Page 19 of Hunted Mate
This is something that means something. The rest of the world has been trying to get me to get back to normal as quickly as possible. They don’t want me mired in grief. It’s not convenient for a girl to refuse her schooling and not eat and not talk to a single one of the parade of counselors, each of whom puts on a sadder and more empathetic face than the last.
I’ve just found something that isn’t normal. Something that doesn’t demand normality from me either. I feel weirder and stranger just for having seen it. I know instantly that I will not be believed, and in this moment, I am glad for it. It is as if having been through terrible loss and strange fate has opened my eyes and allowed me to see other strange things.
This is magic, but it is happening right in front of me. This is real.
I see another man turn in front of the fire, throw back his head in a howl, and then simply melt into an animal right before my eyes. Again and again the ritual is done and the people turn into creatures.
I want more than anything to be like them. I want to escape pain and thought. I want to be a wolf in the woods, with other wolves. I want to be part of a family so big I could never lose it. I can sense their bonds, hear them in the way they talk to one another and interact with one another, and see them in the body language.
I get brave.
I walk toward the fire.
I am drawn to it, like a moth to the proverbial flame. I want to be closer to the heat. I want to be part of the light. I want to howl with them. I want my pain as a human to be able to be transformed.
I walk into the circle of the light. I walk right into the pack of wild wolves, of people and of animals and I stand there, looking at them.
“Hello,” I say, my voice shaking a little from timidity. “I’m Calista Hart. I’m…”
They’re looking at me, but they’re not smiling like me, or like people usually do when I enter their presence. I’ve had a lifetime of being greeted in every place I’ve ever been like a conquering hero. I’ve been the center of attention. I’ve been Leonard and Miranda’s little princess.
Out here, in the woods. I am nothing.
Nothing at all.
I feel my insignificance crashing over me like a wave. I wanted to be stripped of everything that hurt, the life I came from, everything I knew. And it has happened all at once.
They turn toward me, their eyes locked on me.
And that’s when a second realization comes.
In the place I come from, I am the child of those who matter more than almost anybody. I am the apex. Out here? I am prey. I feel it. Deeply. I feel it completely and entirely.
Suddenly, I am a little creature out of place in a forest full of wolves.
They move toward me.
Fast.
Frighteningly fast.
I see eyes and teeth, fangs and hands, one becoming the other in a crashing tidal wave of transformation.
Like something out of a primordial nightmare, I experience the visceral terror that lives inside us, a shadow cast forever in our souls from millennia of living in caves with creatures we did not understand and could tear us to pieces.
I was made for this. Nature made me for escaping this. I follow instinct.
I shriek.
I am being hunted.
I run, leaves slapping me in the face, roots reaching up to trip me. I run track and hurdles at school, and I miss all of them, butin the end that doesn’t matter because I am fleeing on two feet and being chased by beasts on four.
I do my best to flee. I am fast for my age, one of the fastest in my class. None of that means anything here in the forest. I make it maybe twenty feet, and even that feels like a lot before I am pushed to the ground from behind and bitten hard.
Being bitten is a searing, cruel pain. I make a sound like a wounded animal, because I am one. I turn and I scream and I writhe. I am a dying rabbit, furious at the unfairness of being killed.
A large jaw closes over my throat. I close my eyes as a rush of endorphins runs through me. Years from now, I’ll understand that’s a prey response left over from millennia where humans were hunted by animals far more powerful than themselves. For now, I just feel a strange peace. No fear. Just acceptance.
