Page 8 of Fated to the Wolf Cowboy
I sat back on my hind legs and just stared up into the sky. It didn’t even look real. I’d seen such things on TV before, but I never imagined what it would feel like to see it for myself.
It was pretty, but also distant, cold, and isolating. It seemed to represent exactly how I felt in that moment as I strained my ears for any signs of humanity and found none.
I took solace in knowing I was in my fur. That made me less vulnerable out here. Predators would think twice about approaching my wolf. Shifters had lived on all fours for as long as people roamed the Earth, right? I was built to do this. I was invincible out here living my best wolf life, or at least that’s what I was trying to convince myself.
A cricket chirped and I jumped.
Somewhere nearby an owl hooted sending me running for my life.
My heart was racing and there was a roaring in my ears as an oncoming panic attack reared its ugly face.
Was that a frog?
Something scurried past me in the grass and I screamed, only it came out as a weird barking growl in my wolf form.
What had I been thinking? I might be a wolf shifter, but I wasn’t born or taught to live in my fur out here in the wild. The most wild place I’d ever been before now was Central Park and you could still hear the blare of horns, the screech of tires, people rushing by, and you could still see the lights accentuating the skyline.
I looked around. There was no freaking skyline to be seen. And the silence was deafening.
Trying desperately to calm myself down, a strange sound startled me. It was right there almost as if I could feel its hotbreath on my neck, but even when I turned around, I couldn’t see anything but darkness.
There it was again.
I screamed once more and took off running.
About twenty yards into my escape, I tripped over a rock and went flying into a tree. I heard a crack and felt searing pain shoot up my back leg, and my bag flew from my mouth.
Dammit! Where the hell had a tree come from?
There had been nothing but empty fields for as far as my enhanced wolf vision could see before the sun set.
With my heart pounding in my chest, and pain causing my eyes to water, I curled up at the foot of the tree and closed my eyes. When the mysterious sound happened again, I used my front paws to try to cover my ears.
The pain was too much to handle. My body grew cold, numb, until the darkness around me took over and swallowed me whole.
*****
When I awoke, the birds were chirping and everything around me had come alive. Noises comforted me, even if they weren’t the noises I was familiar with. But my eyes were hesitant to open. My head was still pounding, and the pain in my leg made me want to throw up.
What was I going to do? There was no way I could make it to San Marco, California on a broken leg. And I was hungry and scared. No one knew where I was. I could die out here and it could be decades before anyone found my body, if they ever did.
The worst part of all was that I knew I couldn’t shift back into my skin. With a broken leg, that could be devastating. I was going to have to find a way to set it and let it properly heal out here, all by myself, in the middle of nowhere, with no food or water, and absolutely no medical experience.
Leaving New York was without a doubt the dumbest thing I’d ever done.
I no longer cared about the threats and others’ fears. What the hell did they even know about fear?
This, right here, right now, was what true fear looked like. It made all that nonsense back home seem silly.
Get a grip, Tricia. Open your eyes and take control of the situation. You can do this. You will survive, I peptalked myself.
Slowly, I opened my eyes.
Nothing.
There was absolutely nothing. Just a small crop of trees in the middle of a whole lot of nothing. Rocks, dirt, and occasional clumps of grass were it for as far as I could see.
I called on my wolf to enhance my eyes even more.
