The True One

Chapter 11

Verity

The wilderness can be as bitter as an unripe berry or as sweet as a watermelon. Our first night in, I let myself taste every bit of it—acrid pine needles, dusty earth, the rotting scent of carrion.

After a hot day, blood pumping to move my body up the mountain, the night's chill didn't bother me. There was a cyclical rhythm to life that encompassed more than darkness and light, cold and hot. Animals drew breathe to this rhythm, killed and ate and slept to it. Trees and plants swayed with it. Like Alek's compass, which I would not receive from him until the next morning, a magnetic field seemed to orientate life towards an invisible aim. I experienced this force in a way I hadn't back in the city. It didn't stop at my skin but ran right through me. Every molecule of my body buzzed with it; every sense became heightened by it.

That first night, after Alek went to bed, the invisible became visible. I buzzed and breathed and listened as my heartbeat aligned with the crickets' chirp. My body became weightless, like I was made of rice paper, insignificant and easily dissolvable.

This was a trance, and I had become awake and aware within it. My consciousness spread across the forests and foothills.

She appeared at the edge of camp: the speckled wolf of my previous trance. When she cocked her head to the side, I mirrored her. My mind spread out, intent on reaching into hers. But there was nowhere to go. No need to attempt a connect with her. The shock of this discovery should have broken the trance. Instead, there was no shock, no ending, and no beginning between us.

This wolf wasn't a curious wild creature, and it wasn't a fiction or a fantasy.

This wolf was me.

I saw through my wolf's eyes, smelled the intensity of the world around me. Nature and human smells mixing to an almost nauseating degree. I shifted under the weight of warm fur and ran a long, wet tongue over sharp fangs.

I burned with the need to feed.

My stomach—my wolf stomach, my human stomach—rumbled.

Had I come to this camp to find a meal? I looked with both sets of eyes at the silent tents with my friends, my father, and Alek asleep inside. My stomach rumbled again.

No.

I had other choices. I was a fearsome predator but not a murderer. The tough skin on the bottom of my left front paw tickled where I'd stepped on an ant mound. They crawled over me, tiny soldiers attacking an invading force. The ants and I moved to the wild's rhythm. I had thought myself above this, removed from this. But now I was a wolf speeding through the forest, shaking off ants and thoughts of eating my friends.

The hunt was on for a more morally appropriate meal.

Not far from the camp, I caught the scent of a small rodent and tracked it through scrubby brush to a burrow below a tree.

A flash of movement and I pounced.

It was fast but I was faster. I tore at its neck with my fangs, warm, coppery blood spraying into the back of my throat. I had never tasted anything so satisfying.

Before I had the chance to tear into more of its flesh, another movement caught my eye. I lifted my head, senses now alert to potential danger. The air carried a familiar smell that I was just about to place, when a large brown wolf stepped from the shadows into the moonlight.

Another wolf in a place where wolves weren't part of the natural habitat.

Another wolf; a familiar smell.

"I almost thought you wouldn't transform," the wolf said to me. Said, but in words carried by a magnetic field from one mind opened to another.

My hackles were up. I had accepted my strange reality with surprising ease. Was this my breaking point? A wolf telepathically speaking to me like I was known to him felt like a violation. When had I ever given him permission to communicate with me in this manner?