Page 69 of Shaped to Be Yours

“That’s why it was minimal the other night,” Ricky continued. “It only rained a little, no thunder or lightning. Less electromagnetic activity. But if there’s more…” He glanced at the sky like I had, and I could see the hairs on the back of his neck prickling already.

“This is going to be a bad one, isn’t it?”

“We have time, but when the storm hits, yeah, it’s going to be bad.” Ricky looked pleadingly at Mom. “If we don’t stop that mob from reaching the research site, Sandy, any number of them might get sucked in.”

“You can’t…” Her voiced cracked again, more like a whimper now, and she held Mickey even tighter to her chest. “Your father… he…”

“I know. I remember being with him, Mom. I remember that day now.”

“What?”

“It finally came back to me. I wandered into the woods. It felt like something was calling to me, and Dad saved me from it, amonster, the portal, whatever it was, and he got taken instead. It was my fault we lost him.”

“Honey…” She shifted Mickey in her arms so she could lift a hand to my cheek. “You could barely walk. You can’t blame a toddler. You can’t blame yourself. But please, if that is really what happened, don’t go in there.”

“If that is really what happened, I can’t let it happen to someone else. Even if right now, none of them would care about me, I have to be better than them, Mom. I have to go in there. Please.”

The implications and first roll of thunder in the distance had her eyes looking like saucers, yet she mustered a strength I’d always admired and nodded. “Go. But promise me you are coming back.”

I hugged her again, squishing Mickey between us, who let out a grumble of discontent, making both of us laugh. “I promise.”

After Mom went inside and locked the sliding glass doors, Ricky and I raced down the deck steps into the backyard. People were still trespassing to use our deer trail. What did they even think they were going to do in there?

“Hey!” I raced after those I could catch. “This is private property! Scram!” I let the tiniest bit of growl into my voice but kept my features human, so the protesters had to second guess whether they wanted to fight.

Those who hadn’t already disappeared into the trees chose the smart option and dispersed back where they had come from.

But how many had entered?

Ricky grabbed onto my hand as we continued forward. There was so much noise, I couldn’t pinpoint where the most people might be.

“Should we just push through to the site?” I looked at him. “Warn them about—?”

A scream tore through the woods like our first night here, but definitely not from the direction of the portal. We hurried that way instead. Maybe it was a good thing. Maybe they weren’t heading for the portal. But as soon as I thought there might be something worth celebrating, I felt it.

I felt the same presence I’d been feeling since the first day we entered the woods. The same presence I’d felt when I was attacked last year.

“It’s here,” I told Ricky, certain of which direction to go now as we hurried forward. “I can feel it!” I was ready to unleash my own beast at a moment’s notice.

“The monster? Are you sure—”

People burst out of the trees running, forcing us to huddle close to avoid anyone knocking into us. Then Ricky was suddenly the one in front, pushing through the trees ahead of me that these people had come from. He was being too reckless. Couldn’t he feel it too? The monster was righthere.

As I rushed after him, in the darkening thicket of more and more trees, I saw it.

Glowing eyes in the dark.

In the trees.

Teeth.

I leapt in front of Ricky before it could cause any of the pain to him that it had to me, transforming as I did so, and ruining yet another set of clothes as I grew and roared to warn the beast back. The beast… that was a normal, gray, timber wolf, hunkering low to the ground and whining in response to me, before he rolled onto his back in complete submission.

This was the presence. This…

This was what attacked me.

Then I discovered why. Behind him, out of that dark deeper density of trees, emerged another wolf, very pregnant, with twoyounger looking wolves that might have been no more than a year.

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