Chapter 18 Fighting Fate
Fighting Fate
Phoebe
I spend the day researching.
Not werewolves. I’m not there yet. I research the things I can verify, the things that have edges I can hold onto without my hands shaking.
Wolf biology. Pack hierarchy. Alpha, Beta, Omega designations in animal behaviour studies.
The morphology of Canis lupus, the skeletal structure, the average mass, and the documented range.
I pull up every veterinary paper I can find on wolves.
Read them at my kitchen table with a cold cup of tea, curtains drawn, trying to fit what I saw in my living room last night into the framework of things I already know.
It doesn’t fit. Of course it doesn’t fit.
A man became a wolf in front of me. His bones restructured in seconds.
His mass redistributed without loss. His clothing vanished and reappeared, which I didn’t even think about at the time but which now sits in my mind like a splinter: where did the clothes go?
What mechanism could possibly account for the conservation of non-biological matter during a physical transformation?
I’m asking the wrong questions. I know I’m asking the wrong questions. But the wrong questions are safe, and the right ones are terrifying, and I’m not ready for terrifying at half past eight on a Tuesday morning.
By noon I’ve exhausted the internet’s limited supply of legitimate wolf research. I’m staring at a search bar, cursor blinking. My fingers type werewolf. I delete it immediately. Close the laptop. Push it away.
No. I’m not going there. I’m not reading folklore and fantasy fiction and conspiracy forums for answers to something I witnessed with my own eyes. I am a scientist. I observed a phenomenon. I will process it using the tools I have, and if they are insufficient, I will develop new ones.
I open my notebook.
Observed: Complete physical transformation from human male (approx.
90 kg, 188 cm) to large canid (approx. 70-80 kg, shoulder height approx.
90 cm). Duration of transformation: 2-3 seconds.
No apparent pain response. Clothing not present in canid form; restored upon reverse transformation.
Subject (R. Mistwood) reports condition is congenital and shared by multiple individuals.
Observed: Subject in canid form is consistent with animal treated on [date] in forest. Identifying features: coat colouration (dark grey to black dorsal, lighter ventral), eye colouration (gold-amber), size, temperament. Confirmed via behavioural cue (head dip, as noted in original clinical notes).
Reported by subject: “Mate bond”—biological recognition mechanism between individuals. Described as innate, involuntary. Correlates with observed symptoms in self: warmth upon physical contact, heightened awareness of subject’s presence/absence, emotional distress during separation.
Reported by subject: Latent wolf heritage in self.
Mechanism unknown. Activated by mate bond and/or proximity to pack.
Correlates with observed symptoms: sensory hypersensitivity, temperature dysregulation, sleep disruption, involuntary physical responses (tremor, heightened startle reflex), vivid dreams involving physical transformation.
I stare at what I’ve written. Clinical. Precise. Completely inadequate for describing the fact that the man I’ve been falling for turns into a wolf, and apparently, I might be doing the same.
* * *
The anger arrives on the second day.
It comes on slowly. Pressure behind my eyes building through the morning.
By afternoon it’s a living thing, pacing the inside of my chest the way I pace the cottage.
I’m angry at Roan for keeping this from me.
At myself for not seeing it sooner, for dismissing every sign my body was giving me, for rationalising the impossible until the impossible walked into my living room and refused to be rationalised.
At Maggie, her knowing smile, her basket full of herbs, her cryptic note.
At Rebecca, Tom, every warm-handed stranger at the bonfire who looked at me and saw something I couldn’t see in myself.
Most of all, I’m angry that even now, even knowing what I know, my body doesn’t care.
My body wants Roan. My body wants his hands, and the way my body stops shaking when he’s close.
The bond responds to him with a certainty that has nothing to do with my consent, and the fact that it feels good, that it feels right, makes it worse rather than better.
Because what does it mean if my feelings aren’t my own? If the warmth I feel when he touches me is a biological mechanism rather than an emotion? If the pull in my chest is chemistry rather than choice?
I wanted to choose him. That’s the thing that makes me press my hands against my face and sit on the kitchen floor and breathe through the tightness in my throat.
Before last night, before the wolf and the bond and the impossible, I was choosing him.
Every coffee, every conversation, every accidental meeting that I half suspected wasn’t accidental.
I was falling for Roan Mistwood with my own free will, making a conscious, adult decision to let someone in after James, after London, after everything. It was mine. That feeling was mine.
Now I don’t know if it was ever mine at all. And that, more than the wolves and the bond and the fucking impossible biology, is the thing that makes me want to throw something.
The symptoms don’t care about my emotional crisis. They continue with the indifference of a biological process that has no interest in whether I’ve consented to it.
By the third day without Roan, my senses are so heightened that leaving the cottage feels like assault.
The village high street is a wall of sound, smell, and texture that hits me the moment I open my front door.
I make it as far as the shop for milk and bread, moving through the world like someone with a permanent migraine, and by the time I get home, my hands are shaking so badly I drop the milk on the kitchen floor.
The temperature fluctuations are worse. I wake drenched in sweat at three in the morning, strip the bed, remake it, and twenty minutes later I’m shivering so hard my teeth chatter.
My skin crawls with sensitivity. I can’t wear certain fabrics.
Tags in jumpers feel like sandpaper. The seams of my jeans press against my legs like wires.
And the dreams. Every night, the dreams.
My body changing. My bones stretching and reshaping.
Running through the forest on four legs with a certainty my waking self has never known.
The golden-eyed wolf beside me, close enough that our shoulders brush, and the warmth hits so hard at the contact is so vast and so complete that waking from it feels like bereavement.
I don’t call the GP. I cancel the appointment, because no blood test is going to explain what’s happening to me, and I don’t have the energy to sit in a waiting room and pretend this is something a doctor can fix.
I don’t call Roan either. I pick up my phone a dozen times a day and put it down again.
I draft texts I delete. I stand at the window.
Look towards the treeline. The pull in my chest is steady, persistent, pointing towards him with a certainty that doesn’t waver no matter how many times I turn away.
He said he’d be close. I believe him. Some part of me, the part that’s changing, the part that responds to the bond with an assurance my rational mind can’t match, knows where he is at all times.
I can feel him. Not his thoughts, nothing that specific.
But his presence, like a second heartbeat, faint and steady and always there.
I hate that I find it comforting.
On the evening of the third day, I sit at my kitchen table with my notebook open to a blank page, and I write something that isn’t clinical notes.
Things I know: 1. Roan is a wolf shifter.
I saw it happen. This is real. 2. There is a bond between us that I can feel physically.
This is also real. 3. Something in my body is changing.
The symptoms are consistent with what he described: emergence.
4. The changes are getting worse when he’s not here and better when he is.
5. I was falling for him before I knew any of this.
Before bonds. Before impossible biology. Before I had language for what my body already knew.
I stare at number five for a long time.
Things I don’t know: 1. Whether my feelings are mine or the bond’s. 2. What I’m becoming. 3. Whether I can stop it. 4. Whether I want to stop it. 5. Whether choosing something that was chosen for you still counts as a choice.
Number four surprises me. I sit with it, turning it over the way I’d turn over a diagnosis that doesn’t quite fit.
Do I want to stop it? If someone handed me a pill that would reverse the emergence, silence the heightened senses, still the restlessness, flatten the dreams back into ordinary sleep, would I take it?
Three days ago, the answer would have been immediate and emphatic. Yes. Give me back my normal life, my normal body, my normal world where men don’t turn into wolves, and my bones don’t rearrange themselves in my sleep.
Tonight, the answer is slower. Because the truth is, my normal life wasn’t working.
I left London because I was exhausted and unhappy and going through the motions of a career that had stopped meaning anything.
I came to Mistwood looking for something I couldn’t name, and I found it, or it found me, and what’s happening to my body is frightening, but it’s also the first time in years I’ve felt like I’m moving towards something rather than away.
I don’t want to want this. But I might want it anyway.
I wash my mug. Stand at the window looking towards the treeline. The pull in my chest is constant. Patient. I think about a man who turned into a wolf in my living room. Who left when I asked him to. No argument. No pressure. No guilt trip for needing space.
He could have pushed. He could have stayed. He could have used the bond, his presence, or his warmth to override my objections, and, based on how my body responds to him, it probably would have worked.
He didn’t. He said “okay,” and he walked out.
That, more than the shifting, more than the bond, more than the impossible biology, is the thing I keep coming back to. He respected my choice even when every instinct he possesses must have been screaming at him to stay.