5

She scoffed. “Gav!”

“Let him go, Cat,” David said behind me. “He’ll be back.”

I had no choice. Catrina was my girlfriend of five years, and Dalesbloom and Grandbay were more closely allied with each other than with the wolves of Eastpeak. There was no avoiding my neighbor when our affairs were so closely intertwined. Especially when I was destined to become the next Alpha of Dalesbloom once David stepped down. Everything our two packs had done together for the past couple of years was to prepare for the day they would ultimately merge as one. Sometimes I thought I’d prefer having the weight lifted off my shoulders by sharing the role of Alpha with Catrina. Still, she reminded me time and time again why I held off on merging our packs for so long.

 I couldn’t control my wolf because I wasn’t marked by my fated mate. Worse yet, I didn’t even have one. The only way my bloodthirsty beast could be tamed and I could gain control of my anger was through the mark of my fated mate, and in all my twenty-one years alive, I’d never received the Moondream that revealed her to me. Catrina knew that—she depended on it in order to keep me in her grip, and because uniting our two packs was the wisest choice for everyone, I couldn’t deny her.

Only once I stepped outside did I feel some of the tension alleviate. My muscles relaxed in the cool summer evening, the fallen sun little more than an orange glow on the western horizon behind the gentle slopes of the mountains. Shadows settled comfortably across my skin and I was finally at ease in the silence. Though I could feel Catrina and David watching me through the kitchen windows, I didn’t care anymore. I had no obligation to stay tonight or collect David’s illegal handguns. I shed my jeans and left them on the porch, then underwent the metamorphosis of my human body into wolf. With a series of sickening, wet crunches and a crackling of bones, I took on a more predatory structure. My skin was hot and cold and hot again until the weight of fur gave me a sense of freedom that being human never could. A massive wolf stood in my place, subtle timbers and black ticking turning dark in the oncoming night. My senses sharpened, and familiar feral impulses reigned over my body.

I took off in long bounds across the backyard and into the trees behind the manor. Once I was finally out of sight of the Dalesbloom Alpha and his daughter, I was able to breathe. The moonlight guided me through the trees and back toward the town of Grandbay, where my own pack was waiting for me to feed them yet.

For twenty minutes, I slipped through the mountain valleys as nothing more than a wild animal to the world. The forest lit up in ways it never would have if I were human. Hundreds of scents were carried on the wind, each one an individual strand of information: a doe and two fawns thirty yards away, a raccoon scavenging at the base of a tree twenty-two yards away, the same carcass of a badger I had smelled rotting away over the past few days. Warm seed smell of songbirds and their twiggy nests. Dry grass smell of burrowing rabbits. The sounds were just as bright, small animals rustling under foliage and frogs croaking by the water’s edge. The entire forest opened itself up to me, and for a moment, I lost myself in the wilderness, forgetting that I ever had a home to go back to. Until the musky scent of humans triggered curiosity in my animal brain.

Against my better judgment, my paws turned toward the smell. I dropped my nose to the grass and followed, pouring through the shadows like liquid, until the breeze revealed more scents. Smoke and wieners cooking. The trail brought me to a bright spot burning between the trees—a campfire. I hadn’t eaten recently, but the hunt churned my stomach and imparted on me a hunger that was hard to ignore, especially with the aftertaste of blood still in my teeth.

I wasn’t thinking. It was hard to with all my senses firing, but I wanted that meat.

Circling around the campsite, I counted two humans clad in thick clothes to protect them from the mosquitoes and armed only with the metal prongs on which they roasted their wieners. A cooler full of food sat on the grass beside where they were propped up in their camp chairs. I licked my lips and growled, salivating, moving deftly in the darkness until my paw crinkled a leaf by accident. Alerted to the sound, the humans stood and looked my direction.

They saw me, firelight lapping at the snarl on my maw.

I didn’t think. I just lunged.

Chapter 3: Billie

My heart couldn’t stop pounding. Sickening anxiety and guilt reduced me to a wreck in my bedroom. My fists clenched as I swallowed the humiliation of Gavin’s rage. His harsh voice rang in my ears. Thinking about how his eyes latched onto me made the hair on the back of my neck prickle. Then it was a flash of David takingaway my binoculars and grounding me. The tone of Catrina’s voice as she mocked me. It overwhelmed me, bringing me to my knees on the hardwood floor. The only comfort I could find was in clutching my arms and closing my eyes, small reassurances from my usual misery. But this time, there were flickers of something else. Something wild: anger as electrical as the excitement I’d felt watching the hunt, as uncontrollable as my heartbeat. It swelled hotly in my throat and coiled in my head like a viper.

What gave Gavin the right to talk to me that way? I hadn’t done anything except look at him.

I wished desperately that I could fire something back, but even if I mustered the courage to talk to him, I couldn’t back up what I wanted to say. I’d get out one, maybe two sentences before he would pick me up and crush my bones. I was helpless to assert myself, but that didn’t mean I didn’t deserve to be heard, right…? Or maybe it did.

Burying my face in my hands, I cried and stared woefully at the window above my bed until the muffled voices downstairs were silenced. Beyond the smell of salt from my tears, a faint dirt and sweat smell was reminding me of the hunters; strange that I’d never noticed these smells before. The rich, sweet perfume stirred up by Alpha David moving throughout the manor was most prominent. A few minutes later, the front door closed. From the window overlooking the front of the manor, I watched David trudge through the night and get back into his truck.