SEVEN

Latency meant I couldn’t shift; I had a wolf trapped inside of me that wouldn’t come out no matter how much I tried. My kind shifted at eighteen, with Alpha wolves shifting earlier – at seventeen. I would be twenty in a few weeks which meant for two years, I bore the stigma of being a traitor’s daughter and a latent wolf. I couldn’t shift until that night.

Pain bloomed on every inch of my skin. Tiny pinpricks, sharp stabs, I felt them all at once as my body changed. Then the worst of them happened in my head, my skull. As if an external force pressed my skull together, I felt my head squeeze, my brain seemed to be crushed. It passed with excruciating slowness, my eardrums and eyes, nose, everything, changing all at once. If someone took a broken shard of glass and ran it into my eyeballs, they may not hurt as much as they did then.

I hit the ground face first as I fell, my half-open mouth taking in sand and leaves. I hunched over but when the second wave came, it hit harder than the f