***
“Hello?” Josh’s voice came echoing down the alleyway as he cautiously stepped closer. “I know you’re here.”
“Why are you following me?” Hannah said, standing up from behind the bin and taking a step toward him.
Josh reeled back in surprise. “Hannah? I…I wasn’t following you. I thought I saw…” he trailed off with a frown. “I don’t know what I saw. When you left, I went back to the stage to see if I could find Chad. I thought I had seen him earlier, before I was attacked by your friends.”
She winced. They weren’t her friends, and he knew that. But he was just frustrated. Hannah wanted to tell him, and she contemplated doing it just then.
Fuck it. This is no way to live. Hunted and fearing everyone around you.
The big shifter sniffed. “Why does it smell like wet dog here?”
Hannah covered up a laugh by turning it into a cough, but she forced herself to continue on her original path. “Josh,” she began. “What do you know about w—”
“Look out!” Josh shouted without warning, his eyes going wide as he looked beyond her. “Hannah run! It’s a werewolf!”
She spun just in time to see a sleek, powerful-looking shape glide from the shadows, coming to a halt about the same distance behind her as Josh was in front.
Chad!
“It’s okay,” she said with relief, turning back to look at Josh, glad that the secret was out.
The big man was no longer there. In his place, two tons of snarling, angry bear charged down the alleyway at them. A garbage bin went flying as he shouldered it aside, trying to interpose himself between Hannah and the werewolf.
“Josh! Stop!” she screamed, but the animal didn’t listen, flying by her on a path to attack the werewolf.
To attack Chad.
“Dammit!” she screamed. “This is why I didn’t want to tell you!”
It didn’t matter; the bear went in for the kill. Hannah watched in horror, but the sleek, lethal-looking wolf creature easily dodged the powerful blow, darting in behind it to slap a clawed paw against the flank of the bigger creature.
But Josh was good, and the return path of his blow connected with the wolf, sending it tumbling into the wall.
Hannah made her decision, this time calling forth the creature within her on her own, instead of trying to resist it. She cared desperately for Josh in some sort of weird, fated way.
But Chad was family, and she had to ensure his safety first.
For the second time in a short while, Hannah opened her mind and let the other entity within her flow through. It howled with delight, willing to let her be in control this time. It knew a fight was coming, and that she was letting it free. Her limbs lengthened and she felt herself begin to fall over. Dropping onto all fours she snarled a challenge at Josh, the sound low and loud, and completely unhuman. Her wolf was here, and it was time to show the man she cared for what he was really up against. The bear spun with surprising agility, giving Hannah her first real look into the face of his animal.
Uh-oh.
There was no intelligence in his gaze. Only a feral, bestial anger that promised to do everything it could to kill them.
What happened to Josh? Was he locked away in there, unable to control himself? Hannah feared that if that were the case, she might have to kill him that night. Was his hatred for her kind truly that strong?
With the bear distracted by her, Chad launched himself back into the fray, landing atop the bear, his big paws scrabbling for purchase as his powerful jaws worried at the animal’s tough hide.
The spell broken, Josh—or the bear that had been Josh—whirled in place, trying to throw Chad free. Hannah darted in, ripping a chunk of flesh free from its hind leg, eliciting a howl of pain from the much larger beast. She narrowly avoided the kicking motion of the wounded limb as her wolf scampered back out of its kill-zone.
Chad was finally thrown from his spot on the bear’s back, but he rotated once in the air and landed on all fours, crouching low to the ground, lips pulled back in a ferocious snarl. The crazed bear looked back and forth between them, a low growl rumbling through the air as if daring them to attack.
So they did. Together. Hannah would shoot forward, grabbing the bear’s attention, but pulling back just before she got in range. At that point Chad’s sleek form would accelerate, opening a wound on the exposed flank. As Josh turned to confront that threat, it would be Hannah’s turn to inflict damage. She hated herself for it, but knew that unlike the bear, she and Chad would leave Josh alive at the end.
There was no doubt in her mind that the pair of them would win either. Werewolves were not feared simply because all the other shifters thought they were insane. Hannah knew better.
The muscles corded in her legs flexed and she moved with lightning-quick speed to open another large cut on Josh’s right flank.
The bear was tiring, they could see that now. Each spin was slower than the one before it. Blood streamed from dozens of places, coating the thick silvery fur with huge patches of sticky liquid, matting it down in an unruly mess.
Not much more of this, unless I miss my guess.
She didn’t. A few more seconds and the bear collapsed, sides heaving in both pain and exhaustion from the damage done to it.
The wolf form of her brother raced in once more, but this time Hannah snarled and launched herself forward, interposing herself between the pair. She drove him off, her jaws snapping and snarling right back at him, not backing down from him. In human form he may have been larger, but Chad knew who was superior in this form. He backed away, then leapt over them and toward the mouth of the alley where he turned and stopped, looking expectantly at Hannah.
With a mental snarl at the entity within her head, Hannah stood up. The fur melted away as her limbs readjusted their size and joints rearranged themselves to bend properly. The long, powerful snout retracted into her face, leaving her once again in her own form. Her wolf was exhausted, and she had been able to easily overpower it, forcing it back into the mental cage it was kept in.
She looked down sadly at the badly wounded bear. She knew he would recover—it wasn’t anywhere near fatal—but enough to leave him impotent long enough for her to escape.
“This is why I couldn’t tell you,” she whispered, looking into its eyes, searching for any sort of understanding from the person that she knew was contained in there. “You’re so preprogrammed to attack my kind on sight that you can’t even contain the rage of your bear long enough to talk. Imagine if I had told you, and Chad wasn’t here to help? I would be dead right now. Killed by your bear.” She blinked back tears. “Can you understand now?”
There was no response.
Her head drooped. Hannah let out a small sigh and moved past the bear, careful to stay away from its jaws, and headed toward the mouth of the alleyway.
A noise behind her caused her to spin, ready to summon her wolf again if the bear was somehow ready to attack once more.
But the bear was gone, leaving a battered and bleeding Josh in its place. A low laugh burbled from his lips, blowing a blood bubble while he pulled himself into a sitting position against one of the garbage bins.
“What’s so funny?” she snapped.
Josh shook his head. “They have me protecting a fucking werewolf,” he said, flecks of blood spitting from his lips. “That’s right. I knew there was something different about you.” He snorted. “How could Valen do this?” he questioned aloud.
Something in Hannah snapped. “Joshua—whatever your last name is—smarten the fuck up!”
The big shifter’s head snapped back as if she had hit him. “Excuse me?”
“Seriously, think about this. You’re just saying things now that you’ve been taught to say. Programmed to say. You didn’t recognize me from the start. You had no idea what I was. You have absolutely zero real-world experience with werewolves. What makes you such an expert on them?”
The big man stared at her angrily, eyes blazing. Hannah looked deeper, and she thought she saw a sliver of doubt. Josh wasn’t an idiot; she knew that. He was just conditioned by society. Perhaps, in his weakened state, she could push through that? Bring him around to see logic?
“When you first met me, you had nothing against me,” she began.
“Except for the part where you hated me for being assigned to watch over you,” he volunteered.
Hannah rolled her eyes. “I mean as a werewolf. Don’t become a sarcastic prick now. It doesn’t suit you.”
Anger blazed momentarily in those silvery-blue eyes of his, but it faded quickly. She was right on that account and they both knew it.
“You liked me,” she said, forging ahead. “We cared for each other. Even when we were ignoring each other, like you said earlier, we kept looking at each other. We never wanted to be far from each other’s presence, despite pretending otherwise. Everything you know about me—none of that is fake, none of it’s a lie. I never told you I wasn’t a werewolf. Nothing. I didn’t tell you everything, but I never lied.”
“Your point?” he asked.
“My point is why am I suddenly a lower-class citizen in your eyes? I’m not suddenly crazy, nor am I a psychotic killer. I can do the exact same thing you can, and now suddenly I’m the one who needs to be put out of my misery?” She snorted. “Do you not find it ironic that you’re trying to defend shifters from prejudiced humans who would destroy you, and yet you can easily turn around and do the same thing to your own kind?” Hannah crossed her arms in front of her. “True, I may not be a bear shifter, or a dragon. But that doesn’t make me any less of a shifter, dammit!”
Tears began to well up in her eyes as she continued to speak. “We’re called the crazy ones, and yet who was it that couldn’t control their bear and keep it from taking control, sending you into a frenzied rage, hmm?” she challenged, staring him down.
The doubt in Josh’s eyes burgeoned, and when his eyes began to flick around in the way that indicated someone was thinking furiously, Hannah knew that she had won the first battle. It wouldn’t be easy for him to accept that everything he knew about her kind was wrong, but if anyone was going to give it a try, she hoped it would be Josh. Perhaps his feelings for her would allow him to come around and see reason.
“But you’re a werewolf,” he said.
Hannah had to choke back a smile at the halfhearted protest. Maybe her words had been more effective than even she thought.
“Yes, I am. And?”
Josh frowned, sitting up a little straighter. She could tell he was beginning to recover his strength from their fight. Even some of his smaller cuts were starting to heal, fresh pink skin knitting closed the jagged lines of his opened skin. If he began to regress, to decide that she wasn’t as normal as she claimed, Hannah would have to depart, and quickly.
“But werewolves are supposed to be…”
“Crazy?” she pressed. “Have I really struck you as crazy? And think about your answer there,” she said sternly. “This is not a time to joke around.”
Behind her Chad let out a low growl, still pacing back and forth in his wolf form. Hannah ignored him though, content to see what she could convince Josh of at the time.
“But what about the werewolf virus? It was supposed to have infected all of you and made you go insane. That’s why you were practically wiped out a few centuries back, wasn’t it? Because the disease couldn’t be allowed to transmit to other races?”
“That’s the popular story,” she said dryly. “But do I seem infected with some sort of disease that makes me go insane to you? Think about how stupid the reason you’ve been given is,” she said. “Some magical disease that somehow did what, made us want to kill everyone around us?”
Josh arched an eyebrow. “I mean, there was that big explosion right over there,” he said. “That almost killed everyone around you.”
Hannah glared at him. “Not funny. Do you really think, after all we’ve been through, that I’m still infected with something?”
The shifter wiped away some of the blood as rain continued to fall around them, tinging the clear liquid red as it washed off him. “If I was asked ten minutes ago, I would have to say no,” he told her truthfully. “But that doesn’t mean I was wrong. If everything I know about you is wrong, then why is nobody out there telling the truth? Why is the lie propagated through so many generations?” he said, rising to his feet, but not advancing toward her.
Hannah studied him for a moment. “I can tell you if you’re willing to listen.”