Chapter 4 One Hell of a Wrong Turn #2
That was the first plain truth my mind could hold.
Tall, broad, built with the kind of strength no gym had softened into decoration.
His shirt was open at the throat, sleeves rolled to the elbows, forearms marked with scars and old ink.
His hair was black, his jaw rough with stubble, and his eyes were fixed on me with a focus so complete it felt physical.
He looked furious.
No.
That was not right.
Fury was familiar. I knew fury. My mother’s clipped kind. Grant’s wounded kind. My own, banked and waiting under good manners. This…was something else. Something older than temper and less human than attention. I could not look away from him.
The man who had reached for me lowered his hand.
Good decision.
The old man near the altar spoke sharply. “Ian.”
The name hit the circle with weight.
Ian didn’t answer. His chest rose once. Slowly. His nostrils flared. I became aware, with horrifying clarity, that he was smelling the air.
Smelling me.
My skin went hot beneath the torn dress.
“No,” the woman in white said.
Her voice was thin now. The old man lifted a blade from his hip and that broke whatever strange grip had held me.
I stumbled backward, dragging half my skirt under one heel. “Okay, that is plenty. I am leaving. Everyone can keep the knife, the mood lighting, and the cult lawn.”
“Do not let her cross the line,” the old man snapped.
Two more figures shifted behind me. I turned and they were blocking the way back to the hedge.
My heart slammed against my ribs.
“Listen,” I said, and the word came out too sharp because terror had finally found my tongue.
“I am here for a wedding. I chased a dog. I have absolutely no interest in whatever this is, and if one of you so much as touches me, I will scream loud enough to ruin every rich person ritual on this island.”
One of the men smiled but his teeth looked wrong. And that was when the whole night changed.
The man across the circle, Ian, made a sound low in his chest. His body locked and people began shouting. The woman in white backed away from me as if I had brought plague into the circle. Henry barked and barked, twisting at his leash.
“Ian,” a man commanded from the northern edge of the circle.
That voice was different from the others. Colder. Stronger. Used to being obeyed.
Ian still didn’t answer. His eyes had changed and I saw it happen. One moment they were dark. The next, gold burned through them, bright and animal and impossible.
My breath stopped. My brain tried to reject it. Contacts. Light. Shock. A head injury from the fall. Any explanation that belonged to a world with taxes and dental appointments and sisters who married cheating men.
Then…Ian’s hands changed. Claws tore from his fingers and a scream broke somewhere in the circle.
It might have been mine. It might have been everyone’s.
His shoulders heaved, and his body seemed to fold around a violence too large for skin. Fabric ripped. Bone cracked. The sound was wet and terrible, followed by a snarl that turned my blood cold.
I tried to crawl backwards as my palm slid through ash.
Ian lunged. No one stopped him, maybe no one could. A massive black wolf hit the grass where the man had been, larger than any animal I had ever seen outside a nightmare, all muscle and teeth and moonlit eyes. He crossed the circle in a blur.
Straight toward me.
I scrambled backward until my spine struck one of the stone posts.
The wolf landed over me. His paws struck the grass on either side of my body. His head lowered. His breath washed hot over my throat. I could see every tooth in his mouth, every scar beneath the dark fur, every impossible line of power in the beast pinning me to the earth without touching me.
I could not move. I could not think.
The wolf inhaled against my neck and a violent shudder moved through him.
Behind him, people shouted orders, prayers, curses. The name Ian came again and again. The woman in white was crying now, or raging. I could not tell. The old man yelled something about the mark, the circle, the moon.
The wolf’s head snapped toward them, his lips peeling back.
Silence dropped hard. Whatever they saw in him, it frightened them more than I did.
Then his gaze came back to me. I had never understood what it meant for fear to become calm. I had always thought fear was panic, noise, movement. In that moment, with the wolf’s eyes burning into mine and my body trapped between the stone and the grass, fear went quiet inside me.
Clear.
I was going to die. Not metaphorically. Not socially. Not in the way I had joked about surviving the weekend. I was going to die because I had chased a dog through a hedge and fallen into something that should not exist.
Henry whimpered and the wolf’s ears flicked. My hand moved before I gave it permission. Slowly, carefully, I reached for the dog’s leash where it had tangled around the post near my hip.
The wolf watched my hand and his chest vibrated with a sound so low I felt it through the ground.
“I’m just getting the dog,” I whispered.
Ridiculous. As if he understood. As if manners mattered to monsters.
My fingers closed around the leash as a man stepped forward behind the wolf.
“Ian,” the colder voice said. “Move away from her.”
The wolf’s body went still and every muscle above me hardened. The air changed again, and this time I felt it from him. A pressure building under his skin. A fight inside the beast. Command against hunger. Law against whatever had pulled him across that circle and set him over me.
The old man spoke fast. “The human has contaminated the rite. Kill her before the mark chooses.”
Mark.
Chooses.
The words reached me in the wrong order.
Then the wolf lowered his head to my neck.
“No,” I said.
It came out small, but it was a word. It was mine.
His eyes met mine and for one impossible second, the beast hesitated. I saw something human there. Buried. Horrified. Fighting.
Then the wolf’s jaws closed on the place between my neck and shoulder.
Pain detonated through me and I screamed. It tore out of my throat and scraped raw on the way. The world became teeth, heat, and the brutal weight of a body holding mine down while something alive and burning poured into my blood.
Hands grabbed at the wolf. He snarled around the bite and drove them back without letting go. I hit his chest with my fists. Once. Twice. Useless. My knuckles sank into fur and muscle. He was everywhere, too hot, too heavy, too real.
The pain changed. That was worse. It spread from the bite in black, branching lines I felt before I saw them, rushing under my skin with a cold burn that made my limbs jerk.
My vision flashed white, then silver, then red.
The grass vanished. The faces around us blurred into streaks.
Henry’s barking stretched thin and distant.
The wolf released me.
Air rushed against the wound. I folded forward, or tried to, but my body no longer cared what I wanted. I hit the ground on my side, one hand pressed to my neck, and felt blood slip between my fingers.
Someone was crying.
Someone was shouting.
The wolf stood over me, shaking, his muzzle dark.
No one came closer.
Through the ringing in my ears, I heard the colder voice again.
“What have you done?”
The wolf looked down at me. Gold eyes. Blood on his mouth. Horror in a face that should not have been able to show it.
I tried to breathe but my lungs refused.
The moon above him blurred into a white smear.
I thought of Tessa on the terrace, waiting for her dog. I thought of my father telling me I had nothing to prove. I thought of Grant’s hand brushing my wrist and my own stupid certainty that four days of humiliation would be the worst thing I had to survive.
A laugh tried to move through me but it became a cough. The black lines under my skin pulsed once, spreading from the bite toward my chest.
The old man said, very softly now, “She will be dead before dawn.”