Chapter 15

CIARA

I'm free.

It hadn't really hit me until, what with the whole bleeding-wolf-turned-human actually being an ancient goddess and all, but now it does and I choke up.

I should be happy. I should want to dance and sing and do all those things that characters do in films and musicals when they're finally free. But I don't.

I want to scream.

It was so fucking easy.

Five years I'd spent, cowering in the shadows, staying off the grid. Trying my best to make myself as invisible as I possibly could so that he wouldn't find me. So, he wouldn't catch up to me and drag me back to that hell of a life. That waking nightmare.

Instead, all it took was a wolf and a shotgun and I've been loosed from the chains that once held me down.

Maybe I should have killed him.

I'd considered it, in those bleak years where everything had seemed impossibly permanent, even went so far as to look up every day poisons online. But I'd given up because it had been so unthinkable. The only way I'd been able to escape, had been by running. Running and hiding, and somehow still playing the same, sick fucked up game that he'd been playing.

His death had taught me that he hadn't been as untouchable as I'd once thought. He wasn't omnipotent; he wasn't immortal. He bled just as easily as anyone else.

He died as easily as anyone else.

Suddenly I realize that I'm angry, and it's not with him. I'm angry with me.

I'm furious with myself. Livid. This sudden freedom just brought home the fact that I could have been free this whole time. All it would have taken was some guts.

My fingernails bite into my palm, and when I register the sting, I blink and smooth out the fabric of my jeans.

"Ciara?" Red sounds cautious, as if I'm a rabbit, likely to run.

Her instincts aren't wrong.

I might run. It's all I'm good for, after all—running away.

"Ciara." My name is sharper now, harsher and I look up at her, confused.

"What?"

"You…" she pauses and growls in frustration, as if she's still a wolf.

"Did you just growl at me?" I ask, and she ignores the question.

"Why are you letting him affect you like this? He's dead. No longer here."

"I'm angry," I say, and voicing it out loud gives the emotion power. I can feel the energy roaring through my veins and I'm desperate to let it out. To hit something, to yell at something.

Red looks at me, and she understands. She just does. I see it in the shadows of her eyes, the tilt of her lips. "So, you are angry. What shall you do with that anger?"

"I want to shout."

"Then shout." She looks confused, as if this is the most obvious answer possible. "Your cottage is remote, far from anything. Who would you disturb?"

"The forest," I say, and I almost want to take the words back as soon as I've spoken them. Normal people don't talk about the forest as if it's alive, but then I remember to whom I'm speaking. The Morrígan, the Dark Goddess herself.

If goddesses are real, then forests can be alive.

"The forest won't care," she says. "The animals might, and the birds might, but it will startle them, nothing more." Red nods towards the door. "Go on, loose your rage."

Unsteadily, I get to my feet, and look towards the door. There's still blood on the floor, from where I dragged the wolf in earlier. There's still blood on my clothes, on my hands, I realize. It doesn't make me hesitate, rather propels me along until I'm at the door, opening it wide and breathing in the fresh air.

There's not a spot of blood on the road. Not a mark to show that Robert was ever here. No car. No ex. Nothing.

I turn and look back over my shoulder at Red. She looks tired, slumped against the back of the couch, but her smile is encouraging, and there's a glint in her eye that says that she understands all too well why I'm so angry, as if she too knows what it is to wish for a man's death.

I know I should be sorry that he's dead, but I'm not. I'm glad he's dead and a small part of me—a part that I rarely acknowledge even to myself—wishes that I'd been the one to dispatch him, to the fear I experienced for so long, painted on his face.

It wouldn't have brought me closure.

I've read enough books, done enough research to know that. When you have nothing to do but work and read, that's all you end up doing. I didn't even dare do therapy, because that would have required a credit card, and I feared him tracking me down.

Instead, all it took was my grandmother getting ill.

The bastard.

That ignites my fury and I open my mouth to scream.

It's not a high-pitched scream though, instead a guttural sound rips from me. It sounds painful. It is painful. It pulls at my vocal cords and there's a flurry of noise as birds fly from the trees, their repose disturbed by my pain.

And then I hear an answering noise.

A howl.

Slowly, one by one, wolves materialize on the edge of the forest, stepping out onto the road, throwing back their own heads and howling.

At first, I pause, taken aback by their cacophony, but then I join in, intermingling my human voice with theirs. The sound is haunting, and I appreciate the sound of a wolf pack, fully in tune, the way I have never have before.

Although, I've never seen a proper wolf pack before.

When the rasp in my throat becomes too much, I let the sound die away, and their howls follow. We stand opposite each other, staring.

"You are Pack," says Red from the couch. There is magic in her words, almost tangible in its power. "They know it, and now you know it."

"Am I Pack because they want me to be Pack, or because you decided it and told them?" I can't look away from them as I speak. There's something dominant about this position, about the place I'm taking in this Pack of wolves which determines that I cannot back down, I cannot look away.

"I do not know for sure," she says. "But I have seen them reject people before. So, it is not just my determination that makes you Pack."

That is oddly comforting.

The leader of the pack, with a grey coat that almost matches the color of the road pads over towards me. He doesn't break my gaze, nor I his, and I realize that this is a test of sorts. Slowly, I lower my head, and following some unknown instinct, offer him my neck.

His breath is hot against my throat and I have an eerie feeling that I've been here before, only that's not it. It wasn't me with a wolf's teeth at my throat, it was Robert.

My eyes flicker to the place on the road where he last lay. It's empty, and these wolves—my Pack—got rid of him for me.

"Thank you," I whisper, and the wolf huffs across my throat and nudges at me to stand back up.

"There you go," says Red, and her voice is filled with the relief that comes after a moment of heightened tension. "That's more than me just ordering them around; you're a wolf now, Ciara."

I'm a wolf. It's the most ridiculous thing I've ever heard, and yet it couldn't be more correct.