Oh my god.
The temperature in the room drops before the horrifying sound of cracking bones fills the room and Gannon starts to somehow fold in on himself.
Everything I thought I knew about the world—science, humans, and animals—vaporizes in my mind as I witness the man before me shatter, shift, and bend until he’s no man at all. He rips through his clothing and emerges as a massive black wolf whose head is level with my shoulders.
Wide-eyed and aghast, I stare into the light-gray eyes of the beast before me. Eyes that are the same color as Gannon’s. My knees give out as I take him in, his thick dark coat, the flash of white teeth in his mouth, and the long pink tongue that stretches out to lick his muzzle as though he’s trying to convince me that there’s nothing to fear. Torn scraps of what was once a T-shirt and jeans hang from his lithe form and pool beneath his paws.
Flashes from last night bombard me. Running through the forest. The unusually large wolves tracking my every step. The fight. The bite…from a huge black wolf.
Holy fucking shit, it was real. All of it.
10
GANNON
If Perth were here, he’d call this a full circle moment, one of those times in life where you revisit something that haunted you and make your peace with it. Ruger would grunt his agreement, Ellery would offer a neutral shrug at our denmate’s statement, but me…nope. Nothing about this scenario helps me make peace with anything I’ve been through as a naif.
There’s nothing warm and fuzzy about the way Noah is looking at me. The fear in her blue-green gaze, the sorrow, the distress… It’s all aimed at me.
This is a fucking disaster.
Imogen dips her finger into each of the mixing mortars and draws runes on the surface of the liquids there. Each symbol glows a different color before dissolving into the liquid and changing the hue until it matches the runes. She reaches in and grabs a plastic cup from a sleeve in her medical bag before pouring the contents of each mortar into the cup. The healer looks like a human bartender layering some cocktail.
“Here, take this, it will dissolve what’s left of the block on you. It’ll take a few days to fully break down the binding magic, so don’t attempt to shift until then.”
Noah doesn’t take the cup from Imogen’s outstretched hand. She’s too busy staring at me. And the look in her eyes is a lethal mixture of terror and disgust.
Fuck.
“Are you kidding me?” Noah asks, the retort is shaky but so loud it fills the room. “Why the hell would I do anything you say? I don’t want this. Any of it.” She gestures to herself and then to me.
The slice of her hand through the air might as well be the slice of a knife right through my chest.
“I understand that this is a lot,” Imogen counters, her eyes sympathetic but her voice firm. “But whether you want to be a shifter or not, it doesn’t change the fact that it’s happening.”
“Fuck. You.”
Noah’s thought is a yell that echoes painfully inside my skull, and I can see Ellery and Alpha Morgan both tamp down their reactions to it.
Imogen continues serenely because she didn’t just get a brainful of Noah’s pure hatred. “If you try to shift with that block still on, it will not be good. If by some miracle it doesn’t kill you, it will irreparably damage you. Don’t be stubborn. Don’t let your fear make bad decisions for you.”
Noah looks from Imogen to the cup in her hands. “And how do I know that’s not going to hurt me?” she questions, gesturing to the cup. “And don’t ask me to trust you, because I don’t trust a fucking word out of anyone in this room.” If she could light us all on fire with a look, she would.
“You weren’t drugged, Noah,” Ellery interjects calmly. “I know you thought you were, and all of this probably seems weird as fuck, but last night wasn’t a drug-fueled hallucination. It happened. We’re not trying to trick you. You were attacked and we’re going to find who did that to you. Everything after that was a massive misunderstanding. We’re trying to fix it, but we can’t do that until you’re safe.”
Her face is pale, plump lips sucked into a thin line, and her fingers keep clenching and unclenching in front of my eyes. Her agitated alarm gives off a scent like iron, sharp and cold, and it burns the rims of my nostrils.
She’s petrified and pissed.
Dammit all to hell.
I can’t help but feel like we may have lost Noah before we ever even had her.
I walked in here so worried, worried but hopeful. Now, it’s all slipping through my claws, and there isn’t anything I can do about it. I shove aside the wistfulness tightening my throat to ask myself the more important question.
How is Noah going to accept a mate claim when she’s a naif?
“How? How is this happening?” Noah asks, the anger in her voice leaking out like a sieve and leaving a hollow ring to her tone, one I feel in my gut.
I drop my head, hoping to communicate that she’s safe, that I’m still me whether I’m wearing fur or skin. But I don’t miss the way she tenses at my movement instead of relaxing and sensing my intention.
Logically, I know her instincts are going haywire. I remember all too well the war that went on inside me as my new wolf battled with every human urge and impulse I had. Terrifying was an understatement.
I try to picture last night from her perspective. Running, screaming through the woods, from wolves snapping at her heels. It must have been her worst nightmare. I must have been her worst nightmare.
I bit her.
Shit.
No wonder she punched me.
Like a fucking fool, I didn’t stop to question anything. I simply gave in to the driving need to claim her as ours because that’s what she was supposed to be. I knew it from the first second I inhaled her scent, familiar and yet foreign.
That moment—for me—was victorious. I felt everything click perfectly into place when I sank my teeth into her calf. It was everything, knowing I was the first to mark her. We were destined to be connected from that moment on—god, that sounds stupid, and it turns out it was stupid. I thought I was making all our dreams come true.
Instead, I’ve ruined her life.
A dark, burning taste creeps up the back of my throat as I realize what I’ve done. I’ve pulled her into a world she knows nothing about and hung a timer around her neck that’s counting down to something even worse than the beast I’ve just shown her.
“One of your parents must be an eerie,” Morgan explains to Noah, our alpha’s voice low and steady, trying to push serenity on all of us, not only with his cadence but with an alpha’s magical ability to affect mood. “It’s the only way to pass the ability on. Some of us can access our eerie faculties naturally, while others require a propellant. Like for witches, there’s a ceremony. For shifters, it’s a bite.”
For me, it was a goddamned feral neighborhood dog who turned out not to be a dog.
“A bite? You mean an attack,” she challenges.
“No, just a bite. What wild animal do you know that would stop after a single bite?” Alpha Morgan counters.
Noah’s lips twist and her eyes glance away because she doesn’t like the truth of his point.
“If your eerie blood is strong enough, a propellant bite unlocks your true power. That’s what’s happening to you,” Ellery expounds, building on his father’s words.