She stumbled as something unfurled inside, stretching and coming to life. Something alien and new brushed her awareness. She leaned against the tree, gasping for breath.
“Isaiah?” She turned around, expecting him to be right there. He wasn’t. He’d told her to run. And like a coward, she had. But he’d stayed and fought. For her. From inside, there came a whisper.
Isaiah
.
Another brush along her mind. Her beast? She waited for the violence that Isaiah said went hand and hand with the beast, but all she felt was a sharpening of her senses. Isaiah had stayed behind to fight the Reapers. She had to go back.
That something inside growled.
No.
She had to either go backward or go forward. Ahead was a fork in the trail. The branch to the right went to the lake. She knew there were no Reapers at the lake. They’d just come from there. She started down that trail.
The
No
was sharp and immediate. She was stopped so fast, she lost her balance. When she tried to continue, she couldn’t. In her mind the beast paced impatiently.
No
.
She reached for her worry stone, forgetting it wasn’t there. Fear pushed her toward the lake. The beast pushed her up the mountain. Her hand slipped through her shredded pocket, finding nothing but air. What should she do?
Normally the question would have paralyzed her while she struggled with a decision, but this time there was an answer. A mental push to go up.
“All right,” she whispered, “I’m going.”
The beast grumbled its satisfaction with her obedience. Her skirts tangled around her legs, slowing her down. She had a mental image from her beast of tearing them off.
“No.” She couldn’t go naked, she just couldn’t. Her beast was quite ruthless in its logic. It didn’t speak in words, but she definitely got the impression that if she couldn’t move freely, she would be dead. The beast was very good with images and emotions.
She couldn’t do it. “I’m sorry.”
The beast snarled its displeasure.
It was easier to climb the mountain than it should have been. Her legs seemed to eat up the distance with unnatural speed. The waist of her skirt cut into her skin. Her blouse was too tight at the neck, too binding at the wrists, irritating at her shoulders. Her hands and toes tingled. An ache grew in her gums. Her muscles twitched until she couldn’t stand it. Ducking into the shadows of a pine tree, she took off her blouse, her skirt, and her petticoats, leaving on just her camisole and pantaloons. The beast wanted them gone, too, but she couldn’t take them off.
“Twenty-some years of modesty don’t disappear just because one develops a beast,” she informed the disgruntled being in a harsh whisper as she balled up the clothes.
She stepped back onto the trail. An image of the clothes falling over the ledge flooded her mind. She looked at the bundle in her hand. The beast growled a warning. The clothes would leave a scent. Why hadn’t she thought of that? Stepping carefully, she made her way off the trail and hurled them over the edge. They didn’t go out as far she wanted. One of the petticoats caught on a rock a few feet down, but the rest floated to the ground far below. She turned away. The beast growled.
“Oh my God, you are a nag.”
Finding a long stick, she lay down and, reaching over the edge, poked the petticoat free. It floated down with the rest.
“Happy now?”
The beast didn’t answer. She tightened her grip on the stick, squeezing tightly to still the panic. She didn’t have a gun. She didn’t have Cole, or her other cousins. She didn’t have Isaiah. She’d learned how to survive captivity. She knew how to survive rumors and speculation. She didn’t know how to survive being hunted by Reapers. She listened. There was nothing anywhere. Even the birds had stopped singing. She hefted the stick. They knew what she knew. Death was about.
She searched inside for the beast. There was no sensation of anything other than her own fears, her own insecurities, her own doubts. Tightening her grip on the stick, she borrowed one of Isaiah’s favorite curses. “Shit. You picked a lousy time to go silent.”
She continued going up because it was only logical and that was the direction the beast wanted her to go. Of course, that might mean she was attributing a level of intelligence to the beast that might not be there, but then again, it had told her to throw her clothes away. So it had to think about something. Even if it wasn’t talking about it.
The trail up took a turn to the right. She followed it.
Like a lamb to the slaughter
, she thought. It ended at an outcropping. She crept to the edge and looked down. It took her a minute to get her bearings, but below, she realized, was the campsite. The rocks that looked so imposing down there were insubstantial from here. She could see the pond. She could see the trail leading away from the lean-to. She pressed her hands flat on the rock. She could see trouble.
Three wolves wove through the trees. From the trajectory of their path, they’d come from the pond. She gave her beast—no wolf she realized watching the Reapers coming up the path—a mental pat. Had she been at the stream, they surely would have captured her. They stopped at the fork of the trail. Two looked up. She didn’t move, didn’t breathe while they appeared to communicate with each other. As one, they continued forward.
She rested her head against the hard rock. They knew where she was, they just weren’t interested in her right now. The wolf/beast growled. Her head snapped up. Isaiah! They were hunting Isaiah. She dug her nails into the ground. Rock, she realized as they grated loudly. She was digging her nails into rock. When she looked down, her hands were not her own. Instead of the small, pink, carefully tended nails she was used to seeing, she had round, wicked-looking claws that stretched from hands still feminine but larger, and more sinewy. Claws strong enough to gouge into shale.
Panic seared through her. She reached for her worry stone. It wasn’t fair, but her beast was calm, confident, ready to fight.
She shook her head. “I can’t.”
Her beast snarled and scented the wind. Isaiah. She was looking for Isaiah. So were the Reapers below, she realized. Three against one. Those weren’t good odds. Isaiah was a good fighter, but maybe they were, too. Her beast snarled again and urged her away from the edge. She resisted the overwhelming urge, studying the ground below, making a mental map of the area. The beast tugged at her.
“Hush,” she whispered. “We might need to know this.”
Surprisingly, she thought she felt a sense of agreement. She stood, brushing the dirt from her hands. Her claws clacked together. Inside, horror and panic began. What was she becoming? A primitive thought broke into her panic as she studied the wicked curves.
Weapons.
She held up her hands and looked at them with new eyes. The claws were a good two and a half inches long, thick and strong. They would do damage. Some of that sense of helpless panic left. She turned her hand over. In some ways, they were even better than knives. She couldn’t drop them.
The beast growled her approval, or impatience, Addy wasn’t sure. But she agreed. They had to get moving. The wolves below thought she was hiding up here. Thought they could get to her at their leisure. They thought wrong. She curled her claws into her palms. The days when she waited for rescue were gone. She started back down the trail. A
No
flashed into her mind so strongly, it was like walking into a wall. She began to get a sense of why Isaiah was so frustrated with his beast. If they always worked off reaction rather than forethought, it could be a problem.
Inside her shoes, her toes ached and her gums continued to itch. More change? She looked at her hands and looked at her feet. There was no way she could sprout claws on her feet inside her shoes, but if she went barefoot, they’d be torn up.
She remembered claws slashing at her, pain, jaws opening, saliva dripping in her face. As she’d done many times the last two days, she put her hand on her stomach, searching for scars. There was nothing. It stood to reason that if those wounds could heal, that if her feet got a little torn up from going barefoot, those wounds would heal, too. She looked at the ground, the dirt, and then her shoes. It was surprisingly easy to bend down and fasten them closed. Where she expected revulsion and crippling indecision, she found only a sense of urgency pouring from her beast.
Hurry.
Yes, she had to hurry. She took off her shoes. It wasn’t enough.
All.
With only a second’s indecision, she took off her camisole and pantaloons, standing naked as the sun poured down on her body. Again she waited for that sense of panic. She was naked in public. She should have been horrified. All she got was a sense of urgency.
Hurry.
Picking up her clothes, she wrapped them around her shoes, and just like before, she hurled them over the edge. From below came a howl. Isaiah? One of the three wolves hunting him? She didn’t know. Inside, the beast paced with impatience. Clearly feeling that she should know.
“Pardon me,” she muttered, her new claws nicking her thigh as she reached for her worry stone. “I’m new to this.”
The beast had no patience with her excuses. It wanted to go now, toward that howl. She wasn’t so sure that was a good idea. The beast didn’t care. The tingling in her toes intensified. The itch in her gums built to an ache. Her vision blurred. There was a surge of power in her mind, a blankness to her thoughts, a sensation of running freely downward, trees and rocks flying past, her mind focused with a peculiar intensity so similar to the focus she had trained herself to use with her worry stone. But there was a difference. The beast wasn’t thinking of calm. It was thinking . . . blood. Battle. Isaiah.
The beast was focused on Isaiah. Through the disorientation, Addy struggled for some comprehension. She was herself, yet not. She was running, but not like she was used to. Her mind was filled with scents and sounds, processing them at a speed she wasn’t used to. She struggled to see, but the wolf didn’t care about what it saw. It was, she realized, relying on scent and sound first. Most of all, she realized she wasn’t afraid. There was dirt on her hands and she wasn’t disgusted. She was naked and the knowledge wasn’t overwhelming. She had choices and she wasn’t panicked.
She was going into battle, with all the courage she’d always thought she had but could never tap into. It should terrify her, that much change in such a short amount of time. Instead, it was liberating. Here, in this moment, in the form she didn’t recognize, she’d found the person she had always struggled to be. Herself.
Where are we going
? she asked the beast part of her, amazed at the agility of this form.
Isaiah.
That was all she got. Isaiah had been right. The beast was a little single-minded and primitive in its thought processes. Tracking their progress, she could tell from her mental map that they were heading toward the campsite. Where Isaiah was. Where the Reapers were. Her beast was powerful, her body strong, and two against one were better odds. She wasn’t the victim in this fight. She was going to be a part of it. As she got closer, she heard the sounds of battle. Four different growls, four different scents. The beast/wolf rumbled in her mind.
Isaiah.
Addy stilled the rumble before it became a growl. The element of surprise was not one she was willing to give up. There was a moment of resistance in which she wasn’t sure she could attain her goal, and then the wolf . . . agreed.
It was hope. Her intelligence combined with the beast’s power and drive and fearless dedication to fight. They might actually be able to do something. The beast put on a burst of speed. It seemed to fly along the trail, covering the distance ten times faster than she had. The growls ahead turned to snarls. As she got closer, she could hear teeth snapping, and dear God, maybe the sound of flesh rending? Her beast snarled. So did her human. They were hunting Isaiah, the man who gave everything for her and expected nothing back. She’d been his first love, his first lover, and he’d been hers. No one was taking that away from her without a fight. The beast agreed with a snap of teeth.
The trail turned. She didn’t follow it, but instead plunged into the trees straight ahead, following her nose and ears to the fight. Isaiah might have wanted her to run while he sacrificed himself for her, but he wasn’t alone anymore. And she didn’t want his sacrifice. They cleared the woods. Ahead she could see Isaiah fighting three Reapers. She knew him from the shade of his fur, the color of his eyes. His back was to the wall. The Reaper on his right had his back to her.
She focused on him. The most vulnerable. Silently, she whispered to the beast,
Quiet.
She needed surprise. Just a few seconds longer.
There was no hope of keeping her beast silent as it closed in and leapt. Muscles surging, adrenaline flowing, fangs bared, claws ready to rip the flesh. Primitive, feral, effective, it landed on the Reaper’s back, digging its claws in, holding on as it leaned forward. The human in Addy recoiled when her beast’s jaws locked in the base of the other Reaper’s neck. Horror and repulsion filled her as blood pooled in her mouth and the shocking crunch of bone reached her ears. But the human wasn’t in control. The wolf was, and the only thought going through her mind was,
Isaiah.