Cole sipped her coffee and looked me over.
“You need to stop this game now, Cole,” I told her.
She set the mug down.
“This isn’t a game. At sunset, you will shift as you are meant to,” she said.
I marched to the table.
“Wolfsbane prevents the shift and is perfectly safe. It’s been used since records began,” I countered.
“It’s meant to be used sparingly,” Cole said. “I spoke with the Pack physician, and it is not perfectly safe to use continuously for years without any breaks. The risks are well documented. Chronic suppression affects your mood, anxiety, depression, emotional blunting, and insomnia. It impacts your fertility significantly; do you want children one day? It puts you at risk of hypertension, stroke, and arrhythmias. It affects your instincts, reflexes, memory, and your sense of smell! It makes you physically weaker; your muscles, joints, bones, and immune function are all impaired,” she listed off, one after another like a reprimanding schoolteacher, her coffee forgotten about.
“I don’t care!” I shouted.
“I do,” she said.
“No, you don’t!” I continued angrily. “You don’t even know me. All you want from me is my body. Just another alpha wanting to get your claws in me.”
Cole stood, her chair hitting the wall behind her.
“You’re mine,” she said, like a warning. “If I wanted to have you, I would,” she told me.
“Like last night?” I challenged.
“Last night was a mistake. It won’t happen again,” she answered.
The words made my headache pulse painfully. I was offended and shocked by my own reaction.
“Harriet,” she said softly, and it made me feel sick, like I might actually throw up, the way I knew she saw me. “I understand you’re scared to shift tonight—”
“You don’t know anything,” I said and swallowed past the lump forming in my throat, trying to ignore the tightness in my chest.
I couldn’t do it again. The event itself wasn’t the worst of it; it was the realisation that everything was ending. The fear of the void; the darkness that creeps in with the cold, and if that fear subsides and the coldness recedes in its place, is scorching pain. The kind that rips the air from you in screams that char your throat on the way out.
“The scars, they’re from your first shift?” she asked.
“Don’t,” I warned.
Cole nodded.
“You will shift tonight, and I promise I will not allow any harm to come to you. We will shift together, away from the rest of the pack. I’ve already picked out a location and given instructions to the wardens not to allow anyone to wander too close to us,” she told me.
“You want me alone,” I accused.
“Yes, but not like you’re insinuating. I won’t tolerate any more arguments about it. Sit down. I’ve ordered breakfast.”
***
Cole didn’t let me out of her sight for the rest of the day. I used the bathroom, and she was waiting in the hallway for me. It was like she thought I was going to run away.
What would be the point? I was going to shift whether I wanted to or not without access to wolfsbane. I couldn’t run from the full moon.
As morning became late afternoon, we left the house and took Cole’s car on the short drive to the car park of the privately managed forest of Lucian Hill.
There were only a couple of other cars already parked.
I got out as Cole opened the boot and shouldered a rucksack of supplies.
