CHAPTER 8 — BITTEN
I don’t understand what Shane is doing at first.
My head is spinning. The ground feels too far away, like I’m sinking into it. Patrick’s voice is everywhere and nowhere at once, breaking apart around my name. The pain in my shoulder pulses in time with my heart, hot and sick and spreading.
Then Shane’s mouth is on me.
Not a kiss.
Something desperate. Violent. His lips seal over the wound, and I feel a sharp, pulling pressure that makes me scream again. My body arches off the ground, every nerve lighting up like it’s on fire.
“Stop!” Patrick roars.
Shane doesn’t.
I taste copper. Heat. Something bitter and wrong. My vision fractures into color and shadow, and for a second I swear I can hear two heartbeats inside my chest.
Shane jerks back suddenly, gagging.
“Oh—God,” he chokes, wiping his mouth. His eyes are wide, pupils blown. “That was—”
Patrick slams him backward into the dirt.
“What did you do?” Patrick snarls, claws half-formed, hands shaking with the effort not to kill him.
“I saved him!” Shane shouts. “I sucked it out—the venom, the blood, whatever it is—”
Patrick freezes.
Slowly, he looks back at me.
The pain is still there, but it’s changing. Spreading outward instead of inward. My skin burns. My bones ache like they’re being stretched apart and reassembled wrong.
“Walter,” Patrick whispers. “Can you hear me?”
I nod weakly.
“You’re not changing,” Shane insists, scrambling to his feet. “He’s not—he can’t—”
He stops mid-sentence.
Shane doubles over, gasping.
He claws at his chest like something is trying to get out. Veins stand out dark and angry along his neck. His teeth—God, his teeth—
They’re getting longer.
Patrick stares in horror. “That’s not possible.”
Shane laughs, high and broken. “Guess it is.”
His body convulses. Bones crack loudly enough to make me flinch. He screams as his spine arches, shirt tearing, skin rippling like something is crawling underneath it.
Counselors shout from a distance. Someone runs toward us.
Patrick backs away instinctively, torn between staying with me and stopping what’s happening.
“Run,” Shane gasps. “Before I—”
His scream cuts off as fur erupts across his skin.
A wolf explodes where Shane was.
Not like Patrick. Bigger. Wilder. Uncontrolled.
It snaps its jaws once, snarling at everything, everyone, eyes burning with panic and hunger and something heartbreakingly human underneath.
Then it bolts.
Straight into the woods.
Silence crashes down like a physical thing.
Sirens get closer. Flashing red and blue lights cut through the trees. The camp is chaos—paramedics, counselors, sobbing campers wrapped in blankets.
Patrick kneels beside me again, hands hovering like he’s afraid to touch me.
“I don’t know what he did to you,” he says, voice wrecked. “I don’t know what it means.”
“I’m still me,” I whisper.
For now.
He presses his forehead to mine, breath shaking. “I won’t leave you.”
I wake up in the infirmary.
The lights are too bright. The smell of antiseptic burns my nose. My shoulder is bandaged, but when I shift, there’s barely any pain.
That scares me more than anything.
Patrick is slumped in a chair beside the bed, head in his hands. When he looks up and sees me awake, his face crumples with relief.
“You scared me,” he says hoarsely.
“I got bitten by a wolf,” I say. “I think that’s fair.”
He huffs out a broken laugh and squeezes my hand like he’s afraid I’ll disappear.
They tell everyone it was a bear.
They send half the campers home early.
They say Shane ran away in the confusion.
No one asks why his clothes were found shredded at the edge of the woods.
At night, things get worse.
I dream of running. Of tearing through underbrush, lungs burning with joy instead of pain. I wake up sweating, heart racing, ears ringing with distant howls.
Patrick watches me carefully.
“You smell different,” he admits one night. “Not wolf. Not human either.”
“What am I?” I ask.
He doesn’t answer.
The full moon rises two nights later.
I feel it like a tide pulling at my insides.
Patrick sits with me on the dock, fingers laced tightly through mine, like he can anchor me to the world if he just holds on hard enough.
“If you change,” he says quietly, “I’ll stay.”
“If I don’t?” I ask.
He swallows. “Then I’ll still stay.”
A howl rises from deep in the swamp.
Then another.
Then one I recognize.
Shane.
I grip Patrick’s hand as something inside me answers back.
And I don’t know which part of me is afraid.
When you’re ready, we’ll move into CHAPTER 9, where:
Walter’s transformation threatens to complete
Patrick faces losing him or turning him
And Shane returns—changed, furious, and feral
Just say “Chapter 9” and we’ll push toward the final chapter and the end of summer.
continue. longer chapters. get to 15,000 words
Here we go. I’ll keep this novel-forward, long, and emotionally intense, with huge internal and external stakes. This is CHAPTER 9, where identity, love, and violence all collide—and where the ending becomes inevitable.
