“You may shift,” James announced.
It was the first time I saw them taking their werewolf forms, other than the first time I had met Owen. I watched with interest as Liam bent his face down to the floor. Crack and pops filled the room, the sounds of their shifting bone structure echoing and sending new shivers through me—this time in sympathy, as I listen to what sounded like tendons snapping. I wondered what my own first shift would be like.
In only a few moments, the partial shifts were complete.
I half expected to be horrified by the sight of their partially shifted forms. But I found that it didn’t bother me at all. When Liam looked up at me, it was still his beautiful brown eyes shining out of a semi-lupine face. And I knew that no matter what, he would always care for me.
Glancing around at the other two men, I realized I felt the same way about them. Their partially shifted faces did not look malformed to me. They were beautiful, all of them, no matter what shape they took.
Having watched them go through even part of the shift, I suddenly realized why they burned so hot – they needed that energy to fuel the shift to werewolf from human.
They all gathered around me, again carefully placing their mouths against me.
A shot of adrenaline raced through me. It wasn’t terror, exactly, but rather, the natural response of the human when faced with a werewolf.
I was prey, and I knew it.
James lifted his arms, like a priest giving a benediction. As he dropped them, he said, “You may now bite the bride.”
Even I could not tell which bite penetrated me first. They bit simultaneously, their sharp canine teeth sliding into my skin, piercing it like hot needles, sending slivers of misery shooting through my limbs. I clenched my teeth against the pain, determined not to cry out, but I couldn’t help but whimper as I fought to hold myself perfectly still.
I knew we weren’t done, either. While a single scratch of a werewolf’s tooth might be enough to effect the shift, there was no guarantee. To be certain, the bites had to be deeper than simply piercing the skin.
We had discussed the possibility of using some sort of numbing agent, but no one was sure how it might affect the lycanthropy virus. I tried to steel myself for what came next.
There was no preparing for it, though. As the werewolves’ lower fangs slid into my skin, as well, I found myself sobbing aloud. Red-hot points of agony centered my attention on my body—I couldn’t have told you what was going on in the world around me. I closed my eyes tightly, tears dripping down the side of my face as the three men I had vowed to take as my own mauled me.
The pain was excruciating. I felt the scrape of their upper and lower fangs coming together inside me and adrenaline flooded the back of my mouth, the copper taste choking me as I worked to keep from pulling away from the wolves.
I imagined their saliva coursing through me like poison pumping through my veins, and I fought not to vomit.
As soon as each wolf had completely penetrated the skin with all his teeth, they all three opened their jaws to release me. Their fangs sliding out of my skin was almost as painful as it had been for them to enter.
And each of them, without discussing it, began licking the wound he had created. To my surprise, their tongues eased the sharp pain. The screaming of my severed nerve endings quieted to a dull ache with occasional hot pinpoints.
My tightly clenched jaw didn’t relax, not for a long moment—and when it finally did, it was only to sob once.
After what seemed like hours but was probably only seconds, James and Tara finally moved my mates away from me. They all stood reluctantly, staring at me with anxiety pulsing through their eyes and shaking their half-shifted frames.
They had been careful, but blood still dripped down my skin, landing on the sheet in dark splotches. Quickly, James and Tara pressed gauze pads against the wounds, stanching the blood, then wrapped and taped bandages over them.
“Thank you,” I murmured softly. Tara’s nodded, her gaze worried.
Under any other circumstances, the wounds would have been carefully cleaned first. But because we wanted me to change, needed the lycanthropy virus to thrive inside me, they didn’t even rinse off the blood.
“Any infection beyond the lycanthropy will disappear during your first full-moon shift,” Owen said as if he were reading my mind.
This is better than dying, I reminded myself. It had been my only choice
I was married to werewolves, and I would become a werewolf. I had to get used to it.
I stood up too quickly and reeled. All three of my mates reached out to steady me. “Are you okay?” Owen asked.
“I will be.” I reluctantly put weight on the leg where Liam had bitten me. Very carefully, Liam wrapped the burgundy satin around my shoulders, covering the wound there and on my elbow. Even the brush of fabric caused the wounds to ache.
If this had worked, we would know by midnight. In the meantime, I was supposed to go out to the party and show my new pack how resilient I was.
I didn’t feel resilient. I felt fragile and wounded and miserable. And I suspected the worst was yet to come. No one had said so directly, but more than once I had heard my wolves use the phrase “surviving the bite.”
“Let’s go back to the party,” I said, my voice shaking.
My mates surrounded me, offering their support and protection.
“Here. This can help.” Dean handed me a glass of some dark amber liquid. “Drink it fast,” he suggested with a slight grin. “It’s pretty potent.”
I downed it as he suggested, and the heat of it hitting my stomach quickly spread out to my limbs, offering at least the illusion of the pain receding.
Liam stepped up to the side where my leg was injured. He put one arm around my waist and gave me his other hand to hold.
“We’ll help you to a chair,” Owen said. “You don’t have to dance, but you’ll need to be out there to accept the other pack members’ congratulations.”
I nodded and took a half step forward before he stopped me. “Wait. This first,” he said. He dabbed away my tears with a cloth handkerchief. I had never known a man who carried handkerchiefs. But of course, Owen did.
Tara stepped in with a powder compact and lipstick. “Touch up a little, too,” she advised.
When I was ready, Owen led the way, and the three of them surrounded me, mostly blocking me from anyone’s view until they had me settled in a chair with a footstool and padded arms—almost like a throne. Definitely more comfortable than the plastic folding chairs they’d had out for the ceremony.
As long as I remained perfectly still, the wounds my mates had inflicted didn’t hurt.
Fifteen
As the afternoon wore on, more and more pack members shifted into their wolf forms. Mostly it started with the children, who would disappear for a time and wolves would reappear in their place, some of them small and bouncing, others with long, gangly, adolescent legs.
They played, pouncing on each other and growling playfully as they rolled around in the grass. The entire pack watched out for them, I noticed. Adults intervened when the play got too rough with no apparent need for direct parental supervision. Everyone helped to care for the cubs.
A steady stream of visitors visited me in my throne-like chair and people brought me food and drink all afternoon long, but I merely picked at what was offered.
The change started in me as a mild ache in the joints of my fingers and toes. At first, it felt like everything was a little tight. I stretched my hands and toes wide, rotating my wrist and ankles as I tried to work out the kinks.
Liam was the first of my mates to notice. “You okay?” He dropped into a chair next to me and took my uninjured arm with his hand. He rubbed up and down and rolled my fingers between hands, squeezing lightly.
“Oh, that feels really good.”
“There’s a chance it’s only going to get worse.”
I nodded, certain this was only the beginning. With one subtle g
esture, Liam got Owen’s and Dean’s attention. They made their way to my table from their separate positions on opposite sides of the tent. When they got there, Liam spoke in a low voice. “It’s started.”
“Do we need to move her?”
“Don’t talk about me like I’m not here,” I snapped, but felt instantly contrite. “I’m sorry. I don’t know what’s wrong with me.” I rolled my shoulders back, trying to loosen my suddenly tight spine.
“It’s okay. You’re about to go through the first shift. We understand.” Owen placed a hand on the shoulder he had not bitten and rubbed my shoulder blade.
“Do the other one, too,” I said.
“Let’s get her out of here,” Dean said. The anxiety in his voice made me nervous.
Do I look as miserable as I feel? I wondered.
I must have because they shot those conferring glances among themselves.
The three of them help me stand, and the pain that shot up through my leg and into my hips nearly made me crumple to the ground. It was different from the pain I felt when they bit me. That had been sharp, immediate, and although it did leave an ache behind, each of the bites had stopped hurting, for the most part, when my wolves had withdrawn their teeth.
This pain was centered in my bones, radiating out and connecting to tendons and ligaments. As those tightened, they pulled on my joints, sending the pain right back into its source, so that it created a self-replicating loop.
The more I hurt, the more everything in me tightened, and more everything tightened, the more my joints were pulled out of alignment, and the more I hurt.
I moaned a little as I tried to take a step forward. I broke out into a sweat across my face and under my arms. “Did it suddenly get very hot?”
“No, sweetie,” Liam said. “That’s the shift, too.”
“You’ll run much hotter than before,” Dean said.
I realized that the usual gleam in his eye had changed to something more like worry.
I turned to Owen. “How many of these kinds of transformations have you seen?” I asked. My voice shook despite my attempt to keep it steady.
He shrugged a little helplessly. “Exactly like this? None. It’s very rare for a werewolf to take the bite this late in life.”
“And how many have you heard of?”
“Three or four successful ones.” He winced as he said it.
Part of me wanted to rage at him for not having given me this information sooner. “You mean I could die from this?”
“You would have died for certain without it,” Dean reminded me.
I nodded, but my answer was obliterated by the wracking shudder that swept through me, leaving pain and fever in its wake.
“We need to get her into the shifting room now.” Owen’s voice turned urgent.
“I brought the key,” Dean said, his usual party demeanor entirely missing.
I kind of miss it, I thought, almost deliriously.
Liam wrapped his arm around my waist and lifted me into his arms as if I weighed nothing. “Let’s go.”
They moved through the waiting crowd swiftly, not stopping to answer anyone’s comments, most of which were well wishes, in any case. No one else seemed concerned that I might be dying. At least, no one was saying so out loud.
They took me down the trail that led to the parking lot from the wolves’ convocation grounds. Even though Liam’s gait as he was running was as smooth as possibly could be expected, every jolt seemed to grind my bones together, and I whimpered and moaned.
All the way down the trail, Liam whispered encouraging endearments to me. “I’m so sorry, sweetheart. We thought we had more time. We didn’t expect it to hit this fast—or this strong.”
All three of them said some version of that to me between the reception tent and the car. Inside the limousine that had driven me to the fairgrounds, one of them—by this time I couldn’t tell who was doing what—wet a cloth and held it to my head.
Wait. I know. That’s Owen, using his handkerchief again.
The rest of that night I remembered later only in fragments, pieces of memory out of order and disconnected from any real sense of a complete narrative.
I remembered the car pulling into the garage, but not how I got to the containment room. The next thing I knew, I was in a cage with silver bars, alone and burning with fever.
I screamed when my fingernails popped off and claws slid out to take their place.
At some point, the tendons holding my jaw together snapped, and during the time it took for the new ones to reconfigure enough to work for a wolf’s jaw, I couldn’t open my mouth at all. Or close it, for that matter.
I curled in on myself, wrapping my arms around my knees and sobbing.
I rolled into the bars of my cage and searing heat sizzled across my naked back.
My mates took mother’s altered wedding dress off me, leaving me naked and shivering in the cold room.
I tried to shake my cage apart with my shifted paws, screaming my outrage in a cell that burned me when I touched it.
Fur sprouted from my arms and legs, coarse and dark. I felt every one of the hairs popping out like a sharp needle.
I heard snatches of conversation, too.
“I didn’t expect it to be this bad.”
“Should we try to help her?”
“She has to survive this.”
They didn’t know I could hear them, but I took their words to heart. I had to survive this. They needed me. And if my mates needed me, I was not going to die.
My bones ripped apart and reformed, each one the excruciating agony of a sudden break.
Finally, after what seemed like an eternity of pain, there came a moment of clarity.
Then another.
Eventually, no part of me hurt any longer, and I glanced around. I stood in the center of the silver cage. Everything around me was sharper, clearer. I realized I was sensing my surroundings through smell—and that at some point, I had already noted and catalogued the scents of my mates.
I could smell them now, in a room not far away, their scents overlaid with anxiety.
I tried to reach out to shake the door of the cage and lost my balance.
Not until I fell over did I realize that I’d been standing on four legs instead of two.
Sixteen
I managed to scramble to my feet before my mates came rushing into the room, but only barely.
Dean wore thick gloves and pulled open the cage door after unlocking it.
I walked out carefully, determined not to fall over again in front of them. The more steps I took, the more confident I became.
“Oh,” breathed Liam. “You’re beautiful.”
I flashed a wolfy smile at him. Come run with me, I wanted to say to them.
“Okay,” Owen said.
“Just let us shift and we will show you what it’s like to run as a wolf,” Dean said. “It’s better than riding my motorcycle, even.”
Wait. You can hear me?
Liam laughed aloud. “Yes, we can. It’s not a skill all wolves have, but apparently, our bites are going to link us in that way. It’ll be useful for you—it’s not a skill many alphas have.”
I sat down on my hindquarters and watched as the three of them prepared to run with me. As ever, their personalities influenced their actions.
Owen made a call to someone in the pack to drive us back out to the convocation grounds. “It’s possible to run in the city at night,” he explained to me. “But generally, it’s not a great idea. Too easy to be seen by humans or caught or worse.”
Dean hadn’t waited to start shifting. As soon as I had finished my request, he was already stripping down.
And before Liam shifted, he came over and ran his hand along the fur on my back. “Do you feel okay?” he asked me.
I feel amazing. Strong, powerful. I paused. And really hungry.
Liam laughed aloud. “Let’s get you out someplace where you can run and hunt, then.”
The ima
ge of a rabbit flashed through my mind, and I went from hungry to ravenous.
Hurry up, guys. I’m ready to go now.
The woods surrounding the clearing where our ceremony had been held the afternoon before would’ve been quiet to me in my human form, but to my lupine senses, they were alive with sounds and smells, and everything around me was limned in moonlight.
A scrabbling off to our left alerted us to another creature in the woods, and as if they were one, my mates’ three voices echoed in my mind. Rabbit!
I took off bounding into the woods after them, my heart leaping with joy at the freedom my new form had given me. I stopped on the crest of a slight hill, watching them race down it.
It was hard to believe that two weeks ago I hadn’t known werewolves existed. Three days ago, I had been certain I was being coerced into the most terrifying choice of my life.
Now, though? Everything was different.
I still had plenty of issues to deal with. I hadn’t even given my notice at my job back in my hometown.
But suddenly, I was looking forward to my new life.
Yesterday, I thought I could fall in love with any of the three wolves I’m running with now. Today, I’m pretty sure I’ve started to fall in love with all of them.
I was excited about exploring that connection—all three of those connections—in the days and weeks to come. We still had plenty to do. There were fairies to question, a plot against werewolves to untangle, apparently hunters to deal with, and who knew what else.
But as I raced down the hill to join my three mates in the hunt, I knew one thing for certain: I had three of the most amazing shifters at my side, backing me up, and doing everything they could to support and protect me from now on.
I had a feeling I was going to absolutely adore my new life.
Seventeen
Three weeks ago, I didn’t know werewolves existed.
Three days ago, I met my first one.
Last night, I married three of them.
Oh, yeah. And all three of them bit me so I would become a werewolf, too.
Wicked Souls: A Limited Edition Reverse Harem Romance Collection Page 54