no no no no…” I cry, panic flooding my trembling voice as my body sways in the air, hair hanging like the sweep of a broom.
Frantically, I try to bend to reach my ankle and the tight cord biting into it, but my body has been pushed so hard since the night of the Flux, and right now, I just don’t have the strength.
Instead of reaching my foot, after a few shaking tries, I manage to hook the chain tethering my wrist around a different branch to take some of the weight off my poor ensnared limb. Now I’m hanging from my foot and my wrists and bent awkwardly, but at least my shackled ankle doesn’t feel like it’s about to be yanked out of its socket. I fight with everything I have to pull myself up and try to get the snare off, but the few times I manage to reach it, I can’t loosen it enough to rip the damn thing off.
After who knows how long of snarling, grunting, and pulling, my energy is spent. Gone. I hang from the tree like a lamb on a spit. My eyes dart around frantically as though some fanged beast is going to burst from the bushes at any moment and tear us apart. Fear and distress stew my insides. My wolf whimpers and flails inside of me, but we can’t break free.
With drugs still pumping molasses through my veins, I’m starving, thirsty, tired, aching, cold, naked, chained, and strung up. All of this compounds into utter helplessness that crashes into me like the brutal crest of a storming sea. A pitiful whimper escapes me, and dread pools in my soul.
I can’t believe that this is how I’m going to die.
I’ll either hang here until I starve and my body shuts down, or until the Ruin Falls pack finds me. I am painfully aware of which option is worse.
Please let me starve.
My entire existence is just one blur after another of lost time, confusion, and horrible mind-wandering dreams. I have no idea how long I’ve been hanging in this trap, could be ten minutes, could be days. My head has long since stopped pounding from the blood rush pooling in my skull, and I slip in and out of awareness often, making it impossible to gauge anything.
When the white wolf first appears upside down in my line of sight, I don’t even register that it’s not a figment of my imagination. I don’t feel fear as I blink heavy lids, my chest struggling to pull breath into my weighed-down lungs.
But then a gray and white wolf lopes over the hill behind it, and somehow, despite my position and utter exhaustion, a warning growl seeps low and menacing from my lips as my wolf grasps at our flayed consciousness.
The wolves inch cautiously closer, ears perked, noses pulling in deep breaths of my scent. My eyes connect with a pair of golden orbs and white fur, while a deep rumbling growl resonates all around me. My wolf struggles to stir, weary and depleted, but she musters the strength to flash fangs at the strangers nearing us, and the significance of their presence hits me.
The two wolves circle beneath me as though they’re working out how to snap me from the air and devour me whole. I’m under no illusions that a pair of native gray wolves have stumbled upon me. No, these two have the size and cunning eyes that my kind has.
This is the Ruin Falls pack.
Terror strikes hard enough through my debilitated mind that my body jerks into movement just as a man crests the hill. Somehow, seeing him is even scarier than seeing the two shifted wolves. I scramble and pull at my bindings, struggling again to get free, as though there’s still some possibility that I might escape, and these three won’t just hunt me down if I do.
By the time the man gets closer, surveying the trap that I’ve sprung, I’m panting, muscles screaming, and once again hanging limp. The last of my reserves are gone.
The shifter in man form is older. His hair is more white than gray, half covering a face that’s battle-scarred, and even in my upside-down perusal, I immediately note that he’s missing an eye. The look of him has my hackles rising, while his one light hazel eye takes me in as though I’m no better than a next meal. The white wolf whines and scratches at the base of my tree, and