Total pages in book: 85
Estimated words: 81208 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 406(@200wpm)___ 325(@250wpm)___ 271(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 81208 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 406(@200wpm)___ 325(@250wpm)___ 271(@300wpm)
“We have to shift again,” I tell my brothers. “We have to find her before the wolves do.”
Robert’s expression is murderous, and frustration and fury break through his usually stoic reserve. Evan fists his hair as the loss of our mate wrenches his heart. Images of her surrounded by snarling wolves fill my mind, and I almost drop to my knees. If anything happens to her, I’ll never forgive myself. I should have handled her arrival differently. I should have claimed her immediately, and then all of this would have been different. She would have wanted to stay. She’d be pregnant with our offspring and dedicated to our family by now. Or I could have approached her more gently, like my brothers. If she’d felt equally close to me, we might have gotten to the claiming part more gently.
The urge to punch the wall is overwhelming. My bear rears up inside me, snarling and raging at my failure to protect our mate. Stripping off again, I don’t bother to toss my clothes in the basket. Instead, they pile up around my feet. Robert quickly replaces the key in the safe. How he’s keeping his head and restraint, I’ll never know. I’m the first to shift, and the burn this time is greater than the first. There’s a limit to how many times we can do it without our forms becoming confused. Goldie’s scent is strongest around her car, and I breathe her in, the sweet cinnamon and apple fragrance tripping switches in my head.
Find her, my bear growls. Find her.
I don’t wait for my brothers to follow. The forest floor calls me, and the path Goldie took is faint but ever present. Behind me, heavy bear paws crunch fallen leaves.
“She walked towards the road,” Robert’s bear growls.
Maybe she managed to hitchhike into town, or maybe we distracted the wolves long enough for her to find safety.
“If she got into a car, we’d lose the scent,” Evan points out.
Even as my bear scowls at the idea, I pray that's the case. His frenzy at following her smell has our jaws dripping and our teeth gnashing.
It takes ten minutes for the sound of cars passing on the road to become loud. Goldie’s scent becomes stronger beneath a large tree, and I rear up, catching the potent scent of wolf in the surrounding air—wolf and man.
“Wolf,” my bear growls. I’m standing at my full height, furious and terrified. They have her. They have our mate. We’re too late.
Robert lets out a pained growl, and Evan follows. Our thread of connection vibrates with the misery of our situation and the desperation we all feel to get Goldie back into our den, safe and sound.
If she’s still alive.
The thought is a knife slashing my belly, causing my insides to tumble.
She’s useless to them while they’re in wolf form, but if they shift back to human…
“Where?” I ask.
Robert bounds forward, following the scent to the road’s edge, nuzzling into tire tracks that have torn up the soft earth at the edge of the road. “They parked here,” he says. “They went that way.”
The scent of wolf lingers around the tire tracks and trails along the road's edge. They didn’t all shift when they got her to the car, which will be to our advantage. The scent of the car is faint, and we can only follow it by exposing ourselves and risking more humans coming to track bears.
I lead us back into the treeline, and we surge forward to follow the path of the wolves. All we can hope is that they’re all gathered in the same place, and when we get there, Goldie’s unharmed. There are too many uncertainties in this situation. There are too many chances for the worst to happen.
What would happen to us if the wolves killed our mate? Dread leashes my bear tightly by the throat. The pain of the loss of Goldie would end us all. Broken-hearted animals don’t survive. They pine and weaken, forgoing food and water, forgetting their human selves, losing all hope and will to live.
“Stop,” Evan growls in my mind.
Are my spiraling thoughts loud enough for him to hear?
“We’ll find her,” Robert’s bear growls. His certainty restores my resolve. If he believes it, so can I.
I get lost in the red mist of our desperate hunt. The scent of the wolves burns my nose and makes my eyes stream. I take no care where I’m running or notice the pain of tearing my paws on twigs and stones underfoot. My goal is singular.
“Here?” Robert says as we emerge from the undergrowth into a familiar patch of land. It’s where we mauled the wolf who tried to get to Goldie. The rundown house on the edge of town. A dark truck is parked to the side of the building, but it’s impossible to know if it’s the same one that tore up the roadside and transported our mate away from us. The scent of wolf is acrid and sour and intensely strong.