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Wondering if she’ll let me help her.
Holly reaches over and puts her glass on the table beside the empty bottle with slow, careful movements. Straightening, she turns to face me, and the resolute expression on her face tells me I need to pay attention to whatever she’s about to tell me.
"My parents often explored the wilds,” Holly starts, shocking me.
The wilds.
The penultimate place where all shifters came from. It’s the place of legend, the place a shifter returns to if they want to connect with their wolf. It's a harsh place, a place of no laws. Nature holds dominion in the wilds. Strong over weak. Yet Holly’s been there?
“We had a cabin. My parents loved leaving the city behind to go there,” Holly continues, her voice soft even as her face tightens. “But everything changed one day. I'll spare you the details, but the short story is my parents were killed. The shifter was vicious and unrelenting. I thought it was just a wild animal, but I remember the glare of its red eyes, and the hatred they held."
Holly pauses for a moment, then reaches out to grab a bottle of gin and down several gulps. I don’t stop her, despite the fact it’s not even lunch. I can sense she needs the alcohol to dull the terror of what she witnessed.
"Rykard saved me, cleaned up the cabin, then stayed with me.” Anger flashes across Holly's face, even as she ducks her head, trying to hide it. "For quite a while, I hated people like you. Hated shifters more than anything alive."
"What changed your mind?" I find myself asking.
To my surprise, Holly's tension eases up as an endearing smile blooms across her face. Like she's remembering something pleasant, bittersweet.
"About three months after the incident, Rykard came back a little later than usual, and he wasn’t alone. He carried a wolf. Grey, brown, and bleeding."
"Injured?"
"It was pretty bad," Holly says, nodding. "He couldn't shift back until the wounds started to clot. But then he healed, got better. And he was actually pretty good company."
Holly's smile stretches wider as she talks about the shifter and I quickly find my own creeping up my face. I know that smile. "Sounds like he was a lot more than just good company."
"He really was," Holly says, her eyes dropping to her hands as her fingers rub against each other, as if she’s remembering something tactile. “Zac was his name.” She frowns. “Ishis name.”
I nudge her playfully. "And you were giving me crap for Chase. You should see how you look right now."
Holly’s eyes lose focus as she gazes straight ahead. "Rykard was almost never home. But I didn't mind it since Zac was with me."
A small part of me is starting to understand this now. Love is a force to be reckoned with, I should know. And if Holly felt even a fraction of that, then the healing after such a traumatic event makes sense.
Suddenly, Holly starts trembling. Frowning, I move closer and wrap an arm around her shoulder, realizing this story doesn’t have a happy ending. Holly offers me a small smile as if to reassure me she’s okay.
I don't believe it for a second.
“The shifter came back,” Holly says, her voice little more than a whisper. "To this day, I thought it was going to kill me. It would’ve, but Zac stepped in and protected me. The fight was dragged out of the cabin and into the woods."
I squeeze her shoulder, dread pooling in my gut at what I’ll hear next.
"I tried looking for Zac after I thought everything was clear, but all I found were trails of blood and a chunk of his fur."
My heart sinks to my stomach. "Holly…"
"Rykard came back and took me away. Back here." She draws in a shuddering breath. "He promised me we’d look for him."
“And?”
"Rykard tried everything, even ran blood samples through the police database. But we didn’t find anything."
“So you ran away?” I ask. “To find Zac?”
When there’s a chance he’s dead…
Holly raises her gaze to me, a storm of sadness and something else in there. Anger. “Rykard told me he was probably dead. I almost believed him until…”
