Page 4 of Moon Cursed
The Hunters were here.
KATLYN
Fiery heat shot mercilessly through my bones, sending them all splintering.
The agony sent stars sprinkling across my vision, but a fresh wave of cool magic swept over my skin a moment later.
It didn’t dull the pain, but forced me to stay lucid. In that moment, I desperately wished that I was still human.
Because this was Hell.
And there was no doubt that I wasn’t human anymore.
Kane watched me as fear entered his beautifully pure eyes. The white irises glowed with a bright band of gold andgods, he smelled incredible.
I had crashed to my knees when the first echos of my shift had begun. I was still naked and the entire Outcast pack was all around me, watching the spectacle unfold.
The howls from outside had stopped, which seemed to help slow my transformation. Still, it didn’t seem like anything was going to prevent my shift from reaching an agonizing conclusion.
“Kane…” I whispered, then my tongue stuck to the roof of my mouth as my jaw snapped the wrong way, wrenching a cry from me as my teeth broke.
Then they changed.
“Althea,” he growled. He turned on her as a vein throbbed in his neck. “I can’t stay here much longer, but I can’t leave her like this.”
Althea dropped onto all fours and placed a hand on my arm. It twisted underneath the power of her magic, but her touch seemed to put a slight damper on the pain. “I’ll help her through this,” she promised as I cried out when my back broke. I felt it snap like a twig as I lurched. She wrapped her arms around me and didn’t let go.
Kane watched me through the slow, agonizing transformation. “It’s not supposed to be like this,” he said, his words husky with both fear and need. “Tell me what’s happening, Althea.”
“My visions don’t work that way,” she hissed back.
The pack prowled around us, curiosity spiking the air and I just wanted to be alone, away from prying eyes.
My wolf couldn’t talk to me right now. She was too busy trying to rip through my body and free herself from a prison that had kept her asleep all my life.
She’d always been there, but because I had been born a human, she hadn’t been able to reach me.
A human born with a wolf’s sleeping soul. The idea was insane, but I knew it to be true.
That’s why the storms hadn’t harmed me.
That’s why I had been able to smell scents that nobody else could.
Why I had been able to run a little bit faster… a little bit longer…
And now, it was why I had been able to take the Goddess’s magic for myself.
I was her vessel.
My wolf accepted her without hesitation, or without bothering to ask me what I wanted.
“Make this stop,” I begged before my arms broke and I shrieked in pain.
Althea hauled me to my feet, but my legs wouldn’t hold my weight. I helplessly slumped against her like a broken doll. “The transformation is slower than it should be because you’re shifting at the wrong time. You should have shifted last night at the High Moon.” She glanced at Kane. “But you didn’t have an alpha to guide you.”
Right. The ones I’d run into had been too busy trying to kill me.
Another wave of magic gave me a momentary reprieve—enough to think for a minute, anyway. My magic combined with Althea’s seemed to have a numbing effect on the transformation.
