Читать книгу The Moonlight Mistress - Victoria Janssen - Страница 13

ON THE FIFTH DAY AFTER HER ESCAPE FROM THE cage, the wolf decided she had finally outrun all pursuit. She stopped to lick at the dried blood on her wounded shoulder before she slept, to allow herself to heal. She waited for twilight that evening before she moved on, and did the same on many subsequent nights, covering perhaps twenty kilometers without ceasing her steady lope, unless she found water; then she would stop to drink and clean herself. Traveling as she did through fields of grain and vegetables, devouring field mice, only clean dirt clung to her pelage’s stiff hair, but she had become fastidious since her escape.

She not only swam in any suitable water she encountered, but rolled vigorously in sand or against rough rocks, whatever she could find. The stench of him lingered, no matter what she did, and to the wolf an illusory stink was as real as the ground beneath her paws. She took to scrubbing her muzzle in the grass when the taint overpowered her. That helped, or at least provided a distraction from her mother’s never-ceasing voice in her mind: “You must not attack a human. It’s forbidden. Forbidden. Forbidden.”

The weather grew steadily warmer and the days longer. The farther she ran, the more her mother’s voice faded, submerged in the wolf’s mundane concerns. The air of freedom smelled sweet as a fresh kill.

Only once did memory return. Weary of hunting mouthfuls of mouse, one evening she hunted hare, successfully predicting its zigzag dash and seizing its quivering body in her jaws. Blood spurted into her mouth, over her tongue, and it was a man’s blood flowing down, soaking her ruff as she gripped his hip in panic and anger, too weak and fearful to let go and rip instead at his tender belly. The shock of memory almost forced her to change. When she came back to herself, she found the hare’s mangled corpse lying at her feet, but could not summon any appetite for it. She left it for the smaller predators of the fields and went hungry that night, running until she forgot all but the raw-rubbed skin on the bottom of her paws.

After dawn each day, she denned in hedges or ditches, nuzzling her way beneath brush and leaves or whatever cover she could locate. This might have been easier with human hands, but she was reluctant to change, lest anyone see her. And…she did not want to see her human form again. Not yet. It didn’t matter that she bore no scars. That form was bizarre to her, unlikely, and, oddly, she felt as if it had betrayed her. Absurd, when as a human she was also herself; but as a wolf she had never cowered in quite the same way, or yielded to dominance. Her human form was small, pale, weak. It had nothing to offer her today, or tomorrow, or any day after that. Besides, when in wolf form, it was difficult to think too many days ahead. As far as she was concerned, she might remain on four legs forever. So long as she reached home, what did it matter which form she held? This one was as good as any other.

When the full moon came, she dared not run. She heard her mother’s voice again, sensed her mother’s human hands on her puppy fur as she gently told tales of the wolves who’d gone out in the light of the moon, been seen, and been killed.

“You must hide, little one. Hide when the light is too bright. We are only safe here, on our own lands.”

She denned on the edges of a forest, too skittish to go deeper into the dense, cagelike trees and too afraid to lie in the open without concealment. She tried to sleep the night through, to pass the time, but sleep came only in shallow snatches, her legs twitching as if to continue running, so she woke even more weary than she’d been before. At dawn, she found water, then fell truly asleep.

Perhaps her body sensed the trees close around her. She dreamed of being held immobile in a wooden chute, claws scrabbling frantically at the floor while bullets slammed into her haunches, bursts of numbness blossoming into hot, ripping agony. She snarled and yelped, trying to curl in on herself, but there was no refuge, and her blood slowly soaked through the layers of her golden pelage, her strangled whimpers of pain erupting into howls that wrenched and tore into human screams. In her dreams, the change was pain like snapping bones and she jolted into another place, another time. She heard her leg bone creak and twist and pop while she fought uselessly against crisscrossing, pinching leather straps, growling through her bound, bleeding muzzle, while her captor cursed her and smacked her nose, annoyed that she would not hold still. Across the room, the others watched and growled.

She could not bear to sleep among the trees after that endless night. She trusted cornfields, open and predictable, to hide her from view, but sometimes even the spaced green rows seemed to whisper behind her and close in over her head, leaving her no escape but a panicked burst of speed under the white light of the revealing moon.

She had traveled forever. One evening, when she’d slept next to a road, she woke to the stench of tobacco and man. The wise course would be to remain hidden. Instead, she sprang free of concealment and into the road, hackles raised.

He stopped. He spoke.

Her upper lip quivered and lifted, a growl tremoring forth from her belly. Run, she thought. If he ran, she would chase. If he ran, he would be prey. Rage and revulsion fought each other in her belly. She imagined hot blood gushing into her mouth and the slick tenderness of meat beneath his hide.