He went to the bed and hopped up onto it. It creaked dangerously under his heavy weight. He lay down, his paws hanging off the edge. He closed his eyes. He looked ridiculous, the bed too small for something his size. I wondered if he’d always slept there before I arrived.
“Just because you’re shifted doesn’t mean I’ll stop talking.”
He turned his head into his stomach, paws over his head.
“…AND THAT BRINGS US TO SENIOR YEAR,” I told him, hands behind my head as I lay near the fire. I’d been talking for the past three hours, hoping to get some sort of reaction out of him. I knew he wasn’t sleeping because I’d feel his eyes on me every now and then. When I’d look, he’d snap them closed, but if he was trying to be subtle, he was failing. “Which is probably my favorite of all the school years, because that’s when I lost my virginity to a nice girl named Amy. She had the biggest—”
He growled.
I grinned at the ceiling. “Something you’d like to add? Oh shit, sorry. You can’t talk right now. Sorry, dude. Where was I? Ah, right. So, Amy. She was… pretty, you know? And she laughed real loud. And Jesus Christ, she probably could suck a filament out of a lightbulb without breaking the glass.”
He growled louder.
I looked over at him.
He closed his eyes quickly, taking in slow, deep breaths like he was asleep.
“And then after Amy was Tara, and she could do this awesome twist with her wrist—something in your throat? You keep making weird noises. You all right? Yeah, you’re all right. Now where was I? Oh. Tara. Man, say what you will about small-town girls, but they sure know how to—”
The breath was knocked from my chest as he landed on top of me. I made a small croaking sound as the timber wolf covered me completely. “You… dick.”
He growled again, the underside of his snout pressed against my face.
I was about to shove him off me when I heard it.
Something big moved through the forest toward the cabin.
It pulled at my head, little whispers that I couldn’t understand.
An Alpha.
“Oh no,” I whispered into Gavin’s throat.
He spread himself out on top of me as the lumbering beast drew closer. His tail lay across my feet, his back legs against my shins. His front legs stretched along the sides of my head, and he rumbled softly in his throat.
I turned my head slightly toward the window, able to see it with one eye.
It was late afternoon. The snow had stopped falling an hour or two before, leaving what I thought was a good foot outside. The light was gray and weak, and I could see the trees in the forest.
For a moment, at least.
Because then they were blocked out by something massive in front of the window. It was vague, what I was seeing through frosted glass, a hint of shape. There was black fur over hard muscle, what I thought was a forearm. And then a large, misshapen hand appeared on the glass, long claws scraping against it as the pull of alpha alpha alpha crawled over my skin, foreign and cold.
It moved away from the window as it circled the cabin, the floor underneath me quaking with every step it took. Gavin’s heart was sonorous, a slow drumbeat against my chest.
The beast growled as it reached the south end of the house. I felt it down to my bones.
Gavin lifted his head slightly, looking toward the other window.
I tilted my head back.
A red eye stared in at us.
It blinked once. Twice.
The beast growled again before it moved away from the window.
And then it was gone, its footsteps fading away as it went back into the forest.