Page 59 of His Runaway Mate

I back away a step. He follows.

The scent behind him remains. My pack.

My hackles are raised, my lips curled up to display my canines. I am willing to hurt him. At least, that is what my display says. But I am not truly ready to fight again so soon. There is something very particular about the wolf in front of me that drains away any belief that I would win.

This animal in front of me smells like death. Old death, new death, fresh kills, old kills. The way the creature’s eyes burn into me makes me want to whimper and crouch, but I resist that urge as well. I am frozen, trapped between competing instincts, unable to move until he does.

What he does is shift.

In the place of the wolf is a man in his late forties. He is rugged, muscular, and scarred. His hair is down to his shoulders, black underneath but well marked with gray.

“Hello, Nicola.”

My father says my name for the first time in many years, and I find myself unable to respond because a wolf’s tongue cannot speak, and it is for the best that it cannot.

My hackles are still raised. My teeth are still bared. I still want to run, but I can’t. I’ve missed him. Some part of me has missed him every single day since he drove away at that gas station and left me in a mire of blood and bodies.

I stare at him and I stay in that suspension of aggression and fear.

I don’t notice that my wolf form is fading away. It is only when a cool breeze makes me shiver that I realize I have lost my fur.

“I thought you were dead,” I say.

“I thought we were both dead,” he says. “But we’re not, are we, kid? We’re both stronger than we thought. And now you’ve come into your own. You’re grown. You’ve taken a mate. It suits you.”

“You have been taking my pack members. I want them back.”

He laughs, reaches into the bushes, and tosses me a sweater.

It is rust-red in color, and far too long for me. When I put it on, it smells like him. Like death, and like long summer nights asleep on the back seat of his car. It’s warmer than I expected it to be, and I find I don’t hate the stench.

“Follow me,” he says, turning and walking into the woods, toward the source of the scent.

I follow him. What else am I to do? I am barefoot in a forest, I am starting to get hungry again, and I cannot guarantee being able to find my way back again.

After a little while, I start to hear sounds. People talking. Doesn’t sound like they’re particularly anguished.

I don’t know what I expected to find. Cages with my missing pack in them, maybe.

Instead, I find the runners and the stragglers from my pack of Runaways going about what I can only describe as their business. My father never allowed anybody to live with him before. When I was younger, he avoided other wolves like the plague.

There are shelters built into the forest. They’re covered in netting and leaves and branches and such, designed to avoid detection from the sky, and maybe from casual hikers lost on their way, though judging by the smell, a casual hiker is not going to survive long here.

“You turned them all into flesh eaters?”

“Every wolf is a flesh eater,” he laughs. “Some of us are precious about it, but none of us are better than our basest desires and our fundamental hungers.”

He’s been working on that line for years. It’s starting to almost sound convincing.

“I can smell the human in your belly,” he growls with amusement, leaning into me. “You don’t have to pretend to be better than you are. Not here. This is the one place you will not be judged.”

“I only did what I did because I had to.”

“Oh, really? You had to kill and eat a man?”

“I had to kill him, and the eating part. It was more like a nibble. And I was hungry, and scared, and…”

My father puts his hand on my shoulder. “You ate because it was food, and because your instincts told you to. Don’t apologize for it.”