She cuts me off.
“Eron, don’t worry about it. You were reacting to herbs and medicines unfamiliar to your system. You didn’t know what it would do to you, and I didn’t either. I understand. It’s all right.”
I’m not convinced by her words. “Look, I don’t know how it works on your world, but usually, relationships don’t start quite that intensely.”
Wow, good choice of words, Eron… I think. “But I promise I will do right by you. I’ll help you catch this beast, and I’ll help you save your crops.”
She smiles. It seems genuine. I have no reason to doubt her. But still, from the pieces that I remember from last night, I was not…gentle.
She continues cooking and I watch her. How could ever tell her about my dreams now? How could I tell her that she is the woman that haunts my dreams every night? How could I share those tender moments that I dream about? That laughter, the kisses, the hope…
Not after what I’ve done.
She only said out of kindness that the herbs had affected me. Dream and reality had interwoven in my head, and I’d acted on sheer instinct. It frightened me. It was the primordial wolf in me, the thing that my people worked so hard to keep under control.
To become a wolf, yes. To be beast, yes. But we must keep our humanity. Last night, I had lost that, and Sybil had borne the brunt of it.
“The first thing we need to do,” Sybil says, “Is figure out where the beast is now, and how to capture it. If we can stop it, we can save the crops. But I’m not actually sure if it’s nearby anymore.”
I nod. If she didn’t want to talk about, then I wouldn’t talk about it either. I would do right by her, that was the least I could do. I wanted to do so much more now. But now, after everything, I didn’t deserve this.
The dreams had been taunting me after all. There’s happiness here that I just don’t deserve. That I can never have. But I can at least succeed in this mission.
“I can smell out the beast,” I say. “If I change back into a wolf, my senses are heightened. I’ll be able to sense the beast, smell it out and maybe follow its tracks.”
Sybil nods. She looks at me curiously.
“How does this work, your shifting? Is it painful? Will it help you heal or hinder your wounds?”
“The shifting will help heal them,” I answer, trying to figure out an easy way to explain for someone who never experienced it. “When all of my muscles and bones shift to accommodate my new shape, it’s almost like, rejuvenating my body. Not completely, I mean there are pieces of my muscles that won’t reconnect right away, and some wounds may reopen, but not badly. My wolf form is my stronger form. My human form, though, is the one that I prefer. It’s the one that all of my people prefer.”
She nods, takes a bite of food and offers me a bowl. I accept it. Some kind of bean mashed into a paste. She sits beside me. She doesn’t seem afraid of me.
“Why do they prefer the human form?” she asks.
“It’s our natural form, I suppose.” I answer, not quite sure what to tell her. “I mean, we’re born human. We shift to wolves under the blood moon. When we grow in power and maturity, and control, we can shift to wolves under any moon or sun. But the human form is our basic form. It’s the one that we get to think in, we get to plan in. We fall in love in the human form usually, too.”
I could kick myself.
She doesn’t answer that. Silence coats the cave while we finish our meal. I can’t quite let it go, not yet.
“Look,” I say. “You don’t need to be afraid of my wolf form. I won’t hurt you while I’m there— I’m still me. I’m still inside there.”
“I know,” she says. “I saw you fight that beast, you tried to protect me. And you did. If we’re going to go out there together to fight it, which it seems that we are, we need to come up with a better plan than just having you throw yourself at it again. I mean, the last time you were hurt. We can avoid that this time.”
She looks genuinely concerned with my safety. I do not feel like I deserve that, or have earned it, but I intend to earn it from now on.
“If we can track its scent,” she continues, “we should be able to figure out where it nests. If we can figure out where it nests, we can lay some kind of trap there for it. Imprison it, kill it. Stop it from destroying others, and find out if there are others of its kind, too. If we kill that predator, it might lead to a bigger predator coming into our area, after all. We should figure out if it’s a herd animal, a pack animal, or if it’s a one-off, maybe some mutation caused by the radiation.”
“That sounds like a plan.” I agree. “Are there a lot of mutations that occur here?”
“There are some,” she answers. “I mean, there’s radiation falling down all the time, but most of the life here has adapted to the storms. That’s just the way that our world is. I mean, humans don’t even mutate that often. I guess we’re all just adapted to this new world.”
Her voice drifts off. She looks almost puzzled for a while like there’s something else she wants to say, something just on the tip of her tongue that she can’t bring herself to say. She probably didn’t want to tell me because she knows by now that I’m a monster. For all her kind words. I can’t say as I blame her.
Once this monster hunt is over, I intend to find my parents’ bones and just leave. I can’t stay here.
“Well, shall we start hunting?” I suggest.
She nods, and grabs her crossbow. “I have seven bolts left. I can make them count.”
“I saw you in action,” I answer. “I know you can. But let me take the brunt of the fight. I can take more than that. Just, maybe, don’t use the same herbs on me… If I get wounded, just… be careful.”
She nods, and I shift into a wolf. We head out to the hunt.
Chapter 14
Sybil
Watching Eron turn into a wolf the second time is no less disconcerting. I mean, his entire physiology appears to change. Not just that, but the way he moves, the way he interacts with the world around him changes too. He sniffs the ground, surveys the darker parts of the forest, cocks his head sideways to better capture sound.
I wait at the entrance of the cave while he sniffs the air, making sure that the path is clear. He turns and looks at me, and I still see the human in his eyes. Those eyes look very much the same, even wolf-like now.
Orange and caring. Like the man I had formed a deep bond with. First in dreams, then in real life.
Wow, that sounds strange. Even in my head.
How had it gotten so weird, so fast? I knew Eron hadn’t meant to… well, to take things this far this quickly, but what happened had happened. And, strangely, it wasn’t the first time... I can’t exactly tell him that. Just imagining it is giving me heartburn.
I run through it in my head: “Hey, Eron, you know, we’ve actually met multiple times in my dreams. Umm.. we’ve had sex before, and we’ve kissed, laughed, and practically shared a lifetime together already. So, it’s not like this was the first time or that it was unexpected. So… don’t you worry about it!”
That sounds pretty stupid. Okay, so I wouldn’t tell him that. I just wish I could take his shame, or pain, or whatever the hell he felt right now, away. Can’t exactly tell him, though. A dream like that— it would just freak him out.
I wonder if wolves even dream?
He nods his head, indicating that I should follow. I grab my equipment and my crossbow as we head outside the cave. The surrounding area is devoid of life. There are no birds here, no insects. Nothing buzzes about me, demanding attention or blood.
The trees reveal the marks that I’m looking for. Black scorch marks line several of them, and hop from tree to tree until the cover swallows them. Eron follows the trail, and I follow Eron.
So the scorch marks are definitely related. That’s good to know. That observation paid off. If Jordain was here, I’d be happy to show him. If he even noticed them. He’d just take credit for them anyway.
We travel deeper into the forest. Still no signs of life. We trail the scorch marks. They’re sporadic, not in any pattern, like the beast was getting impatient, and decided to take it out on the trees.
If there’s one thing bothering me right now, it’s that I’m not sure how those scorch marks are created. I mean, there were no scorch marks on Eron… It stung him with that tail-like appendage, and it bit him, so something else made the scorch marks.
Is that something else part of the animal, or something completely unrelated? Could there be two of them, maybe? I wish I knew. I would feel a lot less nervous if I had at least a couple of answers.
Eron gives a low growl— a warning. I stop, glance around. I see nothing. He indicates with his head to the right, past a tree. When I look beyond it, I can see a cave. Small, hidden by scorched foliage, and completely scorched from the inside out.
“The creature?” I whisper. Eron nods.
“Alright.” It’s time to deal with that creature. We needed to trap it without getting in another battle. I’m not sure that Eron can handle another fight. I’m not sure that I can take healing Eron again.
I lean against a tree and retreat back to think through the date that I’ve gathered so far. This animal destroyed the fields, either out of aggression towards humans, showing high intelligence and deductive powers, or because it wanted something out of the fields themselves, and the destruction is just a side effect.
If it wanted to destroy us, it could just attack us and not our food supplies. I mean, if wolf-Eron can’t defend against it, we certainly stand little chance. So the animal wants something from the fields. I think that’s more likely. It didn’t show any signs of higher cunning when it attacked us yesterday, so I’m guessing that it’s running on instincts.
I close my eyes and lean my head back. I feel Eron near, keeping an eye out.
I feel safe.
I hold up my hand and he nuzzles it gently. I smile, and I think about what the beast could want from the wheat. This latest crop is a newly modified strain. Its main difference is that it’s made to be fire-resistant. Even if the lightning hits it, it will spread a maximum of three feet, as opposed to entire fields going up in flames. We can protect against radiation, sure, but we need to make sure that our crops aren’t destroyed another way by the same threat.
What if something about this crop attracted the beast from wherever it came from, because of that property? What if there’s something that makes it crave this plant?
I retrace my mental steps back and imagine the fields again. The burn marks don’t indicate if the animal made them on its way into the fields or when leaving them. But from their positions on the trees, I wager that the beast made it on its way to the fields. Meaning that when it was leaving, it was less fiery, or acidic, or whatever made it what it was.
What if the beast needs something in the wheat to stop itself from combusting? What if this radiation mutation
is eating itself from the inside out? And the genetic modifications to the wheat are actually helping it survive its own combustibility?
For an instant I struggle with the moral truths before me. I can trap the beast in the cave and then assume that it will combust. I’m sure that Eron and I, working together, can do that.
Or I can save it. I might be able to do something to protect both our crops and save this beast. It wasn’t aggressive unless it felt it threatened. Or that its territory was being invaded.
It might just be in pain, too. From some kind of crazed heartburn devouring it.
If it’s acidic, I need to make it more alkaline, while not risking its life. Could I save both the crops and the beast? Do I even have the right to make that decision? I mean, what if I’m wrong? What if I’m wrong and the beast breaks free and destroys our crops and our village?
I crouch down near Eron.
“Is it sleeping?” I ask.
He cocks his head a little, indicating he’s not sure.
“But it’s in there?”
This time, he nods. He’s sure about that one. The beast is in the cave, and it is contained. If we can bring down the rocks in front of the cave, we can keep it there. I don’t have any explosives on me, of course. That would be useful. I have a crossbow, I have a man who turns into a wolf, and then I have my bio-kit. And in that bio-kit, I have purifiers for various types of radiation. Including alkaline, which would cut the acidity.
“What if we can just encourage the beast to leave?” I tell Eron. He doesn’t look convinced.
Can’t say as I blame him. I’m not so convinced that I have a good idea, either. I hate the idea of killing a new form of life, though. Something we haven’t explored yet. I mean, I’m a biologist. I’ve been studying how to preserve life all this time. Do I get to just decide what lives and what dies, depending on what’s most convenient?
I sighed.
Truth is that I am deciding who lives and who dies. By letting one beast live, I might doom my own village. I feel a paw on my knee. As though feeling my moral turmoil, Eron sits beside me and places his paw gently on me. In his eyes, I see a world of possibilities. I see things I never imagined before. I see a life that I would like to have, but don’t believe I can.
Her Merciless Prince Page 7
