28Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡQJUGWPPAb428Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡbEUae4BRRG
Leah couldn't pinpoint the exact moment she decided to leave.
Maybe it was the day Sam and Emily announced their wedding. Everyone celebrated, hugged, made plans. Leah stood apart, smiling tightly, feeling something inside her finally break. The crack was almost audible, like ice on a lake about to give way beneath her feet.
Maybe earlier. When her younger brother Seth said he was leaving for college. That he wanted his own life. That Leah needed to stop being his babysitter and find her own path. He hadn't meant to hurt her, she knew that. But his words hit their mark: even he didn't need her anymore.
Or maybe it was the moment she realized there was no place for her in Forks anymore. Too many memories in every corner. Too many ghosts. Too much pain that wouldn't leave, only accumulated, turning into a weight in her chest that made it hard to breathe.
The ticket to Alaska was pure impulse. *Further away. Just further away.*
***
Leah spent three months there. Forests, tundra, endless snow. The cold helped. She could run for days in wolf form until her muscles burned, until her brain was too tired to think.
But Alaska was too much like home. The same pine forests. The same smell of rain and wet earth. Memories found her anyway, caught up with her in dreams, pursued her in waking hours.
So she decided to go south. As far as possible.
The Amazon jungle became her next refuge. Humidity, heat, monkey screams instead of wolf howls. Everything different. Leah thought it would work. She lived there for six months. Hunted. Wandered. Tried to forget.
But the jungle pressed in. Too humid, too stifling, too alive. The wolf inside yearned for coolness and open spaces, as if this was the wrong place. Not her territory.
Leah felt she was searching for something else. She didn't know what. Just something else.
Then in a small Brazilian town, sitting in a cheap hotel during a tropical downpour, she saw a TV report about Chinese mountains. Fog rolling between peaks like smoke from giants' breath. Ancient temples embedded in cliffs. Legends of dragons and mountain spirits. Something inside her clicked quietly, like a key turning in a lock.
The ticket to China became the point where running away transformed into searching.
***
The plane. Endless hours in the air. Leah didn't sleep, just stared out the window, watching continents, oceans, and clouds change beneath the wing. With each kilometer, the weight on her chest grew slightly lighter.
Shanghai hit her like a blow.
Enormous. Noisy. Impossibly foreign.
Skyscrapers stretched toward the sky, gleaming and cold. Neon signs screamed in an unfamiliar language. Millions of people flowed through the streets in an endless stream. Smells mixed into a suffocating cocktail: street food, exhaust fumes, perfume, sweat.
Leah spent three days there, gasping among concrete and glass. It was wrong. The city pressed harder than the jungle. Suffocated more effectively than memories. Her wolf thrashed inside, demanding release, air, space.
On the third night, Leah couldn't take it anymore. She bought a ticket for the first bus going anywhere, just away from the city.
Then another. Concrete jungles gave way to rice fields. Neon yielded to oil lamps. Speed dissolved into the unhurried rhythm of the earth.
Eventually she hitched a ride with a farmer who agreed to take the strange foreign woman with a huge backpack and wild, searching eyes. No words, just silence and road. And that was right.
Further from civilization. Deep into Yunnan Province, where roads turned to dirt trails, where mountains touched the sky and fog spread through valleys like a thick white river.
The mountains called to her. Quieter than the pack's voice, but deeper, bone-deep.
Leah didn't understand why. Couldn't explain it. She just knew with her whole being, with every wolf instinct, that she had to go there. Something was hidden in those ancient peaks, waiting for her specifically.
***
The village at the foot of the mountains was tiny.
A few dozen houses stone, wood, crooked clung to the slope as if afraid to let go and tumble down. Terracotta roofs. Narrow streets. The smell of firewood, garlic, livestock.
Old men sat on doorsteps, puffing long pipes, watching her with open but not hostile curiosity. Children ran out, pointed, laughed: *wàiguó rén*, foreigner. Chickens scattered under her feet.
Leah stopped at a tiny guesthouse, if it could be called that. Two rooms above a tea shop. The owner, an ancient woman with a face carved by time like a mountain slope, spoke no English. Leah spoke no Chinese. They communicated through gestures, smiles, money.
Enough.
***
In the morning, Leah went into the mountains.
The trail was narrow, winding. In places it almost disappeared among rocks and roots, becoming a chain of footprints and hope. Leah walked quickly and easily. Her body, trained by years of transformations, knew no fatigue.
With each step, the tension of recent months slowly released, dissolved into the thin air. Here, at altitude, it smelled of pine, moss, wild herbs she didn't recognize. No vampire scent, that freezing, dead stench forever burned into memory. No pack voices in her head.
Just her, the mountains, and the sky so close it seemed if she reached out, her fingers would catch the wet veil of clouds.
The higher she climbed, the stronger the sensation became.
As if someone were pulling an invisible thread woven directly into her ribcage. A call without words. An attraction, gentle but insistent, leading her higher.
Leah stopped only when the sun began to set, painting the snowy peaks rose-gold.
Around her only rocks and pines, somehow clinging to slopes with hook-like roots. Below, the village looked like a toy. Clouds crawled between peaks, turning the world into a surreal landscape: islands of stone in an ocean of white fog.
Beautiful.
Wild.
For the first time in a year, maybe longer, Leah felt she was exactly where she should be.
She looked around. No one. Only wind whistling between rocks and cries of invisible birds far below.
Leah took off her backpack, set it on a flat stone. She pulled out special gear, light and elastic, sewn back in the reservation for transformations. It fastened to the body so it wouldn't interfere with shifting, stretching with the wolf's body. She attached her backpack to it, tightened the straps.
Then she undressed. Jacket. T-shirt. Jeans. Everything neatly folded into the backpack. Documents, money, spare clothes. Everything she owned in the world.
Cold wind bit at bare skin, raising goosebumps. Leah didn't notice. The cold was nothing compared to the heat inside, boiling in anticipation.
Muscles already tensing, bones seeming to shift, preparing. Blood churning. The wolf tearing at the inside, howling silently, demanding freedom, space, and running.
Leah closed her eyes, breathed in the mountain air clean, sharp as a blade and let go of control.
The transformation was instantaneous.
Familiar as breathing. Pain flared quick and bright, then came relief. Bones shifted, muscles restructured, skin exploded with warm fur. Two seconds later, where a girl had stood, there was a huge gray wolf with a backpack secured by elastic straps.
Leah shook herself, and the world transformed.
Colors faded to shades of gray, but smells exploded in a bright fireworks display. She could distinguish each one: lichen on the rock to the right, a bird's nest in the pine to the left, a mountain goat's three-day-old trail, moisture in a crevice. There was no pack here. No foreign thoughts bursting into her head. No need to compress herself into a ball inside.
Leah ran.
Paws carried her easily over rocks, between trees, up the impossibly steep slope. The backpack bounced on her back, but the straps held firm. Her body rejoiced in movement, long-awaited and uninhibited. Wind ruffled her fur. Her heart beat steadily, strongly, filling the world with its rhythm.
For the first time in a long, agonizingly long time, Leah felt whole. Not a fragment. Not a shadow. Not a sister, not a pack member, not an outcast.
She was herself. Just herself.
She ran until deep night, until the moon rose high, huge and bright, flooding the mountains with cold silver, casting sharp black shadows.
Then she lay on a flat stone still holding the day's warmth, curled up with the backpack by her side. The fatigue was pleasant and earned.
Leah had run so much that she fell asleep under the open sky, conquered by silence and unfamiliar peace.
Sleep came to her in strange fever. Fire streamed under her skin, burning nerves. Most torturous was the pull blind and relentless, hooking her ribs and tearing upward toward the inaccessible mountains shrouded in icy fog.
What she heard in the dream wasn't sound but vibration of the earth itself, coming from its fractured depths. It shook the mountain's granite heart, resonating in Leah's body. And there was a Gaze. She didn't see eyes, but felt two points of searing, all-consuming attention. They were older than these mountains. They were waiting. They were calling her.
Leah woke to a ROAR.
In reality.
She jumped to her paws instantly, heart pounding off-rhythm. The sound still echoed off the rocks: low, vibrating, ancient. Not an animal. Not thunder. Something greater.
And beneath the roar was another sensation. Subtle, almost intangible, but clear as a spear thrust.
*Help me.*
Not words. Not a voice. A feeling that stabbed directly into her chest, making her instincts howl in unison.
Someone needed help. Desperately.
Without thinking, Leah bolted toward the sound.
Paws barely touched the ground. She raced upward, where rocks grew steeper and trees disappeared, leaving only bare stone and chasms.
The call grew stronger, more desperate, becoming a silent scream.
Leah ran like she was possessed, leaping over cracks, claws striking sparks from stone. Breath burst out in hot clouds in the icy air.
And suddenly she froze, claws digging into the ground.
The air had changed.
It vibrated, hummed at a low frequency. As if reality itself was thinner here. It smelled of ozone after a lightning strike, rain on hot stones, forged metal, and something incredibly ancient. Pure, wild magic.
Her instincts howled in chorus. DANGER. PREDATOR.
But that same call, that same plea for help, beat in her chest with pain both foreign and burningly close.
Leah moved forward slowly, prowling, peering into the thick wall of fog.
First she saw a shadow.
Enormous. Wrong-shaped. Too large for any beast, too alive for a rock. It was breathing, slowly, with a wheeze.
Then the fog parted for a moment, as if by command.
And Leah stopped breathing.
The creature was colossal.
A long, flexible serpentine body covered in scales that shimmered even in dim light: crimson like fresh blood on the head, mane, and along the spine, and dark gray like storm clouds on powerful flanks. Four paws with dagger-claws dug into stone. An elegant head with two curved horns and long whiskers that swayed in the still air. And wings. Enormous, membranous wings pressed helplessly against the body.
*A dragon. A real dragon?*
Its beauty was stunning, even now, in captivity and pain. Every line of the body, every curve of scales seemed created by an artist in love with his creation. Leah had never seen anything like it. Nothing so majestic and simultaneously fragile in its helplessness.
But that beauty was mutilated.
The dragon's body was bound by glowing restraints that dug into scales, binding wings, neck, paws. They pulsed with dim, sickly light, and with each pulse the creature weakened. It lay on its side, chest heaving heavily, breathing hoarse and broken.
The dragon slowly, with inhuman effort, opened its eyes.
Golden. Ancient as the mountains themselves. Full of unimaginable pain and... understanding.
Their gazes met.
And the world shifted off its axis.
Leah knew this feeling. Had seen it in Sam's memory. Heard descriptions. Imprinting. Instant, irreversible connection, restructuring the universe around one being.
She had hated the very idea of it. Feared it. Despised it.
And now it was happening to her.
The ground disappeared from under her paws. Everything inside turned over, restructured, clicked into place around this wounded, magnificent creature. Invisible threads of burning power stretched from her heart to the dragon, wove into the very essence, bound them together.
*Mine,* instinct roared, drowning out reason. *Mine. Protect. Save.*
But there was something else. Deeper than fury, deeper than instinct. Tenderness flooded from somewhere in her very heart, so sharp it took her breath away. The desire not just to protect, but to heal. Not just to save, but to stay. Forever.
That scared her most of all.
But this was impossible! Imprinting on a human. Not on... not on a dragon!
And yet her wolf essence strangely resonated with the dragon's magic. Not hostile. Harmonious. Like two notes of one unimaginable symphony. As if they were created for each other, separated by millennia and continents, but finally finding their way home.
In the dragon's golden eyes flickered recognition. A weak spark of hope. And also... surprise? As if he too had felt this connection, also sensed how invisible threads had bound their souls.
A tear rolled from the corner of his eye. A single one, transparent, sparkling in moonlight like a precious stone. It fell on stone, and where it touched earth, a tiny, perfect green sprout instantly grew.
A creature from legends, embodiment of power, lay helpless and dying.
Magic emanated from him in waves, weakened but still palpable. Powerful. Ancient. Real.
The dragon made a sound, quiet, a weak moan that tore Leah's soul apart.
*Hold on,* she thought desperately. *I'm here. I'll help. Just hold on.*
The numbness fell away.
Leah took a step forward...
And froze.
Voices. Human.
Figures emerged from the fog. Three or four, Leah didn't have time to count. In front walked a middle-aged man in a practical jumpsuit, with a staff covered in glowing symbols. The others hung back, dragging bags and ropes.
"Get back to the trail," the leader called without turning around. "I'll finish alone. Wait below."
His voice was satisfied and greedy.
His men disappeared into the fog. The man approached the dragon, not seeing the wolf in shadow.
The dragon jerked, and the restraints dug deeper. The moan repeated, full of pain and rage.
The man laughed. Raised his staff.
Inside Leah, something exploded.
Fury. Pure, primal, all-consuming. Imprint screamed: PROTECT!
The wolf didn't think. Attacked.
Leah shot from shadow like gray lightning. Jaws closed on the hunter's leg. Bone crunched under the force of the bite. He screamed, collapsed.
Somewhere in the fog came shouts. Running feet. His men heard the scream and fled. Not to help, but away.
Leah dragged the leader into the forest, ignoring his blows and screams, until they were far from the clearing. Then she released her jaws and roared in his face: wild, merciless, in a language requiring no translation. *Next time it's your throat. Disappear.*
The man, pale with terror and pain, crawled away, limping, leaving a bloody trail.
*He won't come back,* Leah thought, watching him go. *Too scared. Too injured. He won't dare.*
Leah raced back.
*The dragon. Have to get back to the dragon.*
She burst into the clearing with the first rays of dawn.
And stopped dead.
The dragon was gone.
Only the restraints. Torn, empty, glowing dimly on gray stone. Around them lay scales, crimson and dark gray, smoldering in the morning light like embers of a dying fire.
Leah approached closer. Sniffed. Remnants of magic. And beneath them, his scent: ozone, rain, ancientness. A smell she would never forget. She raised her head, peering into the lightening sky.
Empty.
The dragon had disappeared. Escaped? Flown away?
But the imprint... it pulsed in her chest, alive. Her dragon was alive. Somewhere out there.
She had saved him. And he had left. Without even...
Emptiness struck beneath her ribs. Leah hadn't expected it would hurt so much.
Leah threw back her head and howled.
The howl was long and drawn-out.
The call of a creature whose purpose had flared and gone out in one fatal instant.
She howled until her throat went hoarse.
Until the moon faded completely. Until dawn flooded the mountains with rose-gold.
Then she lay down next to the torn restraints, rested her muzzle on her paws.
*I will find you,* she whispered in thought into the dawn silence. *I saved you once. And I will find you again. I promise.*28Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡ1HmPSyVZHK
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