Page 36 of Feral Werewolves

We did.

But not everything was a choice.

Sometimes, you woke up and it was raining on the day you intended to plant flowers.

Sometimes, you were in a car accident and ended up paralyzed from the waist down.

Sometimes, you got some windfall inheritance from a dead relative you never knew existed.

These things happened. Things that were out of our control.

One moment, the world was one way, and the next, everything had shifted entirely.

When I got that sharp feeling, pinned to the present moment, staring up at the brightness of the sky, I knew that if I was too rigid, if I didn’t let myself move with the rhythm of what was out of my control, I’d only end up snapping in two.

I’d had plans, sure, but now, I had to change my plans.

10

clementine

THE PROBLEM WASthat Paladin had blocked me on social media, and that Kestrel would not respond to my friend requests or read any messages I sent him. Lazarus didn’t seem to have any presence online.

The next full moon was a week away. It was breathing down my neck, and I felt nervous and frightened because I didn’t have any idea what I was going to do.

I would have liked to have it all settled before I left, but I only had a week, and it wasn’t enough time. Also, try as I might, I couldn’t make myself contact my father and explain it all to him.

I wondered at myself, anyway.

How could I be doing this, after what happened to my own mother?

It wasn’t as if I didn’t remember her. I had all sorts of memories of my mother, and everyone of them was a shard to my heart, especially when compared to the reality of Angela, my self-centered stepmother.

I couldn’t make that make sense, the fact that I would fall in love with the kinds of creatures who had murdered my mother.

Anyway, at this point, it was not love, and I knew that.

It was a biological imperative, an instinctive altering of the way my body functioned.

It was like becoming allergic to gluten or something.

I had to obey it. I didn’t have to like it. But forcing myself to eat a lot of pasta was not going to reverse it.

So, the moon came, and I hadn’t really done anything except a bunch of half-hearted research. Still, when I left my dorm, I looked into it and knew I wouldn’t live here again. I wanted to bring things with me, but I couldn’t. I wanted to have made different living arrangements. I wanted to have made progress in changing my classes to virtual and remote. I wanted to have done all sorts of things, and in the end, I was left with nothing concrete except a certainty that my whole life was going to change tonight.

I arrived at the gate, and I kept hoping Noah would be there, but he wasn’t.

Antsy, I waited as time passed, wondering what I was going to do, because I believed it when they said they wouldn’t even be here.

I had been to their farmhouse with Paladin, and I thought I might remember the way, but it was a different route from the gate than from the part of the wall where it had collapsed. It had also been a long walk, maybe twenty minutes.

I needed to make it there.

I felt as if it wouldn’t really matter, in the end, if some of the other wolves caught me and used me before I got to them. They would still claim me, because I was theirs, even if some other men had fucked me.

But, as it was, I had only ever been with them, and something that thrummed inside my chest wanted to keep it that way.

The minute the gate opened, I was off like a shot.

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