Page 8 of Bound

“I’ve had a strange feeling all morning, too,”he responds.

“Same here,”Hunter pipes in.

“Me too,”Chase, Hunter’s twin, adds.

Bain says nothing, which is no surprise. He speaks very little on the best of days.

Everyone follows me in silence for a few minutes until the feeling starts to get noticeably stronger.

“I think we’re close. Whatever it is, we’re closing in on it,”I tell them.“Everyone, stay on alert.”

We continue running silently as the strange feeling grows stronger by the second. The feeling changes to a pressure in my head as I keep going, and just when it feels like I’ll need to turn around to relieve it, I come into a small clearing, and the feeling disappears completely.

I sigh in relief and look around.

“That was weird,”Chase says, shaking his body in obvious relief.

“You felt the pressure disappear too?”I ask him.

“Yeah, it’s gone.”The others confirm they feel the same as we start to look around the clearing. It’s about a hundred feet wide and fifty feet deep. Surrounded by thick trees on three sides and a large boulder on the other. I would have run right past this clearing if I wasn’t pulled here; it’s practically invisible unless you’re inside it.

“There must be something here that caused that feeling,”Gage says as he sniffs the ground and moves around slowly.

I circle around the edge, sniffing heavily, until I come across the smell of something I recognize.Blood.

I let the others know as I slowly follow the faint trail where it leads through the clearing toward the boulder. When I’m about fifteen feet away, we all lift our heads and look towardit. Previously hidden by small bushes, we can now see there’s a cave in the boulder.

“Whatever is bleeding is in there,”I tell them as I slowly move forward.

“Wait. We don’t know who or what’s in there,”Hunter warns.“It could be a trap.”

“I’ll be quiet. It’s light enough out here, I think I can get a good look from the entrance.”

“We’ll wait back here so there’s as little noise and scent as possible. Be careful,”Chase tells me.

I slowly inch forward, making sure not to snap any twigs or rustle any leaves as I step toward the cave.

When I get to the edge of the entrance, my body is mostly hidden, and I peek my head inside. It takes a moment for my eyes to adjust to the dark interior.

I look around, but the only thing I see is something small, brown, and furry at the back of the cave. I blink a few times, trying to figure out what it is. It’s an animal, and it’s much smaller than I am. I’m not even sure it’s alive, whatever it is.

Relaying what I’m seeing back to the others, I carefully enter the cave, and once I’m fully inside, I take a moment to make sure I didn’t miss anything on my first glance, but there’s nothing and no one else here.

Slowly, I move toward the brown ball of fur. I realize it’s not brown, it’s red and covered in dirt. Is it a fox? It’s a little big for that, though. When I’m halfway through the cave, and it’s only a few feet in front of me, I finally figure out what it is and reel back in surprise.

“It’s a wolf shifter!”I exclaim through the bond. I take another couple of steps and sniff.“A female.”

The others all enter, knowing that one female wolf shifter is no threat to thefive of us.

They surround me as we all look down at the tiny female. She’s curled into a small ball, with her tail covering her face.

“She’s hurt,”Bain says after getting a good sniff of the air around her.

“I’m going to wake her,”Hunter says, moving forward. Before we can stop him, he starts to nudge her with his nose. We all hold our breath to see how she responds. But she doesn’t. She doesn’t so much as make a noise, causing me to worry even more.

He tries again, then looks back at us in confusion. She shouldn’t be able to sleep through that. Wolves have great senses—they never sleep this deeply.

Stepping forward, I change into my human form and kneel ‌beside her. Slowly, I reach out and gently stroke her back. She doesn’t react.