She Belongs To The Beast

2. The Rescue in the Woods

He looked at me for a long moment after I stepped out from behind the oak. Long enough that I had to fight every instinct I had not to step back into the shadows and run out of here. His eyes moved over me once, unhurried, the way you look at something you are trying to categorize.

Then something shifted in his expression. Not warmth. Nothing close to warmth. More like a calculation completing itself.

"You look harmless," he said. "Leave before I decide otherwise." He tilted his head slightly. "I will count to five. I suggest you not be standing there when I reach it."

He did not wait for my response. He turned away from me like I was already gone, like the matter had been handled and filed and he had moved on to whatever came next.

I ran immediately. I went through the trees and I did not dare look back once.

The trees closed around me. The moonlight thinned out until I was navigating mostly by instinct and the faint difference in darkness between the path and the undergrowth on either side of it.

I ran faster without letting myself think about it.

The ground felt more familiar here. The slope was evening out the way it did near the eastern markers, which meant the Silverpine border was close, and I was almost through the worst night of my life.

I focused on breathing. Cold air in, cold air out.

Slowly, a sinister sound reached my ears. The strong smell of wolves who had been living outside pack structure long enough that the rules had stopped meaning anything to them was everywhere. Rogues had nothing to lose and had made a lifestyle out of that fact.

I heard rustling from three directions at once. From my left, from the path ahead, and from the rocky slope above me that I had not thought to watch.

Three wolves stepped out of the trees onto the path in front of me. Large and lean, carrying a look of hunger in their eyes. The one at the front had a scar running from his jaw all the way down to his collarbone, and he was looking at me with an expression that made my skin pull tight across my shoulders.

"Wolfless girl," he said, drawing the words out slowly, tasting them. "All alone out here in the dark."

"Please… I'm heading home," I said. My voice came out steadier than I felt, which was the only small victory the night had offered me. "I don't want any trouble."

"Nobody ever does." He took one step forward. The two wolves flanking him spread slightly wider, cutting off the angles on either side of the path. Behind me I could hear movement now, the soft, deliberate sound of more wolves closing in from the direction I had come. "But you wandered a long way from your pack, little wolf. And out here the only rules are the ones we decide on."

I backed up one step, followed by another.

My heel caught on an exposed root, and I stumbled, catching myself against a tree trunk, and the scar-faced wolf smiled at that. Slow and satisfied, the smile of someone who has been waiting for exactly this moment.

My wolf did not stir at the sight of trouble. Of course it didn't. It had given me one single flicker of life twenty minutes ago and retreated back into its nineteen years of silence, leaving me alone in my own body the way I had always been alone in it. I had no claws, no strength, or instinct beyond the very human and very useless urge to run somewhere there was nowhere to run to.

The scar-faced wolf lunged.

I threw myself sideways, and his arm caught my shoulder instead of my throat, the force of it spinning me hard into the nearest tree. My head cracked against the bark, and white light detonated across my vision, and I hit the ground on my hands and knees with the taste of blood flooding my mouth where my teeth had caught my cheek on the way down.

I got one knee under me. And pushed both hands flat in the mud. I was almost upright when a hand closed around my ankle and wrenched me backwards, dragging me across the forest floor through the mud, dead leaves, and the cold wet earth while I clawed at everything and found nothing solid to hold onto, and the scar-faced wolf was saying something above me that I couldn't hear over the sound of my own pulse.

I let out a ragged scream, and then the hand released me.

Not gradually. All at once, like it had been removed by something. I rolled onto my back and scrambled upright, and the clearing had completely changed.

The stranger from before. He was here! He moved through them like resistance was a concept that did not apply to him. There was nothing theatrical about it, no display, no performance of dominance for an audience. It was cold and quiet and devastatingly efficient, each movement landing exactly where it needed to with a precision that suggested he had done this so many times that it had long since stopped requiring thought.

The rogues who had seemed so large and so certain sixty seconds ago were stumbling and falling and making sounds that I would not be able to forget easily.

The scar-faced wolf lasted the longest. He shifted partially, his wolf rising through him as he snarled and charged, and the stranger caught him by the throat in human form and held him suspended off the ground for one long, almost bored moment before dropping him in the dirt.

The wolf did not get up. The others cursed and ran for their lives.

The man stood in the center of the clearing, his expression exactly what it had been when he told me I looked harmless and gave me until the count of five to disappear. He looked down at the scar-faced wolf on the ground for a moment, and then he turned and looked at me.

I was still on the ground. My head was throbbing, and I could feel mud drying on my palms and my cheek. I met his eyes and I held them because I was not going to fall apart in front of this man twice in one night.

His expression shifted slightly, and he opened his mouth to say something.

The white light came back.

It crept in from the edges of my vision all at once, and my legs stopped cooperating with what the rest of me wanted. I reached out on pure instinct, and my fingers found the front of his shirt, closing around the fabric. I felt the warmth of him through the material, and then his arm came around me, holding me up from reaching the ground.

The last thing I registered before the darkness finished what the rogues had started was the smell of him. Cedarwood. Something older underneath it, like the earth after a long rain. Something that made the deepest, most dormant part of me go very still in a way that felt nothing like fear.

Then there was nothing.