by J. L. Wilder
And that wolf isn’t going to survive anyway.
But she couldn’t manage it. The rifle was too long, too unwieldy. She couldn’t get it between herself and the wolf, and she was too dizzy from shock and blood loss to aim. After a moment of trying, she was forced to give up and to let it drop to the ground. It felt as if it weighed a hundred pounds.
She was growing weaker.
Her vision dimmed, especially around the periphery. She blinked, trying to clear it.
And a thought occurred to her through the fog.
It only bit me once. It hasn’t attacked me again.
Why?
She supposed the wolf was just so distracted by its own injury that it hadn’t had the presence of mind to come after her again. That was good. Maybe she would die unmauled. It would be easier for her parents to find her if her body wasn’t too torn up.
I wonder if anyone will tell Chris what happened to me, she thought.
I wonder if Chris will even care.
I bet he won’t. I bet I’ll turn into a fairy tale he tells his new wife and his new kids. The girl he knew who was killed by a wolf. Wolf girl.
And as her vision began to fade for the final time, she felt a brief stab of pleasure at the thought. Wolf girl. If there was something to be remembered as, she thought, that wasn’t so bad. It was better than pathetic girl divorce at twenty-four, better than barren girl, better than nice girl who always says yes and gets walked all over.
Wolf girl.
She blinked, trying to focus.
She couldn’t. The world was slipping away.
And just before she sunk into blackness, she thought she saw something that didn’t belong in these woods.
It was a face.
It was the face of a man.
Tall and tan and muscular, dark haired and with a day’s growth of facial hair, he stood looming over her, watching her. Was he waiting for something?
He had to be a hallucination, she decided. She had summoned something beautiful to look at at the end of her life. A fantasy of a man.
A savior.
The darkness reached up warm, welcoming fingers, embracing Amy, pulling her away from her pain and down into the depths.
Chapter Six
VINCE
The sight of the human girl collapsed at his feet was enough to bring Vince up from his primal, animal mind. It was enough to drag him back into being human.
Not that the shift didn’t suck. Shifting was mildly uncomfortable at the best of times—the awkwardness of bones reforming themselves into a new shape never quite went away, even with a lot of experience. It wasn’t painful, exactly, but it was mildly unpleasant.
But today, now, with his leg broken, it felt like dragging the wound under a chain link fence. Vince let out a cry as he made the shift back to his human self. His leg couldn’t support him. He dropped to his knees on the ground.
The girl was splayed out before him, her breathing fast, her eyelids fluttering. Sweat clung to her pale face.
He had bitten her.
He couldn’t believe he’d done that. He hadn’t wanted to, hadn’t intended to. It had happened almost instinctively. In fact, Vince hardly felt as if he had done it at all. It was as though the wolf within him had reared up and done the deed. There had been a flash of fear and anger when the girl had reached for his injured ankle, but now that he was human again, he understood that she had been freeing him from the trap.
She was trying to help me, and I bit her.
Christ. What could he do?
He couldn’t very well take her up to the house he’d just come running from. Aside from the fact that there might be more traps in the woods between here and there, it wouldn’t exactly do for a naked man to come up to a house carrying an injured girl. He would be expected to stay and talk to the police or something, and what kind of explanation could he possibly give that would account for her injuries, his own injuries, and his nudity? There wasn’t one.
He pulled off her boot and saw that she was wearing knee high socks. That would do. He removed a sock and wound it carefully around the bite on her wrist, pulling it tight. Then he removed the other sock and bound the injury on his own ankle. It wasn’t much, he thought, but it might be the best he could do for either of them out here in the woods.
“Hey,” he said, giving her shoulders a little shake. “Girl. Stay awake.”
Nothing. No response.
I can’t just leave her here, he thought. He couldn’t very well take her up to the house, but to leave her in the woods alone would be to sign her death warrant. She was unconscious, she was bleeding, she was possibly going into shock...and there were wild animals in these woods. Real wild animals, not shifters out on a lark.
He had to do something. He had to think of something, some way to get her back to where someone could help her.
But it was hard to think at all with the blinding pain in his ankle. Before too long, he knew, he was going to have to get out of here. He’d been kicking up a hell of a ruckus when his leg was trapped, hoping that his pack would come and find him—but that had been a long shot, and he knew he couldn’t count on the idea that they were on their way. He was going to have to start making his way back toward the motel.
They would probably have noticed by now that he’d been gone for too long. At least, he hoped so. But would they come after him?
He thought that Dax and Tommy would probably want to. But Ace might tell them no. Ace might assume that Vince had decided to go rogue, to run away and live on his own. It was an uncommon move for a shifter, but certainly not unheard of. And if Ace told the others not to go looking for Vince? Would they listen? Or would they defy him?
Vince had to admit that he didn’t know.
Not knowing that was hard.
We’re fractured, he thought. Our pack is broken, and it’s because we don’t have an alpha in our generation. All we have is the assumption that we all made long ago that Ace is in charge.
What if we were wrong?
What if the reason he hasn’t been able to come to power is that he was never meant to be our alpha? What if omegas have nothing to do with it at all?
That was a strange thought, and kind of a frightening one. Could they really have been barking up the wrong tree all this time? Had it all been a waste? Had it all been for nothing?
He shook his head to clear it. Maybe the girl wasn’t the only one at risk of going into shock here. He was thinking crazy things. He had to settle down, had to focus on the problem that was facing him.
How was he going to help her?
He couldn’t leave her to die in the woods. He couldn’t.
Was there even a chance she might survive if he left now? I did bind up her wrist, he told himself. That ought to stop the blood flow, right?
He couldn’t be sure. He couldn’t be sure that what he’d done was enough.
Then, off in the distance, he heard voices.
“There was howling,” someone said. A man’s voice. “I thought a wolf was trapped, but I figured I’d wait until morning to go find out. Don’t want to go into these woods at night.”
“Yeah, but Molly says she was on the porch. Says she never came inside.” A hesitation. “Amy wouldn’t go after a wild wolf, would she?”
“Hell, I don’t know. Girl’s got more compassion than sense sometimes. If she thought it was suffering, I don’t know what she might have done. And my gun was missing.”
“Jesus,” the second man said.
They were coming closer, moving toward Vince and the girl. Off in the distance he could see the beam of a flashlight. Good. They’ll find her. She’ll be all right.
And on the heels of that thought—I need to get out of here. Right now.
Because if they found her, and they found a strange man with her—a strange naked man—one of the voices had mentioned not having his gun, but Vince was willing to bet his friend was armed, if they were coming out here in search of this girl. If they knew there was
a possibility they might encounter wolves.
It was time to go.
But going was hard. He couldn’t put any weight on his right leg, which made walking impossible. He dragged himself away from the girl and into a copse of bushes, curled up, and focused on his primal self. Three working legs would be a hell of a lot better than one.
But the wolf wouldn’t come.
Maybe it was the pain, or maybe it was the fact that he’d been doing so much thinking, so much analyzing of his situation since he’d shifted back. Whatever the case, he couldn’t seem to access his animal self.
“Come on,” he groaned under his breath. “Where are you when I need you?”
Nowhere to be found, apparently. He strained, but the wolf refused to emerge.
Trying hard not to panic, which he knew would only make matters worse, Vince inhaled. He smelled the scent of blood, ripe and tangy and bitter. Blood meant fight. It meant defend, whether defending himself or the pack. It meant that teeth and claws were needed.
And finally, finally, the teeth and claws emerged.
As two men burst into the clearing just a few yards away and discovered an unconscious girl with a bloody bite mark on her wrist, an injured wolf limped quietly out of the bushes, body slung low to the ground, making his way slowly away from the ranch house in the distance and back to the motel room where his pack members were waiting.
IT WAS TOMMY WHO FOUND him. He came crashing through the trees when Vince was about a mile away from the motel.
“Jesus Christ,” he whistled. “What happened to you?”
Vince, still in wolf form, didn’t even bother trying to shift back to answer. He wanted nothing more right now than a painkiller and a few hours’ sleep. He allowed himself to collapse on the ground at Tommy’s feet.
“Stay there,” Tommy instructed. “I’m going to get the others.”
Vince dropped in and out of a doze waiting for his friend to return. The next time he was fully conscious, he was human again—he must have shifted in his sleep—and his ankle was complaining angrily. After a moment, he realized he was cradled between Ace and Dax, a blanket spread over his body.
“Put me down,” he grumbled. “I can walk.”
“The hell you can,” Ace said. “Tommy, get the door, will you?”
Tommy jogged ahead. Vince squinted his eyes. The lights overhead were too close and too bright to be stars. They were the light posts in the parking lot of the motel.
He had made it back.
Ace and Dax laid him on a bed and set about examining his leg. “That’s definitely broken,” Dax said. “What the hell happened to you?”
“Trap.”
“That’s why we don’t run in rancher territory,” Ace admonished.
“Yeah, I think he learned the lesson, Ace,” Dax said. “He probably doesn’t need an I told you so right now.”
Vince closed his eyes. “What time is it?”
“A little past two.”
“In the morning?” Obviously. It was dark outside. But he felt so disoriented by the events of the past few hours that he still felt the need to ask.
“Here,” Dax said, pressing a few white pills into his hand. “These’ll take the edge off.”
Vince swallowed the pills and tried to relax as Tommy unwound the bandage from his leg. It was painful at first, but the drugs kicked in quickly, and before long he was staring at patterns in the ceiling and smiling vaguely, only half listening to Tommy’s words.
“Well, you got lucky,” his friend said. “It looks like a pretty clean break. All the way through, of course, but if we can set it well it should heal easily enough. And you’ll heal quickly, of course.” That was true of all shifters. Dax liked to joke that it was a superpower, but it wasn’t, Vince thought, not really. It was just an evolutionary advantage, like the fact that they had split natures in the first place, or the way omega shifters could breed whole litters instead of single births. With good care, his leg would probably be healed up in about a week.
It would be an annoying week in the meantime, though. He wouldn’t be able to ride his bike, not if he wanted to heal properly. He wouldn’t really be able to even get up and walk around. He would be stuck here in this tiny room with this TV that only got a couple of channels.
Infuriating.
“All right,” Tommy said, stepping back. “I think that’s the best I can do. Does it hurt?”
“Not right now,” Vince said, but even he could hear how much he was slurring.
“He probably doesn’t even know which way is up right now, with the drugs you gave him,” Dax said, laughing.
Ace’s face came into view. He wasn’t smiling. “I don’t mean to kick you while you’re down, Vince, but I hope this means you’ll listen to me the next time I give an order. There was a reason I didn’t want you three going off alone here. We were lucky not to lose you.”
Maybe Ace was right. It was true that Vince could have died tonight. He had gotten lucky.
“You know, I’ve been wondering about that,” Dax said suddenly. “How did you get back? If you got your leg stuck in a trap, I mean? You can’t expect us to believe that the humans who set it just let you go?”
“Actually, they did,” Vince said.
Ace’s frown deepened. “Why would anyone do that? Trap a wolf and then just let it go?”
He couldn’t answer. He couldn’t even think. The pain started to creep back in around the edges, and Vince didn’t want to feel it. He closed his eyes and let his exhaustion and the drugs sweep him away.
Chapter Seven
AMY
She blinked. The familiar details of her room came into focus. She was in her room, surrounded by those lavender walls, her plush comforter tucked under her chin. Beside her, her mother sat in a chair.
She was knitting. Amy hadn’t seen her mother knit since before she’d left for college.
“What—” Her voice was gravel. She cleared her throat and tried again. “What are you making?”
Her mother looked up. “Amy, you’re awake! How do you feel, baby?”
“I—what happened?” She tried to remember, but something seemed to be standing in the way.
“You’ve been ill, honey,” her mother said. “You’ve had a fever for about thirty-six hours. Scared the hell out of your father and I. But you’re going to be fine. What on earth were you doing out in the woods by yourself, Amy, you know better than that.”
“The woods?” It was coming back to her now. The smell of blood. The call of a wounded wolf. And the face of a handsome stranger—no, that would have been part of the delirium. She shook her head to clear it.
“Your father and Collin Musgrove found you out by one of the traps,” her mother said. “It looked as if you freed an animal and it bit you!”
Her mother’s gaze flickered downward, and Amy followed. Her wrist was wrapped in a thick layer of gauze and rested on a throw pillow.
Seeing her injury brought the memories rushing back. Her ill-advised journey into the woods alone, with nothing but a flashlight and a rifle she didn’t really know how to use. Seeing the wolf in the trap, its eyes wild with fear and pain. Her determination to set it free—her certainty that it would kill her, that she wouldn’t be able to get away—
“What about the wolf?” she asked.
“The wolf?”
“The wolf that was in the trap,” Amy explained. “It did bite me—it turned on me when I set it free.”
“You shouldn’t have done that, Amy. How many times has your father told you not to go near a trapped animal?” her mother asked. “And to do it at night, when you couldn’t even see where you were going!”
“I had a flashlight.” She shook her head. They were getting off track. “The wolf didn’t hurt Dad or Mr. Musgrove, did it?”
“No,” her mother assured her. “It was gone by the time they arrived. And I can hardly blame the creature. It got lucky. I’m sure your father would have put a bullet in its head if it had still bee
n there when he arrived.”
Amy frowned. “Its leg was broken,” she said. “I was going to kill it. It’s just going to die out there anyway, and I wanted to make it quick and painless.”
Her mother nodded. “I’m sure it dragged itself off somewhere to hide and die quietly. That’s what animals do when they sense their number’s up, you know.”
“So nobody else saw the wolf?”
“No, it was just you out there. Your father carried you back. Mr. Musgrove brought the gun and the flashlight you took out with you.”
“I’m sorry. I know I’m not supposed to take Dad’s gun out.”
“Oh, honey, that’s the least of what you’re not supposed to do.” Her mother shook her head. “I’ve never known you to break the rules like this. But I suppose you were feeling a little cooped up in the house. You haven’t gotten out enough lately. Maybe that’s why you’re making some questionable decisions.”
“Maybe,” Amy admitted.
“Well, never mind,” her mother said gently. “The important thing is that you’re all right. And your arm is healing up nicely.”
“My arm?”
Her mother reached over and began to unwind the bandages. Amy watched with interest. Her wrist didn’t hurt anymore, but she was amazed when the gauze was finally pulled away and the bite mark was revealed. “Whoa.”
“You’ll always have a scar there, I’m afraid,” her mother said gently. “But you know, it’s all right. There are wonderful scar concealing products on the market these days. My friend Inez uses one on her chin, on a scar she’s had since childhood. I’ll ask her for the name.”
Amy nodded, happy as always to go along with her mother’s suggestion, but deep down she felt as if she didn’t need Inez’s scar concealer. She was a little bit in awe of her scar. It’s impressive, she thought. It looks like I’ve been through something big.
I have been through something big.
And although it always gave her a pang to think his name, this time she felt nothing but pure pride when she thought, Chris would never believe that I went into the woods and freed a wolf from a trap.