Chapter 1 A Great Fall
In twenty-four hours, I would trade my life for the ravishing pleasures of two merciless gods and their passionate mentee. I’ll experience erotism that I never knew existed, and defy every rule I was raised to obey.
But here and now, I did not know it. I was on top of the world.
The crowd cheered when I leapt off the building, and the wind caught my skirt, pulling every muscle on my face taut as gravity snatched me.
Besides the loud rush of wind, the silence was absolute as I plunged down forty floors of the high-rise building, its glass walls dazzling even in the velvet of nightfall.
Just before my anchor reached its limit, I leapt and opened into a midair split, catching my toes as my veils streamed down on either side of me.
“Go Lys!” Fentone's voice reached me from below.
The cheer was louder this time from our audience sitting in a large garden from across the building in the middle of Hollywood.
They looked miniature from this height, a dual lane road separating us from them for a better viewing experience.
My breath was controlled, the wind was just right and our synchronization was chef’s kiss, so what could be the source of this bad taste in my mouth?
My wolf, Rhea, was nervous and I could see no apparent reason why. The night was perfect, I was sitting at the spot I had worked towards everyday since I was two years old.
I would be competing in the Grand Ascension, a tournament which only one in every two thousand professional ballerinas ever qualified for. The President hosted tonight's ceremony in honor of my achievement even though I suspected it meant more to him because I would be his daughter-in-law than the fact that I was on track to win a rare medal for our country.
Pushing away from the building, I did a triple back somersault mid-air and unfurled like a ribbon around my anchor as nearly half the city stared up at me, before retreating into the circle my veils made, flapping around me like fairies and standing sideways with their feet on the walls of the building.
My eyes found the media team perched on the rooftop of the opposite building. Despite our warnings, they used flashlights, nearly blinding us. Could they be the source of this trouble Rhea, my wolf, smelled then?
Her response to this inner dialogue was nonsensical, and I decided to shut her off for the rest of the performance.
Hugging my veils to myself, I extended one leg out in perfect form as Kade winked and Carolina giggled.
It took the audience half a minute to realize we had just recreated the statue of liberty, if it was hanging vertically off a building. The cheer was like thunder, and the cars driving past on the road below honked in approval.
I launched into the air again for our last lap of performance, and that was when I saw it. But it was too late.
My sister was standing on our side of the road, right at the foot of the building. She had a wide, wide smile as she raised her hands up to clap slowly, once, then twice.
Gianna hardly ever smiled, least of all celebrated anyone.
I screamed as my anchor snapped and my body nosedived. This was not a part of the performance, but it took the crowd way too long to realize that.
They clapped and clapped as the ground rushed towards me, Kael screamed, but the rest of my oblivious veils went on with the performance.
As I fell to my death, I remembered Grandma’s persistent distaste for this sport.
“Nobody ever listens to me.” She said last month. “Pull her out. It will alter her life.”
Now, it was not simply altering my life, it was ending it.
Plop! My head smashed the ground like a coconut against concrete.
A woman let out a piercing shrill that rose above traffic and the festivity. That was the last I remembered.
Broken
Organ trauma
Wolf, weak, unresponsive
Concussion
Nerve Damage
The beeping sound of a monitor reached me as if from far away, and the closer I got to it, the louder it shrieked, like a needle painfully prodding my eardrum.
“Someone please turn it off.” I winced, tried to move, but felt immediate resistance.
Unresponsive
Nerve Damage.
I fought the words off, and opened my eyes to find grandma hurrying towards me.
“Sweet Lys.” She stretched out her hands, spotty with age even though her spine was straight and she moved with the agility of a forty year old.
“Grandma.” I stared at my fingers as the memory of my fall slammed me hard in the chest like a hammer.
“No, no, no.” My heart thudded with a zesty punch, but I fixed my gaze on my fingers, willing out my claws.
I could not afford to lose even one week of practice this year.
“Lys, baby, look at me. Look at grandma.” Her hands rested on either side of my face, attempting to turn me in her direction but I stubbornly kept my eyes on my fingers, and finally, my claws began to protrude as if hesitantly, and my eyes burned with heat as my body started to shift.
“Stop!” Grandma yelled, startling me. She snapped my head to face her, “You’ll be stuck as a wolf if you shift, you are too weak, you barely survived.”
“I need to heal. I cannot miss practice, the Grand Ascension…”
“Is not more important than your life.” She cut me off as the door to my ward creaked open and my parents walked in behind a doctor.
“Mom.” I called out to my mother who was sniffing behind a silk napkin, her eyes red and raw.
She looked up, and stared at me for a long second like I had failed her, before hurriedly looking away. My father would not even look at me, standing stiffly beside her.
“How are we feeling, Miss Grunder?”
I turned to the voice of the doctor, suddenly realizing I could not feel my body.
“Has the anesthesia not worn off?” I gasped, willing my body to move, channeling all my attention to the singular task like I had learned to do in my teen years when I learned the wolf shift, mastered flexibility between a full shift and a partial shift.
Still I could not move.
My mind called out to Rhea, but she whined in exhaustion and I realized I was mostly on my own till however many full moons it took her to heal.
I burst into disbelieving tears, looking around the ward and willing anyone to tell me my assumptions were wrong.
“I cannot feel my body!” I shrieked, aching to thrash around, but it felt like my flesh was a concrete bodysuit. I was trapped in it.
“Grandma. I cannot compete like this.” My gaze found the woman I had learned to lean on since I was a child. But her lips were trembling now with emotions. “Beautiful Lys” was all she could say.
“Why’s no one saying anything?” I lost my patience, a rarity for me. My life was crumbling right in front of me and my family stared on in silence.
“What happened to me? Is it temporary, how many days of practice do I have to miss?”
“Miss Gunder, you have to calm down or I’ll need to sedate you.” The doctor said and when my eyes swiveled to him, he winced. “You just got out of surgery, and barely survived.”
Placing his hand on mine, he stared into my eyes. “I’m sorry to tell you this, but you’ll never dance again. You damaged several nerves in the fall, and medicine has no solution for those kinds of injuries yet.”