Page 8 of Trick Me (Immortal Vices and Virtues: All Hallows’ Eve)

Chapter

Three

ERYNN

S omething is trying to claw its way out of my skin.

“Okay, universe,” I gasp, stumbling deeper into the woods behind the mansion, my heels long abandoned somewhere between the ballroom and here.

“I get it. I shouldn’t have mocked that fortune teller last month.

Or laughed at that tarot reading. Or called astrology ‘space racism.’ I’m sorry, okay? Please stop turning me inside out!”

My bones feel wrong. Not broken, but rearranging, like someone is playing games with my skeleton and forgot to read the rules.

Each step sends waves of sharpness through my body, my joints bending in directions that shouldn’t exist, muscles pulling against anchor points that keep shifting.

The beautiful blue dress I borrowed from Sera is already torn at the seams, and I hear more rips forming with every convulsion.

The trees around me aren’t helping my panic. They’re too tall, too twisted, shadows falling in directions that don’t match the moon overhead. The bark has patterns that might be natural whorls or might be faces, watching me stumble.

“This is fine,” I tell myself, then immediately laugh because it comes out as half groan, half hysteria.

“Everything is fine. You’re just having a supernatural breakdown at a party full of creatures that could kill you.

Except, nothing about this is standard. And I’m talking to myself in the spooky forest.”

My hands—claws, they’re fucking claws now—dig into a tree trunk for support. The bark splits like paper, leaving deep gouges that immediately start weeping sap that glows faintly green. Because of course it does. Can’t even have normal tree damage in this place.

“I’m sorry, tree,” I whisper, watching the luminous sap drip.

My spine ripples, and I cry out in agonizing pain.

I drop to my knees, claws digging into the ground, and the heavy soil scent floods me.

Earth and decay and growing things. Something died here days ago—a rabbit, my new senses inform me, taken by an owl.

There’s water running underground, twenty feet down, mineral-rich and cold.

The moss on the north side of the trees is actually a slightly different species from the moss on the south side, and I know this because they smell different.

“Stop it,” I beg my own body. “Please stop knowing things I shouldn’t know.”

A branch snaps behind me.

Something is approaching. My head whips around so fast my neck protests, vertebrae cracking in complaint, and every muscle in my body locks into a tension I’ve never felt before.

My heartbeat is so loud it should be echoing off the trees. But from somewhere in my chest comes a growl.

Wait, I don’t growl… I make sarcastic comments and avoid confrontation and sometimes squeak when startled, but I definitely don’t produce sounds that belong to apex predators.

There’s a shadow between the trees way behind me. Human-shaped but moving wrong, too fluid, too purposeful. Not stumbling like someone lost, not hurrying like someone scared. Moving like something that knows exactly where its prey is and has all the time in the world to collect it.

“Nope,” I breathe, and the word comes out with a rumble that vibrates through my chest. “Nope, nope, nope.”

Fight or flight . My brain screams to run, but something in me battles to face the danger. Except this isn’t my land to protect. I don’t have property. I have a small place with a concerning amount of dead plants and a ghost cat that isn’t mine but won’t leave.

Flight wins.

I run.

Not normal running. Not even panicked human running.

Something else takes over, my body dropping lower, using my claws for balance and propulsion.

Muscles I didn’t know existed fire away, turning me into something built for speed and survival.

The dress gives up entirely, shredding around me in confetti that catches on branches.

The woods blur past, but my vision is different too. Clearer in the darkness, noticing movement in peripheral spaces, processing information faster than my human brain can interpret. An owl takes flight thirty feet to my left. Something small scurries up a tree trunk to my right.

My chest burns with more than exertion, with fury that I’m being hunted, with terror of what’s going on with me. The growl that escapes me this time is mine, fully mine.

I check behind me and spot the shadow farther away but not giving up.

“Stop following me!” I shout over my shoulder, but it comes out garbled, half-human words mixed with sounds that belong to something with too many teeth .

I push harder, feet—paws—barely touching the ground.

Wait… What the fuck? I stumble, nearly losing my momentum.

White fur runs up my front legs, because I’m now an animal.

A fucking wolf! My heart races as panic rises, clawing at my chest. I don’t know how this happened. I don’t know what’s happening to me.

My limbs are too fast, too wild, and every step moves with a strength that doesn’t feel like mine. The forest seems to open for me, or maybe I’m finally seeing the paths that were always there, concealed from normal eyes.

My left paw catches on a root, hidden under deceptive leaves. The world tilts, spins, and I’m rolling. I come up in a crouch, facing my pursuer, lips peeled back to show teeth eager to bite.

Ash bursts through the underbrush and is on me in seconds.

His weight slams into me, sending us both to the ground in a tangle of limbs.

I’m pinned beneath him, his body covering mine completely. We’re both breathing hard, and this close, I stare into the wildness behind his eyes. Pine needles stick in my hair, the earth cold against my back, and I’m hyperaware of every point where our bodies touch.

He lowers his head, lips near my ear. “Stand down.” His voice is low and firm.

A breath gushes past my lips. Then again, sharper.

“Easy,” he murmurs. “She’s not prey. She’s mine.” Is he talking to the wolf?

A tremor rolls through me.

I blink at him, stunned.

A sudden pull, deep and instinctive, like a thread being yanked tight, pulses through me. My muscles seize. My breath stutters.

In a heartbeat, the world tilts. A rush like falling and flying at the same time roars through my veins, and then everything is twisted. My bones crack. Heat floods my skin. My paws are hands. My chest heaves.

My breath catches. Muscles lock. And slamming me back into my human body.

I’m gasping on my back, skin bare, chest rising too fast, too exposed beneath him, the cold sinking in like a blade.

His weight remains over me. His hands grip my wrists, and the heat of his body is a brand against my naked skin.

I freeze.

His gaze drags over me, slow and intense, then meets my eyes. “Welcome back, pretty girl,” he murmurs.

My breath stutters. “Why the hell were you chasing me like a lunatic?” I snarl, and wow, I can actually snarl now. It comes from somewhere deep in my chest, reverberating through both our bodies. “I’m dying out here, and you’re playing predator? ”

“I was trying to find you, not—” His explanation cuts off as a howl rips from my throat.

Not a human imitation of a wolf, not the kind of sound drunk people make at the moon.

The real thing, powerful enough to echo through the trees, to announce to every creature in hearing distance that something wild is here.

It’s beautiful and terrifying and completely involuntary.

We both freeze, staring at each other. His weight shifts, and I can sense the thump of his heartbeat against my chest, quick but steady.

“Did I just?—”

“Yes.”

“That came from me?”

“Yes.”

“I howled. I actually howled. Like a wolf.”

“Yes.”

“Stop saying yes!”

“No.”

Despite the claws, the supernatural crisis, the fact that I’m partially pinned under a relative stranger in a dark forest, I laugh. Or try to. It comes out as something between a giggle and a yip, which is somehow worse than the howl.

“This isn’t happening,” I babble, because talking is better than thinking about how real this is, how his scent is everywhere now, overwhelming my senses.

How I’m damn naked with my dress shredded through the woods.

“I’m having a stroke. Or someone spiked the fairy wine with hallucinogens.

Or I’m still in bed and this is the world’s most elaborate stress dream. ”

“This is no dream.” His weight shifts slightly. “Right now, we need to talk about what’s happening to you.” His thumb brushes against my skin, but it sends sparks through my entire body.

“What’s happening to me is that I think I must be cursed and someone really hates me,” I pant, trying to ignore how good he smells this close. “I told you, I’m not a shifter. This shouldn’t be possible.”

“I know,” he murmurs. His weight is still over me. “I think we’re connected. That witch in the mansion, the apple peel… she did something to us.”

“That was just a party trick—” But the words barely leave my mouth before something inside me twists hard, like it’s pushing back.

A sudden pressure builds in my chest. The wolf thrashes like it’s clawing for the surface, no longer content to wait. My breath catches. Heat pulses beneath my skin. My heartbeat stumbles.

I scream out, and Ash instantly rolls off me.

Then my body arches without warning, spine bowing. The change is violent and undeniable. I should be terrified by the sound of my bones breaking and re-forming, but the thing inside me is singing with freedom once more.

The world explodes into sensation like the first change.

Ash’s scent dominates, but beneath that, I pick up the deer that passed not long ago. Colors fade but contrast sharpens. Every leaf, every shadow, every tiny movement becomes crisper. The night isn’t dark anymore; it’s graduated shades of silver and gray that show more detail than human daylight.

I push myself onto my side, scrambling onto all fours again.

Panic floods through me because I have zero control.