Page 4 of Wolf's Reckoning
My fingers worked through my braid quickly, loosening it until my hair spilled down my back and over my shoulders.
With a sigh of relief, I shifted.
My wolf stretched and then I ran.
Fast and hard, the kind of run that flayed your soul back from your bones. My breath sawed through my chest, my pulse thundered, echoing in rhythm to the grip of soil as my paws thudded over the earth.
Blueridge Hollow opened around me like a secret. Out here, the rules didn’t speak. The forest didn’t care who my father was or what the druid whispered behind carved doors.
The pines towered over me like ancient sentinels, bark gnarled and thick with moss. Mist curled low across theground, seeping from the hollows between tree roots, wrapping around my legs like old friends welcoming me home.
Crickets rasped from the underbrush. Something unseen cracked a twig deeper in. A blue jay called once, sharp and lonesome.
And still I ran.
I ran past the iron markers set by wolves long dead. Past the spring that carved through the mountain like a scar and was the source of the Hollow’s water. Up and up until the path vanished and the land forgot the touch of man.
Here, the air tasted thinner. Wilder.
The earth smelled of smoke, wet stone, and the sharp tang of something older than even Blueridge Hollow.
I stopped beneath a ridge where the trees fell away into dark ravines, my body panting, tongue lolling, and legs burning.
Above me, the sky was deepening from blue to violet, and the first stars would start to show by the time I returned back to the pack. My head turned as the scent of rain was carried on the wind.
I looked over my shoulder. The Hollow was hidden now, swallowed by the trees below, and the silence all around me felt ominous.
I shifted back to human form, crouched at the edge of the ravine, hair wild and loose, body still feeling the burn of the run, and for a moment—just one—I felt free.
Chapter 2
Rowen
The air tasted wrong.
I’d barely made it back to the pack hall before the scent hit me—myownscent. Sharper, heavier, threaded with aneedI knew too well.
My heat.
Not full-blown, not yet. But close. Close enough the male wolves let their gazes linger too long. Close enough that my skin felt too tight, too hot, like I’d outgrown it during my run.
I didn’t detour to my father’s rooms; I went to my own rooms and shut myself in. I threw the window open and let in the thick Appalachian air, heavy with mist, moss, and the hint of decay—familiar things.Safethings. The slight breeze kissed my skin, and I waited for the pressure in my chest to ease.
It didn’t.
I rolled my head from left to right, trying to ease the sudden tension in my neck. This wasn’t my first heat—heck,it wasn’t even my twelfth. It should’ve been routine by now. Predictable.Manageable.
But nothing about my heats ever felt normal. The ache that simmered in my spine, the pulse that thrummed under my skin. Definitelynotin the way my instincts had started shifting—searching—without my consent.
As if my inner self knew something I didn’t. The wolf inside me began to pace, and I wanted to scold myself for getting worked up early. I’d learned not to shift when my heat was on me.
I would already be on edge when thegiftfrom the Goddess hit me, and changing into my wolf form did nothing other than increase the need tenfold.
The pain and suffering of our heat made me wonder if the deity that ruled the shifter race was really a female. Why would a woman choose to inflict the pure discomfort of a heat on a fellow female? The urge, the gnawinghungerto be filled by a male when our heat was upon us, was utterly consuming.
Frenzied.
That’s what I’d heard one female describe it as once. Her body was fraught with frenzy, and all she could think about was the carnal need to rut. I knew how she felt. Every female shifter knew the need to mate when the heat struck.
