Chapter 1

1

Hide.

Don’t run. If you do, he’ll find you.

It’s not cowardice to stay alive. It’s called survival.

Hide.

Four letters. A single word command. So easy to consider, so hard to do when instincts argued every step of the way. Brambles cut at his fur, but he scrunched down more tightly to the ground, using the weeds’ natural coloring to help disguise his own. He couldn’t do much about his scent except pray the recently fertilized field adjacent to his cover was enough to put the others off. And the night…

He could do even less about the full moon hanging low behind the trees.

His ears twitched at every sound. When a distant baying echoed and rolled around the valley, his hackles rose involuntarily, and his lip curled. If he dared to believe the wolf was alone, he might risk venturing from his hiding spot to tear his throat out.

But the first howl was met with a second, then a third, until the chorus of death resounded across the earth. He wanted to dig at the packed dirt and bury himself out of sight, but one wrong move, one wrong sound, and all was done. He couldn’t even risk closing his eyes because if they showed up, he would need every one of his senses to fend them off. Not that he thought he could. Not that a small part of him even thought he should. They were his brethren, damned souls or not. The beast in his heart believed it was their right to do with him as they wished.

They’ll kill you.

They had to find him first.

* * * *

At the first line of pink along the horizon, the shift began.

It started in his bones, in the very marrow, the core of who and what he was. When he’d been young, his father had terrified him with stories about how their kind was captured so scientists could harvest their marrow for their vicious experiments. It was better to be killed than to be caught. That was the lesson learned. He still lived by that creed, though these days, it was more out of certain terror of what Perry would do to him if he ever caught up. But somewhere in the back of his mind, he always wondered if there was truth in the old tales. Because when he changed, whether from wolf to human, or human to wolf, it always began in the same deep pits of his being.

It hurt, too. Both ways. Whether bones had to shrink or muscles had to stretch, the eruptions beneath his skin burned away everything else until he thought he’d die from the transformation. The pain was the reason so many of his kind howled as soon as the change was done. Baying at the demonic moon responsible for the rhythms of their bodies released all the pent-up anguish to make the night manageable.

The fact that Andre couldn’t had forced him to find other ways to cope with the pain. Not all of them were healthy. None of them banished the aches like howling did for the others. Reverting to his human form was easier, if only because he could turn to pharmaceuticals to help deal with the residual pains.

It wasn’t swift. He often wished for the magic of Hollywood, where glittery dust would shower down upon the writhing beast and transform him into the naked hunk of the month within the blink of an eye. How much better would his life have been if he could have withstood the change with more grace, more efficiency? Instead, he was trapped in this endless game of hide and seek, waiting for the jaws to snap one final time. There were only two ways to end it, and he wasn’t strong enough to make the necessary kill. He’d learned that lesson the hard way.

So he endured the transformation. The rising sun bled over the edges of the world, rousing both beast and beauty, and quelled the silent howls trapped inside his skin for another cycle. He lay curled into a tight ball beneath the bushes and focused on his breathing. In. Out. Another day to live. Another night survived. Whether he liked it or not.

* * * *

His rusted-out pickup rumbled off the dirt road where he’d kept it parked overnight and onto the strip that would lead him to M-20 and back to Remus. Residents would be slow to get up on this sleepy Saturday. The town didn’t really bustle except during the school runs and Sunday mornings. The needle on the gas tank was dangerously low, too, so the smart choice would be to return and fill up at the Mobil Station. He’d have a job waiting for him as well. All it would take was turning right at the T-junction and heading back.