Raised by Wolves(17)

“I’m human,” I said, “but I’m Callum’s.” I didn’t lay things out for him further. In most situations, Callum’s name alone was enough to protect me. Even though there were steel bars in between Chase and me, I couldn’t dismiss the sense that his wolf was close enough to the surface that I might need to be protected. It was odd, really, because despite the fact that it was his pain that had brought me down here, Chase seemed calm now—not agitated in a way that would have his wolf taking control of the human.

“Do you know where Callum is?” Chase asked, latching on to the fact that I’d spoken a familiar name. “He was supposed to let me out. He was supposed to be back by nightfall.”

“The sun hasn’t set yet,” I said. “It’s still early. And Callum’s not here, because he’s taking care of pack business.” No need to specify what that business was.

“It always feels like night to me,” Chase said, his voice oddly reflective considering the fact that his eyes were beginning to change, the pupils dilating and changing color. “Callum says that will pass. He says I’ve come a long way in just a month, that it takes most people in my situation years to shut out the night, to resist the call to run and hunt during the day.”

“And what exactly is your ‘situation’?” I asked Chase, drawn to him even though I could feel his Change coming on, and everything I’d ever been taught told me that now was the time to get out of Dodge.

“My situation?” Chase asked, arching his back in a spasmodic motion that didn’t match his casual tone at all. “I got bit.”

Those three words turned my feet to lead. I couldn’t move, couldn’t walk back up the basement stairs. All I could do was watch as his muscles leapt to life, the tension running up his body like a stadium full of fans doing the wave, each contraction triggering another, until I wasn’t staring at a boy.

I was staring at midnight-black wolf that easily weighed two hundred pounds. He had a few markings on his chest and paws, and his eyes flashed back and forth between pale blue and a dangerous yellow.

I shouldn’t be here.

Chase didn’t seem like a monster, but in this form, he could easily kill me without even meaning to. He’d said it himself: I smelled like Pack, but I also smelled like meat. Now that he’d Shifted, it was anyone’s guess as to which would matter more.

He’s in a cage, I reminded myself, but the words meant nothing to me, because I just couldn’t stop staring into his wild eyes and playing the last words he’d said before he Shifted, over and over again.



I got bit.

I got bit.

I got bit.

It was impossible. Werewolves were born that way. The condition was passed down from father to son, and very, very occasionally, daughter. Books and movies would have had me believe that any little scratch or bite could turn someone into a werewolf, but thousands of years of werewolf history said they were wrong. Unless it took place in the presence of the pack alpha and he forged a bond between biter and bitee, a nibble from a werewolf didn’t do jack. And even with Marks like mine and the wives’, the Mark didn’t turn the recipient into a werewolf. I was living proof of that.

I got bit.

It would take much more than a “bite” to turn someone from a human into a Were. It would take an all-out slaughter, and no one could survive an attack like that. No one. For that matter, there were very few werewolves far enough gone to provoke their alpha’s wrath by attacking a human and risking exposure in the first place. And yet …

I got bit.

In his cage, Chase stared at me, his eyes pulsing. A growl burst out of his throat, and he threw himself at me, slamming his wolf body into the side of the cage. I backpedaled toward the stairs and clambered up them.

I shouldn’t have gone down there.

Still, I couldn’t deny that I’d gotten what I’d been wanting: knowledge. I stepped over the threshold and shut the basement door behind me. My heart pounded as I bolted the door from the outside, my mind caught up in processing Chase’s words—what they meant for him, and what they meant for me.

I got bit.

It was a miracle he hadn’t died. He should have died.

Teeth tearing into flesh and back out of it. Blood splattering. Again and again, vicious, relentless, thorough.

Blood-blood-blood-blood-blood—

“Oh, Bryn.”

And then Callum was there with me in the present, his arms held wide, and I fell into them, caught up in bits and pieces of memories that wouldn’t leave me alone now that Chase’s words had opened the floodgates.

“You just couldn’t stay away.” There was no reproach in Callum’s voice. That would come later, I was sure. For now, he just held me, whispering to me in the old language, little comforts that I understood without knowing the meanings of the words.