Free Cold Mercy (Northern Wolves) by Sadie Hart

that no normal person could hear it. He hunkered deeper into the back of the wolf’s mind, trying to let the beast take complete control, but she seemed determined to lure him out. “The winter wolves are mine. So you are mine now, too. Give me your name.”
    Something inside him, something that was still more a part of the man than the wolf, dared not to answer her. The beast wanted to belly crawl to her, whine, and lick at her face. Soothe her anger. But the man in him recognized evil, knew all too well what danger could lie in the unknown. It was best not to answer. Laughter floated through the trees around him, smug with a victory she didn’t have.
    Pain lanced through him and his mind flayed open, the day flashing before his eyes. Smuggler greeting him with kisses on his cheek. Eden laughing while she sat at his table, the quick quirk of her smile. Bay , Eden said with a laugh and the memory died away.
    “Bay,” the hidden woman murmured. “Come to me.”
    The wolf started to run and despite Bay leaping to the forefront, he couldn’t stop the animal. Not now. He struggled and fought, tried to imagine himself as a man, tried to force the change, and while the animal’s muscles twitched and ached, heating as his body started to try and shift, one sharp word from the woman in the forest and Bay lost his battle. The wolf bolted straight towards her.
    They raced across the forest, past Eden’s house and up the trail towards the heart of Mercy Pass. The zig-zagging mountain crags were slick with ice, but the wolf knew them intimately. Each stride was born of habit, created by night after night of racing over the terrain. The wolf darted along a road and suddenly Bay knew where they were going. He saw the shattered stump of the tree he’d rammed his car into last winter.
    He’d been driving home with a blizzard coming in, the road already slick with ice. Bay had taken a corner to fast in his hurry and had lost control.
    There, on the broken and jagged stump, sat a woman dressed in white. The sheer gown offered no protection at all from the cold, but she looked unaffected. As if the freezing wind toying with her hip-length hair was a summer breeze on a hot day. She couldn’t be human, but she was real. Not a figment of his imagination, not some guardian angel—
    “But I did save you,” she said, and her bloody lips twisted into a pout. “You would have died that night, Bay Hollister.” Surprise jolted through him and she grinned, bouncing buoyantly on the stump despite its jagged appearance. She leaned towards him, a dribble of red trailing down her chin. “I remember you now. You woke me.”
    Woke her? What the hell? Bay strained to back away, but the wolf kept trotting towards her, only to lay his head in her lap. Her hands framed the furred face and tilted his head up to stare down into his eyes. “So scared,” she murmured. “So confused.”
    Her thumbs trailed over the soft fur below his eyes, stroking. Bay lurched back into control, shoving the inner-wolf aside as he lunged, teeth snapping dangerously close to her face, but she held his head as if he were nothing, simply pushing him backwards.
    “Now that’s not nice.” Her soulless black eyes narrowed on him. “Then again, you fought me all last year. You were nearly useless to me. I had to waste so much energy forcing you to my side. You tried to leave me to die even after I saved you.”
    Her fingers turned painful against his head and his jaw ached under the pressure. He remembered all of the visits to the shrink, the talks of mind over matter, controlling his dreams. The various drugs he’d taken to help knock him out at night, the anti-psychotics. But this time, he also remembered staggering out of his house on four paws, slumping into the snow some nights, too exhausted to go further. He remembered hunting and eating, but being too tired to come to her, despite her shouted commands over the forest.
    He’d do it all again this year and the