Page 62 of The Forbidden Wolf

Jayla screamed and reached for Evan, but Sebastian caught her by the arm and yanked her to her feet. I tried to turn around and stop him but it was impossible without stepping on Evan or Charlie. “Sebastian, no!”

She slapped and scratched at his face, but he grabbed both wrists and dragged her toward the opening. “I’m so sorry,” he said, and then he shoved her onto the platform, far enough away that by the time she got to her feet, the doors had sealed shut. She threw herself at the side of the train, banging on the windows and cursing at the top of her lungs. I finally got myself turned around and bounded forward, but the sudden movement only frightened her further. She stumbled back just as the train pulled out of the station.

“Why would you do that?!” I screamed into Sebastian’s mind as my paws frantically scratched at the door. “What the hell is wrong with you?!”

“She cannot be seen with us!” Sebastian took my wolf face in his human hands. “I am sorry, but it was for her own good.”

“No!” I snapped at him. “She’s all alone!”

“The police will be waiting at the next stop, and they will shoot us, and she would not survive!” He pointed at the door the now dead female was slumped against. “Shift back! We cannot be on this train when it arrives!”

“No!” I backed away from him, furry paws slipping in the slick blood. “Evan isn’t dead! I can hear his heart beating!”

Sebastian looked down at Evan, who lay on his stomach with his left cheek pressed to the floor. His beautiful right cheekbone and finely angled jaw had been completely shattered by the blow, his ear crushed into a cauliflower lump, his skull dented like a deflated basketball. But his back rose and fell with labored breaths.

“He is almost certainly brain dead,” Sebastian said in as gentle a tone as he was probably capable of mustering. “There’s nothing we can do for him. We have to go.”

“No! You go!” I pushed my muzzle against my friends wound and began licking as if he were a little pup. “I won’t leave him!”

Sebastian groaned, and I knew I was damning him too. He wouldn’t leave me. He couldn’t leave me. He believed we were fated. It wasn’t even personal. He didn’t even know me. He hadn’t even moved to protect me until it was too late. Now Charlie was dead, and Evan was dying, and Jayla was somewhere out there traumatized and alone. Sebastian deserved to die by my side. The train raced inexorably toward the next station.

Evan’s blood oozed hot and salty onto my tongue. My human form would puke when she remembered this later, but it didn’t bother wolf me at all, other than the fact that I shouldn’t have had to do it. Phantom tears haunted canine eyes that couldn’t cry. Evan. My first silly crush. My first lackluster kiss. My first glimpse of someone who wouldn’t let anyone tell him who he had to be or who he had to love. He had done what I could not, left everything holding him back behind, built himself a brand-new life, and just like that—

Lights pulsed in the corners of my vision. The throbbing pain returned to my skull as I thought of Evan’s mother who never answered his calls receiving one tomorrow from an unfamiliar number. What she would think. What she would blame. How she would never know he’d died a hero, braver than brave, throwing his fragile human body into his own worst nightmare, the technicolor scene from every tragic story where the boy like him meets the same gruesome end. The lights flashed like strobes in a jubilant club, and I heard Evan laughing the night we met, telling me in nine out of ten genres he’d already be dead.

Not this one.

I bit down on Evan’s left shoulder, fangs grinding against his clavicle.

“Elyse!” Sebastian shouted.

Evan’s blood flowed freely through my jaws, and my human self began to panic. I could feel her pounding at my ribs, begging me to stop, but my most primal instincts told me to keep going. Sebastian grabbed me by the scruff, but I planted my paws and bit down even harder.

Suddenly, the pressure in my skull dropped, and the strobe lights coalesced into a unbroken halo lining the edges of my vision. Saliva filled my mouth, choking me as it mixed with Evan’s blood and tried to trickle down my throat. I let go and lifted my head, drool strings spilling over my lips like a St. Bernard.

Sebastian recoiled with an audible gag and looked away. “Did you put him out of his misery?”

“I don’t know.”

I stared at the four bloody but neat holes in his shoulder and felt myself shrinking. Everything itched as the fur receded. I winced as my knees inverted with two sharp cracks, and then I was human, crouched half-naked in a lake of blood that the Scream franchise could only dream of.

“We have to go.” Sebastian held out his hand.

A wave of nausea rolled through me, and I twisted away from my fallen friends to unload my popcorn—and anything else I might have swallowed but never wanted to think about. Shivering and panting, I waited for the will to run to come. I didn’t want to survive this. I couldn’t live without them.

“Elyse,” Sebastian barked.

I lifted my head to glare at him, brushing aside a curtain of matted hair. Like my lovely dress, Ruby’s elegant side chignon was no more. But Sebastian’s eyes were fixed on Evan, not me, and bulging with alarm. I looked at my friend and made the exact same face.

The holes in his shirt remained, but the holes in his flesh were gone. I watched in wonder as his dented skull popped back into place like Thackery Binx’ ribs after he got ran over by the bus in Hocus Pocus. Evan’s cauliflower ear unfolded like a fresh rose petal. And his beautiful jaw shifted back into place with an unpleasant grating.

“What the—Elyse. What did you do?” Sebastian’s deep voice actually cracked. “How did you do…”

“I don’t know…” I stroked Evan’s hair just above the bald spot his injury had left behind. “I don’t know… I bit him… and I felt something… I don’t know.”

“Well, he’ll live,” Sebastian said gruffly. “We need to go.”

“We can’t just leave him here with no explanation!”

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