The animal in me roared to be freed.
Elizabeth Bennett whispered, “Go.”
I went.
I WAS out the door and into the grass when it happened.
There was a great ache in my body, a pain I’d never experienced before. My muscles seized as I stepped off the porch and dropped to my hands and knees. I couldn’t find a way to draw in a breath. Everything was too loud. The heartbeats. The forest. Green Creek. They were all screaming for me, they were screaming OxOxOx and I opened my mouth to scream back, but the sound that came out was low and guttural, a snarl no human could have made.
My bones began to crack and break, the pieces rearranging themselves. Hair began to sprout along my skin, and it was black like the deepest part of the night, and I couldn’t stop it, I couldn’t fight it.
Claws popped out from underneath my fingernails, the strain of it tremendous.
There was a brief moment, a human moment, when I realized what was happening, that it shouldn’t have been possible, that I had died, Richard’s hand in me, my guts spilling out of me. I believed in magic. I believed in the impossible. I believed in werewolves and the call of the moon.
I almost didn’t believe this was happening.
It’s a dream it’s a dream it’s a—
It wasn’t a dream, though, because the pain was extraordinary. It had to be, with the way everything inside me was breaking and shifting. I cried out again, my voice even less human than it’d been before. It came out garbled, and there was the thought of I’m turning, oh my god I’m turning I’m—before it dissolved.
The pain faded.
I was I was I was I was I was I was I was I AM
a wolf
colors there are
blacks and whites
blue there is blue i see blue it’s
in the moon it’s in the moon
it’s green
everything is green
there are others
here i can feel the others
it’s pack it’s home it’s mine it’s ours ours ours ours
they’re here
in pack house they’re they’re standing there standing there and watching
i am
Alpha
i am their
Alpha
eyes