Lifesong

A Total-E-Bound Publication

www.total-e-bound.com

Lifesong

ISBN # 978-1-78184-098-6

©Copyright Erin Lark 2012

Cover Art by Posh Gosh ©Copyright September 2012

Edited by Amy Parker

Total-E-Bound Publishing

This is a work of fiction. All characters, places and events are from the author’s imagination and should not be confused with fact. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, events or places is purely coincidental.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any material form, whether by printing, photocopying, scanning or otherwise without the written permission of the publisher, Total-E-Bound Publishing.

Applications should be addressed in the first instance, in writing, to Total-E-Bound Publishing. Unauthorised or restricted acts in relation to this publication may result in civil proceedings and/or criminal prosecution.

The author and illustrator have asserted their respective rights under the Copyright Designs and Patents Acts 1988 (as amended) to be identified as the author of this book and illustrator of the artwork.

Published in 2012 by Total-E-Bound Publishing, Think Tank, Ruston Way, Lincoln, LN6 7FL, United Kingdom.

Warning:

This book contains sexually explicit content which is only suitable for mature readers. This story has a
heat rating
of
Total-e-burning
and a
sexometer
of
2.

This story contains 135 pages, additionally there is also a
free excerpt
at the end of the book containing 8 pages.

LIFESONG

Erin Lark

Everyone dies and no one knows this better than Tucker—a shape-shifting wolf whose sole purpose is to sacrifice himself to heal the Earth.

Emma’s insistence that her best friend is a talking wolf lands her in the psych ward. When she’s released six years later, it’s the wolf who takes her in. But the creature she bunks with in Maine isn’t anything like the one she remembers from her childhood.

Tucker hasn’t shared his bed in over a century. Falling in love the first time around ended with him having a broken heart inside the body of a wolf. He won’t let it happen again—love be damned.

But when he tells Emma, a feisty blonde whose touch is just as fiery as her personality, about the pact he has with his not-so-immortal life, she does whatever she can to change his mind. Falling in love wasn’t part of the plan, but now he’s falling fast. And if that isn’t bad enough, the mind-blowing sex and Emma becoming the pack’s new alpha certainly add complications.

With the Earth crumbling beneath their feet, can Emma save the pack and the wolf she loves? Or will she make the ultimate sacrifice?

Dedication

Dedicated to my dad, whom I think of every day.

Prologue

Emma

Their screams were what woke me first. Cries of other children stolen from their beds by the Earth. They started soft—pathetic whimpers erupting into long shrieks, which faded well before the children could run out of breath. The offensive noises crackled against an otherwise silent night, their pleas for help sharp and abrupt.

Wide awake, I sat in the middle of my bed, sheets bunched in my lap. My heart pounded, and I held the blankets to my chest, hugging them for comfort. I didn’t make a sound.

The cries stopped, and as beautiful silence coiled around me, I inched over to my window. The wails came around the same time every night, and I could hear them through the bedroom window of our small townhouse. Outside, a fresh layer of snow fell, becoming heavier as the cries of the other children tapered off. I could not really say what sent me into the streets that night. Most nights I would’ve cowered under my shield of blankets until the Earth had stopped shaking. But not this night.

Sure my parents would sleep until morning, I dug through my closet for a pair of slippers and a robe to hug around my shoulders. The floorboards creaked under my weight as I sneaked down the steps, and when the wind moaned around the house, my heart lodged itself at the back of my throat.

Reaching for the front door, I took a deep breath, then another. Something clawed at me, a ghost tugging at my arm as my fingers fumbled with the lock. I held my breath. Closed my eyes.
Breathe.
The door opened and a handful of snowflakes kissed my cheek.

The streets outside were empty. Most of the street lamps had gone dark as a result of the storm. Holding the fuzzy robe close to my neck, I peered up and down the stretch of asphalt. Faint green cracks covered the ground at my feet, the Earth’s energy pulsing to the surface. An invisible hand clutched around my throat, and I gasped for breath.

The Earth had opened right under my house—even though it had sent its long, dark tentacles towards my room, something had fought it back. Protected me.

The sky flickered in the distance as a great tension coiled around my chest, forcing a breath past my quivering lips. I could’ve gone back inside. I should’ve locked myself in my room. Instead, I dipped a toe into the terrifying night. There were no sounds now. Not even the howling of the wind or the slight tinkling of snowflakes on the ground. Silence.

I picked a direction and ran to where the world had turned dark. Black shadows dotted the landscape, a cluster of trees growing in front of me. And it was to that cluster of pines and firs I ran, into the dark and the unknown.

Chapter One

Emma

I remembered him. My wolf. His silver eyes. His fur warm against my skin and the words he’d spoken to me.

“This is a dream,” I’d said, holding myself upright with the help of a nearby tree. “You’re not real.”

He’d hidden his eyes from me. “Perhaps not, but I’m no dream, either.” When I hadn’t spoken, he’d continued, “You’re awake, child. And though I cannot force you, I’d like you to come with me. The land beneath us is dying, and there isn’t much time. There’s something I need to show you.”

I’d scanned the forest, peering at my house far in the distance.

“You’re the only one who can help us heal these wounds. The others…your parents won’t understand.”

I’d taken another breath before kneeling in front of him. I’d stared at his eyes. “But how can I hear you? How can I understand you? You’re just a wolf.”

He hadn’t moved. Ears perked. Tail wagging behind him. “To your eyes, perhaps.”

“How do I know this is real?”

“You don’t.”

His final words have stayed with me ever since.
“The Earth will not find you if you come with me. I can keep you safe.”

I remembered the memories he’d shared with me then—a black tree, dead and broken, strips of green energy seeping through the cracks, and the boy, his eyes the same silver as my wolf.

His memory still kissed my dreams—both the wolf and the boy visited me as I slept.

My body trembled, as if feeling his hands against my face, his cold nose resting in the palm of my hand. It was how I woke every morning, bleary-eyed and much too soon to see the dream to its end.

My dreams were my only escape from the prison into which my parents had deposited me. Too awake to return to my wolf, I blinked at the early morning sunlight. White walls with bars on the windows surrounded me. The ratty old mattress screeched under my weight as I rolled over, scanning the piles of books collected in every corner of the room.

Books about wolves, werewolves, romance novels and anything else I could get my hands on. There were no teachers, no recess. Just my books. My memories. But no matter how much I read, no matter how hard I tried to remember, nothing explained what my wolf had been, or why he hadn’t come back for me.

The staff at the ward insisted I hadn’t seen him at all, and if it hadn’t been for how real my dreams felt, I might have believed them. For the past six years, I’d struggled with the truth. Six years later and I still remembered him.

He’d taken me as far into the woods as we could possibly have gone. And pressing his forehead to mine, he’d shown me things that hadn’t happened yet, things that had happened to him and memories that somehow had appeared in my dreams after we’d met. The black tree. The Earth’s essence—the green energy humans had begun to siphon out of the ground with their heavy machinery. The more we took from the Earth, the darker the ground became.

The Earth was dying, and even though everyone else at the ward could see it, I was the only one who could hear it—the only one who could feel the Earth’s cries. That was what had brought me here in the first place. When my parents couldn’t stand my stories about Tucker any longer, they took me to the ward—to a place he would never find me.

He’d told me to find him when I was ready. When I was sure. He’d promised if I got lost, he’d seek me out. The days passed as if they were years, and as they did, the likelihood of Tucker’s return to me faded.

Aroused as a result of my most recent dream, I considered staying in bed, to close my eyes and only think of him. I couldn’t. The nurses were due back at any minute. Much too soon for me to get off, and way too early for my liking.
Damn.

Rousing myself, I fixed my nightgown, the thin fabric falling below my knees as I closed my hands around the bars of the window. I scanned the world outside for Tucker, the same shape I’d searched for every morning and right before I went to bed. I’d never seen him, yet still I hoped for his return.

A bleak sky hung overhead, but I knew better than to hope for rain. Broken roads and tall cranes jutted from the ground in place of the trees I remembered from my childhood. The colours here were either brown, grey or black. There was no green grass or any wild flowers like the ones from my books. That part of my world had faded, shortly after my fifth birthday, into memory and fiction.

The destruction first started in 2018, following the earthquakes and storms that had begun in 2011 and increased every year. The quakes caused the lands to shift, to break off and fall into the sea. The storms scarred whatever remained. And as the Earth died, mankind tried to save what they could by building machines, ones capable of draining the essence right from the Earth. This essence, or the core as some called it, was hidden far beneath the surface. It was what brought life to the flowers, fields and farms.

After a large string of earthquakes, the humans discovered the stream by mistake—a green energy seeping through the cracks of the Earth’s crust. Wherever the streams touched, new life bloomed. Consumed by their greed, mankind built even more machines—allowing them to turn the Earth’s essence into useable energy.

The children had started to vanish soon after that.
The Earth’s price.

Someone knocked on the door to my room, and I jumped.

“Emma, are you awake?” a voice called from the other side of the door.

“Of course. Am I ever
not
awake?” I asked, heading over to it.

“Good point,” the voice replied, a set of keys jingling before turning the lock. An older woman poked her head into the room. She glared at my mess of hair, the unmade bed and the books lining the walls of my room. She handed me a cup of pills and some water with a sigh. “I take it the new medication isn’t helping?”