The shed was old, the door attached with rust, and it only took a swift kick and yank to pull open. In her head, Nif could hear each second tick by, drowning out any signs of pursuit and leaving her sick with dread. She couldn’t leave Oliver. Especially since they were planning to burn down the house.

“Oliver? Are you here?” It was dark, but when she stepped inside, moonlight spilled in through the doorway and lit up Oliver’s still naked form, bound at wrist and ankle in blue and white rope.

“Oh gods. Oliver! Oliver, can you hear me?” She dropped to her knees beside him, her hand shaking as she reached out to touch him. He was cold, far too cold, but she could just make out the tiny puff of heated air near his lips. He was alive.

The knots didn’t come easy in the dark and working with a broken wrist, her hands shaking, but finally she was able to untie first his hands and then his feet, taking off only a little bit of skin. She didn’t think he’d mind. The biggest issue was getting him into something warm, or else he’d freeze. Best thing for him was to shift, but he didn’t look like he was capable of walking, let alone changing his form.

She shrugged off her jacket and forced him into it, his shoulders near bursting the seams and the sleeves barely reaching mid-arm. There was no way she could zip it up, but she used a length of the rope that they’d used to tie him up to cinch the front closed. That would have to do for now. She just had to get him up and moving.

She shook him, hard, and he groaned.

“What…?” His eyes flickered open and he frowned, trying to focus on Nif with hazy, drugged eyes. “Nif…? Why’s it so cold?”

“You need to get up, Oliver. They’re going to be after us soon and they’re going to kill us like they killed Morris.”

“Morris?” He sounded like he was trying to call out from a deep well, his voice faint and strained.

“Please, Oliver. You have to get up!” Nif tapped his cheeks, not quite slapping, and the haze cleared from his eyes.

“Nif, are you alright?”

“We need to run. They’re coming for us and we have to go now!” She tugged him upright and he swayed, bumping up against the shelving lining the walls. Glass tinked. Stacked in neat rows were jars upon jars and Nif couldn’t help lean forward to see what was suspended in the liquid. She reeled back, a scream snagged in her throat.

“Shit. Are those eyes?” Oliver asked. Whatever colour had filled his cheeks was drained in an instant. “There’s got to be at least two dozen!” Were Morris’ eyes here? Kept as some twisted trophy?

“Hurry! They plan to burn the house down and I can’t imagine they’d want to keep these around.” Nif grabbed his hand and led him out of the shed, her eyes searching movement near the house but seeing nothing but darkness. They’d turned off the lights as if no one was home. “I spotted a road from inside. This way. Come on.”

They stumbled into the tree line, the grass beneath their feet crunchy from a thin layer of ice. She wouldn’t be surprised if it snowed later.

“Where are we?” Oliver grunted through his teeth, one hand pressed to his head as if he was trying to keep his brains from spilling out from his ears.

“I’m not sure. Can you shift? Your toes are going blue.” Nif kept her eyes front and centre, trying not to ogle when neither of them were in great shape.

“I’m not even sure I can manage a full sentence.”

“I’ve news for you then, wordsmith, but that was a full sentence.” She glanced behind them, trying to gauge how far they’d come. They weren’t moving fast enough. She could still see the dark outline of the house and it was difficult to make out if it was the trees moving in the wind or the form of wolves laughing at their feeble attempts to escape.

“You should…” Oliver trailed off, panting heavily.

“If you were about to say I should leave you behind, then fat chance. It’s your fault you chased after them like some half-cocked super hero.”

Before he could reply, they were bathed in heat followed quickly by the booming sound of an explosion. It was like a furnace door had suddenly been open and sweat beaded along Nif’s neck.

“Keep going,” Oliver gapped. “They won’t be far behind.”

The wolf pack’s house was well on its way to being ash before any fire brigade arrived. Whatever Oscar had done to the place – doused it in fuel, set a bomb, filled the rooms with gas and lit a match – had been well and truly effective. It would make it all the more easier for Thea and her team to find the place, but it would also mean they would be busy looking in the wrong direction. Moira and the others would perhaps think Oliver and her had been left inside, yet instead they were running for their lives away from potential help.

They just had to get to the road.

“Come on, Oliver.”

Each step he was becoming steadier, which was a good thing since Nif felt that at any minute she’d collapse into a puddle. Her knee crunched like it was made of glass everytime she stepped. They were slowly exchanging the ratio of weight until Nif was mostly being dragged along by Oliver as the last of the tranquilisers wore off.

With the burning house a pulsing heat against her back, the wintery night air was like a slap to Nif’s face, but she gritted her teeth, using the chill to push down the pain in her arm and head. She had to stay conscious otherwise she may never wake up again.

The woods surrounding the house were dense, but animal trails wove between the trees and many of the low-lying shrubs had lost their leaves, the branches leaving fiery hot trails against Nif’s cheeks and the backs of her hands as they pushed through the scrub.

Beneath the roar and hungry pop of the flames, Nif could hear the chittering flight of frightened animals, her own panicked pants and Oliver’s bare feet kicking up leaves. No sound of the pack on their trail. They weren’t playing anymore. She wouldn’t hear them until they were ripping out her throat and human Oliver was just as vulnerable as her.

“Think you can transform yet?” she asked him between breaths.

“Maybe.” He slowed a little, a deep crease lining his forehead and he was sweating despite the cold. The bones in his face shifted slightly before returning fully human. “Not yet.” He groaned and swayed, staggering into the brush until Nif hauled him back.

“That’s okay. We just need a new plan.” Nif looked around until she spotted the thickest, denses bush she could see, like a dark smudge on reality. It was some kind of thorn bush, winter bare but the branches closely woven together to make a thick mat. “You need to hide,” Nif said. “And I’ll run for help.” Beneath the bush was a narrow space, just big enough for a human to wiggle under. Hopefully the branches would also protect him from the chilly wind.

“But your arm! And you’re clearly limping!” Oliver didn’t struggle though as she tugged him towards the hiding space.

“I don’t need my arm to run and my knee is fine. The road isn’t far ahead. I can hear traffic. Come on, squeeze under here and shuffle back as far as you can.”

He fell to his knees, exhaustion, the cold and whatever drug still lingering sapping his energy.

“I’ll flag someone down and then come back for you,” Nif assured him, and helped him roll under, wincing when he lost more skin and her borrowed jacket was snagged by the thorns. As she checked no one could see him from the outside, he snaked out a hand and grabbed her.

“Promise me you won’t until you have reinforcements, alright?” Oliver sounded desperate. “You have to promise you’ll only come back if it’s safe.”

“Of course,” Nif said. “Now stay still and quiet.”

Nif had every intention of reaching the road, but she was also determined to lead their pursuers away from Oliver. She backtracked a full thirty metres, her heart in her throat as she imagined running straight into the pack before she turned heel and made a dash for the road along a different route.

A car horn blared and for a single moment, Nif honestly believed she’d make it. Flag down a car. Get too much attention so the pack had no choice but to melt back into the forest. Except a heavy weight barrelled into her side, pounding the breath from her lungs and suddenly she was staring up into the sky, the moon fat and round, smoke from the burning house tinting it to a warning orange glow. Nif opened her mouth to scream when large paws pressed down on her chest. Stella’s muzzle shoved close, teeth bared and saliva streaking her chestnut brown fur.

The wolf’s laugh was an odd chuffing sound, tongue lolling out between yellow teeth. Nif was terrified, but through the pain and fear, a deep, white hot rage filled her, starting deep in her gut and working her way up through her chest and throat. Suddenly she had air to scream, except her scream was one of anger. Nif scratched and clawed at Stella’s golden eyes with both hands, her fingers sinking into eye jelly. Stella yelped, flailing back and leaving claw marks in Nif’s shirt and chest, but Nif was too wound up to feel it.

Scrambling to her feet, Nif used a tree to steady her balance and searched for a weapon, anything at all, because there was no way she could outrun this family of wolves. She needed to attack them first. If she didn’t make it, Oliver would die, freezing under that thorn bush before he could be found.

Stella was shaking her head and making soft, hurt sounds, shocked perhaps that her prey had lashed out even injured as it was. Beneath icy frost, Nif picked up a branch, as thick and long as her arm, but light enough she could hold it in one hand. Her broken wrist she kept tucked to her chest, the pain going beyond burning to a pulsing throb, as if her heart had temporarily moved in.

This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

Before Stella could regain her senses, Nif pulled back the branch and swung with all her might at Stella’s head.

The blow was weak. No strength behind at all being only one handed, and the branch was brittle. It snapped. Nif lost her balance, tripped, and found herself wedged awkwardly amongst thin saplings. She was completely helpless to Stella’s lunging attack, but the wolf shifter’s howl of rage was cut short.

Nif had closed her eyes. She felt the weight of Stella, the hot splash of saliva across her face, but then the heaviness of the wolf increased as if Stella was trying to smother her.

Nif opened her eyes.

Stella stared back into hers, wide, startled, still. The branch Nif had still clutched as she’d fallen was lodged in the wolf shifter’s heart. Blood dripped onto Nif’s cheeks. For a brief moment she was warm beneath the furry weight of Stella. With a burst of adrenaline, Nif wiggled and pulled herself away from the corpse, using the saplings to haul herself from beneath the lifeless weight. Once far enough away – could she ever be far enough? She just killed someone. A living, breathing person! – Nif collapsed backwards, staring up into the smoky sky.

A strangled laugh was caught in her throat. One down, she guessed, but the brothers wouldn’t be far behind and running wouldn’t save her.

The road seemed close yet incredibly far away, so Nif took a deep, settling breath, but her mind was sluggish and the pain was edging darkly across her vision. Sleep is what she needed and a hell of a lot of painkillers. What if she just lay there for a little while? Shut her eyes for a few spells?

Move it, Nif. Of all people, she hadn’t imagined Sapho being the voice of reason inside her head. Sleeping is what you do when you’ve got the time. Now think. What would I do? Sapho was a cat shifter though. If she was here right now, she’d just climb a tree and take a nap.

Nif looked up. Cats could climb. Humans too. But wolves...they couldn’t climb. All she needed was to gain time for the cavalry to arrive, and hopefully the brothers would be overwhelmed by the death of their sister to think clearly. She’d read studies that strong emotions could affect a shift, sometimes making it hard to change between forms. It was the case with Moira, except she could only change during extreme moments of emotions. Was she angry now? Or just scared?

Nif wasted no time finding a suitable tree. One that was high enough she could theoretically hide amongst the branches despite the limbs being naked of leaves, but easy enough for a woman with only one working arm and a dodgy knee to climb yet challenging for any four limbed creature. Nif’s chosen tree was an oak. The trunk was wide enough Nif could only just wrap her arms around it and the branches were close together, thinning out quickly so if the wolves could climb or they shifted back into men, they’d find the branches sagging and breaking under their weight.

The bark was the texture of choppy waves and it was no easy feat climbing with one arm out of commission. For a few hairy moments, Nif thought she’d fall and end up breaking her neck, but finally, for what felt like long, long hours, but could only be a minute if that, Nif wedged herself into the branches of the young oak, and tried to embodied Sapha in all her feline glory.

Hopefully no one could see her from the ground. Nif shivered, the sweat on her body turning icy without her jacket, but she couldn’t imagine how much colder Oliver had to be feeling.

For a few quiet moments, Nif listened to the wind creaking through the trees, the grumble of flames eating Baskerville’s house, the hum of distant traffic. No sirens yet, but maybe they’d turned them off to avoid alerting the pack? She watched blood pool around Stella’s still wolf form like dark ink on a grey sheet of paper. The earth drank it in thirstily.

What had happened to Stella to make her into what she’d been? If Nif was right, it had to have happened when she was very young, perhaps before her brute of a father had left. Her human self was far too integrated with her shift form, something that only really happened when the person suffered trauma as a child. Was she abused by her father? Rescued by her brothers too late? Dougie had been a little younger than her when his mother had died and seemed to have mostly grown into a typically awkward, eager to please, teenage boy. In comparison, there had been something fundamentally broken in the young woman and Nif hated that she hadn’t been able to help her. She’d done the absolute opposite and there was no way she could ever forgive herself for it.

“Well, it looks like our little birdy thinks hiding in a tree will save her,” called out a voice. Baskerville stepped out into the clearing dressed in dark jeans and down jacket he’d first worn at the university, moonlight turning his hair silver and washing out the colour of his skin. His eyes flashed gold as he stared up at her, grin a horrid slash across his face. Her heart sank as she realised her footprints in the iced leaf litter had led them straight to her.

Three other forms materialised from the trees. Wolves. Dougie was easy to pick, almost prancing on the spot in barely contained excitement, his paws far too big for his lanky body. The top of Daz’s head almost reached Baskerville’s chin, shoulders thick with muscles and legs long and powerful. Oscar lingered a little behind, watchful, his fur the dappled colour of dead leaves across a sunny snowbank. It was Oscar who noticed Stella’s body first.

He made an odd, mewling sound and slunk towards her, body sinking into the ground in grief as if he already knew what he would find. The others didn’t notice, even as Oscar gently nosed Stella’s muzzle and her head remained frozen, the cold and her death stiffening her joints already. She could have been an ice sculpture, carved into the likeness of a wolf. When he threw back his head and howled, Nif’s heart pulsed in sympathy, his call full of genuine grief and despair. The other brothers noticed then.

“Oscar?” Baskerville whispered, uncertainty and wariness like streaks of paint across his face. If Nif could understand Oscar’s lamenting keen, then there was no doubt Baskerville and the others did too, without even seeing Stella’s still body. Dougie snapped back to his human form in a flash, even as he barrelled across the clearing to Oscar, his fingers digging into the icy ground.

“Stella? No no no no…” his cries had the mellow edge of a wolf’s cry, but he used his human arms to gather Stella’s stiffening body into his arms. She was almost too big for him, but he gently lifted her off the broken branch she’d been impaled on and tried to wake her in vain. Daz stayed where he was, by Baskerville’s side, his fur bristling in building rage and when he looked up at Nif, her breath was stolen from her. He would kill her for the harm she’d caused his family, she had no doubt.

“You witch!” Baskerville screamed, spit flying, and he searched the ground for something to throw at her before grabbing the trunk of the tree to shake it as if she was a ripe apple ready to be picked. The oak was too strong to wobble even the slightest. Nif searched the branches above her to see if she could somehow clamber up higher, but the branch she was on now was sagging beneath her weight, barely thicker than her own wrist. The only reason it hadn’t snapped was because she’d kept herself wedged close to the tree’s trunk.

“We will peel off your skin! Bite off your fingers! Pluck out your eyes!” Baskerville reached for the nearest branch and hauled himself up. The branch held and Nif whimpered in horror as her death approached her.

“How could you!” Dougie was yelling now. Nif wasn’t sure if it was directed at Stella or her. Nif reached up, grabbed a thin branch and yanked, hoping to pull it free to use as some kind of weapon but she almost rocked herself out of the tree.

“I’m coming to get you, little bird, and I’ll eat you up!” Baskerville was getting closer, his movement slow and steady, calculating each branch before shifting his weight. Every time he moved closer, he’d stop and test the trunk, give it a shake, to see if he could cause her to fall into the maws of his waiting older brother.

Nif uncurled her injured arm and forced it around the trunk, hugging the cold wood against her chest, and tried to snap free the smaller branch again. This time it cracked, peeling off from the rest of the tree, a flexible green thing with a switch of twigs at its tip.

“Stay back!” Nif shouted, her voice a shaking mess. In the distance there was shouting and the mournful call of a fire engine. The calvary had arrived. “Over here! Help!” she shouted. “Someone! Please! I’m over here!” Instead her words were swallowed up by the cold.

“Shut up, you cow,” Baskerville snarled, close enough to reach up and grab her ankle.

Nif whipped the branch across his face, the snap loud in the clearing, the tiny twigs lashing across his wide blue eyes, and he yelped. But as he lost his balance, his hand wrapped around Nif’s leg and they fell together. They crashed through branches to thump in a heap at the base of the tree. It happened so quickly, Nif had no chance to protect her wrist and she suspected she blacked out for a moment.

Slowly, as if climbing from a deep well, she made out the strong, lean form of Baskerville. He was looming over her, already on his feet and his hair only a little messy from his tumble, his body half twisted away from her as he argued with his older brother.

“I’m staying,” Baskerville hissed at Daz. “She’s my prey. She killed Stella and it’s my duty to pay her back twice over.”

The shouting was drawing nearer. Nif tilted her head and saw Dougie trying to pick up his sister, but her wolf form was too big.

Daz had shifted, his nude human body crouched low to the ground, not as if he was afraid, but rather he was a bare flick of an eye away from shifting back into his wolf body. Nif could see the edges of him flicker and wobble, as if he was a man made of mist and smoke.

“I’m alpha, Bas. You’ll do as I say and you’ll do it now,” he growled. He never took his eyes off Baskerville, even as he directed his orders across the clearing to his other brothers. “Oscar, Dougie, get out of here. Bas, you will keep them safe or so help me, I’ll string you up and leave you for the birds.”

Baskerville bristled, grinding his teeth, a hair's breadth away from challenging his brother then and there.

“But brother, what about Stella?” Dougie’s voice was wet, tear tracks trailing down his cheeks and gleaming in the moonlight like scars. Nif felt a stab of guilt briefly edging back the pain, fear and exhaustion. She hadn’t meant to hurt anyone let alone kill them. Don’t think about it. Nif pushed the thought down deep, locking away the feeling of Stella’s sudden weight on her body, the rough splinters of the branch clutched tight in her hands, the hot splash of blood across her face. God, she was probably covered in Stella’s blood! Think about it tomorrow, Nif. Not now. It can’t be now.

“There’s no more we can do for her, little brother,” Daz said softly. “What’s important now is getting you to safety. Now go on and shift. You’ll be able to outrun them as a wolf and fight any who get in your way. Oscar, you take him. Run like the hounds from hell and don’t stop until you reach the eastern den. You hear me?”

Oscar bowed his shaggy lupine head and gently nudged at Dougie. Poor Dougie gave a mournful whine and shifted into his wolf form, licked Stella’s cheek once and then followed his older brother into the woods.

Both Daz and Baskerville watched them go and Nif took the opportunity to scramble to her feet using the oak as support. She couldn’t run. How she was still able to stand was a miracle if she was being honest. But her lungs still worked.

“Help! Someone! Over here!”

Baskerville growled and backhanded her across the face. Her cheek blazed with white heat and she didn’t remember hitting the ground again, only curling up into a ball around her broken wrist, her good arm shielding her head.

“Shit, Bas. The pigs will have predator and winged shifters. They’ll be here in a flash. We need to both go,” Daz hissed. For the first time, Nif saw fear in his eyes and it brought her a fierce joy. It would be only a fraction of the fear Morris had felt, but she knew it would be just the beginning for them.

“She knows who we are. Rip out her throat,” Daz ordered. “And we’ll be done with this mess.”

“You’re forgetting. They already know who you are,” Nif uttered, unable to hold back her gloating smirk. “Remember? I called for help before I left the house. The police listened in when Stella told me about your dad skipping town and I saw Dougie’s uniform. I even asked him what year he was in so they have enough information to track down who you are. They know. That’s why they got here so quickly.”

“You fucking bitch!” Baskerville roared and was leaping for her before he’d even finished shifting. He never hit her.

A mass of brown fur and muscle flashed through the trees and blocked Baskerville’s leap, using his bulk as a protective wall.

“Oliver?” Nif whispered. It was too dark to really see him clearly, but there was something in the way he moved that left her positive it was him. He was okay. The drugs must’ve finally left his system and he’d shifted into a creature full of protective fury.

Baskerville yelped in surprise and scuttled back and Oliver glanced over his massive shoulder, canting his head in a way Nif recognised from her own mother.

“I’m okay,” Nif assured, then added. “Well, mostly okay. I will be soon.”

Oliver nodded and then faced off against the two wolf brothers. Overhead, a falcon cried out and an owl responded. The Calvary had finally arrived.