Half Wolf (3 page)

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

K
aitlin 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.”

The hairs at the nape of Kaitlin’s neck stood up. Chills iced her spinal column as phrases came back with a startling clarity—bits of words the Michael in the nightmare had used.

It’s the only way you’ll make it.
And
Remember that I gave you a choice.

She did not want to ask the next question and knew Rena anticipated it, because the scent of Rena’s excitement wafted in the air.

“Are you hinting that I’ve become one of you?”

Glancing sideways to view her image in the wall mirror, Kaitlin found a pasty-complexioned, tangle-haired version of herself. But it was Kaitlin Davies who looked back.

Rena smoothed the creases from her jeans with both hands. “Not quite one of us. I suppose you’ll be accepted by the pack if he wants you to be, though, since...”

“Since what?” Even short pauses in Rena’s partial explanations were intolerable.

“Well, it’s not my place to assume anything or tell you more. You’re Michael’s pet project, so he will have to explain.”

“What is he, the king?”

“Alpha,” Rena corrected, walking to the door. She opened it before anyone had knocked, and then stepped back to make way for the man who suddenly filled the doorway.

Chapter 4

M
ichael stopped on the threshold of Kaitlin’s apartment. He looked first to Rena, who nodded her head before slipping past him. Damn it. Rena knew about Kaitlin, which meant they probably all knew.

His gaze slipped to the waif on the bed who had compressed herself into a tight ball near the headboard. The auburn-haired beauty was staring at him with a wide-eyed, stunned expression, as though she’d seen a ghost.

Because the bandage he’d taped to her neck had been removed, he knew what was coming. Hard questions and demands for explanations would be the next things out of her mouth.

Really, this nursemaid routine didn’t suit him. He was better at chasing bad guys. And Rena had no right to jump on his parade.

“I see you’ve met Rena.”

He leaned against the doorjamb, not quite sure what to say now that Kaitlin was fully awake. She was staring. Her eyes were clear and focused.

“I didn’t tell the others about you because I wanted to make sure you were all right first. Otherwise...”

She finished the remark for him in a voice that was stronger than he would have expected. “Otherwise there might not be any me to tell them about, since I’d be dead.”

He could sense the fear radiating off her in waves similar to the rippling heat of a desert mirage. Only colder. He felt that fear from six feet away. Yet Kaitlin was showing an inkling of the spirit that had attracted him to her in the first place. Even half-dead, he’d sensed she was a fighter.

He couldn’t look away from the tight, pale face that wasn’t quite like any other human’s face he’d seen. Light, this time from streaks of morning sun, seemed to caress Kaitlin’s delicate contours. He’d noticed those contours from the start, too. What he’d failed to remember correctly was the impact she had on him when those big eyes of hers were open. This fragile flower took his breath away.

And if he admitted that to anyone, or took it too seriously, he would no longer resemble the wolf he’d always thought he was, and he would dishonor his fallen mother’s memory.

Humans were a fickle, dangerous species. Some were even his enemies. And here he was, protecting one from things that went bump in the night.

He observed Kaitlin steadily. “You’re pale, but looking better. Does your neck hurt very badly?”

“Bad enough,” she said.

Life pulsed beneath her skin. In this case, he could sense anger, an indication of her turnaround, and yet Kaitlin looked even more waifish than before. Already thin, she’d lost more weight in the past two days—a sign of her new, faster metabolism kicking in. If she didn’t eat something soon, her nerves would fry.

Michael lifted the paper bag in his hand and watched her glance at it. “Breakfast.”

She didn’t acknowledge that.

“Do you feel sick, Kaitlin?”

She shook her head. “I’m not sick, I’m scared. I’m not sure who you are, why you’re here or what’s going on.”

He nodded. “I do realize how difficult this must be. Let me just say that I found you in the park, injured pretty badly, and that I helped in the best way I could.”

She pointed to the bandage. “You did that?”

“Yes.”

“You brought me here?”

He nodded. “As soon as I found out who you were and where you belonged.”

Her hand went to her neck. “I can’t feel stitches.”

“You didn’t need them.”

“I didn’t go to a hospital?”

“No. No hospital.”

“Then the injury wasn’t so bad after all?”

“It could have been your death,” he said, “if untended.”

She took a moment to reply. “If you hadn’t come along with a bandage, you mean?”

Her eyes were pleading with him to lie. She wanted him to laugh and tell her this was all a big joke of the worst kind and that things would be fine now. Of course, he couldn’t say any of those things and mean them. Though she had been faced with this situation for only fifty-some hours, she would have to come to terms with what had become her new reality.

“Lucky for you, I did come along,” he said.

Kaitlin’s shaking intensified, though Michael didn’t sense shock setting in, and that was another miracle. Her fragile exterior hid a decent backbone that made her want to try to deal.

“Public places are bad for us,” he explained, driven to speech by the intensity of her gaze. “Finding out about what we are would mean the end of many of us. Humans aren’t partial to sharing their planet with those who are unlike them. Given that, I couldn’t take you to your real home, either.”

She didn’t immediately press him for more information about that. Her attention moved again to the paper bag in his hand before coming back to his face. When her eyes met his, an electrified shudder passed through him that Michael didn’t like at all.

Her bloodless lips parted. “I dreamed that I had a near-death experience. Could that be true?”

“Maybe now isn’t the time for details.”

“Because you don’t have any details?” she challenged.

“Timing is everything, Kaitlin. Those details might hinder the healing process.”

Would you want to hear how you nearly bit the big one, and that your life force was drained by a fanged parasite? Or that you now will be initiated into the moon’s cult?

He kept those things to himself.

Her gaze remained nearly as steady as his was. “Maybe you’ll tell me that I’m going to be a wolf, and that you really are one, too,” she said. “Like in my dreams, and according to Rena.”

Michael glanced to the corridor before turning back to the bed. Rena had gone, but had obviously spilled some of the dirt he had intended to hold back.

Moving slowly, he stepped inside the apartment and closed the door behind him. “If we’re to have a chat, mind if I come in?”

“I thought only vampires had to ask for permission to enter a building.”

He smiled. “I was being polite. We have no such rule governing our behavior.”

“No. I don’t suppose animals have a need for rules,” she said.

She was still staring at him, and hadn’t moved. Michael didn’t attempt another step in her direction.

“Did it really happen?” she asked. “Was I attacked?”

“Yes.”

“You helped me?”

He nodded.

“None of it was a dream?”

“Afraid not.”

She rubbed her eyes, daring to momentarily take her attention from him, and whispered, “Shit.”

“I’m sorry,” Michael said.

“For helping me?”

“For how that’s going to turn out.”

She sat up straighter, resignation in her expression. “Okay. If it wasn’t a dream, tell me about what’s going on. That’s what you meant, isn’t it, by withholding details? There’s a surprise in store?”

“Truly, now might not be the time for the tough ones.”

“Tough for me, or for you?”

“Both of us, actually,” Michael said.

She fingered her neck. “Your friend came here to tell me I’m going to become something other than human. Since she was pretty convincing, does that make me crazy if I decide to believe her?”

“Not crazy,” Michael said. “Enlightened.”

He watched Kaitlin briefly close her eyes and exhale a slow stream of the air that he had helped to preserve by giving her back her life. Thoughts of that rescue brought mixed feelings because of all the unseen consequences. Still, damn it, if he had it to do all over again, he’d have done the same thing.

“You aren’t a figment of my imagination?” She asked this seriously.

“No figment, Kaitlin.”

She seemed to consider his reply. “If the attack was real, what about the other parts of what I thought was a dream? Did we run through a park?”

“We did. Last night.”

“Naked?”

“One of us didn’t have many clothes on. Clothes get in the way of a shape-shift.”

That shut her up for a long minute. Then she said, “No dream, really? None of it?”

“I’m sorry.”

Her eyes were even wider now, and trained on him in a way that made Michael’s internal wolf whine. Kaitlin’s gray gaze was direct and accusatory. “What is an Alpha?”

Her change in direction didn’t throw him, but her use of that word did. Michael promised himself that he would be having some serious words with Rena later on.

“An Alpha is the leader of a pack,” he said.

“A pack of wolves.”

He nodded, almost able to see the wheels of Kaitlin’s mind turning. The scent of her desperation tinged the air, though she was fighting for control over her part of the conversation, knowing its importance had to override her fear levels.

“I’ve never liked big, scary animals.” She said this breathlessly. “And now I’m supposedly going to be one?” Her eyes found his. “Like you? Like what I think I saw you turn into?”

Michael’s heart picked up its pace. He had made a vow never to get this close to a human female under any circumstances and had obliterated that vow with her because...well, again, he wasn’t sure why this woman affected him so much.

“Not exactly like me,” he replied. “Though you will be something close enough.”

Her jaw tensed, sending a spiral of pain through the wound on her neck, pain that Michael also felt. He supposed he was sharing her feelings due to having placed his blood in her veins, and that blood was giving him a heads-up on a few things. But that kind of sharing deepened his determination to stay as far away from Kaitlin Davies as possible in the future, once she knew the score.

“What does
close enough
mean?” she asked.

It seemed they were going to aim for the hard ones after all. This little fireball wasn’t about to let him off the hook.

Could he blame her?

“You now have Lycan blood in your veins,” he said.

He saw that the word
Lycan
didn’t ring a bell.

“Lycans are a very old lineage of shape-shifters,” Michael said.

Her head came up.

“Lycans can’t replicate themselves exactly, unless two Lycans mate and produce pure-blooded offspring. Because you now have Lycan blood in your veins, you’ll be a special combination of wolf and human, two things that can only mix well if the recipient of the blood gift is strong enough to handle their wolf, and pays close attention to the changes.”

“Blood gift? Hell, that’s what you call it?” Her eyes had gone glassy, though they still maintained focus. “
Lycan
means
wolf
?”

“Yes.”

“If this is true, I won’t be a real wolf?”

“Half wolf,” Michael reiterated. “And half human.
Werewolf
.”

She repeated that term to herself in a whisper, as if trying it on for size, and took time to formulate her next question. “You aren’t a werewolf?”

“Lycans are Weres, yes, and yet some older Were families have traits that actually fall under the categorization of shape-shifter. When those like us change, we take on animal form. Wolf form.”

None of this appeared to deter Kaitlin from pursuing her agenda of gaining all the information she could.

“What about the monster that attacked me?” she asked.

“Vampire.”

She closed her eyes and clasped her knees tighter, as if one of those monsters had gotten into the room. Michael sensed the rise in her blood pressure. There was now a faint tinge of pink in her cheeks.

“That was real.” She hung her head. “God. True. There are such things. No joke.”

“Hard to believe, I know,” Michael said. “For me, it’s equally as hard to believe that there are regular old humans that can’t change into anything.”

He walked to the side of the bed and set the paper bag on the table beside it. Kaitlin glanced up again. Beneath that gaze he felt wrong somehow, and that neither of them deserved the repercussions of what he had set in motion. His blood had bound them together in special ways. Before too long, he would have to break some of those invisible chains he already felt linking to her.

“You chased that vampire away,” she said.

“I took care of the problem so that vampire can’t hurt others or make more mindless monsters.”

“You don’t consider yourself a monster?”

“I suppose that’s a matter of perspective. But no, I don’t.”

“Supernatural vigilante, then?” she asked.

“My pack and others like us try to keep the peace. Some of us work behind the scenes to chase the undead away from the human population because only in that way can we, as a Were species, stay safe.”

There was more to tell her. Things she needed to know—such as the fact that she had spent one entire day and night in a coma, fighting the transition from human to something else.

He could tell her that he’d never seen a human take such a short time to pass through the first phase of moving toward their half wolf status, and that she was an anomaly.

He could warn Kaitlin that possibly she would hit the next wall in the hours to come, and therefore would need him for a while more, though he dreaded that need for closeness.

He could not bring up the fact that humans, like the one she had been, had hunted and killed his mother for sport.

“Then I should be grateful you were out there.” She surprised him again with a complete change of tone. Her voice became softer now, with an almost magical ability to work its way under his tough Were skin. The prickle of anticipation Michael felt when he observed Kaitlin was always unexpected, and wholly unique.

He fended off the desire to shift right there and avoid those gray eyes, the way he had done the night before. But shifting was a private matter, and Kaitlin had already seen him do it twice.

“Thank you for whatever you did to keep me alive, Michael. I mean it.”

She was still curled up in a ball, knees drawn tight. “I didn’t want to die and prayed for intervention. So, really, you can be considered an angel. My angel.”

Michael counted the passing seconds by his own racing heartbeats, knowing that this was the moment to take his leave. He wanted to argue again that he was the furthest thing possible from an angel. He had lethal teeth, ten razor-sharp claws, and he pretty much adhered to the moon’s beck and call. What kind of angel used the moon for their higher power?

He was a tough fighter for the rights of his kind to exist in this world, and yet his reactions to Kaitlin left him feeling fuzzy and ill-defined about the whole human-versus-wolf thing. These feelings were new and unwelcome. They left him feeling vulnerable when that word had never entered his vocabulary. They made him feel guilty about breaking certain vows.