Page 63 of The Forbidden Wolf

“We have to,” Sebastian growled. “Don’t make me throw you over my shoulder!”

“Try it if you want your backside filleted.” I glowered up at him, lip curled with disgust. “Then you’ll never be able to just sit there like a useless statue again.”

Sebastian flinched and then covered it with a furious frown. “What the hell was I supposed to do? Attack them first? That would look great on the news.”

“And this will?” I flung my arm at the carnage all around us. “All you had to do was look at that creep the second he spoke to me, but you just… you just sat there until Evan tried to do your job!”

Sebastian’s jaw clenched. “I have many jobs. It can be hard doing them all.”

“Just go.”

A sob welled in my throat, but I refused to let it out. I didn’t deserve to let it out. I could have ripped the bat from that male’s hands the moment he touched me, knocked all his teeth out myself. But I had just sat there, waiting for Sebastian to save me as he had before.

He sighed, and I heard the crunch of his hand in his gelled hair. “I cannot leave my—”

“I am not your damn fated mate!” I screamed so loud I could have sworn I felt my lungs ripping. “Leave me alone!”

Evan moaned. He lifted his whiskered cheek from the floor and then collapsed again with a tiny splash in the pool of blood. Joy and dread wrestled in my chest. He was alive. But when he opened his eyes, he would see that Charlie was not. I grabbed his right shoulder and carefully rolled him onto his back so at least he’d see me first. He moaned again, his lips looking oddly swollen in the midst of his bushy—

I recoiled, hands hovering above his chest.

Evan didn’t have a beard.

My heart rate steadily climbed as my friend’s facial hair rapidly spread down his neck, filling in the deep V of his sweater with smokey black fur. It grew upward too, a fine layer coating his nose and forehead, merging seamlessly into the slightly receding hairline he was always trying to hide. He writhed and moaned, lifting his hands to scratch at his newly hirsute face with the claws protruding from his furry fingertips. He yelped in pain as he drew blood from his own cheek, and his eyes popped open, fully human and crystal blue.

He sat up bleating like Chewbacca, revealing four over-sized canines in the midst of all the teeth he’d paid a pretty penny to have straightened for his head shots. His eyes bulged at the sight of my gore-stained face, and he reached for me with both hands. I shirked away from his claws, and he froze, gaping at his long hairy fingers. He bleated again.

Whoops.

What the hell did you do to him?!?!

Um… fixed him?

I looked up at Sebastian, whose tan skin had paled to the color of my own. His lips fluttered with silent stammering, and he slowly shook his head. This was impossible. There was only one way to make a new shifter. It had been so long since it happened like this that no one could really say for certain it had ever happened at all. Father had always been careful to tell us it may have just been some fanciful part of the Old Stories about Marrak and Chann. Nothing to be taken too seriously.

And yet…

“Evan.” I carefully touched his wrists, which felt considerably thicker than they had before. His shoulders, too, seemed to be widening, his chest swelling outward. “You’re okay, buddy. Just stay calm for me. I can explain, but—”

Evan shrieked in pain and flipped over onto all fours as the seams of his rear pockets began to tear as he continued to grow. Recognizing the problem right away, I grabbed his belt loops and ripped his pants down. The nub of a tail sprouting from his tailbone shot out in a fluffy plume, which he quickly clamped over his butt crack. He darted forward, but the denim shackles of his jeans and the slippery blood foiled his plans.

He landed spread-eagle on his chest, sending ripples throughout the pool of blood. He screamed, arms flailing like a drowning swimmer as he tried to get back up.

I pounced on top of his strange new body, pinning him down by the shoulders. “Stop.”

His pointy ears flicked toward my voice, but his movements only grew wilder. Two sharp cracks echoed in the small space—his knee inversion—and he howled in pained. But it didn’t take him long to get his new legs underneath him, and he bucked me off as he caught hold of a metal pole and hauled himself onto his back paws.

Standing there in the shreds of his human clothing, his face halfway between man and beast, he looked like he’d walked right off the set of a Stephen King movie. Complete with gallons of blood and dismembered limbs. Sebastian reached a cautious hand toward my friend’s shoulder, but Evan snarled and slapped him away. I signaled with my eyes for Sebastian to back off as I pushed to my feet.

Evan’s blue eyes darted from the dead younger males in front of the sliding doors to the dead female slumped by the emergency exit and then briefly back to me, taking in my half-shiftskin before sliding beyond me to the older male whose throat I’d ripped out. Finally, they landed on Charlie, who I had successfully avoided looking at with my human eyes so far, but time was up.

Evan lurched to her side, falling into an animalistic crouch because his knees were now sharp points facing backward. He tried to touch her pallid face, then stopped, curling fingers into fists. He roared in frustration and shook out his hands as if he could shake the claws off. A little sob finally broke loose from me. Would he ever shift back? Would he ever shift all the way? Or had I doomed my friend to life as a movie monster?

“Evan, we have to get you out of here,” I said. “If anyone sees you—”

He growled and made a biting gesture at Charlie. Then he pointed at me, at himself, and back to her. As if he knew what I had done. I covered my next sob with one hand and sank to my knees beside them.

“I can’t. I’m sorry.” I made myself look at Charlie’s face. The shock had worn off, her expression now totally blank. I tried to hold on to that moment of wonder just before the end when she knew I’d told her my whole truth. I reached over and drew her eyelids shut. “She was gone in an instant.”

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