Free Of Wings and Wolves by SM Reine

forest?
    He’s in danger . She could feel it in her gut.
    Her pace quickened. The coffee cup slipped from her hands and the ceramic shattered against cement. Summer’s feet slapped against the ground, clumsy in her shoes, and she kicked them off as soon as she reached the border of grass between the campus and forest.
    Another gust of wind blasted her hair out of her face. This time, it didn’t just carry Abram’s smell to her. It brought a cry, too.
    He was in pain.
    Summer ripped off her shirt and flung it to the grass. The leggings would be too complicated to remove. She could only hope that the hems were weak enough to tear.
    She didn’t step into her second skin this time—she leaped.
    With a roar, the form of her beast ripped free of her chest, consuming her flesh in an explosion of blood and musky pheromones. Shreds of cotton tangled between her hind legs, but she kicked them aside, and all four paws connected with the ground. Her spine and skull continued to shift as she ran.
    Throwing her head back, she loosed a howl into the forest that she knew her brother would hear.
    I’m coming, Abram. I’m coming .
    His scream responded to her wolfish wail.
    The smell of blood and smoke grew thick until it felt like she had to swim through sludge to keep moving. Summer huffed to clear her sinuses of the damp leaves and sap, then breathed deep again. Abram wasn’t far.
    His voice whip-cracked through the forest. “Summer!”
    She yipped at him and plunged deeper into the trees.
    This part of the forest was as familiar to Summer as her bedroom. She darted between a pair of boulders and circled around the hill as Abram cried out again.
    Summer found him in the grassy clearing on the other side of the ridge. She couldn’t see any reason for him to be screaming. His back was pressed against the trunk of a tree, but there was nothing physical to hold him in place.
    Yet his shoulders twisted and feet kicked as if struggling against a captor.
    “Summer!” he shouted.
    She sniffed the air. That smell of a raging fire was much stronger in the clearing. Her instincts said that there was an assailant nearby—maybe even two of them. But she couldn’t see anything amiss.
    As she watched, a fresh cut sliced open on his cheek, as if the point of a dagger had been drawn from his nose to his ear. Abram thrashed, but jerking his head away didn’t stop the cut.
    What the fuck is going on?
    Pain flared in Summer’s ribs. She whirled, searching for the source of the attack.
    Nothing.
    Blood spilled from her fur, and the fever of rapid healing made her flesh crawl and shake. Her nose was filled with the scent of an enemy. But where was it? She snarled and snapped at empty air.
    “To your right!” Abram called.
    Summer jumped a moment too late. The next hit smacked her into the ground. Weight crushed her ribs, as if someone was sitting on her.
    She bit at the air near her side. Her teeth sank into something soft, a foul taste filled her mouth, and shrieks shattered her eardrums.
    The pressure vanished.
    As Summer climbed to her feet, the trees whirled around her. Ground and sky inverted. There were clouds under her paws and a halo of rain-soaked earth.
    When everything reoriented itself, Summer and Abram were no longer alone in the forest.
    There were three young children with them, each no more than six years old. They had button noses, plump lips, and eyes framed by thick eyelashes. But there was no mistaking them for normal kids when shriveled wings hung from their backs and blood stained their claws. One of them even had an injured leg—an injury that looked a lot like a wolf bite. The other two held Abram to the tree.
    Summer felt dizzy. What she was looking at should have been impossible.
    Denying their existence didn’t make them vanish again.
    “Can you see them now?” Abram asked.
    She couldn’t respond without a human mouth, so she lunged at the nearest child and slammed her head into its midsection. It alighted,