CHAPTER FOUR: MOONRISE
1474 Words
MOONRISE
Aurora's POV
The sun hadn't fully set before Asher appeared on my porch, serious but not cruel.
"Tonight," he cut in. "Full moon."
My gut had dropped.
I didn't understand what he was talking about. He wasn't even making sense to me, and he saw no big deal in it.
I was such a fool all along. So clueless not to take note of the little happenings around me. This isn't what I'm known for. It's a slap to my face.
I should have known this was coming—all day, I'd hung in suspended animation, anticipating it—yet the words on my lips shriveled on my tongue. "I'm not ready yet. I can't do it. Can we please try something else?"
"You are ready." He grasped my hand. "Trust me on this one. I can't lie to you,"
"Can't lie to you"
The words sound familiar. I could have sworn that I've heard it before.
The last time someone told me that, it didn't end well for me. I had my regrets.
It was a day I could never have forgotten in a hurry. Not now. Not tomorrow. Not forever. Like glue, it's stuck to my head.
I looked upon the open hand, half-turned back in memory of pain-contorted bodies clutched in bodies.
But I recalled the black wolf who had helped me, who had somehow calmed the tempest.
The same black wolf I detested until he came to my rescue. What an irony.
Asher or otherwise, I knew he'd notice what I was to suffer in the end.
I reached out for his hand.
I had no choice. I wouldn't have ignored his assistance.
He led me into the woods, deeper than borders I had previously known, to an opening that I knew had never been.
The earth was a tidy ring, rimmed by elder trees whose branches arched to a sky rapidly darkening.
No thorn bush lay along the ground—only rich grass and moss that felt nearly sacred under your foot.
"This is where we transform," Asher said, releasing my hand.
"The clearing existed, smoothed flat by the moon and magic and every wolf's tooth that's ever bitten into it. It makes it possible.
Makes it more possible to achieve."
I could feel it—a vibration of power in the earth itself, a pulse. "What the heck am I doing?"
"Take off your clothes. Else you want to tear them apart." He moved away from me, giving me a modest amount of space.
"The pain can't be averted, Aurora. Your entire body will undergo a cellular level of reshaping—bones will c***k and reform. It will definitely hurt you, but don't panic," he said to me, even though it didn't sound like an assurance to me.
He definitely didn't mean any of these words. He just said that to make me happy.
"You're basically selling out," I growled, though my own hands were already trembling as I shed my bare skin. The slap of the cold night air against my skin left me with goose bumps.
"But," he continued, "if you don't fight it, if you surrender to your nature and let the wolf out, it'll be sooner. Your wolf knows. She's waited a lifetime."
"I'm ready," I said to him, though I wasn't.
Asher approached, and I stayed where I was, because he'd already shed his own attire.
I should have blushed, I should have turned away, but then there was nothing sensual—only two beasts on the edge of something else altogether.
X
His gold eyes were the final of the waning light.
"When the moon appears," he told me, "do not try to fight it."
And the moon ascended high in the trees, and the world exploded in silver light.
The shifts rolled over me like an unstoppable freight train.
My spine flexed, vertebrae clicking into place and reforming themselves with sounds that would have sent me shrieking out of the room if I could hold the air in my body.
But it wasn't that—this time, rather than spinning in and out of the ring, the shifts moved with terror.
My bones are cracking. I knew every c***k—arms, legs, ribs, all the bones in my hands and feet snapping and reforming into new ones.
The pain was something I could never get used to.
"Don't fight," I instructed myself through a fog of pain. "Let her in."
My muscles tore themselves in two and then reconnected into something harder, something stronger.
My jaw swelled, flattening into a muzzle, teeth lengthening.
My hands clenched, my fingers and toes curled back as claws erupted from them.
Fur seared through my skin in a sheet of silver-white that sparkled in the moonlight like frost.
And then, just as suddenly as it had begun, it was over.
I was crouched on my hands and knees in the clearing, panting and disoriented.
The world at this level was another one—flat, somehow more exposed.
Colors had been altered, blues and reds relocated to warmer tones, while the others turned tightly outlined.
A giant black wolf sat beside me, amber eyes regarding me with what I could only term pride.
"Asher." I called out.
I tried to step and fell at once, my legs tangled round one another in a movement that would have been humiliating if I had not been too stunned to know it.
Four legs.
I had four damn legs.
How has anything ever been made out on four legs?
The black wolf let out a sound—nearly a laugh—and exhibited crude movement that didn't even filter through an exercise of thought.
I watched where he placed his feet, the rhythm of his step, and attempted to do it like him.
Step by step!
I had three feet before I fell.
But I was laughing—or whatever our laugh would have sounded like when we were wolves—because it didn't matter. I was a wolf.
A real, honest-to-goodness wolf. My body was slick with silver-white fur that glowed in the moonlight, and if I concentrated, I could feel the strength knotted up in these new muscles, the strength waiting for its turn to be called on.
I tried again.
I trotted six feet, ten, before I was moving—literally walking—toward and through the clearing with increasing boldness.
Asher kept pace with me at his own pace, sometimes pushing at me with his shoulder when my balance center wobbled.
His solidity was reassuring, anchoring me when the unfamiliarity seemed on the verge of overpowering.
And then the self of me held on to me, whole and whole, and I knew.
This body was familiar to me—mine, was mine all the while, bound up in skin and lies.
I trotted and I ran, and the flood that rose in me was unnameable.
I could perceive. The distinct smell of a thousand individual plants, the foul smell of the creatures who had slept overnight, the smell of creek water I couldn't see but knew was three hundred yards to my east.
I could smell trees from scent alone, and could track where a rabbit had gone hours prior.
My ear was marvelously good. The thud of a flying owl overhead, the thump of the mouse beneath, in its burrow, the creak of wind through pines—each of these built a surer picture than ever built.
And the speed. Good, the speed.
My legs consumed earth in burning strides that carried me across the clearing with a speed I never had as human.
The wind whipped through my fur, bitter and cold, and I was alive in a way I never was as a human—there in each moment, each sense, each breath.
Asher rode behind me, leading me onto new paths in front of him.
We thundered through the woods, parting around fallen logs, crashing into frozen water that was starlight liquid on my legs.
I still tripped every so often, widening the gaps or stumbling over my own feet, but no one cared.
The transition was faster—less painful now that my body has become accustomed to the procedure.
I was human in seconds, there standing naked as a baby, panting and grinning with unadulterated joy.
Asher, having regained his human form, was grinning.
Not the fake, created one I'd witnessed before, but a genuine one that was full of warmth and warmth. "How do you feel?"
"Unbelieving," I cried out. "I didn't know. I never would have suspected—" I was speechless.
How could I ever explain to him what had just come over me?
But from the glint in his eyes, I knew that I didn't have to. He knew.
"Welcome home, Aurora," he whispered.
- Writer
