with a ravenous hunger, the likes of which I’d never encountered. And the only food I’d wanted was meat. Raw and bloody.
After gorging myself on as much red meat as I could get my hands on, I’d thrown up for the remainder of the night and into the next day. Alex had stuck by my side the entire time and had helped me through the ordeal, telling me everything I was experiencing was normal, that I had to teach my body to eat the way the wolf eats. It hadn’t been exactly pretty.
But after two weeks, I’d started to feel more like myself again. The only difference was that I had to eat every few hours. If I didn’t, I grew increasingly hostile, to the point that I wanted to tear out the throat of whoever happened to be standing closest to me.
Alex had explained that my metabolism was much faster now, and in order to satiate the appetite of the wolf, I had to constantly keep my stomach full.
“When will you teach me how to take the form of the wolf?” I asked him, once our waitress, Hildy, had walked away after taking our drink order.
“All in good time,” Alex responded with a little laugh as he leaned back into his chair and eyed me with amusement. “Shifting is no small feat. It requires a lot of patience and practice.”
“What good is being a shifter if you can’t shift?” I argued with a little pout.
“Patience, young Jedi,” he answered, laughing.
I didn’t respond but watched Hildy return with my soda water and lime and Alex’s Coke. She dropped off our drinks with a hurried smile and disappeared back into the kitchen.
“So when will you go before the tribal court?” I asked Alex as he took a sip of his Coke.
He shrugged. “I’m not sure, but I’m also not concerned so neither should you be.”
Even though Achak had been the one to bite me and therefore, the one to start my metamorphosis, Alex was ultimately held responsible because the choice to allow me to live or die had been his. Or at least that’s the way the tribal police looked at it. To become a werewolf was a right that wasn’t just offered to anyone. You had to apply for that right and it could be—and in many cases, was—denied. Granted, it wasn’t as though Alex had had time to apply for the tribal counsel’s permission to turn me into one of his own kind. This was the reason why he wasn’t much concerned about the outcome.
As for Achak, Koko had been correct—the silver bullet from my gun had pierced his heart and even though the shaman of the tribe had attempted to save him, the silver had done too good a job of contaminating his body. In the end, the decision was made to burn his body, rather than attempt to bring him back.
That situation didn’t exactly leave me with a glowing reputation where the tribe was concerned. Not only was I an outsider, but I’d also shot and killed one of their own. Granted, Achak had been guilty of attacking Donovan, a kernel of information we’d been able to squeeze out of Koko, but that didn’t change the fact that the tribal members weren’t exactly my supporters.
As to the situation between Donovan, Koko and Achak, Donovan had been trying to win Koko back from Achak, who had stolen her shortly after Donovan had done the same to Alex. Achak had stabbed Donovan as a warning not to attempt to come after Koko again. That was why the blade hadn’t pierced Donovan’s heart and also why his body hadn’t been burned. Achak had intended to warn Donovan, not kill him.
“You haven’t seen or heard anything from Donovan?”
Alex shook his head. “Nothing.” He fixed his attention on the bubbles foaming up in his glass. “I hope he’s okay.” He glanced back over at me.
“I’m sure he is,” I offered with a shrug. “He’s a werewolf, so he’s kind of at the top of the food chain, right?”
Alex just nodded but didn’t say anything more for a few seconds. He just continued spinning his straw around in his glass.
“Everything okay?”
“Yes,” he answered quickly before inhaling deeply and facing me. “I want to go after him, Elodie,” he admitted. “I want to find Donovan and then I want to go after everyone who had a hand in what became of him.”
“What do you mean?” I studied him pointedly.
He shrugged. “The neighboring gang who