Total pages in book: 76
Estimated words: 71067 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 355(@200wpm)___ 284(@250wpm)___ 237(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 71067 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 355(@200wpm)___ 284(@250wpm)___ 237(@300wpm)
A lot of things are weird.
I can feel the animal inside me getting bigger. It’s like she’s shifting under my skin. She wants so badly to take over. I can’t have that happen. I promised I would never, ever take my wolf form. The fact that these people keep trying to push it telling me how natural and beautiful it is just means they don’t have any idea what they are asking for.
There’s a reason I ended up outcast. It’s because my father was outcast. My father was outcast because the type of wolf we turn into is dangerous. Actually, dangerous is far too small a word for what my bloodline becomes.
* * *
Thirteen years ago…
I am crying and I cannot stop.
There is so much blood. There are so many bodies. They’re everywhere, strewn about like, well, bodies. I wanted to think of something more poetic, but there’s nothing else to compare this to. It’s like if you tipped out a drawer of cutlery, but all the spoons and forks and knives were people who had been alive and were now dead…
My father is in the middle of the lot of them. He is covered in blood, too. There is so much of it, it almost looks like it has been painted onto him.
I wasn’t supposed to be here for this. I wasn’t supposed to see it. But I did. All of it. I am too small to understand. Too scared to run. So when my father slides from his wolf form and turns back into the man I know, I just stare at him.
“Oh, shit,” he says. “Weren’t supposed to be here, kid.”
He picks me up and I scream because I don’t want the blood to touch me, but then I look down and it’s already all over me. There’s no escaping it.
My dad carries me away from the blood and from the dead people who look like rag dolls who got chewed on too hard. We go out into the sun, where a light rain shower starts to make the blood on him and now me go all dappled.
I get the courage to ask a question.
“Why did you do that to those people?”
“I didn’t want to,” he says. “But when I get my dog on, there’s not much that can stop me. I never wanted you to see that.”
“Am I gonna do that?”
“No,” he says. “You’re a girl. You’ve got protection against this. Just as long as you never take a mate. And even if you do one day, and you get the urge, you suppress yourself. You hear me?”
He grips my shoulders tightly and looks into my eyes with his wide, desperate orbs. “You don’t have to shift if you don’t want to. Fight your nature. There’s nothing good that comes from it. You gotta trust me.”
* * *
That memory of my father exhorting me not to ever shift comes to mind. There’s a faint coppery tang in my mind mixed with iron as I blink and find myself in the car with my packmates and Rex. They think I am bad now. They wouldn’t be able to start to deal with me if I actually shifted.
“Can we get snacks?” I make the suggestion as we pass a gas station. “I’m hungry. I could go for some jerky or something like that.”
“We are not on a road trip,” Rex growls. “I am taking you for your own good.”
“So it has to suck? And be snackless?”
“Little brat, if you keep talking back to me, I will stop this car, take your pants down, and spank you on the side of the road.” He growls the promise at me, making it infantilizing enough to scare me out of keeping up my bullshit.
Good for him.
It takes three hours to get to the reserve. It’s a chaotic three hours. I try to get him to stop for snacks several more times, but Rex has pretty much stopped talking to me. I’ve become too obnoxious. Instead, my boys make polite conversation with him. They’re quite awed by the man.
I’ve heard about the reserve. Never been here. It’s massive, apparently. More land than most ranches, and all of it for the Regent pack and their special guests. I suppose that includes us.
The gate is less imposing and impressive than I thought it would be. Just two stone pillars and an iron gate with a sign that says Private. Then there’s a driveway. Gravel at first, but after a few hundred feet it becomes paved. Like they wanted it to not stand out as being anything in particular. Interesting. For all the flash of the Regent brand, this place is under the radar. I heard that it was very fancy, but aside from the smooth asphalt road running between trees, I’m not seeing anything particularly, oh… no… there it is.