Page 23 of A Wolf’s Wound

Ryder

“H-h—”

The man tries to speak, but his vocal cords have shifted too much. His mouth is half snout now with fur just barely sprouting along his muzzle. I can guess what he’s trying to say, anyway. He’s asking me for help.

His body seizes, another wave of shifting pops and breaks his bones and cartilage. He screams, but the sound is as mangled as his body.

“I’ve got you,” I say, but it’s a lie.

Leaning this close to a newly shifting wolf is dangerous, but I can’t take the anguish in his eyes any longer, and I’m strong enough to withstand a bite. Stronger than all the pets and wild animals that have been fodder for…who, exactly? A rogue shifter, or the others he’s turned?

As terrifying as that thought is, I’d rather this be the work of a stranger than someone I know. Imagining a member of our pack choosing to do this to someone else makes my stomach turn.

Bloody foam and spittle fly from the man’s lips. I squeeze the back of his neck reassuringly. His lips pull back in an instinctive snarl, but he doesn’t have the strength to snap at me. I squeeze again, and this time he seems to relax.

He coughs, a wet, deep cough. I clear the foam away from his lips, but it keeps coming. It’s difficult for him to breathe, even as I adjust him on my knees to improve the angle.

“You’re okay.”

He isn’t. He’s dying.

And there’s nothing for me to do but watch.

There’s a reason this is prohibited, why shifters are so closely monitored by our alphas, why we can’t just bite whoever we like.

This is no fairytale. Most humans who are bitten never survive the shift into a wolf, and those who do might not survive the shift back.

Their bodies simply can’t handle it. Mates have much better chances, maybe because shifters are biologically drawn to those who are hardy enough to handle it, but even that’s risky.

And I don’t think this guy was turned by a mate.

An anguished howl escapes his lips, and sweat beads on his newly hairy brow. His eyes are flecked with yellow, terrified, and staring into them gives me a dizzying sense that I’ve done this before.

There’s this nightmare I keep having. I don’t like to think about it.

When I wake up afterward, I’ll call Gavin just to have something to occupy my mind because it feels so real.

I even tied a string across the door, just to make sure I haven’t been sleepwalking.

As soon as I established it was just my mind fucking with me, I did my best to forget it was even happening.

His eyes throw me right back into that dream. That nightmare.

I’m in an alley. It’s dark, and there’s a cold, misty fog hanging in the air, clinging to my skin. But that’s not why it’s clammy.

I’ve done something. Something terrible.

My mouth tastes like copper. Like blood. It’s still dripping from my jaw, and I fumble as I try to wipe it away with the sleeve of my shirt, but someone else does it for me. A stranger? He doesn’t act like a stranger. A hysterical laugh bubbles up from his lips. He’s ecstatic.

And he’s bleeding. I see the blood on his arm as he cleans my face with his own sleeve.

Streetlights above us flicker briefly to life and zap back out again, but I don’t need the light to know what’s happened to him.

My nose is full of it, and the scent makes me ill.

I brace my forehead against a brick building, uncaring of how it scrapes against my skin.

He’s been bitten. He’s been bitten, and it smells like—

A rattling wheeze jerks me back to the present, where I’m staring at another bite.

That’s about all there’s left to see. This man’s shift has left him mangled and mutilated, and even as I mourn the life of a man I never knew, I wonder how the fuck I’m going to clean this up before the authorities catch on to the fact that something is very, very wrong in Stonehaven.

I’ll have to burn my clothes, to start. They’re covered in a man’s blood, someone who’s likely going to be reported missing any day now.

“Shit.”

There’s blood, buckets of it, most of it on me, and all of it’s human. Some shifter did this on purpose, but I can’t fathom why. Is it some sort of message? A threat? So much work goes into keeping our kind under the radar, keeping us safe, and this shit is about to blow all of it up.

What if this isn’t the only person they’ve bitten? I look at his destroyed body again, and bile threatens to riot up my throat.

He looks an awful lot like the victims of animal attacks we’ve already found. I’m beginning to think those weren’t attacks at all, but an attempt at…what? Turning humans into shifters?

This rash of animal attacks has to be connected, somehow, but none of this is making sense.

I stagger away from the body and lean heavily against the thick trunk of an oak tree.

This small copse is absent of any life at all, except for mine.

No birds sing, no squirrels scuttle about, and any stray cats in the neighborhood have long fled or been eaten.

Stonehaven is rapidly turning into a ghost town for animals. And once whoever it is runs out of animals to attack, I can’t shake the feeling that humans will be next.

That they might be already. One man can be explained.

But tens of them? More? We’re already hitting the limit, what with all the mangled bodies we’ve found so far.

If this escalates any further, we’ll be dealing with three-letter agencies coming to town.

If I don’t get to the bottom of this ASAP, it’s not just the Stonehaven pack that will be in danger.

This could blow the cover for shifters all over the world. No pressure.

A plane flies overhead, a reminder of the world that still spins, oblivious to all of this. At least for now.

I don’t even know where to begin with my report to Gavin.

I know what this shifter is doing—biting humans to force them to shift.

And I don’t smell any other animals but humans in this small outcropping of trees, which means they must have bitten him in human form.

This isn’t some new shifter, drunk with bloodlust.

This, and the other bites, were premeditated. Done with a human’s intellect, not driven by animal instinct.

That much I know.

But as for why?

Or who ?

I can’t even fathom the answer for the first, and as for the second…

I can only pray I don’t know anyone who would do this. But the shifter world is small, and the shifter world in Stonehaven is smaller still. The chances that I know the person who’s doing this, and know them well, are very, very high.

“I’ll find out who did this to you,” I tell the man’s body. What’s left of it, at least. My promise to him is the only sound in the small forest. “I’m sorry.”

In the distance, a motorcycle backfires.

Somewhere in my busy, bustling town, there’s a person with this man’s blood still coating the back of their throat.

Maybe they’re sitting in a diner, or walking their dog, or sleeping in all afternoon after a late night of mayhem.

Whatever they’re doing, whoever they are, I’m going to find them.

And I’m going to stop them for good.