SHIVER - Ch. 2
CHAPTER 2: Ashley
They snatched the girl off her swing in her backyard and dragged her into the woods.
Her body made a track in the snow, moving her from her world to mine. I saw it happen and I didn’t stop it.
It had been the longest, coldest winter of my life. Day after day under a pale, non-existent sun. And the hunger-the hunger was the worst, it burned and gnawed at all of us. That month nothing moved, the landscape was frozen and devoid of life.
One of us had been shot trying to steal trash off someone’s back porch, so the rest of the pack stayed in the woods and slowly starved, waiting for warmth and our old bodies. Until they found the girl. Until they attacked her.
They crouched around her, snarling and snapping, fighting to tear into the kill first. I saw it. I saw them shudder with eagerness. I saw them tug the girl’s body this way and that, wearing away the snow beneath her. I saw muzzles smeared with red.
Still, I didn’t stop it.
I was high up in the pack-Sam and Paul had made sure of that-so I could’ve moved in immediately, but I hung back, trembling with the cold, up to my ankles in snow. The girl smelled warm, alive, human above all else. What was wrong with her? If she was still alive, why wasn’t she struggling?
I could smell her blood, a warm, bright scent in this dead, cold world. I saw Seth jerk and tremble as he ripped at her clothing. My stomach twisted, it was painful, but it had been so long since I’d eaten.
I wanted to push through the wolves to stand next to Seth and pretend that I couldn’t smell her humanness or hear her soft moans. She was so little underneath our wildness, the pack pressing against her, wanting to trade her life for ours.
With a snarl and a flash of teeth, I pushed forward. Seth growled back at me, but I was higher up in rank and slightly stronger than him, despite my starvation. Paul rumbled threateningly for back up. I couldn’t do that.
I was next to her, and she was looking up at the sky with distant eyes. Maybe She was dead. I pushed my nose into her hand, and smelled the scent on her palm, it was all sugar, butter and salt. It reminded me of another life.
Then I saw her eyes. She was wake, still alive.
The girl looked right at me, eyes holding mine with such awful honesty. I backed up and recoiled, starting to shake again- I was angry….at myself. I was tearing apart, inside and out. Her eyes were on me. Her blood was on my face. Her life or mine?
The pack backed away from me, warily. They growled at me, as if I was no longer one of them, and they snarled over their prey. I thought she was the most beautiful girl I’d ever seen, a tiny, bloody angel in the snow, and they were going to destroy her. I saw it. I saw her, in a way I’d never seen anything before. And I stopped it.