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Grey

As I grab her and pull her close, a deep-seated, overwhelmingneedto know everything she’s harboring inside her must tie into the magic I’ve recently come into because it’s the only thing that makes sense to me as the reason for the burst of heat and sudden tsunami of images and sensations slamming into my consciousness.

And as I process it all, my knees give out and she and I go to the floor.

I don’t just see things through her eyes, I feel things. Smell them. Taste them. It’s pain and fear; it’s sorrow and hunger. It’s desperation and fuck, the hunger... it’s so stark, my gut aches.

I find myself holding my mate on the floor, turtling over her in wolf form as the walls surrounding us in this building crumble. While I protect her from the falling debris, I roar out my anger while shifting to and from my forms repeatedly, as if against my will while my mind floods with images, scents, sensations. Images that turn my stomach. Sensations that fucking hurt. Scents and flavors that I want expelled from my body.

Strobing images come fast as scents and sounds all assault me from her mind, her memories. But I smell, feel, and see them all here. In the now.

I see a large, older alpha crouched over her, taking her on all fours, grunting with the corner of his mouth full of spittle and I somehow know she spent months with him as he tried to get herpregnant because his wife was barren. She couldn’t have been more than eighteen. He had to be in his forties.

I see her brother’s red face as he looms over her before he backhands her five times in a row, the force of his blows so hard I’m shocked it didn’t snap her neck, meaning she wouldn’t be here to become mine. He’s furious about her fucking over his plans, costing him money he would’ve gotten if she’d given that alpha a child.

I see, feel, and smell death around me and it’s as if I’m experiencing a time lapse of the disintegration of this pack, from what it was before her father and then her brother ruined it. Lush turns to barren. Green turns to black. Blue turns to grey. Silver turns to rust. It all becomes the dystopian surroundings we see now.

My teeth chatter so hard I’m surprised they don’t crumble as I absorb pain from some lengthy illness that sends my body through stages of freezing, then so impossibly hot it feels like it’d bend metal.

The hunger pains – pain I’ve never experienced – makes my guts feel like they’re going to consume themselves as the taste of blood and rusted metal coat my tongue.

The overwhelming feeling of helplessness with the cocktail of emotions has me suddenly sweating bullets as I continue to quake while holding her, wanting with everything I am to consume all her pain and fear and erase it for her.

I’ve got the rancid scents in my nose of every male who’s spilled seed into her. I’ve got flashes of her image, of her cowering as she’s being shouted at by her brother, then a shift to an image of three males taking their turns mounting her for a punishment of some sort. I feel agonizing sorrow lance through me as I catch the visage of pack members being beaten to death fortransgressions before being mangled by angry, hungry wolves. I can feel a culmination of her emotions, including despair as a little girl being ripped from the arms of an old man with kind, wet eyes just like hers.

More images. Babies crying, old people withering, hunger gnawing, stenches making me retch. Thunder booms and lightning rents the sky as I’m filled with her fear. Stark fear and self-loathing as she’s shouted at and bullied by callous nude males.

I feel it all.

I smell it all.

I fuckin’ taste the pain. The shame. The longing.

Voices are filling my head. Shouting.

Wyatt:

“Gonna fuck this mouth since the betas complain your cunt’s too dry, Stacy, but that’s tonight. If I don’t get a bitch around here pregnant soon, it might have to be you. Might have to be Meadows seed planted in a Meadows to save this pack from extinction since the rest of these fuckers are inferior. I own everything in this pack, bitch, including you.”

Wyatt:

“Feed them sawdust for all I care. Figure it out; I got shit to do here!”

There’s nothing to eat. Nothing to eat. Nothing nothing nothing…

The woman helping out in the mess hall:

“Marnie’s delivered her baby on the bathroom floor and they’re both dead.”

An older, sickly woman lying in a bed in that trailer.

“Girl, you’re our best hope. You go there and do whatever you need to do to force change. We’ll look after Halla. Addy and Misty will look after me. Ellie will take care of the office. You go and do what you need to do. Don’t feel bad about it neither. We gotta survive somehow.”

An attractive woman with red curly hair leans over and whispers into her ear. They’re watching me, Mase, and Ty while we sit in the woods talking about our concern over Rye being on the road, looking for Erica.

“You’re the key, Stacy,” the woman says into her ear, “You’re the key to change for your people. Don’t lose heart. The road might be hard but something that’s fundamentally part of your fate ties in with positive change coming for your pack.”

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