Half Wolf (8 page)

“Good luck with that,” Michael said, the parts of his tattoos that were visible beneath his collarbone rolling with the motion of a gathering storm system.

“You can read my thoughts?” she asked.

“Some of them,” he replied.

“The ones that pertain to you?”

He nodded, refusing to explain in more depth. “It’s safe now. We can walk.”

Possibly it was safe, but her feet wouldn’t move. Besides, Kaitlin figured that she had every right to be wary. Michael assumed she was worried about vampires, but with the ability to read her mind, he would know it was both Michael and the moon she feared most at the moment. Michael, because he was Michael. The moon because of all the predictions and insinuations about how that big silver orb was going to affect her in just two days’ time.

Michael’s eyes were disarmingly wide and green. Being on the receiving end of his intense observation made her dizzy. There was a chance Michael rescued people often with a dose of Lycan blood, and therefore had her reactions mapped out. He wasn’t coughing up any useful information about that, though, and only dropping nebulous hints here and there about the murkiness of her future.

“Can’t move my legs,” she confessed, holding up a hand to ward Michael off in case he had ideas about helping her. “I just need another minute.”

She was in turmoil. Could the moon cause that, too, or was this emotional upheaval due to the fact that she had never met a man like Michael in her old world, and didn’t trust herself to be in his world now?

“It’s okay.” His tone was like a brush of silk over her jangling nerves. “A minute more in this place is maybe all we have, though.”

His warning was another reminder that there was no use pretending this was a normal meet-and-greet between a man and a woman interested in each other, and that being so close to Michael smacked of danger. That sense of danger charged up her arms like streams of electricity, and tasted like pepper. Her hormones might have been singing, yet not so loudly that she’d let herself lose control, even when Michael didn’t take his eyes off her.

She was holding him back. He was needed elsewhere.

A growl of distress rose from deep inside her, and that was as frightening as everything else. In a show of defiance that mocked her lack of moral fortitude, Kaitlin again met Michael’s brilliant, forthright gaze.

“You’re wrong, you know,” she said. “You might be an angel. Having done your good deed in helping me, I hereby release you from any responsibilities you might assume to have over me and my life. You can safely get back to yours, and I’ll do the same.”

On legs like putty, Kaitlin turned from him and began to walk, still scared out of her mind about what might be hiding in the dark, and needing to lose the moon and that moon’s secrets for a while longer.

She didn’t get far.

Michael’s whisper came in a warm puff of exhaled air on the back of her neck. “It doesn’t matter what you say, or how much you protest. I’m here to see this through.”

Michael was behind her, close. In spite of his heat, Kaitlin’s chill was due to the memory of having his warm breath in her mouth and lungs as it sparked her narrowing life back into existence. Did she owe Michael for that? Did she owe him her blind trust and her future?

“You don’t owe me anything,” he said. “On the other hand, you do have to trust me.”

“Why should I trust you?”

She wasn’t going to turn around. That would be a big mistake. Seeing Michael up close made her senses go haywire.

“You’ve seen me, and what I am. You cannot discredit that or pretend it isn’t real, Kaitlin.”

“I believe you are what you are, Michael, and that you like it. That doesn’t mean I’m going to like it, or accept it as my future lifestyle.”

Something sharp scraped along her shoulder blade without tearing her shirt, and Kaitlin knew what that was. Claws. Michael’s wolfish claws.

Her muscles shivered in response. Molten balls of fire gathered in her stomach before hurtling toward her throat, burning tissue as they traveled and setting fire to everything in their path. She had to clench her hands to make sure she didn’t have claws, too. She felt the tips of her fingers swell.

Hell. Was this reaction caused by lust for Michael, or by a wolf being born inside her?

Kaitlin remained upright by leaning forward on the balls of her feet. Frustration made her groan, and that sound made Michael move.

He wrapped his arms around her, pulled her close, so that she felt every inch of him from his chest to his thighs. His heat scored her back through the loose weave of her sweater. Her breath was as ragged as his was.

“Kaitlin,” he said, the word like a further caress. “After I left you this morning, what was your day like?”

“I...” She couldn’t get a stream of words out. Heat behind her eyes made her shut them.

She knew what lay beneath Michael’s borrowed clothes. She had seen that lovely picture before, just as she had felt the buzz of the nearness of his incredibly honed body.

Would wolf hormones, when added to girl hormones, push her over the edge?

“Your day,” he repeated. “What happened? Learn anything you’d care to share? Anything out of the ordinary?”

Michael’s tone, and the force behind it, compelled her to answer.

“Yes.” She struggled to go on. “I learned that a person can be maimed and nearly murdered, and the world still turns. Vampires and werewolves roam the park around my college, and yet two plus two still equals four. Somehow that just doesn’t seem right.”

Though she now wanted to look at him, Michael held her tightly.
Go on,
she thought she heard him silently urge.

“I...” she began, again failing to finish the thought.

“Relax,” Michael said. “Tensing makes things worse. Listen to me, Kaitlin. Relax. Swallow the fire and put the wolf back in its place. You can do that because it’s not time for that wolf’s appearance.”

“How do you know about the fire?”

“I can feel it roaring through you.”

“You said the wolf isn’t a separate thing. So how would I put it back in its place? God, Michael, I’d prefer to forget about all of this. Maybe wanting to forget is enough. You also said that being near another wolf might bring out mine. So, what if I don’t get near any of you? I’ve already said thank-you, and meant that sincerely. I owe you my life and won’t forget that, but...”

“But what, Kate?”

“You need to tell me everything and get it over with. Tell me now, so I don’t have to imagine I’m going nuts, and so that I can prepare.”

The night seemed to press in around her. She wasn’t sure if she’d ever be able to walk alone on any path through it again.

“You’ll feel the fire first,” he began. “That’s the way the wolf comes into existence, the way the wolf is born. The fire is a sign of internal changes taking place at the cellular level.”

She struggled in his arms, but not very hard.

“Once that’s finalized, and if you make it through the next phase, your wolf simply is part of you. Just another piece of Kaitlin Davies, as if it had always been there. It’s almost like an emotion rising to the surface at times—a new emotion that rallies and then radicalizes all the other ones.”

He had obliged, had told her something, as she’d asked, and now she was sick again.

“
If
I make it?” she said.

“You’ve already assimilated some of your wolf. I’m not sure how that was accomplished so quickly and your doing so was quite unique. As I said earlier, though, there will be more trials to come.”

“I don’t want to think about that,” Kaitlin argued.

“Unfortunately, that won’t stop the progress of what has already begun. It’s time to face the facts, Kaitlin. It’s time to move on.”

Her voice was faint. “I know.”

Kaitlin felt her next few questions tank, though she hadn’t yet asked one of them. Looking up, wincing with the strain that movement put on her throat, she said, “The damn moon in getting brighter.”

Reaching for the collar of her sweater with an action derived from self-preservation, Kaitlin felt for the raw-skinned pucker she’d first found that morning in her room. She ran her fingers over her throat uncertainly, finding that the injury wasn’t nearly as sore as it had been.

She almost sat down in the dirt.

Michael tightened his hold on her. “It would be safer for you indoors tonight. You’ve had enough. You’re healing on the outside. The inside takes longer.”

Kaitlin teetered again and pointed a finger upward. “Does it burn you? That moon?”

Her lips were trembling. Her hands were clenched so tightly, her forearms had started to cramp. The scent seeping from her pores now smelled like aluminum, the odor of fear. The peppery taste in her mouth had burned away, replaced by the metallic tang of having sucked on tin foil. She feared she might stop breathing altogether if she and Michael stayed here for much longer. Yet she was afraid to move. She was afraid she would throw herself into his arms if he moved.

Glancing at her wrists beyond the cuff of her sweater, she felt...

She felt a kiss of silvery light on her skin that was like the smile of a treacherous lover’s lips. Soft, yet demanding. Deceptively light, while at the same time completely deceiving.

An unfamiliar sensation, like roving invisible fingers, worked its way up her legs, her thighs, climbing hand over fist along her vertebrae, one bone at a time. Panic returned. She was panting for breath. “What’s happening, Michael?”

“You’re feeling the lure.” Michael’s voice had an edge, as if his explanation merely surrounded a much deeper meaning.

His closeness allowed Kaitlin to keep focus for a while. Michael’s arms were supportive. The way his body braced hers gave her some strength. This closeness also sent her mixed messages; sexual signals radioed to her overworked nervous system. Michael’s touch was seductive, provocative. By liking this and by translating every meeting of their bodies into sexual terms, Kaitlin wondered who the real animal was.

“You have my blood in your veins,” he said. “That’s what dictates the way this will go down. With a single drop, you would change, and you’ve had more than that. You needed more than that.”

Dear Lord.
Kaitlin kept repeating those words silently as she rocked back and forth on her feet.

“The changes will be noticeable, Kate. Sight, hearing, sense of smell, are enhanced, enlarged, enlivened. Does this sound familiar? Has some of it happened already today?”

“Yes,” she replied.

Michael was quiet for a short span of time before continuing. “More small things will shake loose. Barely noticeable things. Longer fingernails. Brighter skin. Hunger.”

Hunger.

Inadvertently, Kaitlin again curled and uncurled her hands, already sensing the arrival of more of those changes. The smells at school and the anxiousness over being confined in the library had to be part of the change. The white, haunting reflection in her mirror was part of it, as were the quaking limbs and the sinking sensation in her stomach each time she felt as though the moon was watching her. The treacherous moon that turned humans into wolves.

“Must be hell on clothes,” she said, remembering her dream of running barefoot in the grass beside a half-naked Michael, then having him turn up tonight in the buff. She also remembered that in one of those dreams, she had felt light and joyous and had wanted to jump Michael’s bones.

“Maybe being a werewolf isn’t all bad?” she whispered.

“It can be quite beautiful,” Michael said.

She believed him because Michael was beautiful, and nothing that special could step out of a bad reality.

He was smiling sadly when he finally released her and she was able to look at him.

“How many nights, Michael? How many nights will I be affected?”

“Two or three. You’ll change as fully as your body determines, and only during the full-moon phase when moonlight touches your skin, though you will be vulnerable to moonlight one day before and one day after that.”

There would be a full moon two days from now. Michael said she wouldn’t change until then...so why did she feel moonlight sliding down strands of her tangled hair right that moment? Why did her fingers feel strange, as if claws might appear any second?

“The imagination is a strange beast,” Michael said, reading her. “You will adjust when the real thing happens.”

“I don’t want to do this. Be this.”

The moonlight was stifling. Chilling. She felt so very cold when the wolf was supposed to be hot.

Her knees buckled without warning. Next thing Kaitlin knew, she was on the ground, head hanging forward, sickness roiling through her.

The hands clamped around her waist were Michael’s. With a single heave and the slightest grunt of effort, he had her on her feet, then up in his arms. In a move reminiscent of some distant time when damsels were weak-hearted and repeatedly in distress, he turned, holding her tightly to him, and ran.

Chapter 9

K
aitlin squeezed Michael’s shoulders, silently begging him to stop running. They were heading the wrong way. Her apartment was in the opposite direction. Michael was moving fast, as if he was aware of where he was taking her, which turned out to be the closest cover.

Beneath the protection of the roofed park bench, he set her on her feet and waited while she leaned over to wretch, but although her stomach heaved, nothing came up.

“This, too, will pass,” Michael said gently. “Fear is making you sick. Nothing else.”

Kaitlin wasn’t so sure about that. Her blood, as well as her body, had turned icy. She didn’t know whether to laugh maniacally or cry, and made a Herculean attempt to stand up straight in spite of quivering abdominal muscles.

“Please, Michael. Make this go away. I’m begging you.”

“I’m sorry,” he said again, and she recognized his sincerity. He was sorry, and she had to go through this.

“Let’s cover you up, and I’ll take you back to your place.” He was already pulling Cade’s shirt over his head without bothering to use the buttons.

Her eyes went to his chest and the scrolling tattoos that left her feeling dizzier. “You said it wasn’t going to affect me tonight.”

“Hell, Kaitlin. I’m not sure the wolf is doing this. Everything about tonight is strange.”

She said, “I can get home on my own.”
I’ll crawl if I have to.

But could she get there? Kaitlin gazed out at the darkness with new eyes that were no longer so innocent, and mindful of the danger. Although clouds partially covered the moon, she could feel threads of silver gathering. She smelled change heading her way on the breeze.

“You are a stubborn woman.” Michael held out the shirt.

Kaitlin searched the dark, hoping to find different answers than the ones Michael had already given her.
Wolf? Damn.

“Come,” Michael said, offering both the shirt and a hand.

She didn’t place her fingers in his. In touching Michael, she’d feel human again and needier than ever, when according to Michael, being human was far from the truth. If her fate was sealed, she had to give in and embrace what Michael and his moon were telling her.

“Cover your head so you won’t have to feel the light,” he advised. “Maybe that will help to ease your fears.”

She shook her head.

“All right.” Michael sat down on the bench. “I’ll just sit here then, and watch you go.”

The idea of leaving the overhang rendered her immobile. Their shelter suddenly seemed to Kaitlin like a tiny ship in a vast sea of uncertainty. Who was she kidding? She wasn’t going out there alone. She wasn’t really that brave.

“You’ve scared me, that’s all,” she said. “This whole night has scared me.”

“The vampires are gone, Kaitlin. If you’re talking about becoming a werewolf, I honestly thought you’d prefer life over the alternative, no matter where that life led,” Michael said. “There are good parts to being what you now are, you know.”

“Such as?”

“The park is a great place without the monsters currently tearing it up. The camaraderie of a pack is like nothing else, and almost equals the sensation of moonlight on your skin. My world is sensuous and beautiful beyond the top layer that other people see. And due to our added strength, we don’t have to be afraid of much.”

“Beneath that top layer is a fur coat,” Kaitlin said.

“True. Yet after a while, even those who weren’t born to the wolf begin to like it.”

She faced the park. “If I’m already feeling odd, and it’s not just sickness, what will happen to me if I step out there? What if I feel the moon already?”

“It can’t be the moon.”

“Okay. I’m going to find out,” she whispered, with an added inward
maybe.
If she took a giant step, she’d know for sure if what she was feeling was fear or something else. Something worse than fear.

With her eyes closed, she slid a sandaled toe forward, allowing two inches of skin to meet that damn mystical lure Michael had mentioned, hoping for the best, praying for a miracle.

* * *

The look Kaitlin gave him when she turned her head was one of a sorely wounded soul in search of enlightenment. Anger was in that look, and condemnation.

Could he blame her?

Nothing happened when she stuck out her foot, though it was clear that she had anticipated a reaction.

Michael shot to his feet, anxious about this whole deal, and was beside her in a flash. Kaitlin’s eyes were glassy, her face pale enough to belong to the undead. She was looking at him without seeing him. Looking through him.

Muttering an inward curse, he reached out to her. Kaitlin shied away, leaving the shelter of the overhang by taking several steps into the night. Standing in the open, with a mixture of moonlight and darkness crossing her features, she gazed up at the sky as if tempting the moon to strike.
Here I am
, he wouldn’t have been surprised to hear her say.

But she remained silent.

“Talk to me,” he said quietly to the woman who single-handedly obliterated what he’d come to expect as the usual process of transitioning from human to Other. It was clear to him that she was feeling something.

He had never seen this kind of recovery or the arrival of her current level of awareness, and wasn’t sure how to proceed. His plan to hand her over to Rena might have backfired because he wasn’t certain Rena would understand the complexity of this particular case, either.

What was she seeing, standing there?

What was she feeling?

He closed his eyes and looked into her mind.

“Kaitlin,” he said, able to feel the stirring, faint movement of the wolf tucked deep inside her as easily as if his own wolf was doing the fidgeting.

He cut off a rising growl. Kaitlin’s wolf was waking before the rest of her could catch up. The moon was calling to her early, and that just wasn’t right.

She wasn’t Lycan. There wasn’t one real wolf bone in her body. A possible explanation for her reaction to wolf blood was that he had given her too much of it and her system was in a state of confusion. He really didn’t know what to expect. Although Kaitlin wasn’t the first human he had protected from fanged demons, she was the first human he had shared his life force with. The first person he’d wanted to share himself with. Rescuing her had felt personal.

“Kaitlin.” He called to her again, moving to within touching range without actually making contact. “Tell me what’s going on.”

“I see things. Valleys and hills.” Her voice was distant, as if she was relating part of another dream. Michael figured she was hallucinating, since there were no hills or valleys surrounding the college, and they were standing on flat, grassy ground.

He wondered if Kaitlin wouldn’t be able to handle her transition, if he had merely extended her life by hours, instead of years, before that inner bonfire took her down. She looked otherworldly as she stood there, and more transparent than solid. Paler. Slighter than ever.

When she spoke again, his heart fluttered.

“More of them.” Her gray eyes flashed as she struggled to focus.

“More of what, Kaitlin?”

“Vampires.”

“Damn it all to hell!” Michael didn’t question her perception. He put his fingers in his mouth to whistle, knowing the pack would still be relatively close and patrolling the area, and that they would hear his call.

“These damn bloodsuckers just aren’t going to give up,” he said with his senses on full peripheral scan. “I don’t know why so many of them are coming out tonight. There must be a reason.”

As he looked at Kaitlin, Michael began to consider whether this new wave of bloodsuckers had something to do with her. Was Kaitlin some kind of vampire magnet?

Insane idea.
He shrugged it off. Vampires didn’t plan, or have specific goals for taking revenge on their enemies. Vampires only wanted one thing, and that was to feed. Their entire existence depended on finding humans to feed on. Yet they were coming to this area as if he, Kaitlin and this damn park were ground zero for an undead rally.

“I have to get you home.” He waved the blue shirt at her and stressed the word. “Now.”

Seeming to comprehend the problem, she nodded. Instead of coming to him, though, she spun on her heels and took off at a run in the opposite direction...like a damn little half-human fool who hadn’t believed a word he’d said.

* * *

Kaitlin couldn’t breathe but refused to stop running, sure that if she kept going she could outdistance the nightmares that felt like her past, present and future all rolled into one big terrible tangle.

She felt much too vulnerable near Michael, possibly because she actually was. He held all the cards. He was the keeper of Lycan secrets. Michael wanted her to be strong, while also fostering her need for him. He would gladly have carted her home, and then what?

She was alive, and riddled with guilt about that. Michael belonged with his pack. If his pack were to accept her, and that was what she ended up wanting, she’d have to get Michael to sever whatever ties bound them together so that he could do what he needed to do without worrying about her.

So she ran away from him, dreading every yard of ground she covered that created more distance and lamenting her need for space. She needed to be on her own to think. Michael needed to be with his pack. She would face this werewolf prognosis head-on as soon as her emotions caught up.

She ran without assistance or support, not looking at the moon. Her legs were strong enough to carry her over grass and concrete, and those things kicked up familiar, comforting smells in a world that had first spun her around and then dumped her on her ass.

She didn’t feel like a werewolf, despite the sickness inside her. Her legs were her legs. Her chest heaved with a need for oxygen like any human’s lungs did while sprinting. Still, if being a werewolf meant she’d stop being afraid of every damn shadow, maybe that was a good thing.

“I’m still Kaitlin!” she shouted to the moon that was supposedly going to help change her.

What she wasn’t, she quickly found out, was fast enough to outdistance a vampire.

* * *

Michael moved so fast, his surroundings seemed to have liquefied. Kaitlin didn’t know how to truly perceive the dead, and she was heading toward one of them.

He ran for only a short time before allowing his wolf to take over. Arms, legs, feet, torso began to morph in record time. With one good leap into the air as a man, he landed as a wolf and bounded forward with the kind of speed only an animal could utilize.

With the sound of cars in the distance and civilization too close to put him at ease, he became aware of Kaitlin’s racing heartbeats before seeing her. In his wolf vision, she was a heat source.

He also detected that vampire slithering through the dark on a parallel path to the one she had taken.

He caught up to her in seconds. Hurtling past Kaitlin with a fury inside him that bordered on insanity, Michael lunged at the vampire, meeting it in a tremendous body slam that sent shock waves through the air.

They fell and rolled over in the grass, tumbling body over body until Michael came out on top. Without hesitation, he bit down on the vamp’s neck, severing ligaments and everything else in his way, until the vamp’s head rolled away from its emaciated body.

Done deal.
The undead could survive a lot of damage, but not without a head. He had to assume that the person that vampire had once been would have thanked him for putting him out of his afterlife misery.

The whole thing took less than a minute. When he looked up with his muzzle dripping vampire blood, he was afraid of the picture he presented to Kaitlin.

She wasn’t there.

Without the ability to speak, he was momentarily at a loss. He backed up, searching the area, convinced that he had to be mistaken, and that she had to be hiding nearby.

He heard the pack coming. They were running full tilt, cutting through the night like well-aimed arrows homing in on a target. As for himself, shifting back and forth from his wolf form so many times in a short period had left him lacking in sustainable energy and panting with the effort to maintain his current shape.

Wanting to run, to find Kaitlin and chase more vampire prey, Michael waited for the pack to arrive. Rena was in front, and slid to a stop beside him. All four Weres wrinkled their human noses. Four menacing human growls of disgust rumbled in the dark.

Rena said, “Where’s Kaitlin?”

Michael growled a reply.

“Shit,” Rena said, already sniffing for clues as to the direction Kaitlin had taken. “There’s something chasing her.”

The others nodded in agreement.

Michael was already gathering to move.

“Michael.” Rena again faced him. “Though I don’t condone what might happen, it would end your responsibility where she is concerned if you let her be. Like she wants you to.”

Yeah. That’s not going to happen.

Michael leaped ahead, tearing through the night, pounding the ground, swallowing the dark breeze as he followed Kaitlin’s trail like a wolf possessed.

Old thoughts reemerged as he raced on; bits of remembered remarks and phrases from his youth.

There are some good humans, Michael, but it’s not worth risking our species to seek them out.

People have always shunned what they know to be different, and that fact will never change.

Your mother didn’t stand a chance against silver bullets specifically designed to take down our kind, from the weapon of a hunter because of greed and a hatred for what he could not understand.

No one came to your mother’s aid. None of us were near.

I’m sorry, son. I will always regret having to tell you that your mother is not coming back.

He heard those words often enough to be able to see his father’s lips moving. His dislike of getting close to humans had grown from that moment. He had vowed never to interfere where he didn’t belong. And then he had helped a human named Kaitlin without thinking, feeling her pain and picturing his mother alone and dying. Wondering what would have happened if someone had kicked that wolf hunter to kingdom come and helped his mom get home.