Page 21 of Rabid
My wolf whines inside of me, picking up on my fear, and as much as I want to keep her calm and reassured, I can’t. I crawl forward on my hands and knees, ignoring every bite that digs into my bare skin. The chains make it difficult to move and impossible to shift. I can’t risk our bones snapping beneath their hold, but I need them off if I have any hope of getting the fuck out of here.
If Burke truly dumped me in Ruin Falls territory, then I need to get away fastbefore I’m detected and ripped apart. I might be rabid, but they’remonsters.
I start looking for a rock or something I can wedge into the keyhole of the manacles. I stay low, using the long grass as cover, more or less frog walking my way to the treeline while looking for something I can use to break my chains.
The sound of a twig breaking in the distance might as well be cannon fire.
I freeze in my reach for a palm-sized rock and try to listen to my surroundings over the pounding of my own heart.
Dread hammers through me, but I can’t smell or hear anything. The little hairs rise on the back of my neck, and my wolf paces nervously inside of me. Out of nowhere, a massive crow lands to my left, making me nearly jump out of my skin. It blinks, shouting an ominous croak at me. I snarl at it and skitter away, fur exploding all over me as my hands morph into paws. I try not to give in to the panic, yet my vision once again breaks into that disorienting double sight.
A fiery rage builds in my chest as though it’s a forge. I spin wildly again to keep anything from sneaking up on me because I feelstalked. I try to take deep, measured breaths in an effort to calm the frantic and turbulent emotions coursing through me, telling myself that everything’s okay. No one knows I’m here. Burke probably dropped me off on the outskirts of their territory. I doubt that chicken shit would have had the balls to set one paw on their land.
I move closer to the trees, instinctively drawn to their cover and protection. At least from the forest, I can see what’s around me, because this grass is starting to feel like hundreds of grasping hands against my half-shifted skin.
My wolf calms slightly as we pull in the soothing scent of the pines, firs, and cedars. The dirt smells different here, richer, more uncultivated, and I’m surrounded by rolling hills with larger snowcapped peaks in the far distance.
Cautiously, I stand, hiding my body behind a tree, pressing my furred back against its rough bark. After a moment of nothing happening, I begin to shuffle from tree to tree, my eyes peeled for something that will help me get the chains off. My gaze surveys my surroundings in a constant sweep, while my ears strain to hear the slightest hint of anything amiss. I can still feel the effects of the dart making me lethargic, but I keep going, scenting everything around me for hints of wolf-claimed territory.
Soil sticks to the clammy soles of my feet, but I make steady progress. A deer rounds a bend in the distance, but one quick flare of its nostrils in my direction and it goes leaping away. My wolf perks up, wanting to chase it, and I’m reminded of just how empty and silent my stomach is. I need to get food, maybe find water, and—
Snap.
In a flash, I’m whipped off my feet and thrust into the air. I shout, panicked, as a snare wraps painfully around my ankle and yanks me upside down until I’m dangling from a large branch of a tall tree.
“No no no no no…” I cry, panic flooding my trembling voice as my body sways in the air, hair hanging like the sweep of a broom.
Frantically, I try to bend to reach my ankle and the tight cord biting into it, but my body has been pushed so hard since the night of the Flux, and right now, I just don’t have the strength.
Instead of reaching my foot, after a few shaking tries, I manage to hook the chain tethering my wrist around a different branch to take some of the weight off my poor ensnared limb. Now I’m hanging from my foot and my wrists and bent awkwardly, but at least my shackled ankle doesn’t feel like it’s about to be yanked out of its socket. I fight with everything I have to pull myself up and try to get the snare off, but the few times I manage to reach it, I can’t loosen it enough to rip the damn thing off.
After who knows how long of snarling, grunting, and pulling, my energy is spent. Gone. I hang from the tree like a lamb on a spit. My eyes dart around frantically as though some fanged beast is going to burst from the bushes at any moment and tear us apart. Fear and distress stew my insides. My wolf whimpers and flails inside of me, but we can’t break free.
With drugs still pumping molasses through my veins, I’m starving, thirsty, tired, aching, cold, naked, chained, and strung up. All of this compounds into utter helplessness that crashes into me like the brutal crest of a storming sea. A pitiful whimper escapes me, and dread pools in my soul.
I can’t believe that this is how I’m going to die.
I’ll either hang here until I starve and my body shuts down, or until the Ruin Falls pack finds me. I am painfully aware of which option is worse.
Please let me starve.
* * *
My entire existence is just one blur after another of lost time, confusion, and horrible mind-wandering dreams. I have no idea how long I’ve been hanging in this trap, could be ten minutes, could be days. My head has long since stopped pounding from the blood rush pooling in my skull, and I slip in and out of awareness often, making it impossible to gauge anything.
When the white wolf first appears upside down in my line of sight, I don’t even register that it’s not a figment of my imagination. I don’t feel fear as I blink heavy lids, my chest struggling to pull breath into my weighed-down lungs.
But then a gray and white wolf lopes over the hill behind it, and somehow, despite my position and utter exhaustion, a warning growl seeps low and menacing from my lips as my wolf grasps at our flayed consciousness.
The wolves inch cautiously closer, ears perked, noses pulling in deep breaths of my scent. My eyes connect with a pair of golden orbs and white fur, while a deep rumbling growl resonates all around me. My wolf struggles to stir, weary and depleted, but she musters the strength to flash fangs at the strangers nearing us, and the significance of their presence hits me.
The two wolves circle beneath me as though they’re working out how to snap me from the air and devour me whole. I’m under no illusions that a pair of native gray wolves have stumbled upon me. No, these two have the size and cunning eyes that my kind has.
This is the Ruin Falls pack.
Terror strikes hard enough through my debilitated mind that my body jerks into movement just as a man crests the hill. Somehow, seeing him is even scarier than seeing the two shifted wolves. I scramble and pull at my bindings, struggling again to get free, as though there’s still some possibility that I might escape, and these three won’t just hunt me down if I do.
By the time the man gets closer, surveying the trap that I’ve sprung, I’m panting, muscles screaming, and once again hanging limp. The last of my reserves are gone.
