Page 16 of Wolf Chosen

I'm on high alert, every sense attuned to potential threats lingering in the forest shadows. Mitch's words at the latest pack meeting echo a grim warning in the back of my mind. He thinks ferals are targeting our human female mates. We've been urged to exercise extreme vigilance until he can work out why.

Gripping her hand a little tighter, I can't help pulling Taylor closer against my side as my wolf tenses into alertness. No harm will come to my mate. I'll guard her with my very last breath even if I must tear apart every feral in our path with my bare hands to keep her safe.

Time slips away as we hike deeper among the ancient trees, Taylor fairly glowing with her rediscovered energy and zest for life. I can't resist basking in her joy, in the way she's blossoming right before my eyes, free of the illness that took everything away from her.

However, I can't keep putting this off, no matter how I wish to preserve this moment. Steeling my resolve, I finally bring us to a halt, searching for the right words to shatter her reality.

“Taylor, there’s something I have to tell you.” I internally wince. No good conversation ever started with those words.

Taylor stops and turns to face her, her brow furrowed. “Yes, Liam?”

Her gaze slides over my shoulder and she gasps. The bond flares with intense curiosity and shock, and I whirl to see a clearing past the ancient trunks of the pines surrounding us.

One that definitely shouldn't exist so deep in these woods I know like the back of my hand. Nor should there be a rickety old hut, whose walls made from twisted branches could only be held up through willpower alone.

Taylor brushes past me, her jaw slack with disbelief. “That’s not possible…That's...that's the clearing. And the hut…”

“What clearing and hut?’ I ask, stepping into the clearing after her.

The line between her brows deepens and the bond thrums with shock. “The exact ones from my dream...”

Chapter Nine

Taylor

The forest shimmers with an energy I've never sensed before. I drink in the verdant hues, the light greens of the leaves contrasting with the darker shadows beneath the canopy. The scents are rich and earthy, and the freshness of the woodland mingles with the faint sweetness of wildflowers carried on the gentle breeze.

Even the sounds seem amplified, every crunch of leaf litter and distant scurry of small creatures through the undergrowth reaching my ears with startling clarity. Suddenly all my senses are dialed up to an intensity I've never experienced, leaving me overwhelmed by the vibrant symphony of the forest.

I can't begin to explain this sudden resurgence of energy coursing through my veins. Just days ago, I could barely muster the strength to make it through the day, my body slowly betraying me as debilitating fatigue took its toll. The tiredness had crept up on me so gradually, I didn't even realize how depleted I'd become.

But now...now I've been reborn, every ounce of weariness banished from my body. I’m more alive than I have been in years. Of course, I know it can't last. Nothing this wondrous ever does, but I'll be damned if I won't savor every second in the meantime.

Liam walks beside me, his presence a comforting anchor even as it fills me with an inexplicable sense of connectedness. I still imagine I sense his emotions flowing into me, a palpable weight of solemn urgency coalescing in my chest.

I don’t understand why. Perhaps I’m finally losing my mind, and being here in a beautiful forest with a man I could fall in love if I had a lifetime ahead of me with is a mind-trick. A delusion drawing me away from reality, whereby I’m really lying in a hospital bed drawing my last breaths.

“Taylor.”

Liam utters my name, weighted with urgency. This is the tone someone uses when offering bad news. I brace myself, turning to face him as a chill sweeps through me. But it's not Liam's intense gaze that captures me. It's the sight of the clearing beyond his shoulder. The clearing from my nightmare. Breath catching in my throat, I brush by Liam and stumble past the ancient trunks of the forest.

This can't be real.

It simply can't.

And yet, the details are unmistakable, from the green grass waving in an unfelt breeze to the edge to the rickety thatched hut at its center. The hut shouldn’t be standing. Not how it’s made from dead, twisted branches, all rough and uneven. The roof is made from thatch and is angled impossibly high. A thin trail of smoke curls from a chimney.

There was a crooked man who lived in a crooked little shack…my mind spins off an old childhood rhyme, but the man who steps from the door is not a crooked little man. Recognition flares through me. It's him. The man from my dreams but in the waking world, however, his appearance is almost disappointingly ordinary.

He’s a man who blends into a crowd. Nothing about him stands out in any way. He has wavy blond hair to his ears and wears a nondescript blue shirt and faded jeans. His face is attractive in a bland sort of way. There's nothing outwardly menacing about him, nothing to justify the way my heart lodges in my throat as a smile edges across his face.

Liam tenses beside me, his hand tightening around mine. “We need to go,” he murmurs, urgency and dread lacing his words.

My mind screams agreement but my body refuses to obey. An unnatural compulsion grips me, rooting me to the spot as the stranger opens the shack’s front door wider. Despite the dissonant alarms blaring through every instinct, I find myself unable to turn and run.

“Please, come inside,” he calls out in an affable tone completely at odds with the dread coiling through my gut.

His voice reverberates around me, the words an irresistible summons I'm helpless to defy. My feet begin moving of their own volition, carrying me toward the hut with Liam in tow, his own movements stiff and jerky, as if he's physically battling against the unnatural compulsion driving us forward.

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