I Saved The Alpha. (Watty Awards 2012)

It's A Wolf Thing

Picture Ally's wolf -------------->

Ally

It burned. A searing pain was shooting from my toes, straight through to my skull, making it almost impossible to move without making it worse.

What the hell was going on?

As soon as Luke's arms had come around me, the initial pain had halted all together. He was so warm.

And then the second round of pain hit, sending my body into a tumble of spasms that send me jerking around in awkward positions.

Right now I could feel Luke carrying me, but I couldn't hear anything over the roaring in my ears. My head hurt, my back hurt, my legs hurt, hell, even my lips hurt. And it wasn't getting any better. If anything, it was getting a whole lot worse.

I felt a sudden blast of air slam against my shaking body. It was winter. It should have been freezing, especially in the soaking wet clothing I was wearing, but it wasn't. It felt like someone had turned on a heater and blasted it full force in my direction. Nothing was helping me out here.

A whimper escaped my lips, forced out by the suddenly searing pain in my skull. It felt like someone was kicking it repeatedly as hard as possible. I had never been in this kind of pain before, in my entire life. Even falling off my roof and snapping my arm in half when I was sixteen hadn't hurt this bad.

Luke groaned, burying his face in my hair.

"Just hold on baby, we're almost there. You're going to be just fine," he murmured. I felt the cool press of his lips on my cheek, the only thing that hadn't scalded me like a hot iron. I whined when I felt him pull away.

"I'm so sorry baby, I wish I could help. I can't stand seeing this." From what I could hear of his voice through the deafening roar in my ears, he sounded like he was about to cry. It took everything I had left to make my sore, cracked lips form the words I was trying to say;

"Make it stop Luke, make it stop!" I heard his own answering moan of pain, before I completely blacked out.

LUKE

This was torture. Watching her squirm in pain was almost bringing tears to my eyes. Me. The Alpha male who hadn't even cried when his parents had died.

I had never felt so useless in my life.

I couldn't touch her without hurting her, I couldn't take away her pain, I couldn't tell her what was going on, I couldn't save her from the world she was about to enter, I couldn't do anything. Nothing.

She was shaking in a ball on the floor of the forest, the softest place I could find for her. I couldn't have her getting hurt. She was already in so much pain, I couldn't stand thinking about what was to come.

It came.

It was absolutely inevitable, but it still broke my heart clean in half when I heard the first bones begin to snap. Her fingers came first, followed by her arms, and her legs. They were slowly reconfiguring into wolf like paws. They her ribs...

Each snapping echoed in my head like a bullet going off. I wanted to grab her and hold her in my arms until she stopped crying, and lost all the pain. But I couldn't.

And then her spine snapped.

The forest was silent as she lay there, perfectly still, no longer human.

I counted the seconds until she opened her pretty eyes.

267 seconds.

Yes, I really was counting.