We had barely reached the edge of the camp when the bullets started to fly. They barely missed Devin and he dodged into the underbrush. There was no time to ask questions, no time to explain, no time to figure out what was going on. I struggled with my own breath as I tried to determine what direction the bullets were coming from. I didn’t have time to do anything other than to burst into action, trying to take some cover behind a tree. There was only so much time to hide, so I dove for cover. I could smell the acrid odor of hot silver. I knew what it meant. They were trying to kill us.
I saw two of the shifters that were in the camp take off into the shaded forest. They were after the shooters. I followed them into the forest, changing as I moved through the brush. It would be better to stay low. It was a different thing to change on the run. There is something freeing about it as I made my way after the other shifters. There was going to be a fight. We didn’t start it, but we were going to finish it.
It didn’t take us long to track down the assailants. They were on the top of a hill with plenty of firepower to keep us from climbing up to get them. I wanted to curse, but I could only growl in frustration. I was behind a log, glancing over it occasionally while the gunshots continued. I couldn’t see a clear path, but someone was coming up behind me. I snapped around, trying to figure out who it was. I recognized the scent immediately. It was Devin and he was in his wolf form. He stared at me for a moment and we both turned back to face the men that were shooting at us. The truth was, I hadn’t had much experience with hunters. That was the nature of not being a particularly important individual.
I sniffed, communicating with Devin. “Who?”
He huffed at me. It was a kind of animalistic shrug. “Don’t know.”
“Why?”
“I’m Alpha,” he told me in the way of the beast.
There was no way to use diction or specific language like that. That wasn’t the way we did things. Still, I will try to translate the conversation as well as I’m capable of doing. We communicate through a variety of smells, actions and small noises. It’s hard to explain. Hopefully, I can make it clear.
“Hunters?” I indicated the men that were shooting at us as we spoke.
We were in a fairly safe spot and needed to make a plan. So far, I couldn’t smell blood. That was good. No one had gotten hit, but we had to figure out how to get up that hill to the men that were camped up there.
“Yes.” There was doubt there. He couldn’t know for sure, but agreed that it was the best guess that we had.
“Others?” I indicated the other shifters that were trapped like we were.
“Friends.” He obviously knew these people.
While I had heard that already; I was kind of happy to hear that he trusted these men.
“Why here?”
“Don’t know.”
“Did friends bring hunters?”
He was expressing a great deal of displeasure at the idea that I was putting forth. “No.” It was something that couldn’t be argued, more like a ‘hell no’ than a regular ‘no.’ He refused to entertain the idea that we had been set up. “Friends are friends. Hunters are hunters. Friends do not work with hunters.”
“Agreed. This is strange.”
“Agreed.” He nodded at me and we continued to watch our assailants.
They had stopped firing for the time being. I watched them; they appeared to be searching for us, bringing out some rather specialized equipment. I didn’t know what it was, but I thought it must be some sort of thermal scope, something to help them to see us. We would have to do something soon. I knew there was only so much that we should do.
I looked at him and his muscles were twitching. He was planning to charge up there during the momentary distraction. I wasn’t sure how well this was going to work, but we weren’t going to be able to wait this out. They had forced us to this point, now we had to respond. We were predators, capable of great violence when pushed out of our own comfort zone. He charged up the hill, foam flying from his mouth as he growled and howled the attack, leading all of us behind him.
We had to do something.
I saw one of the hunters struggle with a small sidearm as we got to the top of the hill. I moved to him, intent on defending myself, but I wasn’t going to make it in time. The man had the weapon pointed straight at me. There was no time to get out of the way, but suddenly there was something in the way. I couldn’t identify it right away. It was large and grey, and right in the path of the speeding bullet. The weapon had already struck the wall in the way before I realized whom it was. It was Devin and I was watching him fall. I have to admit that I lost my mind in that moment. Several others and myself leapt on the man that had taken down the Alpha. Needless to say, he didn’t last much longer.
The fight was still going on around us as I changed back into my human form, gripping the man in my arms. He was shifting back to human himself. I screamed a horrific sound. My pain seeped into the surrounding trees as I held him to my chest, the tears running down my cheeks and onto him. The fight seemed to continue on around us, a slow motion encounter that belonged in the movies. I could see bodies and bullets flying. I was totally exposed, but nothing seemed to come my direction. I was alone, trapped in my grief. I couldn’t really explain it. I didn’t know him well, but flashes of a future that would never happen rushed into my head. I saw an entire relationship in time lapse as I cried over his body.
He reached up to me, his arm weakly trying to touch my face. I leaned down and he began to whisper, “Fynna.” It took a lot for him just to say my name.
“I won’t let you die. I won’t let you die.” My mind raced over dates that we would never have as I watched him bleed onto my lap. I was crying.
“I-I-I—” He couldn’t finish whatever he was trying to say.
“Hush, save your strength. We need to get you out of here,” I consoled him.
I could hear the growling and snapping coming from around me. The shots had stopped coming. I wasn’t paying much attention, but there were no more bullets. The wolves sounded angry as I held the man in my arms and sobbed over him.
“I’m going to save you,” I promised him.
I could smell the silver in his wound. The monsters had been out to kill him. They had succeeded, and I had no idea why we had found ourselves in this situation.
“Fynna.” He was calling my name and his eyes were closing. I could hear his breath growing ragged and strained.
“You’re going to live. We’re going to save you. I promise.” I told him, and hoped against all hope that I could keep that promise.
“It will be all right,” he said, fighting against his dying breath.
One of the other shifters put her hand on my shoulder as I cried over the loss of the man in my arms. A part of me wouldn’t face the fact that he was dying. I knew what she was going to say and I shielded him with my body.
“You won’t do this!” I demanded that she respect my wishes. “We can save him.” I wasn’t going to hear any insistence to put him out of his misery.
“I’m trying to save him. You have to let me help him.” Her voice was soft, almost as if she felt sorry for me.
I was dragged away from him, my grief keeping me from really doing anything other than reaching for him. I wanted to scream at her to leave him alone as she poked at his wound, but it was too much. I was too tired to fight against what felt like a thousand arms holding me back. Maybe she would keep her word. Maybe she would be able to save him. I didn’t know how she was going to do it. There were no bandages, nothing to give first aid with.
“I can save him.” Still her face looked sad.
“What do you need?” The voice came from behind me.
“Someone will have to give.”
“I’ll do it. I’ll die to save him.” I was sobbing, kneeling on the ground.
“You won’t die,” she promised me and for some reason I trusted her. “You will be bound to him. When one of you dies the other will. It will be the way of things. Can you live with that?”
“Yes.” I didn’t even have to think about it.
She reached toward me. “Come here.”
I stood, my legs wobbled under me as I walked toward her. She started to chant. I couldn’t understand the words and I started to understand. This was magic. I had witnessed it from a distance, but I had never been so close, never been a part of the mystical ritual that she was starting. She pulled something out of her bag. It was a green powder – no, it was bits of leaves that she sprinkled over my head, then over his wound. I didn’t understand. I don’t think I will ever understand what happened, what I volunteered to do. She continued to chant and I watched her work in awe, still not a hundred percent sure that I could trust what was going on. Still we didn’t have much time.
“Pull the bullet out,” she ordered me.
“How?”
“However you need to.” Her voice was soft. “You need to be the one to do this.”
“Okay,” I mumbled as I looked up at her. I tried to stick my finger in the wound. I couldn’t feel anything, but Devin began to writhe and moan in pain. “I can’t do it. I can’t find it.” I started to sob uncontrollably, but someone handed me a knife. I was surrounded by solemn silence as I used the knife to widen the wound. I could see the bullet now. It was in one of his organs. That was why he was dying. “Is that his heart?”
“Yes, you have to hurry now.” The witch’s voice was gentle yet firm.
“I’ll do it.”
I could hear the rest of the group draw in a collective breath. I reached into his body and pulled the bullet out of his wound. I didn’t have a choice. He had saved me and now I had to save him. I had to do it. I needed to save this man. He had been there for me during our entire ordeal, patient. We had shared secrets that we would never tell another soul. We had become family and I was starting to realize I had already begun to consider him my mate. I wanted him to live. I needed him to live.
“Save him.” She was whispering as I reached in and pulled out the bullet. I felt the silver burn at my skin. “Hold it in your hand.”
I nodded. “I can handle the pain,” I said and I gripped the silver ammunition in my hand, clenching it in my fist.
It was burning. It hurt as the woman began to chant again. Water was sprinkled on me. It smelled odd, but I wasn’t paying attention to what was in it. She reached for my hand. I held it out to her. I hadn’t even noticed the knife in her other hand and flinched when she cut me, but I didn’t pull away. Devin was starting to draw in his death rattle. He wasn’t going to last much longer. She squeezed a few drops of my blood onto his forehead. It stretched and melded with his blood that covered his body.
Everything started to melt together. I couldn’t see anything. I was dropping into unconsciousness. I suspected we had been betrayed, but it didn’t’ make sense.
The last thing that I saw was Devin as I was draped over him, unconscious.
THE FINAL
CHAPTER
He was looking at me when I woke up. We were in a bed, next to each other and he was staring at me. I don’t know how to explain the relief I felt. I don’t know how anyone could ever understand the intensity of my emotions at that moment. There were tears in his eyes and I knew that one was starting to form in my eye as well. It was my left eye I think. It didn’t really matter.
I embraced him. “You’re alive.”
He coughed a little because I hugged him so hard. “Be careful. I’m still kind of sore. They told me what you did for me.”
“Did that really happen?” I looked at him, not really knowing how to respond to the adventure that we had been on.
“Yes, unfortunately. Do you remember yet?”
I closed my eyes and tried to think back. I was starting to remember. We were being tested. Devin and I had been dating for a while and had considered mating permanently.
“I think I do.” His eyes were watching me. I felt like I was losing my mind as the memories came flooding back. “Was it?”
“A test. We had agreed to it. They returned the memories to us after it was over.”
“Were the hunters planned? Did they try to kill you?” I fought against my tears. I didn’t know what I would do if the others were involved in his near death. “You could have died.”
“They had ambushed them. They were trying to kill me. My people weren’t involved.”
“How do you know? It could have been a coup.”
“None of my men and women would do that. I promise you. I’ve known them for years. That isn’t something that they would do.”
I started to remember meeting the men. I had been dating Devin for almost three months before he had brought me to meet his pack. I didn’t have a pack to introduce him to. I had made the choice to leave my old one. I was a lone wolf. I remember that. I had been alone for a long time before I had run into Devin. I moved away from old pack, leaving with my job and eager to start a new life. There was nothing that I could do about the corruption among the shifters at my old home and my new home was a pleasant change. The shifters of the Pacific Northwest had been a thousand times kinder than the shifters in the Southwest. I was happy there, changing my life with my job.
It was at one of the local meetings that I had met Devin. We had known each other for a few weeks before he had gotten the nerve up to ask me out. My world shifted that day. There was something between us, a connection between an Alpha and a Lone. It was unusual, but we had support as we began to see more and more of each other.
“The beach.” I smiled and looked at him, remembering the first time that we had been together, under the sunset over the Pacific Ocean.
I kissed him and it had led to so many things, so many happy memories that were starting to invade my mind. I had loved him. I remembered that as I had looked at him. I had told him so under the moonlight in the local park. He had responded in kind.
“I love you,” I told him that as I propped myself up on my elbow to look at him a little better. We were together, our memories starting to flood back. That was what mattered.
“I love you too.” The sparkle in his eyes told me that he remembered. “You saved my life.”
“You saved mine first.” I reminded him of the fact as I remembered the amazing conversations that we would have.
“It was a test. It was all a test. Except for the hunters of course.”
The hunters had been waiting to take out an Alpha. That action would have been a destabilizing force. It would have shifted things and our people would have had to adjust and change. That would’ve taken time and it would’ve given the people that wanted us dead a chance to strike.
I thought about the men and women that hunted us just for being who we were. It was enough that we existed to people like that. It wasn’t right, but still I could almost understand the fear that they felt. Most humans that knew about the world we lived in were brought in through violence and they went out of their way to hurt us. It was one of the dangers of existing as a shifter or any other supernatural creature. It was what we lived with on a daily basis. It made the moments that we shared a lot more special. We appreciated life a little more than humans did because every day we could be killed just for existing. It made sense that the humans would go out of their way to destroy the special ritual that we were going through.
I remembered what we had been doing. We were going through a ritual, something that the local shifters required before a mate could be picked. My local tribe would never have considered anything like that. They had always tried to arrange mating’s and they ended poorly more often than not. That was one of the reasons that I had left. That was the reason that I had moved here. I had done my research and learned about the world that I was about to move into. It was a pleasant change, to be welcomed without a ton of suspicion. Still, I hadn’t joined a pack and there was no pressure for me to do it.
When I had met Devin, there was no pressure to join his pack, and even with the possibility of mating on the horizon, I had the opportunity to pick my own path. I liked that. This was something more tribes needed to do, but there had been a lot of bloodshed, a revolution that made the changes in this area. Still, the changes were starting to spread. I had helped with that, by phoning my cousins and other disenfranchised friends from down south to tell them about the differences up here. My sister wanted to join me, but my parents weren’t going to allow that. They had already lost one mate-able daughter; they weren’t going to lose another one, not so easily. Still I worried about her and had been working on a plan to get her up here.
Devin had helped me with that plan. I remembered that road trip now. I remembered having snuck my sister out in the middle of the night. I remembered his pack taking my sister in, giving her a home and she was dating his Beta now. We didn’t know if it was going to go anywhere, but my sister was enjoying the freedom that came with the new life that I had brought her into. My parents now want nothing to do with me, but it doesn’t matter. Sometimes I miss them, but then I remember that I am no longer currency. I am a person now, and this man, this wonderful man in front of me had helped me to learn about the different life that lay ahead of me.
“Did any of them get hurt?” I asked the question.
To be honest I hadn’t worried about it until then. My mind had been still wrapping itself around all of the memories that I had willingly forgotten.
“I don’t know. We can go and check on them.” He offered me his hand and we rose off of the bed. It was then that I noticed the scar. I reached out to touch it. “You saved my life.” He reminded me. “You gave a piece of yourself to save my life.”
“Do you remember that?” I asked the question.
“I was watching you. I could barely see, but I heard everything. I know what you did. You didn’t even hesitate. You would have sacrificed yourself for me.”
“Well I couldn’t let you be the only hero.” I laughed, but I wasn’t feeling it.
The pain of his near-death was still raw and bleeding in my heart. I could still feel his blood on my body and on my hands as I began to look down. Someone had cleaned me up, but I didn’t remember that. I was wearing a nightshirt now, with nothing underneath it. I didn’t recognize it. It wasn’t one of mine. In fact, it looked like we were in some sort of hotel room. I didn’t know where we were.
“Where are we? Do you know?”
“No, when I woke up they had already brought us here. I helped them get you changed. You needed more time than me to recover from the spell. You had given so much.”
“Do you know what’s going to happen now?”
It was starting to bother me. What had I signed up for anyway? I knew that no matter what I was doing, I would never take it back. I couldn’t force myself to regret the actions that I had taken. Still, I worried about the consequences. He had been saved from powerful magic and spells like that always come with a price.
“No, but we can go and find out.” He held my hand and walked to the door.
Opening it and looking outside, we could see that there was someone at the door. We were being guarded. Our guard motioned for someone, indicating that we needed someone to explain things to us. I began to listen to the consequences for the spell when the witch arrived along with the Beta that had supervised the trial.
I learned about the trial. We had passed; we were eligible to become mates now. We had proven ourselves compatible. I don’t know how we could have failed that test short of trying to kill each other, but the way that the Beta put it, lightning struck twice and that meant that we would work well together in the long run.
We were told that everyone had survived and that there had been a few injuries, but there weren’t any as severe as Devin’s had been. Everyone had made it through the fight and I had saved his life. I held my breath after getting this reassurance and waited to find out what I had signed myself in for. She told us that we would be connected for the rest of our lives. Devin and I would feel the strong emotions of the other person. We could foster this bond and make it stronger by spending time together, but we could also weaken it by being apart.
She had wanted to make sure that we knew these things. Devin’s and my life forces were bound now, intertwined together to make them into something different. We were going to do things differently. There was a chance that some habits could change as we adjusted being so closely connected. The more time we spent together, the closer we would become. We might even be able to send thoughts across the bond eventually. She couldn’t give us a bunch of specifics because everyone reacted differently to spells like this. We would be connected and there isn’t really anything that we could do. The only way to end this was for us to die. If one of us died, the other one would die too. It was the nature of his new life. He was bound to me. I would be weak for a while.
I was to expect to sleep a lot and need more to eat. I had sacrificed myself to save his life. I would be tired while my soul started to recover from the wound that had been inflicted upon it. My life had healed his wounds. He was strong and powerful, able to carry me through my weak point. He promised to stay by me as we were left alone.
“I’ll make sure that you get through this.”
“Thank you.” I was starting to feel a bit overwhelmed. I struggled to find my way into the bed. “I think this has all been a bit too much.”
“Before you go to sleep…” he let his question trail off.
I knew what he was talking about and I already knew my answer. “Of course I will, just let me get some rest first.” I yawned.
It wasn’t as romantic as I had dreamed about, but there it was. The decision was made. I vaguely remembered him running to the door and announcing the fact that I had said yes. He came back to the bed and carefully pulled the blanket back up over me as I faded into oblivion.