Werewolves in Love 2: Yours, Mine and Howls (23 page)

Alone now with Cade, she sat and stroked and stared for a long time. Then she shucked off her lounge pants and crawled into bed. She pressed herself against his side with one arm around him, listening to him breathe. It took a long time to fall asleep.

Chapter Seventeen

He knew it was the silver knife wound summoning The Dream after so many years of peace. As a teenager, when it tortured him all the time, he’d learned to control The Dream—alter it, rewind it, make himself wake. Sometimes he even changed the ending, and Mama and Papa lived as long as he slept. He couldn’t do that now. He had to let it run while he watched it like a movie.

Papa put them to bed. Carson fell asleep, but Cade couldn’t. He lay there and listened to the fighting, the crying and the pleading. Mama and Papa argued in hushed tones. Mama cried, as she’d cried for weeks, ever since their arrival in Scotland. It scared him as nothing had ever scared him in his short life. His parents never fought. Since they’d arrived in Scotland, they argued every day.

They’d come here because Mama wanted to show them where she and Papa had met, but now she sulked and cried and spent every moment alone on the beach. Nothing Papa said could make her come inside. She sat and stared at the ocean for hours, ignoring the three of them. At first, Carson and Cade tried to cheer her up. They begged to go to the cold, lonely beach with her, but she smiled sadly and told them she needed to go alone. They stopped asking.

The front door of the little cottage opened, then closed. Cade heard no more voices. Footsteps approached. Cade closed his eyes, feigning sleep, as Papa peered into the room. Satisfied that both boys slept, he closed the door. A few minutes later, the front door opened and closed again.

Mama had left the house, and Papa had gone after her.

Cade briefly thought about waking Carson, but his older brother would stop him. Fifteen and swollen with pride after completing his first change, Carson thought he was such a grownup. He ordered Cade around as if he had a right to, and he pretended to understand their parents’ new troubles. He told Cade to leave Mama alone, that Cade was just making it worse.

That wasn’t true. It couldn’t be true.

He slid out of bed and pulled on his clothes, including his jacket. He hated the cold Scottish summer. He wanted a real beach, like in California or Florida or Texas, where kids and dogs ran in the surf and teenage girls jiggled in bikinis. The only other people at this beach were a honeymooning couple and old folks who never left their cottages.

Scarista Beach was a five-minute walk from their cottage. To avoid overtaking Papa he hung back, creeping along the winding path. Papa said the ocean interfered with his sense of smell. Cade hoped the surf’s roar interfered with Papa’s hearing as well. As he approached the beach, he dropped to all fours, creeping through the grassy hillocks of sand. Nothing out here would interfere with Papa’s night vision.

Cade didn’t have a wolf’s hearing yet, and he didn’t need it. The people on the beach weren’t trying to be quiet. He heard Mama talking to a strange man. It sounded vaguely, but not quite, like Icelandic.

The strange man sounded angry. Mama sounded angry and scared.

Cade crept behind a sandy hump to the left and peeked over the top just in time to see Papa run onto the beach.

Mama and the strange man stood at the water’s edge.

In The Dream, Cade never saw the strange man’s face. He knew he’d seen it that night. But in The Dream, the man’s face was a blank spot, a hole in the movie screen.

The stranger stood too close to Mama. He shook her as they shouted at one another. Mama’s long black hair and the stranger’s long black cloak snapped in the wind, billowing around them, binding the two of them together.

“Eirny!”
The wind carried Papa’s howl up and down the beach, a howl infused by a blend of heartbreak and rage the eleven-year-old Cade couldn’t understand and the adult Cade could never forget.

Mama and the strange man turned, Mama’s face a mask of grief and terror.

The stranger yelled something to Papa in the unknown tongue. He held Mama back for a second, but she broke free with a shout and flung herself across the beach.

“Louis! Leave, please! Go!”

The stranger shouted something, though whether at Mama or Papa, Cade couldn’t tell. Mama, crying and pleading, threw her arms around Papa, who pushed her roughly aside.

Cade cried out as she tumbled to the sand. The adults didn’t hear him. He wanted to run to Mama, but terror held him paralyzed.

Papa snarled and charged the stranger standing at the water’s edge. As Papa closed the distance, the man’s hand moved to his belt. Mama screamed. Cade barely had time to register the glint of silver.

Papa leapt. The man’s arm flashed out to meet him, plunging the knife into Papa’s stomach and thrusting it deeper as he shoved Papa away. Papa’s yowl of pain and rage joined Mama’s terrified keening. He fell to the sand on his back, the enormous knife embedded to the hilt in his belly.

The strange man stood there, unmoving. Even though, in the Dream, Cade couldn’t see his face, he sensed him smiling. The stranger didn’t move until Mama ran back to the water’s edge to throw herself on Papa’s motionless body, wailing in the same foreign tongue. When he bent down to grasp her arm, she erupted with an animal snarl and ripped the knife from Papa’s body.

Whirling around, she slashed madly, blindly. The stranger roared and flung an arm across his face. Mama slashed again, but he tore the knife from her hand and threw it far out into the ocean. Clutching at his face, he turned and ran off down the beach, disappearing from sight as quickly as a werewolf.

The sight of the knife sailing through the air and dropping into the water broke Cade’s paralysis. With a guttural cry of “
Papa
!” he ran to his father’s body and fell to his knees.

When Mama raised her face to him, he didn’t recognize her.

The blood gushed from Papa’s belly, clotting the sand. Mama’s hands were wet with it as she raised them to her face, her eyes wide and wild. She let out a keening wail. Cade stared at her, transfixed. Who was this woman?

She rose to her feet, wild grief written on her blood-smeared face, and reached out her hand to him. Trembling and sobbing, he extended his, but before they touched, she gave a harsh shout and turned her back on him. She ran straight into the pounding surf. She didn’t stop, and she never looked back.

He screamed as she vanished beneath the waves. He kept screaming when the old couple from the cottage next door came stumbling down to see what had happened. He screamed for Mama as the policemen raced down to the beach, and he screamed for her as they peeled him off Papa’s body.

He was still screaming when he woke up, but this time, for the first time, he wasn’t alone.

His eyes snapped open. His body, locked in the nightmare, refused to move. He heard his heart pounding in his chest, his blood pulsing in his ears—and Ally stirring next to him.

“Cade? Cade! Wake up, baby. Look at me. Here. That’s good.”

She held his face while she kissed his forehead and his eyes. Then her mouth covered his, pouring sweet relief into him like cool wine.

He tried to take her in his arms, but the left side of his body erupted in fiery pain. She seemed to sense it, pressing a hand to his chest, urging him not to move. Her tongue stroked inside his mouth, easing the panic, calming the terror. His body shuddered as the nightmare surrendered its hold.

His mate had saved him.

“You broke his neck,” he whispered hoarsely, wonderingly.

“Like a fucking toothpick,” she murmured with a shy smile.

He chuckled, light-headed. “You’re cute when you say fuck.”

She kissed him again. “Go back to sleep. I’m here.”

His head fell back against the pillow. He let sleep take him, untroubled this time by dreams or pain.

He awoke to someone knocking on the door and fading sunlight peeking through the drawn curtains. The clock said five p.m. Ally was gone.

“Cade?” Michael called.

“Come on in,” he croaked, clearing his throat. “You seen Ally?”

“She’s swimming. Uh-uh, no way, bro,” Michael laughed, pushing him back against the bed when he tried to stand. “Ally said you’re not getting up.”

“What the hell is wrong with—” he lost the intended effect when he had to stop, panting, and wait several minutes ’til he had enough breath to finish “—you?”

“Ally said if I let you out of bed she’d kill me.”

“Ally’s not your Alpha, wolf.” Some of his strength had returned, but not enough to intimidate his second, who knew it.

“Yeah, well, my Alpha can’t do much to me right now, but his mate kind of scares me. There’s something strange about that chick, Cade.”

“I know. I don’t care. Help me up.”

“Cade, I just told—”

“I need you to get me into the bathroom, Michael.”

“Oh. Okay, sorry.”

“I need a shower,” he wheezed as he put his hands on Michael’s shoulders and pulled himself to standing.

“Cade, I’m not sure that’s a good idea.”

“Before she comes back.”

“Ally doesn’t care—”

“
I
care. I want a shower before my mate comes back.”

“Ah. Gotcha. You do stink. But I’m getting in there with you, just in case.”

“Whatever.”

They hobbled to the bathroom, Cade’s arm around Michael’s shoulder, Michael’s arm around Cade’s waist.

“She killed the wolf,” Cade panted.

“I know.” Michael grunted under the weight of Cade’s body. “It bothers me.”

“She can see in the dark.”

“That bothers me too.”

“When she slammed the door, the house shook.”

“Bothering me.”

“She runs almost as fast as I do.”

“Bothering the fuck out of me.”

“She called me baby.”

“Oh, well then, we’ve got nothing to worry about, do we? Hope she’s not the jealous type. Wouldn’t want her breaking my neck if she catches us in the shower together.”

“Shut the fuck up and help me get undressed.”

Michael waited by the shower door, but Cade didn’t need him. The wooziness was gone. He leaned against the wall of the capacious stall as hot water pummeled him, massaging and reinvigorating his battered body while the soap scrubbed away the lingering scent of silver, grass, blood and dirt.

It left him exhausted and exhilarated.

Michael handed him a pair of clean sweats.

“Hold up,” he said as the big wolf wrapped an arm around his waist to hustle him back to bed. “I need to shave.”

His beard, which he kept trimmed close to his jawline, had reached island castaway/mad backwoodsman status. Would Ally care how clean he was if she couldn’t find his mouth?

He stood at the mirror with the warm washcloth on his face as he inspected the damage to his body. The scars would all disappear in the next couple of days. He knew he’d have invisible scars for longer than that. The return of The Dream meant the attack had messed with his head. He didn’t want to think about it right now.

“The gunshot wound looks clean and pink,” he said to the mirror.

Michael, lying on his back on the bathroom rug with the
Sports Illustrated
swimsuit issue, grunted his agreement.

“Sindri does good work.”

“Sindri didn’t stitch you up,” Michael said distractedly. “MacSorley did. Looks like he knew what he was doing too. ET assisted with his herby stuff.”

Cade paused mid-lather. “What the hell are you talking about?”

Michael tore himself away from the bikinis. “When we brought you in. Dec removed the bullet and stitched up the cuts.”

“And you let him?”

“Why not? Sindri was okay with it. Look at your chest. That’s some nice sewing.”

Cade stared at the mirror. “You like the bastard, don’t you?”

“Yeah.” Michael shrugged. “I can’t figure out what he’s done to make you hate him.”

“I don’t hate him,” Cade whispered in frustration. He closed his eyes, listening to the rhythmic drip of water in the basin, and tried to figure out what he was feeling. “There’s just something about the wolf that sc—” he caught himself before he said
scares
“—rubs me the wrong way.”

Michael smirked. “Maybe you’re jealous. He’s lived with Ally for four years, and he looks an awful lot like you. Maybe the mate bond doesn’t like it.”

Their eyes met in the mirror. A foreboding crept over him, a deep unease that hadn’t plagued him since he was a lonely, sullen teenager. Was it The Dream? Or was it MacSorley?

“He doesn’t look like me,” Cade said softly, staring at himself again. “He looks like my mother.
That’s
why he gives me the creeps.”

“Okay, that would be disturbing.”

“I had The Dream.” He didn’t look at Michael as he said it. “Earlier, when Ally was with me.”

“I figured,” said his best friend, returning his attention to supermodels. “I heard you screaming. I thought I’d give Ally a shot at it before I came in. She took care of it, didn’t she?”

“Yeah.” He started shaving, his mind wandering as his hands worked without any direction from his brain. “Michael,” he said as he swished his razor in the water, “why don’t you ever dream about your father?”

“Because I know I didn’t kill him, and I don’t care who did.”

He knew Michael meant it. Cade was the Alpha, but in some ways, his second was harder. Or maybe just more damaged.

“Are we gonna talk about feelings now?” Michael yawned.

“Shut up.”

“Thank you.”

They shaved and ogled in comfortable silence.

“Hey,” he said suddenly. Michael looked up. “You hear anything from Seattle? Anyone see Rufus around?”

“Oh yeah. I’ve got info on the wolf who’s trying to kill you. I just somehow forgot to mention it ’til you reminded me. Because I’m stupid like that.” He muttered “sheesh” under his breath and returned to the girls.

Cade’s cheeks reappeared. His beard and moustache lost their depth. He patted his newly mown face dry.

“Hang on.” Michael scrambled to his feet. “I’m coming.”

“I don’t need help,” he snapped, “I can walk by—”

That’s when his legs decided not to hold him up anymore. He didn’t fall over. He just sort of wilted in place. Michael caught him before he hit the floor.