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A twig snaps to my right this time and I jerk my head toward it, breathing heavily now. I can’t help myself; I’m terrified.
“Stop playing games with me, Elijah,” I say, hoping his name will work like a magic charm. “I’m scared. I just want this to be over.”
“But I’ve just started to play,” the voice says. It’s behind me now, and I turn in a panic, dropping the violin as I move.
It’s when I reach to grab it that I see a pair of eyes in the darkness, and I stumble back to fall on my rear. I watch him with wide eyes, staring into those glimmering opal irises, like Elijah’s grey eyes butwrong. He stalks forward slowly, just a hulking, graceful shadow in the dark—with two glowing eyes that promise violence.
“Why do you smell so good, wildflower girl?” he rasps.
“I don’t know,” I say. I watch as the eyes lower, and then get just a smidge closer. I take a sharp breath, cringing backward and preparing to get up and fucking bolt...but I know he’ll just catch me.
So I wait.
I wait to die.
Ijustleft home for the first time, and I’m already dead.
“I just want a taste,” he says.
He leaps forward, and I’m thrown to my back as he pins me to the forest floor, sharp talons on my wrists. He doesn’t hurt me—I’m just startled, really, especially when I realize that he’s bleeding heavily from ragged wounds all over his torso. The blood drips onto my shirt as I trash to escape, my legs kicking weakly underneath him.
“Let me go,” I demand. “I don’t want anything to do with this!”
He ignores me, pressing his animal snout into my hair and huffing against the shell of my ear. The sensation feels strange, a buzz zipping down my neck and into my chest, and I writhe beneath him.
“You must feel it too, Sunshine,” he says. He breathes again into my hair, like he’ll inhale me and swallow me whole without even chewing first. “Who the fuck are you?”
I fight him again, but he’s too big and too strong for me to escape. So I give him the one thing he’s wanted this whole time, hoping against hope that it will help him see me as human.
“I’m Charlotte,” I say, closing my eyes. “Just Charlotte.”
The wolf’s eyes flicker to mine, and a new gush of blood pumps from a deep wound in his chest. I grimace at the sensation, the heat of it pooling across my skin, soaking my shirt. I’ll need that change of clothes in my bag faster than I thought, if I even survive this.
“Charlotte,” he repeats, the name impossibly sensual on his alien lips. He sounds like Elijah again, the tone of his voice almost tender.
“Yes,” I say, and I repeat my name like a prayer. “Charlotte.”
And then he does something strange. His body shivers, a full tremor that shakes him from shoulders to hind legs. He twists and contorts, and then his limbs begin to crack and pop, forming themselves into something that looks more like a human. His snout contracts into a handsome face, his grey eyes still glimmering like gemstones, but otherwise becoming something recognizable.
Oh—and he’s completely naked.
He rolls away from me, his back against the forest floor as he passes out cold. It’s only then that I notice the horrible wounds all over him; transforming doesn’t seem to have done anything to help, instead making matters worse. The wounds are still bleeding.
I stand on unsteady legs, then shuffle over to my pack. I have everything here that I need if we’re going to survive, and a full medical kit to save his life. He’ll need stitches, but I’ve given myself stitches before, and I’ve patched up Gran and Pa a few times too. And we have antiseptic, enough that I wouldn’t use nearly all of it on the way to Austin no matter what I do. I look at him, pointedly ignoring his groin and putting my hands on my hips.
There’s no way I can leave him here.
So I guess it’s time to make camp.
CHAPTER FIVE
?
ELIJAH
I slip in and out of awareness as Sunshine—Charlotte—hauls me through the woods, my bare feet exposed to the elements. I’m too hurt and too much of a bastard to care much about decency, but I feel at least a flicker of shame that I’m butt naked in the middle of the forest with a girl who seems a little too innocent for my usual taste.
“Keep moving, Elijah,” the girl mutters when I stumble over a log. “If I’m reading Pa’s map correctly, there’s an outpost just up here where I can get you fixed up and we can go our separate ways.”
