I remembered the way he’d grabbed the knife from me back at the Scottish kingdom castle, then licked my neck while he held it at my throat.
“Are you cold?” Sea asked, mistaking the reason for my full body shiver. “Here, take my cloak.”
And that was how I came to find myself making an extremely unplanned run for the tower.
Dad genes, don't fail me now!
“Bragging is against the St. Ailbe Ordnung, yeah, yeah, yeah. But you should know your father was the reigning winner of the Accra Championship Youth Run three years in a row,"my Ghanaian father once told me after I won one of the foot races he often challenged me to when no one else could see us breaking the St. Ailbe Ordnung's forbearance against competitive one-on-one sports."Itcould have been four, but my parents sent me to Canada for university, and I was happily saved from my dismal lifelong fate before I could go back. Just know, you get your gift of speed from me.”
Being "saved" from his "dismal lifelong fate" was the quaint way my father described getting bitten by a werewolf on a Bible club camping trip and eventually converting to Wölfennite after meeting my born-werewolf mother at a fair where she was selling Amish butter.
He thought his Wölfennite origin story was cute. But as I grew older in a community that didn't provide girls' schooling past the eighth grade, I became increasingly horrified that he’d never finished his university education as planned.
All because of some random wolf.
My whirling thoughts crashed. Speaking of random wolves…
In my peripheral distance, I could see Wild drop his phone and immediately give chase, charging toward me like a hunter born.
Crap! Crap! Crap!
I bore down to run through what looked like an old wooden door but slid open with sleek mechanical ease to reveal a dark, empty space just as I reached it.
Oh no!
I jerked to a hard stop to avoid crashing into the other side of the stone tower's wall when I entered…
Nothing.
I ran into the black space beyond the door and found nothing. There was just a slight rising sensation as if I had stepped onto the elevator we rode in the Scottish airport again.
And then suddenly, I was standing inside a circle of stones.
What in the…?
I looked all around and saw that the stones appeared to be sitting on top of a cliff overlooking the sea."
I had no idea where I was, but it smelled…I sniffed the air several times to be sure…and yes, this place smelled like the real world.
The ground scent was where it was supposed to be, underneath my feet, as opposed to somewhere faint above my head. And it no longer smelled like a cave while looking like a fantasy world.
The grey sky overhead threw uneven shadows on the non-uniform green and brown ground beneath my black shoes, and the air felt like the sky looked — not temperate but dank and chilly.
I stepped out onto the non-sea facing side of the circle and discovered, in a shockingly cold way, that the stones had been protecting me from a fierce, gusting wind. It bit into the bare skin on my arms, neck, and face — the polar opposite of the warm, fan-like breezes in the secret kingdom.
No, I hadn’t been cold when Sea offered me his royal blue cloak, but the whipping wind made me wonder if I should have taken it.
However, that regret slipped out of my head when I saw the structure in the distance. Just a few kilometers away.
Not another tower, but a two-story brick house. And maybe a few more kilometers beyond that lay a small town on the other side of a mountain.
Civilization!
If the town was filled with unknowing humans, I could find help for me and all the other she-wolves trapped beneath that stone circle. And if they were in league with our kidnappers like those guys who took Sadie, I could hide out until I managed to steal or find a phone or a computer I could use tocontact my sister.
Either way, all I had to do was…
Run!
