Cry Wolf (2 page)

She arrived at the intersection where she would normally cross the street on her route home. The vision came to her like a cloud covering the sun, except her premonitions seemed to make everything clearer rather than dimmer. She saw with perfect clarity the traffic signals losing their sync, a red light turning green too quickly as another green light only turned yellow, then the three-car collision that would cause injury and considerable vehicular damage.

She breathed in, out, focusing on the air moving in a slow, healthy cycle.

It was bad enough when the curse made her life miserable, but then she had to bring it out into the world with her. But what was she supposed to do? Live alone in a cabin in the woods? Just put herself and the world out of her misery? Heavens and earth help her, she couldn’t help but think that if she just held on, she’d find a place for herself. It hadn’t happened yet, of course, but Kelly had always been foolishly optimistic.

The focused breathing wasn’t working. Her dread continued to climb, threatening to explode out in a burst of energy that was close enough to electricity to confuse any sort of electronic device.

The vision of the future, of failing signal lights and the crash, hadn’t faded. Kelly abandoned trying to calm down and instead ran as fast as she could into a thin alley between two historical downtown buildings.

She was halfway through the alley when the energy finally released—a snap of tension like wanting to cry and finally letting it out. The cement under her feet trembled. Kelly stumbled then leaned in relief against the brick wall of the building next to her. Maybe the lights in the shops on either side of her had temporarily gone out, but an inconvenience on their part had saved several people very real pain and suffering.

And that was her life—close call after close call. All it took was
one
mistake. What the hell was she going to do when she didn’t get out of the way in time?

“Hello, gorgeous.”

Kelly jumped. Her personal belongings clattered in the box. She had been so focused on getting away from the street that she hadn’t fully noticed her surroundings. An oily residue iridized the water in the centre of the side alley. The mostly cloudy sky barely brought in enough light to see the two small dumpsters…or the man who jumped down from one of the fire escapes to land onto the ground in front of her.

“You. You’re the one who’s been following me,” Kelly said, taking a few steps back.

He had been little more than a flicker at the edge of her mind for the last few weeks. She’d had so many other things to deal with that she’d just ignored it.

She still didn’t sense any malice from him, but something was…off.

The man closed the space between them with fluid ease. The closer he got, the more Kelly felt like she was in a room with nothing but light bulbs, glass statuary and nuclear launch codes. Her aunt would have described it as being a long-tailed cat in a room full of rocking chairs.

“You’re very direct,” the man said. His thick brown hair was tousled and wet. Light-brown eyes that should have been gentle smouldered.

“And you’re very patient,” Kelly said. “Perhaps I should be even more direct.
Why
are you stalking me?”

“It’s as good a word as any,” the man said with a grin. “Can you blame me?”

She couldn’t use anything in her box as a weapon. Then again who needed a weapon when she was the loose cannon in question? Just because she’d let out a release of energy didn’t mean there was none left—she had what sometimes seemed like an endless reservoir. It scared her to think of how deep it might go.

“You aren’t answering me,” Kelly said.

“My name is David,” the man said. “And your name is Kelly. I know that you were fired today, and I wanted to offer my condolences, although we both know it was inevitable.”

“Do we?” Kelly replied coldly.

“I’ve been asking around,” David said. “The second I saw you, I knew you were different. We have that much in common, Kelly. But you’ve been trying so hard to fit into that world”—he gestured to the alley’s opening—“that you haven’t figured out yet that world isn’t good enough for you.”

“Charming,” Kelly said. She had enough cryptic shit going on in her head and enough less cryptic shit going on in her life. She didn’t need a stalker—handsome or not—playing his little games when all she wanted was to get home, drink a soda and read something mindless while she ate dinner. She turned towards the street.

David put a hand on her shoulder, and Kelly dropped her box again.

At his touch, she saw
David before her, not in the alley but surrounded by coniferous trees, his body gleaming silver in the moonlight, each tight shadow of muscle defined and beautiful. Then the man was gone and a monster emerged from his flesh, a monster with shaggy brown fur, fiery eyes and bright silver teeth. It howled at the night sky with the last crack of bone then lunged at her.

She flinched back, flinging up her arms to ward him off, but David—the real David, not the David in her vision—was behind her now. He caught her, wrapping his arms around her shoulders and her waist.

“Don’t be afraid,” he whispered in her ear. Then he whipped her around and pushed her deeper down the alley. She stumbled out of her short heels. Her bare feet hit the pavement. Just when she was about to fall again, this time into much filthier conditions, a creature dipped underneath her. Kelly reflexively grabbed onto its wiry fur.

The creature—
werewolf
, her mind whispered,
David
—ran into the alley behind the downtown street then leapt over the painted concrete wall, and she had to grab on more tightly to him. She was sure she looked quite undignified, clinging sideways to a giant wolf, her feet bare, knees desperately pressing into the wolf’s ribs and her skirt-covered ass sticking out while she held on for dear life.

Kelly cried out as her grip slipped on his fur and she began to fall. The wolf gave a huff that she realised was laughter. He slowed and lowered himself to give her leverage in order to clamber on top of him in a more secure position.

It was not much easier to ride him that way, but as he picked up speed and headed into the park, she stopped focusing so hard on staying on his bony spine and started worrying more about what the hell she was doing.

Once she had accepted the premise that the werewolf underneath her was real—and it was hard not to—she wondered what the hell he might want from her. Had he been more than just stalking her? Had he been hunting?

Nevertheless, she held herself closer and braced herself against the wind sweeping over them. The energy inside her became subdued in the werewolf’s presence, because beneath her was another kind of energy that made her head ache and her fingers prickle to be near it. She welcomed that headache the same way she welcomed a hangover after the oblivion a drink gave her the night before.

The werewolf stopped in a clearing near the edge of the forest.

When David changed back into a man, he assumed the naked form she had seen in her vision, this time coloured not by the moon but by the setting sun. It rendered him a golden satyr in the dimming light.

“You don’t even know what you are, do you?” David said. He cradled her cheek in his hand. “If you did, you wouldn’t keep trying to be something you’re not. You shouldn’t be in their world. You should be here, in mine.”

She should have been afraid. He stared at her mouth as though he wanted to devour her, his palm feverish on her skin. In her red suit jacket, she felt like Little Red Riding Hood getting snowed by the wolf.

But it had been so long since a man had touched her like this, since
anyone
had touched her without things going crazy around her. Well, the leaves around her rustled, and sudden gusts buffeted the branches and kicked up forest debris in a circle around them, but none of that was dangerous. The forest was familiar with wind and its destruction, and the leaves were well-worn from the number of times they had been swept up just like this.

She leaned into his touch, shivering as if cold. Kelly had spent most of her life feeling out of step, closer and closer to exploding from whatever raged inside her. And this man knew what it was.

“What am I?” she whispered.

He stroked his thumb over her lower lip and met her gaze. “What big eyes you have,” he said

His head snapped back. A giant red welt formed along the line of his cheekbone. Kelly gasped. Apologising was as automatic as breathing for her—she had been doing it for so long. David had basically kidnapped her from an alley after stalking her for over a month, but
she
was the one who was horrified.

“Oh my God, I’m so sorry,” Kelly said. After apologising, her next instinct was to flee, but David caught her wrist before she could. Not that she could have outrun him anyway.

“Did I say we were done?” David grinned. The whip mark was livid, but it didn’t faze him. “We’re not finished yet, witch.”

He had named her curse.

It should have made her scoff, like the idea of ‘werewolf’. Yet what other word—fantastic though it may be—could describe the things she did? Pseudoscience had its terms—telepathy, psychokinesis, precognition. However, in the old days it was called something else—magic. And the ones who used magic were called witches.

“Is that what I am?” Kelly asked in wonder.

David tugged her closer, wrapped an arm around her waist and brought her hips against his. She gasped again, but this time it had nothing to do with magic, although branches snapped around her.

“What did you think you were?” David asked, chuckling. He lifted her arm up and breathed deeply from the place she’d scraped herself from her fall. He licked his lips then pulled her arm around his shoulder.

“Cursed,” Kelly replied.

“Some say our kind are cursed, too,” David said. He danced to music only he could hear, danced them around in slow circles as the isolated wind storm around them picked up, yanking at her skirt and hair and tousling David’s hair further. “I don’t listen to them. Weak, jealous meat, all of them. Nothing this alive and powerful could be cursed.”

“But…” she tried to protest.

David pressed his lips against hers with soft and delicious tenderness. The storm continued to whirl around her, but she went still, her world narrowing to David’s kiss, his hot tongue slowly but thoroughly claiming her mouth until she clung to him to keep herself standing.

When he pulled back, she tried to follow him to make the kiss never end.

“You are a child of the earth and I am a child of the moon,” David murmured. He was so close to her that he didn’t have to raise his voice to be heard over the howling wind. “You can’t control your magic because it’s too big for the human you are. I can make you more powerful. I can give you the earth and skies and everything in between, as well as the strength to harness your magic. If you keep trying to fit yourself into their world, it’s going to tear you apart. I can let you loose. I can make you wild.”

“That doesn’t sound like control to me.”

He was undoing her jacket, pulling it down her arms. It dropped to the forest floor.

“
This
doesn’t feel like control,” Kelly said, a little breathless.

“You got to lose it to find it again,” David said with a feral grin.

He slipped a hand under her skirt and squeezed her ass. Among the cacophony of leaves and breaking branches came the sound of tearing fabric. Her blouse ripped apart of its own accord—or perhaps from her own force of will.
Because I wanted it,
Kelly thought with amazement.
I wanted it and it happened.

Her skirt quickly followed the torn shreds of her blouse on the ground. David yanked off the rest. He fell to his knees to take one nipple in his mouth, teasing it with his teeth then making her moan with the wet, velvet heat of his tongue. He traced fingernails that became claws over her tattooed thigh, where a darkly colourful fairy with delicately torn wings knelt in a magical forest.

“I win,” he said, baring teeth that had gone sharp.

Fairy tattoos were about as common and clichéd as roses, skulls and dragons, but she had drawn the concept herself during one of her blackouts. The image, quite unlike anything she had ever drawn before, had stuck with her for several weeks until it had finally compelled her to step into a tattoo parlour.

At first, she had been afraid that the pain was going to make things go crazy around her. A tattoo parlour was one of the last places a person wanted something to go wrong. But after the initial flickering lights as the artist had begun, there hadn’t been a single other incident during that session or the next two.

Instead, Kelly’s eyes had glazed over, and during the second session when the artist had started the colours and shading, she had actually fallen asleep. In spite of the way her thigh had felt as though it had been attacked by a horde of bees, she had practically been high, every muscle in her body relaxed, her mind wonderfully fuzzy and the storm inside her calm. It had lasted for about three blissful days after each session.

Her energy—no,
magic
—wasn’t calm now. It raged within and around her, but she didn’t have to futilely hold it in the way she did in her apartment, at her myriad jobs, when walking down the street or shopping for clothes or groceries.

“I’m going to give you the whole world,” David promised. He kissed the fairy’s body then stroked it with his palm, moaning as he lapped at the juices dripping from her. His wolfish teeth scraped against her mound before he looked up at her and sucked her small, throbbing clit into his mouth.

She cried out at the sky when one of his teeth caught against it.

He wasn’t finished with her yet. David pulled her down until he lay on the ground with her over him. The head of his cock pressed bluntly against her entrance. He was hot everywhere she touched, his muscles alarmingly firm, and she ran her hands over as much of him as she could reach. David laughed as she bit his shoulder, his neck, his jaw. She wanted more. She wanted closer. She wanted wilder.

The cold wind buffeted them from side to side, forcing them to tighten their grip on each other. Icy fingers pulled at her professional bun and tugged until pins flew in every direction and her long, amber-rich hair tumbled loose. It whipped around them like the tails of a soft flogger, twining around his fingers and her arms and curling around the curves of her breasts and hips.