My throat felt like sandpaper. I tried to sit up. A thin tube ran from my arm into the wall, and the beeping of the monitor sounded like a slow, angry heartbeat.
“Nothing’s wrong,” the nurse said, flipping through a clipboard. “Your vitals are fine. We can’t find any injury or infection.”
Her words floated around me, empty. My head throbbed, and the pain in my chest felt like a fist crushing my heart. I wanted to scream, but the words got stuck, tangled in the darkness that was growing inside me.
I closed my eyes and tried to reach out to the wolf I had felt when I shifted. I breathed in hard, trying to dig deeper, to find the familiar pulse that would tell me she's real.
But the more I tried, the more the pain grew. It was as if a heartbreak had split my chest in two, each half pullin
