“Give it a try?”
Taking a deep breath, I glanced down at my hand and concentrated. My mind reached out and tentatively touched my wolf’s, and I told her it was okay. I visualized what I wanted and stayed calm and open to her. After what felt like an eternity, a buzzing tingle ran through my hand, and I opened my eyes.
My entire hand and halfway up my forearm was a wolf’s paw. Fully covered in hair, bigger than a typical wolf, but otherwise, exactly what you'd see on an animal in the woods. “Holy shit,” I said, on the verge of freaking out.
“Calm down,” Nico said. “Just take a breath and relax. It’s okay. This is part of who you are. It’s something you’re doing. It’s not something that’s being done to you against your will.”
He was right. I needed to stay calm. Still, it was hard to explain how weird it was to see part of your body completely change and look unlike anything it had ever looked like before. Sucking in a heavy deep breath, I steadied myself. Nico leaned forward and gently took my paw in his hand and ran his fingers along the fur. The feeling was strangely soothing.
“It’s a regular wolf’s paw,” Nico muttered to himself.
That was a weird thing to say. Was I supposed to have a horse’s hoof or something? “Why do you say that?”
He looked at me, shaking his head. “I just wasn’t sure if you’d shift into a wolf or a werewolf. When you only did your fingers, it looked like one, and this is the other.”
He was right. I’d been wondering about that. Would my first true shift be simple, or would I be something that was strange even in the shifter world? My birth mother’s letter made it sound like my father had only ever been able to shift into a werewolf, and it was part of why he’d tried to stop shifting altogether.
I pitied him. He must have been incredibly strong mentally. To have Edemas’s reincarnated wolf inside your mind had to have been much more difficult than what I was going through.My wolf had been a young girl, a child really, when she died. That’s what I had in my head. David Samuels had an angry, powerful, and enraged former king inside his mind. It had to have taken a toll on him. There’s no way it hadn’t.
Nico and I worked on it a bit more the rest of the day, but it was exhausting, and we finally took a break. Luis texted that they were en route to the other safe house, which didn’t help my anxiety. I wanted this all over, but I also didn’t really want to go through all that it entailed.
We had a little over a week until the next full moon. In some ways, it seemed to be taking forever to get here. In others, it seemed like it was coming in the blink of an eye. I was happy that we’d been able to locate Abi, but we still had to lay eyes on my parents, make a plan, and then implement it—all of that in less than two weeks? I wasn’t sure we’d pull it off.
I couldn’t stop picturing that video of my mother getting electrocuted with that shock collar. Abi was mostly unhurt, but who knows what would happen the closer we got to the full moon? My resentment and anger at the royals was getting more intense with each passing day.
“Do you think you’re getting closer to shifting?” Nico asked as we picked at our lunch.
“A little. My wolf seems a little calmer and more at ease, but there’s still a lot of nerves and anxiety.”
Nico gave me a concerned look. “I just hope we get there soon. It would be nice if your wolf could stop fighting it. I’d love to know exactly what we’re getting into.”
“You and me both. You have no idea how stressful this is.”
“Shit, I almost forgot,” Nico said, grabbing a newspaper that was sitting off to the edge of the table. “I saw this a while ago. I think it explains why they chose the next full moon as the deadline.”
He handed me the paper, which was open to the life and sciences section. There was a headline about the next full moon being a super moon. I glanced through the article. It explained that it was when there was a full moon that passed as close to Earth as it possibly could. I looked up after reading it and frowned at Nico. “Do you think this is part of their plan?”
“It has to be. If you don’t shift before then, there’s no way your wolf would be able to resist the pull of a super moon. It’ll drag her out. I think the royals want that. That moon will have a shifter or werewolf at its strongest. Even I’ll feel it. That strength will be in their blood. I think they want to take your blood that night so it gives them the highest chance possible to open that vault.”
“I guess that makes sense,” I said.
“Right. These people have spent centuries kidnapping shifters and using their blood, then discarding them when they aren’t strong enough. They’ve murdered innocent children. There is nothing they won’t do. It has to be for the treasure that’s supposed to be hidden there.”
“What about the vial of blood? Isn’t that the main thing they want?”
“I’m sure they probably want to destroy it, yeah, but the treasure has to be the true endgame. It belongs to the actual descendants, but that doesn’t matter to them, of course.”
Sure, they wanted the treasure, but there had to be more to it than this. The royals were already incredibly rich and powerful. What was a little more money when you already had billions? No, they wanted the vial. My mother’s suspicions had seeped into me. The things I’d read inside that envelope had filled me with a sense of impending doom. Something sinister was on the way. Something that involved that small container of blood. I needed to get my mind off all this for a little while.
“Can we go check on my bar?” I said.
“Now?” Nico asked in surprise.
“Yeah. I just want to make sure things are okay. I miss it, and I haven’t been by since we shut it down.”
“As long as I go with you, sure. I don’t want you going anywhere alone in town right now.”
“I wouldn’t have it any other way. I wouldn’t feel safe on my own anyway.”
