“I know a shifter when I see one, trust me.” Sabine smiled, but it was clinical.
“I’m not a shifter. Promise.” I chuckled uncomfortably.
“Then how do you explain turning into a fox last night?” she asked.
I rolled my eyes. “Fox shifters aren’t even a thing. I would know, I’ve been hunting supes for a decade.”
And that’s when the elephant entered the room, sucking all air from my lungs.
Brock shoved a phone in my face with a video already playing. The image showed me lying on a medical bed. I was half naked, white as the moon, and covered in blood. But the longer I watched, the more my stomach dropped.
Rust-colored pelts of fur rippled down my arms, and I started to wail in pain. Brock muted the phone that instant as the whole room, including myself, flinched at the sound. Even muted, it was a horror show.
My body arched and writhed as Brock held my ankles, the doc held my shoulders, and Cass screamed while he held my face. Within a minute, I’d fully shifted into a two-foot tall fox, a sight that held the entire room captive.
I registered my own piercing violet eyes staring back at me—from the face of a fox—before Brock clicked a button and the phone went black.
My mouth dropped open. I shut it, then opened it again and tried to form words. What the ever-living fuck? In the end, I just sighed and closed my eyes.
Maybe if I fell asleep I’d wake up in a world where I hadn’t just seen myself shift into an animal that shouldn’t even exist.
8Denial Is A Town I’d Like To Move To
Funny thing,it turns out that nothing changes when you close your eyes to escape. The world is still a clusterfuck when you open them again.
Cass, Molly, Brock, Sabine, and a wolf I didn’t know still stared at me.
Cass narrowed his eyes while he studied me, and scooched his butt closer across the comforter. “How are you taking the news, hon?”
I took in the others before answering. Were they just going to keep staring at me like I was some kind of rare specimen? Apparently so.
“How do you think I’m feeling?” I asked the friend I’d had since we were eager newbies at the Hunter Academy.
“Like you want to go postal on some tin cans until you run out of ammo,” he replied.
That got the tiniest smile out of me. He knew me so well. “That sounds about right.”
Cass squeezed my hand so hard it hurt, but he didn’t say nonsense like,Sure, you shifted into a fox but everything’s going to be all right. I appreciated that about my friend. No lies, no platitudes. The teeny imp played it straight.
My gaze wandered around the room, my attention landing on the unknown. On cue, the tall, broad-shouldered Greek god stepped forward, hand outstretched. “I’m Ray.”
I recognized his voice right away. “You’re the dominant wolf who was ordered to kill Nathan as punishment?”
He nodded, and I shook his hand. “With how I feel right now, I’m wishing I’d let you do it.”
Brock’s gaze was so furious then that I felt it searing through my skull. “You should’ve let me order it,” he growled.
I didn’t know exactly what to say to him. He was intense right then, and I wasn’t usually at a loss for words. Let him? As if I had any power over the alpha.
What was that blazing in his eyes? Was he protective of me? Was he upset that I almost died? At least the mask had dropped, but I couldn’t decide exactly what he felt by the string of emotions swirling across his handsome face.
“And you should’ve fucking listened to me, and stayed put like I told you to.” He punctuated his pretty statement with a growl.
O-kay, then. So, not upset I almost died, just upset I’d disobeyed his orders. “I wouldn’t have been in danger if you’d kept a leash on your new pet,” I growled back. “That’s your bad, not mine.”
“I warned you.”
“Yeah, and I’m a grown woman who doesn’t need an overgrown dog telling me what to do!” I was naked under a comforter in a room half full of strangers. I’d just been told I was a fox shifter, a fact I was struggling to believe, no matter what kind of video evidence he had. He didnotwant to fuck with me right now.
