Charmed I'm Sure Read Online Free PDF

the thick muscle in her shoulders, but not snapping under her weight, either—and I used that instant of saving grace to dart out from beneath her. She managed an inelegant swipe at me and two things happened simultaneously: The pike snapped in half, dropping her to the ground; and her paw caught the tip of the compound bow jutting out above my head. I was spun around crazily toward deeper water, the bow nearly dislocating my shoulder as the bow was violently ripped off of my body.
    Still whirling and lurching, I fell backward into the river. She lumbered toward me, in pain but insane with rage, and I escaped in the only direction that offered me any chance of survival: down. Twisting beneath the water, I did not use my legs to propel myself in a straight fast line away from her because that was the obvious choice, but slid away at an angle.
    The mud and the cold water must have lowered my core temperature enough, as she lost me in the dark river. My body was actually corkscrewed around by the impact when her full weight broke through the surface of the water a few feet in front of me. Struggling to orient myself, I made for the direction that I thought the cleft rock was in.
    I was close enough, emerging a few feet from where the hawthorn stake was jutting above the surface of the river. I tore it from its makeshift sheath while gunfire ripped through the night.
    Eric was firing at the wila with the Thompson again. If she hadn’t already been half mad with pain, she might have ignored him. The lead bullets could not kill her, but they stung, and animal instincts tend to come to the forefront when a shape-shifter is frightened and tired and wounded. The bear forgot about me for a moment and lumbered toward the Marine.
    I charged after the wila, counting on the sounds from the Thompson and the splashing of the bear’s larger body to cover my own noise, and when the Thompson ran dry, the bear’s roar still served that purpose. Eric’s body went flying through the air an instant before mine did. I landed on the bear’s back. I don’t know where Eric landed, or in how many pieces. I never saw him again.
    I stabbed the hawthorn stake through the bear’s right eye, but my fingers were numbing and her neck was too thick to get my arm all the way around; my body slid at the last instant so that the tip of the stake did not pierce the bear’s brain. The creature rose up on its hind legs and threw me off with a violent twist that brought its moving upper shoulder into contact with my chest as I was slipping. If she had caught me with an elbow or forearm it would have cracked my breastbone open. As it was, I went hurtling backward through the air and landed in the river again.
    The bear went down on all fours, its movements sluggish. The wila was in a predicament. A large fragment of wood was lodged inside her, and if she shape-shifted into anything smaller, that body would draw in around the pike until the wila wound up impaling herself. But the bear’s form did not have the manual dexterity to remove the pike, and the wila was losing blood.
    The bear went up on its hind legs so that its forepaws could at least clutch at the stake that was sticking out of her right eye. I dove into the water while the bear was distracted, and when I came up I was directly in front of the standing bear as she was hurling the stake away with an awkward outward parting of her paws.
    We both lunged frantically. I moved toward the bear, plunging my right hand into the pike wound in her chest while she drew her arms inward to crush me in its embrace. The bear’s own strength pulled me farther in while my hand was pushing into the pike, tilting it, and I think that is the only thing that saved my life. I’m not really certain. Those last few instants are lost to me. All I remember is being borne away in a black avalanche of pain.
    *  *  *
    A voice eventually woke me. My body was freezing and wet and