TO CATCH A WOLF By Susan Krinard

Not impossible. You did it once, easily. When you were hardly more than a girl, you couldn’t imagine a life without it. Or a life without the use of your legs.

Now you have your legs again. Claim the rest of yourself, Athena. For Morgan’s sake.

She closed her eyes and willed.

Nothing happened. She stood on two weak legs, her loosened hair lashing about her face. It would be so easy to give up and admit defeat.

I cannot. It has been too long. My body does not know how.

She sat down in the alley, burying her face in her hands. Better to just lie here and let the snow cover her up. How could she help Morgan—she, who had lived a soft and easy life, believed herself so important, and yet had no real courage to face a true challenge when it came?

Who was she, to think she had the power to save him?

She flung her head up and stared at the falling snow. That same snow fell on him now, in a place where he might lie dying and alone.

She clenched her fists and pushed to her feet. She remembered what it had been like when Changing required no more than a thought. She remembered racing through the forest up at the ranch, borne to ecstasy on a hundred smells and sounds even her superior human senses could not detect.

Above all, she remembered running beside Morgan, wolf with wolf, utterly free.

A peculiar frisson swept through her body. It was as if every muscle, every bone, every nerve twisted inside out, yet there was no pain. A mist rose about her like a silken veil, untroubled by the wind.

She threw up her arms and gave herself to the Change. Life flowed and shifted. Her sight altered, taking in the world from a vantage much closer to earth. Scents and sounds burst in upon her senses like a tidal wave.

For a moment all she could do was breathe, struggling to manage the overwhelming assault. Gradually what seemed so alien became familiar, as natural as walking had been before the accident. She took a step on four wide paws. Her hind legs trembled, the lingering remnant of her lameness, but they carried her out of the alley, first at a walk and then a trot and a gallop.

She ran down the deserted street and to the shacks at the outskirts of town, past the mine and the tailings and waste of man’s grubbing in the earth. The forest called to her, and the mountains, with songs only one of her blood could hear.

Instinct pointed the way to Long Park when no trail remained for a human being to follow. Instinct, and a very human emotion called love.

Athena howled defiance into the blizzard and ran as she had never run before.

Niall had come this way. Morgan sniffed at the ground, detecting the odors buried under a layer of newfallen snow. Any tracks Munroe had made were long gone; if he were not dead already, no human born could find him.

But a werewolf could. And Morgan planned to do so, setting aside his hatred of the man he hunted. For Athena’s sake.

He almost felt Athena beside him, bounding over frozen creeks and through thickets of serviceberry shrubs. But she was in Denver now, safe and warm where she ought to be.

He sat on his haunches and chocked on a howl. The last words he had spoken to her had been filled with cruelty and bitterness. That was her final memory of him—angry, hating, blaming her for being what she was instead of what he wished her to be.

She had not made the same mistake. She had understood that he wouldn’t go with her. Perhaps that was why she had asked.

Damn you, Athena Munroe. I will find your precious brother. And then you must let me go. Let me go, do you hear?

His growls flew away in the wind. Tensing his muscles, he leaped up and over a snowbank and followed the trail of scent. No other animals were foolish enough to be abroad; the forest and park looked as they must have done before the first intruding human had walked in these mountains. Peaceful. Still as death, or forgetfulness. A sweet offer of ending he could not accept.

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