XXII
Maria hesitated for only a moment before running after him. She was clumsy and uncertain of her own strength. Her first leap carried her nearly ten paces over a deadfall, slamming her shoulder into a tree. But the pain was nothing compared to her transformation, and she rolled and was back chasing his scent before she realized she had fallen.
He ran so fast.
The faster she went, the more her body pushed her forward, wanting to use her arms to grab the ground before her. It was awkward, and she could barely keep up with the golden shadow rushing ahead of her. In glimpses, she saw him through the trees and realized why he was so fast.
He ran on four legs now, completely a wolf—a massive gold-furred creature running though the woods, tongue lolling.
The sight shook her for a moment. She’d been half-prepared for the monster she was, but to become fully an animal? It didn’t seem possible.
She was losing him in the forest.
Could she do that? Did she want to so completely change?
I want to know what I am …
She focused on the golden wolf ahead of her as she reached for the ground beneath her. She leaned into her arms as if they were forelegs, holding her head up as if she was meant to run this way. She pulled against some form of internal resistance, a barrier within her between what she was and what she was becoming. But she forced herself through it, pushing her new self through her skin as if she was giving birth to herself.
The internal resistance gave way with a shuddering wrench. Another transformation rippled through her body, tearing spasms of pain and ecstasy—and she threw herself into it unreservedly.
But she never stopped running.
Even without looking at herself, she knew that she was now fully a wolf. Black-furred, smaller than Darien perhaps …
But now she was faster.
And she caught up with him.
She could see—in his panting, his strides, the scent of his exertion—that if he had been holding back for her sake, he was no longer. She was catching up, and on four legs she had lost all trace of clumsiness.
He darted around trees, leaping over fallen logs, plowing through underbrush, sending twigs and leaves flying. And she chased after him, on his heels, close enough that she tasted the dirt he kicked up as he ran. Close enough that she could have snapped and grabbed his tail. She let out a low growl—one that let him know she was right behind him.
He had been holding back, a little. He sprang forward, throwing a clod of dirt that exploded against her face. She licked the aromatic mulch off the fur of her cheek and realized that a wolf could smile. She bounded after him, barely winded, and saw her chance as he scrambled down a nearly treeless hillside that sloped down to a shallow brook.
She crested it right after him, but he was already halfway down. Without hesitation, she leapt from the crest of the hill. For the brief moment she was airborne, she had the time to think, What am I doing? Then she tackled him, sending them both tumbling down the hillside.
One of them yipped in surprise as they hit the water. Maybe both of them. For a moment, she had him pinned below her, her forepaws resting on his chest as he lay on his side in the shallow water. For a moment she saw him—wet, golden, beautiful. She felt a rush of incredible power as he looked up at her.
Then his lips curled back in a savage snarl as he snapped at her neck. He bit only air, but he jerked his body upright, throwing her off him. She yipped and sputtered as his paw came down on her back, slamming her face into the water. He might have said something in his growling wolf’s voice, but she couldn’t hear it for her own growling, and the water rushing through her ears.
She fought two instincts. Maria the woman, the servant, the bastard—she knew that she had somehow overstepped her bounds, that she needed to accept the consequences. Maria the wolf, the monster—that one knew that, right now, the human rules didn’t apply.
She didn’t have to submit.
She let loose with her own waterlogged snarl and pushed up from the riverbed against his weight. He might be stronger than her, and outweigh her by half, but she felt that the strength of this lupine body could lift two of him.
And she felt his mouth clamp onto the back of her neck, forcing her down.
No!
She dug into the mud of the creek bed, pulling herself and Darien forward, toward deeper water. He pushed her head down, into the water, but she pulled it back up again. She tried to shake him off, but his grip was painful and tenacious.
She pulled them both into the deepest part of the creek, chest-high on her, and when he shoved her head down, she allowed it to be submerged. She folded her legs and dove, dragging his head down with her. She could feel him gag, but he held on.
She held her breath, and wondered how long he could hold his.
Her lungs burned for air. The old Maria inside her screamed for her to surface. The new Maria knew it was a test of wills between them. His jaws tightened on her neck, and she felt the points of his teeth digging through the thick fur of her neck. He tried to shake and pull her up, but his movements were slow and halting underwater.
The rush of water filled her ears, accompanied only by the thudding of her heart. The core of her body ached for air, but it was still less painful than becoming what she was had been. Darien struggled above her while she forced herself to be still.
A calm heart, she thought, feeling a canine smile on her lips.
Magnificent.
That was the word that filled Darien’s mind. It had been decades since he had seen his own kind outside a reflection. He watched her transform from the weak human form into something sleek, black, and incredibly alluring. He stared at her as she racked herself in the heat of the change, and he nearly climaxed in sympathy. When she was finished, crouching on the forest floor before him, his world consisted only of her and the scent of her excitement.
He’d never thought such a creature would ever be his.
Fear still cloaked her, but now it mixed with other smells, some of which he couldn’t identify. Soon he would show his mate the joy of what she was. “Follow me,” he told her.
He led her on a race though the woods. At first unhurried, she was clumsy in her body, slamming into trees, almost falling with each turn. But he heard her closing and glanced back to see that she had dropped to all fours and had, like him, become completely wolf.
Smaller than him, she still made a fearsome sight. Midnight-black fur, long of limb and body, a narrow wolf head like a snarling arrow. She moved faster than anything Darien had ever seen. He pushed himself to run faster, digging his paws into the earth and thrusting himself forward over the crest of a hill.
Halfway down the other side, she slammed into him. He tumbled down into a brook that ran by the foot of the hill. He fell onto his side, and for a moment the simple shock of her standing above him, holding him down, paralyzed him. For a moment he was overwhelmed by memories of childhood—of adults or siblings holding him down until he admitted who was in charge.
But he was no longer a child, and she was not in charge here.
He snapped and threw her off him. She was his mate. That was the point. That was the only possible reason for them coming together. And that meant that she had to submit to him.
He slammed her down into the water under him, his paws on her back, snarling that he was to be obeyed. But she didn’t listen. She bucked him off her.
This wasn’t what was supposed to happen. Darien’s conscious mind became a confused tumble of anger, embarrassment, and uncertainty. But while he couldn’t think, instinct still allowed him to act.
He bit the back of her neck.
She snarled as if he was trying to hurt her, then dragged him deeper into the creek. He tightened his hold on her neck. She had no choice but to concede to him; he was larger, stronger, and there was nothing she could do to break the grip of his jaws on her neck.
But she didn’t yield, and he didn’t know what to do. He tried to push her head down, but she would struggle up, growling, pulling deeper into the water. He’d already bitten down as hard as he dared without crushing her neck.
The wolf within him grew furious at her defiance, while the man in him pleaded silently with her to give in. He knew she wanted this, wanted him, so why was she refusing him now?
Her head slid under the water, and the wolf felt a brief surge of triumph as the man felt the first hint of alarm.
She won’t be able to breathe—
Then his thought was cut short as she dragged him under with her.
Water rushed into his nose, leaking into his mouth. He tried to pull her back up, but his legs didn’t have enough purchase in the soft creek bed. His paws just sank into the mud, turning the water cloudy and blinding him. She was deadweight in his mouth, dragging him down. He pulled, her submission becoming secondary to his need to breathe.
He let go, thrusting his head up out of the water to suck in gasping lungfuls of air. She exploded to the surface before him in a cascade of water and mud. She whipped around to face him, her black, mud-streaked face contorted in a feral snarl. It took a conscious effort of will not to back away from the challenge.
His anger rose, and he felt his own lips curl. He quickly tamped down his anger as he realized: She doesn’t know.
The she-wolf in front of him had been raised by men. She might be his kind, the first he had seen in more than twenty years, but she didn’t realize that she needed to submit to him.
And, of course, she would. They hadn’t even mated yet.
“What kind of game are you playing?” She spoke through the snarl, the words barely words.
Game?
“Do not hold me down,” he responded in kind, deciding that there had been enough correction for that already.
She sniffed, turned, and leapt onto the shore, shaking the water from her fur. She turned her head toward him and cocked it, silently asking, “What now?”
Without the water, he could jump and pin her down, make her submit, force her to mate. Once that happened, there would be no question whose pack this was …
But he held back, because he had smelled her excitement and knew that she would willingly give him what he wanted if he was patient.
She was still watching him with her head cocked, and he jumped onto the shore in front of her and answered her unspoken query.
“We hunt,” he said, and shook the water from his fur.
The two of them, the black wolf and the golden one, ran through the woods. No more words passed between them; the instincts of their bodies were enough to communicate. As one they caught the scent of a young bull elk, and they pursued, though not quite as urgently as she had followed him.
The elk, young and healthy, was large enough to deter most predators. But the pair that stalked him were not like any other predators, and in some part of its brain it must have known that, because as soon as it became aware of their presence, it ran off at a speed that seemed impossible for a beast its size.
They followed it through the woods. It ran at a pace driven by sheer terror, but they loped along, barely winded. The elk never had a chance. It finally cornered itself between a deadfall and a steep hillside.
Maria stopped in front of it as it turned around, the human part of her completely forgetting to be afraid as the terrified beast spun wildly, kicking out, looking for an escape. She watched in fascination, bordering on awe, that she could inspire such a reaction.
As she stared, Darien leapt from behind her, burying his teeth in its throat. The elk bellowed—a long tragic groan as it shook frantically, trying to dislodge the gold-furred demon chewing its neck. It jerked its massive head to the side, slamming Darien into a tree. Darien fell to the ground, his back twisted and one foreleg broken so badly that the bone pierced the flesh.
She stared at him, open-mouthed. She needed to get him away. Those wounds…
He barked at her, and inarticulate as it was, it drew her attention back to the rampaging elk. It reared, blood flowing down its chest, frothing from the wound in its neck, and she barely had time to dodge before its forelegs came crashing down where she had just been.
It had stopped being a game.
Anger came easy. She looked at the bellowing creature spinning around and felt a cold fury envelop her. She growled and leapt, not at the neck as the elk thrashed and reared, but at the rear legs. Her jaws seized on its left hind leg as it reared at her, biting down above the joint so hard that she felt the bone splinter in her mouth. The beast screamed and fell forward. She moved in the opposite direction, then spun around to see it thrashing on the ground with three legs.
Most of the fourth leg dangled from her mouth.
As she stood there, realizing the enormity of what she had just done, Darien moved to the front of the thrashing beast, bent down, and finished tearing out its throat. He showed no sign of a broken back or a fractured leg.
He lifted his bloodstained muzzle from the elk’s throat, then lowered his face into the soft underside of the dead beast. Watching him attack the elk, Maria realized how hungry she was. The changes and the running had left her with a burning emptiness, and the blood from the leg in her mouth tasted like the sweetest wine.
She lowered herself to the ground and set the elk’s leg down in front of her. Something of the human within her rebelled at the thought of raw, unskinned meat. To the wolf, however, the freshness of it had a scent more appetizing than any cookfire.
While Darien buried his head in the guts of the elk’s carcass, Maria held her leg down with her forepaws and tore strips of flesh off the bone. She ate slowly, savoring the taste, the sensation of the raw flesh sliding down her throat, the feeling of quenching the fire in her belly.
She finished eating before he did. The leg of the beast was more than she needed. When she was done, she rested her muzzle on her forepaws. Her body was content, allowing her to think.
I am a wolf …
What did this mean to the old Maria? Was that person gone? Had she ever existed? The feeling of power Darien had shown her was intoxicating—and terrifying. At the moment, with her belly full, she could easily imagine running deep into the woods, far past where her mother had lived, wrapping herself in this wolf skin and never coming back.
The thought was alluring, but something in her balked at it. What about her family, her brothers, her real mother: the woman who had raised her? They deserved more than to mourn her disappearance.
And what about Josef?
She shook her head, as if some river water were still trapped in her ears. Why had she thought about Josef? Him, of all people? For all she might care for him, want to be with him, what she was now was, to Josef, a soulless beast at best, and a demon at worst. He was part of the Order that hunted Darien, had killed his family …
Did Darien know, showing her this, that he was doing to her what the Order had done to him? Taking away her family, everything she had ever cared about?
That’s unfair. My family, even Josef, will live without me.
Wouldn’t they?
She looked at the beautiful, brutal animal eviscerating the carcass in front of her. Darien had just slaughtered eight men. She had no doubt of the truth of his statements; they certainly would have killed him, given the chance. But the hunt for him would be redoubled now. Maria could not imagine Telek leaving his uncle’s death unavenged, and could not imagine the Duke abiding the loss of his chosen deputy. Even without the Order’s presence, all of Gród Narew would now be arrayed against Darien.
And Josef? She remembered him vowing to “finish this thing.” This thing. Her. Whatever she felt or thought she felt, whatever Josef might feel—she was the monster he hunted. There was no way around it, no way to fix it. She wasn’t human, and there was no place for her with Josef, or her family, no matter what she pretended to be.
All she had now was Darien.
And if Josef and the Order had their will, she wouldn’t even have that.
What can I do?
Perhaps if she talked to Josef, maybe she could convince him to lead the Order away from here, to look for their wolves somewhere else. Leave these woods safe for Darien.
For her.
Darien lifted a shaggy, bloodstained head from the carcass of the elk and looked at her. She stood, stretching, as he watched. For a moment he seemed angry, as if he was upset that she had finished eating first. However, there was something else in his eyes, and in his scent.
When he leapt over the carcass, she knew it was his turn to chase her.