Wolfsong (Green Creek 1)

I wondered then if all my scars were gone, the marks that made up the map of my life. If they’d all healed too. The thin line on the back of my neck where I’d caught it going through a barbed-wire fence when I was six. The small divot from chicken pox on my cheek when I was nine. The mark on my right forearm from when my daddy had been drunk and had thought it’d be funny to toss a brick at me to catch. That one had gotten me six stitches and an apology.

I couldn’t look. I didn’t know how I’d feel to see them gone.

I was more myself now. The wolf was pushed back. I thought it was because Joe was near. I could feel all the others, more than I’d ever felt before. Two days ago, they’d been there, but the edges had been blurred. Now, they were all crystal clear. They were waiting for us. We’d get there. Soon.

Joe said, “I turned you because I couldn’t let you go.” It was the first time he’d spoken in almost an hour.

I sighed. “I know.”

“Are you angry?”

“No. I’m not angry at being a wolf.”

“But you’re angry.”

“No.”

“Ox.”

“Not really. I don’t know. I can’t tell what’s my anger and what’s yours. It’s like… it’s going through me and—”

“Feedback loop,” he said.

“I don’t know what that is.”

“It’s a circuit. A circle. Completed between you and me. Everything I feel is everything you feel.”

I nodded slowly. “Is it always going to be like t

his? It’s….”

“Overwhelming?”

“Yeah.”

“No, it won’t,” he said. “You’re newly turned. Everything is dialed up. Once you get the hang of it, you can control it better.”

I thought that sounded right, but it didn’t help me now. “So we’re both angry, then.”

He snorted, hands pressing harder against my stomach. “Nah. It’s just me right now. I’m pissed off.”

“At me.”

“Damn fucking right I am.”

“Oh.”

“Why?”

I didn’t play dumb. I didn’t think I’d be able to anymore. “Because if there was a chance he wouldn’t hurt you, then I had to take it. And the others. The humans. I couldn’t… I couldn’t leave them, Joe. I just couldn’t.”

“You should have told me.”

“Kinda makes the whole heroic thing moot if I tell everyone about it.”

The breath he let out then was more of a sob than anything else, but we waited until he was okay again.

“You can’t do that again,” he said finally.