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I hope we can outrun them.
I take Charlotte’s hand and we leave the cave, climbing up the rockface to higher ground, away from the approaching scent. We’re going the opposite direction from where we’re headed, Austin getting farther and farther away, but I don’t much care as long as we escape. They’re gaining on us, though, and a jolt of pain tears through me as I start to change in full.
This is going to be a fight.
I double over, my claws and teeth getting sharp, spines erupting from my shoulders.
“Elijah!” Charlotte cries, turning around, looking strange and feral and beautiful in the clear daylight under this hole in the Celestial Curtain. She rushes to kneel in front of me, taking my face in her hands, and I focus on telling her what she needs to know.
“Charlotte, I have to tell you,” I start. “I’m…if they catch us,you aren’t safe.”
My teeth grow so long I can barely speak around them, and I have to focus as the wolves’ scent gets closer.
“What do you mean?” she says. “You fought off the ones before.”
“You’re in heat, Charlotte,” I bite out. “Any alpha in that pack will kill to have you.”
“What?”
She frowns, and then it all starts to click into place. She stands, staggering backward.
“In heat?”
“I”m sorry,” I say. “I wish I could explain.”
But there’s no time. A howl pierces the early morning, and I turn to face our pursuers. “Run, Charlotte,” I growl, my claws stirring up the earth beneath me, watching the edge of the cliff and the creek running over it.
“No way inhellam I just leaving,” she says, and it’s the first time I’ve ever heard her curse. “You have a lot of explaining to do.”
“And I won’t be able to do it if we’re both dead!”
She doesn’t get another word in; a grey Lycan crests the hill, its eyes glimmering, its savage teeth bared, a ridge of silver spines along its back. I recognize it as another alpha right away, and the violet ridge on my own back rises in response.
He’s going to take her.
He springs at me, going right for the throat, and I move to meet him as Charlotte screams. She isn’t backing down either; she races toward us, and I have to put myself in between her and the stranger.
As I maneuver between them, he manages to toss me to the side, though I roll right back to my feet. My front paw is a little sore from where she bit me, but it only makes me bolder, running back toward him. Just as I’m about to reach him, though, something massive barrels into me from the side: another wolf, this one with golden fur and silver spines, with eyes that glimmer like diamonds.
And then there’s another, and another, circling around me with a growl, going in for the kill.
They fall on me like I’m fresh meat—and I may as well be, with the number moving against me. I try to fight them, thinking about how Ihaveto protect Charlotte, how if they get their hands on her they might do unspeakable things. But the world is blood and horrible pain, and black spots swim across my vision as they tear at me with tooth and claw.
“Stop!”
They pause, and then a human form suddenly flings itself on top of me, hands gripping my white fur. I recognize her scent right away, inhaling her and trying to calm my unsteady, desperate breathing.
Charlotte.
“I’ll go with you if you just leave him alone,” she says, her voice strikingly calm. There’s a hint of threat to it as well, and I can feel the barest touch of her claws on my skin. She’schangingas we speak, though I don’t know if she can fully shift. Even if she does, her scent is different than mine and the other wolves—only certain types go into heat, and they’re smaller, faster, quieter.
She’s an omega.
Of course she is.
“Charlotte, don’t!” I try to say, but I can’t speak around my sharp teeth, unable to shift back until the threat is gone. I manage to drag my eyes up to look at the new wolves, each with drastically different coats and spines. They’re first generation—like me—not natural born like Charlotte. I can see it in the way they move together as a pack, and the slightly more alien features on their bodies.
And then one steps forward, and I watch him shift back into the form of a human—latino, I think, with salt and pepper hair and a thick beard, a tattoo spiraling around his forearm. The guy is huge, obviously the leader of their pack, as the others all defer to him even when he’s in this form, staying in a circle around us. He tries to cover his nudity, looking almost embarrassed.
