Fate Succumbs

Fate Succumbs

Timber Wolves Trilogy :

Book 3

A novel by

Tammy Blackwell

Copyright © 2012

Smashwords Edition

All rights held by the author.

Just in case the boys turning into wild
animals under the light of the full moon didn’t make it obvious,
this is a work of fiction. All characters and events exist only in
the mind of the writer. Any resemblance to real life is a figment
of your imagination.

Cover Design: Victoria Faye
(
www.victoriafaye.com
)

For the Beta Fish.

You make me better.

Chapter 1

“
I can’t do push-ups.”
Sweat slid down my neck, clinging to the top of my shirt. It was
only eight in the morning, but it was also August in Kansas’s
Cimarron National Grassland. “In case you forgot, my hand hasn’t
been fully functional since I jerked it through a pair of
handcuffs.”

“
Of course you can,” Liam
said, pouring a bottle of water over his head. “You’re a
Shifter.”

“
Which means I’ll have use
of my hand tomorrow.”

“
Fine. If you can’t handle
it, do them one-handed.”

For two weeks I had been roaming across the
United States in a car with Liam Cole. During our road trip from
Hades, he only spoke to inquire on the state of my bladder (which
is exactly how he phrased it); offer up some more Tylenol or Advil
(the only medicine I was taking for my shattered hand); or ask me
what I wanted from the latest drive-thru window (where he always
ordered a cheeseless triple cheeseburger). Now, the morning before
the full moon, he was suddenly a chatterbox, with every single word
used solely to antagonize me. I could tell I was being baited, and
it should have stopped me from trying to do them two-handed.
Unfortunately, I’ve never met a challenge I didn’t like.

There was a chance the residents of Timber,
Kentucky, heard my scream.

As if the physical torture and snide
comments weren’t enough, Liam also felt the need to enrich my brain
with a tedious lesson in Shifter Basics.

“
And how do you react if
you run into a member of the Chase Pack tonight?”

I willed my eyes not to roll. “I drop my
head and expose my throat in submission since this is their
territory and I have no desire to take it over,” I said for the
fifth time.

“
It’s not going to be
easy,” he assured me, also for the fifth time. “You’re going to
have to override your instinctive response to exert your
dominance.”

“
I know.”

“
But if you don’t, it could
get ugly. You might be able to take another Shifter in a one-on-one
match, but if you Challenge someone, the whole pack will
come.”

“
I know.”

“
The Chase Pack normally
doesn’t come over to this side of the park, but you need to be
prepared just in case.”

“
I
know.
”

And to think, just weeks ago I wanted to
learn more about the Shifter world.

“
We’ve been over this,” I
said, grabbing yet another granola bar from the backseat of the
car. It was the last one in our third box of the day. “I promise
I’ll follow your lead, stay on this side of the park, and treat any
other Shifter I come across with the utmost respect. Seriously,
Liam, I’m not going to flake out on you. I don’t want someone
snitching my location to the Alpha Pack any more than you do.”
Because God only knew what they would do to me when they found me.
Well, I guess God wasn’t the only one. I mean, I had it pretty much
figured out since they tried to chop off my head with an actual
guillotine.

“
Good,” he said. “Now let’s
go over the landmarks you need to be on the lookout for
again.”

There were oh-so-many reasons to be excited
as the light of day began to fade from the sky.

In the Cimarron, there aren’t a whole lot of
places to strip naked and wait for your body to rip itself apart so
it can reform in the shape of a wolf, but we found a large
turtle-shaped rock which would offer up a reasonable amount of
privacy. As we were heading over Liam said, “Remember to pull the
energy from the ground as you Change.”

I stopped at the edge of the rock.
“What?”

“
Make a conscious effort to
pull the energy from the ground. It’ll make the Change
quicker.”

“
What are you talking
about?”

“
Energy
transference.”

I thought about it, searched the recesses of
my memory, and… “I have no idea what that is.”

Liam looked towards the setting sun with
obvious annoyance. “I thought you said you understood the science
behind the Change.”

“
I do, but Dr. Smith’s book
never said anything about energy transference or pulling stuff from
the ground.”

“
Dr. Smith…” Realization
flashed in Liam’s eyes. “You have Dad’s book?”

This was not going to be a comfortable
conversation.

“
Alex gave it to me,” I
said. It had been a Christmas present. Alex knew I would have a
million questions about the whole Shifter thing once I discovered
he was a werewolf, so he gave me the one book in the world that
explained the science of what happened to the body during the
Change. It talked about bone reconstruction, cellular regeneration,
and nerve remapping, but never delved into the stimulus for those
transformations. “I was going to give it back, but then…” But then
Alex died in my arms after a horrible accident. It still caused me
physical pain to think about, and I knew it couldn’t be any easier
for his brother to hear, so I just shrugged off the end of the
sentence. “I’ve been taking really good care of it. You can have it
back.”

Liam did a kind of head bob thing which
could have been interpreted in a myriad of ways. “When you’re
Changing,” he said, switching back to the original subject,
“imagine you’re pulling strength from the ground and air into your
body. We steal energy from our surroundings during the
transformation. Mentally opening yourself up to those energies
relaxes your body and makes the Change easier.”

As far as logic went, it was pretty sound.
“Thanks,” I said as I stepped around to my side of the rock.

“
Scout.” I stopped, if for
no other reason than it was the first time he ever called me by my
name. “Good luck.”

***

A year ago, I was a normal girl living what
I thought was a normal life. That all changed when Liam and Alex
Cole moved to my hometown of Timber, Kentucky. Alex, Liam’s younger
brother, was the living embodiment of perfection - smart, funny,
and so hot you worried about spontaneously combusting in his
presence. It took me all of five seconds to fall head-over-heels,
which wasn’t surprising. Everyone loved Alex. The shocker was that
he loved me back.

Alex was the one to
introduce me to the world of Shifters and Seers, but I soon
realized I had been living smack dab in the middle of it my whole
life. Thanks to skills I learned from watching too much
Veronica Mars
, I
discovered Jase, my step-brother, and Charlie, his cousin who I’d
loved since my idea of quality TV included a singing purple
dinosaur, were also also Shifters. Not only that, but my best
friend, Talley, was a Seer who could See a person’s thoughts and
feelings with a touch.

Finding out everyone I trusted made it a
daily practice to keep elephant-sized secrets from me wasn’t one of
my better moments. I may have done a bit of property damage as a
result.

In April, Alex died in a horrible accident.
I was devastated and heartbroken, not to mention sporting some
major injuries of my own. I thought things couldn’t get any more
complicated.

I thought wrong.

Thirty days after Alex’s death my world
changed again. That night I became a Shifter, Changing into a wolf
under the light of the full moon.

It shouldn’t have been possible. For one
thing, I’m a girl. For another, my father isn’t a Shifter. Since
the ability to Change is passed from father to son, my newfound
abilities were met with some not so pleasant feelings, most of
which came from me.

At that moment, crouched down in Middle of
Nowhere, Kansas, I welcomed the Change for the first time. It
wasn’t just because I was going to get the use of my hand back
thanks to the Change’s tendency to heal injuries - although that
was a big, shiny gold star bonus - but I yearned to be wild and
free. I was tired of being pinned in with only the crappy thoughts
in my head to keep me company. Human Scout was more than ready to
hand over the reins to Wolf Scout.

Maybe that’s why the Change went more
quickly than ever before. Or maybe it’s just one of those things
that gets better with practice. It could have been that Liam was
right and the whole pulling energy out of the ground thing worked,
but I didn’t want to jump to any crazy conclusions.

Once I emerged from behind
the rock I found myself staring into the eyes of a gray wolf. Not
just any gray wolf,
my
gray wolf.

Being trapped in a car with his scent for
hours on end hadn’t dulled its impact on Wolf Scout. Her nose kept
nuzzling into his neck, confirming he was really there. There was a
period of time when Human Scout had questioned the gray wolf’s
existence, but Wolf Scout never doubted. But she had never seen
more than a glimpse, had never been able to actually touch him.

The part of my brain that was still human,
the part that used logic instead of instinct, knew this was the
same Liam who hated cheese and was completely unfamiliar with the
concept of smiling. Wolf Scout didn’t care. She only knew him as
the friend who had always been there for her when she was in need,
as the one who came to her rescue time and time again.

Liam nipped at me, and I nipped back. Then,
he was off. I caught up with him quickly, but only because he let
me. We ran together, our sides rubbing against one another as we
went. Eventually, Human Scout faded out completely; leaving Wolf
Scout at peace with the one person on earth she trusted above all
others.

Chapter 2

Before, when I was just a naive teenage girl
who knew nothing of the real world where magic was possible, I paid
little attention to dreams. I rarely had any and thought people who
wanted to analyze them or believed they were passageways to
something mystical were idiotic. That all changed once I became
involved with Alex.

Although he was a Shifter and male, Alex had
a few Seer abilities. While he couldn’t do the whole non-verbal,
in-the-brain communication thing Seers are capable of, he could
Dream Walk. He had developed the ability as a child, although it
only ever showed him one thing: Me. Once we finally connected in
the real world, I started participating in those dreams. For months
I dreamt of a place on the lake with a rocky patch of beach
shadowed by a cliff. In April, I found myself at that very spot. It
was the place where Alex and I had our first date, and where we
were attacked by my brother and Charlie.

It was the place where Alex died.

After that night, I continued to dream of
our spot on the lake. In those dreams, Alex was there. I could see
him, feel him, and taste him; he could hold me in his arms and help
me sort out my plethora of problems. Those dreams kept me going
when my heart was in shambles and during my incarceration by the
Alpha Pack. But since my escape those beautiful dreams were gone,
just like everything else in my life.

That, however, didn’t mean my nights were
dreamless. I slept very little those first few weeks, but when I
did I was rarely alone.

Most nights featured Jase,
my step-brother, who I loved like the twin people believed him to
be. Those sleep-induced mini-movies weren’t dreams so much as
memories. He would stand in front of the Alphas, head held high,
and testify against me. The next morning I would wake with the
words, “
She’s not my sister,”
echoing in my ears. It would take hours for the
betrayal and pain to loosen their hold on my lungs enough for me to
breathe normally. On the other nights, I found myself with Travis,
a now dead member of the Alpha Pack. The most disturbing of those
dreams were the ones where everything seemed normal. I would be
sitting in class or trolling the aisles of Wal-Mart and there he
would be. He would walk towards me, his mouth curved up slightly as
if to say, “Oh, hello friend.” I would try to get away, to run, but
he was always just around the corner, or blocking my
way.