But goose bumps ripple and rise, and the back of my neck tingles as if someone’s blown on it—because a tiny part of me believes…he might be telling the truth.
Before I have time to fully process why, the door behind Gannon swings open, and an older woman in pink scrubs carrying a black medical bag strides confidently in. I whimper at the sight of her.
How can I possibly take in anymore right now? I’m hemmed into a corner and considering the possibility that everything I saw last night wasn’t a hallucination. I can’t take anything or anyone else—
She sets down her bag on the desk and raises her hands as if to show me she’s not a threat, but that only sets off all the red flags, because every damned person in this town has tried to disarm me this way, and I keep ending up hurt.
“Hello. I’m Imogen. I’m a healer.” Her gaze sweeps over me, assessing me clinically before she turns to Ellery. “This definitely isn’t the Fade. But she looks like she’s about to shift for the first time and can’t quite get there.” Turning to Morgan Arcan, she asks, “Alpha, permission to assist her magically?”
Morgan Arcan nods just as Ellery adds, “She’s a naif,” repeating the term he used earlier.
Imogen grimaces in response and it looks like she’s biting back a string of expletives. Or I might be projecting, because right now I’m filled to the brim with curse words and fear and anger.
When she turns a pitying expression my way, I want to smack her.
All I want is for someone to tell me none of this is real and let me leave.
I just want this to be a vivid nightmare.
But, instead of telling me what I want to hear, Imogen says, “I’m here to get you through your first shift, okay?” The woman’s voice has the low tone of a chain-smoker. And everything she’s saying sounds as unappealing as a cigarette.
“First shift. What the motherfuck?”
“You’re about to shift into your wolf for the first time. It’s going to hurt, and it’s going to be confusing, but we’ll be right here with you. We’ll get you through it. And we’ll show you how to be the shifter you were always meant to be,” Morgan Arcan speaks steadily.
I start to shake my head, but Ellery chimes in gently, “Noah, the process has already started. She’s just here to help.”
Process. What fucking process?
“Unfortunately, you’re too far in right now, so the discussion will have to come after—” Imogen cuts herself off and hastily chants a few words I can’t understand. Then a pearlescent mist glimmering with blues and yellows rises from her palms and starts to fill the room.
Holy fucking shit!
I stare at it, gobsmacked, completely at a loss about what I’m seeing.
The mist crawls closer but, as much as I don’t want it to touch me, there’s nowhere for me to run. A warm tingling sensation washes over me when the strange haze makes contact. Befuddled, I remain frozen until the warmth morphs into a blaze, and the blaze becomes scorching.
I scream as I start to burn from the inside out.
The mist immediately rips away from me like some beast on a leash, and the pain ebbs. I swallow a sob.
Panicked shouting fills the room, and everyone rushes toward me. I raise my arms to try and stop them from coming any closer, and that’s when I notice something sliding beneath my skin.
Horrified, I lift my hands only to see my veins darken from pale bluish green to jet black.
“Why isn’t she shifting? What’s wrong?” someone demands.
“She has a block on her. I can feel the magic woven into her aura. I didn’t even think to check. We have to stop the shift, or it could kill her,” Imogen states.
Snarls fill the room, and the black inside my veins starts to rush up my arms. I scream again and it morphs into a drawn out, yowling note.
Oh god, what’s happening to me?
“Calm her down to stall her shift. I have a spell, but I need a few minutes,” the woman orders, moving to the desk where she starts pulling things out of her medical bag.
“Noah. It’s okay. Just relax…” Ellery encourages, and if I could stop freaking the fuck out long enough, I’d show him exactly what I think about being told to relax while I’m fucking dying.
“Let’s take a deep breath and calm down a second,” Morgan tells me, only I can see him right in front of me, and his mouth hasn’t moved.
No, instead, it’s as if he’s crawled into my head, his intense gaze never leaving mine as the echo of his words plummets under the weight of my other panicked thoughts. He didn’t mutter those words aloud at all, and yet I heard them crystal clear inside my mind, which is not possible.
Nothing in this room right now is possible.
“Breathe with me. In and out. In and out.”
Those warm mental fuzzies from before are back, buzzing around me, and I try to hit them, claw at them, bite at them, but there are too many. In a great swarm, they land, covering me and somehow wrapping me into a cocoon, holding me tight.
“Feel that? You’re safe. This town is a safe space for people like you and me. Like my son and his denmates. I need you to trust me…trust us. We’re here to help you.”
But something about this extra presence inside my head, the calm that’s not my own, the uninvited voice trailing across my synapses, and most of all that phrase, “I need you to trust me”—it all lights a fuse that I didn’t even know existed. A short one that leads to a bomb I had no idea was buried inside my brain, but then it detonates, and I screech, “Get out!”
“Shit,” Morgan Arcan gasps, stepping back like my words were a physical blow.
“What’s happening?” Ellery looks at his dad.
“She shut down the mental link,” he answers, seemingly shocked. “And she’s too strong for my alpha influence to work when she’s not connected to the pack yet.”
“Noah,” Gannon calls to me at the same time Ellery swears and turns back to me. “Noah,” Gannon commands again, and something in his tone has my frantic eyes snapping to him. “Look,” he tells me, lifting his hand so I can see.
At first I don’t know what he’s trying to show me, but then I see the black line moving over the hard muscle of his forearms, and I’m thunderstruck by the sight.
“That’s right,” he assures me, his voice confident and calm. “I have them too.”