Soul Bound

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Nineteen

The woman, the babies, the man, the screaming.

I wake with a start, my head hurting the worst it has in weeks. My eyes are met with darkness and my nose can't make out anything; all of my senses have been dulled to uselessness. The floor is cold and hard beneath me: metal. I turn my neck so my forehead touches it; the coolness soothes my headache some. My body is horribly sore and stiff. I've probably been lying on the floor for hours now.

I try to bring my hands up to rub my eyes, but they're bound behind my back. I twist my wrists, testing the strength of the rope tied around them. If I could bring them down and over my legs I could bite at the knot with my teeth, but my shoulders and knees sting with pain the second I try to use them. There's no way I'll be able to shift like this. Into Wolf or any other form.

Wolf? What do we do? How do we get out of here?

There's no answer. She's there somewhere, but her presence feels disconnected.

Wolf, I need you, we've got to—

A pair of hands grasps onto my leg and move upwards, feeling like a blind man might over a wall for a door.

Goosebumps erupt over my skin.

"Falon, are you awake?" a voice whispers from the darkness.

River. Thank god, it's River. I turn on my side to face him and his hand squeezes my thigh. The breath from his sigh of relief blows gently over my face. As long as we're together we can figure this out.

"Yeah." I roll my forehead back and forth over the floor. "I can't see or smell anything. Wolf is asleep or something," I croak.

"It's the drugs. They'll wear off."

"Since when does a drug affect us like this?"

"Since they invented it," he says, turning me over with his bound hands, "I'm gonna try and untie you."

He curses at the rope, tearing at the knot in it.

There are others around us. I can feel them even before I can hear them groaning and shifting around. "My head is on fire. The memory is burning a hole through it," I cringe.

"It's because of the others," he explains. "You've never been around this many before. If you can't feel Wolf, it should go away soon," he says.

"River, what happened? Did you see Blythe?"

"Blythe? Why was she there?"

I bite my lip, wondering how much to tell him. "She saved me from the werewolves," I say. It's not a lie, just not the whole truth. "Did Cara and Ramsey catch you?"

He laughs. "Catch me? Nope." I can see his crooked smile in my mind. "I managed to lose them and circled back for you."

"How the hell did you outrun them?"

"I didn't. I shifted into a mouse and hid. They passed right by me." His hair brushes against the exposed skin on my back as he bites at the knot.

"A mouse? How?"

He spits bits of rope out of his mouth. "Sheer desperation. Got a broken wrist and dislocated shoulder out of it."

He's got to be a mess of broken bones by now. "Then rest. I can move better now."

"I'm fine. The drugs are numbing a lot of the pain," he says, continuing to tear at the rope with his teeth.

"How'd you get caught?"