Page 35 of WitchCurse

I didn’t see the eyes until it was too late.

It was a half second of glittering in the headlights, instinct to swerve and hit the brakes all at once. My car tipped, half spun, and slammed into a tree so hard I felt my bones break with a breath-stealing crack. I took a shuddering breath while pain ripped through me, my mind in full panic mode even though the car had stopped moving. Something hot trickled down my forehead as the pale rays of the sunrise topped the trees.

I couldn’t move, but heard claws on pavement. Had a moment of fear slam through me as I glimpsed the eyes again. Not a deer or a coyote, but a giant ass wolf stalking across the narrow distance from the road to where the car had stopped. It hurt to breathe, everything fading, and I thought, that would be my bad luck. Survive a crash only to die eaten by wolves before anyone knew where I was? Maybe my Death card draw actually meant death. At least I passed out before it happened. Small favors.

I sucked in a hard breath as those memories sank deep, latching onto a dozen others, all digging in like daggers. I could have let go, tossed the memory away and run back to shore to save myself the pain, but I held tight, watching as the pieces seemed magnetized, drawn to each other, and formed more memories.

I remembered waking, feeling strange after a long age in wolf form, disoriented, moved my limbs to stretch and found myself with no fur and human skin. I jolted, surprised and terrified. I looked down at myself to the human body where the wolf had been. Was this real? What was real?

The wolf paced within, planning, rubbing its furred self along the edges of my consciousness, with a strong feeling of give me control added with each touch. Did it mean of the human skin, too? I didn’t think I could eat raw meat like this. In fact, the taste lingered in the back of my throat, and I gagged. What if the other wolf didn’t let me out? Kept me locked away and fed me raw meat, even in this human form? How insane would I become?

Madness already filled my brain most days, leaving me with a scattered mess of memories, fear, and confusion.

I shivered, the room cold without fur, and none of the blankets had survived the wolf’s rage. But I laid down in the nest, curling in on myself, and waited. Maybe he would let me out now? His name had long faded in the background noise of the wolf’s anger. The wolf wanted control again and kept shoving me back like I was a pup it was protecting. Staying awake felt like swimming through a sea of black jelly.

Hungry, the wolf told me, but it had been his responsibility to eat, not mine. Were we not being fed enough? I hadn’t cared. Accepting death as long as all the pain ended.Weak, the wolf admonished me, but I closed my eyes and sank into a light doze.

The door opened, rousing me again, and I was still in human skin.

The other wolf, in human flesh, paused in the doorway, half hunched as he made to shove another tray of meat inside, stick firm in his grasp. I glimpsed the room beyond and a distant door. Heat coming from the woodstove, but he didn’t even take the chill off the meat. I lay there glaring at him, feeling the rage of the wolf battling inside me, demanding control. We would kill him for endless amounts of pain and keeping us caged.

What was his name? Isaac.

The wolf wanted him dead. I wanted him dead.And myself, I recalled.

He stepped into the room and closed the door behind him, shoving the tray of food to the side with his foot. His lips moved, speaking, though the words didn’t register at all. A jumble of noise as I studied the sound of his heartbeat and rush of his blood as it sped up. He wasn’t afraid, excited maybe?

I didn’t move as he crossed the room, stick clenched at the ready. He hadn’t locked the door. My human brain understood that much. He was inside and I only needed to get past him to be free. Or kill him. The wolf and I warred over that. Not that I didn’t want him dead, more that I wanted freedom over revenge.

He reached for me, hand going to my bare hip, but I didn’t move, studying him instead, looking for a way out. The wolf gave me a half dozen places to attack, bleed, kill. Humans were soft with easily broken skin. It wouldn’t be hard.

A sudden grip on my hair, yanking my head to look at him, made me snarl. The stick touched my hip, and pain flowed again until I could barely breathe. His weight on my back made me still, body trembling from the jolts and mind struggling to catch up. He held me down, hands running over my delicate human skin like it belonged to him. The snarl rose again, but I held it back, trying to give myself a chance to heal from the many hits of electricity. He was happy to have a grip on me, to be holding me down, his hips pressed into my butt, with his obvious erection digging through the material of his pants to crush against me.

Give me control, my wolf demanded, willing to take the pain and offering me a chance for freedom.

I had. The wolf taking memories.Rape.The word was like a fist to the gut, but spun images through my mind that I’d long avoided. Still, I didn’t let go, holding tight to the memories as I sank to the floor of the shower and curled in on myself. It was too much. The crash, the change, the betrayal, the imprisonment, had anything ever hurt this much?

I remembered my mom leaving me with my aunt as a kid, and that didn’t come close to the heart wrenching pain. The wolf sat on the other side of the divide, not looking my way, letting me suffer, after all he had already done his best to save me. It was me who failed miserably every time.

But I didn’t let go. I held tight to that memory, letting the others find their place, watching the shore rebuild as though it were covered in jagged pieces of glass rather than sand. Would I ever be able to cross again? Even with the memories back in place, they were brutal, and I’d have to face that agony every day? How was that fair? I’d survived, wasn’t that enough?

A stone near the center pulsed. Not an old memory, but a newer one that had been set in the middle of the ever-churning water. I reached for it, still holding tight to the pain that had reshaped everything in my life, and found Sebastian.

He shoved back the curtain and turned off the water, pulling me into his arms and a giant towel that was warm and smelled of him. I trembled, hardly able to breathe, but he held me, his arms unyielding even as I sobbed into his shoulder, and his clothes got wet from touching me. The calming waves of his omega strength ran through me. The jagged pieces forming my shore smoothed, becoming white sand and stretching into the distance. There was still water, a divide, though much narrower than it had been. And I understood that some of the memories were the wolf’s, and he was just as unwilling to face them as I had been.

I refused to let go of the memories or the glowing pebble of Sebastian’s warmth. There were others, bright like his, and I could tell what they were just by glancing at them now, a path snaking through the water connecting it all; Keith, my aunt, Dylan, Liam, Nick, and Kiran. Those who had tried to put me back together. The boulders were gone, and a narrow path crossed from one side to the other, but the stones were solid, edges decorated in glittering thorns of glass, the shard of memories that hurt so much. The memory I had been holding was no longer in my arms, but a part of the fractured shore, set into place. And I realized it would always be there, no matter how many times I faced it, sometimes it would cut, other times I’d look away, but it would always be part of my past, something I lived through. But I had survived.

“You’re not alone,” Sebastian whispered, hugging me tight. “You will always have us, and now you’ve got Nick and Kiran. It’s okay. You’re safe, you’re home. It’s okay.”

Home was the camper, I thought absently, wanting to crawl in beside my men and rest, but not certain if they’d even welcome that. Everything had gone wrong from the start. My misfortune, or something else? Strange how I could look back on that, and think of how often I tried to laugh it off, yet time and time again, something smacked me down when I started to rise. Was that what was in store for my future too? If so, then what was the point of trying at all?

I thought of Nick’s watery gaze, filled with unshed tears, and Kiran’s defeated exhaustion and hoped there was something I could give them. Stability, or even clarity? I’d brought some balance to their magic, that had to be something worth starting with.

The door to the bathroom opened and Liam stood there, holding out another towel, the fabric smelling fresh from the dyer and still warm. Sebastian grabbed it, tossing the first aside and wrapping the new one around me.

“Did you know about this wolf?” Sebastian asked Liam. “Isaac?”

“He left the pack before you arrived,” Liam said. “I knew he had changed Toby. Though he said it was to save him. I didn’t know the rest because Toby never said a word, and the first time Toby ever changed back to human was after you arrived.”