Chapter 7
1754 Words
Heather’s house smells like citrus cleaner and something old—wood, maybe. Warm. Lived in. Not quiet in the way empty places are, but settled. Like it expects someone to come back.
She leads me inside, but I hesitate on the rug, claws half-curled, body tight like I’m waiting for a blow.
“Well,” Heather says, shutting the door behind us. She kicks her shoes off like this is normal. Like there isn’t a wolf standing in her living room. “Make yourself at home.”
My ear flicks. I understand the words. I just don’t understand how they apply to me.
She moves into the kitchen without waiting for an answer. “I’ll get some tea going. Is water okay for now?”
I stare out at the fully furnished home. She had an open living room to the right, with stairs leading upward on the far wall. Her dining room sat next to me. Wood table that looked brand new, covered in a light layer of dust.
The only room not open down here is the kitchen, which is tucked away, walls keeping it enclosed.
Behind the walls, I hear the sink turn on. A glass fills as her voice calls out.
“All I’ve got is tap,” she adds. “Do you want ice?”
She pauses this time, like she’s listening.
How ridiculous, ice in water when it’s this cold.
Something strange pulls my chest at the thought. Not fear. Not instinct.
“No ice,” she says after a beat. “Got it.”
I hear her fill a tea kettle and start working on making the tea. Meanwhile, I go into the living room to ‘make myself at home’.
It’s comfy. Plush couch and chairs, shelves filled with books. I sit just in front of the chair and watch as Heather comes out, glass in hand.
She sets it between us on the coffee table, carefully out of reach of my tail, before sitting on the couch across from me.
“You can take the chair if you want,” she says. “Or keep the floor. Dealer’s choice.”
My chest tightens.
She isn’t watching me. Isn’t commanding me.
She’s talking to me.
The answer forms without effort.
The floor. I don’t want to break anything.
Heather smiles faintly, like she heard it anyway. “Floor it is. Tea will be a minute.”
She disappears back into the kitchen.
The quiet stretches.
I stare at the couch. At the glass of water. At the space I’m allowed to exist in.
You can take the chair.
I place a paw on the arm of the chair, reaching out to it.
My paw brushes the fabric.
It’s soft. I want to sit in it.
The realization hits harder than a falling branch.
My breath stutters. Heat moves through me—not tearing, not burning. Just… shifting. Like something long held is finally allowed to loosen.
I don’t want to be a wolf right now.
It isn’t rejection. It isn’t shame.
It’s exhaustion.
My vision blurs. My weight changes. The room tilts.
I gasp.
“I—”
The sound catches.
“I don’t under—”
My voice breaks free mid-thought.
“I don’t understand—”
The sound of my own voice snaps the world sharp again.
Heather is suddenly there, kettle abandoned, eyes wide but steady.
I’m on my hands and knees, hair hanging in my face. My skin is mostly bare. The torn clothes I had been wearing in ribbons, arms shaking under my own weight.
“I didn’t mean to,” I whisper, panic flaring. “I wasn’t trying to—”
She drops a blanket over my shoulders without hesitation. “It’s okay. You’re okay. Sit. Breathe.”
I obey before I realize I’ve decided to.
She stays there, rubbing my back as I come to my senses.
“I thought I had to make it happen,” I say hoarsely. “Change. Force it. But I didn’t know what was happening. I didn’t know what I was.”
My hands shake.
“It’s like I knew I was me, but I wasn’t, and I couldn’t figure out how to get back.”
I didn’t know how to stop the words now that they started again.
“I was so scared. I had to run, I had to protect myself, I didn’t know…”
Heather doesn’t interrupt.
“I wasn’t safe,” I finish. “And my body knew it.”
She nods beside me. “It’s very common, especially for young wolves. I assume this was your first shift?”
“Shift as in… Changing into a wolf, right?”
She paused for a moment, her head tilting as she looked at me.
“Yes. It’s usually referred to as a shift.”
I thought about it for a while. It felt like an odd term to describe it, but I couldn’t really come up with anything better myself.
“May I ask you a couple of questions?” She adjusts slightly, taking the chair beside me.
I wasn’t sure what I should answer, or how I should answer.
In the past, I had been told to stay silent, to wait for my grandma. But I knew she wasn’t coming… And I trusted Heather.
I nod to her.
“First, what is your name?”
“Maethys.”
She beams at the name. “Maethys… That’s beautiful. Was it a name your mom gave you with your pack?”
I freeze. I knew my mom was dead, but I knew nothing about our pack. Grandma said it had been destroyed, and people still hunted us for having once been part of it. Just another reason to avoid other packs.
The kettle whistles.
“Tea,” she says softly. “I’ll be right back.”
I nod, thankful for the time to think.
I have to figure out what to tell these people. I hadn’t even considered what kinds of questions they would ask when I decided to return.
Do I keep the secrets my grandmother shared, or do I tell them everything?
I hear something from the kitchen.
Metal hitting the floor.
Then an eerie quiet settles over the house.
Not peaceful.
Empty.
Wrong.
I pull the blanket tighter around my shoulders.
“Heather?” I call.
No answer.
I feel the air shift.
A cool breeze slides across the floor, brushing my bare legs beneath the blanket.
But there is something else beneath it.
A scent.
A gut feeling.
Something I can’t name.
Something wrong.
I stand slowly, waiting for another sound. Waiting for Heather to round the corner with tea in her hands and an explanation on her lips.
She doesn’t come.
My legs wobble, exhaustion and hunger making them go soft, but I follow the sound down the hall anyway.
I sniff the air.
Nothing.
Only clean citrus.
That makes it worse.
As I round the corner, I see her.
Heather.
And a large man with his hand wrapped around her throat.
Her feet barely touch the floor.
Her face is flushed, mouth open in a soundless gasp, his fingers digging deep enough to blanch her skin. One of her hands claws at his wrist. The other reaches blindly toward the counter, toward anything she can grab.
She finds nothing.
His shoulders are broad. His hands scarred. Close-cropped hair. Dead eyes that flick to me with irritation.
Not surprise.
He expected me.
His other arm moves.
A knife catches the light in his hand.
He raises it toward Heather.
And I know he means to kill her.
Something inside me shatters.
Not fear.
Loss.
My grandmother’s face flashes in my mind—still, pale, gone. The way the world took her without asking. How her last words to me were to run.
I had run.
I had left her behind.
And now she was gone, no trace of her left behind.
Not again.
Never again.
“Leave her—”
The words rip out of me as a scream.
“—alone!”
The air erupts.
The kettle shrieks. The cabinets rattle. The blanket snaps against my skin as something invisible tears out of me so violently my chest feels like it splits open.
The man flies backward like he’s been struck by an invisible wall.
His body slams into the far side of the room hard enough to crack the wall. The sound hits my teeth. The knife skitters across the floor, spinning once before striking the table leg and going still.
Heather collapses, coughing, hands clawing at her throat.
I don’t move.
I can’t.
The air around me still trembles.
My chest heaves. My eyes burn. Something vast and furious coils beneath my skin, hot and unfamiliar, as if the scream left a wound open somewhere inside me.
Necessity.
Fear.
A promise I don’t know how to break.
Then my legs give out.
My knees hit the floor hard enough to send pain up my thighs. The blanket slips from one shoulder, and I clutch at it weakly, trying to keep myself covered, trying to stay upright, trying to understand what just happened.
My vision blurs and spins.
Whatever I just did…
It took every last inch of my strength.
Footsteps thunder through the house.
I see Heather still on the floor. She is looking at me now, breath coming fast, one hand pressed to her throat.
But she’s alive.
That is the only thought that matters.
The front door crashes open.
The Alpha bursts in first.
Then the Beta.
Then warriors, steel and breath and authority filling the room so quickly Heather’s house no longer feels warm at all.
They stop when they see me.
Their eyes move from Heather.
To the unconscious man.
To me.
A human woman wrapped in a blanket, shaking on the floor.
Zach and a warrior move around me, checking on the collapsed man.
He looks back at the others. “It’s the one who escaped.”
“Check on…” My words falter, my breath barely strong enough to carry them. “Heather. She needs…”
I can’t get anything else out.
My vision fades at the edges.
But I see their eyes.
Their confusion.
Their suspicion.
The way their hands tighten around their weapons.
I am the only thing standing between them, an injured Heather, and an unconscious man.
And if they decide I am the threat now…
I won’t have the strength to stop them.
- Writer
