Walking Wolf Road (Wolf Road Chronicles Book 1) (39 page)

I felt every inch of the bullet’s path with bizarre detail as it tore through my chest just under my collarbone, and out the other side in a wet explosion that drenched the back of my shirt.

The book hit him dead in the face and knocked him back, just enough to foil his kill shot. I fell
as my nervous system shorted out and I writhed in agony.

He stepped on my chest and pinned me down as he chambered another round. The spent shell pinged on the round beside me and Jack sniffed at the blood that leaked out of his broken nose while he took aim at my head.

Like the moment when Fen’s teeth sank into my hand and changed my life; time stood still. An instant stretched into a lifetime…

This agony was the last thing Fen ever felt in this world. The last Loki would feel too, unless I stopped him here.
Now!

Wolf surged inside me, and I snarled as I grabbed the scalding hot barrel of the rifle and tore it out of his hand. I threw it into the darkness of the library where it clattered to a halt somewhere in the shadows.

Shocked and disarmed, Jack took a reflexive step back. With a half human roar, I threw myself at him and tackled him to the floor. He twisted underneath me as he screamed and blubbered. He punched and clawed at my face, and I caught one of his hands in my jaws and clamped down until I tasted blood and felt a bone crack.  

He screamed and dislodged me with a hook from his other arm. The pain of his punch barely registered, but it knocked the cross Fen gave me out of my shirt and it snagged on his flailing hand.

The silver chain broke with a snap, and that crystalline wall that held wolf caged within me ruptured.

As the wall fell away, Wolf’s fire engulfed me and filled me until I felt I’d burst at the seams. For a moment, the feeling of wholeness eclipsed the agony from my shoulder. Sensations overwhelmed me; blood roared in my ears, sounds amplified to almost painful levels, and color
s bled out of my sight. Scents bombarded my brain with an intoxicating cocktail of blood, my own and his, and the thick musk of his terrified sweat.

My hand captured his neck. I felt his pulse beneath my fingers, and clenched. Jack killed my Alpha, my friend, my family, and dreadfully wounded the woman I
loved—I couldn’t let myself think she wouldn’t survive.

I’d become the true horror of a werewolf; all the ferocity of a force of nature, with a human’s wrath and rage.

I couldn’t even think in words anymore, images flooded in a stream through my mind in Wolf’s simpler and purer form of awareness. It was clear; by taking life, Jack had forfeited his own.

Convulsions racked my body while my lips pulled back from lengthening teeth and a bestial roar tore from my throat. My breath choked by in shuddering gasps as my diaphragm clenched and contorted. Beneath me, the hand that gripped his neck and the wounded half-limp one spasmed as the sweat that covered by body evaporated in wisps of steam. The tendons in the back of my hands stood taught under the skin as the nails grew long, dark, and curved.

Holy shit it’s happening, it’s really happening!

My bones elongated and shifted while my innards churned and changed to match. My stomach purged itself all over him, laced with blood.

His screams reached fever pitch as what little sanity might have remained in him was annihilated by the sight of a teenage boy transforming into a wolf—right on top of him. A spasm shot down my arm and cut off the sound as the change consumed me.

I let go of myself, and let Wolf and I become one…

The thick gray pelt sprouted first, joined soon after by coarse black hairs. My legs shrank as my arms lengthened, and my hands and toes grew more paw-like until I couldn’t hold him down anymore.

He scrambled out from underneath me, making hiccupping gasping sounds. I tried to pursue him, but could barely move. The cloying stink of fear trailed behind him and left an easy trail to track.

My tailbone popped as the bones elongated and developed into the physical counterpart of the phantom tail I’d experienced for so long. The bones of my face elongated and reconfigured themselves.
The inferno of shifting energy boiling off of me shredded my clothing,
and it slithered off me in tatters. My ears lengthened and moved up the sides of my head while my nose and mouth projected into a muzzle.
With audible pops, the bones of my chest deepened and narrowed, while the muscles of my neck thickened to hold my head in front of me instead of over my neck. With a final satisfying shake, I rid myself of any remaining scraps of clothing.

I panted with my long wet tongue, and stretched my newly reformed muscles. My left shoulder burned, but the blood had slowed and it was somewhat functional.

Limping, I followed the ridiculously traceable scent trail he’d left behind. His blood and fear curdled in the air like a trial of incense smoke. I wedged the library door open with my muzzle, and quickly adjusted to walking on four legs as my claws clicked on the hallway floors.

His head start was no match for my sense of smell and relentless pace. My padded feet loped in a steady rhythm down the hall as his stench grew stronger. I slowed to a stop, his pungent smell was strong and I heard him gasping for breath around the corner by the auditorium. He jumped at ever
y shadow, caught in the throes of ancient fear.

I lifted my head and let out a full-throated howl. A primeval warning and promise of his fate—he got the message—

With a choked cry he threw himself through the door and staggered outside. I waited in the shadows until I was sure no one would see me, and then I gave chase.

He was an athlete though, and I was wounded, and he drew further from me as he ran across the athletic field. I panted hard from the pain that radiated from my shoulder and worried that even on four legs I wouldn’t catch him.

As he passed through the trees on the far side of the field, he stopped dead. My hackles crawled with a familiar sensation and my eyes widened as a gray wolf evanesced in the air before him.

“You murdered me…” Fen’s voice whispered from the semi
-transparent wolf, which laid its ears back and snarled.

“No… NO!” Jack whimpered and backed away from the specter.

A raven appeared nearby, see-through like the wolf, and together Corwin and Fen chanted the word ‘
murderer
’ in a mocking whisper while Jack cried and remembered one last weapon. He unfolded a three-inch pocketknife and brandished it at the ghosts as I reached the trees and recloaked in their darkness. I growled softly, and his head snapped toward me, but I’d already moved. Fen’s ghost growled too and Jack looked back at him as I moved closer. Together, he and Corwin herded him closer to me.

Jack backed up against a big elm, unaware that I crouched behind it. I inhaled a snout-full of scents; sweat and blood, the tang of juniper bushes, and the rich tannin of moist soil and rotting leaves. As the sirens drew closer I knew that my time was up. I gathered myself and lifted my voice into another howl, right behind him.

He screamed and ran. Instinct kicked in and I pursued as he bolted in the only direction that wasn’t blocked by Fen or Corwin. I drew alongside him as he neared the irrigation ditch.

I snapped out and severed his Achilles tendon with a quick flash of my teeth. He fell and
urinated into his pants, and then lifted himself into a desperate crawl toward the earthen bank of the ditch while dirt and grass clumped around his bleeding ankle.

I followed, a shadow with burning amber eyes. At the edge, I knocked him over and pinned him down with one of my massive forepaws, like he’d done to me in the Library, like the faceless hunter that’d haunted my dreams for months.

I stared down at him while the water rushed by, flickering silver in the night, and saw that any shred that was left in him that was human had shriveled up and died. I lowered my face and took his throat between my teeth, but at that moment we met eyes. His eyes were empty, his madness eclipsed everything, but through my rage a thought broke through and pity swept over me.

I made him this way…

He’d done the deeds, but I’d pushed him down the path to insanity. I was the one who’d driven him over the breaking point. I wanted to blame him, but I couldn’t; it wasn’t all his fault…

He seized my moment of hesitation and plunged his knife up and into my side—

Behind my eyes I relived the moment he split Jake’s lip—when the amber light faded from Fen’s eyes—when Loki collapsed in the closet—when I saw the crimson pool around Bo’s crumpled form—

—An agonized snarl tore from my throat as my jaws convulsed and drove my fangs together through the soft tissue of his neck.

Blood washed over my muzzle, and I jerked away from him. He rolled over and tried to escape into the ditch until he weakened and went still. The slow pull of the water dragged him in and carried his body away.

I lifted my nose to the sky, to the pale ghost of the moon just visible in the eastern sky. Blood poured from me as I howled; an anguished dirge of pain and sorrow for broken love, stolen lives, and the blood that stained me.

Shock took me, and I stumbled dazed through the shadows on autopilot while I bled, until the world twisted out from underneath me and pitched me into the black abyss.

“My poor child, my sweet warrior, you have fought so hard…”

That voice seemed so familiar. “Mom?”

Out of the dark, I saw a body, so familiar, yet strange and alien… A huge black wolf lay on its side in a puddle of blood while its tongue lolled out; its furred sides unmoving.

Lupa appeared and walked up to my body.

“Your sacrifice was not forgotten…”

Lupa looked up from my body and pierced me with her stare. Then she stretched out and laid her body over mine, and they melted together as it turned human again.

I floated so free, weightless in the light, until I felt the tug. An urgent
pull drew me back down, but I felt so weary, I couldn’t bear it anymore, all I wanted was to end my pain…

I felt Fen and Corwin beside me and I opened my eyes. They laid their hands on my shoulders and pushed me back down as they smiled.

“This is what it means to be Wolf”, Fen whispered, “To be Wolf, is to survive… No matter what; you face pain, you face trials, you face all the adversity of the world, and with pride—you survive…”

“Your road doesn’t end here…” Corwin added.

I heard ravens in the darkness as the features of my body melted back to human form. I reached out desperately to Fen and Corwin as I was pulled back toward the pain. They shifted into their animal forms before my eyes, and I watched as the wolf and the raven faded into the light. The ravens grew louder, and the rustle of feathers surrounded me with streaks of violet. I heard Raven’s voice as I was drawn in and devoured by my material shell, and the suffocating weight of flesh and agony, “
Oh, no you don’t kid, you’re not done yet…”

Plastic objects clacked amid a sporadic beeping sound while a siren howled over a roaring truck engine…

A strange man’s voice broke the darkness—“We have a pulse! Inform the hospital that we’ll be coming in, Code Three…”