Page 66 of Hunted Mate
But when I open my eyes, I see that she is not a wolf.
She is furred, she is fanged, and she has impressively long claws on each of her digits, but what I am looking at right now is no shifter. No pack beast.
What I am looking at… is a werewolf.
She stands erect on two legs. Her face has taken on the visage of a wolf: long snout, sharp teeth, ferocious eyes. Her body is twice the size it was before, and thickly furred with a kind of blue-gray pelt.
She turns toward me, claws extended, and cocks her head to the side in a very canine motion.
The laboratory has made a monster. Werewolves don’t exist, according to modern shifters. They’re like Bigfoot and the Loch Ness Monster.
Maybe that was true a few weeks ago. It’s definitely not true anymore.
“Hey,” I say. “Do you understand me?”
She throws her head back and howls. The sound is wild, and deeply evocative.
I am seeing something that should not exist in this world, and I am absolutely astonished by the beauty and power and, hell, majesty of the feral side of the woman I adore.
I wonder if they could have made a werewolf with anyone else, or if she has some kind of blood in her that reacted a specific way. She’d been bitten by shifters before. Maybe that was a complicating factor. Whatever it is, she is stunning.
She howls again, then takes off into the undergrowth. I shift and follow her, keeping pace on four legs with the incredible bounding of her two. She scents prey, and follows the scent without hesitation.
We are fortunate that the forest is private and no people have stumbled into it, because her drive to destroy is now at its absolute peak. All she did before, when she escaped the lab, or when she ran from the officers, is nothing compared to the pure, perfect prey drive she is now displaying.
We take down a deer, and feed. Then we cross paths with a stag. He dies too, and she tears through him with a vicious reverence that I will never forget. I consume parts of her first kills as is tradition, bonding with her as I would another wolf.
Then I lead her home, once her hunger is sated and her bones begin to grow weary with the effort of their twisted transformation.
I get my mate to bed with a feat of strength and physics that frankly makes me very proud. I have to use all the principles of leverage to get her on the mattress. She’s big. Very big. She’s also very sleepy. I’d say that first shift took pretty much all her energy out of her. Makes sense. She did not merely become a wolf. She became… this. I shift into my human form and watch her as she sleeps, not as a human, and not as a wolf, but as a third, more strange and terrifying thing. She is beautiful in this form too, but not what I expected. Not what anybody expected. I can only begin to imagine the chaos that will inevitably be wrought once she begins to understand herself in this way.
Mercifully, as the dawn begins to rise, she slides out of her were-form and takes her naked human body again. I have been awake the entire time, keeping a close eye on her. I want her to be safe, even if there’s not really anything I can do if something were to go wrong.
I breathe a sigh of relief as I see her pretty face again. She was a stunning werewolf, but I do love her human nature.
She stirs as the second shift, the returning to self, takes place. I press a light kiss to her brow, which seems to be the last straw of her slumber.
She opens her eyes slowly, and I feel simultaneously guilty for waking her up, and immensely relieved to see that she is still herself behind her eyes. It wasn’t quite the same when she was unconscious. She might have looked like herself, but I needed to know she really was.
“Was I a pretty wolf?”
I realize she has no idea what happened, or how she looked, or the fact that she was not, technically, a wolf.
I do not know how to tell her, but I know I have to.
“You were exquisite,” I say.
Callie
“What? Was I some kind of mangy whelp?” I laugh, making a joke. It’s really weird not to be able to remember anything that happened between orgasming and waking up in bed, but I hope I had fun. I also hope my ability to remember starts to come back.
“You weren’t a wolf, exactly,” he says. He’s vague. Very vague.
“What, did I just pass out? Nothing happened? My body feels like something happened. Oh, my god, is this what’s going to happen? I’m just going to feel like shit, but have no power?”
“Oh, you have power,” he says.
“What did you see? Tell me?” I’m starting to worry. There’s an ache in every part of me. It’s not unbearable, but it is constant. I feel different, too. I feel lighter, more free, as if something I’ve been trying to hold in for a very long time has finally been expressed and I don’t have to hold it back anymore. Something in me is sleeping at peace.
