Wild Side (Dark Side Series: Book 2)

Thirty-Four

"Love Can Only Heal"

This is the kind of awesome song I'd have playing over those moments in a tv series where you flash through each character at season's end, but I got chapters so I can't do that lol, so just enjoy the ever and always talented Myles Kennedy!

Evan's feet churned through the springy soil with hardly a pause or misstep. In the coming night, at this distance, it was impossible to see his expression, but he seemed direct and so forward in his progress, a compass ticking toward true north.

Ticking toward me.

Ticking toward death.

The moss, the trees, the back of my hand and my skin flickered abruptly with the warmth of a green fire. I turned my head away from the man momentarily to look over my shoulder.

The shaman, possessed, possessive, smiled from the far side of billowing flames. Nightjars fluttered like bats overhead. A ring of broken headstones kept the fire in check, while the decayed ground beyond flexed and seemed to breathe.

I eased my feet onto the rough roots of the closest tree.

"You like it hard?" Jaxon called, dark eyes flicking from my dirty toes to the soured expression on my lips. He'd removed his shirt while I'd been watching Evan, and had in its place slipped on a delicate feathered headdress and an intricately beaded necklace of lapis lazuli and other colorful, misshapen stones.

"You won't be around to find out," I told Jaxon, rolling my shoulders back, taking a nervous breath, turning my gaze toward the graveyard. Tasha had unwound herself from the statue's arms and slipped away into the shadows. She reappeared as a pale face on tightly coiled haunches in the branches of the trees overhead. Behind Jaxon, dark fur just catching the profile of thick guard hairs, lounged a massive wolf. The missing paw that had hobbled him at the end of his life had been replaced with a greyed, fleshy hand of some half-human werebeast.

The wolf's yellowed nails tapped the ground impatiently, and then Jaxon yelled at it to move back, and it rose–on three paws and the one hand–and slunk a few feet back into the brush.

Jaxon tossed first the dog then the hen onto the fire. A searing stench crackled into the dead space between stars. My stomach rumbled at the odor. It took every ounce of a strength I had to keep from lunging into the fire after the meat.

The wendigo's curse was not a demonic possession, though Zakar knew how to kickstart the transformation. The wendigo, I had come to the guilty realization as Zakar kept my mind full and aware in the later transformations, was me. I think a part of me kept it separate, made it its own entity, called it by another name because it was easier to think that it wasn't me than to deal with the consequences that it was.

But the wendigo was down there under my skin, in my belly, flexing, scratching at the surface of my brain, pleading with me to change. Pleading with me that we were hungry, so hungry, that we needed this or we would die. We needed this or everyone would die.

The sickly glow of flame burned shadows below Evan's eyes. "Irene!" he exclaimed as he drew nearer, slowing the last ten yards to get a good long view of my nakedness. I was thankful for every second of greying dark. "I tried calling, but you-"

"My phone's dead," I said quickly, and swallowed him up in my arms. With just a little wiggle his attention shifted to friction. One big hand rested hesitantly on my waist, and then he pulled away slightly, his eyes on the man looming behind us. Before he could utter another word, I turned and waved a hand.

"This is one of my packmates, Jaxon Valentine."

"Shit, that's a cool name," Evan said, holding out his hand.