Laura's Wolf (Werewolf Marines) (27 page)

“Under the uniform, you’re still flesh and blood.” Laura slipped her fingers under the collar of his shirt to caress the warm flesh beneath. “You know, the human body is sixty percent water.”

Roy laughed. “Today I’m only fifty-eight percent.”

“And I still respect you.”

Roy determinedly changed the subject. “So if you and I have the pack sense between us, you don’t need Gregor, right?”

“I’m sure I don’t. And I assume you don’t need DJ.”

He frowned, the worried creases reappearing in his forehead. “He might need me, though. And I can’t leave you alone, and I can’t drive. But now that we know it was Gregor who was after you all along, I’m not so worried about the lab. I’ll call DJ’s family and cross my fingers their phone isn’t tapped.”

“I hate to tell you this, but my phone’s in my purse, which is in my car. Which is parked in Gregor’s driveway.”

Roy gave a frustrated sigh. “And there’s no landline here, huh? All right. Here’s the plan. Once you’re up to a hike, we’ll walk to the nearest pay phone or person with a phone and call DJ’s family. Hopefully, they know where he is. If they do, I’ll hit him up to help me take care of the Gregor situation—oh, and get your car back,” he added, as an afterthought.

“I appreciate it. I’m attached to that car.” Laura pointed out the window, toward the dirt road. “The nearest neighbor is three miles away, a guy named Jim Sullivan. He knows Dad. I’m sure he’d let you use his phone.”

“Or let you use the phone on my behalf,” Roy said glumly. “I haven’t tried phones yet, but the odds of me having problems with them are probably pretty high.”

“Maybe not.” As soon as he mentioned the phone, scattered pieces of information assembled themselves in Laura’s mind, like colored dots coming together to make a picture. “Roy, you might not have any problems with anything any more. If you don’t have a pack, you get so lonely you can’t stand it. But the other thing that happens is that your powers go out of control. And now you have a pack.”

“But I don’t have a power. I mean, other than turning into a wolf.”

“You do!” Laura said excitedly. “You can smell me, right? I mean—”

“I know what you mean,” Roy said, smiling. “You smell like lemon meringue pie.”

“Seriously?” Laura asked, momentarily distracted. “My scent name would be
Lemon Meringue Pie
?”

“I’ll call you Lemon Meringue for short.” A playful gleam brightened his gray eyes.

“Isn’t there some more dignified way to describe it?”

Roy shook his head. “Nope. You’re Lemon Meringue. Just be glad you smell like something nice. Gregor smelled like a stepped-on ant hill. Imagine if I had to name you Squashed Ant.”

Laura dragged her mind away from that appalling prospect. “Anyway, Roy, here’s the thing: I can’t smell you now. That is, this close, you smell good. Clean. But when I was a wolf, you had a completely different scent.”

“Did you like it?”

“I did,” replied Laura, secretly amused that Roy cared what she thought about his scent, given that she could only detect it as a wolf. “It’s very masculine: charcoal and black leather and bittersweet chocolate.”

“Black Leather is cooler than Guinness,” Roy said hopefully. “Even Charcoal is cooler. Could you—”

“Nope,” Laura said with some satisfaction. “First name sticks, Guinness. But Roy, I think your power is enhanced senses. Without a pack, you sense things so intensely that it hurts. Everything you can perceive as a wolf, you can still perceive as a man, can’t you?”

“But I thought all werewolves…” Roy began, then trailed off. “Can you hear my heartbeat?”

“Your
heartbeat
?” Laura asked incredulously. “I couldn’t even do that as a wolf. Can you hear mine now?”

“If I concentrate. My vision’s sharper, too. And I can see in the dark. And—” Roy’s gaze moved from Laura to the lamp by the bedside table.

All his muscles tensed against her body, then he drew in a deep breath. Before she could stop him, he reached out and clicked it on.

Laura felt him involuntarily jerk away. He closed his eyes tight, then covered them with his hand. Her heart sank, though undoubtedly not as much as Roy’s did. Then she realized that he’d flinched and covered his eyes, but no more than that.

“What’s it like?” she asked.

His jaw clenched tight, Roy took his hand away and opened his eyes a crack. Then, turning so he wasn’t looking directly at the light, he managed to open them all the way. “It hurts my eyes and it’s giving me a headache. It’s not as bad as before, though.”

It clearly wasn’t as bad as when he’d collapsed to the kitchen floor. But she could see from his expression that “not as bad” covered a whole lot of painful ground. He’d said, “It’s not that bad” when he’d been shot, too.

On impulse, she touched the pack sense. This time she could feel something wrong with Roy. It was as if he was free-falling, desperately grasping at something that wasn’t there. She reached out for him through the pack sense, but instinctively knew that she needed something more.

She took his hand. With the skin-to-skin contact, she felt another, smaller
click.

Roy’s body jerked. “What was that?”

“I don’t know. Hang on.”

She could reach him now in the pack sense, steadying him, bracing him with her own strength. If he was metaphorically tumbling through the air, she couldn’t set him on solid ground. But she could catch his hands and turn his fall into a controlled skydive.

He gave a deep sigh of relief. “That’s better.”

“It doesn’t hurt?” Laura asked hopefully.

“It hurts a lot less. It still doesn’t feel good. But I can take it now.” He turned back and gave the lamp a good long stare with his eyes wide open, no doubt to prove to himself that he could, before he turned it off. Then he rubbed his forehead, wincing.

Laura came near the verge of tears. “I thought all you needed was the pack sense. I was so sure.”

“Don’t feel bad, Laura.” Roy ruffled her hair. “Honestly, this is better than I expected. I bet I could use the phone if you held my hand.”

“But it would still hurt.”

He shrugged. “You can’t take the day off in a war zone just because you haven’t slept in a couple days and you haven’t had a chance to eat and you have a headache from the sun. I’m used to not feeling great when I do stuff. The important thing is that I can do it at all.”

“Really, you’re fine with ‘so long as I hold your hand, the lights only hurt
some
?’” If Laura had been in that position, she’d have been miserable.

“Yes.” Roy sounded completely sincere. “Obviously, I’d rather be cured. But it’s a huge improvement. Though I do realize it’s a burden on you. I don’t want you to feel like you have to stick around to be my—my voltage regulator.”

“I don’t want you to feel like you have to stick around so I don’t go crazy from loneliness and have to crawl back to Gregor,” Laura said promptly.

She’d only meant that to imply that helping Roy wasn’t a burden, but he reacted as if he’d been electrified. He grabbed both her hands and stared into her eyes so intensely that Laura instinctively rocked back. “You’ll never have to do that. Never. If it doesn’t work out between us, we’ll find you some other pack. Besides, didn’t you want me to kill Gregor? I swear, I will.”

“None of my other boyfriends ever promised to kill someone for me,” Laura said, smiling. “You’re the sweetest.”

As she’d hoped, Roy chuckled and relaxed. “Right. I get you. We both need each other. Which reminds me—if my power is enhanced senses, what’s yours?”

“The power to help you with your power?” Laura suggested doubtfully. “It would be romantic. I guess.”

“It would suck and you know it. You should get something badass.”

Laura laughed. “Okay, yeah, I hope that’s only the pack sense. I
would
like something else. Maybe invisibility.”

“That would be cool. Mine’s awfully… low-key. Even apart from that it doesn’t work right.”

“Think of it this way, Roy,” Laura suggested. “You’ve got the same power as Wolverine.”

To Laura’s amusement, he looked genuinely consoled by that idea. “Hey, that’s true. I have super-healing, too. And claws. Sometimes.” He glanced down at her toast, untouched except for the one bite. “Want me to make you something better to eat? I only brought the toast because I thought your stomach might be upset.”

“Sure, thanks. Let me just take a shower.”

Cautiously, Laura stood up. A twinge of pain shot through her ankle, but she could walk on it. And she felt a lot stronger than when she’d first woken up.

I’ve got super-healing too,
she thought.

It was still hard to believe that she’d changed so profoundly. It wasn’t only becoming a werewolf. Everything had changed. Her entire life was rearranging itself around Roy, as his was around her. Everything she did now would affect him, as everything he did would affect her. It felt like skydiving together, the primal terror of falling transmuted into excitement and joy.

In the shower, she realized that she could have asked him to join her, even though he’d obviously had his already. Their whole relationship was so new, it hadn’t occurred to her that she could do such a thing. She looked down at her belly, which had never in her life been perfectly flat, at her plump hips dimpled with cellulite, at everything she’d ever seen as a flaw that would turn men off, which was pretty much everything, and knew that if she’d invited Roy in, they’d never have gotten out without making love.

They could do that now. It was only a matter of time. She’d get to see his body by the light of day or candles, and get a look at the scar on his hip that she’d forgotten to check out before. She could learn the story behind it, since he surely wouldn’t have brought it up if it was a sensitive topic.

As she rinsed her hair, she felt for Roy with the pack sense. He was in the kitchen, which she already knew, but she liked being able to feel where he was. When she pulled back from the intricate depths of his self, she got a glimpse what he was feeling, floating and delicate as a soap bubble. She caught some worry, some melancholy, and some regret. But what she felt most strongly was his happiness, deep and resonant as a tolling bell.

Laura got dressed and joined Roy at the dining room table. He’d made hash browns with onions and bell peppers, and pan-fried small venison steaks.

“Very impressive. Thanks.”

He slid a steak on to her plate. “I thought it’d be appropriate, since you’re a wolf now. You know, the two of us could pull down a deer.”

Laura cut into her steak: perfect medium-rare. “I assume the one of you could do that. Your wolf is nearly as big as a deer.”

“You’d like hunting as a wolf. I bet it’s even more of a thrill if you do it as a pack.” His gray eyes had the same cool, predatory light she’d seen in his wolf’s ice-blue eyes.

The wolf in him was much closer to the surface than it was in her, Laura realized. Maybe that was why he’d become a werewolf so quickly, while she’d struggled for hours. Roy had obviously spent a long, long time in that clear bright place where ruthlessness and intent and action became a single, shining thing.

“I’ll hunt with you,” she promised. “Not today, I don’t think I’m up for it. But I at least want to walk around as a wolf, even if I don’t run as one. I didn’t get to do anything at all yesterday.”

“Yeah, it was the same for me when I changed. Second time was much more fun.”

Laura ate ravenously, polishing off three steaks to Roy’s two. She hesitated, self-conscious, before taking the third, then decided that becoming a werewolf clearly expended a lot of energy and anyway Roy liked her body exactly as it was. He seemed to like it when she enjoyed his cooking, too, and eating lots of it was the highest praise.

When she was done, Roy stacked the plates and got up to take them to the sink. As he took a step toward the kitchen, Laura caught sight of a shard of muddy glass that he must have tracked in earlier. It lay on the floor glinting and sharp, in exactly the right place for him to step on with his bare foot.

“Stop,”
Laura exclaimed.

As she said it, she knew that she had spoken with more than mere words. A sensation of power rippled though her. Roy stopped as if he was caught in a freeze-frame, his foot poised an inch above the shard.

Laura yanked him away. She felt his muscles flex under her hands as he abruptly regained the ability to move. His foot came down awkwardly and he stumbled, off-balance. Laura rescued the dishes in the nick of time.

“What was—” Roy began, then spun to face her. “That’s your power!”

Now that she’d done it once, Laura instinctively knew how it worked: a word, and an intense focus on making the person do what she said.

She had a power. And a deceptively strong one, at that. She’d only been able to make Roy freeze for a second or two. But if she’d been able to make Gregor obey her for a single second, no one would have died at the bank.

You don’t know what you’ve done, Gregor,
she thought.
You’ve given me the power to set your pack free.

“Do it again,” said Roy eagerly.

“Do your absolute best to hold still.” Laura concentrated. “
Clap.”

She had to laugh at his expression, part baffled and part delighted, as his palms flew together as if they were magnetized.

“That’s badass. I’m jealous. And congratulations. I can think of all sorts of things you could do with that. Like
drop
or
run
or…” He eyed her with an expression that again made her think of his wolf. “I wonder what would happen if you said,
die
.”

“I don’t know.” Laura found herself fishing for reasons why that wouldn’t work. It would enable her to simply walk into Gregor’s lair and kill him. But the idea of being able to order someone to die unnerved her. “‘Clap’ and ‘stop’ are actions you could choose to do. You can’t choose to die. I bet it wouldn’t work.”

“Let’s test it,” Roy suggested. As Laura’s jaw started to drop, he went on, “With something harmless, obviously.” He went to the living room and lay down on the sofa. “Order me to sleep. That’s not something I can decide to do.”