Witches & Werewolves: A Sacred Oath by Bella Raven Read Free Book Online

The ones where they strap you into a seat and drop you vertically, plummeting as fast as gravity can pull you. It always felt like your heart was sucked up into your throat as you screamed forty stories to the ground below. I imagine that’s what it would feel like to jump off a building, or a cliff—except the landing wouldn’t be quite as gentle.  
    My mind races through all the possible scenarios that could happen upon impact with the bottom of the ravine. What will be the thing that kills me? Will my chest get crushed against the dash? Maybe a trauma to the head? What if I survive and lay mangled in the wreckage for days until I die of dehydration? My head starts to spin as I work myself into a frenzy obsessing about my impending demise. The rust bucket groans and squeals. I’m convinced it’s going to slide away, plummeting below any second. Suddenly, the passenger door rips open, completely torn from it’s hinges. Ethan appears, jutting his head inside the car. “Are you okay?” he asks.
    “My leg,” I say.
    I stare at him in shock. Did he just tear the door from it’s hinges like it was paper?  
    Ethan leans into the car and I watch in disbelief as he pries the dash away, releasing my leg. His eyes burn with that same fire I saw in him back in the forest, when he was hovering over the bodies. He extends his hand to me and the instant I clasp it he pulls me from the wreckage. I watch the rust bucket tumble end over end crashing into a heap of metal at the bottom as Ethan whisks me up to the shoulder of the road. I feel like I’ve been airlifted away. The whole thing is surreal.  
    Ethan sets me gently on the ground, brushing the hair from my face with his soft hands. I gaze into his eyes and he smiles as he cradles my face with his hand. Gone are the days where you can just bat your eyelashes at a guy. Now it seems you practically have to kill yourself just to get a smile. It’s a smile I’ll accept, none the less. But it just doesn’t seem possible. How did he get to me so fast? How did he have the strength to pry open the door and the dash? How did he scale the side of the cliff with me in his arms so effortlessly?  
    Adrenaline?  
    It has got to be adrenaline. I’ve always heard stories of people exhibiting super human strength during a crisis. The body’s fear response kicks in. The adrenal glands pump cortisol and adrenaline into the blood stream, spiking blood pressure. Surging the heart rate. Allowing people to tap into these reserves of strength. They say we normally only access 65% of our muscles’ capacity. But in times of extreme stress we can reach near 100% of our maximum because of this chemical rush. We’ve all heard those stories of the father who was able to lift a car to free his son trapped underneath. There has to be a logical explanation.
    The sound of a siren echoes off the mountainside, drawing near. I peel my eyes away from Ethan’s perfect face to see the driver of the logging truck climbing out of the toppled cab. He’s a portly guy wearing a red flannel shirt and orange baseball cap. He waddles to us through the maze of spilled logs. “Oh dear God, is she okay?”

CHAPTER 8

    SOMETHING IS SERIOUSLY wrong. After waiting in the ER for over an hour, the chemical rush of the moment long since past, pain decides it’s time for a visit. My chest and hips are a horrific rainbow of colors. Red and raw from abrasions and deep bruising of purple and blue, ringed by a sickly yellowish green. But that’s not the worst of it. My leg throbs with that kind of deep pain you feel in your gut, and I know it’s broken. I’m just waiting for the doc to come back with the results of the X-ray to tell me how bad. And what type of fashionable leg accessory I’ll be wearing while it heals. At least it’s not a compound fracture—the kind where the bone breaks and punctures the skin—those are grizzly. I shiver just thinking about it.  
    All things considered, I can’t complain.