Total pages in book: 76
Estimated words: 71314 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 357(@200wpm)___ 285(@250wpm)___ 238(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 71314 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 357(@200wpm)___ 285(@250wpm)___ 238(@300wpm)
Her voice is deeper still, and there is a certain… lope to her gait. She’s moving with the intensity and motion of a wild animal already. There’s nothing I can do to stop what is about to happen. I am as helpless as a king before an incoming tide.
Sure enough, the minutes fail us, the full moon slips out from behind the clouds… and my mate erupts into her true form.
“Oh, my god,” I growl to myself.
It’s worse than I expected.
It’s more than I could have imagined.
The first shift is always messy. It’s not the smooth transition that it becomes later on. Learning to shift is about learning to submit in some sense, so I shouldn’t be surprised that her limbs are sort of all over the place, and she’s not going down on hands and knees in a way that would make things easier.
“Kneel down, sweetheart,” I say, trying to guide her. It’s not really how it’s done. A shifter can only ever handle their shift themselves, but maybe I can coach her through it a little. “Don’t stand on your hind legs like that. You’ll fall over when the full shift takes place.”
She’s still not listening, and now her legs are starting to look very odd. Very large. It’s normal for them to be covered in a thick pelt of fur, but it’s not quite as normal for them to look almost digitigrade, up on her toes.
It strikes me, all of a sudden, that the scientists might have made a mistake of a nature that will not allow her to make a proper shift. She might even die in the attempt, her body not properly wired or made for this taxing biological experiment.
I want to reach for her, but her hands have sprouted very, very long claws that look sharp enough to rip my throat out with a casual swipe. I can’t get any closer. I can’t fix this. All I can do is watch the terrible thing happen and hope that somehow these things get better on their own.
I curse my father inwardly. I wish I had never taken her anywhere near his cursed house, and given him the chance to have this done to her. This is just a longer, crueler way of killing her in front of me. It would have been kinder if he had simply put a bullet in her head.
She is howling and fighting air, somehow still standing erect, but writhing around anyway. I am now certain that I am watching my mate perish. Nobody can survive the wicked cracking of bone and twisting of flesh. She is being tormented and remade, like a person in an invisible car crash.
I close my eyes. I pray to the cursed god who bestowed this gift upon us for mercy.
And suddenly, it is over. I know because the night goes silent, and her anguished screams and cries fade to the light wind. I know I have lost my mate. There is no way she is…
She’s alive.
But when I open my eyes, I see that she is not a wolf.
She is furred, she is fanged, and she has impressively long claws on each of her digits, but what I am looking at right now is no shifter. No pack beast.
What I am looking at… is a werewolf.
She stands erect on two legs. Her face has taken on the visage of a wolf: long snout, sharp teeth, ferocious eyes. Her body is twice the size it was before, and thickly furred with a kind of blue-gray pelt.
She turns toward me, claws extended, and cocks her head to the side in a very canine motion.
The laboratory has made a monster. Werewolves don’t exist, according to modern shifters. They’re like Bigfoot and the Loch Ness Monster.
Maybe that was true a few weeks ago. It’s definitely not true anymore.
“Hey,” I say. “Do you understand me?”
She throws her head back and howls. The sound is wild, and deeply evocative.
I am seeing something that should not exist in this world, and I am absolutely astonished by the beauty and power and, hell, majesty of the feral side of the woman I adore.
I wonder if they could have made a werewolf with anyone else, or if she has some kind of blood in her that reacted a specific way. She’d been bitten by shifters before. Maybe that was a complicating factor. Whatever it is, she is stunning.
She howls again, then takes off into the undergrowth. I shift and follow her, keeping pace on four legs with the incredible bounding of her two. She scents prey, and follows the scent without hesitation.
We are fortunate that the forest is private and no people have stumbled into it, because her drive to destroy is now at its absolute peak. All she did before, when she escaped the lab, or when she ran from the officers, is nothing compared to the pure, perfect prey drive she is now displaying.