Feral Wolf by Caroline Peckham

“He’s coming around now, ready for extraction,” a female voice reached me from the fog of my mind.

“By the sun, I hate when they wake up. What do you reckon, Angie, is this one a screamer like the last one?” a male voice followed.

“He’s a Lion Shifter, I think we’ll make him roar, Roland,” Angie chuckled and the mist lifted from my mind a little further until I was able to crack my eyes open. They came into focus above me in blue scrubs with masks over their faces so all I could see were their eyes. There was something seriously disconcerting about Roland, his long dark hair held back in a ponytail, and the greasy gleam of it making my inner Lion shudder. There was a jagged scar running through his left eye which seemed much darker than his right, and wrinkles furrowed his forehead in a permanent frown.

A blinding pain started to rake at my chest and panic washed into my veins as the repetitive beeping of a heart rate monitor picked up somewhere nearby.

“Easy now, big boy,” Angie cooed.

I dropped my chin as they probed at something in my chest and I felt the horrible, gut wrenching terror of realising their fingers were pushing beneath my ribcage, inside my body. Healing magic took most of the pain away but as my gaze settled on the hole carved into the centre of my chest, a strangled noise got stuck in my throat.

“What are you doing?” I slurred, drugs making my limbs heavy.

I couldn’t move them at all. I couldn’t thrash or shift. I was restrained and even if I hadn’t been, I doubted I had the strength to fight.

“Extracting in five, four, three, two, one,” Roland said calmly then a blinding, unimaginable pain tore at my insides.

He had his hands in my fucking chest and was pulling on something vital inside me. I roared in anger and agony, trying to buck them away but my limbs wouldn’t move.

“Get away from me!” I bellowed as Roland continued to yank and tug and suddenly there was a cutting sensation that seemed to sever something from my very soul.

“No – no – no!” I cried, frantic as Roland cut it away, taking that piece of me, stealing it from my being. And as he cupped a glowing blue light in his bloody hands, raising it from my chest, I knew what it was. I recognised this part of me as my Order. My Lion. They were taking my fucking Lion.

“No - please!” I found myself begging, terror scoring through me as this nightmare descended on me.

“This one’s powerful,” Roland groaned like he could feel the strength of the creature in his hands. “Bring the jar, Angie.”

She grabbed a large jar covered in runes from a trolley as I started to convulse, foam rising in my mouth as a fit took hold of me and the hollowness in my chest made me want to vomit.

“Give him ten milligrams of Ivis elixir,” Roland barked then some drug flowed into my veins and the fitting stopped, my mind refocusing once more.

But I was still in hell.

“There we are,” Angie sighed and I saw the jar with my Lion locked inside it, the glowing light shimmering and a label on its side with a symbol of a Lion alongside my star sign and water Element.

She placed it on a trolley and picked up another jar, carefully unscrewing the top and handing it to Roland as my head spun and pain danced all along the inside of my flesh. I was in agony, but not because of the gaping hole in my chest, because of what had been torn from my body, taken from me.

“Give it back,” I begged, my voice croaky, broken. I felt weak and lost and so hollow inside I wanted to die. I’d rather they let me die than live on without my Lion. “Please, give it back. I need it.”

“Here we are now, hush, hush,” Angie said softly as Roland reached into the jar and took the glowing essence between his hands which pulsed and writhed in a different way to how my Lion had.

As Roland’s hands lowered into my chest, energy started to return to my limbs and I fought, my muscles bunching against the restraints. I didn’t want that alien thing in me. I didn’t want another Order. I needed my Lion. I was my Lion. Without it I was nothing, no one.

“Stop!” I bellowed at the top of my lungs, but Roland placed it within me and started casting magic which latched it to my soul.

I growled and groaned against the horrid new feeling of this thing inside me as it was bound more and more irrevocably to my being. The vomit started rising in my throat again and I jerked and begged, but nothing I did made them stop.

When Roland was finished, I felt it there, permanently seated within my chest, living and twitching and taking root in my body, changing me. So much was fucking changing and my skin was on fire as everything burned then turned icily cold. Roland healed the gaping wound in my chest, sealing it within me and I fell still as numbness gripped me.

And all at once I was dying, falling away into the dark as another seizure took hold of me and I wanted it to end, prayed the stars would take me away because death was preferable to this. I was mutated, twisted beyond recognition, forged into some other beast that didn’t belong in me.

“His heart rate is dropping fast,” Angie cursed and both of their fingers pressed to my body as healing magic rushed into me. “We need to stabilise him in the next minute or he’s a goner.”

The darkness was creeping in and my body was twitching, jerking. No breath found my lungs and I didn’t want it to.

Take me away.

Let me go.

Then somewhere in my mind, I found Rosalie. I saw her big brown eyes and the desperation in her to save me from Darkmore. My whole existence pivoted on that girl now. My Rosa, the sweet rosebud who had blossomed into a flower with thorns and beauty so unimaginable that it made me want to kneel at her feet and worship her.

But she was gone. And I was reliving losing her all over again. I felt her hands slipping from my body as I cut her vines free of me. I saw the anguish in her gaze when I’d had to let her go, and I felt the longing in me to be with that girl. Only that girl.

She was my mate, chosen for me by the moon and I suddenly realised that no force in this world could take me from her. Not even this.

So I started fighting to stay even when I wanted to die, and the tremors in my body slowly stopped.

“There,” Angie sighed happily. “That’s a good boy.” Her fingers caressed my cheek and I tried to flinch away but found no strength in me to move.

I was here, needing to be here for Rosalie, but my body felt like it was someone else’s, like everything I knew about myself had suddenly shifted. And it made me want to numb out so I didn’t have to feel it.

As Angie and Roland moved away from the bed, they took the jar with my Lion in it with them and I felt its presence leaving me forever.

I wanted to scream, but no noise came out. My head lolled to the side and my gaze fixed on Gustard in a bed beside mine. His eyes were wide and glassy, and for a moment I thought he was dead before he blinked once, the emptiness in his gaze seeming to go on forever.

I stared back at him, sinking into that eternal void and trying not to feel the stirrings of this new, strange creature awakening inside me. It wasn’t mine. It wasn’t me. I was gone. And maybe staying here for Rosa was pointless, because even if she found me, I wasn’t the mate she’d had to leave behind.

I was something else. Something wrong. Something twisted. And I didn’t know if it could ever be undone.

 

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