Page 51 of Cursed Wolf

I looked up from those paws into his face. A face that was not Tryn’s but one I recognized instantly.

“Oh God…” I’d gone to the floor at some point and was now eye level with this creature in my living room. He was so big that he actually loomed over me. I fell back on my butt and scuttled backward until I hit the couch. “What the fuck?” I rubbed my eyes, wondering if I’d somehow ingested some LSD and was hallucinating this whole thing. “What the fuck? What the fuck?”

A massive wolf stared at me from across the living room. Not just any wolf, but my wolf. The one I hit with my car and who I’d released early. Who had come to my apartment one night.

The one wild animal I grew strangely attached to and missed terribly.

“It’s you,” I said in a disbelieving whisper.

With a soft whine, the wolf lowered his belly to the floor and rested his chin between his paws. He was just as beautiful and powerful as I remembered, if not more so now that he was no longer caged. And right then he looked harmless. Sweet, like he wanted hugs and ear scratches.

But again, what the actual fuck?

“You’re…Tryn?” That very question felt like it broke my brain. It was impossible. “You’ve been Tryn this whole time?”

The wolf let out a short bark and wagged his tail. Did that mean yes? Was Tryn still in there, conscious and aware?

“Can you, um, change back?” Could the wolf understand me? I felt like I was on another planet trying to communicate with an alien. “I would like to talk to Tryn.”

The wolf pressed up, sitting on his haunches. His fur seemed to get sucked back into his hair follicles, and then came the sounds of bones and tissue rearranging themselves. I couldn’t bring myself to look again, so I brought my forehead down on my knees.

After another minute, there was silence and then Tryn’s soft voice. “It’s me. I’m back.”

I lifted my head to see him sitting cross-legged on the floor, his clothes in his lap to cover himself. His expression was apprehensive. Vulnerable.

I didn’t know what to do or how to react to what I just saw. It was all I could do to keep from utterly losing my shit.

“What was that?” I asked as calmly as I could.

“That was my other form,” Tryn said gently. “I can change between human and wolf.”

“So,” my breath shook as my mind raced, “that was you I hit with my car? You were the wolf we kept at the clinic?” It might have seemed obvious but my brain refused to connect the dots. Up until a minute ago, those dots simply weren’t connectable.

“Yes,” Tryn answered. “That was the real first time we met. Not when I came into the bar.”

“Why did you come into Buck’s Peak? Why were you…around here?”

Tryn dropped his gaze at my tone. I probably sounded accusatory, but I was really just trying my hardest to keep it together.

“Because I wanted to meet you as a man. I wanted to learn about you, get to know you. You had such a calming effect on my wolf that he was curious about you too. Seeing you was what kept my spirits up in that cage, so I just had to find out more about you.”

The questions flew through my head too fast for me to catch up. “And everyone in Vargmore is…like you?”

“Not everyone, but the majority are.”

“So every person I met in Stout & Spirit can turn into a wolf?”

“Shiloh can’t,” he said. “She’s a witch, so she wields moon magic in a different way. But she doesn’t have an animal inside her, so she can’t change between forms.”

“I’m sorry, moon magic?”

“Yeah.” A tiny smile pulled at his lips for the first time since we got to my apartment. “Surprise, Dr. E. Magic is real.”

“I…okay, wow.” I rubbed at my forehead, trying to pick out another question from the alphabet soup of my brain. “And the reason you left in the middle of the night was because of,” I gestured vaguely toward him, “this?”

Tryn cleared his throat, becoming serious again. “Right, yeah. A couple reasons. One was that the full moon was approaching in the next two days. When the full phase is that close, it has certain effects on my kind. Our animal instincts become more dominant. We become more, well, possessive of what’s ours. We might snap at any perceived threats to our homes and families. And our, uh,” he stroked his beard, “our sex drive and the urge to breed skyrockets.”

“Oh.” My face heated, and I remembered how insanely horny I was during that full moon night. Did his libido rub off on me or something?

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