glare at him.
“Fine, be that way!” I growl and then stomp away from all of them. Have lots of mates, they say. It’ll be so much fun, they say. Yeah, until the fuckers gang up against you, and you never win an argument again, I grumble.
“You’re right; sex, or the lack thereof, really motivates her,” Valen observes, and then he proceeds to fist bump Torrez.
I point an aggressive finger in their direction. “There will be no bro-ing out. And consider yourself warned—if I wolf out, I’m biting both of you.”
“Ooh, your kinky is showing again, Bruiser,” Bastien announces as he joins Valen and Torrez. “Why is she all riled?” he asks casually.
“We threatened her with no sex for a week,” Valen fills his twin in.
“Yup, that’ll do it,” Bastien chuckles.
“I can fucking hear you,” I shout at them.
“None of us care,” Bastien shouts back.
I glare at each of them in turn as I pull magic from my core and feed it into the new runes I now have from Torrez’s mating mark. I feed the magic into the new runes slowly and from one blink to the next, everything changes.
My vision sharpens and alters. I’m assaulted by what feels like a billion different smells. I can see so much more in my periphery than I could before, and I can’t seem to decide where I want to focus.
“Whoa,” Torrez comments offhandedly, and I don’t know if that freaks me out or makes me excited.
“Am I a wolf?” I ask, unsure. I look down at my hands, and all I see are my hands, although now I feel like I could count every hair on my arm. When did I get so hairy? Does Torrez see himself as a wolf when he’s in wolf form, or is this what his body looks like to him even though he looks like a wolf to everyone else? Man, this is trippy. I wonder what color my coat is. Black maybe?
“You’re not a wolf,” Torrez tells me, stepping closer. “Well, not a fully shifted one anyway.”
“Uh, what the hell does that mean?”
“Your eyes have shifted. They’re still the same green, but they’re wolf eyes right now, not your regular eyes.”
“Oh, well that explains this change in my vision then. Am I hairier?”
The three of them laugh.
“No, but you can probably make out the details of your body much better than you could before,” Torrez tells me, and I breathe out a sigh of relief.
Time to magically shave again.
“Anything else different?” Valen asks. He bends over to get a better look at my new wolf eyes, and I snap at him for shits and giggles. He doesn’t even so much as flinch or make a noise of surprise. Lame.
“You don’t scare me, love,” he teases, and I don’t miss his use of that word again. It slipped out a few times when we were getting it on in the barn. I chalked it up to an in-the-moment term of endearment, but it seems I was wrong. I’ve got Chosen dropping L bombs like I drop F bombs, and I’m not sure what to think about all of that. Or maybe I do know what I think about all of that, and I just need to work on the logistics of what I want to do about it.
“What I smell has changed,” I tell them. “It’s more overwhelming than the eyes. I can pick up a ton of things I couldn’t before, but I’m not sure what everything is.”
Torrez brushes my cheek with the back of his hand, and I lean into it. “Yeah, that makes sense. It will take time for you to catalogue different scents in order to identify them later.”
“Does this mean I’ll be able to smell lies and emotions, too?” I ask, excited.
“Yup,” Torrez admits, and I can’t tell if he thinks that’s a good thing or bad thing.
“We’ll have to start introducing smells to you right away so you can learn. Your wolf eyes will be most useful at night. Our night vision is incredible, so that will definitely be a handy tool. What about your hearing, any changes there?”
“I already had runes for that,” I confess, and I hear Bastien and Valen both sputter out, “What?”
“Where are your runes for that?” they ask in unison.
I point to the helix of my ear. They both grow quiet with concentration, and I know they’re testing those tiny runes out. They’re easy to forget about, and I’ve been purposely not pointing them out