Karly's Wolf (Hollow Hills Book 1) (14 page)

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

The three-mile hike to the top of the ridge was in actuality almost four miles because Margo insisted on coming in up-wind of the camp, letting the early morning breeze announce Karly’s presence long before they cleared the curtain of trees and brush that skirted Hollow Hill’s traditional Hunting ground. Karly didn’t know if it was Mama Margo’s secret recipe, her foreign humanity, or the fact that she was practically naked, but every eye and nose attached to a male contestant was turned to her. Considering her female competitors were already assembled and already completely naked (apart from their own body paints), she figured her nakedness was the least likely explanation.

If nothing else, the
volka
believed in equal opportunity embarrassment. It wasn’t just the females dressed in only a few squiggles of body paints. The men were every bit as scantily attired, and it wasn’t hard to tell who was there to participate and who to cheer on the participants. Mama Margo’s estimated ‘sixty’ seemed more like a hundred, especially when Margo leaned into her and whispered, “Take off your shirt. Let them see what they’re getting.”

“No.” Karly flushed, already sweeping the crowd for any sign of Colton.

“Oh, like you’re anything they haven’t seen before!” she hissed.

“No!” Karly hissed back.

Mama Margo gave her a withering glare, then stepped aside, gesturing for Karly to head on in and join the rest. Glaring back at her, Karly started to, but the minute she stepped ahead of the old woman, she felt an ominous snag at the back of her nightshirt, followed by a loud rip of sundering cloth.

“Oops,” Mama Margo said drily, and put away her pocket knife.

It was either let the torn shirt fall and join the others, as if she did the naked body-painted hippy in the woods thing all the time, or just stand there, foolishly trying to hold the cut back of her shirt together.

“You’re an evil old woman,” Karly told her, choosing the latter.

“See the way they’re looking at you.” Mama Margo nodded proudly. “My secret recipe. It works every time.”

Something was working anyway, because people definitely were staring. Not all seemed pleased. Many, like the buxom blonde daughter of the Alpha Deacon, were openly annoyed. But it was surprising just how many of those naked—plainly aroused—men were staring hungrily back at her.

“Give ‘em a good run,” Margo whispered to her, and then shoved, that shove being the overwhelming force necessary to get Karly’s stilted legs moving again. She still couldn’t see Colton, but it was easy to see where she was supposed to go.

The female
volka
were gathering within a roped off corral, held separate from the men not only by a barrier of multi-colored banners, but by an entire football field of grassy distance. Even from this distance, it was plain the males viewed this as an agitating hardship. They were crowded all along the barrier that kept them from advancing, not a pennant-dotted rope, but a hastily constructed three-rung wooden fence. They were tense and silent, completely oblivious to the physical reactions either they or their neighbors were having to the visual proximity of the women, the vast majority of whom pretended not to notice. Nobody was shifted, but all Karly saw among the females was wolfish posturing—the non-existent tail swishes, the preening and strutting, and the enticing aloofness with which the females beckoned potential suitors to ‘come hither’.

When she drew near enough, an elderly
volka
standing guard over the female’s corral moved to block her way. She frowned at the torn shirt Karly stubbornly held onto, her gaze sweeping what paint lines she could see on Karly’s thigh and face. While it looked like squiggles and nonsense to Karly, the old woman must have read something of note because she eventually stepped back and even raised the rope, allowing Karly to join the other women.

She went in like Moses parting the seas. Although her god-awful stink led the way, she doubted that was the only reason for her shunning. As an outsider, she was way out of her element and she knew it. She tried to find a quiet place away from the others, eventually taking up a quiet post by the rope, tucked up between a tree and a fraying green pennant. With some creative folding of the cut halves of her shirt, she was able to prop herself against the trunk without fear of a stray breeze leaving her anymore exposed than she already was.

“
Chevolak
,” someone spat. “She has no business here.”

“If you can’t run faster than her, you’ve got no business being here either,” another drawled, which pretty much silenced the first.

Karly quietly shredded the fraying edge of the pennant and pretended she hadn’t heard either of them. She glanced across the field, because everywhere near her was occupied by someone who didn’t like her—and that’s when she spotted him. In the thick of all those men, Colton grabbed the highest wooden rung to scale the fence, lifting his face to the breeze as if scenting the air.

Could he smell her all the way over there? Heat flushed her, turning her core molten and sending it flowing down onto her painted thighs. Her nipples peaked, tightening and abrading themselves against her torn shirt. She had the most overwhelming urge to break out of her corral and race over there just to apologize for how bad she smelled.

But she didn’t.

She was crazy. She was absolutely crazy.

Pushing back off the tree, Karly let go of both ripped halves of her shirt, letting the cloth simply slide off her shoulders, down her arms. She bared herself. Not to the crowd, that was incidental. She bared herself for Colton, and even from all the way across the field. She knew the instant his eyes finally found her. Every inch of him tensed. Naked as he was, that was a lot of inches to drink in, but she couldn’t look away. He was rippling, that strange yet beautiful undulation of flesh that meant the wolf in him was fighting to reach the surface of him every bit as hard as he was fighting to keep it down. He wanted her.

That was when she knew, absolutely knew all the way down into the pit of her quivering, knotted stomach, she was going to run…because he was going to chase her.

“They will fault you for many things, you know,” Maya purred as she brushed up against Karly’s side, “but they cannot fault your good taste in men.”

Karly barely took her gaze from Colton long enough to glance from Maya to the three packwomen who accompanied her. Between the four of them, a rainbow of body paints was represented. Yellow, green, metallic silver. Maya was the only one who sported two colors, swirling dots of pink and white that played over her dips and curves. No two women wore the same design.

Maya turned her head, her smile turning sly as she nodded across the female’s corral. “If pissing Joela off was your intent, you’ve managed it.”

It wasn’t hard to follow Maya’s stare to the Deacon’s blonde daughter, huddled amongst her tight circle of friends, all of whom sported bruises and scrapes from the day before. “I wouldn’t call it intent,” Karly said dryly. “It’s more like a bonus.”

I knew there was a reason I liked you,
chevolak
.” Maya bent to briefly rest her chin upon Karly’s shoulder. “Don’t be offended, my friend, but your stink is marvelous. May I borrow it?”

Before Karly realized what Maya was truly asking, the
volka
caught her shoulders and hugged her. She rubbed, her full breasts pressing hot against Karly’s back as she ground herself against her.

Across the field, three more men jumped up onto the fence, craning to get a better look.

“My thanks,” Maya said, panting that soft, breathy laugh of hers when she noticed Karly’s stunned face. “Don’t worry, we’ll keep the Deacon bitch off your back long enough for you to reach the woods.”

A roaring shout went up across the field, and Karly turned in time to see Colton punch the man standing on the fence next to him. He succeeded in knocking the other man down, only to be ripped off the fence a half second later by someone else. And just like that, suddenly Karly was watching a barroom brawl. Every male erupted in snaps and snarls. It was the most unholy cacophony—more animal than man—punctuated by punches and body slams.

A shiver—half excitement, half apprehension—prickled up her spine like icy fingers.

“Your Alpha is calling to you,” Maya whispered in her ear. “I hope you let him catch you, because that is the Alpha Joela was supposed to win.”

“Over my dead body,” Karly couldn’t help muttering.

“Don’t say that too loudly. She might comply.”

The brawl among the men wasn’t easing. If anything, the intensity was picking up. They were making the most unholy baying sounds now, interspersed amidst the growls. They were all rippling now, a chaotic tide moving in every direction at once. Some had transformed already; others were in the process. Karly couldn’t see Colton anymore. She tried to look for Puppy, but there was more than one black wolf in the males’ corral.

And the spectators, they were everywhere, loosely grouped in family units, content to watch and point, seemingly focused exclusively on neither the males nor the females, but on both collectively. Karly thought she saw money changing hands. It began to feel like Sunday morning at the races, and she was horse Lucky Number Seven. All she needed was a jockey…although with any luck, Colton would be riding her soon enough.

At once both excited and appalled, Karly rubbed her hands against her thighs, smearing the paints there until she caught herself.

“Get as far as you can,” Maya told her, her eyes brightening with that oddly lupine yellowish hue. “You’re human. If you’re brought down too soon, no one will think any worse of you than they already do.”

The excitement was building, and it was all around her now. It felt palpable, and just a little bit frightening.

“Where do I go?” Karly asked, tensing now herself.

“Just run,” Maya said, growled rather, her voice deepening into startlingly masculine tones.

Karly looked around to find Maya shifting, transforming right there by her side, her whole body rippling in that oddly fluid way as her face distorted, her limbs lengthened and thinned, her back hunched and her fur sprouted at a rate Karly had never seen outside of time-lapse photography. She dropped to the ground, an absurdly graceful canine yawn and stretch easing her into her fully wolfen form. Hollywood had it so wrong. There was nothing painful in Maya’s transformation, at least not that Karly could see. No discomfort, not even the slightest wince in the lupine face that turned to her, muzzle gaping in a toothy grin just before the males broke the fence that surrounded them.

Apparently, that was the gunshot she’d been waiting for. The ropes around the females dropped and everyone scattered. With no idea which direction to run, Karly tried to scatter with the group, but she was attacked. Somewhere in the panic, she had lost track of Joela, but when the furry weight of a shifted
volka
hit her sideways, knocking her sprawling on the ground, Karly thought she knew exactly who was snapping for her throat.

It was shocking how strong the woman in her wolf form was. She would have gotten her teeth into Karly, but for Maya and her three pack mates, who leapt into the middle of the fight, snarling, biting, ripping at the blonde’s scruff and flanks, and all Karly could do was scramble to get out from under them all without getting hurt. Someone yelped, and Karly felt the spattering of hot blood spray across her back. But there was simply no time to check who it was, because the males had already caught up with them.

Maya sprang away just as Joela was engulfed, every member of that impromptu pack fighting viciously to be the one to cover and hold her. She went down yelping, struggling violently to break free while they squabbled, snapping, biting, ripping into one another and sometimes, in the brutal excitement, into her. It was the football game all over again, only this time no one was playing. They drew blood, theirs and hers; bones snapped, that ominous cracking sound being what finally broke through Karly’s shock and launched her back into the race.

She ran, as fast as she could go, her bare feet slipping in the dew-soaked grass, following the path Maya and her friends had taken into the dense forest that surrounded the ridge. There would be no more help from that quarter. The closest things to friends that she had, they were already gone, but that didn’t mean Karly was alone. Someone was coming up fast behind her. Right behind her. She could hear the panting and growling, could all but feel the heat of his breath on her back, and both Maya and Mama Margo were right: humans were dreadfully slow runners.

Karly had barely reached the trees when she was tackled. Just as fast, however, the weight that hit her back was knocked off, but it wasn’t two wolves that she found herself pinned beneath. It was Seth McQueen, untransformed, naked and painted like every other participant, who wrestled the young grey that had knocked her down into the brush. Without any trace of either anger or enjoyment, McQueen hooked one strong arm around the snarling grey’s neck, his other hand latching onto the grey’s right front leg. In one savage yank, he broke it.

The grey yelped, with high-pitched screams that erupted into desperate writhing to break free.