The Wolf in His Arms (The Runes Trilogy)
Read The Wolf in His Arms (The Runes Trilogy) Online
Authors: Adrian Lilly
The Wolf in His Arms
Book
Two of The Runes Trilogy
Adrian W. Lilly
© 2014 by Adrian W. Lilly. All rights reserved. Cover design by Sandra
Schroeder.
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Dedication
To Chris. Always.
Table of Contents
The Arrangement
Lucy
groaned audibly and then flung her head back onto her bed. She looked up at the
ceiling as she felt the headboard to her bed rattle from the thumping coming
through the wall. She groaned again, louder, and covered her head with the
pillow.
When
Jared had suggested that the three of them move in together, Lucy had some misgivings.
Mostly, she worried that her new “condition” would put Alec and Jared in
danger. As it turned out, the real danger was lack of sleep. As soon as Alec
and Jared thought she was asleep, they were at it like rabbits—and she was
suddenly awake.
She
reached for the earphones on her nightstand and turned on her iPod. She chose a
mix of classical music and cranked the volume up. As violas and piccolos
soothed her ears, she closed her eyes, hoping to drift back off to sleep.
Her bed
quaked delicately with each pounding through the wall. Letting out a great
grunt of annoyance, Lucy tossed the covers off. She rose, glared at the wall
separating her bedroom from Alec and Jared’s, and trudged into the hall to the
kitchen. Without flipping on a light, she filled the teakettle and clunked it
to the burner and gruffly turned the dial. A flame leaped to life, licking at
the bottom of the pot.
A few
minutes later, she sat on the couch with a cup of chamomile tea and the soothing
classical music still floating through her ears. Lucy pulled her knees to her
chest and rested her chin on her knees. Tears formed along the rims of her eyes
and gently rolled over her cheeks. The worst part of waking in the middle of
the night was the loneliness that swallowed her like a giant, Biblical fish.
Her longing for Rene and the life she’d had a few months before huddled in the
darkness with her, frail and sad as she.
Lucy
wiped her eyes and tossed back a few sips of the tea, determined not to feel
sorry for herself. She made a mental list of things she would do. The first,
she decided, was tell Alec and Jared that their late-night escapades woke her.
She knew they were trying to work their voracious sexual appetites around her,
but the late-night rendezvous were a fail. Second, she decided to add an extra
hour at the gym the next day. If one day they would go into battle, she decided
immediately, she would transform from a bookworm into a bad-ass bookworm. She
had started with self-defense classes, and now she was working her way up the
belts in taekwondo.
Her
mind immediately flipped to her nuisance of an instructor, Mitch McCallahan.
Lucy scowled just thinking about the boorish, rude, egotistical jerk. He was,
unfortunately, an amazing instructor, and Lucy was determined to become as good
as she could as quickly.
Lucy
set the empty teacup on the coffee table and curled up on the couch. She
thought she might try her bed again, but decided it safer to stay on the couch
and sleep. She closed her eyes and drifted off as violins cried a melancholy
chorus in her ears.
*
*
*
*
Waking,
Alec stretched his arms over his head in a large V, his knuckles scraping the
headboard. Jared nestled against his chest, and stirred, gripping him tighter,
momentarily. “Timetoge’up?” Jared mumbled.
“Yes,”
Alec croaked with his dry mouth. “Coffee.”
Jared
nodded vigorously and pulled away, stretching. He slung the covers off his body
as he did every morning, as if that were the only way to coax himself from bed.
The covers pulled off Alec, exposing his bare chest to the cold air in the
apartment, and he clamped his arms to his chest and shivered. He smiled as he
watched Jared’s bare butt cross the room and grab underwear, jogging pants and
a tee-shirt.
Alec
tossed the covers off with a groan and hurriedly pulled his own clothes on. He
followed Jared out to the kitchen where he was grinding coffee beans. Alec
paced up behind him, resting his chin on Jared’s shoulder. “Love that smell,”
he said of the coffee beans.
Jared
smiled as he scooped the coffee into the coffeemaker. He turned around and
rested his hands on Alec’s shoulders and kissed him on the cheek. “I love
mornings with you.” After filling their cups, they padded down the hall to the
living room in the front of the apartment. “Uh-oh,” Jared said, nodding to Lucy
sleeping on the couch. “I think we must have woken her last night.”
“Great,”
Alec mumbled. “Let’s have our coffee in the kitchen and let her sleep.”
“You
did wake me,” Lucy said groggily from the couch. She sat up with a great
stretch and rubbed her eyes. Her face turned to a scowl. “We need to talk about
your bedroom acrobatics”—she smiled when both of their jaws dropped—“but coffee
first.”
They
followed her to the kitchen, where she poured herself coffee and sat at the
table. “Sit,” she said.
“We try
to, ah, work around your schedule,” Jared started.
“I
know,” Lucy said, nodding. “But you guys are not quiet. In fact, my entire bed
shakes. Seriously.”
Alec
looked down at the table, silent. Lucy could tell he was blushing.
“Why
not just schedule your fun time while I’m at the gym?”
“We
do,” Jared said. He arched his eyebrow. “That’s round one.”
Lucy
rolled her eyes histrionically and sipped her coffee. “Well, waiting until
after I’m asleep is no good.”
“We
could move our bedroom to the living room,” Alec suggested. Jared snarled his
lip, and Alec added, “It’s not like we have guests.”
Jared
countered, “What about this: if you’re home, we knock, tell you to put
headphones in, and you can plan on coming to the living room. And we’ll make it
a reasonable hour, since the late-night thing isn’t working.”
“I
really don’t want to know every time you do the nasty,” Lucy said.
“And I
don’t want her to know,” Alec agreed.
“I
appreciate your incredibly mature feedback, and I’m open to other suggestions,”
Jared said.
Alec
finally suggested, “We could schedule it.” He turned his gaze to Lucy. “You’re
not to be in your bedroom between 11 p.m. and 12 a.m. any night. We may or may
not be—”
“Copulating?”
Jared interjected with a smirk.
“Yeah,
that.”
Lucy
nodded. “I think that’s reasonable.”
“Since
we resolved that, and we’re all up, shall we have breakfast?” Jared asked,
standing and walking toward the refrigerator.
Alec
stood, casting his eyes down at Lucy. “You sit. We’ll make breakfast to make up
for waking you.”
Lucy
stood anyway to refill her coffee cup. She leaned against the counter as Jared
broke eggs into a bowl for scrambled eggs and Alec laid bacon on the microwave
dish. He popped it in the microwave.
“So two
days until the full moon,” Lucy said. She leaned against the counter.
“We’ve
not had a problem so far,” Alec said.
“True.
But I don’t want to get too relaxed.”
Jared
dumped the egg mixture into the frying pan. “The spot we’re using is perfect.
We can use it until we find a cure.”
“Sure,”
Lucy said. She admired Jared’s optimism for finding a cure—something she no
longer shared.
“We’ve
barely made a dent in the files from the barn,” Jared said, as if reading her
mind.
Lucy
nodded. While months passed, grief and depression took their toll, debilitating
her. After the shock of the night of the fire had worn off, the grief over
losing Rene sank in, and Lucy had spent days on end in bed. She had canceled
classes for the previous semester, though she was taking classes again now.
Alec, too, had taken a semester off. Jared had soldiered through and was now
writing his dissertation, a process he planned “to drag out.”
Alec
and Jared had made finding Lucy a place to transform safely their priority. Jared
found an abandoned building: six vacant floors with an empty bank in the first
floor. The vault in the basement made the perfect place to transform. Each full
moon Jared and Alec camped outside the vault while she thrashed at the walls
maniacally until the morning. She never remembered any of it.
Lucy
thought of the morning after her first transformation. Jared eased the vault door
open, Alec pressed against it in case they needed to slam the door shut if she
were still a werewolf. Though Alec tried to hide his feelings behind a
faltering mask, Lucy could read him: apprehension, embarrassment, and relief as
he handed clothes to her and breathed, “Lucy.”
Lucy
did not need to remember the full moons and the monster they made her; the
mornings after, and the looks on their faces told her everything. And each time
she changed, the walls of the vault became more gouged and pummeled so that she
doubted Jared’s assertion that they “could use it until we find a cure.” Lucy
feared that one day the door would rip from its hinges and she would awake with
them dead, and no memory, just a new morning of regret.
“Luce?”
Alec said.
She
looked at him quizzically.
“Breakfast
is ready,” he said with a smile. “What were you thinking about? You really
zoned out.”
“My
annoying instructor, Mitch,” she lied.
Alec
nodded but she could tell Jared saw through her, as he always did. “I’m
famished,” she said and grabbed a plate of steaming eggs and bacon.
“I’m
gonna hit those files after breakfast,” Jared said.
“Together,”
Alec said, smiling at Lucy.
“Together,”
she agreed.
Loft Living
Morning
sun flooded through the old paned windows of the downtown Detroit loft as Jason
poured a cup of coffee. He looked across the snack bar from the open kitchen to
the large main living space. On one side, custom-built shelving covered the
brick wall. Pottery, books, and glass art filled the open shelves. Wooden doors
in the shelving hid the television. A sectional sofa and cocktail table were
oriented to take advantage of the city view and a table and chairs set off to
the side. Doors led out of the loft onto a large balcony. A light dusting of
snow covered the floor and handrail. The openness and the sunlight appealed to
him and Ilene since the fire.