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I wandered a full mile sobbing, completely oblivious to my surroundings, before I realized that I had missed my turn. I sank to the sidewalk and cradled my head in my hands.
“What is the matter with you, Maggie Mae Mortensen?” I scolded loudly, not caring if anyone was around to hear. With the hem of my shirt, I wiped the tears from my cheeks. “You have been through so much worse than this crap! So he has a girlfriend! So what? Pick up your feet and stop moping. ”
I stood and started backtracking. After fifteen minutes of wandering I realized I was way lost. The urge to sit down on the sidewalk again and just stop existing made it nearly impossible to think. I wanted to die.
The will to survive is one of the strongest instincts a person has. Stronger, I found out, than the desire to die of a broken heart. At that moment, I thought death would have been an easy alternative to what I was suffering. I decided to shift before the moon forced the change out of me. That’s what ended up testing my will.
I stepped into the nearest front yard. The flowers were fragrant and the bushes were thick. I stripped behind those bushes. After putting my clothes into the plastic bag with my new jacket, I stood for a long minute, just feeling the cool, dry, dusty breeze on my naked skin. Then I shifted into the one animal that could make me forget about a broken heart, because when I ran, my aching heart became an afterthought, overpowered by the feel of the world rushing by.
I became a tall, sleek, spotted cheetah, my long tail whipping slowly back and forth, and the world became clear. Instantly I knew how to get home. In fact, I could sense directions, north, east, south, and west. If I wanted to, I could run in a perfectly straight line to anywhere—the North Pole, Bridger’s house, even the mine. I just knew where everything was.
With the grocery bag in my mouth, I dug my hind claws into the grass and ran.
For a brief second I thought I was the luckiest girl alive.
29
Night thrived at the mine. Moonlight reflected from the small, abandoned cement buildings on the mountainside. An owl hooted and an intermittent breeze whistled through juniper boughs.
I set my bag of clothes beneath a tree and, on padded paws, slunk between the cement buildings. What I smelled there excited my animal side and chilled my human mind. Traces of blood spattered the ground. I glided from building to building looking for the animal it belonged to, but found nothing.
Hugging the shadows, I loped to the dirt road, sniffed, and found my own scent—human, weak, and almost forgotten. Then I found Bridger’s scent, new and strong, along with another. It was female, masked by perfume, hair spray, and lotion. A low growl rumbled deep in my throat. I ran from that scent.
The night slipped by as I wandered the eerie terrain, discovering the giant holes where the mine had caved in, swallowing the earth’s crust. The holes were dark and silent, yet icy wind poured out of them as if the earth were a living, breathing thing, its breath crying out from haunted depths.
When the moon had moved halfway across the sky, I climbed to the mountaintop that overshadowed the mine and sat with my tail wrapped around my paws, looking down at the small, sparkling city far below. People were the cause of those lights—normal, mundane, happy people who slept, ate, played, worked, and never turned into something as impossible as a cheetah. They got married and started families, went to school, played with friends, had aunts and uncles and grandparents who came over on Thanksgiving and Christmas.
My tail whipped about restlessly. I was so different. Why was I an animal? Had my parents shifted? Did something happen to them because of it? Did other people shift, but were too scared to tell?
For hours I sat on top of that mountain, savoring the feel of the night wind in my fur and staring down at a world that looked so simple from up high. Finally, when I’d had enough solitude, I leaped from the mountaintop and began a downward sprint, ready to go home.
At the mountain’s base, I turned instinctively in the direction of my bag of clothes and started to lope toward it. Tree branches rustled in a breeze that blew from the north. The wind shifted and the world seemed to crumble beneath my paws. I crouched low to the ground and growled an ear-splintering roar that shuddered off the side of the mountain and echoed back.
Something was tainting the air, an odor that turned me into a quivering mass of fear. I had smelled that horrible stench before, the night I’d been attacked by the pack of wild dogs.
In that moment, I should have run. Instead I cowered. And the mine came alive with crawling movement. Dark, slinking shadows materialized from under trees, behind rocks, out of thickets—stalking me on all sides.
Beneath the glow of the full moon, they appeared to be animals. But I knew better. They moved too stiffly, as if stumbling around on legs without joints. Where their eyes should have been were black, opaque shadows that absorbed the moon’s light instead of reflecting it. Unlike their eyes, their sharp teeth caught the light.
There were groups of wild boars, coyotes, foxes, mountain lions, dogs … When I saw the wolves walking on their hind legs like men, my blood seemed to thicken and freeze beneath my skin. Werewolves were not the fictional creatures I had always imagined them to be!
As the circle of beasts tightened around me, they began to pant and whine and smack their chops. It was like reliving the day Danni got half the school to turn against me, times one hundred. And this time I wasn’t going to cower.
One animal, a boar with swordlike tusks reflecting moonlight, slipped from the circle and darted toward me. My muscles tensed, ready for a fight, but one of the werewolves pounced on it, picking it up in its front paws and tearing at the boar’s throat with its teeth. The night came alive with the cries of a hundred frenzied animals. As quickly as the noise started, it deadened into silence. The wolf held the boar out and dropped it. Its dead body smacked wetly to the ground, and the scent of fresh blood wafted on the air.
A memory flashed into my head, something so terrible that it had been buried in my brain for thirteen years. My aunt, Effie Reynolds, and her daughter, Lucy, were attacked by a pack of Russian boar when I was five years old. The only reason they hadn’t attacked me, too, is because Aunt Effie pushed me up into the boughs of a sturdy pine. When she tried to push Lucy up, Aunt Effie was gored in the back. I still remember thinking that the tusk that went completely through her was more like a sword than something jutting out of a giant pig’s face.
Lucy fell to the ground when her mom was gored. The boar killed her instantly. I started screaming and was found within minutes, but it was not soon enough for Aunt Effie to pull through. She hung on to life and died three days later in the hospital. That was the worst day of my life. And the day I met Mr. Petersen.
The memory flashed through my brain in less than a second. I knew these animals. They were the same type of creatures that had killed my family, and now they had found me. Fighting was out of the question. I needed to get away or be slaughtered.
I dug my back paws into the ground, crouched low, and prepared to leap. The deep, gravelly growl of a big cat vibrated in the air and my muscles went slack with fear.
Three huge striped tigers joined the circle of animals, two behind me and one in front. They stood amidst the smaller animals and devoured me with their eyes. The other animals, natural prey of these massive cats, showed no fear. They seemed to be bowing. Even the wolves no longer stood on their hind legs, but hunched low to the ground, groveling. My stomach clenched.
The odds of me surviving till sunrise were growing smaller by the second. I could outrun one tiger—at least I hoped I could. But three? And what happened if one got in front of me while the other two were on my flanks? I was a cheetah, made for speed, lean and long. Compared to the bulky, muscular tigers, I was scrawny as a chicken.
The three tigers, as if of one mind, started slowly, silently, to close in on me. Their eyes did not gleam in the moonlight like their glossy coats, but I knew they were stari
ng at me. The weight of that stare was suffocating. With every predatory step they took, my time was running out. Looking at the tigers, I could imagine being scratched to shreds, gnawed to pieces. I was about to die.
And, broken heart or not, I was not ready.
Once again, my hind legs dug into the earth, my claws cutting the ground for purchase. Muscles bunched and strained, and with every ounce of strength I possessed, I leaped, gliding in a giant, soaring arc past the perimeter of the animals. One tiger had anticipated my reaction, moving at the exact same instant I had. My body came down on top of it. It felt like landing on stone. Maybe it expected me to fight, because when I pushed off its back to leap again and ran into the trees, it didn’t follow.
Faster than I’d ever run before, I sprinted down the clearest path, a forgotten, wind-rutted dirt road. I heard no pursuit from behind but didn’t dare turn to check—my instincts warned against it. I had to run or die. The road curved to the right, and I followed, though my legs were begging for a rest and fire filled my lungs with every inhale.
In the shapeless shadow of an ancient pine, I paused and scanned my surroundings, desperate for a way to stay alive to see the sunrise. Above a giant hill of dirt, a red flag flapped feebly. I was in the wide juniper valley that stretched below Evening Hill—the place Bridger and I had had a picnic. A burst of hope gave me the courage to go on.
I ran toward that hill, for I had a plan.
At the top, the scent of Bridger became so strong and fresh, I actually feared for his life. I would fight the tigers to keep him safe. But he wasn’t there.
I stood atop Evening Hill and awaited my three hunters, luring them toward me. Like noiseless shadows they appeared at the foot of the hill, their dark eyes unnatural voids on their moonlit faces. I tensed to run, but instead of coming up after me like I’d hoped, the tigers split up, flanking me on three sides. That’s when I realized tigers were not chasing me—I mean, they were, but they had human minds.
Just.
Like.
Me.
Shock overwhelmed my fear. I was not the only human being who could turn into an animal at will. But that meant the boars that killed Aunt Effie and Lucy were not animals. They were beings that possessed a conscience and the ability to know right from wrong. Humans had murdered Aunt Effie and Lucy.