Human Shifter (Book Three: A Werewolf BBW Shifter Romance) (3 page)

"The werewitch is there?" Julia asked, a note of desperation stretching out of her stomach and into her voice. "Where?"

"Where she's lived for ages, before even this old one was a pup," Mara said, tensing her muscles as she looked at Dee.

"Which old one?" Dee said, the white lines of her eyebrows lifting only slightly. "You mean your pack elder? I'd be careful speaking so carelessly if I were you."

"Is this your pack?" Mara's mouth twisted upward into a barely-veiled sneer. "I thought you were all just a bunch of wolves thrown together."

"Wolves thrown together can form the strongest pack," Dee said.

"Oh? How does that work?" Mara said, cocking her head as though she was speaking to a pup.

"Have you never seen a beaver's dam?" Granny Dee said. "Or a nest in the hook of a pine branch? The twigs that snag in each other's bends, those are the ones which truly hold fast."

"I wasn't informed that we were in the business of building
nests
," Mara said, obvious contempt dribbling from her words. "I was part of a pack that ran smooth as metal. We
fight
. We
win
."

"That is a sweet sentiment, my dear," Dee said. "Except the last time, you lost."

Mara winced, and underneath her cool exterior Julia saw a flash of pain, true pain. Was she so committed to her previous pack? They had treated Julia like an object. She couldn't imagine that Mara had been treated much differently.

"I did not lose," Mara said, but her voice had lost much of its sharp edge. "Trax lost."

"True," Dee said. "A pack is only as strong as its leader."

"We say that the pack is as strong as its weakest pup."

"That seems to place a lot of pressure on a pup," Dee said. She glossed over Mara's use of the word
we
, but Julia saw her eyes track Mara's lips when she spoke about her previous pack. Mara noticed it too.

"Trax's pack was all strong," Mara said.

"Because you abandon wolves when they are weak. Or is that not what happened with Kyle when he was young?"

"There's no other way!" Mara said. Her eyes darted from Julia to Dee, as though she was a cornered animal seeking an exit. "If you're weak, you risk the pack."

"Those who would turn their back on a helpless pup—"

"Don't quote scripture to me, old woman!" Mara cried. Her hands trembled in fists at her sides. "I'm sure that's what your pack uses to justify creeping around like mole rats under the earth, hoping to stay out of sight. Weakness, not strength. Hiding, not fighting."

"It isn't my pack," Dee said quietly. "It's Damien's."

"A blind wolf! Ha!"

Julia seethed. How dare Mara speak about Damien like that? He had saved her from Trax's brutal pack. He had spared her life where anyone would have simply killed her.

"And you," Dee said, continuing as though Mara had not spoken, "you don't understand strength."

"If you weren't so old, I would consider that a challenge."

"Find me in wolf form sometime and we'll see how much of a challenge you can stand," Dee said. She took Julia's hand. "Let's go, dear."

No!
Julia wanted to cry out.
What about the werewitch?
She needed to know more about where the woman lived, how Julia could reach her. But Dee was already moving her away to the door and Julia could tell that one moment more would see the two of them at each other's throats.

"I guess as old as you are, you've forgotten how to fight," Mara said, taunting her.

Dee turned around at the doorway, her eyes glowing white around the edges of her irises.

"Better than forgetting what it is I'm supposed to be fighting for."

CHAPTER FOUR

Damien

Damien walked down the back porch of Julia's house, across the meadow, and to the edge of the forest where the soft grasses underfoot turned into crackling pine needles. He stepped carefully. Normally in human form he carried a wood cane to guide him, but he would have no use for the cane where he was going. He wore few clothes, for the same reason.

He stopped at the edge of the woods, just inside the treeline. Stretching his arms over his head, he breathed in. The pine smell was overwhelming in the air, and the birds calling back and forth seemed the only creatures alive in the forest. Damien pulled off his clothes easily and began to shift.

Although sometimes he was forced to shift rapidly, as for a fight, Damien preferred to take his time changing from human form into wolf form. The stretching of skin, the cracking of the joints—these changes made him feel alive, and he loved to pay close attention to the shift. First the bones in the ribs, turning and knitting themselves more tightly. The muscles of the legs stretched here, and here they contracted, and the joint of the knee switched and bent. He let his wolf form take over slowly, slowly. The fur, sprouting between his fingers. His fingers shrinking, his nails becoming claws. Then his snout pushed out his face, and this was the part where he felt most alive.

He breathed in, fully a wolf now, and the world came into focus around him.

The resin from the pines differed from one tree to the next, so strongly that he could pick out the trunks of each one around him. The earth smelled of wildness and animals, and here was the trace of a fox who'd been chasing rabbits in the meadow. Underground he could smell the rabbits' den, the tunnels stretching out beneath the forest floor. Nearby a deer must have died; the scent of rot was carried on the wind. And farther on, faintly, his pack—he could make out the distinct scents of each of them, their trails from days previous and also from that day. He would track them. He would follow them.

He walked to find Jordan's trail and held to it fast. Once he was certain he knew the way, he began to trot, then to run. The inner parts of this forest were familiar to him by now, although he always feared a downed tree when he was running—the scent of the broken wood might not reach him before he met the obstacle. As he ran through the forest, he picked up speed and certainty. The wind shifted and he was able now to make out all of the things in his path before he came to them. And the scent of the wolves grew stronger and stronger, until they were just over a hillside. At the crest of it he howled in joy and heard the rest of his pack call back. All except Mara. Her scent was strange to him, new and not yet so familiar that he could track her without effort. As he came into sight of the rest of the pack, he could hear Jordan bark in recognition. They were running, they kept running, and Damien joined them, falling into easy step with Jordan.

Now they ran at full speed, indulging their need for exercise and loving the brisk air on their backs. Kyle and Katherine tousled, losing ground and being left behind. Damien smiled inwardly—the two were inseparable, and he was glad that Katherine had been able to find someone else after he'd found his Julia. Then Jordan nipped at his ear and he nipped back, playfully tumbling over each other now that they had reached the edge of their territory.

"Farther?" Mara stopped and looked back at them expectantly.

Damien shook his head just before hearing Jordan prepare to leap, claws digging into the ground. He rolled down and out of the way, and Jordan tumbled over him and into Mara, knocking her to the ground. She yipped at him and leapt over his back as Damien feinted a snap towards his haunches. Kyle and Katherine bounded into the clearing, and soon they were all five of them at play like a litter of pups, bowling into each other in rowdy leaps and nipping each other's heels and tails.

It was nice to see his pack so active, having fun for once. They'd traveled for almost two years before finding this place, and now that they were settling in, they were able to relax their guard just a bit. Kyle and Katherine were still building out their cabin in the woods behind Julia's house, and Jordan was almost done with his shelter, a small den that was built into the crack between two boulders and topped with a moss roof. Mara—well, Damien didn't know yet what to do with Mara.

During play, she seemed at times to be too invested in fighting. One of her snaps came so close to Damien's ear that he could feel the air moving his fur as her teeth came together next to his head. When she shoved against him, she shoved
hard,
as though she were trying to push him over. Once when that happened, Damien heard her weight shift just beforehand and was able to roll back on his haunches. Mara fell forward past him, her claws scrabbling at the pine needles, trying to find purchase. She snarled then, a real snarl.

"Easy there." Damien thought it wise to break up the play fight before anything too serious happened. Mara had probably gotten carried away, that's all. Jordan noticed immediately, but Kyle and Katherine were too busy romping flirtatiously to care.

"You coming?" Jordan said, nudging Damien's shoulder back toward the house. Damien paused, trying to decide whether or not to confront Mara, then decided against it. Best to talk with her privately, save her from some embarrassment in front of the other members of the pack. Her scent was aggressive, but that might just be the play fighting that brought it out in her.

"Yeah," Damien said, and followed behind Jordan. He could almost feel Mara's gaze on him as they left the clearing and bounded away toward Julia's house.

Jordan said nothing as they returned through the woods, but when they shifted back at the edge of the meadow Damien finally spoke.

"You saw Mara?" he said, pulling on his clothes. "How she acted?"

"I told you, the girl has some things to work through," Jordan said. "She's not a danger yet, but she could be. You ought to put some sense into her before anything happens."

"We'll see," Damien said. Jordan was right about one thing: Mara would be dangerous if she decided to leave. Trax hadn't told anyone else in his pack except the scouts that Julia was a purebred shifter. The rest of the scouts were dead, but Mara could easily get the attention of her former pack. And after finally being relieved that he could settle down, attention was the last thing Damien wanted.

Jordan went off to work on his shelter, and Damien strode back through the meadow. Julia was sitting on the steps of the back porch, and as Damien came nearer he could sense a sadness in her that he didn't recognize from their previous encounters. He'd been sensing her emotions more strongly, lately, and with more nuance. Or perhaps it was that her emotions themselves were changing, becoming subtler, more pockmarked in her age. The thoughts that the feelings evoked became clearer. Enunciated, almost. Sometimes he swore that he could see the words exploding behind his eyelids in red and orange, like the way it used to look when you lay on the ground, eyes closed, the bright sunlight waving its way through the mottled and blowsy tree. The tree bending and shifting, gridding shadows on the backs of his eyes.

The words came then in a flash—

... abandoned me. He abandoned ...

"Hello, beautiful," Damien said. The words dissipated into dull embers under his eyelids. Julia's shields were up now that her attention was on him. Once she knew that he was feeling her thoughts, she immediately tamped them down. It saddened Damien to know that she could not trust him with her thoughts. He wanted to touch her shoulders with his hands, run them down her arms and over the inside softness of her elbow, over the curve of her waist, her hips. He wanted to whisper that he would never abandon her, that he was sorry for anything she felt.

"Hello," Julia said. The cheerfulness in her voice sounded forced.

... abandoned ...

Damien bent, kissing Julia on the forehead before sitting down beside her, his hands clasped between his legs. When he was with Julia, he felt almost as though he could see; that was how well he knew her body, could sense her movements, the whispers of her body's angles as she changed poses. The very air around her seemed to him to vibrate and pulse toward him.

He had not told her how deeply he had begun to sense her emotions. He did not tell her that sometimes he could hear the thoughts that she was thinking before she opened her mouth to say them. There had been moments—not many, but they worried him—when he had sensed things too sunken for even Julia to know.

A week after the bonding ceremony, Julia had been raving about Granny Dee's pies to Damien, whose stomach was growling just at the description of the crust. She'd been talking about a certain fruit pie.

"And there was one more ingredient. I know this," Julia said, her hands clasped in loose fists against her temples, knocking against them slightly, the pensive thump of skin on skin. "We had a tree in the backyard—"

... loquat ...

The word arose in his mind, the letters in red, the voice in her voice. He spoke without thinking.

"Loquat."

"Yes, that's it!" Julia said. "Loquats! And it was tart and sweet at the same time, but not too sweet, not, you know,
cloying
... "

She went on, but Damien's mind paused at what had just happened. He had heard her thoughts. The word
loquat
meant nothing to him—he'd never heard of the fruit—and it shocked him to have in front of him the proof that he could, to put it plainly,
read her mind
.

He didn't tell her. From then on, whenever he heard her thoughts, he half-blocked them out. Not entirely, just turning down the stereo a bit so that he couldn't hear the lyrics exactly right. But sometimes, as when they argued over some small point, Damien found it useful to listen in on the half-formed phrases which floated into his senses. At times the words jumbled together and the sentences mixed themselves up, and he knew to take her hands and kiss her on the cheek, and let her rest against his chest for a while, until the whipping waves of her thoughts settled into an easy flow. Other times her thoughts would come out clearly, and at those times it was all he could do not to respond.

... it isn't fair ...

The first time he had met Julia, he had heard her thoughts, but thinking back on it, he might have just sensed her emotions by nose—stress put out a powerful scent, and so did attraction. But the words, he
swore
he had heard actual words. He could not trust his memory until he began to hear the words again and not just hear them, but
see
them.