I hated these early winter days, throwing off my sense of time, making the nights seem all the more endless...

  I hadn't even had time to go back to my dorm and get supplies. I'd had to mooch a number two pencil and extra notebook paper from a classmate who was leaving the exam just as I made it there, and my Professor gave me a sort of “eat shit” scowl as I tardily received my test packet from her, and rushed over to my seat.

  So far I'd raced through the entire multiple choice section of the test, trusting my intuition with the answers to a far greater degree than I might normally have done. That was the easy part, however, and now I moved on to the essay questions. At the moment I could barely string together two coherent sentences, much less fill out pages' worth of analysis on the works of old dead authors.

  “The Similar but Contrasting Themes in Jack London's White Fang vs. Call of the Wild,” I scribbled across the heading of my test packet, before my eye was drawn once again to the phases of the moon wound tight around my wrist, pressed deep into the skin.

  Every time I looked at those marks, a fresh wave of horror washed over me. I'd thought that maybe, just maybe, I'd overreacted at first. I thought maybe I'd laid on something strange in Ethin's bed the night before– like the way that if you sit with bare legs against carpet, it might leave an impression on your skin when you first stand up. It was wishful thinking, I knew, but I still found myself hoping against hope that the marks on my wrist would fade as time passed, that I wouldn't have to associate the loss of my virginity with this man's horrific defilement of my flesh.

  But no. The mark clearly wasn't going anywhere. The sicko had imprinted himself upon me, by whatever means– a mystery I still couldn't figure out. And my last night on campus had been as disastrous as all those that had preceded it.

  There was a strange tingling in my wrists from time to time. A kind of– I don't know– almost a sparkling sensation, if that makes any sense at all. Sometimes faint, sometimes far clearer. Part of me thought I might just be imagining it, that it was just the sight of them, the thought of Ethin tattooing them onto my flesh, that made my flesh crawl.

  A kind of dark pit opened in my chest, and seemed to sink further and further down inside me. A mix of grief, of disappointment, of self-loathing.

  If I let my guard down, I could almost remember what it was that had made me fall for Ethin the night before. Those soft blue eyes. That handsome face, and his kind smile. Even that scar across his face was uniquely beautiful in its own way.

  The actual physical experience had even seemed magical at the time. My body had sang for him. He'd made me feel things I'd never felt, in places I hadn't even known were there. And even if it had only been a one night stand, at least I could remember it fondly. It had been magical from start to finish, the attraction between the two of us almost animalistic– until I'd awoken to his imprinting himself on me, like some serial killer shit or something, and realized the man I'd fallen for was no White Knight, no gentleman whatsoever.

  I should have known better... If my mother was still around, she would have talked some sense into me. She'd warned me about the things men do. And it was true, she'd always been a bit of a hypochondriac– she must have self-diagnosed herself with every possible illness known to man in her time, and that worrying spirit extended deep into her flawed comprehension of the world in which she lived. But she was also a living example of what can happen when you put your trust in the wrong man, as evidenced by her relationship with my father, the gas lighting drunk, whom I still held largely responsible for her death all these years later.

  I'd spent my entire life erring on the side of caution because of those two. And the one time, the one single instance I decided to let loose and try living like a normal young woman, I fucked the whole thing up and thus proved that the two of them had been right all along.

  That, I realized, was almost worse than the tattooing itself...

  Maybe girls like me just didn't get to have a real life. Maybe people like me should stick to doing all of their living through books.

  “Ten more minutes Miss Osmond!” the grumpy professor suddenly barked from the head of the classroom.

  I looked up and around at the classroom, which was now totally empty save for me.

  “Shoot!” I hissed, and attempted to double my writing speed, my already slapdash handwriting becoming almost illegible as I scrambled to rush all of my profound thoughts on Jack London into words.

  –––––

  I finished the exam in time, if only just barely.

  The moment I was out of the building, my eyes were once again fixed upon the montage of satellites stamped across my wrists. It was completely dark outside now at around six thirty in the evening, and snow was swirling through the air before my eyes, chilling me to the bone.

  Maybe I should go to the campus hospital, I thought, and make sure the situation wasn't even more insidious than I already imagined it to be. What if Ethin had poisoned me or something while administering the markings, I wondered? Though it was impossible to tell whether such thoughts were at all rational, or simply an inherited vestige of my deceased mother's hypochondria.

  “Better safe than sorry,” I thought, and wondered where the hell this same good sense had been the night before, when I'd agreed to go home for the night with the jerk who'd given me these marks in the first place.

  It suddenly dawned on me that I'd strayed from the main area of the college campus without even realizing it. It was like I'd absently been following some sixth sense, toward the outskirts of civilizations to a crop of snow dusted pine trees swaying angrily in the breeze.

  In my paranoia, I caught myself thinking, however absurdly, that somehow it was the markings that had led me here. I was just mulling over how stupid a notion that was, however, when suddenly the shape of a figure materialized in the darkness in front of me. A pair of black eyes stared out at me from the night, yet seemed somehow to glow, making me deeply uneasy.

  I took a step back, pulse hammering in my ears, voice caught in my throat.

  “Who– who–“ I murmured, teeth clattering from fear and the cold.

  “Who, who!” the shadowy figure mocked. “Do you hear that? There's an owl out here in the snow!”

  She stepped out of the shadows, and at first seemed no less indistinct for the fact. Curtains of black fabric billowed from her slender form, making her appear as a living shadow herself. Her skin, meanwhile, was an almost shocking color of white by comparison, almost as white as the snow, and it dawned on me that I might have stared at her there in front of me for moments on end, without even realizing it until now. Strands of raven hair blew around her sharp face in the wind, and she smiled darkly at me, the way I imagined a vampire might smile.

  I was so close in this assessment, I would later realize, yet so far off...

  “So,” she said. “The former alpha decided to get his dick wet, did he? With you, of all people? A human? But then again, why am I surprised... Who among our kind would stoop to mating with a disgraced alpha...”

  My eyes fell to my wrists again. I didn't have a clue what the hell was going on, but I was certain now that it had something to do with Ethin, that it wasn't just my own paranoia talking.

  “Who are you?” I asked finally, teeth still clattering together as I spoke.

  The woman sneered. “The competition,” she said. “Or at least, that's what I would be, if I considered you to be any threat whatsoever to me or my man. For there's one thing you've got to understand, my dear. Simply mating with an alpha does not make one an alpha. You've got to work hard to earn that position, like I did. Pleasing your man is the easy part. It's having to lay down the law that so many alpha females don't seem to understand. For me, however... That's the fun part...”

  Without warning, two more figures appeared suddenly from the dark of the tree line. Two hulking, completely naked men, one white and one black, came trudging through the snow, locking me in eyes that were dark, though not quite as dark as those of their mistress.

  I stepped back in terror, absurdly worried about these naked men freezing to death in the cold, when it was abundantly clear at that moment that I was the only one among us who should be worried about her safety.

  “I don't want any trouble,” I said, shaking violently from head to toe, my tattooed wrists beginning to throb painfully.

  “Oh, sweetie,” said the woman, “You should have thought of that before you jumped into bed with it...”

  “Do you want money?” I asked pleadingly. “Is that what you want? Here! This is everything I have! Take it!” I pulled my wallet from its compartment in my purse, and threw it at her feet. The woman stared down at the ground with her dark eyes, then looked up at me, a wicked smile spreading across her lips.

  “No. But thank you, anyway.”

  She lifted her right hand into the air beside her face. She snapped her fingers. And then something horrible happened.

  The men on either side of her lurched forward. I gasped, thinking at first they'd both suddenly collapsed from the cold. But that wasn't what was happening. The palms of the men's hands hit the ground, and they launched themselves up again, throwing their bodies forward in my direction.

  But there were no men any longer.

  Two massive, hulking wolves now came rushing forward in their place, paws hammering the snow beneath them as they surged in my direction.

  I screamed, and tore off through the snow, tripping over my own two feet as I ran. I hurled my body back up as fast as I could, knowing even as I did so that it was already too late.

  A huge furry body slammed down on top of me, plunging me face down into the icy snow. The cold ice burned against my skin, and the wolf's teeth snapped against the back of my neck. I swatted a hand at it, and felt my tattooed wrist being bitten through to the bone, blood seeping into my coat and up to my elbows as it jerked its head back and forth.

  I screamed and screamed in pure, abject terror, certain no one could hear me, certain that I was about to be killed by my own stupidity, without even fully understanding how or why.

  “I don't want to die, I don't want to die, I don't want to die!” I chanted, as though this man turned wild animal gave a good goddamn what I wanted. From the corner of my eye I saw another flash of movement, another wolf plunging straight toward me, and it was at that very moment that I knew it was over. There was no escaping fate. This second beast would plunge its fangs into my flesh, tear my face clean off my skull, and that would be the end of me.

  An unceremonious end to the short and altogether pointless life of Natalie Osmond.

  That's a great title for my autobiography, I thought, and experienced the bizarre realization that that would be my final thought on this earth– except for that one... And that one... And that one...

  But this wasn't the end.

  To my astonishment, no additional set of fangs was plunged into my flesh, and in fact the set that was already there was pulled clean out of me, leaving me to topple back freely across the snowy ground.

  I sprang up as quickly as possible, and realized with astonishment that there were now three wolves instead of two– the two that had come at me were of dark gray coloration, whereas this third creature was as virgin white as the freshly fallen snow.

  I looked beyond the canine fray, and saw that the woman was still standing there, looking utterly horrified. It was stupid, I realized, to think that she might have been the one to save me, seeing as how she'd been the one ordering the attack.

  And then it hit me– I suddenly knew who this was, who it had to be, even though it was impossible.

  “Ethin,” I whispered. Despite how certain I'd been mere moments ago that I never wanted to see the bastard again, I felt an unparalleled bliss at the idea that it was he who'd come to my rescue.

  The great white wolf slashed and bit at the two gray wolves, the soft white snow beneath them rapidly turning crimson with their blood.

  All I could do was stand there and watch, feeling totally helpless as the two villains attacked him at once. The white wolf, however, held his own surprisingly well against his dual opponents. One ran up to him and snapped at his face, only to be knocked back by a single, vicious claw across the snout from Ethin. Another was kicked backwards by Ethin's hind legs, only to surge back up again to the sinking of the white wolf's fangs into its throat.

  The white wolf tore its head back, clearly attempting to shred his enemy's windpipe. The second wolf recovered from Ethin's previous blow and came charging up behind him, a fact to which Ethin seemed shockingly oblivious.

  “Ethin, look out!” I screamed.

  The gray wolf's mouth was open, its hulking body soaring through the air in Ethin's direction. But at the last moment, Ethin spun around as though it had been his plan all along, slashing a sharp claw across the monster's eye, half-blinding him as he did so. The creature let out a pitying yelp, and I couldn't help but smile, thinking that if nothing else, at least I'd placed my bet on the right wolf...

  “You useless fucks!” came a shrill scream from the tree line, and I jerked my head up again, almost having forgotten about the pale woman's presence among us. Her eyes seemed to bulge from her head, and veins throbbed in her thin neck, at her sides her hands curled into two trembling fists. I thought for certain from her murderous expression that she was about to lunge forth and join in the fray. To my shock and disgust however, she turned suddenly on her heel and abandoned her men to be killed at Ethin's paw, disappearing into the dark of the woods from which she'd come.

  “Hey! Get back here you bitch!” I screamed after her, my sense of bravado slightly inflated by Ethin's relentless ass-kicking of the two gray wolves on either side of him.

  I veered around the three wolves, the white one's cold blue eyes flashing briefly after me in passing, and stormed into the woods after the woman, determined to catch her, without a clue as to what the hell I might actually do to her if I did. I was like a dog chasing a car, I mused, driven by some archaic instinct that had been buried deep down inside me my entire life, but which was only just now being out into the daylight– or into the moonlight, in this case, as the white pearly orb shone down through the snow, dimly lighting the path ahead.

  I dipped and weaved through a maze of towering pine trees, shocked at how quickly the darkness overtook everything a short distance on into the forest. My ears piqued at the sound of branches crackling, loads of snow cascading down along tree limbs, though each and every instance of such noises I quickly realized had been produced by yours truly.

  I ran and I ran, lungs on fire from the cold, until finally I grew out of breath and was forced to stop, crashing down hard against the trunk of a tree.

  I gasped in the cold, thin air, a thick white fog pluming up from my lips as I choked, my ears ringing loudly, yet piqued to discern even the slightest of disturbances. I held what little breath I'd managed to collect, not daring to let the sound of my own breathing drown out any potential noises.

  A primal howl rang out at length, shattering the silence.

  “AAAAAOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!”

  This, I knew, was the moment of truth.

  I braced myself, standing stock still against the trunk of a tree.

  I heard the approach of footsteps, crunching steadily through the snow in my direction. First two pairs of feet, and then one, as though the owner had risen mid-stride, up onto his or her hind legs.

  “Please... Please... Please... Please...” I whispered, thin spirals of opaque white air twisting up from my lips.

  The steps grew closer.

  A shadow appeared at the edge of the clearing in front of me. It drew nearer and nearer, grew larger and larger. It became apparent that the shadow belonged to a man.

  I didn't blink. Didn't dare look away. I watched the shadow coming and coming, my frozen, bloody hands curled painfully into fists, ready to fight like hell the moment a gray wolf stepped out from the shadows.

  “Please... Please... Please!”

  But then a sudden shaft of pale moonlight shone blindingly down through the trees. In the cold light a pair of sky blue eyes materialized, followed by the face of a man I'd come to know, then love, then hate, then love again, bloodied and battle ravaged, yet somehow no less beautiful than he had ever been.

  “We need to talk,” said Ethin, standing before me in the moonlight, as soft white flakes of snow drifted gently down onto the rock hard surface of his beautiful, beautiful body.

  7

  Ethin

  “Ethin, I'm sorry... I'm so, so sorry for storming out on you like that. I was confused, and afraid, and–“

  “Is your hand okay?”

  She blinked at me, as though she didn't have a clue what the hell I was talking about. She looked down at her injured hand, and winced as she flexed the bloody wound.

  “I think I might need stitches,” she said. “And... Maybe a rabies shot.”

  I wanted to smile at this last remark, but couldn't quite locate the nerve for it. The situation just now was far too dire for that.

  I shook my head and sighed, squeezing my temples as they throbbed with pain. “Thank God I got here when I did,” I said, and finally looked up at her again. “Natalie, you aren't the one who should be sorry right now. I didn't understand before why you ran off the way you did, what you thought I'd done. But now... Now I understand... And I would go running for my life too if I was in your situation. I'm afraid I've gotten you involved in something you couldn't possibly be prepared for.”

  She didn't say anything for a moment. Just stared at me with her dreamy brown eyes, considering me carefully.

  “What are you?” she finally asked, and for some reason the question struck me hard, like a punch to the gut.

  I didn't answer her, but stepped toward her, afraid she would flinch at my approach. She didn't, thankfully, and I pointed toward her. “Let me see your wrist,” I said. “The uninjured one.”