With Everything I Am by Kristen Ashley, now you can read online.
Prologue
Connection
The trail of blood was leading the hunters straight to him.
Normally, he would have outrun them long before now, but with his right flank wounded by the shotgun blast and with him unable to rest or transform in order to heal quickly, he was simply losing more blood, more energy and slowing.
He tried to sense his brethren but they weren’t near. They weren’t due for hours.
He’d arrived early, too early.
Something had drawn him to this forest, so much as called out to him.
And, as usual, he followed his instincts.
He’d gone early and transformed so his senses would be sharper in order to seek out whatever it was.
Therefore, he’d been distracted and, if he was honest with himself, cocky. He’d smelled the hunters but he’d never expected they’d be a threat. Humans rarely were.
As he ran, he sensed it again, out there. It was close, whatever it was and the pull of it was so strong, it made him momentarily lose focus.
This cost him. He wasn’t watching where he was going. He wasn’t scanning the landscape.
He skidded to a painful halt, the snow blossoming out in white wings at his sides. A sheer rock face in front of him. A dense forest of pine trees, difficult to maneuver especially injured, to his right. Hunters at his back and to his left…
He stared.
A child.
Wearing a pink hat, scarf, boots and mittens and a navy coat, her long blonde hair falling down her shoulders.
Her green eyes were on him.
She couldn’t be more than five, maybe six, alone in the snow, in the forest, in the dead of night.
What the f**k? He thought
She had to be lost. Her need for rescue was what he must have sensed.
But he could feel no fear from her, not even of him and in this form everyone and everything feared him.
But obviously not her.
She was gazing at him calmly as if she took moonlit strolls regularly and further, as if she could see him plainly in the dark.
As if she was one of his own.
Impossible, he thought.
First, she was blonde. There were no blondes of his kind. None. Not in history.
Second, he’d smell it and she smelled starkly human.
He considered transforming. However, even if the cold couldn’t kill him, he didn’t relish the idea of transforming into a six foot six inch na**d man with a gunshot wound to his thigh in front of a child. Not to mention, the hunters, who were gaining and who he could far more easily attack as a wolf (which was not forbidden, but frowned upon even if there was no alternative as it seemed would soon be the case).
But it was forbidden to change in front of a human who didn’t know about their secret culture.
Completely forbidden.