Bonds of Fenris

By S.J. Bell

Talia Thornwood's life ended one year ago, when she became a werewolf. She survived the attack, and the horrifying transformation a month later, but the life she has now is barely worth living. She lurks about in a filthy, run-down house, with too many werewolves crammed into too small a space. Every day is a struggle against the stress of human contact, the romantic prodding of her obnoxious packmate Pierce, and the gnawing hunger for flesh in her soul.

She's all but resigned herself to a dreary existence on the margins of society when she meets Corwin. Corwin is a werewolf like none other. He walks among humans as if it was nothing, and can keep his wolf under control even when the moon is full. Talia's mind is suddenly opened to the possibilities before her, and the realization of how little she really knows about lycanthropy.

Corwin claims that he can teach her how to cope as he does, even how to transcend her affliction. But it will not be easy. It is a hard education that requires her to question everything her pack taught her, and confront exactly what she has become. And, more amazingly, what she never stopped being.

• Language: English
• Publisher: S.J. Bell
• Release date: Apr 29, 2012
• ISBN: 9781452450445

S.J. Bell

S.J. Bell has a lifelong love of stories, in all their myriad forms. In junior high, he used to stay up until 10 P.M. reading cheesey science-fiction novels. In high school, he was a Squaresoft fan and Babylon 5 junkie. In college, he studied English Literature and argued on the internet about the relative quality of anime dubs. Today, he lives on Long Island and writes for a living. He spends his spare time reading and blogging about werewolves, watching movies with his girlfriend, and playing board games. He plays a poor game of Agricola, but a very good game of Innovation. His first novel, Bonds of Fenris, is due out in May of 2012.

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Bonds of Fenris

by S.J. Bell

Published by the author at Smashwords

Copyright 2012 S.J. Bell

Cover art copyright Stephanie Mooney. All rights reserved.

Connect with the author at http://wolfmanbell.blogspot.com/

Smashwords Edition License Notes:

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

PROLOGUE

CHAPTER I

CHAPTER II

CHAPTER III

CHAPTER IV

CHAPTER V

CHAPTER VI

CHAPTER VII

CHAPTER VIII

CHAPTER IX

CHAPTER X

CHAPTER XI

CHAPTER XII

CHAPTER XIII

CHAPTER XIV

CHAPTER XV

CHAPTER XVI

CHAPTER XVII

CHAPTER XVIII

CHAPTER XIX

CHAPTER XX

CHAPTER XXI

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

PROLOGUE

The truly awful thing about full-moon nights is, they feel good. It’s almost like a drug. Yes, you’ll wake up the next morning feeling rotten about yourself for enjoying the blood, the murder, the loss of your humanity. But in the moment it’s euphoric, an indescribable sensation of freedom and power. You run free, king of the wild lands, all creatures within it submissive or powerless before your fast legs and sharp, killing teeth. No need for any thought but pure instinct. No need to do anything but just be.

Not the first time, mind you. The first time is pure, unadulterated hell.

I remember my first time I shifted. Well, I remember parts of it. Mostly, I remember pain. Agonizing pain. Violent, twisting, shredding pain all through my entire body. I remembered lying on the ground in a forest near the highway, screaming. I remembered wolves—three of them—surrounding me. Bo was there, in human skin. I had been fleeing him, but when the moon rose and the change took me he caught up easily. I was in agony all over—arms, legs, chest, even my gums. I heard a crackling noise, which I later realized was my bones breaking, repairing themselves, and re-breaking constantly. It was like I was being torn from the inside by some hideous beast that wanted to get out. It was like my insides were on fire.

Bo had dropped to his knees beside me, and reached for my head. I turned aside and shut my eyes tightly. A spasm shot through me, excruciating in its intensity. I wailed to the heavens incomprehensibly—maybe pleading to God for mercy, maybe begging for death. Maybe both.

Bo touched my head. He stroked my hair, whispering soothing words. Shhh. Shhh. I know what you’re going through, Talia. It’s always hard the first time. But don’t be afraid. You’ll still be human tomorrow, I promise. And we’re all here for you tonight.

We? I thought. Who’s we? I lifted my head and looked around. There was no one else here. No one but the wolves. The wolves? Could that be what Bo meant? Why hadn’t he disturbed them? Did they know him?

They had closed in, and circled around us. One of them nudged my cheek and licked it. I thought he might be tasting me for a meal, but instinct said no. That was a greeting, a reassurance. Another wolf came up alongside me. She was female. I didn’t know how I knew that; I just did. She lay down right next to me, her body pressing up against my chest, and also licked my face. At the same time, the third rubbed up against my back. I should have been shivering from fear, but their closeness felt protective, somehow. Comforting. Bo stepped away and started to undress. I blinked. Was I seeing things? Bo was growing hair, all over his body, at an astonishing rate.

Then, I looked down at my hands and my eyes went wide. I was growing hair! Over the back of my hand, and all along my arms. And that wasn’t all—I felt pins and needles all over my body. And my fingers! I couldn’t move them. As I watched, they shriveled. The knuckles vanished, the fingers themselves shrank. The spaces between fingers seemed to close up. The entire hand compressed painfully inward. It was horrifying, but I couldn’t look away. And the cracking noise. All through it, there was a horrible cracking of bones in my ears.

I felt my gums split apart from the inside. My jaw was stretching out; it felt like it was being pulled off. I tried to scream again, but my vocal cords felt twisted, and all that came out was a fearful moan.

Before the change took him completely, Bo stroked my hair one last time. Try closing your eyes and thinking of something else. And don’t worry, we’re all here for you.

I did as he said. I closed my eyes and started humming a tune in my head. It did little good, since I still felt the excruciating warping of flesh and bone. My clothes ripped as my torso grew thicker, more massive. It felt like the muscles in my arms were migrating into my chest. But I felt something else, too. The wolves brushed up against me, rubbing their fur against my body, snuggling me, nuzzling me, licking me.

It didn’t make the torture any less torturous. But the presence of the wolves was soothing. It was strange. Bizarre, even. I was literally surrounded by wild animals—wild predators, no less. And I was in the grasp of something so awful, so scary, so unknown. But I felt safe. I felt protected.

Finally, the changes ended, and the pain subsided. An ache was still there, but it was a dull, sore ache instead of the feeling of being ripped apart. My breathing was heavy, but steady. My arms and legs felt awkward. The clothes I had been wearing didn’t fit anymore. The articles that hadn’t torn were so loose I felt I could crawl out of them. The wolves withdrew, exposing me to the open air. It didn’t feel as cold as I imagined it should. One of them leaned down and nudged my head, which felt different, longer. I opened my eyes.

I had a new body. Before I even saw it, I knew what it was. It made perfect sense despite making no sense. I was in the body of an exceptionally large grey wolf. I was one of them now. A werewolf. I was scared and confused, and at the same time I felt like laughing. A werewolf? It was ridiculous. And yet, here I was with four legs, a long face, and a thick fur coat.

I crawled out of what remained of my clothes and stood up, unsteady on my new legs. I was in a daze. It felt like I was dreaming, like I was not myself—like I was watching my own life on television. I could see, and hear, and smell, and even feel the ground beneath my four feet, but it all felt unreal. One of the wolves (Pierce, I later learned) touched his muzzle to mine, nuzzled me gently, and licked me. I licked him back, a gesture of thanks. I don’t know why I did that. I don’t know why I recognized it as meaning what it did. I did it without even knowing I was doing it. Like I wasn’t myself anymore.

I looked around. There were four of them now. Bo must be one of them. Yes, I recognized him. He was the largest and most powerful-looking. His brown eyes and his distinctive scent made him easily spotted. A smaller one—the one who had licked my muzzle—met my gaze and held it for a moment in his ethereal blue eyes. The stare made me inexplicably nervous, and I looked away. Satisfied, he nodded, a more human-like gesture. Then he turned around, cocking his head into the distance. He wanted me to follow.

I wasn’t sure if I should. I was in a vague, dissociative state. I would be in it all night—observing wolf-me doing things while I watched, helpless. But where else could I go? He walked off and I trotted after him as best I could. The others followed, spreading out around me protectively.

It was the worst night of my life, and there is heavy competition for that title. Things didn’t get much better afterwards. The realities of living with lycanthropy tore my life to shreds. But I learned how to like it—the exhilaration of speed, the thrill of the chase, the climax of the kill, the sweet dessert of blood and flesh down your throat. It’s the recognition of how good it feels that makes you hate yourself in the morning. The freedom it gives you is freedom from conscience. The wild moment it gives you is a kind of surrender. Surrender to the animal. A relinquishment of the very things that make you human.

So I thought. And until the night I met Corwin, I had no idea how wrong I was.

CHAPTER I

Before the bite, I lived with my parents, in a typical one-family house near the center of town. Now, I lived with the pack, in a rental on the edge of the woods. It was a small one-story house. A bit of a dump. Actually, there was no qualifier needed: it was a dump, period. The paint flecked off the walls, the roof leaked, and the lawn out front was comatose and on life support. The backyard was ringed by a border of junk: old car parts and rusting metal objects that a previous owner had left, and which hadn’t been worth cleaning up. The interior was no better. The living room was dusty, the carpet filthy. The linoleum in the kitchen sorely needed a good scrubbing. There were spots on the walls and ceiling, and often a stray pizza box sat on the kitchen table, its contents slowly going moldy. It was your typical underemployed twenty-something domicile: cleanliness optional.

But it had certain advantages. It was cheap enough for four people working menial part-time jobs, plus one slacker. It was only a short drive from the local community college—less than an hour—which meant we could continue to tell ourselves we were moving up in the world. The backyard dropped off into the vast tracts of state-protected woodland that surrounded the town, meaning we could go out without being seen. And perhaps most importantly, the area was sparsely populated. The fewer humans around us, the better.

An additional, minor advantage was a larger-than-usual kitchen table. I think it was technically a patio table. Dragged inside for lack of a patio, it always looked out of its element, and it crowded the room. But its size meant that a large map of the surrounding woodlands could be spread out on it to make a decent war room. We always met here on a full moon night before going out.

So one night in June, unaware of how our world was about to change, we gathered in the kitchen about an hour before moonrise. Well, I gathered myself in the kitchen. Leroy and Marlene were out scouting. Someone, or two of us, always went out the evening before the full moon, to get a rough idea of where the deer were. Recently, however, the deer seemed to be wising up. Once-reliable hunting spots were no longer bearing fruit. So, we were going further afield tonight, which meant Marlene and Leroy were late. Of course, they were frequently late when they scouted together. The wolf growled in my ear, annoyed and impatient. I growled back at her, out of habit. She’d have her time soon enough.

Through the archway between the kitchen and the living room, I saw Pierce and Bo, the remainder of our pack, talking furiously under their breath. No, talking is the wrong word. Their gestures and tones of voice indicated that they were arguing.

Bo was muscular, blond-haired, and commonly wore short-sleeved shirts to show off his biceps. The same age as the rest of us, he had boyish features and soulful brown eyes. Back before I knew him properly, he made me swoon. By the time fate forced us to become housemates, I was over it. But he was still a good friend, if a bit of a dim bulb sometimes. He was also the nicest guy you’d ever want to meet. He was always there to listen to your problems, or cheer you up when you were in a tough spot. He’d give you the shirt off his back, if you needed it.

By sharp contrast, Pierce was a short boy with thin limbs and an ego problem. Pierce was the youngest of us, just barely eighteen. You could take a single glance and peg him as a rebellious high-school kid. He wasn’t, but he would have been had he gone to high school. He had bleached blond hair—naturally black—that he wore gelled and spiked. When in a good mood, he had a mischievous grin, with blue eyes glinting in the light. More often, however, he wore a defensive glare, poker-faced and serious. Over his lanky frame, he wore jeans and a T-shirt, usually black. He accessorized with a chain on his wallet, steel-toed sneakers on his feet, and a stainless steel ring on his finger, in the shape of a stylized skull. You would have guessed him far too bratty to be the pack alpha. But he was, by means of seniority. He’d been bitten five years ago, long before any of us.

I probably could have eavesdropped if I wanted, but I wasn’t interested in being drawn into this drama. Not like I could really avoid it: they were probably talking about me. This felt ominous, somehow. A side effect of Bo’s big heart was that he had trouble minding his own business, but he didn’t often let Pierce goad him into a fight. Ignoring them both, I sat at the kitchen table, drummed my fingers on it, and waited for our scouts to get back. I checked my watch. It was almost eight o’clock, and moonrise was at eight-thirty. They’d better hurry up.

Oh, what! What, asshole! You wanna go? Pierce’s voice rang out from the living room. I turned to see Bo with his fist raised and an angry look, and Pierce in a pose that silently said, Bring it on.

Hey! I yelled at them. No fighting!

He’s asking for it, Talia, Bo said through clenched teeth. With his massive frame, Bo was terrifying when angry. He wasn’t angry often, and never enough to get violent. But there was a first time for everything, and we were all dreading this particular first.

Bo! I yelled at him. Come in here and chill out, alright? Just ignore him.

Reluctantly, Bo put down his fist, wagged a finger at Pierce threateningly instead, and stomped over to the fridge to grab a drink. Yeah, that’s right, Pierce said to Bo’s back. Keep walking, musclehead.

"Pierce, shut the hell up! I yelled back at him. I swear to God, your mouth is going to get you killed one of these days!"

Pierce threw up his hands in a hell if I care gesture, and then plopped down on the living room couch to watch TV. I sighed and ran my hand through my hair. I’m surrounded by children.

Finally, the sound of the back door swinging open heralded the return of our packmates. Leroy’s voice rang out in a cheerful greeting as he entered the kitchen. Leroy was a big guy. No older than the rest of us, and nowhere near as muscular as Bo, but tall. He would have been imposing if he weren’t also so obviously friendly. He laughed easily, and his smile was a big, goofy grin. When he shook your hand, it was warm and welcoming.

Leroy had actually founded the pack. Pierce would have told you otherwise, or insisted that they were co-founders, but he was wrong. He had been a simple runaway living on the streets when he found Leroy. It was Leroy who had the idea to start a pack. He thought if we could get enough of us together, we could start our own settlement. Our own place, he had said. Some town way out in the boonies, not a single human for miles around. Somewhere we can be away from the scent and be ourselves. Like a place out of Lovecraft, but without the whole things-from-beyond bit. And no one going insane.

It was a good dream, but would take time. In three years of searching, the pack had found only two other legitimate werewolf attacks. One brought them Bo and Marlene. They had both been in the college’s outdoorsman’s club at the time. A camping trip to celebrate the close of the school semester had gotten cut short by a wolf attack. I understand those have a way of ruining a fun little outing. The other attack, last year, brought me into the pack.

Marlene followed Leroy inside. She was short and slim, almost frail-looking. When I first saw her, I thought she was a high-schooler. In reality she was twenty-one, same as me. She just looked young. She wore round glasses around icy blue eyes which spoke of an intellectual bent, and had long, black hair. Normally, she dressed very conservatively. She liked skirts and blouses, and her hair was usually tied in a ponytail. But as she had just shifted to human skin and would be back to wolf skin shortly, she wore sweats and a t-shirt. Leroy wore a similar chilling-out outfit, but then again he dressed like that whenever he could. He didn’t stand much on formality.

I checked my watch again and swung quickly from relief that they were back safely to annoyance at their lateness. It’s less than an hour until moonrise! Where have you two been?

Scouting, alright? Marlene shot back. Relax, we’re home on time.

Yeah, barely, I said. Why does it always take you two so long?

Marlene narrowed her eyes at me. "We’re thorough, okay, new girl?"

I may have been the most recent addition to the pack, but I hadn’t held the title new girl for a while. Only Marlene called me that nowadays, and only when she wanted to dig at me. Something indefinable about her grated on me, and the feeling was mutual.

Girls, girls, Leroy said diplomatically. Chill out, okay? We’ve got a briefing to get done.

Marlene ignored him. You know, Talia, if you don’t like the way we scout, you can get off your tail and do it yourself.

"I don’t mind the way you do it, I just wish you would actually move it from doing to done, already!"

Pierce had wandered in from the living room and watched us with interest. Ohhhhh, bitch-fight, he said with an amused smile.

Shut up, Pierce! Marlene and I said, almost in unison.

Leroy pounded lightly on the wall below the clock, to get our attention. Tick-tock, tick-tock, people, he said, indicating the clock. Talia’s right, we’ve only got a little time before moonrise to get our plan straight.

Well, if she would— Marlene said, beginning a rant, but Leroy wasn’t having it.

Enough, Marlene, he said, interrupting her. Drama-free time from here to moonset, okay?

Marlene crossed her arms and pouted. She turned away, taking a sudden interest in the wall. I took a similar interest in the opposite wall. Meanwhile Bo glared at Pierce, who did his best to sneer back.

Leroy rubbed his forehead, as if he were getting a headache. Living with lycanthropy, you have good days and bad days. This was a bad day. This was a bad day all around.

Okay, Leroy said tiredly. Gather ’round, here’s what Marlene and I discovered . . .

Shifting forms is easier the second time you do it, and easier still the third. After more than a year, what had been five minutes of pure agony was the aching strain of lugging heavy boxes around. What had been sheer terror was a commonplace inconvenience. The body and mind get used to it. This made things a lot easier, so long as we didn’t let our minds get too used to it.

Leroy led the way through the wild, over hill and dale, through the trees and bushes, over rocks and rivers. It was a beautiful night. Bright moon, shining stars, soft blanket of darkness all around. The June air was warm, but not yet hot enough to have us panting constantly. The owls hooted merrily, reminding us to be cautious, for we were not the only ones up and about. And through it all, we ran, the wind caressing us through our thick coats, the blood racing in our veins, reveling in adrenaline and activity and life.

The run took us beyond the limits of our previous exploration, as we followed Leroy to a new, hopefully richer hunting ground. Finally, we trotted to a stop and Leroy nodded silently at Pierce to take over. Pierce was the alpha, after all. It was his job, and his right. Nodding back his confirmation, Pierce lifted his nose to sniff at the air.

When I first joined the pack, I was surprised at how easy it was to identify things by smell, and said so. I could pick up prey from a substantial distance. While I couldn’t tell a deer from a chipmunk instinctively, I learned fast, and had an excellent memory for it. We all had this little perk. We called it an enhanced sense of smell, but this wasn’t technically what had happened. That is, lycanthropy didn’t truly make our noses sharper. We could detect and distinguish as well as we ever could. What had happened was that our brains had been rewired to pay more attention to what we were smelling.

Say you’re in an art gallery, Marlene had explained, "and you’re fascinated by a particular sculpture. You’re so enthralled in the task of looking it over that you don’t know someone’s speaking to you. You hear him, but your mind filters it out, because your sense of sight is holding your attention. Similarly, you’ve always been able to smell the things that you smell now. You just didn’t focus on scents, because you didn’t have any real need for the information. But now, your brain has learned to make use of it."

In any case, we could track deer easily with our noses supplementing our eyes. We followed the scent trail and soon found our target. A mature doe, fat from a good spring, munched peacefully on some vegetation, unaware that she was about to be drawn into a battle for her life. We approached stealthily, using the brush for cover. Sometimes the prey would hear and run before we had a good position, but tonight we were silent. She had no idea that dangerous predators were about until we burst into the open and rushed her. Pierce, ever the aggressive one, leapt straight for the throat—for the killing blow. He almost had her—soaring through the air, he came within inches, but the deer noticed us and ran. Landing on his feet, Pierce joined the rest of the pack and took off after it.

The chase was on. We charged through the woods after the deer, the exhilaration of pure speed and the wild energy of the hunt filling us. Our hearts pounded with excitement, the adrenaline raging through our bloodstream. Small and lithe, Marlene caught up to the doe first. She lunged for the rump, but missed and spent a second regaining her footing. Pierce was the next to close, and also snapped at the deer’s hindquarters. He scored a glancing blow, but the deer evaded the worst of it by turning sharply . . . right across my path. I lunged, going not for a mortal wound, but a strategic blow to the leg. I caught it between two rows of carnivorous teeth.

Our jaws were our main weapons, and they were fearsome—the teeth were specifically designed to shred flesh and hide, and the bite was a vise grip. As the deer struggled to kick at me, I bit down hard on her thin leg, squeezing until I heard the cracking of bone and the deer’s pained yelping. Flailing even more desperately now, the deer’s hooves whistled past my ear. Not willing to risk being injured, I released her. On three legs, she struggled to remain upright and continue her escape, but not for long.

Bo crashed into her. He did not bite—he body-slammed her off her feet. Ordinary wolves don’t fight like that, of course, but we had human intellects, and Bo kept his massive bulk in wolf skin. He hit like a sledgehammer when he was able to build up enough momentum. The doe fell upon her side, and Bo pinned her to the ground with his body. Immobilized, she thrashed around, squealing pathetically. It was no use, though. Bo was too big to be kicked off. As she struggled, Leroy approached from behind and delivered the fatal blow.

When the prey was crippled beyond escape, but not killed, one of us went over to finish the job with a snap of the jaws around its neck. We each had a slightly different technique. Pierce would get a firm grip and keep squeezing until he was sure the prey was dead. When it was Bo’s turn, he would lick and nuzzle the prey, to try and relax it, and then bite down on the neck as quickly as he could. Marlene simply sauntered up and bit hard, with the air of not being interested in making a big production. When it was my turn,