Jacks, Marcy - Eli's Reluctant Mate [DeWitt's Pack 5] (Siren Publishing Everlasting Classic ManLove) (3 page)

He’d hoped Lloyd would be a good boy and just die or something,  but that was the problem with killing other werewolves. A hit like  that, that would’ve taken out a human without a problem, would just  tickle a were, even young ones like these two.

Lloyd was thrown off his feet though, and Eli transformed, letting  the change come over him, so fast, faster than he’d ever been able to  do it. His clothes shredded even.

He jumped on top of his prey. Lloyd brought his arm up to defend his face against Eli’s jaws, but that was a mistake, and he screamed as  Eli bit down and pierced the flesh, finding the hard bone and crunching onto that, too.

Kill you. I’m gonna kill the both of you
.

Another wolf smacked into him, throwing him off of Lloyd’s

struggling body.

Eli still managed to take a long strip of skin away with him, and  Lloyd shrieked like a girl.

That only seemed to spur on the friend all the more into avenging  his injured companion, and he and  Eli rolled, paws and legs kicking,  claws trying to dig under the mass of fur that each had to slice skin,  teeth biting.

Eventually those dagger-sharp teeth did manage to get around one  of his front paws.

Eli yelped and rolled, and somehow he managed to get a lucky  shot in on the wolf’s nose.

His attacker immediately shrieked and backed off, melting back into a man and clutching at his face.

Eli saw the damage and nearly puked again. The guy’s nose was hanging from his face by a strip of skin.

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He went over his friend Lloyd, who had gotten to his feet and was clutching at his shredded arm. The two of them were too occupied with their own wounds to bother with shooting Eli the customary angry glare that the losers sent to the victors. Together they ran off.

Eli didn’t doubt he’d be seeing them around again after they’d healed up. They’d want revenge after what he’d done to them. Their inner wolves wouldn’t allow them to rest until they had it, especially now that that one wolf had gotten a look into Chris’s eyes.

Eli fell onto his side, the ground almost shooting up and smacking him on his furry shoulder. He released a wolf grunt, wondering why everything was becoming all swirly again when he’d puked up all that alcohol.

Had that little bastard gotten him, and Eli had been too hyped up

on adrenaline to notice?

Shit, wouldn’t that just suck. His brother murdered and he hadn’t even gotten the chance to kill the guy who did it, and now he was going to lie here like roadkill and die, right after finding his mate.

Swell
.

He let his body shift back into normal, forcing the change and shift into his bones until the rest started to handle itself. If he was

going to die here, he was going to do it as a man. He didn’t want  some animal control shit coming to pick up his wolf  corpse and  throwing his body into a furnace.

Tunnel vision came onto him, and he was pleased to see his  bleeding paw shed its thin, short hair and turn back into a bleeding  human arm, but right before the black completely took over his  vision, a pair of sneakered feet, crunching on the rocks and dirt on the  pavement, came into his line of sight.

* * * *

Chris ran when that guy trying to take his pants off finally jumped off of him and transformed―transformed!―into an enormous wolf,

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and then started attacking that other huge wolf that was ripping the  living hell out of their other attacker. Chris didn’t catch sight of that  man, the big, handsome, if extremely drunk man  who he’d been  trying to help get home.

He couldn’t just run down the street, though. What he saw, people  changing into animals, was the most amazing, most frightening thing,  he’d ever seen.

Chris ran to the nearest set of shrubs he could find and got behind

them.

It was like watching a dog fight, and Chris had seen YouTube videos on animal sites for preventing abuse, so he knew what it looked like.

For a few seconds, it was hard for him to tell the difference

between the two gray wolves rolling around, biting and clawing and  snarling at each other, until the one wolf nearly had his nose chopped  off and turned back into that fucking prick who had been pawing at  Chris.

He couldn’t help but watch as the guy handled his severely bleeding face and think, Good. Chris had zero sympathy for the guy.

He and the other man, whom Chris could only assume was also a werewolf, ran off together after having their asses handed to them.  Chris was amazed they could walk at all. The blood loss alone should have been enough to put them down.

Then the only wolf left behind just keeled over. Chris worried that he’d died until he saw the hair slowly shed away, leaving only pink human skin behind, and that man, the one Chris had been trying to help, appeared in the wolf’s place.

He got out from his hiding place to go and make sure he was okay.

He definitely wasn’t. The man’s eyes were bleary and barely open, and he groaned in what was definite pain and confusion. There was a long slash mark that bled freely down his face. It began at the right side of his forehead before ending on his left cheek. There were

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also several huge puncture marks along his arm, and they were  bleeding even more than that.

Chris couldn’t leave him here. It may or may not have been  intended, but this man had saved Chris from rape at the least and

death at worst.

He lifted his T-shirt off of his shoulders and wrapped the thin material around the man’s arms. Hopefully that would stanch the blood flow. There wasn’t much he could do about his face, not until

Chris took him back to his room.

Somehow he doubted that there were hospitals for people like this, and he put his hands under the man’s armpits, and using all of his strength, Chris hauled him to his feet.

“Don’t die on me.”

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Chapter Three

Getting that man back to the motel room Chris had rented had been absolute hell. If Chris thought the guy weighed a lot back when he was still carrying himself―barely―on his own two feet, it was nothing compared to how heavy he was when completely unconscious.

That, and it was the middle of the day, and Chris didn’t want anyone to catch him dragging a naked man around. The locals probably wouldn’t look too kindly on that.

He had to drag this guy through the bushes and trees, keeping off the roads and any trail that looked like a person might walk on.

He was sweating clear through his clothes by the time he returned to the motel. He already had his key, and the parking lot wasn’t exactly a ghost town, but there was only one other truck there apart from his own shitty vehicle. He had to risk it.

Chris wiped his brow free of the building moisture, bent over to grab his heavy load, and dragged him across the lot as quickly as he could.

Please don’t let anyone see me. Please don’t let anyone see me
.

He had his key out, in the lock, struggled with it for a few too many seconds that nearly gave him a heart attack, and then was finally inside.

He dropped his two-hundred-pound cargo with a loud bang against the carpet, and Chris was too busy wheezing for breath to do anything about it as he slid down the door. He wasn’t much sure he cared at this point either.

No. He did care. Otherwise he wouldn’t have taken a complete

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stranger with abnormal powers back to his motel room. The safest  thing would have been to have left the guy on the side of the road.

The trickle of blood pooling on his carpet, and Chris’s bloody  neck and shoulder from where the guy’s cut-up face had rested, made  him ashamed for even thinking such things.

First things first if Chris was going to have the energy to nurse  this guy back to health.

He ran into the tiny adjoining bathroom, grabbed one of the  stained towels, wet it, and started scrubbing his neck and shoulders,  removing the blood. The cold water felt so good on his hot skin that  he decided fuck it and turned on the cold water tap from the shower  and got under the icy spray, not bothering  with taking off his pants  and barely taking the time to kick off his shoes.

He only allowed himself ten seconds in there, if that, letting the  water rush over him, cooling off his body, and rinsing out his mouth.  At least now he wouldn’t pass out from heat exhaustion.

He jumped out, dried off as best he could, and then went to see to  his patient.

Christ, this guy had seen better days, and he was going to have a  couple of nasty-ass scars after all his wounds healed several months  down the line.

He found the  first aid kit, took the blankets and sheets off the bed,

and heaved the guy onto the mattress.

Despite his injuries, his breathing and heartbeat were still strong.  He thought once more about calling an ambulance but again pushed  the thought away.

He owed this guy his life. Chris doubted he would want to go to a  hospital, considering what he was.

Chris tended to the wounds and stitched up his arm. For the face,  he didn’t think the slash there was deep enough to warrant stitches, so  he just cleaned it out with some alcohol. Then he applied more  bandages and creams and decided that would be that.

Chris sat back in the chair he’d pulled up, exhausted and hot

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again. He heaved a sigh at the work it took him more than an hour to

accomplish, and then he ran his hands through his hair.

God, he was tired.

The bed was out of the question, so it was better to just sleep where he was. Not that he had much of a choice in the matter of

where he slept. His eyelids were as heavy as though there were rocks

tied to them, and they just kept right on falling shut.

Before he drifted off, it occurred to him that this man was a real,

live werewolf. Or maybe he was a shapeshifter. Didn’t werewolves  only transform under a full moon? Whatever. He definitely wasn’t  normal.

Dean had said  he was going to be in this area, right before Chris lost contact with him forever. Dean always had been into dangerous things since their parents and sister had been killed by those wild animals. Maybe this man might be able to help Chris in finding out what happened to him.

* * * *

Eli had no idea how long he’d been out for, but he did know that he had a killer headache. He brought his hand up to his head, hoping to dull the pounding, and then he noticed the wrap around his arm as well as the pulling sensation on his skin beneath.

What the hell?

There was also a bandage on his face. He could feel it there and even see bits of the white stuff at the very corners of his vision if he looked down enough.

Chris, his mate, was sleeping in the most ugly-looking  brown chair Eli had ever seen. His neck looked like it was in a painful angle, but his chest was rising and falling in that hypnotic way that could only mean he was just resting.

This place he was in, Eli looked around, definitely a motel room.  And since this highway town was so small, there was only one motel

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this could possibly be.

Chris had brought him here and tended to his wounds.

Still, that pulling feeling was getting on his nerves. Eli unwrapped  the bandage from around his arms and found the culprit. Stitches.

Well, fuck. The good news? He’d been passed out when they were  being administered, otherwise he would have flipped out at the sight  of the needle.

The bad news? He now had stitches he needed to try and pull out.

He got to working on them. He was naked on top of the bed.  There were no blankets, or even sheets covering him, which, considering the heat, had probably been a good thing. Had Chris been looking at him while he’d been out of it?

Eli looked over at the sleeping man, and then down at the  stitches he was doing his best to tear apart. Maybe he hadn’t been looking.  This work looked a little too well done for Chris to have been

distracted by anything else.

He picked at the thread with his fingernails and then with his  teeth. They weren’t the kind of stitches that a normal doctor or nurse  would apply. This looked like the kind of thread someone would use  if they were sewing a hole in a pair of jeans. Eli knew the difference  because the pack’s wise woman, Old Maggie, was always on hand  with some  good quality stitching. Both for the flesh and for any  ripped up clothes that inevitably occurred in a pack of werewolves.

Finally he got the stitches out. His wound had already closed,  leaving a pink line with those tiny pinprick holes. Even that sort of  healing was a little bit too fast. Maybe he should be a little more  grateful for the stitching.