Page 1 of Wolf Blood

CHAPTER ONE

harper

The face reflecting backat me in the mirror was mine, but... different.

Sharper.

Sadder.

Hungrier.

I'd been looking at it for months, and it still didn't feel like me.

Ididn't feel like me, either.

"Can I come in?" My best friend’s voice crackled through the speaker between my room and the viewing area. There was no lock on the door, and Bloom knew she didn't need permission.

Technically, the room wasn't mine at all.Not anymore.

Rhone, the Beta who I despised with at least a small piece of my soul (assuming I still had one), kept moving my stuff back to the apartment the werewolves had given me in their tower.

Which was why everything I needed lived in a hiking backpack that weighed almost as much as I did. It currently sat right next to the observation room’s door.

I used to weigh more than it.

I used to be strong, and healthy.

Now I was a shell of my past self, both figuratively and literally. A strong breeze could've knocked me over, if not for Rhone’s ridiculously delicious blood running through my veins at the moment.

I waved Bloom in.

The hair I used to keep platinum blonde and cropped sharply to my chin had grown out to the middle of my throat. The cut was weird and mullet-ish without my regular once-a-month visit to the hairdresser I loved.

The professional but sexy wardrobe I'd spent so long piecing together was tucked away in the closet of the apartment I didn’t want, replaced by faded cotton shorts and baggy t-shirts that had holes in them from when I wore them in high school more than ten years earlier.

Even the socks on my feet were old, worn, and slightly ripped.

My bloodlust was so constant that I didn't have the energy to fight my clothes too. It took everything I had just to stay lucid most of the time. Even my best friend had to run away from me and call my nemesis to take me down again last week.

The person I had been before was gone, even though no one around me wanted to acknowledge that.

The door opened without a beep. It had been unlocked.

My tan-skinned, brunette friend stepped inside the room. Her red eyes were bright and cheerful.

Mine glowed like something out of a hellscape, brighter, less natural, and more deadly.Paired with my pale, sallow skin and the threadbare black clothes that hung off my bony frame, I looked more ill than vampy.

Vampirism was a disease for me as much as it was natural for Bloom. She had been born a vampire, and I had been turned into one.

I should be dead.

Icouldbe dead, if I'd chosen to be.

Unfortunately, I'd decided to fight the endless bloodlust for a while. It would've been nice to have an empty bottle of self-preservation rattling in my chest, but mine was at least half full.

"Wrestling with existential dread again?" Bloom checked, plopping down onto the bouncy, uncomfortable mattress with me.

"Like it's my full-time job."