Chapter 18 - Miley

How was she supposed to just sit around and wait for a bunch of men to decide her fate? They didn"t sound any better than her damn parents, heading out into the woods to discuss what they were going to do with the latest inconvenience that had turned up at their door.

And sitting in Kane"s room—though it smelled like him, which was comforting—she could hear too much of what was going on around her.

The manor was far too loud. It was such a strange feeling, being able to hear the mayor"s wife and her friends drinking lemonade in the garden, hearing their children playing on the lawn. She could even hear the rustling of the grass under the ball as it was kicked from one foot to another. It was loud, abrasive, strange.

Her own heartbeat was too loud, pounding in her ears, and even the sound of her own breathing was irritating her.

She didn"t try to do it, but she even managed to catch small snippets of the men"s conversation out in the woods. It was just on the edge of her hearing, and it blew her mind to even be able to catch a single word from such a distance, but she did.

And it was driving her mad.

Her skin felt as if it were on fire, tingling all over with pinpricks just like it had the night before. But it was daylight, and the moon was nowhere to be seen out of the bedroom window.

Still, her bare feet were itching. She longed to run. It was the oddest sensation of all. She had never been a big runner. In fact, in school, she had gone out of her way just to avoid running in gym class. Faking a period or a sprained ankle, or even forging fake notes from her useless parents just so she wouldn"t have to partake.

But this urge to run that she felt now was impossible to ignore.

Kane told me to stay here, she told herself over and over. I have to stay inside the house.

But it was as if she wasn't the only one in control of her body right now. There was something else inside of her, another being that urged her out of the room, down the stairs and out into the yard.

The sun felt almost as good on her skin as the moon had the night before, and she tilted her head up to it.

Breathing deeply, she hoped the urges inside her might quiet a little. But feeling the earth beneath her bare feet only made her want to run more. And so that"s exactly what she did, heading in the opposite direction of Kane and the others.

Her feet carried her faster and faster until she was practically flying over the ground, barely touching it at all.

The breeze in her red hair, the sun on her skin, the earth beneath her feet. It all felt so damn wonderful that she wished it would last forever.

But when she finally stopped to take a moment to breathe, she started to panic. The pain was returning. Just as it had last night, it started as a dull ache, growing and growing until she had to bite back a scream.

When she looked down at her hands, her fingernails were no longer just that. They had elongated into long, thick black claws.

Preparing for the fangs that were sure to come next, she opened her mouth and stroked her tongue delicately over her teeth.

For now, they were still human, but the pain in her gums told her what was coming.

The sunlight grew too harsh. It felt as if it were burning her retinas right out of her head.

She tried to shield her eyes with her arm, only to feel the bones in her wrist shifting as she did.

It was a sickening feeling that churned her stomach and would have sent her to her knees if not for the arms that suddenly wrapped around her from behind.

"Kane?" she whimpered, relieved. He had come to help her again, to calm her as he had on the farm.

Everything would be alright now that he was here. He would never let anything bad happen to her.

But when no soft, gentle voice whispered in her ear for her to be calm, her instincts started to kick in.

The beast growing inside her reared its ugly head and drank deeply of the scent of the man holding her.

Not Kane! It didn"t matter who it was. All that mattered was that it wasn"t him, and so Miley started to struggle.

She fought with all that she had, but disoriented and half-shifted as she was, in agony with the transition, she barely had any strength left.

The more she struggled, the more her vision blurred and darkened.

No! Not now! she pleaded, trying to stamp hard on the man"s foot in a last-ditch effort to get free.

It didn"t work. She felt herself slipping into darkness, slung over someone"s shoulder like a ragdoll. Unable to fight back, she drifted in and out of consciousness, feeling like the most useless werewolf that had ever existed.