Page 34 of Wolfsbane

I was definitely going to puke.

Viktor jerked to a stop ahead of me. Drew had climbed up on to his shoulders and I thought—I thought when I looked down at his feet, that he was going to insist he carry me too.

I couldn’t even argue with him anymore, because I couldn’t breathe, and we were fucked, and Destiny was shouting now and I was pretty sure they were close enough that Viktor could hear too. Maybe they couldn’t see us directly, but if they’d caught our trail—fuck.

With my face cupped in both his hands, Viktor pulled me upright. He breathed slow and deep, as if he could get my lungs working again purely by example.

“It doesn’t always hurt,” he said urgently. “The shift. It’s natural. Think about your paws in the dirt. How it felt to run on four legs. It’s freedom, and if I can do magic, you can do this, zaichik.”

His fingers twisted in my shirt, pulling it up. Stunned, I lifted my arms and let him. If I didn’t figure this out, Destiny and the others were going to see more of me than they bargained for.

“The run, the hunt, the wolf. It’s all yours, as natural as standing there on two legs.”

I shut my eyes, because I couldn’t look at him or my own bare legs and really believe I was anything but what I was. Closing my eyes? That helped. And Viktor was right. It didn’t hurt to shift. I felt the strangeness of it, legs and arms rearranging, but there was no pain like there’d been when I was bound.

I fell forward on four legs, my lungs stronger, my body built for this.

I looked up, and Viktor nodded at me. He smelled . . . complicated. Proud and sad and angry, and I whined.

“Let’s go,” he pressed.

Help.

It was a single word, but a thought so clear.

We needed help.

I threw my head back and howled, and then, I took off after him.

CHAPTER 17

Viktor

Hearing my own howl from someone else’s throat was a new step of surreal in a night that had been almost nothing but surreal.

Still, it was a smart move from Daire. Or my wolf in his head, whoever had decided on it. Both, since I knew better than anyone that being a werewolf wasn’t like having two personalities.

We ran through the woods, and suddenly I was the liability, because Daire as my wolf was quick and agile, even though he seemed to be bigger than Daire himself. My wolf, I supposed, so even if it was coming from him, it was still me.

Too bad I didn’t think he was suited to fighting, because I knew that body could do some major damage to witches.

Would his bite turn them? An interesting conundrum, and I wasn’t entirely sure about the answer. It should, since he was sort of a werewolf. And yet, in fact, he was not.

I doubted they wanted to try being bitten to find out, and more than that, I was sure biting people wouldn’t be in Daire’s immediate instincts.

My wolf might change that, though . . .

He definitely wanted to take a chunk out of a few witches. All of them, maybe.

They had accepted Ermengarde murdering her own son, so as far as I was concerned, Daire was the only redeemable one of the lot.

Not that I was looking forward to convincing the pack of that.

They’d been hard pressed enough to accept Tristan, and he was one of us now. Daire wasn’t getting the bite. I wasn’t even sure it would work on him, given that he was sort of a werewolf already. Maybe like most witches, he would just die.

Crashing through the woods on two legs, I couldn’t hear if the pack was coming. Wolves were quieter than humans, and more than that, my human ears, while my wolf was literally busy being someone else’s body, weren’t all that good.

What I could hear, unfortunately, was SUVs zooming their way up the road toward the pack settlement.