Chapter 11
The nausea came in like a heavy wall the moment Willow woke up.
She rolled onto her side, and noticed the bed was empty. Right. He said he had a shift in the morning, so he wasn't actually that far off. Her stomach lurched again, and Willow gagged, clutching her stomach.
What did she eat that would…?
Oh.
Fish.
Right.
Willow cursed Carter's restaurant choices and stared longingly at the bathroom, feeling too dizzy to stand up. Instead, she clutched her stomach and hoped that she wouldn't get sick on the bed.
She'd had such a good night with him and enjoyed every bit of it. She was relieved he wasn't there to see her rolling around in discomfort on her bed. The sheets still smelled of him, his masculine thick smell. Her mouth watered at the thought of him, and then she gagged again. She moved over to his side of the bed, letting his smell relax her even just a little.
Her stomach felt like it was moving from the outside, and she decided she couldn't wait any longer
That restaurant was going to get one hell of a review as well. She didn't care if Carter liked it or not. She'd never had a bout of food sickness this horrible before.
Rolling out of bed, she rushed to the bathroom and kneeled in front of the toilet, her porcelain god, as she waited for her dinner to come up.
It didn't.
Her stomach settled, and Willow sighed, sitting back against the tub.
Her entire body ached, which didn't make any sense since the sex wasn't that exhaustive. He'd done most of the work. There was no reason she should be so drained. She just slept nine hours, and there she was craving even more sleep.
“Ugh,” she groaned, leaning forward toward the toilet as another wave of nausea rocked her. Finally, her stomach emptied, and she wretched, flushing it down immediately. After dry heaving for a second, she waited to see if it fixed anything.
Not much.
Her stomach was still rolling, angry at its emptiness now.
Willow grabbed her toothbrush and tried to get the taste out of her mouth, hoping it would ease her gagging.
Her legs seemed to vanish away from beneath her as she rinsed her toothbrush. Reaching out, she tried to pull herself up to the counter, and froze.
It wasn't her hand.
That wasn't her hand; it wasn't even really a hand at all.
A furry paw sat in front of her on the counter, and she sprung back, trying to shout. A yip escaped her lips, and when she tried to reach up to touch her mouth, all she managed to do was pop herself on the nose with her paw.
Something was fucking wrong.
Standing up on extremely wobbly legs, she leaned on the bathroom counter and stared into the mirror.
A freaking dog was staring back.
Maybe a dog?
Maybe a wolf?
She wasn't sure, the biggest pet she'd ever had was a ferret in college.
What the hell kind of food sickness makes you hallucinate so vividly?
She was a human being. She knew that. She saw her hands as she held her toothbrush and brushed her teeth. She had fingers, a thumb, and yet when she looked down at the ends of her arms, all she saw was a pair of paws with long hard nails.
This wasn't human.
She wasn't human.
Willow tried to walk on her hind legs, and then just normally. She was wobbly and uneasy, like a newborn horse. She tried to carry herself forward to the bed, working on convincing herself that she was just having a very vivid fever dream and needed to be back in bed. She could sleep this off and then wake up and laugh at how ridiculous this was.
She wasn't a dog-wolf-whatever. She was a human being who ate bad fish.
And maybe drank a little too much wine.
Then had sex and mixed that all together.
She sighed to herself and climbed into bed, shuffling around until she could figure out how to get the blanket on top of herself. She willed herself into sleep, willing her eyes to close and just sleep.
Sleep came fitfully and slowly, and as she finally slipped into it, she was pleased to not feel the strange paws anymore.
Her dreams were nonsensical to her. The pictures she'd taken of the wolf statues were plastered on every bare surface of her room, their green eyes reflecting her own and staring at her. She couldn't move without their gaze tracking her.
Loud banging woke her, shaking her out of it, and she tried to sling herself out of bed to answer the door, but ended up stumbling to the floor.
The paws were still there.
Panicked, terrified, she rushed to the door.
When she was a couple of steps away, her body felt like it was imploding on itself. Her bones sounded like a crackling fire as they roared into a different position, and she could feel every splintering and movement. She couldn't scream, couldn't work her vocal chords, and the moment she could, she was coughing.
Laying on the floor, catching her breath, she stared down at her pink hands and feet.
The only hair in sight was her long, brown hair she had only hours before been holding back so that she could get rid of her food sickness. Was it even food sickness?
Was she just losing her mind?
A knock came at the door again, and Willow realized how naked she was, grabbing a robe to put it on before she answered the door.
She needed to see another person.
She needed to know if she was actually awake.
***
Carter could smell an Alpha in the resort.
At least, he was mostly sure it was an Alpha. It was definitely a wolf.
They had a specific scent when in wolf form that wasn't like anything else. It was so unique that even some humans could pick up on it and know that there was something different about those wolves, those Alphas.
There weren't supposed to be any Alphas in town. They'd all run off. None of the Lycaon line were within a thousand miles of West Valley, and yet there was the smell. A sweet twinge changed the smell, making it unique from any other Alpha scent, and he tracked it curiously. Up from the second floor to the third, then the fourth, until he found himself standing outside of the room he'd just left earlier that morning.
There was a wolf in Willow's room.
He wasn't sure what to do with that information.
He couldn't sense any malice, any ill intention, but there couldn't be any good reason for a wolf to be in her room. He knocked softly at first, not wanting to startle anyone. There was no response. He knocked harder, then stopped and listened. There was a whine – soft, but there – and then a loud thud, and Carter's ears were hammering with his pulse.
He didn't have anything on him to fight off someone in wolf form at the moment.
He couldn't shift and have Willow know what he was.
How the hell was he supposed to protect her?
He banged on the door again, only now letting the thought cross his mind that she may not want him there.
As Carter was getting ready to just leave, soft footsteps, human footsteps, thudded toward the door: toward him.
The door clicked open, and there she was – beautiful and sleepy looking. The smell of wolf billowed out from around her.
She was the wolf.