18

lazarus

IT WAS A nightmare.

They were everywhere.

They outnumbered us three to one, and I tried to keep enough of myself together to strategize or plan or think, but I had an overload of that pretty quick. There was only so much of my higher-level thinking skills that I could access in a shift.

The wolf took over, and then I was just mindless and raging.

Everything was a blur. I fought them. I watched myself fighting them.

But one of them leaped onto my back and sank his teeth into the back of my neck, and another one bit into my calf, and a third one ripped into my belly with his claws.

And then I was bleeding, bleeding badly.

I knew that when the sun came up, I'd shift back, whole and healed, and none of these wounds would matter, but when they let go of me, I fell down to the ground, whining and beaten.

They kept at me, kicking and swiping and biting me. They made more wounds, and I couldn't even try to stop them.

I lay on the ground, in a haze of blood and pain and confusion, and I could tell that it was almost over .

I wondered if my life was going to flash before my eyes or some cliché shit like that.

I remember thinking idly that no one knew if that happened before you died, because no one who'd died could tell us what the final moments were like.

Which then made me think about near-death experiences, and I thought that was fucking weird, that I was here, bleeding out, being ripped to shreds, and I was thinking about shit like this, and what the hell was wrong with—

Something streaked behind the wolves on me, something dark and quick, something that nipped at their heels and distracted them.

I recognized the dark blur as Paladin, darting in quick and dancing away.

He was bleeding, too, his pelt matted and glistening in several places. But he was up and running and moving.

The wolves turned to look at him, and he took off running, at full speed.

The other wolves followed him.

Right, I thought. When we're in wolf form, we can't stop ourselves, sometimes, running after something that's running. We're all instinct. He's smart. He's drawing them away.

Paladin streaked off into the darkness, the other wolves hot on his heels.

I managed to get to my feet. Well, to all fours. I wavered there, trying to look around.

A yip.

Kestrel.

I whirled in the direction of the sound and then I saw him, staggering towards me. Where were the other wolves? Where was Paladin?

Where was Clementine?

I charged towards Kestrel, who turned and started running off away from me.

What the fuck was he doing?

I followed him, going faster until I caught up to him.

Then, we moved together, and I yipped at him, trying to communicate. Did he have a plan? What the fuck were we doing?

But then the wolves came back, all nine of them, and Kestrel yanked me down and we hunkered there in the shadows as the other wolves sniffed around, howling and barking and obviously searching for us.

What to do?

Going back out there to challenge them was suicide.

Clementine was fucking gone.

And Paladin? Where was Paladin?

Going out there to fight clearly just got us killed. Hiding—it seemed cowardly, but in the grand scheme of things, if we wanted to find our mates and figure this out—

Paladin was there.

He was panting, his rib cage heaving, his fur plastered to his body. He nudged us both with his snout and took off.

Kestrel and I exchanged a look and then we went after him.

Together, we ran off into the night, and it didn't take me long to figure out where it was that Paladin was taking us.

The quarry.

We managed to get into the boat, but trying to do the oars while shifted was hell.

Paladin jumped out of it and swam. We followed suit.

We swam into the caverns, following Paladin, who led us to a small dry place, where we were able to get out of the water, shake off, and lie down on the damp rocks there.

I had lost a lot of blood, and the minute we weren't moving, I felt all my wounds again. I tried to stay awake, but I could feel my consciousness ebbing out, a betrayal.

My last thought was that we'd run like cowards while they took our mate.

I hated myself.

clementine

I SCREAMED A lot.

The wolf that tackled me had handcuffs of all things. He had trouble using his claws to make them work, but he was stronger than me, and he got my hands cuffed together in front of my nude body.

Then he took the chain of the cuffs in his teeth and pulled. I was lying on my back. My arms went above my head. He dragged me away, dragged me over the ground, which hurt, and the pain kept making me fucking come .

I was in pain and pleasure mixed, my teeth gritted together, dragged off, and I couldn't even see what was happening to my mates. All I could see was wolf bodies, too many wolf bodies, all of them on top of each other out there in the darkness, their fur gleaming here and there in the moonlight.

He dragged me off and there was a van.

Other naked women were in there, handcuffed.

I tried to fight that, but there were other wolves, and they got me inside.

A woman was driving the van. She looked terrified or maybe angry or maybe both.

We drove off somewhere else and stopped.

It was dark and I could hear the other women breathing, and I could feel the touch of their skin here and there, but whenever we touched, we recoiled from each other.

I should talk to them, I thought.

I tried to find words.

I couldn't.

I just went inside, deep inside, and I curled up there, within myself, as if my body was a fortress, as if I could hide there forever and never come back out again.

Eventually, the door opened, and another naked woman, also in handcuffs, was thrown in with us. She had a big gash on her face, and it was healing up before my eyes. I recognized her. She'd been one of the tithes at the first gathering I'd gone to.

We stopped once more in the dark, and they brought another woman.

Then, we drove and drove.

When we stopped this time, there were a sea of wolves outside, and they seized us by the handcuffs and pulled us all out of the van. I had the presence of mind to fight to stay on my feet and let them lead me. I didn't want to be dragged again.

We were outside a huge house. It was in a housing development full of other huge houses, the kind of thing that they used to put up in the country before the First Full Moon. This house, though, had been built onto, and the additions were ugly and mismatched, hanging off the original construction, turning the house into some kind of Frankenstein's monster of a house. It was all lit up and the doors were open and it seemed to pulse at me, sinister.

I didn't want to go in there.

But we went in there.

The wolves deposited us in a big room that might once have been a living room. It had this recessed area that was made for a TV, before the TVs got flat, but there was no TV in it. There wasn't much in the room at all. No furniture. There was carpet. It was stained.

They put us all in there and then, they, um…

They had sex with us.

I mean, they raped us.

It was odd, because I was still all curled up inside my body fortress, so it was like I was there but not there.

I remember thinking weird thoughts, like I was glad that the wolves were only putting it in my vagina, not my mouth or my ass or anything, and that it was totally fine this way, like I could handle that, as long as they just kept it there.

And I don't know how many wolves or how many times.

I did… have orgasms, but that was strange, too, because it was like I didn't feel them all the way in. They happened to my body, but me, the real me, it was inside, curled up, and the things that were happening to me couldn't get me there. So, they didn't feel good exactly. It was like… a sneeze. My body just clenching on itself, going through the motions, on auto-pilot.

And I knew then that there were awful levels to this thing that had happened to me.

You maybe couldn't say that being a tithe was a fully consensual experience, but there was what had happened with my mates and there was this , and they weren't the same thing.

And eventually, it was over, and I lay on the floor, still handcuffed, numb.

I slept.