Savage Instinct (3 page)

She’d be stranded until she could walk somewhere for help. 
Her cell phone didn’t get any service this far out of range of the cell towers.

Nydia grit her teeth.  Her hands wrapped around the
steering wheel with a death grip that made her knuckles ache.  Tension
tightened her neck muscles, giving her a headache at the base of her skull that
threatened to creep up her scalp and make her whole head hurt.

She might not have taken off in such an emotional state and
risked getting into an accident if not for Richard’s sisters, Alice and Alex,
the twins.

Twins from hell.

She still couldn’t fathom what she had initially done to
those people to make them so standoffish and cruel to her.  It was her first
time meeting his parents.  When he’d said they were a little bit country, she
thought she’d understood what he was hinting at and been prepared to be on her
best behavior, her most charming.

From the moment her butt touched the couch in their living
room, Alice and Alex acted like they had a problem with her.  Richard sat next
to her, but he’d seemed distant and unwilling to hold her hand.  Hell, he’d
been unwilling to defend her from them at all, like he was afraid of losing
face, or ashamed of her—she wasn’t sure which.

Just remembering it made the angry tears well in her eyes
again.

“Crybaby,” she said to herself, hating how much she’d
allowed herself to be affected by them.  She felt like a spineless wimp.

At least she’d stood up to Richard and not been the doormat
she’d felt like all evening.

Nydia wiped at her eyes, having a hard time seeing through
them to keep an eye on the road.  When she came to the end of the long dirt
road where the paved county road took over, she didn’t bother to stop, she
simply slowed down enough to make a wide turn onto the county road and once she
felt her tires hit the gravel of the far shoulder she stepped on the
accelerator again.

Nydia misjudged her control of the car’s tires changing
from dirt to pavement.  Gravel spun out from beneath the wheels.  She could
hear the rocks ping beneath the car and felt the wheel jerk as her sedan
whipped to one side of the curve.

She overcorrected herself, swerving into the other lane
with a gut wrenching lurch.  Almost at the same moment, her headlights
illuminated a pack of wolves standing in the road.

Reflex made her body tense all over and her eyes squeezed
shut, braced for impact.  She screamed and slammed on the brakes with both
feet, feeling her car hit something so big so hard that the wheel vibrated in
her hand and a loud bang thundered through the windows.

The car jerked to a halt.

Outside, she could see the pack of wolves run into the
woods surrounding the road, disappearing out of sight.

Nausea welled in her stomach.  She clutched her gut,
breathing hard, swallowing back the bile that hovered in the back of her
throat.

Her heart pounded so hard she thought she might pass out.

She knew she’d hit a wolf, but everything had happened so
quickly, she hadn’t actually seen what she’d hit or if it was pinned under the
car and flung out somewhere on the shoulder.  The thought that she’d hurt or
killed another living creature made the sick feeling return tenfold.

Before she could decide what to do, a man stood up and
collapsed on the hood of her car.

“Oh my god!” she screamed, her hands flying up to her mouth
to contain her horror.

His gaze met hers a brief moment through the windshield and
then his knees buckled, forcing him back to the ground in front of her car.

“I’ve hit a man,” she said to herself.  She pushed the gear
stick into park and ripped her door open, running around the front of the car
to where the man lay.

She paused a brief moment, stunned to see he was buck naked
and bleeding profusely from a wound in his chest.  Recovering from her shock,
she rushed to his aid and crouched on the ground beside him to check his faint
pulse.

He was so still and pale, she’d think him dead if not for
the blood pumping sluggishly from a jagged spot just above his heart. 

“Oh my god,” she said again, panic making her thoughts
broken and frantic.  “Are you all right?  Can you talk?  Where do you hurt? 
Where’s the nearest hospital?  Should I even move you?” she stammered,
bombarding him with questions.

She dragged her phone out of her pocket, dialing 911.  When
the message for no service answered, she groaned in frustration and stuck it
back in her jeans.

Dirt, mud, and flecks of gravel and pine straw stuck to his
body everywhere he’d sweated or bled.  Without a second thought, Nydia pulled
off her tee shirt and began wiping the debris away from his chest, trying to
find the source of the blood.

Something sharp snagged her questing fingers.  She swiped
at the spot, and he jerked and coughed, making blood seep from the wound.  On
closer inspection, she could see a broken piece of metal sticking out of his
chest.

A quick glance at her bumper told her the metal hadn’t come
from her car.

She wadded up her shirt and pressed it to the wound, hoping
she didn’t make it any worse than it already was.

The man groaned.

At least he was alive and not just a smear on the pavement
beneath her car.

“Did those wolves attack you?  Where are you from?  Why
were you in the road in the middle of the night?  Where are your clothes?  Do
you realize that we could have both been killed?”

“Aiden.  My name’s Aiden Kinsey.  Just get me the fuck out
of here,” he said, gritting his teeth in pain.  He held her shirt to his chest,
and she could see the periwinkle turning dark red around the edges of his
fingers and palm as it soaked through.

Nydia pulled on his other arm, trying to lift him to no
avail.  “I need your help.  You’re too big for me to lift.”

Nodding, he gripped her hand and struggled to his feet. 
Nydia stood under his arm, supporting him as she walked him to the passenger
side of her car.  She flung the door open, and he collapsed in the seat.  Nydia
leaned over him and buckled the seatbelt, tucking the shoulder strap behind his
head so it wouldn’t irritate his injury.

Shutting the door, she ran around the car and got into her
seat, punching the car into drive.  If she’d thought her nerves were bad
before, they were practically supernova now.  Her tension was so high she
thought she might burst if anything else happened.

She whipped the car back onto the road.  The wheels
screamed on the pavement as she accelerated.

“Don’t kill us,” he muttered weakly from his seat.

“I’ll try not to.  I’ve got to get you to a hospital.”

“No!”

The way he said it startled her.  She glanced at him,
meeting his fevered green eyes and seeing worry etched across his face.  He
couldn’t be thinking clearly now, not with his injuries.

He caught her gaze and held it, riveting her mind into a
blank slate for several seconds until she managed to shake the sensation off
and regain coherent thought.  The unending adrenaline rush must be getting to
her.

“You’re hurt.  You’re not thinking right,” she said.  She
dragged herself away from the endless pool of his eyes and returned to the
road, feeling foolish for staring at him so long.

“No hospital.  It isn’t safe,” he said, his voice gravelly
and weak.

“What?”  She directed her eyes back on the road.  “Are you
crazy?”

“Someone attacked me.  They’ll be looking for me at the
hospital.”

“Then we’ll call the police.”

“They can’t protect me from them.  They’ll just think I’m
crazy.”

She nodded, agreeing with him there.  “What do you want me
to do then?  You can’t stay like this.  You’ll die.  I’m a spa technician, not
a doctor, but you’ve got something stuck in your chest and I don’t think a
bandaid is going to do you a lot of good.”

“Take…me to your…home.  They’ll be…watching…my place
by…now, waiting...”  Every word he said seemed to take longer and longer to come
out.  Unconsciousness beckoned him.

“I can’t do that,” she said.  “I can’t take you home.”

“You…have…to.  You…hit me…with…your…car.  I…could walk…if
you hadn’t hit me.”

“What if you have internal bleeding?  You might have some
broken ribs.  You could die on my couch.”

“I’ll be okay.  Just go,” Aiden said.

Nydia swallowed.  The chances that they’d pin this on her
and take her straight to jail were probably pretty good.  Guilt swamped her,
forcing her into a decision to comply.  She just hoped she didn’t end up with a
dead white boy in her kitchen before the night was up.

Chapter
Three

Aiden knew his powers of healing and shifting were weakened
by his injury and the poisonous silver in his blood.  She didn’t know it, but
she’d saved his life when she plowed through the pack of wolves and disrupted
the fight.  Sure, Riker had pushed him into her path, but he could handle a
woman if he had to.

When he captured her gaze, he put every ounce of power into
his visage to will her to listen to him.  Guilting her into it would work for
him as well as anything else.  He’d take what he could get.

Feigning more weakness than he felt could work to his
advantage.  He had to get the broken blade out of his chest somehow without
going to the hospital, and he couldn’t risk returning to his place by the
lake.  It wouldn’t take much effort for Riker’s gang to track his trail all the
way back.

Aiden hadn’t been worried about being followed when he’d
left his place, and going back now would only leave a trail of blood they could
sniff out for miles.  They’d have a much harder time tracking him if he went
somewhere completely unrelated.

Until his pack returned to town, it was too risky for him
to take them down on his own.

Much as he liked to think of himself invincible, that
didn’t mean he could handle someone willing to fight with any underhanded means
they had available to them.

Most shifters followed an unspoken rule not to use silver.

Riker’s gang didn’t appear to have a problem with cheating.

There was a good chance that Lee Riker and his brothers
would be waiting at his home ready to finish what they had started.  If he
could get this young lady to let him go to her home tonight he would have time
to heal and would be able to defend himself when he came back into contact with
the Riker clan of shape shifters.

Aiden knew the magical spell he could cast with his eyes
and stared straight into those beautiful brown eyes.

He watched as she wrinkled her little button of a nose.  Her
mahogany skin looked warm and inviting in the soft blue glow radiating from the
dashboard.  Her pouty mouth finally showed the promise of her weakening.  Her
lips slowly relaxed, and he could see her shoulders slightly drop as she
surrendered to his persuasion, and pulled back onto the road to head for her spot
in the city.

Aiden congratulated himself on his skill set and leaned his
seat back to rest for the ride.

***

The wolves raced along the game trail through the wooded
valley until the path opened like a yawning mouth to a lake.  The full moon’s
light glittered on the gentle ripples of water like stars. 

The moon glowed so bright that even a human could discern
every detail around the lake.

Lee, leading the pack, stopped at the water and lapped at
the edges until he could catch his breath.  His sides heaved from the exertion
and excitement.

Behind him, he heard the others approach.  Following their
alpha’s moves, they all ran up to the lake and began to drink of the pure
water.

The creatures sat on the edge of the lake and through their
slow and painful process, returned to the shape of seven human men, sitting
naked in the moonlight.  They felt no embarrassment or shame from their
physical state.  It was natural for a shape shifter to revert to the human
state when they were resting, or trying to heal.  Human forms required a slower
metabolism rate than the wolf forms required.

Clothing was something that shape shifters wore to stop
humans from being curious about them.  If the shape shifters had their way,
they would have no garments binding them and stopping them from having freedom
of movement.

Lee looked at the members of his clan gathered around him.  They
weren’t the prettiest of men, or wolves.  He knew when the last three babies
born to the pack had been born with severe birth defects that the pack was
going to dry up and go away if he didn’t get fresh blood mixed into their own.

He knew that by adding a new blood line into the clan they
would start to produce better specimens that were smarter, faster, and better
equipped to run this mountain area.  The women from Aiden’s clan would make
excellent breeding stock.  They could be kept to breed and to care for the
children.

The men of Aiden’s clan could be useful as slaves, and if
they were willing to switch alliances, they could even be useful as hunters.  Some
of the men would even be beneficial as breeders with the women of his own clan.
 He simply had to get rid of their leader and make them see that he was the stronger
alpha so that they would follow him instead.

His plan should have worked if not for that little
interruption.

For months, Lee and his pack had watched Aiden Kinsey’s
clan, tracking their movements, counting their numbers. 

He’d seen their hunting grounds and wanted them.  He did
not admit to his pack that they hadn’t tracked Kinsey’s den for fear of
alerting the rival pack to their presence and risk spoiling their plans to take
over before the right opportunity.

They were well formed and muscular, the lot of them.  The
women were attractive, and he hadn’t seen any that were fat or lazy.  The men
were smart, their children smarter, and it seemed that they had an easy life in
the valley.

Lee wanted that easy life.

And he was willing to do anything to possess it.

His pack had grown so stupid it took every ounce of to
maintain order and manage them.  He needed more men to oversee the simplest of
tasks.

It was enough to make him want to rip his hair out.

Violence only went so far to maintain order.

He couldn’t see the work that the Misty Springs clan had
put into their homes and their surroundings that gave them an easy life.  People
were not chasing and tormenting the creatures, because the werewolves never fed
on a human within one hundred miles of their homes.  Never.

Lee could not see this.

He’d seen the nice secluded dens the shifters had built,
the expansive hunting grounds, and the comforts they had amassed.  He saw the
beauty of the women in the pack and the children who looked nourished and
healthy.  All of these things were things he wanted for his own clan.

He didn’t know about the rules and the self-discipline that
the clan used to keep their homes safe and peaceful.  Where Lee and his clan
were from they were constantly hiding from humans with guns.  The humans knew
of their existence even though they had never killed a werewolf that they could
display.

Lee’s pack scrounged for food every day.  They lived in
squalor.  Some in the woods under the elements, and others in abandoned
trailers with the floor rotting out beneath their feet and roaches scurrying
around the walls.  Lee’s home, a trailer, had so many holes in the floor that
he’d taken to just walking on the support beams, and his child had gone through
the floor of his bedroom and gotten stuck at the waist.

They’d glutted on the local wildlife until most of it had
moved to other areas to survive, forcing them to live off humans and their
livestock.  He hadn’t thought of it as being too lazy to hunt more difficult
game, or that they needed to maintain their human identities and live in the
human world with human jobs and livelihoods.

Pretending to be human was too much of an effort.  And his
people tended to get strange looks.

Hell, just looking at them himself made Lee’s skin crawl. 
Ugly sons-of-bitches.  No wonder none of them could get a job.  They were
idiots.

And they smelled like wet dogs.

Moving in on the Misty Springs clan would make his brethren
like Aiden’s brethren.

One of the men lying on the ground, Jesse, looked at Lee as
Lee stared at him for too long.  “What we gonna do now, Lee?  You think he’s
dead?” Jesse asked.

Lee rolled his eyes and cleared his throat of phlegm,
spitting on the ground.  “We ain’t gonna get through this that easy.  I stuck
him, sure, but he got away.  All’s it’ll take is him pullin that blade out and
a few hours he’ll be healed.  We gotta get rid of him afore his pack comes back
from that festival.  I heard they’ll be bringing back new mates.”

Joey, his younger brother by four years, grinned and rubbed
his hands together.

Lee crossed his arms over his chest.  “Don’t get too
excited just yet.  Kinsey was hunting around here, so we just gotta sniff
around and we’ll find his place.  He’ll come back eventually.  We just gotta be
here waiting on him when he does.”

“Why didn’t we go to the festival if that’s where all the
women are?” Joey asked, looking thoughtful and out of place.

Lee snorted.  “We wouldn’t get no willing ones with the
looks y’all got.  Just look at yer reflection in the lake.  Would you wanna
fuck you?”

Joey looked at himself, his tawny red hair standing on
end.  His eyes, also too close together like his brother’s, a mushy nose and
flat lips with a big jaw that stuck out begging for someone to punch it
sideways.  But he was also as broad as a door, muscular, with hands that could
crush an enemy’s skull with little effort.  Joey laughed.  “I ain’t gotta be purty. 
Just bigger, stronger, and meaner than everyone else.  That’s what you told me.”

“That’s right,” Lee said.  He stood, signaling the
discussion had ended.

The rest of the pack began to reluctantly get up and start
off in the direction of the forest trail they had come in on.  Before they even
reached the edge of the clearing, Lee caught a whiff of the scent he hunted,
and began the transformation back into a wolf.

The excitement of the hunt caused almost an immediate
transformation reaction in the group and they raced through the thick
underbrush.

Aiden’s trail snagged Lee’s sensitive nose, drawing him around
the edges of Misty Springs and up the side of the mountain.  His muscles worked
overtime, and only through sheer determination was he able to keep pushing
himself to follow the trace of his enemy.

A couple of miles northwest of the town, the trail led the
pack down into the valley that Aiden called his home.  The closer they got the
stronger the scent, until it seemed like an invisible finger crooking come
hither to them.

Lee whined with excitement.  His brethren yelped and woofed
behind him, echoing his enthusiasm.

The pack raced up to the edge of the clearing and stopped
to survey the surroundings before they entered the open clearing around the
structure that was Aiden’s den.  A log cabin sat on the grounds like a
sprawling old man with its back to the mountain range, and its front facing a
small pond.  To the right of the area, a thin stream babbled over mossy rocks
down the mountain side, feeding into the pond.

Everything looked peaceful and serene.  No light shone
through the windows lining the building’s façade like eyes, but that didn’t
mean anything.

Aiden was also a shape shifter and had vision as good as
theirs in the night.  If he wanted to hole himself up in the dark, it wouldn’t
be no skin off his back.

Lee lifted his snout in an attempt to sniff out blood.  There
should be fresh blood where he had stabbed Aiden.  Even if there were bandages
covering the wound he should be able to detect the hint of blood in the air.

He could smell nothing, however.

Puzzled, Lee cocked his head.  Tension tightened the
muscles of his thick neck and shoulders.  He padded forward, cautious, glancing
side to side for signs of ambush.

Slowly the pack circled around the cabin.  They carefully
kept their eyes peeled for any sign of a trap, or sign that Aiden had returned
to the cabin after the accident.  There were no such signs.