Fated To The Alpha: A Paranormal Shifter Romance (8 page)

CHAPTER FOUR

  I could hear and smell the carnage long before I saw it.

Several minutes before reaching my destination, I heard the howl of a Morgandorf wolf sounding an alarm to his or her pack.  I didn’t think I could have possibly run faster than I already was, but once I heard that howl, that was precisely what I started doing.  I emerged from the forest into what had to be the Morgandorf village to find a hideous scene of chaos and bloodshed before me.  Dozens of wolves I knew from my own pack were viciously biting and clawing at dozens of wolves I did not recognize, with fur and blood flying everywhere. 

I raised my head and sniffed at the air, trying to locate Jeremy’s scent, but with so many wolves running, charging, and jumping about, it was like trying to find Waldo.  So I went running towards the fray, hoping I might find him somewhere in there.

I quickly realized my mistake when a random Morgandorf wolf came charging at me, seeing me as just another attacking Caldour.  I tried jumping away, trying to avoid a confrontation, but my attacker would have none of that.  He continued rushing at me, spittle flying from his bared fangs and his eyes burning with crimson rage.

Unable to escape, I reared back on my hind legs to meet his charge.  I tried to be as non-aggressive as I could, trying to only push his attacks away by swatting his claws aside and nudging him back with my head, while ducking away when he tried to bite me.  Apparently, he was too caught up in the bloodlust to understand that I meant him no harm.  I started to realize I was not going to get away from him without fighting back.

I figured that out a few seconds too late to stop him from finally getting a good bite of me.  I yowled with the sharp pain as his teeth sank into the flesh of my shoulder.  Many of my pack were used to this kind of pain, from all the fights they participated in for fun.  I was the lightweight with no scars, who shied away from inflicting or receiving battle wounds.  When his fangs dug into me, it was as if my brain suddenly didn’t know how to deal with this kind of pain. 

Which I guess was why I wasn’t sure what was happening at first, when my attacker was suddenly gone the next instant.

I blinked through the pain in my shoulder and looked up, seeing that another wolf had rushed in and was fighting my attacker off.  My first instinct was to think that one of my pack had come to my rescue, but as I looked harder and caught his scent, I realized otherwise.

It was Jeremy.

Jeremy was fighting off his own packmate for me.

The attacking wolf backed off after Jeremy got a good bite into his side, and then Jeremy turned to me.  I nodded my head toward the woods, which he understood.  As I started running away from the fray, he ran after me.

The sounds of growling and biting faded into the background behind us as we dashed into the trees.  I thought we were about to make a clean getaway, when suddenly another lupine shape appeared right in front of us, her fangs bared and dripping as she growled.

This one I recognized immediately.

Despite her ferocious visage, I felt safe enough with Charlene to risk shifting to my two-legged shape in front of her.  I rose to my feet and looked down at her.  She waited a few seconds before she did likewise, and then I heard Jeremy taking his two-legged form behind me.

“Get out of my way, Evie,” Charlene warned.

“Not gonna happen, Charlene.”

“He’s a Morgandorf, Evie!  He’s the enemy!”

“Not to me.”

She tilted her head, looking at me like a stranger.  “So that’s it then?  You’re really turning your back on your own pack?”

“If this is how my own pack rewards me for following my own heart, maybe that’s what I have to do.”

Charlene growled, her teeth growing longer and pointier, and her eyes turning yellow.  “I don’t want to hurt you, Evie,” she warned, her voice rumbling with an underlying lupine growl.

“You’re gonna have to if you want to get to Jeremy,” I firmly stated.

She continued glaring at me with those fiery yellow eyes, and I started to think she really was going to attack me.  Seconds ticked by as I waited, wondering what she was going to do.

After several long, breathless minutes, she seemed to relax, her eyes turning back to their human brown and her teeth shrunk down to human size.  She looked at me with a defeated frown, and said.  “Get out of here.”

“Just like that?” I said.

“Just go before I change my mind!”

I spared a glance back at Jeremy, before we started moving off into the woods past her.  Just as I began to pass Charlene, she suddenly reached out and grabbed my arm to stop me, and turned her head to look me in the eye.  “Evelyn,” she said.  This already could not be good, if she was not abbreviating my name.  “I want you to know this makes you a traitor.  If I ever see him again… hell, if I see
you
again… well, you better hope I don’t!”

She disappeared into the brush after that, while I stood there, too stunned to move.  To hear my best friend say those things to me…

Suddenly, my shoulder did not hurt so badly anymore.

Jeremy came up behind me and began stroking my arm.  “Are you okay?” he said.

“I don’t think I am,” I said honestly.

He pulled me into his embrace from behind.  “Come on,” he said.  “We’d better go.”

*

We ran for hours through the woods, only stopping when my shoulder started to hurt too much for my front leg to continue supporting it.  At that point, I collapsed forward and resumed my two-legged form.  Jeremy stopped, and retook his own human shape, kneeling down over me.  He took a good look at my wound, and then stood up.  “Stay there,” he said, “I’m gonna find something to treat that.”

“Out here in the middle of the woods?” I said,

Jeremy was already hurrying off into the foliage, digging around in the bushes, for what, I couldn’t imagine.

He soon disappeared from my sight, though I could still hear him rummaging around.  As I lay there, pressing a hand to my wound, I started listening to the sounds of the forest around me.  I heard the chirping of crickets, the hooting of owls, and the scurrying of small animals in the brush.  All of it sounded much bigger than it ever had before.

Being a wolf meant I was more than accustomed to running around without my clothes on, just like I was right then.  I couldn’t remember ever feeling quite so naked.

Because I’d always had my pack behind me.

What did I have now?  I defied my alpha, stood up to my father, ran away with a member of a rival pack and been called a traitor.

I’d been torn over what to do before, when I was expected to marry Leon.  Now I felt truly lost.  More than ever, I had no idea what to do next.

Jeremy returned with a few bits of plants in his hands, and knelt over me again.  “Let me see it,” he said.  I reluctantly removed my hand from the bite on my shoulder, while he started picking some little flowers from his hand.  “This might sting a little,” he cautioned.  I hissed in pain as he pressed the plants to my wounds, but he kept a hand held tight over me to hold me steady.  Then he took a large leaf and wrapped it over my shoulder, pressing it down to hold it in place.  “This ought to help the pain, and keep it from getting infected.”

I clenched my teeth for a few seconds more, but then the pain started to dull.  I sighed as my muscles started to relax, and my hand came on top of his, partly to help hold the leaf in place, partly for… other reasons.

“Where’d you learn that?”

“My pack puts a lot of value on learning herbal medicines,” he said.  “You never know when you might need to treat something when you're miles from a first aid kit.”

“Case in point,” I said.

Jeremy lay down on the ground and curled up with me.  “You know we can’t stay here long,” he said.  “If they come looking for us, they’ll find us.  They only have to follow our scent trail.”

“And what happens if they do find us?” I wondered aloud.  I was not expecting him to know the answer; I just needed to ask it, because I really wanted to know.

“Who can say?” he said.  “I guess it depends on which pack finds us first.  They’ll probably try to kill one of us and take the other one back.”

Great.  Really comforting.

“Well,” I sighed, “maybe they’re still too busy fighting each other to worry about us right now.  How many of them even know we’re gone yet?”

“Glad to see you finding the glass half full,” he said.

“Actually I’m coming up with an excuse to just lie here for a while.”

Jeremy chuckled.  “I can appreciate that.”

He wrapped an arm around my back and pulled me against his chest, which I pressed my head against, using him as my pillow.

I think we dozed off like that for a few hours.  The next thing I remember was being awoken by the sound of a howl in the distance.  It didn’t take me long to recognize the howl either.

“That’s my alpha,” I said in a harried whisper as Jeremy and I lifted our heads.  “He’s looking for me.”

“How’s your shoulder?” he asked.

I looked down at it, pulling the leaf away.  The area around it was pretty purple and yucky, but the bite wound had closed.  “I think I’m okay.  Going to leave a scar, though.  Guess I’m due for one.”

“Come on,” he said, rising to his feet and extending a hand down to help me to mine.  “We should get going.”

“But where can we go where he won’t find us?”

Jeremy looked around, thinking.  “There’s a river about half a mile that way,” he said, pointing off into the distance.  “He won’t be able to follow our scent trail if we cross it.”

I nodded, and we shifted to our four-legged forms and ran off in that direction.

Judging by the look of the night sky, it was nearing 4 a.m. by the time we reached the river.  I’d never been much of a swimmer, but when faced with the choice of that or whatever Leon might do if he caught up with us, I wasted no time in jumping right in after Jeremy.

The water was freezing, and rushing like mad.  My paws worked hard to keep me moving forward, fighting against the tow that worked relentlessly to pull me downriver, away from my goal on the other side.  I saw Jeremy reach the shore and climb out, shake himself dry, and then turn his head back to me.  I surged forward with a renewed dedication to reach him—

—when something, I’m not sure what, maybe it was a limb or something, but something in the river collided with me, knocking me off my course.

All sense I had of up or down vanished as the current carried me helplessly tumbling along.  I could hardly tell if I was paddling at water or empty air.  All I could see were indistinct blurs of white water foam and occasional glimpses of the sky.  The only time I could tell what was above or below me was the brief time when I went over a few feet of waterfall. 

Yeah, that was scary.

Just when I was starting to think I would drown before Leon ever caught up with me, I felt a pair of jaws close around the back of my neck and start pulling me in another direction.  All at once, I could breathe again, and I felt dry land beneath my side.  I coughed water out of my lungs and shakily pushed myself up on my front paws.

I blinked a few times to see Jeremy shifting to his two-legged form and kneeling in front of me.  “Are you okay?”

I shook the water out of my sopping wet fur, making Jeremy recoil and shield himself, before I retook my two-legged shape.  “Peachy,” I croaked.

“Well, as unpleasant as that was,” Jeremy said, “It probably worked out for the best.  We’re way downriver now from where our scent trail ends, so it’ll be that much harder for anyone to find us.”