Page 61 of Wolf's Forbidden Curse

DAPHNE

For the third time in less than twelve hours, I woke up without my bearings.

When my eyelids peeled open this time, a bright light was streaming in from a massive window beside me, and the room was abuzz with various beeping and whirring sounds. When I glanced down at my body, I was happy to see that I was no longer bound, but there was an IV sticking into one of my arms. My head was pounding, and it was a struggle to keep my eyes open for more than a few seconds at a time, but I sensed I was safe.

When a warm, familiar hand slid into mine, I felt even safer.

“Rory,” I said softly, trying to look at him but not doing a very good job.

“Shh. I’m here. You’re in the hospital. They are trying to flush the drugs out of your system and make sure that you don’t have any internal injuries. Can you tell me if Missy hurt you in any way?”

I shook my head slowly. “I just… I got banged up in the car.”

“Anything hurt right now?”

“No… I don’t think so.”

“Alright, I’ll let the nurse know.” He used his other hand to push some hair out of my face, and I let my head fall into his palm. “You can go back to sleep now. You need your rest.”

I smacked my lips together, getting ready to argue, but it was like when Rory said the word ‘sleep,’ he had put some spell on me. I held on tight to his hand and promptly slipped back into dreamland.

“Okay, it’s been long enough. I feel a lot better. Can we please talk about what the fuck happened back there already?”

It had been almost an hour since I’d woken up for good, and it seemed as if Rory was looking for an excuse to put off the conversation we so clearly needed to have. First, he insisted on me taking it easy and not taxing myself. Then he went to find the nurse to come check on me. And lastly, he went to the cafeteria to purchase a variety of snacks, even though I’d told him I wasn’t even hungry. Now that he was back by my bedside and out of reasons to stall, I reached for his hand again and dragged him down into the chair next to me.

“C’mon,” I said. “Let’s talk. There’s literally nothing else for us to do while we wait for the doctor to come back and discharge me.”

“Yeah, I know… But…” He looked around nervously. “I was hoping they would admit you into an actual room so we would have more privacy.”

“There’s no one around, and we’ll talk quietly.”

He sighed but nodded his head. “Alright, alright. We can talk about this now. Where do you want to start?”

“Uh, how about with the fact that you’re also a fucking werewolf!” I said in a soft but stern voice. “Why the hell didn’t you tell me?”

“Well, for starters, I’m not a werewolf.”

I rolled my eyes, shocked at his audacity. “You can’t seriously think that you can gaslight me when I literally saw you turn from a wolf back into a human.”

“No, I’m not trying to gaslight you.” He squeezed my hand. “I would never do that. I just meant that I’m something else. It’s called a shifter, and we are different from werewolves in a few ways. We don’t have the same rules, so to speak.”

“Shifter…” I frowned. “That sounds… familiar. I think the psychic in town mentioned shifters when I went back to him after my first transformation.”

“I’m sure he did. If he knew about werewolves, then he definitely knew about shifters. We are a lot more common because we haven’t been hunted to near extinction like werewolves.”

“Why not? Are you not as dangerous?”

“Sort of yes, sort of no,” he said. “In some ways, we can be more dangerous because we can shift whenever we want and tend to run in much larger packs. But on the other hand, we have a lot more control over the wolf side, whereas wolves like you don’t. For that one night every month, you really do become the most violent version of yourself. There are ways to train for it, to get better at not going totally berserk, but it takes a lot of work. Throughout history, werewolves have brought a lot more attention to themselves by accidentally killing people and not being able to hide it. Hence, why there are so few these days.”

“Okay…” My brain still felt a little fuzzy from the drugs, but I was pretty sure I followed what he was saying. “So you don’t change on the full moon. You just change whenever you want to?”

“Yes.”

“And you can change back when you want to?”

“Yes.”

“And then, are you born as a shifter?”

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