Page 37 of Captive Wilderness
If I didn’t let her go, we’d be here for the remainder of the day. I stepped back from the wall. As we separated on a groan, her legs slid to the ground. Then she straightened and winced.
My entire body went on alert. I yanked up my jeans and tugged her away from the wall. A six-inch swath of red and raw skin had been scraped on her lower back by the logs.
Ihadhurt her. Angry at myself for not taking more care, I clenched my fists.
“It’s okay,” she said, putting a comforting hand on my arm. “It’s a good kind of hurt. A shift will take care of it.” To prove her point, she backed away, smoothly shifted into her bobcat form, and did a lap around the cabin. The ease with which she shifted made me envious.
Conflicted, I stood there a long moment, then blinked. It was like she’d known what I was feeling.
18
BROOKE
I couldn’t decideif I was trapped in a dream or if it was real life.
My feet led me through the schoolyard. Not my school, someone else’s. But I knew the school, so how did that make sense?
Kids played. Birds chirped. It was recess. Distinctive groups formed around me. Humans, cougars, bears, and other forest shifters. Everyone looked human, but I knew some weren’t by their scents. They watched me. This was my first week at Goldenlach Ridge Elementary, grade seven, and I’d been labeled an outsider. We’d moved here after my grandfather was put down, to get away from the stares and speculation of those of my old town.
Wait. What? I never had a grandfather who’d been put down.
No, he had been. He’d gone full-blown rabid just like my father who now lived permanently as a bear. A genetic trait. Sometimes my mother would look at me, worry on her face before she erased it. She didn’t look at Sabrina that way, only me.
No, my sister’s name was Emily. Wasn’t it?
Noises, someone fighting, drew my attention. A group of boys stood in a loose circle, two deep. I couldn’t really see who was in the middle. A particularly loudoohmade me move closer. It took me a few seconds to wedge my way through the crowd far enough to see what was going on. Then I froze.
It wasn’t two boys brawling, getting rid of aggression in a fair fight. It was a bigger boy, and he held down his prey by her wrists.Her.It was a girl, a human. Way smaller than him, maybe like ten years old. Her bright red hair frizzed out in every direction. She had blood on her face. The boy holding her down, a dickhead named Tom, another grizzly, straddled her.
My vision hazed red. I roared and pushed through the crowd, grabbed Tom by his nape and threw him. He hit three guys in the toss, landing on his ass. At first, anger colored his expression, but then he saw me. Blood covered his knuckles. Behind me, the girl whimpered. The red haze darkened. My vision narrowed down to nothing more than the sniveling face of that prick.
“She hit me first—”
He didn’t get a chance to finish the sentence because my fist connected with his eye. Then I was on him, choking the life out of him, then punching. I couldn’t stop. I didn’t want to stop.
The things around me didn’t exist, only my fists hitting his face. Only my rage existed.
There were adults there now. Some were shouting at me. The words “police” and “parents” and “expelled” were thrown around. I didn’t care. All I wanted to do was finish what I started—to make sure Tom never hurt anyone again.
The world spun around me until it slowed in a blur of yellow striped wallpaper. Our kitchen smelled the same as always: the fabric softener coming through from the laundry room, bread cooking in the toaster, the peanut butter jar left open on the table. As Mom busied herself with the dishes from last night, I took a bite of the corner of my toast while Sabrina spread jam on hers.
“Do we have a dad?” I asked after I finished my bite.
Mom froze at the sink. Sabrina stared at me, her eyes bulging.
Since no one answered, I went on. “I know you said once we did, but I’ve never met him, so maybe you were trying to be nice. Sue called me a bastard. I don’t even know what that is, but it didn’t sound very good, so I pushed her and called her a liar.”
My mother partially turned toward me, a plate in her hand. “You don’t need a dad, you have me.”
“I know that.” Of course I did. She was a good mom, didn’t yell like Sue’s mom, didn’t make us do a hundred chores on the weekend like Davy’s dad. “But we have an awful lot of uncles, and we only see them once or twice before they’re gone. There was Uncle Reggie and Uncle Terrence, and Uncle Peter, and Uncle—”
“That’s enough.” Mom’s voice bit out fast and harsh, unlike her. My whole body stilled, becoming alert. Sabrina’s face had gone white. Then she was moving, impossibly changing into a tree, one of many as I walked beside Landon on the well-beaten path through the forest. The entire setting had changed, as had the people with me.
“If you lose it when you shift,” Landon said, his tone pointedly calm, “then just don’t shift, man. I don’t. It’s uncivilized.”
His voice cut through the quiet of the forest around us. We walked along the creek, picking up stones as we went, seeing if we could skip them to the other side. The guy wore loafers instead of runners like everyone else our age. It always made me shake my head. When we’d met the first week I’d moved to Goldenlach Ridge, I’d thought he was a preppy asshole. He’d mellowed on me since.
We slowed our pace when a boy a little older than us jumped in our path. A cougar shifter I recognized, in high school this year. He usually liked to hang out with his own kind.
