Half Wolf

Struggling to keep her eyes open, she looked straight ahead at something that had to be a length of chocolate-brown fabric. She was almost positive it wasn’t dirt.

Fire sang through her skull when she tried to place even that one small thing. Her lungs ached. Her eye sockets throbbed. She welcomed the discomfort because those things had to mean she was alive.

Focus.

The brown surface had white lines that looked like stitching. White thread. She was on a blanket. This was good. She hadn’t been left in the park for early morning foot traffic to find.

More relief and another round of chills accompanied a further perception. She wasn’t cold. She rested on a blanket, and the man who had rescued her was here. She remembered the hardness of his chest in what still seemed like a dream. Though she had stopped shaking, she felt like she might throw up.

“Can you speak?” he asked again.

Was he casually posing a question when she had no idea where she was, who he was or what had happened to her? When she couldn’t have uttered one word if she’d wanted to? Her throat was tight, raw and constricted, because a fiend had chomped on it.

Yes. A fiend. I remember that, too.

Swallowing was a chore. Something tight had been wrapped around her throat, from which a distinctive smell arose.

Gauze?

It was a scent out of childhood memory—of scraped knees and knuckles. In this instance, it was the smell of a treated bandage and implied that not only had she survived, but the man beside her had to be a good guy. Still...hospitals didn’t have brown blankets or intimate sleeping accommodations.

More panic threatened with a dangerous undertow. Why hadn’t she been taken to a hospital?

Kaitlin waited to find out if she was wrong about her rescuer and if this guy might have saved her for nefarious purposes of his own. She’d have to rally somehow. She would have to run.

“You’re in my room,” her companion explained, his voice producing a familiar tingling vibration inside her chest. “I didn’t know where else to take you. Didn’t know where you belonged. In truth, taking you anywhere else might have been bad for both of us.”

His voice had the mesmerizing quality of a dangerous animal temporarily appeased. While the words themselves were gentle, they were underscored by a hint of something scary that chilled Kaitlin to the bone.

She gasped and managed to suck in a lungful of daylight-filled air. Stripes of light filled with dancing dust particles lay across the blanket beside her, she now saw. Sunlight was seeping through curtains or shutters.

She withheld a shout of relief. Daylight would chase the nightmares away; keep the horrors out of reach.

Any time now.

“Hospitals are out of the question,” her host continued. “I’m afraid they don’t deal well with people like us. Their physicians wouldn’t know what to do or what we’d need.”

People like us. Kaitlin hoped to God he meant doctorate students without health insurance. She hoped with all her might this guy would turn out to be from the campus police.

She was twenty-three years old and felt terribly small and inadequate. More than anything, she wanted to hear her parents’ voices. Without the people she loved, sunlight and fresh blankets weren’t completely normal things or as comforting as they could be.

She fought back tears.

Squeaking bedsprings made her heart flutter. Her center of gravity shifted as the man behind her moved on the bed.

“You will heal, though it will take some time. The worst is over, but there will be more trials to come. That can’t be helped. That’s just the way it is.”

“No,” Kaitlin sputtered with a ferocious effort. No more of this.

“Luckily, you rode some of this out while unconscious. Our bodies are quick to repair and you’ll soon find this to be true. Your body is trying to adapt right now.”

Kaitlin moved her lips. “Thank you.”

This had to be the man who had come to her aid in the park, and had put her on a blanket. Whatever else came to pass, she was grateful for that.

“You’re welcome,” he said hesitantly, sounding both relieved and wary.

“Angel,” she managed to get out, her throat throbbing like crazy with each uttered syllable. “You?”

His response came in the form of a deep cascade of laughter that sent more dust motes dancing. “No angel,” he said. “Not by a long shot. I’m Michael. Can you tell me your name?”

“Kaitlin.”

“Right now you’re still very sick, Kaitlin. But it’s a new day and you’re mending.”

Taking a chance, encouraged by his kind words, Kaitlin unfurled her fingers slowly, glad when they soaked in the blanket’s softness.

“Don’t worry about anything right now,” Michael soothed. “Rest. Heal some more. Get used to what’s going on in your body.”

Squeezing her eyes shut, Kaitlin whispered, “Afraid.”

“I know.”

“Home.”

“In a while,” he said.

“Home,” she repeated.

“As soon as you’re feeling better, I’ll take you there.”

His words were immensely reassuring. Why, though, when he could have an agenda of his own?

“Sleep now,” he suggested. “Heal.”

“Heal,” Kaitlin echoed, wondering how she could sleep when she had been mauled by a monster and nearly killed. She would be screaming right now if her throat worked properly, and be running if she had the use of her legs.

“Sleep a while longer,” he directed with a lulling, rolling purr. “You’re safe here. No one will harm you while I stand guard.”

Hell. Did she need guarding? If so, did it mean the monster that had nearly killed her might come after her again? Having sampled a taste, would he seek her out?

The roaring noise in her ears was like distant engines getting progressively closer. She actually felt her brain go dark. And for the second time in Kaitlin Davies’s personal history, she just...slid...away.

* * *

She ran.

Barefoot. With the night wind on her body and moonlight in her hair. Sucking in air. Devouring the night. Blood pumping wildly in her veins.

Stars were luminous overhead. The night tasted like licorice and smelled like old wood. Running through the dark, inhaling it, Kaitlin felt driven, free, uninhibited and exceptionally fast. She felt joyously different somehow. More alive.

Noises followed her as she moved: a creak of branches, the rustle of leaves. Close behind those things came other sounds, like the racing beats of her heart and the snap of overextended muscle and bone. Each movement she made was a symphony.

Trees were dark shapes she rushed past. She knew them all, could name them and count the animals sheltering beneath. She could see in the dark. Outlines, shapes, were clear and slightly alien.

She wasn’t alone. Someone ran with her, his strides in sync with hers. They moved as a single unit, in silence, with some distance between them.

Her companion called out once with a word Kaitlin didn’t recognize, though she chased the sound of his voice into an open field. And suddenly, Kaitlin no longer felt sure of foot. She stumbled, teetered, struggled with her legs. Faltering, she fell to her hands and knees, sliding several inches, carried forward by momentum.

Strong hands yanked her upright, spun her around and lifted her off the ground as though she were as light as a cloud. Whoever this was carried her into the shadow of nearby tree cover and dropped her onto her feet. Warm hands pressed her to the bark of the closest tree in a hazy repeat of another time and place she couldn’t quite recall.

“Not so fast,” her companion advised.

The body leaning into hers was male, extremely warm and completely naked, though she didn’t glance down to make sure of that. He was tall and light-skinned, with features that gave him a regal air, and rippling abs of steel.

“Take your time,” this naked man advised.

His dark chin-length hair brushed her face, sending meaningful vibrations downward and toward a spot between her thighs. Bursts of energy spiraled outward from a spark deep inside her—barely containable energy. Highly unstable stuff.

Kaitlin couldn’t keep her legs still, or her arms. It felt as though her internal engine’s idle had been set too high and she waited nervously at a starting line for the gun to go off.

Did she know this man beside her? Her body did. She had a new and raging hunger for him that added to her shakes. She wanted to crawl under his skin and stay warm. The desire came to nip at his marvelously sculpted chest, half of which was etched with spirals of inky-black tattoos that swirled each time he moved.

Being with this guy felt exquisitely erotic, even though somewhere inside her mind red warning flags were waving with questions about who he really was and what she was doing here.

“Have to move. Have to run,” she said breathlessly.

His piercing green gaze held her captive. “Go ahead. Run,” he said, beaming silent messages Kaitlin swore she understood in some strangely telepathic way. “Stay close to the tree cover tonight. Taking small steps is the way to go.”

The gravelly quality of his voice sent a cascade of thrills through her that set off another adrenaline rush. Her body was responding to this guy’s closeness as though she knew him better than she should and much more than she recalled. Or maybe her anxiousness was translating this dream into some kind of twisted sexual wishful thinking, because she had a nearly overwhelming desire to trace those inky tats with her tongue.

“I’m fast,” she said, exhaling pent-up steam.

“And cocky for a newbie,” he countered. “Hell, you’re only two days old.”

“I merely stumbled.”

“You’ll do so again if you don’t listen. Your muscles have to get with the program.”

Kaitlin glanced around, needing to look anywhere but into the green eyes observing her. “Why are we standing beneath the trees?”

“You’ve got to avoid staying for long in direct moonlight. It all takes time. You’ll thank me later if you listen. It’s a miracle you’re here at all.”

Each word he spoke in that mesmerizing tone served to spread the wildfires already kindling inside her. Only this guy, whoever he really was, could affect her like this. His powerful body, chiseled face and incredible eyes were a turn-on that made her want to jump his bones.

She felt like an animal.

If she could just wrap her arms around his broad shoulders, then lift her legs to encircle his strong thighs, the place inside her that was thrumming with a need for intimacy would perhaps be appeased. As inexplicable as it was, she was tethered to this sexy beast by an invisible chain. His breath had meant her survival. Part of him was already inside her.

Or had she made that up?

“Tell me your name,” she said.

“Michael.”

Michael. Like the archangel. She remembered hearing him tell her this before in a conversation that seemed to have taken place a long time ago.

“Two days old?” she said, remembering what he’d just said.

He shook his head. “Explanations later. For now, it’s enough that you’re alive and walking.”

More than alive, Kaitlin thought. And how could she think about later when Michael’s expression told her he shared her hunger and was fighting to keep from letting his hunger out? Weren’t people supposed to live in the now? Experience each moment as if it were their last?

Had she confronted that last moment recently?

“I want to feel,” she whispered hoarsely, afraid to think back. “I need to know everything life has to offer.”

“Yes, but for you tonight is merely a dream.”

“That’s why you’re here, Michael? I’ve dreamed you up?”

He took her hand in his and placed her open palm on his chest, making his remark about dreams seem ludicrous. This guy was solid sculpted male goodness through and through.

“Enjoy this while you can because if it’s all good, you’ll be back to reality tomorrow,” he said.

Another word floated through Kaitlin’s mind as if Michael had conjured it. College. Not a totally unfamiliar word, yet too distant to capture with a focus that already moved back to Michael’s taut body and the hardness below his waist that she knew was in her honor.

“You want me,” she whispered.

“Like I said, you know nothing.” Michael reached up to move a tangle of her hair back from her face, showing off arms corded with power and tension. No tats covered his biceps. His skin was actually sun-bronzed.

Waves of lust struck Kaitlin so strongly that she would have swayed if he hadn’t pinned her to the tree.

“I know this isn’t normal,” she said.

“Not for you,” he agreed. “Not yet. Your feelings are tied to what happened.”

Do not think back, her mind warned. You’ll be sorry if you do.

Kaitlin glanced sideways. “No one is around?”

“No one you can see.”

Michael’s remark triggered a memory she had just warned herself not to find. Things hid in the dark. Bad things.

Catching a whiff of some new scent, Kaitlin struggled to place it. She reached for her throat, found the rough surface of the bandage and pressed there. The sharp-edged pain beneath that touch caused the night to close in.

“Oh, no, you don’t.” Michael’s hands tugged her fingers from her neck.

“What...” Nearly breathless, Kaitlin started over. “What’s wrong with me?”

“Nothing we can’t deal with.” Michael’s voice deepened further as he glanced up at a patch of night sky visible through the branches.

Kaitlin followed his gaze. “Will I remember this dream?”

She ran her palm over his chest, outlining one scroll of the tattoos. Michael twitched, stopped her progress with a tight grip on her wrist and shook his head.

“It wouldn’t be fair for me to take you up on that,” he said.

Her eyes strayed. “What does it matter, if it’s a dream?”

“It matters,” he said. “And you will remember it all eventually.”

She pulled away from his grip and moved her hand to his shoulder, where moonlight helped to outline his exquisite muscular shape. He stopped her again with a firm hand and a nebulous whispered comment. “You don’t, as yet, know anything. It’s hard for me to...”

He backed up, stood tall, drenched in moonlight. The first pop Kaitlin heard after his little speech was a muted sound. There was no mistaking the second for anything benign. Or the third.

Like a series of pinging buttons on an overstretched shirt, the bones of Michael’s jaw began to unhinge. The beautiful, sharp-featured face in front of her began to stretch. Michael’s dark hair lengthened as if someone invisible had tugged at the roots. His muscles danced as though something alive under the skin wanted to get out.

As he dropped to a crouch, the scrolling tattoos on his chest began to spread, covering muscle, turning his skin dark. Then his legs furred up in fluid series of swishes and cracks.

One minute the man had been there, and the next minute, something else appeared that uttered a reverberating growl. When his head lifted, familiar green eyes looked out, but it was no longer Michael, the angel’s namesake, facing her. It was an animal, dark as the night, tall as her thighs. Sleek. Primal. Down on all fours.

Michael had turned into a wolf.

And he had been right about one thing.

She didn’t yet know anything about what was going on.

Chapter 3

Kaitlin woke up screaming, her body prepared to fight. Fists curled, mouth open, she felt trapped and unable to flee the nightmare because something was holding her down.

She kicked out with her legs and opened her eyes. Expecting to see a big wolf leaning over her, she instead found another image. Trees.

Hell, yes. There were trees in her sightline, and not the living kind. She was looking at a picture, a poster of a forest, on the wall above a desk that held a retro lava lamp, a silver telephone and an open laptop computer.

Hesitating, consciously attempting to quiet her churning insides, Kaitlin’s mind filled in the gaps. These were her things. Familiar things. She wasn’t outside, running in a moonlit field. Nor was she pinned to a tree by a naked man.

This was her apartment.

But she wasn’t alone.

Fine hairs at the nape of Kaitlin’s neck prickled with leftover panic as she turned her head. No wolf waited there with its black fur gleaming. A woman, a stranger, sat on the edge of her bed.

“Kaitlin, is it?” her uninvited visitor asked.

Kaitlin sat up to find that she’d been trapped by nothing more than a tangle of sheets. Eyeing the stranger, she scooted backward against the headboard. Quivers of muscle soreness accompanied her movement. She looked down to find her arms covered in red scratches already starting to scab.

Instinctively, Kaitlin reached for her neck.

“That bandage won’t be necessary for long,” the woman said. “You’ll have a pretty little scar that I suppose you can consider your first war wound.”

The woman was close to Kaitlin in age—maybe twenty-three or four, with deeply tanned olive skin and glossy black hair that hung halfway down her back. Nothing out of the ordinary presented itself in the woman’s face or body. The problem was her eyes, which were an unusual shade of green that Kaitlin had seen before.

Fingering the bandage taped to her neck, Kaitlin’s fear escalated. She tore off the bandage and winced at the raw, extremely sensitive puckered line of raised skin beneath her right ear.

That can’t be right. I’m awake now.

Dizziness threatened as flashes of memory returned. Night. Blood. An attacker with incredible strength. In that nightmare, she had been mauled by a monster.

Her eyes swept the room in a desperate attempt to set things straight. No man, wolfish or otherwise, sat on the bed, or appeared anywhere else in the small studio apartment. Morning light seeped through the filmy curtains. There was no brown bedspread. She sat on familiar worn floral sheets.

“Kaitlin?” her visitor repeated.

“You can’t be real.” Kaitlin avoided the woman’s green-eyed stare.

“Really? Then I wonder why I bothered to brush my hair. Still, I guess you’d have to think that way, wouldn’t you, since your reality is being inconveniently rearranged.”

“Who are you?”

Her visitor tossed her hair, scattering a whole bunch of scents into the air at once: soap, lipstick and something else Kaitlin had no time to pin down. Damp fur?

Also, now that she thought about it, other smells came to her above and beyond those: dust, pencil lead, chemicals from the lava lamp and a pair of dirty socks stashed under the bed. She also smelled the iron tang of anxiety. Her anxiety. Because, hell...the crisp denim of this stranger’s dark blue jeans had a unique smell. Also discernible was the scent of the worn-out fabric of her own T-shirt. Edging those smells was a lingering odor of badly injured skin, blood and matted hair.

Her hands fell like rocks to the mattress as she studied the scratches crisscrossing her forearms.

“Looks like you might have picked those up last night,” her visitor said. “Sometimes puppies forget how vulnerable their skin really is.”

“Who are you?” Kaitlin repeated.

“I’m Rena. And you, it seems, are Michael’s little secret. Until now.”

Michael. That name belonged in a dream. Kaitlin refused to let this woman see her shake. She swallowed a rising protest.

“He hasn’t told us about you,” Rena continued. “Since Michael has been MIA for a few days, I got worried and followed him here.”

Michael was here? Yes. With her eyes closed, Kaitlin found hints of her dream man in the room. There were scents of shaving cream, faded jeans and musky maleness.

“Who are you, exactly?” she asked Rena, her voice faint.

“Kind of a new relative. A distant cousin.”

That made no sense at all. Kaitlin tried another tactic. “What do you want?”

“Merely to see you and find out why Michael would do something like this. I suppose he wanted to ease you through the process on his own first, before letting us know what he’d done.”

“What process would that be?”

In Kaitlin’s mind the word wolf kept flashing. Fragments of what she’d begun to worry had not been a dream began to coalesce. In it, the man this woman spoke of had turned into an animal right before her eyes.

The fine line between reason and insanity made Kaitlin’s nerve endings fire. As she wrapped her arms around her knees and considered Rena carefully, fear continued to make her heart race.

She looked again at the scratches on her arms. Had she gotten those from being pressed to the bark of a tree, or from a madman trying to kill her in the park?

Rena’s smile suggested that none of these panic attacks Kaitlin was having might be warranted. Whoever this Michael guy was, and whatever kind of trauma she had been through, she couldn’t believe there were alternate species in the world. If she’d had an accident and some guy named Michael, acting like a Good Samaritan, had helped her home, possibly jealousy was what had brought Rena here today. Rena could be Michael’s girlfriend. His lover.

As calmly as she could, Kaitlin met Rena’s scrutinizing gaze. “Where did your friend go?”

“To the corner store, probably to bring you something to eat,” Rena said. “We need to keep our strength up and require lots of fuel. More than usual.”

“We, as in what? Wolves?” Kaitlin asked cynically.

Rena smiled again, flashing very white teeth that almost made the idea of wolves seem plausible.

“He didn’t have to bother. I’m not hungry,” Kaitlin said. In fact, she was sure she’d never be hungry again.

“You’ll be hungry as soon as you smell the food,” Rena told her. “Our metabolisms run hot.”

In her dream, Michael had been hot in more ways than one. But Kaitlin couldn’t turn inward to look for answers to the problems at hand with this woman staring at her. In another minute, she’d sprint for the door.

“It wasn’t a dream, you know,” Rena said as if she had the ability to read Kaitlin’s mind. “You’ll find that out soon enough.”

Rena seemed to be waiting for her to say something, as if they were going to have a conversation that made sense. All Kaitlin could get out was, “What day is it?”

“Monday.”

“That can’t be right. I couldn’t have lost two days.”

With another glance at the discarded bandage, Kaitlin added, “What is going on? Really going on, I mean?”

Rena stood up. “I’m sorry I can’t explain it to you, Kaitlin. For the time being, I guess I’m not supposed to know you exist. Imagine my surprise in finding out that you do.”

Kaitlin was feeling stranger by the minute because Rena was fairly convincing. She decided to go for broke, hoping that when this woman she had never seen before heard what she had to say, Rena would laugh her head off and hit the road.

“Are you a wolf, Rena?”

“You can’t tell?” Rena countered noncommittally.

“Hell, I’m not even sure I’m awake.”

“Then the answer is yes.”

Yes...

The room suddenly felt cramped. Too many ridiculous ideas were taking up space, and the air seemed to beat with a foreign rhythm. Kaitlin blinked slowly to get her bearings and went for round two of the most inconceivable questions possible. “So, that would make you and Michael part of a group of...wolves?”

The question sounded silly in a truly horrifying way. Rena didn’t laugh, though. She said, “You call us werewolves. And we call ourselves a pack.”

Werewolves. Pack. Kaitlin’s stomach tightened. Her next question bordered on hysterics. “You believe that? For real?”

Rena held up a hand in a gesture that indicated she was telling the truth. Scout’s honor, or some such equivalent thing for females.

Kaitlin stared at the pretty, rather feline-featured visitor. “How many of you are there in this pack?”

“Four. There are four of us here, and then there’s you.”