Page 31 of Hunted Mate (Stalked Mates #1)

C allie

The house in the wilderness is probably haunted. I’m not worried about that. I am haunted too, and the ghosts that live inside me are much more of a concern to me and the rest of the world than anything that happens to inhabit an old country house.

As we pull up to it, I find myself looking at a big old majestic building that reminds me quite a lot of the house I was staying at with my family after my parents died.

It’s big and painted white and there are massive bay windows and all kinds of fretwork and general charm.

It’s the sort of place that was built by people with less than good intent or behavior.

There’s a heaviness to it if I look too hard or think too long. I try not to do either.

The place has been left clean. I enjoy carrying the groceries inside and getting set up. It feels very domestic and normal, which is a nice change from feeling like a psychotic animal.

“This is nicer, right?” I prompt Gray for his response.

“Sure,” he says. “It’s a lot more private, but…”

“Oh, my god, don’t ruin it immediately.”

“We’ve gone from being surrounded by people, who act as a sort of natural protection, to being alone out here. If something goes wrong during the shift, there won’t be easy help for you.”

“If something goes wrong, you call for my personal helicopter,” I tell him.

“Why didn’t you do that when you broke out of the lab?”

I shrug. “Didn’t really need it.”

“God,” he mutters to himself. “You’re absolutely…”

“I wasn’t in any danger then, and I’m not in any danger now. Full moon’s tonight, right? Let’s get this over with.”

Gray

Let’s get this over with. I share the sentiment, but not the enthusiasm.

I know something is coming through Callie.

I can feel it. I can see it behind her eyes.

The last vestiges of her humanity have been forever twisted, and when the moon rises from behind the trees which surround the house, it’s going to be over for who she once was.

I try to stay cheerful. Callie is clearly unbothered by the whole situation, but that’s because she doesn’t know what it feels like to shed one’s human skin and take on the mantle of the wolf.

I am going to have to be at my best tonight.

I made sure we have plenty of protein on hand to not only feed us up beforehand, but to help recover from the shift after.

“That smells like… not good,” Callie says, coming to sniff at a pot of bone broth I am stewing on the stove.

Her voice is lower and huskier than it was before.

Her shift is already beginning, though she clearly doesn’t know it yet.

She is also getting snappier and less patient.

I don’t think she’s going to eat dinner.

She’s been pacing the kitchen and lounge as the sun sets.

“I have to go outside,” she says suddenly. Her voice is full of certainty. She doesn’t want to be out there, she has to be there. The moon is summoning her, and there is no escape.

I turn the burners off and follow her out, stripping my shirt off as I go.

It’s going to be a warm, quite humid night.

As good a night as any for a human female to be forced through a transition that will not come naturally to her.

Fireflies are dancing low over the lawn, messing around low and high.

Callie’s pacing is faster. She’s wearing a light white dress. It’s almost sacrificial in nature. She is so beautiful as she loops about much like the fireflies in the gathering dimness, flashing a smile at me when she realizes I’m here with her.

I remove my pants and fold them neatly on the stairs, standing naked in the twilight before the celestial body who governs us rises and takes her sway.

“I feel amazing!” Callie yells to me. “I’ve never felt so free!”

Her voice is deeper still, and there is a certain… lope to her gait. She’s moving with the intensity and motion of a wild animal already. There’s nothing I can do to stop what is about to happen. I am as helpless as a king before an incoming tide.

Sure enough, the minutes fail us, the full moon slips out from behind the clouds… and my mate erupts into her true form.

“Oh, my god,” I growl to myself.

It’s worse than I expected.

It’s more than I could have imagined.

The first shift is always messy. It’s not the smooth transition that it becomes later on.

Learning to shift is about learning to submit in some sense, so I shouldn’t be surprised that her limbs are sort of all over the place, and she’s not going down on hands and knees in a way that would make things easier.

“Kneel down, sweetheart,” I say, trying to guide her. It’s not really how it’s done. A shifter can only ever handle their shift themselves, but maybe I can coach her through it a little. “Don’t stand on your hind legs like that. You’ll fall over when the full shift takes place.”

She’s still not listening, and now her legs are starting to look very odd. Very large. It’s normal for them to be covered in a thick pelt of fur, but it’s not quite as normal for them to look almost digitigrade, up on her toes.

It strikes me, all of a sudden, that the scientists might have made a mistake of a nature that will not allow her to make a proper shift. She might even die in the attempt, her body not properly wired or made for this taxing biological experiment.

I want to reach for her, but her hands have sprouted very, very long claws that look sharp enough to rip my throat out with a casual swipe. I can’t get any closer. I can’t fix this. All I can do is watch the terrible thing happen and hope that somehow these things get better on their own.

I curse my father inwardly. I wish I had never taken her anywhere near his cursed house, and given him the chance to have this done to her. This is just a longer, crueler way of killing her in front of me. It would have been kinder if he had simply put a bullet in her head.

She is howling and fighting air, somehow still standing erect, but writhing around anyway. I am now certain that I am watching my mate perish. Nobody can survive the wicked cracking of bone and twisting of flesh. She is being tormented and remade, like a person in an invisible car crash.

I close my eyes. I pray to the cursed god who bestowed this gift upon us for mercy.

And suddenly, it is over. I know because the night goes silent, and her anguished screams and cries fade to the light wind. I know I have lost my mate. There is no way she is…

She’s alive.

But when I open my eyes, I see that she is not a wolf.

She is furred, she is fanged, and she has impressively long claws on each of her digits, but what I am looking at right now is no shifter. No pack beast.

What I am looking at… is a werewolf.

She stands erect on two legs. Her face has taken on the visage of a wolf: long snout, sharp teeth, ferocious eyes. Her body is twice the size it was before, and thickly furred with a kind of blue-gray pelt.

She turns toward me, claws extended, and cocks her head to the side in a very canine motion.

The laboratory has made a monster. Werewolves don’t exist, according to modern shifters. They’re like Bigfoot and the Loch Ness Monster.

Maybe that was true a few weeks ago. It’s definitely not true anymore.

“Hey,” I say. “Do you understand me?”

She throws her head back and howls. The sound is wild, and deeply evocative.

I am seeing something that should not exist in this world, and I am absolutely astonished by the beauty and power and, hell, majesty of the feral side of the woman I adore.

I wonder if they could have made a werewolf with anyone else, or if she has some kind of blood in her that reacted a specific way. She’d been bitten by shifters before. Maybe that was a complicating factor. Whatever it is, she is stunning.

She howls again, then takes off into the undergrowth. I shift and follow her, keeping pace on four legs with the incredible bounding of her two. She scents prey, and follows the scent without hesitation.

We are fortunate that the forest is private and no people have stumbled into it, because her drive to destroy is now at its absolute peak. All she did before, when she escaped the lab, or when she ran from the officers, is nothing compared to the pure, perfect prey drive she is now displaying.

We take down a deer, and feed. Then we cross paths with a stag. He dies too, and she tears through him with a vicious reverence that I will never forget. I consume parts of her first kills as is tradition, bonding with her as I would another wolf.

Then I lead her home, once her hunger is sated and her bones begin to grow weary with the effort of their twisted transformation.

I get my mate to bed with a feat of strength and physics that frankly makes me very proud.

I have to use all the principles of leverage to get her on the mattress.

She’s big. Very big. She’s also very sleepy.

I’d say that first shift took pretty much all her energy out of her.

Makes sense. She did not merely become a wolf.

She became… this. I shift into my human form and watch her as she sleeps, not as a human, and not as a wolf, but as a third, more strange and terrifying thing.

She is beautiful in this form too, but not what I expected.

Not what anybody expected. I can only begin to imagine the chaos that will inevitably be wrought once she begins to understand herself in this way.

Mercifully, as the dawn begins to rise, she slides out of her were-form and takes her naked human body again. I have been awake the entire time, keeping a close eye on her. I want her to be safe, even if there’s not really anything I can do if something were to go wrong.

I breathe a sigh of relief as I see her pretty face again. She was a stunning werewolf, but I do love her human nature.

She stirs as the second shift, the returning to self, takes place. I press a light kiss to her brow, which seems to be the last straw of her slumber.