I Rejected My Obsessive Werebeast novel Chapter 91

Chapter 91

We slept deeply. For the first time in longer than I could remember, I woke up in the morning without the residual tension in my shoulders that came from bracing myself in my sleep. There were no anonymous messages. No one was watching us. No one was waiting for us to make a mistake

On the afternoon of the fourth day, the town was holding one of its seasonal market events–a collection of stalls set up along the main street, selling local crafts, food, and the kind of souvenirs that tourists buy and immediately forget the name of. We’d seen the flyers posted around the guesthouse and decided to go down and take a look. The sky was overcast when we left, a thin layer of gray clouds sitting low over the mountains. but the air was still and warm, and there was nothing in the atmosphere that suggested anything worse than a light shower.

We spent an hour browsing the stalls. Silas bought a small carved figure from a woodworker–something abstract, a bird or a fish, he wasn’t sure which, but he liked the way it felt in his hand. I found a bag of dried herbs from a vendor who told us, with great seriousness, that they would make our cooking taste like the mountains themselves. We were laughing about it, walking between the stalls, when the light changed.

It happened fast. Not the gradual dimming of a normal cloud passing over the sun, but a sudden, total collapse of brightness, as if someone had pulled a curtain across the sky. The clouds, which had been a thin, unthreatening gray, were now a solid, churning black, rolling in from the mountains with a speed that made the air itself feel pressurized. The wind picked up in the same instant, a hard, gusting thing that tore at the canvas awnings of the market stalls and sent loose papers spinning into the air like startled birds.

7388

4

OORG

Chapte

Then the rain came.

didn’t start as a drizzle and build. It arrived all at once, a wall of water that hit the ground with enough force to bounce back up in a fine mist. The street turned into a river within seconds, the drainage systemis overwhelmed before they could even begin to cope. The crowd, which had been relaxed and browsing a moment before, broke apart into a panic of running figures, people shouting, children crying, stall owners grabbing at their goods with the futile energy of trying to save something that was already lost.

Silas’s hand found my arm and pulled me against his side. His body turned into a shield between me and the worst of the wind, his tail wrapping around my waist to keep me close. His ears were flat against his skull, his eyes scanning the street with the same alert intensity they’d had in the city, the vacation vanishing from his posture in the space of a single breath?

“We need to get back. Now.”

We moved toward the edge of the market, heading for the path that led up to the guesthouse. The rain was so heavy that I could barely see ten feet in front of me. The path, which had been a pleasant walk through trees and switchbacks, was now a chute of mud and running water, the ground beneath my feet shifting and sliding with every step. Silas kept one arm around me, his grip firm, his feet finding purchase where mine couldn’t.

We were halfway up the slope when the town’s emergency broadcast system crackled to life. The speakers, mounted on poles along the main street, were barely audible over the roar of the rain, but the words they carried cut through the noise with a clarity that made my stomach drop.

“Flash flood warning. All residents and visitors in low–lying areas must evacuate immediately. Move to higher ground. Do not attempt to cross running water. Repeat: flash flood warning in effect. Move to higher ground immediately.”

39.90%

15:32

4

RG

Chapt

Silas’s grip on me tightened. He looked up the slope, then back down toward the town, his jaw set, his tail bristled. The path ahead of us was disappearing under the mud. The path behind us was already underwater.

VERIFYCAPTCHA_LABELVerify