This Dark Wolf (Soul Bitten Shifter #1) - Everly Frost Page 0,44
rises inside me, but it’s a calm, tentative surge. I’ve kept her energy quiet ever since I arrived here, needing to keep her hidden and safe, not wanting to expose her—not wanting to expose myself.
Vines sprout around my legs, slipping across the space between my feet and the grassy ground. A silver flower blossoms right beside my hand, its center dusted with gleaming specks of light.
I’ve never seen anything like it.
The moment that the flower brushes against my fingers, my wolf’s energy rises, her form flickering into sight at my side.
She’s joined to me like always, this time at my shoulder, her body curving around me. She nudges her head against my chest and brushes the bottom of my chin, her energy buzzing across my jaw and chest.
Opposite me, a smile touches Helen’s lips when my wolf appears.
“The most important thing you need to learn is that your scent isn’t a smell,” she says, startling me with this revelation. “Your scent is your power.”
My wolf’s gaze turns to Helen, as transfixed as I am.
“My power?” I ask.
“That’s why the fiercest alphas can detect it. They recognize your strength. As long as you’re splashing it around, they are drawn to it and—like all dominant creatures—they need to control it. To leave you uncontrolled is to diminish their own power. Do you understand?”
I remember Cody’s declaration after he inhaled my scent. He said he couldn’t decide whether he wanted to fuck me or kill me—dominate or destroy.
“I’m a threat,” I say.
She nods. “A significant one.”
“So to control my scent, I have to control my power,” I say, drawing conclusions from what Helen said.
She smiles. “I believe you’ve spent your whole life pushing your wolf away, denying your power, because that’s how you had to survive. It’s time to really get to know your wolf, Tessa. You have to understand your power before you can control it.”
Fear is cold inside me. I’ve never hated my wolf’s energy, but her unusual nature has caused me constant pain, both physical and emotional.
“I don’t know how,” I whisper. Reaching out to run my hand through my wolf’s insubstantial form beside me, my fingers float right through her shape. “She’s energy inside me. Even like this, I can’t touch her unless I merge with her. And then I’m still me, just in another form. She has no thoughts except for mine, no heart except for mine.”
Helen leans forward with a soft smile. “Then you need to get to know yourself, Tessa. You need to understand your own fears, strengths—your capacity for love, hate, indifference, happiness, grief, and all the emotions in between.”
I stare at Helen, helpless. “How?”
She settles back onto her cushion. “Let’s talk.”
While my wolf lowers her head to the flowers, nudging them and tapping her paws on the new ones that blossom in front of her, Helen asks me questions.
She starts with my first memories of the cabin where I grew up and the things I remember about my father in my early years. She touches on my first meeting with my mother when I was school age and required to walk down the mountain to the main village for the first time.
I fall silent at that point.
My wolf’s hackles rise at memories I want to forget.
My mother was waiting at the school gate. That was the first time I saw her and her new mate—Peter Nash. My mother stood tall, her red hair a different shade to mine, more orange, like a sunset. Her eyes, startlingly blue, were cold in the early morning light.
She strode up to me, stared down at my six-year-old self, and smacked me across the face so hard that I fell onto the pebbled path. I remember the clatter of my pencils as they scattered across the stones, the crack of her boots as she walked past me, driving her heels into the pencils and snapping them in half before she strode away without a backward glance.
“She hated me,” I say. “I ruined her life.”
The first two years of school were bad. Then my half-brother Dawson was old enough to attend and things got even worse.
I wince and veer away from the memories, but Helen forces me to refocus on them. “Tessa, the broken bones you sustained tell a story you might not want to remember, but—”
“You’re going to tell me that my pain made me stronger.” I give her a cold glare. All that what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger bullshit.