Page 28 of The Wolves of Forest Grove

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.