The wolf's blood was warm on my hands.
"Stay with me," I whispered, pressing gauze against the bullet wound in his shoulder. His golden eyes fixed on mine as his breathing grew shallow. "Come on, buddy. Stay with me."
Thunder cracked overhead as rain hammered down on the mountainside, turning the forest floor into mud beneath my knees. Somewhere in the darkness, the poachers were crashing through the underbrush, their shouts carried by the wind.
They were coming back.
My hands trembled as I worked. Three years as a wildlife veterinarian, countless emergency surgeries, and I had never lost the fear. Never stopped feeling the weight of each animal's life balanced on the edge of my scalpel.
"Dr. Chen!" My assistant's voice crackled through the radio on my vest. "They're circling back! You need to move—now!"
"I'm not leaving him!" I said through gritted teeth.
The wolf whimpered. His heartbeat fluttering against my palm like a dying bird.
I heard them before I saw them. Boots splashing through puddles. The metallic click of a rifle being cocked. My body went rigid, every muscle screaming at me to run, but my hands kept working, kept applying pressure, kept fighting for this beautiful creature's life.
"You should have run, lady."
I didn't look up. Didn't give them the satisfaction of seeing the fear on my face.
"He's just an animal. Let me save him and I'll go."
"He's a protected species worth twenty thousand dollars to the right buyer." The man's voice was cold and uncaring. "Dead or alive, he's coming with us."
"...Over my dead body."
The words left my mouth before my brain could stop them. Was I Brave or stupid? I had never quite figured out the difference.
The man laughed. It was an ugly sound that disgusted my ears. "That can be arranged."
Time slowed as i watched the barrel rise, watched his finger tighten on the trigger. Some distant part of my mind noted the rain drops running down the rifle's scope, the way the man's hands were completely steady, the absolute certainty and wickedness in his eyes.
He wasn't aiming at the wolf anymore.
The world compressed into a single moment of crystal clarity. I could count the raindrops suspended in the air. Could hear each individual beat of my racing heart. Could feel the wolf's pulse beneath my fingertips, weak but still fighting, still alive.
I should move.
But moving meant exposing the wolf. Meant giving them a clear shot at him. And after everything, after tracking him for six hours, after watching him drag himself bleeding through the forest, after looking into those eyes that held something so achingly close to human understanding...I couldn't do it.
I wouldn't.
So I did the only thing I could. I threw myself over the wolf's body, covering him completely, feeling his laboured breathing against my chest.
"You're insane" the poacher said.
"Yeah..." I whispered into the wolf's wet fur as a smiled, stealing a glance of his beautiful golden eyes."I get that a lot."
The gunshot was deafening.
White-hot pain exploded through my back, stopping my breath flat, turning my vision into starbursts. I felt myself falling but couldn't process it, couldn't connect the sensation to reality. The wolf was warm beneath me. That was good. That meant he was still alive.
Mission accomplished, I thought distantly.
The ground rushed up to meet me, but I never felt the impact. Instead, there was just falling. Endless, weightless falling through darkness that should have been terrifying but felt strangely peaceful.
My last thought was that I hoped someone would find the wolf in time.
Then nothing.
---
I woke to the taste of blood and earth in my mouth.
Weird. I'd expected heaven to be cleaner.
Pain radiated through every nerve ending, sharp and immediate and absolutely, viscerally real. Dead people didn't feel pain, right? My medical training tried to kick in with explanations: shock, oxygen deprivation, brain death hallucinations, but all of that required me to be alive, and I was pretty sure I had just been shot in the back at point-blank range.
I forced my eyes open.
Trees. Not the scrubby mountain pines of the mountainside but massive things that blocked out the sky, their trunks wider than cars and covered in bioluminescent moss that pulsed with an eerie blue-green light. Vines thick as my arm twisted between branches, dripping with flowers I had never seen in any botanical textbook.
"What the hell?" My voice came out as a croak.
I pushed myself up on trembling arms. My back should have been shredded, but when I reached around to check, I found smooth, unbroken skin beneath my torn shirt. No wound. No blood. Just the ghost memory of pain that made my hands shake.
The forest floor beneath me wasn't soil, it was something softer, springier, covered in a carpet of moss that glowed faintly where my body had compressed it. The air tasted different too. Too sweet, too thick, like breathing in pure oxygen mixed with honey and something wild I couldn't name.
And it was quiet. Too quiet. No birds, no insects, no wind. Just an oppressive, waiting silence that made my skin crawl.
Then I saw it.
Floating in the air directly in front of my face, glowing with soft golden light, was what looked like a video game interface that I had seen little boys play on their portable consoles while waiting for their pet dogs to get a shot.
Texts scrolled across the translucent screen:
[BEASTWORLD HARMONY SYSTEM INITIALIZING...]
[Welcome, Dr. Kira Chen]
[Species: Human Female]
[Status: Critically Rare]
[Analyzing compatible bonding candidates...]
[WARNING: You have entered a Mating Zone]
[WARNING: Unmated females detected by predator species within 5km radius]
[WARNING: Multiple hostile entities converging on your location]
[Estimated time until contact: 3 minutes, 47 seconds]
I stared at the floating text, my brain refusing to process what I was seeing. This wasn't real. Couldn't be real. I was hallucinating. Dying. Already dead and experiencing some kind of neurological misfire as my brain shut down.
The bushes to my left exploded.
I screamed and scrambled backward as something massive crashed through the undergrowth. Not something. Someone. My mind struggled to categorize what I was seeing: human torso, human arms, human face twisted into a snarl, but covered in gray fur with pointed ears and eyes that reflected the bioluminescent moss-light like mirrors.
A wolf. A man. Both. Neither.
"MINE!" The word came out as a guttural roar that reverberated through my chest.
More crashing sounds erupted from all directions. Shapes moving through the trees. Growls and snarls and something that might have been words in a language I didn't understand. The wolf-man lunged toward me, and I saw his hands: they were hands, definitely hands, but the fingers ended in sharp black claws that could easily tear through my flesh.
The golden screen pulsed urgently:
[CRITICAL DANGER]
[INITIATING EMERGENCY BONDING PROTOCOL]
[Accept bond with nearest compatible mate? Y/N]
[WARNING: Rejection may result in territorial combat and/or forced claiming]
"What the fuck is happening?!" I shouted at the screen, at the wolf-man, at Reality that had apparently lost its mind.
The wolf-man was three meters away. Two. I could smell him: wild and musky. Could see the hunger in those reflective eyes, could hear more of them closing in from every direction.
My finger hovered over the glowing interface, shaking violently.
[Y/N]
The wolf-man's clawed hand reached for me.
And from somewhere in the darkness behind me, something roared.
Not the aggressive challenge of the wolf-man. Something different. Something that made every hair on my body stand on end, made some primal part of my hindbrain scream APEX PREDATOR RUN RUN RUN.
The wolf-man froze, his eyes going wide.
I turned my head, slowly, and saw two points of silver light gleaming in the shadows. Eyes. Watching me with an intensity that made the wolf-man's hunger look like casual interest.
Then a voice, rough and deep and edged with barely controlled violence:
"Touch her, and I'll tear out your throat."
The words were in English. Perfect, unaccented English that somehow sounded more threatening than the wolf-man's roar.
A figure stepped from the shadows, and my brain short-circuited trying to process what I was seeing. Tall, at least six and a half feet. Powerfully built, with platinum-white hair that fell to his shoulders and skin covered in sleek, spotted fur. A snow leopard?, my veterinarian brain cataloged distantly. Panthera uncia. Endangered species. Shouldn't exist in this kind of ecosystem.
He was bleeding.
Dark blood matted the fur on his left side, dripping steadily onto the moss. He moved with a limp, favoring his right leg. Wounded. Badly.
But his silver eyes never left the wolf-man. "Leave. Now."
The wolf-man snarled but took a step back. Then another. With a final glare at me that promised this wasn't over, he disappeared back into the forest.
The silence that followed was deafening.
The snow leopard-man swayed slightly, his hand pressing against his injured side. Those silver eyes finally moved to me, and I felt the weight of his gaze like a physical thing.
"You..." he said softly, and there was something like wonder in his voice beneath the pain. "You're really human."
Then his eyes rolled back, and all six-and-a-half feet of him collapsed directly toward me.