“I tore its throat out.” With my newly descended fangs. He kept that detail to himself.
“You were in the West Lands? Yet Solenne wrote to you at Hardwick House. Did you not stay in the West Lands? You killed the beast. It was your territory.”
The trees thinned, and Alek could see the road ahead.
The days and weeks immediately after his transformation were a haze. Survival instincts controlled him, prioritizing food and hunting. When he finally emerged from the shift, he found himself coated in sticky blood with feathers in his teeth. As far as he could determine, his victims had been mostly pheasants and other small animals. Every full moon that followed, Alek took pains to isolate himself so he only hunted game, not people.
He shivered, despite the humid heat, unable to say what he wo
