She catches my arm in her mouth, that commanding snidey tone on show once more, and tugs me hard as she can to get me going. I know she wants to put distance between me and Colton, and I don’t blame her for choosing me over the plan.
It’s only then, when I have to fight gravity and momentum of moving, that it dawns on me I’m doing so much worse than I thought. My vision is all over the place, and I’m struggling to walk straight, my head spinning. I stumble and fall onto all fours after only a few steps forward, letting out an exasperated noise, unable to hide how much I’m suffering. I throw up a mouthful of blood and spit in disgust, retching on more. Carmen hesitates, looks out into the chaos, and seems to struggle to decide what to do.
I’ll find Sierra, stay. Look, behind you, in the log. Get in and lay down. Hide. I’ll be fast, please…I beg of you…stay concealed.
This time I don’t argue. I know this is bad and I’m losing use of my limbs and even the sensation of my fingers and toes. I can hear a soft high pitch tone rattling inside my brain and the bleeding hasn’t eased up at all. My head’s aching, my sight’s completely out of whack and I know something is really wrong with my mind. My wolf is writhing and whining to let her come out to help me, and I have to grip on with every ounce of willpower to stop the self-preservation kicking in to make me turn. It’s a battle in itself and it drains me as fast as this new injury is doing.
Despite the sun rising high enough to warm my bones there’s a coldness seeping through me as I struggle to take control, and I barely manage to crawl into the fallen log Carmen guides me to. I feel like a coward having to hide but I have no choice. The witch was right and like this I’m weak, no match for a wolf, especially not Colton.
I either have to accept fate and lose the lives within to save my pack, live on to keep fighting for them, or succumb to the fact that I can’t do this, and I need to retreat and hide to save my children. My pack or my babies…. that’s what this comes down to and I can’t choose to let go of my own blood.
My heart breaks open and the internal wracking guilt gnaws at my sanity. I’m instantly so consumed with sudden grief that when I slump into my hiding place, I fail to check around me before seeing Carmen shoot off in pursuit of my healing mother-in-law. My entire focus on the damp earth under my flat palms as I lay on my front and shallowly breath through the mist of my own broken eyesight.
The log is ripped from around me, so sudden, in the blink of an eye that I can’t react. I grip the fallen debris below my fingers in haste to cling on, as I’m trundled out like a floppy rag onto the ground into a disheveled heap and discarded. The huge black silhouette of my worst nightmare, and best dream, towers over me and snarls in satisfaction that he found his prey once more.
I lift my frail hand in an attempt to muster what power I have left, and it dies on me completely, ebbing away like a flickering flame that’s been caught in an airless room.
I’m seeing two of him, my head aching, my throat dry and my limbs no longer functioning. Heaped in an awkward position on uneven ground, because I’m so fatigued, I can’t move myself. My gift even as a wolf has given up on me, the will to turn is all that claws inside, and I need to choose how this goes.
Save myself…. Kill them.
Let him take me, we die anyway, and yet the pack may yet survive.
Could I live on with the knowledge I took my babies lives? Could I look him in the eye and watch him destroy himself with the guilt that he did this when the spell finally breaks?
No. I can’t. I’d rather die than live with his pain, and mine, and the loss of them.
Colton lifts me up by the throat, choking me with his sheer pulsating strength, even without gripping hard. Pulling my lifeless body to him as though I’m a mere scrap of rubbish. My eyes mist over as emotions consume me and I stare helplessly into the dead and empty eyes of the man I love more than anything in the world. It’s his body, his wolf, but he’s not in there anymore and nothing I do will change it. Physically he’s hurting me as he presses just a little, but emotionally he’s destroying the last ounces of my soul and I begin to sob like a broken child. Pain coursing through every nerve ending.
I know this is it…. My life, or theirs, and the way this is looking, they will die anyway if I don’t turn. Because Colton isn’t about to stop. My wolf can’t defeat him either. I must face the reality of this.
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