Chapter Fourteen
Mitch
Ibolt down my stairs, a tripped ward between our packlands and Ironjaw shrieking in the back of my mind. Panic lances through me and I almost lose my footing when I reach ground level.
My wolf snarls against the threat to our packlands. As alpha, it’s my duty to investigate any perimeter breach. No matter how ingrained my need to stay here and protect. I pray it’s nothing more than a wolf straying across the line in tonight’s run. A silly mistake. But my wolf’s hackles are raised, lips peeled back. He senses danger and rages to defend our territory at all costs.
Guilt wars with urgency as I bolt outside and let the shift take over my body. I embrace the heated prickle along my spine as thick fur sprouts across my skin. Bones grind and rearrange in the ancient, agonizing shift. My muzzle lengthens into a deadly toothed snout as I drop onto four powerful legs. In moments, I’m no longer man but a giant, massive russet wolf.
I throw back my head and exhale a long breath, allowing my wolf’s predatory instincts to take over. I breath in a cacophony of forest scents–crisp pine, loamy earth, Sarah’s sweet floral musk lingering in our den. Narrowing to laser focus, I catch the tang of the tripped ward burning my nostrils.
A menacing rumble builds in my broad chest as I dart into the forest and become a part of its shadows. The night forest surrounds me in shades of silver and shadow. Tall pines loom like silent sentinels, their feathery boughs swaying in the cold mountain breeze. In the distance, my packmates’ celebration howls reach a raucous crescendo under the full moon’s silvery glow while my wolf self is all coiled aggression and intensity.
I lope across the frozen ground, clawed paws eating up the distance in powerful strides. Icy streams and fallen logs are cleared in a series of effortless bounds as I race up the steep, unforgiving ridge toward the ward line.
My breaths come in ragged pants, chest heaving against the thin air. Sweat soaks my fur, as I push my body to its limits but I can’t stop. Not when I want to get back to my mate. Not when I need to tell her who she really is.
The bond is strengthening. She’ll be able to feel it by now after what we’ve shared, even in her human body. I feel her anxiety, her confusion, and it’s damn near doing me in. I want to tell her everything. Show her who I really am. She needs to know everything now. She’s ready.
I reach the ward line–an invisible magical barrier that shimmers like a heat mirage along the boundary of our territory. Only my kind can detect the faint rippling and distortion in the air currents over the shining, black oval wards that look like onyx stone.
To my wolf’s heightened senses, the wards thrum with a low, resonant hum. The enchantments woven into them crackle with barely-perceptible sparks of energy, giving off an ozone tang that stings my sensitive nostrils.
One ward lies in fragments, the intricate spellwork woven into it shredded into delicate ribbons. Fraying tendrils of disrupted magic hang in the air, the normally cohesive vibrations now discordant and jarring. They twist and unravel in dizzying, unpredictable patterns, sparking erratically like downed power lines. Even now, the bright blue will quickly fade to nothing now that the ward no longer holds any power.
Where the ward line should be a seamless, unified thrumming force, it now gapes with a black hole. Rage pounds through my veins at the violation of our territory’s magical defenses. I sniff past the burnt ozone smell of dying magic to find the sharp, musky scent of an unfamiliar wolf.
Male.
Feral.
My hackles rise as a vicious growl rumbles from my throat. Rage pours off me in roiling waves, my powerful body trembling with the force of it. How dare this rogue breach our territory–our home? Endanger my wolves with his crazed presence? The urge to rip and tear this threat apart with fang and claw is almost overpowering.
But twined through the crimson haze of fury is icy fear. Fear for any of my packmates who may have already encountered this beast. Panic squeezes my heart at the thought of finding broken, bloodied bodies in our forest. A feral is unpredictable at best.
The sword of death at worst.
I have to find this intruder quickly before he can attack anyone.
Least of all my mate.
Never before has life had the potential to hurt me so much.
Giving myself over to the hunt, I flare my nostrils and track his scent. To my horror, the trail angles away from our forested packlands and cuts unerringly toward Willowbrook.
I.
Bolt.
Branches scratch through my fur. Downed twigs crack under my feet. I bound over the mountain stream, sending rocks scattering when I land. I charge through the main street, thankfully empty now that my pack are running through the forest. I dart past shops and Sally’s empty diner, closed for the festival.
The feral scent leads me on the road out of town. Icy dread claws at my pounding heart as the feral’s scent trail snakes up the familiar winding mountain road.
Toward my cabin.
I put on a burst of panicked speed. My claws pop through rocks as I tear around each hairpin bend until I break through the last lot of trees and see my cabin. The rogue’s rank, unsettling musk is everywhere–heavy over the porch, seeping through the shattered front door hanging ajar on its hinges.
He’s there. Inside. Where I told my mate to stay and wait, alone and vulnerable.
A guttural howl rips from my throat and shakes the shadows as I charge inside, only to be brought up short by a scream that rends the black night—high-pitched, fearful, and all too familiar.
Sarah!
Only she’s not inside. She’s somewhere in the forest where she has no protection.
Anguished fury surges through me and I throw back my head, releasing a hair-raising howl into the darkness. My focus narrows to a single, blazing need–get to my mate.
Shred the feral who has deigned to take her.
I crash through the underbrush in a frenzy, ignoring the slashing bites of pine branches and stinging lines of blood they leave on my face. Every shred of my being strains toward the sounds of her cries splintering the silent forest. At last, I barrel into a small moonlit clearing and freeze, a choked whine catching in my throat.
There she is. My beautiful, delicate Sarah crouched against the slashed trunk of a gnarled old tree. Tears stream down her porcelain cheeks, green eyes stretched wide as the feral circles her in hungry, unpredictable loops. His jaws are distended in a permanent snarl, thick ropes of drool dripping from his lolling tongue to spatter on the ground. Ribs appear through his mangy, threadbare pelt with each heaving breath. Scabs mar his legs and along his flank and when his head swivels toward me, his eyes are bright with insanity. He has no idea what he’s doing. A part of me wonders how he was able to breach a witch’s ward, find my cabin through the town and my mate, but then his legs tense and he’s arching through the air toward my mate.
Her scream shreds my soul.
In two massive strides I’ve crossed the distance between us. My paws leave the ground, my jaws clamping around his throat with bone-crushing force before he has a chance to touch a hair on her head. I use every ounce of my weight to bear down, driving his body into the ground. His eyes widen with shock and terror as I tear out his jugular in one savage motion, spraying his lifeblood in an obscene crimson arc.
I release the ragged flesh from my jaws, watching impassively as his body gives one final jerking shudder before falling forever still. A pool of gore slowly spreads out around his matted fur, staining the pine needles beneath and filling the clearing with the thick, cloying scent of death.
Lifting my muzzle to the glimmering moon, I allow a single mournful howl to pour from the depths of my soul. A mourning song for the violence, for the loss of control and a feral’s senseless death.
When I turn to face Sarah, she’s trembling against the rough bark, staring at me with horror reflecting in her eyes. Her hair is a wild, tangled mess. Blood splatters her pale skin and deep tremors wrack her body.
My ears flatten against my skull and I release a broken whine, desperate to convey the roiling storm of shame and anguish tearing through my soul. At revealing the other half of myself in such a brutal way. At her witnessing the true depths of violence I’m capable of unleashing with fang and claw.
Even if I shift back to the human form she knows and loves, can she ever again look at me without a glimmer of fear and revulsion? Will she ever be able to separate the man from the beast whose unholy presence taints our bond?
Or have I just destroyed any chance of her loving all of me?