TurningWildBlankEditionHTML by Erika Masten Read Free Book Online Page A

The fur was worn soft,
pliant, and it smelled of something earthy and spicy and musky with a sweet
scent under that like wine and wildflower honey. Strange, in a very good way.
She toted it out with her onto the porch, into the night air, to watch the
storm rolling in over the lake.
    After everything that
had happened thus far, the night seemed unnaturally, impossibly beautiful as
Holly stood on the porch at the banister and gazed at the murky sky while she
unfurled the fur throw. She glanced down at the lush brown cover and wondered
for a second if was real fur. Holly always felt guilty about how much she liked
the feel of real pelts and made sure she only bought fakes. An odd thing to be
thinking about after a werewolf attack and Dustin Berg kissing her and now
being on the run with a shifter.
Fashion and office politics and the size of her thighs didn’t seem important at
all amid the electrical charge of a brewing storm, with the distant lap of
water churned by the wind across the lake, and with the intensely green and
earthy smell of the trees and underbrush practically swaddling the cabin and
carpeting the slope down to the reservoir.
    Then Holly sighed with
something that could have been contentment, had the circumstances just been a
little bit different, and wrapped herself snug in the fur throw. It was every
bit as warm and comforting as she had expected it to feel, just right for
standing there in the night air and taking in the moment, gathering her
thoughts, gathering herself after everything.
    The smells, the lapping
water, the chill of the night air…all came on so intense. More intense by the
moment. So powerful and then so overwhelming that Holly’s head swam, and she
had to close her eyes. That only made it worse. Fur, thick musky loam, the
whispery hiss of wind through redwood branches, the water lapping and burbling
anxiously, excitedly—too far away to hear so clearly, and yet she could. More
chaotic and more vivid than the storm building over the forest was the storm of
senses flaring to life inside her.
    I’ve
fallen asleep on the porch swing , Holly realized, and I’m having the strangest, most amazing
dream . It was one of those lucid dreams where she could make her own
decision and move through the landscape as she wished, only a hundred times
more distinct and brilliant and lifelike than anything she’d experienced
before.
    Those were among the
last of the truly mundane, human thoughts that went through Holly’s mind. It
was a distinctly inhuman growl that said to her then, “Be a wolf.” Like Ivan
and Dustin. Wild like they were, strong, free, beyond the fear and weakness
that dominated her everyday life. An astonishing inspiration. And she embraced
it, shivering and shuddering with her teeth chattering as the idea of a wolf
became a body.
    Holly threw off the fur
blankets and peeled away layers of clothing, of skin and cells, everyday hurts
and anxieties. Her wolf body loped off the porch and into the rich earth, moist
against the pads of her feet. She needed those feet, all four of them, to race
from tree to trail, brush and bush to meadow. With growing speed and power.
Holly yipped and yowled just to hear her own voice, and the night sky above her
turned inky and answered with the flash of lightning and its own snarl of
thunder. The rain on her fur was like the darkness caressing her. It washed the
scents and tastes of the forest off the leaves and blossoms, off the birds and
small hidden prey, and brought them all to Holly to drink in. She rolled in wet
meadow grass and shook herself violently and reveled in the spray of water
radiating from her honey brown fur.
    And then Holly ran. She
ran not like a woman with a size sixteen body might have jogged with effort and
discomfort around a track while she worried who would see her but the way a
predator would have run. Nothing to stop her. Flat out. With everything inside
her striding forward, unfettered. From ridge to lakefront, gully to