Fulfilling Ancient Lycan Prophecy

CHAPTER THREE: BREAKING POINT

Aurora's POV

The cold crept in first—greasy grass beneath bare toes, cutting night air through sheer cotton. I jerked awake, startled, my mind struggling to make the leap from sleeping in my own bed to this on the edge of the woods in my nightdress.

How did I get here?

I had not previously had a chance to pose the question before I was seized with fear. I was asleep.

I remembered shutting my eyes in safety within my padlocked bedroom after hours of reading through Constance's diaries. I was outside, alone, and had no idea how I had ended up there.

Sleepwalking. Must have been sleepwalking, some response to tension after all I'd learned. My arms shook as I hugged them close, looking at the way helpless I was, laid bare.

The house stood behind me, windows empty and dark. In front of me, the woods, darkness on the breeze.

I took a step back to enter the house.

And that's when the pain hit.

It started at the bottom of me—pressure building up from inside, as if whatever was trapped inside was trying to break out along the length of my back.

I yelled, the yell tearing through the blackness, and doubled over as it grew.

My spine arched into a cramp, vertebrae snapping and cracking with noises far beyond human.

Every snap lashed riptides of lightning agony through my nervous system.

"No," I was able to scream, falling to my knees in the soggy grass. "No, no, no—"

My fingers clenched, the joints groaning as they tried to re-form. I stood there aghast, as nails lengthened and darkened, pushing through the nail beds with a ripping-off, growing feeling.

My bones in my hand hurt as they cracked and re-formed, snapped and built, doing it again until I was sick.

My legs cramped, thigh muscles and calf muscles spasmodically twitching so that I bellowed.

Muscles bulged under my skin, contracting and relaxing in spasms of effort as they tried to re-form into a shape that could support another body.

My feet contorted, arches stretched, toes pointed out. All my tendons and ligaments seemed to be on edge.

My body was frozen in some hellish limbo between human and other, transformation begun but never completed, trapped in experiencing the same agony of transformations over and over again.

My jaw ached, the bones creaking with rage as they attempted to snap shut to shove themselves into a muzzle that wouldn't yield.

My teeth were larger than it was designed to accommodate, crunching my gums so savagely I could feel the metallic tang of blood.

I couldn't close my mouth, couldn't swallow, couldn't do anything other than spasm and bellow as the agony increased.

And my senses—Good God, my senses were unravelling.

All of the odours streamed past me as if I had been smitten.

I caught the obdurate smell of each of a hundred different plants, the wild smell of animals which had just gone through hours or days before, the metallic taste of my own blood, the lightning storm's ozone, the brutal smell of rock and dirt.

It was too much, more than my head could bear.

Sounds deluged me with bursts. My own heartbeat hammered within my ears like a drum.

Crawling bugs in the grass, the swoop of the owl's wings a half-mile away, little things burrowing underground, the mansion creaking behind me—each creak and whisper a thousand times louder.

I was dying. I had to be dying. There was no possible way anything could live through this.

I rolled tears to the ground, convulsing. My face shed tears that were absorbed by the dew on which the grass lay.

My fingers tightened in the earth, leaving grooves in the collapsed dirt as a spasm of sliding pain ripped me.

"Oh, please," I growled at no one, at God, at the universe, at whatever malignant power was torturing me. All my cells wailed in horror. "Please, stop."

There was motion from the haze of agony, from the multitude of senses shredding the world too coarse and too unyielding and too intense. The smooth glide of footfalls over earth. The ripping of leaves being torn asunder. The sensation of weighty, deliberate pressure advancing toward me.

Fear coursed through me as a new wave of metamorphosis agony exploded into my line of sight.

I couldn't move, couldn't struggle, couldn't even lift my head. It would overwhelm me in my powerlessness, whatever it was.

The enormous black wolf emerged from the darkness.

It was a monster—bigger than any wolf could have possibly been, as big as a small bear.

Its coat did not shine in the moonlight it rested in, but absorbed it like a sponge, and it was part of the living, dark shape and tooth.

Muscles rippled beneath that darkened hide with ease of murder as it progressed. Amber eyes held me in the knowledge that froze blood to the bone.

Those weren't animal eyes.

Those were too perceptive, too knowing, full of something that was concerning.

I tried to crawl away, but my body wouldn't comply. My legs spasmed ineffectually, still stiff from their try at movement.

My arms trembled with the effort of holding me upright. Tears streamed down my face a second time as the wolf came closer, its massive head lowered.

It was murdering me. I'd have been dead on the lawn, my body suspended between worlds, torn apart by a werewolf without ever so much as the slightest sense of being one.

The wolf didn't attack.

It came gradually, every step a slow and deliberate one.

When it was near enough for me to sense the warmth of its body, to see the hackles on its back rise in the wind, it halted.

It dropped to the ground beside me—near but not against—and emitted a sound that stiffened me like stone.

Not a growl. Not a snarl.

Louder, but not quite whine, the way one talks to calm a frightened beast. To a hurt one.

The wolf did it again, low and growling in the throat.

My body acted before my mind was even peripherally conscious of what it was doing.

The growl hummed through me, synching my wild, panicked beat. And then, in an instant, it calmed the panicked beat, calming it like a hand plunging into chaos and forcing me back into balance.

The wolf's breathing was slow, measured, and steady. My own, unconsciously, fell into rhythm.

In. Out. In. Out.

The agony of change that had been dismantling me, piece by little piece, reducing me to shards, gradually drained from me, as if my body had finally learned to listen to a message it could hear: "stop, settle, return."

My bones came back to their normal form. Muscles relaxed from their desperate fight to reshape. Fingers decreased. The choking flood of my super senses continued, but it receded to something I could stand, something I could be near without drowning.

I lay on the grass, shaking and exhausted, my nightgown wet with dew and sweat and tears. The great black wolf rested beside me, a silent presence in the darkness, amber eyes looking into mine with something very nearly comprehending.

It saved me. This beast, somehow, had heard me as my body tore itself apart.

"Thank you," I was able to manage, my voice a rattle and cough.

The ears of the wolf stood up in front. Made that tiny sound again and painfully stood up.

Glared at me for a moment, moonlight over its eyes and its eyes smouldering hot coal. And vanished into trees, disappeared through the night as if it never existed.

I knelt on the earth for what seemed like forever after it'd gone through, trying to make sense of what I was experiencing, how to describe why a werewolf—a member of the Blackwood Pack, for goodness' sake—it had to be—would rescue me rather than kill.

And if I had been rescued by a monster, it would be so much more complicated.