Shifter

by Jennifer Reynolds

  “What if she doesn’t conceive?” the female asks.

  “Oh, she will. My other spell will ensure that,” Mave says, grinning down at me malevolently.

  I don’t know how long I was out, but judging by the look on their faces, I haven’t been out for long. They look bored and annoyed. Thankfully, they aren’t looking my way, so I quickly shut my eyes and try to go back to sleep. This doesn’t work. It doesn’t take long for them to realize that I am no longer sleeping. My breathing must have changed or something, and they have noticed.

  “I know you’re awake,” the male says.

  I refuse to acknowledge him, wishing I could melt into the surprisingly conformable mattress. If my arms and legs weren’t pulled so far and so tight and in so much pain, and I wasn’t in this situation, I might let myself fall asleep to escape the world.

  “I told you that you should have taken her while she was sleeping,” the female says.

  “Mave said that she had to heal. That as long as she was asleep her body was healing. My seed wouldn’t take hold until she heals. Now help me undress her.”

  I feel my shoes pulled roughly free of my feet. My toes grow cold as soon as the air touches them, making this already mortifying situation even more uncomfortable.

  “Does she have to be completely naked? Can’t we bare her from the waist down?” the female asks. For a brief second, she sounds as she is purposely trying to drag out the event, not to stop him from further hurting me, but to keep him away from me as long as she can.

  “No, I want to feel her completely nude under me,” he says lustfully, bringing me fully into the scene.

  I fight the urge to vomit, then I wonder if there might be a way for me to escape when they untie my legs to remove my pants. I quickly forget my plans because they only untie one leg at a time, and they both hold me down as they work. This doesn’t stop me from trying to jerk from their touch.

  Tears began to squeeze from eyes when I feel the rough touch of his fingers against my hips as he grabs the hem of my panties and rips them from my body.

  “I’m going to the restroom,” the female says. I doubt she has to use the restroom. She just doesn’t want to watch what is going to happen. Too bad her reluctance has nothing to do with the fact that he is about to rape me. As a fellow female, she should have some sympathy toward me and the violation I’m about to suffer.

  I don’t know for sure, because I’ve closed my eyes tightly, not wanting to see what he is doing, but I think I hear the soft thuds of his clothes hitting the floor after the female leaves the room.

  I don’t beg him to stop. I can’t stop my sobs, but I swear to myself that I will not give him any other reaction. The foot of the bed sinks as he crawls onto it. I jerk slightly when he places his hands on the inside of my ankles and begins to slide them up my body. At my knees, he spreads my legs wide and bends slightly to inhale me. This position causes the ropes around my ankles to chafe more, and I think I feel a bit of blood wet my skin. I hear him growl in pleasure, and I swallow down more vomit. Of its own accord, my pelvis shifts and tries to wiggle away from him.

  His hands slide up my thighs, but stop before he gets to the center of my body. His body freezes there for a long time. I can’t stop myself from looking at him. The curiosity as to what has stopped him overpowering me. I’m glad things haven’t gone any further, but I have to know why. He looks confused, as if he is struggling to figure something out. After a second, he shakes his head and moves over me, his body hovering inches above mine. I can feel his penis lightly brushing across the top of my mound. He isn’t erect, and I thank God for small favors.

  Again he stops. Looking down at me in frustration. He leans his body on one arm, reaches down, and takes hold of himself. I can feel the movement of his hand as he furiously jerks on himself. When nothing happens, he lets himself go.

  “Margaret,” he calls out, and instantly the female wolf’s head appears in the doorway. Her eyes cast down, purposely not looking toward the bed.

  “Yes?” she asks in a low, sad voice.

  Growling again in anger and embarrassment he sits up, points to his penis, and says, “Help me out with this.”

  Slowly she raises her eyes to see what he needs help with. The first look she gives him is a scandalized one. The look changes quickly to one of amusement as she comes to understand that he is having problems getting up. She walks over to the bed, a bright smile on her face, and reaches her hand out to half-heartily stroke him.

  “Use your mouth,” he spits after a few minutes. This time I think she is going to refuse him. I think about goading her into refusing, but settle for mentally praying for God and Dimitri to save me. Instead of watching her suck him, I close my eyes and try to summon Dimitri’s super strength or even Dimitri himself, but I get nothing.

  My eyes shoot open a few minutes later when Margaret’s head lands painfully on my arm. She has succeeded in making him hard, and he has pushed her away and is preparing to enter me. Fear rushes back over me, and I begin to cry. Margaret turns to lock gazes with me, and I plead with my eyes for her to help me. She looks at me dispassionately and sits up. As she does, she snickers, and I realize that he hasn’t moved.

  I make myself look at him. He lifted my hips up and poised himself at my open, but he is limp again. Cursing, he moves to run his fingers between my legs, but he stops mere millimeters from me. His hands shake as if he is pushing against an invisible barrier.

  “You touch her,” he snaps at Margaret who was trying to crawl off the bed.

  “What?”

  “You heard me.” He grabs one of her hands, puts it around his penis, and shoves the other toward me. Her face goes red in anger but quickly shifts to confusion as she looks down at her hand. The one he has forced in my direction has stopped an inch or so from me.

  “I...I can’t,” she says in bewilderment.

  I begin to cry even harder now, though these tears are in relief instead of fear. Granted, I will suffer the humiliation of this entire event for the rest of my life, but it seems I am being spared much worse. As I cry and thank God, it dawns on me what might be happening.

  “What do you feel?” he asks her, letting go of her hands.

  “Nothing now, but when you were trying to force me onto her, my body felt repelled by her. As if it knew it shouldn’t be touching her and didn’t want to.”

  “Damn it,” he shouts, leaping off the bed. “Mave,” he calls into the other room.

  “What could you possible want with me?” she asks in annoyance, entering the room.

  “She’s mated to him,” he screams in her face.

  “How’s that possible? I didn’t think you could mate with humans.” She visibly fumes at the idea. I smile mockingly at her.

  “We can’t. Weres and humans aren’t the same species. Shifters, on the other hand, are human with special abilities, like witches, so apparently they can. Fuck.”

  I lay in shock and relief. Dimitri was right. I hadn’t believed him. I couldn’t believe him. Couldn’t believe that someone like him could love someone like me. But he has to, right, for us to have mated? I close my eyes, mentally call out to him with every bit of love and need I have in my heart, and to my surprise, he answers.

  Chapter 32

  ~~~Dimitri~~~

  Sam is doing everything she can to locate Abby. Every item in the cabin that belongs to Abby or that Abby may have handled more than a few times lies on the kitchen table. Sam is taking turns with each item, trying to scry for her.

  She isn’t the only one. I’m in the small, spare bedroom Abby and I share—we let her sister and the kids have the master—meditating, trying my best to reach out to Abby through our bond. If she truly believed I love her, believed that I want to stay with her for the rest of my life, that the small changes in her physical makeup are proof of how much we love each other, then I would have been able to find her in an instant. Since she doesn’t. Since she doubts, she is unintentionally blocking herself from m
e. This doesn’t stop me from trying.

  Mom has gone to the Angels for help. We don’t exactly know how to reach them. We called for Dr. Smith numerous times, but she didn’t answer. Mom went to the animal hospital to find her.

  Sam has sent a few of our shifters after the other witches in her coven. Until recently, her coven had been working on a way to break the spell, but I have done that on my own. Now they are working on a way to get to Mave and punish her for her actions. Neither they nor the Regent will come after me if I kill Mave for what she has done to Abby or me, but the witches prefer that we hand her over to them. I will do my best to do so.

  I am focusing all of my energy on calling to Abby, and had been doing so for a while when a soft voice whispers to me. “Dimitri.”

  I sit up sharply and look around to see if someone entered the room. No one has.

  “Abby?” My whisper shows my uncertainty.

  “Dimitri, is that you?” The voice is Abby’s. A wave of relief spreads through me, and I lie back down on the bed and close my eyes, thanking God for the sound of her voice.

  “Yes, baby, it’s me. Where are you? Abby, talk to me,” I demand.

  “Mave has me. I don’t know where,” she tells me.

  “Are you hurt?”

  “Only emotionally.”

  “What did they do to you?”

  “Nothing yet. Mave promised me to a male were. He tried to rape me...”

  I can’t do anything more than howl in anger, my wolf side coming through and causing everyone in the cabin to rush to me. I block their voices, listening only to Abby’s reassuring words.

  “Dimitri, it’s okay. He didn’t. I mean, he couldn’t. They say you and I are mated and somehow that is deterring him from following through. You have to hurry. He and Mave are devising a plan to break the bond. I love you. I love our bond, please stop them,” she begs.

  “Just keep talking to me. Tell me everything that has happened. I’m going to try to sense where you are.”

  Sam grabs my arm and places my hand with hers on her scrying crystal. Abby continues to talk. She tells me about sending Katie to us and about how she thinks that our mating is altering her to be more like me. I had figured most of this out for myself, but I don’t stop her. The more she works through the events and her thoughts, the more she is able to convince herself of what is happening to her.

  “I believe you,” she finally says, and her essence lights up inside me.

  “Believe what?” I ask, knowingly.

  “That you love me.” At that moment, the crystal Katie is scrying with stops spinning.

  “And you love me,” I reply.

  “Forever.” Then she screams.

  “Abby?” I shout, but she doesn’t answer. “Abby, we know where you are. I’m coming to get you,” I continue even after our connection is broken.

  “Summon all of the shifters,” my dad barks. “Sam, you should call the Witches’ Council.”

  A minute later the front yard of my cabin is full of shifters, witches, and a few other supernatural beings. Dad relays the plan. When he is done, Sam gives us Abby’s coordinates. I already know where she is, and in the blink of an eye, the yard is empty. Seconds later, we are surrounding a small cabin in Kentucky and the weres Mave has protecting the cabin are attacking us.

  Chapter 33

  ~~~Abby~~~

  Speaking to Dimitri is easy. Keeping myself from speaking aloud while doing so is hard. The male wolf and Mave are arguing over the differences between weres and shifters. Margaret, the female, has returned to her seat and is reading a magazine with a satisfied smile on her face. I can’t figure her out. Her entire personality shifts with any given second. When I first arrived, she cackled like a cartoon witch while Mave tortured me, causing me to believe she was insane. The way she behaves around her alpha is more like a woman who truly believes her abusive husband loves her and is willing to do anything to make him happy so he doesn’t leave her.

  “Turn her then,” Mave suggests, grabbing my attention. Dimitri is still talking to me, but my focus has shifted to my captors.

  “You think that will work?” Margaret asks not looking up from her magazine.

  “Yeah,” the male says. “The change should break their bond because she won’t be the person he fell in love with and mated.

  In a flash, the wolf leaps onto the bed, covering my still naked body with his, shifts into his wolf body, and bites deep into my left arm. The scream that escapes my lips breaks my connection with Dimitri. The pain is fierce and the venom that courses through my veins burns. I hold onto consciousness for only a second or two after telling Dimitri that I will love him forever.

  -----

  I don’t know how long I was out, but when I wake, Dimitri, Daniel, and Katelyn are standing over me. The two men are working my hands and legs free from my restraints while Dimitri’s mother is tending to my wounds. I hurt everywhere. The parts that don’t hurt feel numb or asleep. To ensure the venom took, the wolf must have bitten every inch of my skin he could.

  “I think I’m going to be sick,” I whisper, closing my eyes in an effort to steady the world that is spinning out of control around me.

  “Abby.”

  I open my eyes at the sound of my name and see that Dimitri has abandoned his duties and is leaning over me with his hands outstretched to touch me, but is unable to find a bite-free place to do so.

  I look away from him and to his mother who says, “It’s all right. You’re probably a little lightheaded from the blood loss. If you feel sick lean your head to the right and vomit on the floor beside you.”

  I nod and close my eyes instead.

  “She’s free,” his dad says. “We can go now.”

  “Mom,” Dimitri pleads, as he switches to my right side and very gently slides his hands underneath my sheet-covered, naked body.

  Gently, Katelyn removes a needle from my arm that I hadn’t known was there and says, “You can move her. And yes, she will live. Just get her home so that I can work on those wounds properly.”

  He cradles me in his arms, rubs his cheek along my forehead, then kisses the spot lightly. Katelyn must have given me some good, fast-acting pain meds because his actions cause me very little pain.

  “What did they do to her?” he asks no one in particular.

  “I don’t know. Bite marks cover her body. Wolf bites from the look of the marks. And there are burn marks on her legs and stomach. I don’t know what did that.”

  Burn marks? On my legs? My stomach? How did I...oh yeah. Mave did that. I had almost forgotten about that bit of torture.

  “Did he rape her? There’s blood...” Dimitri asks, tightening his arms painfully around me.

  “I don’t know. There’s blood everywhere, Dimitri. Will it matter?”

  “No, but if he did, I’ll castrate him before I kill him.”

  “He didn’t...” I try to say, not that I don’t want the bastard castrated for the humiliation and the attempt, because I do. I just don’t want Dimitri to think he did. Although, I’m not sure he hadn’t. I had passed out after the first bite. If the venom worked quickly, my bond with Dimitri could have long since been severed, and the mongrel could have been in and out of me while I was unconscious. I try feeling for our bound, but I am too weak, too tired to feel much of anything.

  “Abby, honey, don’t speak,” Katelyn says, placing a thicker blanket over me.

  Dimitri doesn’t say anything to me, but his grip tightens, and I groan.

  “Take her home. I’ll be there in a minute. She will live. I promise. Now go. I’ll help take care of the mess outside then come straight to you,” Katelyn orders.

  “What’s outside?” I ask.

  “Hush,” Dimitri says, and we disappear from the cabin.

  -----

  I must have passed out again, because I don’t remember the ride home, the bath someone must have given me, or the bandages they placed all over my body, making me look like the Mummy from those old h
orror movies. I open my eyes to a room I have never seen before. The room is a plain one with cream-colored walls and only a few sepia-toned, blown-up scenic photographs hanging around the room. There is a wood chest of drawers to my left, a wardrobe to my right, and in front and slightly to the right of me a closed door.

  There are people in the room. Dimitri, Devan, Sam, Carrie, Katelyn, Daniel, and a few others I don’t know. Pack members, I guess. There are others outside the door. I can hear their voices, but I don’t recognize any of them. I look at each person in the room in turn. Not one of them says anything, though by the looks on their faces they are dying to speak. I guess they are waiting on me to speak first, but I can’t. I can’t think straight. The pain in my body is down to a dull ache, but my memories are clearing.

  I don’t want to tell them about the humiliation, and I really don’t want to tell Dimitri that I have been bitten by the were, however, it is obvious I have been. Besides, I don’t know what happened while I was unconscious. I catch Dimitri’s eyes for only a second. I can’t hold them. I don’t want him looking at me. I don’t want to see the revulsion in his eyes now that I’m his enemy, so I turn to Daniel and ask, “What happened?” My voice sounds harsh.

  “We were kind of hoping you could tell us,” he replies.

  “I can’t. Not with everyone in the room.”

  He sends away those few people I don’t know, but it isn’t enough.

  “Can you send everyone out but Katelyn?” I ask purposely avoiding everyone’s gaze. I even want him to leave, but I have a feeling he isn’t going to let a wolf, even a newly made one, alone with his wife.

  He gives me a quizzical look. He could probably understand why I might not want Sam and Devan here. They are practically strangers. He might even understand why I would want to send Carrie away. Even though she is my sister, she is my baby sister, and as a big sister, I would want to save her from knowing the horror I had gone through. Dimitri on the other hand, he probably doesn’t understand.