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“Raven, can you hear me?”
Her eyes watered over. “Help me, Levi. I don’t know what’s happening.”
“GET OFF!”
I snarled. “Fuck off is more like it.”
“Levi!”
I focused on Raven’s shrieking voice in my head. “Your wolf side is scared. When a wolf gets scared, they fight. You have to fight back. You can’t run from it.”
“Why not?”
I focused not on her gaze, but behind it. Straight into the eyes of the scared little girl that Raven had become, thanks to her mother, no doubt. “Because this is what happens when you run. Your wolf wins if you run. Wolves are astute at running. They can catch any prey that turns their back on them. Don’t turn your back, Raven. Stare it in the fucking face.”
“I WANT FOOD!’
I got into Raven’s face, even though it wasn’t her eyes staring back at me. “I’ll make you my fucking food if you don’t shut the hell up.”
“How do I fight? Teach me. What in the hell am I supposed to do?”
Raven’s wolf rolled me over, pinning me onto my back. “You can’t go back to your life like this. Even if you choose not to stay, your wolf form can’t control you. You have no place in the human world if you can’t do it.”
I tossed Raven’s body off mine and scrambled to get to my feet. My fingernails lengthened into claws as my eyesight sharpened. I saw everything around me. I felt everything around me. I smelled deer galloping five miles away while birds fluttered high overhead, as if they were right in my fucking ear. I’d take her down if it meant pulling her back from the brink. Even if I had to hurt her. Even if I had to knock her the fuck out.
“Come on, Raven!” I roared. “Be stronger than this! Be the woman I know you are!”
Her head fell back and the howl that peeled from her throat was a sound I’d never forget. It was full of anger, and anguish. Loneliness, and despair. The hurt that poured forth was unlike anything I’d ever heard in my life, and it trembled the ground we stood upon. She fell to her knees. She raked her hands through her hair. She tugged at it, tearing chunks out as I rushed to her and wrapped my hands around her wrists.
“You’ve got this,” I whispered as I cheered her on, “just a little bit longer.”
“Whyyyyyyyyy?!” she shrieked.
“I JUST WANT SOME GODDAMN FOOD, FOR FUCK’S SAKE!”
The second I heard her wolf’s voice in my head, I forced mine to retreat. She had won. Even if she didn’t feel like it, she had won. She bent forward and sobbed, placing the top of her head against my chest. And as I stroked my hands down her neck and back, her blubbered words rose to the surface.
“I can’t do this, Levi. I can’t do this for the rest of my life.”
I tried to softly unravel her hair. “Just one more time. Do it for us.”
She shook her head. “I have to do this for me. I can’t.”
“Do it for me, then. Just come home and do it one more time for me.”
She practically choked her words out. “I’m sorry, but I’m not strong enough.”
“Look at me.”
“No.”
“Raven, look at me.”
She whipped her head up. “I said, no.”
I smirked. “And yet, you’re looking at me.”
She clenched her jaw. “What is it? What the hell do you people want from me?”
