Free When a Pack Dies by Gwen Campbell Page B

simply throw her body away from his. Raise his hand to her and cuff her for her insolence. She snarled and stiffened when she felt another werewolf pressing into her back but her anger fizzled when she realized it was Nathaniel. He lifted her hair and began rubbing his temple against the back of her neck, her shoulders and spine—rubbing his scent over her like she was rubbing hers over Cutler. When her scent had completely erased Suzanne’s, Fina turned, grabbed Nath’s biceps and began to rub her face over his torso.
    Cutler blinked then grinned like he was drunk. He growled but it was a drugged, glutted sound. He leaned down, wrapped his arms around Fina’s waist and began sliding his cheeks over her shoulder blades, marking parts of her his brother hadn’t.
    The three of them clung to each other in a sated huddle until Cutler’s deepest instinct lifted his head. With unerring accuracy, his eyes turned to the white nebula just visible over the treetops, heralding the approach of the full moon. He held his breath for the span of a heartbeat, then two, then threw back his head and howled. “Let the run begin,” he bellowed in a voice that was half human, half wolf.
    All around him, naked, human bodies shrank in height but expanded in mass. Rising, multiplying howls sang out through the clearing as his pack shifted into the form of the wolf. He kept his chest pressed to Fina’s back but clawed at his zipper, yanked down his jeans and kicked them aside. He could hear his brother panting and growling as he too shed the last of his clothing.
    The two of them stood on either side of Fina, standing tall and powerful and pressed against her.
    Fina trembled but for the first time in weeks, it wasn’t with fear. It was desire—raw and foreign and she looked at the two powerful males, smelled the heat and need pouring off them, saw the fully erect and formidable penises rising from the dark thatches on their groins. Her wolf howled with all the power it possessed and she felt her bones splinter. Her spine shifted, drawing her head back and pulling her mouth open. Her gums ached, then her jaw as her teeth shifted, grew and moved back to fill her elongating mouth. The ache flashed into pain then disappeared entirely. The sound of her howl changed. It was fully animal now, strong and primitive and gloriously free. Her skin broke loose from the thin layer of womanly, insulating fat beneath it, slithered over her freely then fastened onto violently expanding muscle. Hairs formed beneath her skin and slid out through tight follicles. She dropped down onto all fours and howled again only this time the tremendous sound of it joined hundreds of other wolves crying out with unfettered joy. Her ankles shattered, stretched without impediment then knit themselves up almost immediately. Her nails thickened into sharp, thick daggers that promised death to anyone foolish enough to challenge her.
    Her snout snapped shut and Fina’s fully wolf eyes gazed over the clearing, seeing everything. Her tipped, perked ears swiveled and she heard everything. She smelled everything. A red squirrel in a cedar chattered down at them aggressively then seemed to sense the combined power of the new animals crowding its territory. Its tiny claws dug into the soft bark and it spun, raced up the trunk and disappeared into a tiny crevice between two limbs. Fina knew it wouldn’t come out until after sunrise. She heard a leaf tremble in the breeze, heard a blade of grass bend as the rough pad of a paw passed over it, smelled the quick, frightened release of an elk’s urine from over a thousand feet away just before it flipped its tail up and ran, causing its small herd to stampede away in its wake. The muzzle of the wolf that was Fina pulled back from its sharp, solid teeth in a parody of a human smile. They were the most powerful creatures on the face of this land this night and the most powerful had the luxury of play.
    But before her wolf let itself