savaged arm and broken leg over the branches, I climbed toward the trunk. The merciless river burbled past, seeming to laugh at me as I clambered onto the thick wooden limb that grew horizontally over the river. Halfway across the branch, there was a loud crack. I was weightless for a moment, and then I plunged back under water. The river ripped me back and forth, and then I slammed into a hard surface. Every one of my ribs seared, and I opened my eyes to see that I had collided with a boulder. It felt as if the impact had shattered my ribcage. Reaching up, I grabbed onto the rock, found a groove and pulled myself onto the stone. I gasped in breath as I lay there on the cold stone outcropping. Using all of my remaining strength, I reached up and dragged my body a few more inches onto the rock.
Every labored breath threatened to be my last. The world faded away, returning with a rush of water and searing pain, only to disappear again.
“How the fuck did she survive all this way?” an unfamiliar male voice said from close by.
Immediately, I thought it was Kane. Kane would save me. And, then my slow, groggy mind remembered that Kane had been pretending all along. Kane had made a deal with Triple Cappuccino, probably to save Kane’s pencil company that was bankrupt because it was a fucking specialty pencil company, not exactly a hot seller.
“It doesn’t matter how she survived. It only matters that she did.”
It was Triple Cappuccino’s voice, but all I saw was a bleary swirl of color. Hands grabbed me around my waist and knees and lifted me up. Pain exploded through every inch of my body.
“She’s lost too much blood, Alpha,” someone said from a short distance away. “And it looks like the crashing against the rocks have battered all of her internal organs. She’s not strong enough to survive the bite.”
“She’s strong enough.” Triple Cappuccino said from just above me, then he lay me down on the cool, slick rocks. His fingers pushed my wet hair from my face and then traced down my cheek. His thumb brushed over my lips. “We’re your pack now. You’re never going to escape us again, Omega.”
I had been saving up all of my energy, and I used it to bite down on his thumb. Instead of pulling away, the man just watched me until the strength of my jaw failed. “Fuck you,” I wheezed. “I’d rather die than go with you.”
He grunted. “That’s a lie. You’ll never stop fighting to survive. It’s in your nature… you’ve already proven that. And so long as your heart beats, you’ll belong to me.”
There was a rustling sound over me, and then sharp teeth pierced the length of my wrist. Liquid fire flashed through my limbs, and my vision went white before subsiding into darkness.
Chapter One
Ever since the day I became a werewolf ten years ago, fear has had a specific taste for me. It tasted metallic, like sucking on a penny. Right now, slouched in the back row of a mostly deserted bus, somewhere in Northern California, my mouth tasted like I swallowed a whole piggy bank.
The bus seat under me vibrated with the telltale rhythm that signified we were decelerating on the highway. My heart raced and palms began to sweat. Something was very wrong. This wasn’t a scheduled stop.
I had memorized every town on the route from Colorado to the border of Canada, and we shouldn’t have been stopping for another hour.
No one else on the bus had seemed to notice something was wrong. They didn’t even look up as we pulled off the highway, all of them either sleeping or playing on their phones.
We approached a city sign at a reduced speed, and I raised my digital camera and adjusted it to night-mode just in time to snap a picture as we passed. In the photo, “Welcome to Grayhaven” was illuminated in the bus headlights as the sign hung crooked on its post. Something was written under the welcome, and I narrowed my eyes to examine the blurry photo, but the battery light on my camera blinked on, and the screen went black.
“Fuck a duck,” I whispered as my mind spun with the possible scenarios.
My panicked brain was screaming that my pack had found me. The Alpha of North America had tracked me down, and he was waiting in this Grayhaven town with his ten werewolf enforcers.