Chapter 3

I couldn’t move. I couldn’t breathe. My heart hammered wildly in my ears as blood dripped from Andreas’s claws. It felt like the horror would stretch for a thousand years.

Then my mother, half-transformed, leapt in front of me, screaming, “Michaela, RUN!”

Her scream broke my paralysis, just as Andreas lunged for her throat. I scrambled away, half-blinded by tears, falling over myself in a wild rush to escape by the back door.

I had only a second to look back, but that was enough.

My father’s corpse lay in a pool of blood on the floor, my mother’s dying body flung atop his. Andreas, fangs out and bloodstained, raised one shaking red claw to point at me.

To the werewolves waiting outside, he snarled, “Bring her to me! At any cost!”

Sobbing, I threw myself out the back door and ran for my life into the deep woods.

My year of grief-stricken training was the only thing that saved me. I knew how skilled and dedicated our pack was when hunting – I was once one of those hunters. Now I was prey.

Every panicked, breathless stride I took was like a gift from my past self’s relentless training. Though the pack howled with fury as they chased after me, I was stronger. Branches whipped against my skin and stones turned under my pounding feet, but I never stopped moving.

I ran.

I ran for hours. I ran far, far from the sound of my pack hunting me, and kept going.

A day passed. I ran until even the memory of their smell was far behind me.

The night fell.

I was all but mindless with panic and grief and pain. I finally collapsed under an overhang of rock partway up a slope in an unfamiliar wilderness. Absolute, utter exhaustion beyond what I ever imagined a body could experience overtook me.

I slept as deeply as the dead.

When I woke up, I felt like part of me had died.

I knew immediately what that emptiness was. The place in my mind where I could once mindlink with my parents was gone. My parents – the traitors who got my sister killed – who had died trying to save me.

My entire world had changed so quickly. Barely more than a day ago, I felt like my lifelong dream was coming true: Andreas wanted me too.

Now he wanted me dead. Like my parents, who he’d killed as revenge for my murdered sister.

It hurt too much even to cry.

Instinct and training alone shoved my body up and threw me back into running when the distant smell of werewolves reached my nose.

It was worse this time. Now as I ran, my body felt wrong – agonisingly wrong. Like something immense was pushing against my skin.

It was a sensation I hadn’t felt since I was a young child. My parents had said it was a symptom of our familial disease. That was when they’d started giving me the supplements.

I had no supplements now. I only had the pain and the numb, innate urge to keep running.

The weight of it all – loss, horror, betrayal, exhaustion, pain – was crushing me inwards, and the wrongness beneath my skin was thrusting outwards.

Uncontrollably, I was twisted – no, I was shifting – shifting into my wolf form – except this wasn’t my wolf form. Something was wrong. Something was different than it had ever been before.

My nose guided me to a pool of still water.

Despite the horrors of the past days, what I saw in my reflection was the worst thing of all.

A Lycan.

My form made it immediately clear what I was. Bigger than any werewolf, my muzzle a sickening meld of human and canine features, my fingers and paws lengthier, my muscles rippling with strength.

Andreas’s words echoed in my mind: Having my trust made it so much easier to get information for the rest of the Lycans.

I was a Lycan. My parents were more than spies – they were Lycans. We didn’t have a genetic disease treated with supplements; we had a Lycan form and instincts suppressed by medication.

Everything Andreas had said was true.

I was a monster.

Time passed strangely after that.

I had immediately shifted back into human form and held it, despite the increasingly brutal conditions I endured in the wilderness.

I couldn’t bear to spend another second in the shape of my pack’s archenemies. The monsters Andreas and I once dreamed of defeating together.

Better to die wearing the face I knew.

Weeks passed in a mindless daze. Sometimes I caught food when instinct led me to it, but otherwise let myself starve. I was freezing, heartbroken, and covered with untreated wounds from my frantic escape.

There was nowhere for me to go. I had a rogue’s scent now. But even if I still smelled like a member of my pack, there was no going back.

The weeks of wandering the desolate woods were bringing me gradually closer to the human world, though I was hardly aware of it. What did it matter?

I was a monster. I’d lost everything. And I was going to die in the wilderness, alone.

Finally, when I had no scrap of strength left to go on, I collapsed.

——Sounds and images passed in a jumbled dream. I never thought I would wake up again. But slowly, warmth and light crept over me, and I came back to myself.

I felt bandages on my wounds, the pinch of an IV needle in my wrist. There was an unfamiliar scent near me – a human man.

“You’re finally awake!” gasped the young man sitting by my gurney.

“Don’t worry, you’re safe. This is my friend’s clinic, out here by the hiking trails – it was the closest place to bring you, after I found you out there.”

My heavy eyelids opened.

I was lying on a hospital bed in a small white room. A window overlooking the forest I’d spent weeks lost in lit up the thin face of the young man beside me.

“I don’t mean to pry, but… are you in some kind of trouble? I’ll help you, if you need it. I’m Gavin – I’m a law student back in the city. I’ll do whatever I can to–”

“You shouldn’t have saved me.” I rasped.

Gavin’s gaze was calm. He waited patiently, in case I had anything more to say.

There was silence.

"Well," Gavin handed me a file from beside my bed, labelled Unknown Patient (Jane Doe).He flipped past a chart of my vitals and to a page titled Ultrasound Results.“Here. If you want to see it.”

“You should have let me die out there.” I whispered, my voice a dry husk. "Let me go."

“But you should know,” he told me, there was no judgement in his placid voice.“that you’re pregnant. Are you going to take that to the grave with you?”

A shock ran through my body. I shook my head in utter disbelief.