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With that we strip down, pack our travel bags, and head outside shifting into our wolf forms. My senses are heightened this way. Sniffing around the perimeter I find where Ash’s scent carries forward into the woods, almost completely masked by the heavy scent of juniper.
We move in sync, silently through the trees. The damp earth is soft beneath my paws. Each step I take pulls us deeper into the forest. The bright light of the day dims under the canopy of the trees.
The trickling sound of a stream calls my attention toward it, shit. Water can mask scents and Ash’s trail leads directly toward the small stream.
As we reach the water his scent wanes. Come on Ash, give me something. My heart races like the hooves of a prized horse on the racetrack.
I can’t lose you. Crossing the stream, I breathe a sigh of relief as I pick back up on his scent. Isaiah’s bear form is right behind me, and Drew’s sleek panther body struggles not to leap ahead.
My snout turns up as I pick up on two unfamiliar scents. Glancing at Drew and Isaiah I can see they smell it too. Dread tenses every muscle in my body.
A picture begins to form in my mind, he was lured out here.
The scent leads us into a thicket, with thorny bramble bushes that tug at my fur. Breaking through I find myself in a small clearing. Tall grasses with colorful wildflowers dotting the greenery fill the circular space.
A deep involuntary growl escapes my lips, my blood runs cold as though icicles are growing in my veins. The air thickens around us.
Jax. His scent appears in the clearing. Please be alive Ash, we are coming for you.
Jax’s scent is sickly sweet, and it hangs in the air like the smell of disease that clung to people during the plague. Once I get my hands on him…
I am going to kill him.
His scent leads to a strange mound of earth. Isaiah, Drew, and I exchange wary glances. This is definitely man-made. Hiding something perhaps?
Prowling around the mound slowly I pick up several strange scents alongside Jax’s. The strongest concentration of the scent comes from the top of the mound.
Cautiously I make my way up the mound scratching gently at the earth as I skulk forward. At the top of the mound, my paws feel a change in the earth, there is something hard beneath the dirt here.
Scratching with my front paws, I dig until I uncover a metal trap door.
Excruciatingly, my bones contort and crack. Agony reverberates through my being as my tendons strain and reshape. Each sinewy movement is a painful dance of transformation. Until my wolfish essence quickly and reluctantly gives way to the restraints of humanity. This painful process occurs every time any shifter transforms. But we shifters are so use to that kind of pain, it feels ‘normal’.
Falling to my knees with nervous hands I twist the door handle and pull the door open, crumbles of earth falling into the damp hole as I do.
“I’m going in. Isaiah come with me. Drew, keep watch?” I order.
The colossal bear shifter lowers his massive frame. A rumbling growl emanates from deep within his chest as my command echoes through the ancient forest.
Drew nods his obsidian head and lowers it in submission.
Undergoing another agonizing metamorphosis, I surrender to the relentless pull of the shift. My body contorts and reshapes. The air crackles around me as my bones creak and muscles coil until I am reborn once again as a wolf.
My senses are heightened. Ash’s scent wafts heavily from the corridor beneath our feet. We’ve found him. With my newfound vitality, I spring into the abyss below, my heart thumping wildly in my chest as I plunge into darkness.
Momentarily I am engulfed in pitch blackness. A loud thud beside me tells me Isaiah has made his way down here as well. Slowly, my eyes adjust to the shadows, and I can move forward again with Isaiah right behind me.
Where are you? It feels like we’ve been following his scent for miles before I finally hear a dull heartbeat coming from ahead of me.
Only one heartbeat. One strong scent. Ash.
Rushing forward, I find myself in front of a gruesome display. Ash’s wrists are tightly bound together, and he hangs from a large meat hook from the bindings between them.
His arms are purple, and his shoulder blades are oddly bent. His breathing is shallow, but he is alive. Thank Heavens.
Ash’s mangled form rests on the cobalt blue velvet sofa in the living room. His breathing is still shallow, but I can hear the effort inside of his body as his blood pumps and each celldiligently works to heal the damage done to his flesh, his bones, and his tissue.
Despite my best efforts to ignore it, the sound of the sickly stretching and expansion of his muscles fills my ears. His broken bones mend and the marrow replenishes itself inside of them.
