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)
Even in this animal state, I have nothing but reverence for a hot shower. The human trapped inside me wants to wash all that has happened from me. I want to forget the sights and the sounds of the dispatching of a man who very much needed to die.
I am starting to become much more comfortable in this animal state. The way I can move on four paws, lope along at a pace that is far faster than any human gait feels like freedom of a kind I can hardly believe I tried to deny myself.
As I make my way through the forest, I catch a scent. It’s familiar. Very distant, but familiar.
For a moment, I cannot place it. Memory is hard to access in this state, but I know what is important, and what is not. This smell matters. It takes a few moments for my mind to catch up to the reason why.
Our pack mates are still missing. I’ve not heard anything from anyone that suggests they’ve been found, or that even a lead has come up in the meantime.
But I just caught scent of one of them. At least one.
I instinctively move toward it, the desire to protect and reclaim my pack the most powerful drive I have in this moment. I have destroyed one evil thing, and if I am to survive to destroy more evil things, I will need my family around me.
I move faster, turning away from the city and toward the thick forest around the base of the mountains. I can smell a lot of human activity out here too. Sweat and electrolytes and trail mix. Chocolate bars and regret.
I skirt around the people, hearing their chatter. One of them is playing tinny music from the speakers of their phone. I feel a brief instinct to savage them for that sin, but I pull back. I am not that hungry.
The scent draws me far from the human tracks that wind up the mountains, and instead pulls me deeper into the goat tracks and animal paths that wind into dense natural bush.
The scent continues to become stronger as I get closer. I smell animals. I smell wolves. I smell blood. Suffering. Pain. I smell captivity.
The closer I get, the more certain I am that my lost pack members are being held out here. Of course we never found them. They were being held outside the city. I didn’t even think about extending the perimeter this far from the borders of the city.
Suddenly, there is a new scent. This one comes to me suddenly, because the source of it remained downwind of me right up until the moment it wanted to emerge. This is a scent that knows how to hide itself, and how to appear.
I stop dead, my paws digging into the soil.
Another wolf is in front of me. He is gray, but appears reddish because of the rust discoloration around his jaws, chest, and front paws. He has followed me, I realize. Followed, then swung out and around and cut me off.
I back away a step. He follows.
The scent behind him remains. My pack.
My hackles are raised, my lips curled up to display my canines. I am willing to hurt him. At least, that is what my display says. But I am not truly ready to fight again so soon. There is something very particular about the wolf in front of me that drains away any belief that I would win.
This animal in front of me smells like death. Old death, new death, fresh kills, old kills. The way the creature’s eyes burn into me makes me want to whimper and crouch, but I resist that urge as well. I am frozen, trapped between competing instincts, unable to move until he does.
What he does is shift.
In the place of the wolf is a man in his late forties. He is rugged, muscular, and scarred. His hair is down to his shoulders, black underneath but well marked with gray.
“Hello, Nicola.”
My father says my name for the first time in many years, and I find myself unable to respond because a wolf’s tongue cannot speak, and it is for the best that it cannot.
My hackles are still raised. My teeth are still bared. I still want to run, but I can’t. I’ve missed him. Some part of me has missed him every single day since he drove away at that gas station and left me in a mire of blood and bodies.
I stare at him and I stay in that suspension of aggression and fear.
I don’t notice that my wolf form is fading away. It is only when a cool breeze makes me shiver that I realize I have lost my fur.
“I thought you were dead,” I say.
“I thought we were both dead,” he says. “But we’re not, are we, kid? We’re both stronger than we thought. And now you’ve come into your own. You’re grown. You’ve taken a mate. It suits you.”