She crept over to the one window in the room and peered over the side, hoping to gain some insight into where exactly she was. The light outside was the kind of purple-gray that only came with dusk. She felt her heart stop for a moment in her chest and her head begin to pound even harder than it had been before.

If she was correct in her thinking, she had been unconscious for almost a full day. Just the thought of it was terrifying, that she could have lost a whole day, especially with these people who were most definitely not her friends. It only added to her level of disorientation and made any hope of people locating her grow all the more dim. As if it hadn’t been dim enough.

She had left of her own volition. She had left, written a note and walked out like it was the easiest thing in the world. She had done everything she could to keep Joshua from coming after her, or anyone else, for that matter. There was so little chance that they would do so anyway and even less chance that they would find her locked away in this god forsaken place.

As far as Alina could tell, all was basically lost. It was probably no less than she deserved. She had come in between two people who loved each other and that was a crime of morality she had hoped never to be the perpetrator of. If you believed in karma, which she was starting to find that she did, that wasn’t the sort of thing that went unanswered. Perhaps this was just the punishment she deserved.

Lost in those thoughts, at first she saw nobody outside of the window. She saw nothing but thick trees and dark earth. But slowly, as her eyes adjusted even further, she saw an alarming number of great wolves slinking through the trees towards the house. She gasped and jumped backwards so quickly that the pounding in her head reached a level she was sure would cause her to pass out.

The wolves were moving towards the house as if it were the most normal thing in the world, as if they belonged there. But how could that be? Did these crazy people actually keep wolves as pets? What kind of people did that?

But then, right before her eyes, the wolves began to change. They contorted, morphed into something else, and then they were walking towards her as men. They were like Joshua, like most everyone living in the town of Charlotte, only they were wolves instead of bears. There was that, but also the level of danger they presented. These shifters did not see her as anything but a good time, something to be used and then thrown away. She was in real, acute trouble that she could not see how to get out of.

Pages: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46