Chapter 7

Billie

With the fading light, Colt and I came in from the meadow. I dished up the stew that I'd prepped earlier for everyone, and we had a rather subdued "family" dinner. Catrina kept checking her phone, I suspected for messages from Gavin. Then she gave me the stink eye when she noticed me looking at her.

"This is delicious, Billie," Colt, bless him, said.

I offered him a smile, half listening as David quizzed him about the folks he'd delivered the elk heads to in Denver.

"Dirk Kerby said it was the best bull head he'd ever seen," Colt said.

I saw the cogs turning in David's head as he calculated whether he'd have follow-up orders and how much more work he could fit into his schedule.

Catrina sighed, her nose stuck to her phone. Then she glared at me again as if Gavin's not texting her was all my fault.

I saw that both David and Colt had finished their meals. And, like me, Catrina didn't seem to have much of an appetite. She'd pushed her food around the plate.

Looks like it's leftovers tomorrow.

I took the opportunity that David's finishing up his story awarded me. "I'll clear up if everyone's finished," I said as if I didn't always clear up.

Catrina muttered, "It was too bland." I jumped to my feet. That was enough of a yes for me. With the dirty plates, I made my escape to the kitchen sink.

Colt offered, "If you wash, I'll dry."

I knew the glow that warmed me as I stood filling the sink beside my friend was overkill. But, in my life, I really had to take every glimmer of contentment I could. For a moment, just doing the dishes felt like something to celebrate. But the glimmer didn't last. A searing pain fired through my right shoulder. I buckled over the sink, holding its ceramic edge as my vision blurred. I gasped in shock as my entire right arm felt as if it were on fire.

I inhaled sharply, swallowing a cry.

Shit, was I having a heart attack?

Colt's strained voice sounded beside me. "Billie? Billie, what's wrong?"

The fiery burst of pain receded as quickly as it had come, and I stood up again, releasing my supportive grip on the sink. I blinked up stupidly into Colt's concerned stare.

"Sorry," I said. I rubbed my sternum and then chest. "Just… heartburn, I think," I said lamely.

"Drama queen," Catrina murmured, going back to bashing the buttons on her phone. I wondered if she was texting Gavin. Not because I wanted to hear from him because of what had happened in the Moondream, but because I suspected that what I'd just felt had something to do with him.

The hairs stood on the back of my neck as I realized David's piercing eyes were settled on me. I stifled my worries down, going back to washing up after assuring Colt I was okay.

But as soon as I'd finished, I ran upstairs to check my shoulder and arm in my bedroom's looking glass. I was flummoxed to find nothing unduly wrong. But it had felt as if I'd been badly wounded. As I stared at my reflection in the mirror, looking into my green eyes, a flash of hazel ones appeared in my mind's eye. Deep down, I knew what I'd felt had been Gavin's pain. In werewolf culture, fated mates were said to form a telepathic connection, which made them extra powerful in the pack, given that they could silently communicate with one another during a hunt. My skin prickled with wonder as I mused whether this was a sign that such a connection existed between Gavin and me.

Despite everything that had happened between us, I fidgeted restlessly for the rest of the evening, unable to focus on my book or the pile of mending I had to do on my sewing basket. I kept my bedroom door cracked open, listening for any sound from Catrina's room. At least if she got a call or tried him herself, I'd know. But as the hours wound on, and no new pain transpired, I convinced myself that no news was good news.

The experience left me rattled, though. Over the next few days, the thought of that pain and our shared connection frequently crossed my mind. I couldn't help dwelling on it and what it meant. He may have rejected me, and by Vana there was no way we were ever going to mark each other, but we were still linked.

On the other hand, my excitement about gaining my wolf soon lightened my heavy spirits. And if doing chores with Colt made me feel warm, holy Vana, shifting with him made me positively giddy.

Each new day, I found myself feeling as if it were Christmas. Waking at the crack of dawn, Colt and I would steal out the house and out to the woods. The weather was fair and wonderfully dry for this time of year, and we made the most of it.

In a blur of fur and fangs, my wolf emerged. It was a marvel to see the forest through her lupine eyes. Everything seemed smaller and more detailed, but at the same time, bigger and more textured. Through her eyes, I felt even closer to everything—the rocks, the trees, and the sky. To everything. Through her, I knew I was closer to Vana in a way I'd never been before.

When Colt and I ran together, tearing through the woods, with the trunks and leaves blurring in the periphery of my vision, I felt as thrilled as those first humans must have felt as they ran alongside Vana in the very beginning.

Thanks to Colt's guidance, I was getting more accustomed to my wolf. As we wandered out with the dawn and toward the woods for the third day in a row, I said, "Let's go to the canyon. We can check for peregrines, too."

My adoptive brother shook his head. "It's best to keep away from the chasm until you've gotten more control over her."

"I'm ready," I said, the giddiness to run starting to zip through me. I was dancing on the balls of my feet as we slipped beneath the canopy.

"Okay then–"

I almost shifted in excitement at his words, but Colt gripped my arm and said, "Okay then. If you show me you can run to Joseph's Stump and meet back here again."

Exhilaration pounded through me, and I grinned. "Deal." We'd been using Joseph's stump as a marker the last few days for most of our runs. It was named after one of Dalesbloom's packmates because it was where he'd had his Moondream. Like me, he'd lost consciousness one night in the woods. I was kind of glad I wasn't the only one in the Dalesbloom Pack who had taken a tumble in the woods.

Shaking my head, I focused on what I had to do.

It turned out that my wolf wasn't very well-behaved. A scent hit my nose, and instead of making for Joseph's Stump, she veered left, right toward a burrow. I tried to steer her away from the burrow that she started to dig at, but nothing I said would pull her away from the scent.

I thought we were going to be here playing in the dirt all day. Then Colt, finally, in his wolf form, snuck up behind me and tussled with me. We rolled around in the undergrowth until he'd successfully pinned me to the ground. Finally, my wolf, realizing she'd been bested by one of her pack members, bared her neck, submitting to Cole.

His proud black wolf got off of my sandy wolf from where he'd pinned me.

I let fur and fangs recede. Colt morphed into his human form, too. I wandered over to one of the bushes covered with spring leaves while Colt averted his gaze and went to a tree. We'd gotten used to using whatever coverage was around when we shifted into our human forms.

"And this is why you stay away from the canyon, okay," he said in his best know-it-all tone. "At the moment, your wolf is so green, she'd chase whatever scent she got into right into the Gunnison."

"It was really strong," I said, still not sure what exactly she'd picked up there and what she wanted to get at in the den.

"Golden-mantled ground squirrels. There's a new litter in there. Smelled the scent before we entered the forest."

"You set me up," I argued, not really feeling hard done by, but it was fun to argue with Colt.

He shrugged and flashed me a smile. "When your wolf notices such a strong scent as soon as you enter the forest, then we'll know you're ready for the canyon."

Yet, even as Colt's faith reassured me, I suspected that my wolf wouldn't be as easy to get under control as he reckoned. It was common knowledge in werewolf culture that it was only when one claimed their fated mate and each mate marked one another that one's beast would be truly tamed. I thought of how Vana had made it so when the first humans she'd chosen to walk with couldn't, with their human forms alone, control their beasts. I'd always thought there was something beautiful about the fact that one's fated mate was the key to taming one's beast. But now I couldn't help but feel pissed off by this need. I felt as if I'd been waiting forever to be able to channel my wolf, and now I couldn't control her, all because Gavin didn't want anything to do with me.

That night, my lack of control over my wolf came back to bite me. I was down in the kitchen, getting a glass of water, suddenly having woken up hot and thirsty. Half asleep, I gulped down my water when the urge to open the door and breathe in the night air washed over me. I didn't think anything of it, and I soon had put my glass down and opened the back door to do just that, when all at once, my wolf leaped up within me, and suddenly, she had landed on all fours outside.

She snuffled out of my PJ top, whining with irritation. My baggy bottoms were already discarded on the doorstep.

My heart thumped in my furry chest with shock. She'd transformed of her own accord. With trepidation, I realized she was gallivanting off down the dirt path. I had to rein her in.

Shift.

I envisaged myself in my mind's eye. I imagined my pebbled skin in the night air. The breeze playing with my sandy brown hair, but still, my wolf's paws pounded across the meadow, the grasses tickling the pads of her feet, and the condensation beading on the grasses catching on her fur.

Bad wolf. Bad.

I thought about how, only recently, I'd promised Colt that I wouldn't do anything daring and run off by myself into the deep, dark woods. But my wolf didn't pay any attention to me; instead, her joy consumed me. The thought of how I'd wanted to run through the woods with Colt in my wolf form pounded through me. And here I was. As my wolf and I raced under the canopy and into the undergrowth of the forest at night, I felt more alive than I ever had in my life. This was exactly what I'd always wanted.

Good girl.

For a while, we ran, relishing in the thickness of the shadows that cloaked our sandy form. The little bit of light that pierced the canopy from Vana's waning moon above meant that our fur wasn't too luminous. Every piece of forest floor seemed to hold a new scent and story as we traced the movements that had happened throughout the course of the day.

As my wolf came to a patch of ground with recently trod hoof-prints, the fur on her back crept up. The scent from the floor filled our olfactory senses, painting a confusing story. I didn't recognize it at all. We didn't recognize this new perfume. The closest thing I could compare it to were lilies. But there was something far more delicate about it. Curiosity took over, and my wolf, having set her sights on the trail, continued to track it.

We tracked the odor all the way to a glade in the forest. As the pines and firs thinned and left the open dell, the waning quarter of the moon bathed the dell with much more moonlight. And there, standing right in the clearing, was the source of the perfume I'd tracked.

My wolfish gaze widened as I drank in this creature's statuesque form. From her hooves to her shoulders, she must have stood about five feet. She would easily match any of the male elks in Gunnison Park. But her sleek coat was pure white. But what stood out most was her horn. I didn't think any of the bulls I'd ever seen, with their impressive velvety antlers, had ever come close to being as magnificent as the gleaming horn that projected from the center of the unicorn's forehead. She looked out toward the end of the meadow.

Captivated, I continued to watch the creature from the shadows, anxiousness prickling over me. I didn't want to startle the creature and scare her off. I didn't know how my wolf knew she was a female. But I supposed something about her scent informed my wolf. Somehow, I knew that the unicorn was a she.

My gaze raked over her gleaming silvery horn and then over her hooves, which glimmered to a lesser degree. I realized that she emanated with magic as pure as that of Vana's, which I'd felt in my Moondream. My wolf senses tingled with curiosity and a touch of apprehension.

Just then, the unicorn turned her silvery eyes on me.

The sense that she'd known I was here all along took hold. Her eyes seemed full of an ancient wisdom, and for a moment, we regarded each other in the moonlit clearing.

Enamored by her beauty, my wolf took a step forward. My heart swelled with a mixture of awe and longing. The unicorn stood so poised and still. I was close to her, no more than a meter. Without thinking, I extended my neck, reaching out my muzzle toward her. To my surprise, the majestic creature stooped down, lowering her own muzzle. Her touch sent a surge of warmth and wonder through me. A sense of peace washed over me as if all my worries and doubts were being cleansed away.

But … the calm was suddenly assaulted. For a moment, I thought drums were pounding the air. But as I looked up—I blinked in as huge, scaly forms darkened the air, their pounding wings ripping through the air as they soared down toward us.

As surely as I'd known the unicorn was pure-hearted, something in my wolf growled that these beasts, these dragons, were the opposite.

In a moment, four huge, terrifying beasts had surrounded us.

The unicorn reared up on her hind legs as she faced the two dragons on her side of the clearing, seemingly startled by the creatures, too. One of the dragons on my side roared. His voice echoed through the night, catching in the canyon shelves not far off. The glimmer of fire that I saw in its open maw sent a shiver down my spine.

Without warning, the larger dragon on my side of the dell launched her long neck toward me, snapping her teeth at me. Once again, something in my wolf's senses told me that she was female, and I stupidly wondered whether the bigger ones tended to be female. I told my rational brain to shut up. We weren't watching birds of prey in the canyon. I narrowly dodged the beast's snapping snout.

Then, the male dragon's huge tail careened toward me. His long, scaley tail had barbs on the end, and I veered away, trying not to freak out over the danger those things could do to me.

The female's glimmering orange eyes burned with viciousness as her jaws once more snapped toward me.

A bright light behind me distracted me, and I cast a look toward the unicorn and caught the dragons on her side of the clearing backing away from her glowing horn as if they couldn't bear its brightness.

With my heart racing, I swerved away from the male's tail again. The dragons were large and formidable creatures, and as fear flared through me, I knew I didn't stand a chance against these huge, tough-scaled, fanged creatures.

But my wolf saw things differently. Instinctively, she snarled and leaped around, determined to protect her and me. The protective urge swept through us both as we instinctively knew that we needed to protect the unicorn, too. As I peeked around again, I watched her slash her horn at one of the dragons, landing a blow into its soft underbelly. It let out an enraged shriek, and I took heart.

Maybe we could do this.

The clash of scales and claws echoed through the forest as my wolf went for the male dragon straight after he tried to strike with his tail again. Despite their size and strength, my wolf's agility and primal instinct were impressive. With a series of swift moves, she managed to outmaneuver each of the dragons' strikes. I marveled at her speed and nimbleness each time she bypassed an opponent, wondering how she did it. She always seemed to be two steps ahead until …

She wasn't…

We weren't…

Pain flared through my flank.

I was shocked as intense pain pitched through me, almost knocking me to the ground. My wolf whined in distress, the sound reverberating through the clearing as I stumbled, struggling to stay upright.

I felt the warm trickle of blood seeping from the wound on my side, the metallic smell of it engulfing me as panic thrashed through me.

The dragons had landed a hit. I didn't know whether it was the male's barbed tail or the female's fangs that had left a deep gash in my wolf's side. But as I backed away, my strength waning, her movements started to grow weak, and … my back legs gave out completely.