I didn’t have the patience for banter so I released his tail and scanned the area hoping that I could find this damsel in distress.
Roman sniffed the air. He was much better at tracking a scent.
“Do you smell anything?” I asked, now back in my human form. The hairs on my arms were raised with a sweeping of goosebumps. A strange sensation rolled through the length of my spine and left my nostrils flaring.
“There!” he exclaimed, pointing at the water. It was dark and the water even darker but, thankfully, my superior vision allowed me to see the head of a girl bobbing just above the water. She opened her mouth, like she was going to shout but a wave crashed over her and filled her mouth with water. A second later, she disappeared.
Without thinking, I ran to the cliff’s edge and dove into the water. It didn’t matter to me what might be waiting for me at the bottom of my dive, so long as I could manage to save the girl from drowning.
“Landon!” I heard Roman scream my name just before I sliced through the water. It was ice cold and quite a shock to my system but I ignored all that as I started to kick my legs. I reached the surface and tried to orient myself but I really had no idea where the girl was in proximity to where I had landed. Perhaps this hadn’t been my most intelligent decision but when instinct tells you to do something — you do it and you don’t ask questions. “Right in front of you!” Roman directed, taking advantage of our link as Alpha and Beta. Trusting that he was guiding me in the right direction, I started forward.
It had been a while since I had swum in my human form. It felt strange but it was faster than doggy paddling to this woman. Besides, if she happened to be a normal human woman, instead of a member of our lost pack, then I didn’t want her to freak out when I finally came upon her. Humans didn’t take to shifters all that well. Urban legend has painted us into monsters over the years and, truth be told, some of our kind fit the description to a disturbing degree.
“Hurry up, will you? She hasn’t surfaced in a while!”
?
??I’m going as fast as I can! The current is working against me here.” I knew that this was a race against the clock and that with each wasted minute, I was that much closer to losing her.
But I wasn’t going to let that happen.
Some internal trigger signaled that it was time to dive and that’s exactly what I did. When I opened my eyes, I saw her body suspended in the water. Bubbles escaped from her lips as she sank deeper and deeper.
I grabbed her arm and yanked her toward the surface.
Her body was already dead weight and I was starting to fear the worst.
She can’t be dead, I kept telling myself. There can’t be another death on my hands.
We broke through to the surface. Her skin had a waterlogged look to it and her lips were blue. With her body pinned against my own, I tried to get a response out of her but as far as I could tell, she wasn’t even breathing.
“We’re too late.”
“Get her back to shore and I’ll be the judge of that,” said Roman. Of the two of us, he was definitely the optimist.
“She isn’t breathing.”
“Ever heard of something called CPR?”
“I don’t know how to do that.”
“Well, I do, now get her over here. Now.”
Seeing as she was unconscious, I transformed into a wolf and settled her onto my back, so that she remained above the water at all times. It felt like an eternity before I finally reached the shore. Each minute felt like it was dragging into an eternity and I knew our chance of saving this girl was dwindling to almost non-existent.
As soon as I stepped on firm ground, Roman snatched her up and landed her on a patch of dry sand.
He started to pump her chest, both palms together. His face was screwed up with concentration.
After a while, he leaned down and opened her mouth, blowing air into it.
He repeated these steps countless times but nothing seemed to happen because of it. “Roman —”
“Shut up. I won’t have you tell me that it’s too late because I know it’s not. We heard her screams for a reason.” His eyes burned like I had never seen them burn before but I understood his emotion because there was something about this girl…
I couldn’t quite tell what it was exactly but it felt like something had clicked inside of me. In a way, she felt like a missing link but I didn’t know what it was she was completing.
Could it be? I wondered.