Wolf Bargain (Wolfish 3)

“Just feel the wolf nature inside of you,” Marlowe says, taking my hand. “It’ll come.”

“Here,” Kaleb adds, with a mischievous smile. “We’ll help you a little.”

Their eyes suddenly begin to glow in that warn golden color that looks like melted gold and the three of them stand around me with their chests and other body parts pressed against me.

I can feel them, and our bond; and as they start to transform, I can feel the primal and urgent nature of their shift. I feel it call to me and I feel my body want to join them, which it does.

It’s not at all painful.

The transformation feels like a big stretch that has been long overdue or a yawn that has been held in for much too long. It feels as if my body is finally allowed to just simply be.

I shake my head and instead of feeling my hair fall around my neck, I feel the rippling fur that is covering my body move against the air. I smell the air through a new keen nose, and I feel four legs and paws touching four points on the ground beneath me.

I look at the boys, who now look back at me with their glowing canine eyes and I can see my reflection in those eyes. Mine are glowing too. They circle around me and I rub my muzzle against each of their sides and noses, leaning into each new feeling and being surrounded by the presence of our deepening bond.

Then, after we have had a moment of closeness in our wolf shifted forms, Rory lifts his head toward the sky and howls. At his cue, the Kaleb and Marlowe do the same. And then, with a glint in his eye, Rory takes off running. The other two wait for a second to make sure I know what to do, but this is what I have been ready for the whole time. I push off my feet, and I run like hell.

The feeling of the wind in my face and the scurrying padding of my fast paws that seem to fly across the ground are everything that I had hoped them to be. I look to my sides and see the boys running alongside me and I think and feel everything that I can soak up from this experience of my very first shift.

I am in love with being a wolf and I am in love with the three of them.

Tonight we will run and run until we can’t possibly run anymore, and then we will collapse together and make love until the moon ducks below the trees.

I know that this won’t be the end of the pack’s struggles. I know that there will be more challenges ahead. But there is a peace now that hasn’t been there before. A peace that we all fought hard for and will have to fight hard to keep.

But I have a family now, a real one.

I know deep inside of me that I won’t be able to have any more pups after this, I can sense it as much as I can sense my own breaths. But that’s okay. My body fought to keep my babies and for that I couldn’t be more grateful.

I already have everything that I have ever needed or wanted, and I already have three pups which is more than enough to fill my heart with happiness. Not only did our pups defeat all odds of survival, but they also look eerily like Rory, Marlowe, and Kaleb, which means that our bond is more fulfilled than any of us could have hoped.

And tomorrow, when we wake curled up in each other’s arms and hold our pups to our faces; they will all get names.

Because the danger is passed.

And maybe this chapter of my life will have ended, but it only means a new one is truly beginning.

Epilogue

Sabrina

There are no longer only three hundred people in North Port, Washington.

Not if they’re going to count the number of shifters coming in droves to live by the banks of the same winding river that once nearly claimed my life.

With Remus gone, a new peace has settled over the alliance of shifters. And with it has come a new sense of permanence.

For the packs, and also for myself.

When I first came here with my mother all those years ago—determined to leave the past behind and keep anyone else from getting too close to me—I never imagined once that this is where it would lead me.

But who could?

In the span of a year and a half, everything in my life was turned upside down.

First by the shifters Rory, Marlowe, and Kaleb.

And then, maybe even more, by three others.