Bitch: Transformation

Pain. Like a fresh treatment, just waking up, but with none of the usual fuzziness to blur the edges. It was all sharp and broken pieces. Everything hurt and it was dark at the edges. It was hard to hear and things kept moving even when I stopped.

I had taken out the tracker. I tasted her blood. She tasted so good, even her blood. That first time I saw her kept flooding back. I knew that I had to get her out of sight and the trek had hurt her. I carried her like a newborn pup to a makeshift den in the snow.

When she awoke, she was better. She seemed to wearily accept me.

I’d never killed a wolf before and it filled me with an energy that I could not name. I felt the power of the kill coursing through me. I was an alpha, it was my birthright, and I was taking my power back, here in the wild. If I couldn’t be what Shen wanted me to be, then I could still be what my instincts told me.

I’d left the world of the lab behind. I’d left the prison, I didn’t know I was in.

It was all new. She had opened the door in my mind, when she opened the lab door.

And I had her, not the loving strokes that she’d given her dog, but maybe she could come to care for me in some small way.

I didn’t understand the barks and noises she made and she didn’t understand at first that I wanted the tracker out of me as well. If she didn’t I would be leading them right to both of us. It hurt my neck a little, but she only bit the tracker. She didn’t bite me. She was careful with me. Perhaps there was hope for me. Maybe she would still take me as a mate. I would protect her. I would show her that I was the best, I would take out any other suitors. I would fight them, as sure as I breathed, they would have to beat me or die trying.

I could hear another barking. I thought at the other - Come and I will destroy you, you will never have her.. I could feel the power again thrumming along my muscles, it made my head hurt now. I got to my feet or maybe I was still laying down. Cool puddles.

She licked me. I licked my face and could still taste her there. A canoe, I recognized it from my training with the hunters, I tried but I couldn’t smell them here. We were going on a trip across the top of the water. I was following her scent now, through the water. The rest was blurry and unclear, but she was always clear, bright orange in my mind. Leading me down, anywhere as long as she was with me.

It was dark here at the edges.