Page 47 of Wolf's Forbidden Curse

“This is ridiculous,” I said. “We’re not going back! We left that place for a reason, and I, for one, have no inclination to go back. I don’t care if they need us. As far as I’m concerned, my pack includes only the people who live under this roof and no one else.”

“Rory,” Nic said in a soft voice. “You can’t honestly say that you never think about the past.”

“If I can help it, I don’t. What’s there to think about? We saw the pack for what it really was—backward—and we chose to start over on our own. I’m happy here, and up until about three minutes ago, I thought you all were too.”

“We are,” she said. “But?—”

“But we haven’t been able to forget about everything as easily as you apparently have,” said Matt.

I looked down at my feet and tried to control the fury bubbling inside me. Did he really think that I’d forgotten? How could I forget what happened in the past when it was burned into my memory?

The taste of blood in my mouth, the sound of screams in my ears, all of it still haunted me even this many years later.

An image of the day the four of us left South Carolina flashed through my mind. Our parents, who none of us had been very close to, had banded together to celebrate the accidental killing of a human classmate of ours. They had raised us to believe that we, shifters, were a superior race who were meant to dominate human beings and run the world. They didn’t value human life at all, so when a schoolyard fight turned fatal, they had nothing but good things to say to the four of us. I, meanwhile, was grappling with a sickness that could only come from watching the life leave an innocent person’s eyes, and I knew I had to get away from the people who saw what I did as a triumph.

We stole away in the middle of the night, and I never looked back.

“What the fuck do you all think is waiting for us back there anyway?” I asked after a bit. “They’re not going to welcome us back with open arms, you realize that, right? When I said that thing about this being a ploy to lure us into our deaths, I wasn’t kidding.”

“I don’t think they would kill us,” said Nic. “I’d like to believe that my mom wouldn’t let even the pack leader hurt me in any way.”

“She’ll be outnumbered,” I said. “Anyone who has any sympathetic feelings towards us still would be risking their own lives by saying as much out loud. That’s what I don’t understand with Cornelius. He’s the smartest person I know, and yet when it comes to this obsession with going back, he’s just being so naive.”

“You know he misses his sisters,” Nic said in a low voice.

“He feels guilty about leaving them still,” Matt added.

Cornelius was the only one of us who had younger siblings whom he had to leave behind on the compound. He worried for their safety and had even considered smuggling them out with us, but he knew that if he did, the chances his parents would come searching for us would be far greater. On our compound, Cornelius was in line to take over as pack leader once his father died, and his sisters had already been promised as future brides to other powerful packs in the South. Leaving on his own accord was shameful enough, but taking his sisters with him would’ve been a crime that his father would’ve never overlooked.

“Is that who he gets the letters from?”

She nodded. “I’m pretty sure. Though I still don’t know how they get to him since he swears that nobody knows where we have been living all this time… I guess there’s some sort of transfer system. The letter goes from one person to the next to the next until they land in his hands.”

“He thinks we’re at risk because of Katrina, but really, he’s the one that’s been potentially bringing danger to our doorstep by keeping up communication with the pack.”

“Enough about Cornelius,” Matt said, cutting me off before I could really get going on my rant. Perhaps that’s why he did it. “Regardless of who he’s in contact with or how he receives his letters, he’s not what we should be talking about right now. What are we going to do about Katrina? The next full moon is just around the corner, and we sure as hell can’t let her run loose in the town again.”

“I know.”

“Did you explain anything to her?”

“Not really.” A pang of guilt nestled under my ribs. “I was just so upset. I know it’s not her fault, but you know how I feel about humans meddling in this stuff. It’s so irresponsible for people to throw lycanthropy curses around like it’s not a big deal. It took me years to learn how to control the wolf inside, and in the meantime… people suffered.”

Matt and Nic looked anywhere but back at me. They remembered who had actually taken the bully’s life that day. While all four of us had been involved in what started as just a schoolyard scuffle, I was the only one who couldn’t control myself. I was the only one who shifted.

“What I would give to find out who gave her this curse,” I said after a while. “Do they have any idea what they did to her? What they unleashed? She could’ve hurt someone and doesn’t even know it! Someone could be lying in the forest, dead by her hand as we speak. How is she supposed to live with that?”

A hand fell on my back. “The same way you live with it,” said Nic.

I scoffed. “You mean by distracting myself? By doing whatever I can to forget it ever happened? Because that’s obviously working so well, as you two just pointed out!”

“We can help her,” Matt said. “We have to help her. Before something really bad happens. If we don’t, then we are just as responsible for whatever she does next time she shifts.”

“I agree.” I looked up at him. “We need to tell her we're shifters too, so she knows she can actually trust us to help her through everything.”

Nic clicked her tongue. “Before we all jump on the bandwagon of bringing this woman into the fold, there are some things I found out about her while I was doing my research.” She glared at me. “Which, in case you forgot, you were supposed to let me do before you went and saw her again.”

“Do you really want to fight about that right now?” I said. “Because I don’t have the energy, so let me just save us some time. You were right; I fucked up. I’m sorry. Now, can you just tell me what you found out about Katrina?”

---