“No. You need to let me go,” she says boldly, fixing me with that wild green stare, and a look of fierce determination that tells me she has no intention of submitting to me on this matter.
“That’s not going to happen,” Skor says.
Thorn nods.
This is the one thing we are all absolutely aligned on. She’s not going anywhere.
“You are ours,” I tell her. “That is simply a truth you will have to accept. You were given to us by your father, and we survived the night with you. We have mated. We are bonded.”
“Then come and be my mates in the mountains. These human towns have nothing to offer besides noise.”
“That’s not true.”
She screws her face up in frustration. “It is true. I hate everything about these places. I hate everything I’ve seen. I hate how I have to hide myself, and my magic. And I hate you!”
She spits the last words with hurtful venom, but I know the tone of a child’s tantrum all too well. She’s not going to get away with this, and I have no intention of responding to the vicious little jab she just took.
“You are going back to the train cabin,” I tell her. “We all are.”
She doesn’t want to submit to this decision, but she knows we can just pick her up and carry her there if we have to.
I can almost feel her thoughts, a thousand angry little plans buzzing about in her mind like a nest of annoyed wasps. Shewants to act out. She wants to run away. She wants to shift and eat all these humans, bound from one to the other, ripping their throats out.
Or maybe that’s just my fantasy, projected onto her.
Tabby
I want to bite everyone in the neck and I want them to all fucking bleed out begging for their worthless lives. I also don’t really want to hurt anyone. That doesn’t make sense, I suppose. It’s not these people’s fault that they suck so very much.
We go back past the restaurant, which is still serving customers. They’ve put a big board of wood up over the window where Krall and Skor came through like wild beasts. They stayed in their people forms though. Disappointing.
I have only seen my mates’ wild forms once, when they hunted me down in the mountains. They were larger than most of the mountain wolves, better fed, and much more powerful. I want to see them again. I want to take my own form. I want to be free.
I think they want to be free as well, underneath it all. They say they want to take me to some awful city, but they were attracted to the wild thing in the mountains. They came to a terrible place, and they have to expect to have picked up a terrible creature.
Maybe I haven’t been bad enough yet? A petty little whine about some noisy human is nothing. I dropped some drink on hum. I could have hit him with a thunderbolt. I could have set his hair on fire. I could have…
“I can feel your vicious little thoughts, and I like them,” Skor murmurs in my ear as we climb back into the train.
“What?”
“I can hear them,” he repeats, flickering a wink at me.
I am inclined to take that statement literally.
“Then get out of my head. Creep.”
“Oh, she’s feisty tonight,” he grins. “Coming out of your shell? Careful. You might be coming out just to get smacked into line.”
He says that just as we step into the cabin. And I don’t know what it is. Maybe it’s his tone. Maybe I’m still hungry. Maybe I know I need to give these guys a demonstration that will make them let me go. Whatever it is, it’s the final straw.
Krall
I have seen many shifters take their wolf forms in the past. Usually it is a smooth physical transition. When my brothers and I take our wolf shapes, it is silent and it is clean.
Blam!
Tabby mutters a word and a thunderclap issues from some unseen storm. There is a thick cloudy haze in the air around Tabby. When it clears, a silver and white wolf with incredible phosphorescent green eyes is staring at us.
