Chapter 15 A Dire Without a Pack
A DIRE WITHOUT A PACK
RONAN
One Month Later…
Iwoke with my face pressed against frozen ground and no idea how I'd gotten there.
The shelter I'd built—three days ago? four?—hung crooked above me. Branches and salvaged tarp that barely qualified as cover. Cold air burned in my lungs when I breathed, made my ribs ache, and the first thing I registered was the complete absence of anything familiar.
No pack scent. No wood smoke. No distant hum of a town waking up.
Just silence.
I pushed myself upright slowly. My body was functional—bruised, filthy, running on fumes, but nothing actively broken. The rogue bite on my shoulder had mostly healed. The cuts across my ribs had closed into raised lines.
But my mind was frayed.
I stood on legs that shook and forced myself to take inventory.
Hunger sat in my gut like a stone. I'd eaten yesterday—pretty sure I'd eaten yesterday—but my body was burning through calories faster than I could replace them.
The constant terror, the nights without real sleep, the way my wolf kept surging beneath my skin demanding shift when I couldn't afford it.
Animals watched me from distances that should have felt safe but didn't, their eyes tracking my movements with the patient attention of creatures waiting to see if I'd die so they could scavenge what was left.
I moved through the clearing, looking for signs of intrusion, for tracks that didn't belong.
What I found made my stomach drop.
Snapped branches at wolf height. Claw marks gouged deep into tree bark. Tracks in the soft earth near the stream—massive, heavy, the print of a dire wolf moving with purpose.
Mine.
All mine.
I crouched beside the deepest set of tracks and tried to reconstruct the timeline. I'd gone to sleep—what passed for sleep—sometime after dark last night. Woke just now with dawn grey overhead.
The tracks looked fresh. Recent. Made within the last few hours when I should have been in my shelter.
I stood too fast, vision greying, and grabbed a tree trunk to keep from swaying. My hands looked wrong in the early light—too pale, nails cracked and dirty, knuckles scabbed.
And there, dark under my fingernails where scrubbing hadn't quite reached, was blood.
Old blood. Dried to rust-brown.
The nausea hit hard enough that I had to brace both hands against the tree and breathe through my mouth.
This was getting worse.
A week ago I could still track my time. Could account for most of my hours, could feel the compulsion building when Silas reached for me and fight it off before it took hold.
But the gaps were widening. Spreading like rot through timber, eating away at the continuity that made me a person instead of a body being piloted by someone else's will.
I forced myself to move.
Found a deer carcass two hundred yards east with its throat torn open.
I stumbled back toward camp following my own tracks.
My reflection caught me when I bent to drink from the stream. I stopped and stared down at a face I barely recognized.
Hollow. My cheeks had gone gaunt, skin pulled tight over bone. Beard grown in patchy and unkempt. Hair hung past my collar now, matted in places, stringy with sweat and dirt.
You're losing yourself.
I looked away before the reflection could confirm what I already knew.
The thing eating me from the inside was winning, and I had no plan for stopping it beyond running until I couldn't run anymore.
I made myself eat.
Jerky from the gas station I'd passed three days ago, stolen while the clerk wasn't looking because money was finite and shame was a luxury I couldn't afford. The meat was tough, over-salted, the processed protein that would keep me upright without requiring me to remember cooking.
Feral starts with refusing to fuel the body. Starts with the small neglects.
The jerky sat heavy in my stomach. My body wanted fresh meat, wanted the deer carcass I'd left behind, wanted to feed the way wolves fed when they stopped pretending to be civilized.
But eating what I'd killed without remembering the kill felt like surrender.
So I chewed processed meat and told myself it counted.
A sound cut through the forest quiet.
Distant. Maybe a mile out. The particular timber of a howl, except it cracked wrong in the middle, turned into a scream that no wolf throat should have been able to produce.
My instincts surged. My bones ached with the need to shift.
My wolf was clawing beneath my skin, pressing against the cage of human form, demanding I let it loose.
I grabbed a tree trunk with both hands and held on until my fingers cramped.
Breathing. Just breathing. Counting seconds between inhales, forcing air into lungs that wanted to reshape themselves.
The sound came again. Closer this time.
I couldn't go toward it. Couldn't risk the shift, couldn't risk losing more time, couldn't trust that if I let my wolf out I'd be the one in control when it was over.
The tree bark bit into my palms. I focused on that pain, used it as anchor.
Minutes passed. The sound faded.
My hands were shaking when I finally let go.
I spent the next hour setting up safeguards.
Rope lines strung between trees at angles that would tangle me if I tried to leave camp while shifted. Symbols scratched into bark with my knife—pack marks, territorial boundaries. Stacked stones at the cardinal points around my shelter.
I finished the last marker and sat down hard on a fallen log.
The sun was climbing higher. Morning proper. Another day of existing between feral and functional, another day of fighting myself, another day of wondering if this was the one where I'd lose completely.
I closed my eyes.
Felt the pressure building behind them.
I dug my nails into my palms. Hard. Let the bite of pain cut through the building fog.
The compulsion didn't break.
It slid.
That was the new horror. The compulsion didn't slam down like a wall anymore. Sometimes it eased into place while I was still awake, still aware, still present inside my own skull but no longer in control.
My limbs went obedient.
I felt it happen—the moment my hands stopped belonging to me, the moment my legs would move when commanded regardless of what I wanted.
Still here. Still conscious. Still aware of every sensation. But not in control.
I stood up.
Walked away from the fire without choosing to.
The world tilted. Time folded.
Then I was somewhere else entirely.
Deeper in the forest.
Standing over an animal. A rogue—the scent was wrong, carried the rot-iron stink of a wolf that had been broken from its pack. Its throat was torn open. Fresh blood steamed in the cold air.
My hands were wet with it.
I should have felt horror. Should have felt guilt, revulsion, the sick weight of taking a life I didn't remember choosing to take.
But there was nothing.
Just acceptance. Just the growing certainty that this was what I did now. What Silas had built me to do. And fighting it was becoming harder than just letting it happen.
I looked down at my hands. At the blood coating my fingers, pooling in the lines of my palms.
I should clean them. That was the practical thought, the only thought that surfaced through the numbness.
I found the stream and dropped to my knees at the edge.
The water was ice-cold. I plunged my hands in and scrubbed, watching blood dissolve into pink clouds that the current carried away.
But I didn't feel disgust. Didn't feel shame.
Just went through the motions because that's what you did after killing. You cleaned up. You moved on.
I pulled my hands out. Stared at them.
Clean. Objectively clean.
The sensation of blood persisted anyway. Under my nails. Under my tongue. In the spaces between my teeth.
But it didn't bother me the way it should have.
“I won't become what you want,” I whispered into the night.
I collapsed near my shelter. Whole body shaking with exhaustion and the growing certainty that I was losing this fight one blank space at a time.
The fire had burned down to embers while I was gone. I didn't rebuild it.
I curled on my side in the dirt.
The compulsion was rebuilding in my head. I could feel it. Threads weaving through my thoughts, connecting to places I couldn't protect, preparing for the next time Silas needed me to move.
And the worst part was that fighting it was getting harder.
Not because the compulsion was stronger.
Because I was tired of fighting.
Tired of resisting. Tired of clawing my way back to consciousness after every blank space only to find more evidence that I'd done terrible things.
Tired of being afraid of myself.
I woke near dawn half-shifted without realizing it.
My heart was racing like I'd been running.
I forced the shift back with effort that left me gasping. Felt bones crack and reshape, felt flesh reorganize itself, felt the dire in me snarl in protest at being caged when it wanted to be loose.
A sound cut through my breathing.
Soft. Controlled. The particular quiet of a large animal moving with deliberate care.
I froze.
A wolf stepped into view.
Older. Scarred across the shoulder and muzzle in ways that spoke of fights survived. Broad-shouldered, heavy, the build of a male in his prime who'd aged into a thing even more dangerous. His coat was grey-brown, darker along the spine.
He moved wrong for a stranger.
He walked toward me like he had every right to be here, like my space was his space.
Pack.
But the scent was different. It was older and familiar in ways that bypassed my conscious mind entirely and went straight to my wolf.
The wolf stopped three feet away just watching me.
He tilted his head. Left side down, right ear up. The exact angle, the exact gesture I'd seen a thousand times in my brother when Daniel was weighing whether to believe me or call me on my bullshit.
Family.
The wolf took another step closer. Lowered his head and huffed once. Soft. The sound Daniel made when he was exasperated but fond, when he was done being serious and ready to let things go.
My chest went tight.