Alpha's Child (5 page)

“Damien’s the first boyfriend I’ve ever had, so I’ve never been hurt before,” Julia said. “I’m lucky. But I could only imagine…if Damien died, or left me…I would be so hurt that I’d never want to open myself to the possibility of that much pain again. But I
would
want to love again, eventually. And if you want to love again, I think you have to open your heart at least a crack. Being in love, sharing love, requires vulnerability. You can’t be invincible.”

“You ever notice how addictive it is to talk about relationships?” Mara asked, her chin in her hand.

Julia laughed. “I hadn’t, but you’re totally right. I guess it makes sense. Most of life comes down to relationships.”

“All of life does. Speaking of which, how are you and Damien?”

Julia cast her eyes downward. She wondered how much to share for only a moment before speaking.

“Well…we’re not great. We just had a fight. It’s funny. When we first got together, I remember thinking that I couldn’t imagine fighting with him.”

“Really?” Mara’s laughs rang loudly through the dark trees beyond the stream. “My relationship with Antonio was pretty much founded on fighting.”

Julia smiled, but the smile faded quickly.

“It’s not like either of us is going to actually win the fight—we both think we’re right. So we just both apologize and move on. But I don’t want to do that. I’m mad at him. I know being mad at him isn’t going to accomplish anything but I still am.”

She picked up a pebble and threw into the stream. It hit the water and skipped once, then sank with a tiny splash.

“Well,” Mara said, “in two days you’ll forget it ever happened. You know, as much as I like the freedom of being single, when you’re in the right relationship, there’s nothing like it. But I think it’s easy to forget that when you’re actually in the relationship. You forget how nice it is that you’re never really alone; even if you’re apart from each other for a long time, even after you have a fight, they’re still there for you. When you can’t be with the person you’re in love with, you realize that it’s, like, a binary thing — either you have the person you love, or you don’t. And if you do have it, everything else is just background noise.”

CHAPTER EIGHT

Damien

Julia went to bed before Damien and left for class in the morning silently.

They hadn’t talked at all since the fight. Her frustration built on his, tearing at the bond between them, stretching the fibers of their connection.

He thought about the fight as he lay in bed, inhaling the crisp air streaming in through the open window to calm himself. If he just apologized, it would be over. Continuing to be angry at each other served no purpose. He
had
lied. But it was a white lie, one meant to preserve her happiness. Everyone tells a small lie or two to their significant other occasionally…don’t they?

A sound from outside snagged his ear, in the planter below the open window. It was so faint he couldn’t tell exactly what it was—something scraping the dirt, maybe, or a few leaves brushing against each other—but it was definitely the noise of some small movement. A squirrel or a rabbit, probably. Damien rolled over in bed.

Was there any practical benefit to telling Julia about his scare in the woods? Not really. She’d be more careful now, but she would have been more careful anyway because he’d told her to stay out of the woods. Never mind the fact that she actually
had
gone into the woods immediately after their fight, which angered him. He hoped she’d gone because she genuinely wanted to be alone and not just to spite him. Because if she had put herself and their children in danger just to spite him…

No. She would never do that.

Damien still felt he hadn’t done anything wrong in not telling her about the scare. She would have been just as safe either way. Shouldn’t a man prefer that his mate be safe and happy as opposed to safe and scared? His mind swirled with questions he’d never thought through before.

A door opened downstairs.

Damien listened curiously. Julia had only left fifteen or twenty minutes ago. And the other members of the pack usually knocked before coming in.

There was no more noise, and Damien sat forward, scrunching up his face in concentration. He heard nothing. Nothing at all. He could always hear people when they walked in—clothes rustling, floorboards creaking, joints popping. In fact, it was strange that whoever it was hadn’t already called out a hello.

He opened his mouth to call out a hello himself, but something held his tongue.

There were no scents in the air, not even the lotion Julia put on every morning. He opened his mind wide, trying to sense a familiar presence. There was absolutely nothing.

His chest felt hollow and his heart was starting to beat too fast. Maybe the wind had blown the door open, though he could have sworn he’d heard the creak of the knob turning, the click of the latch bolt.

Leave.

The thought fluttered at the edge of his consciousness. A blur of other thoughts was whirling around his skull but for some reason this particular thought stood out.

As quietly as he could, he slid out of bed, wanting to be on his feet if something attacked him. There was still dead silence in the house.

The pack is in danger you can’t stay here you have to
—

Damien felt a jolt. This stream of thoughts was in his head. Yet the thoughts were too distinct, more distinct than any of his other thoughts, as if he were hearing another person’s voice in such a way that it bypassed his ears and ran straight into his mind.

He shook himself, trying to clear his head. This was nonsense.

“Julia?” he called.

Nothing.

“Dee?” He walked to the doorframe, his head cocked. “Who’s there?”

Nothing.

Then, downstairs, a floorboard creaked.

The tiny noise snapped Damien’s composure. He flung the door shut, lunged over to the window, and shouted as loudly as he could.

“KYLE! KATHERINE!”

Turning, he felt his body ride the edge of shifting, his wolf form intruding as adrenaline urged him to fight. He expected to hear footfalls thundering up the stairs as the intruder abandoned stealth and charged, but the silence held. And then, in the silence, one word that blasted through the darkness and left his ears ringing even though he swore he heard nothing.

LEAVE!

Damien fell to his knees, clutching his head as the sensation in his head. It reminded him of his connection with Julia, only a dark and perverted version of that connection. This bond was controlling, the thoughts penetrating into his skull without thought as to the intrusion.

“Damien?” Kyle’s voice rang from the clearing and came into focus as Damien forced the alien thoughts from his mind. A second or two later. a door banged open downstairs and Kyle yelled again, this time from inside the house.

“Damien?!”

Damien yanked the door open again, still primed to lash out if anything came at him, and called out downstairs.

“Kyle, be careful! Something came into the house.”

“A shifter?”

“I don’t know,” Damien said, his muscles twitching, on edge.

“I don’t sense anything,” Kyle said. “Wait where you are. Don’t move.”

Kyle dashed up the stairs and looked in every room. Then he rushed back down and covered the first floor. Damien waited helplessly, cursing his blindness.

Finally, Kyle came back up the stairs, no longer in a hurry.

“There’s no one here,” Kyle said. “What happened?”

Damien’s fear over an intruder was dissipating just as a very different fear curled itself snugly around his heart.

Another false alarm. It was the second time in as many days that he had been sure he’d sensed something when there was actually nothing.

Was he going crazy?

“Was the back door open when you came in?” Damien asked.

“It was open a crack, yeah. You heard something come inside?”

“I heard the door open…and then I thought I heard…” Damien trailed off. He’d thought he heard a floorboard creak. It could have simply been the house settling. Houses made noises all the time.

“Could the wind have blown it open?” Kyle asked.

Suddenly Damien remembered that rustle of movement outside his bedroom window.

“Come outside with me, I want you to look at something,” Damien said.

He led Kyle around the house to the planter beneath the window.

“Do you seen any footprints or anything in the planter? Earlier I thought I heard something right about here.”

Kyle stepped into the planter. Damien waited anxiously. He didn’t know if he wanted Kyle to find something or not. Either there really had been an intruder, or he was insane. Neither was an ideal outcome.

“There’s a few footprints,” Kyle said, and Damien’s insides clenched. “I mean, I don’t know. There’s footprints everywhere. Julia was planting things last week.”

Damien frowned.

“Are there prints that aren’t Julia’s?” he asked.

“How should I know?” Kyle asked.

“You’re a wolf, dammit,” Damien said, trying to make the half-joke sound friendlier than he felt at that moment. “Don’t you know how to track?”

“By scent, yeah!” Kyle said. “Sure, but the only scent here is from members of the pack.”

“Pack? What pack?”

“Our pack,” Kyle said, beginning to fray at the edges of his patience. “Your pack. It smells like Julia in here.”

“I know how it smells,” Damien said.

“Well, then, why’d you yell like the moon had gone out?” Kyle asked. “You scared me.”

“Those footprints,” Damien said, latching onto a new thought, “You’re not
sure
they’re Julia’s?”

“Again with the footprints?”

“Kyle, just tell me.”

Kyle sighed.

“They look like Julia’s. Definitely too small to be you or me, or any of the males,” he said.

“Which direction do they go outside of the planter?”

“Well…it looks like…” Kyle’s voice trailed off.

“Looks like what?

“I can’t find any footprints leading away.”

“No prints?”

“Maybe Julia was too light. Or maybe it’s a kid, Damien.”

“A kid?”

“Kids all think these Victorian-looking houses are haunted. You know, I’d bet one of his friends dared him to open the door and then run for it.”

Damien nodded slowly. That seemed pretty reasonable—at least, more reasonable than anything that had occurred to him, but his mind was reluctant to accept the reasonable explanations. Still, it wouldn’t help things to stand here and argue with Kyle for any longer.

“Do me a favor and don’t mention this to Dee or Julia, will you?” Damien said.

“Sure thing,” Kyle said. But there was more than a trace of wariness in his tone. Damien went with him as far as the porch steps and then retreated into the house. He locked the door behind him and slid the bolt into place.

CHAPTER NINE

Julia

Her literature class was called Rhetorical Technique Analysis of Poetry of the Second Romantic Generation. Damien joked that he’d gotten bored before she’d even finished saying the name of it, but Julia was excited. She loved poetry — the harder to understand, the better.

When she read a novel, the words were like the camera in a movie. Assuming it was well done, she didn’t even notice it. She saw straight through and got lost in the story, ignoring everything else.

That was great in its own way, but she loved that poetry was almost completely the opposite. The language
was
the story. The words kindled emotions by how they sounded and interacted, not just by the meanings they represented.

And because of this, because the rhetoric itself was the focal point, you could be confident that everything about a poem was deliberate. Julia saw poets less as artists than as meticulous engineers who were concerned with the function of every single little piece of their creations, every cog in the machine. It fascinated her to imagine what was going on in the poet’s mind when they were crafting a piece, to try to infer why they picked this word instead of that one, why they placed this dash here and that comma there.

The professor of the class was a burly man in his fifties with a crown of brown hair. Julia got the impression that he wished he was a Victorian-era English aristocrat. His default expression was haughtily thoughtful—Julia kept waiting for him to stick out his pinkie while drinking from his mug—and he enunciated his every word slowly and precisely, like an English-as-a-second-language teacher demonstrating proper pronunciation. He clearly liked to hear himself talk.

He spent almost the entire lecture reading the syllabus. Considering that the class would be expected to interpret complex poetry, you’d think they could be expected to grasp a plainly written syllabus on their own. The rest of the lecture wasn’t much better—he just talked about John Keats’s childhood.

Julia remained upbeat, though—what she was really looking forward to was the discussion section afterwards.

However, as it turned out, the teaching assistant wasn’t really looking for discussion.

The TA was a lanky woman who looked young enough to be an undergrad. Sharp face, black-rimmed glasses, porcelain skin that contrasted strikingly with her short black hair. One whole arm was sleeved in colorful tattoos.

“We’ll start with the first poem of the packet, and go through as many as we have time for,” the TA said, popping a mint into her mouth. “Okay? Lines 6-8. Anyone want to do a close reading?”

Julia looked down at the page and reread the lines to herself.

Huge cloudy symbols of a high romance,

and I think that I may never live to trace

Their shadows, with the magic hand of chance;

She’d read the poem before, many times. Keats was one of her favorites. Still, it took some courage to raise her hand.

“Yes?” The TA didn’t seem to care who Julia was, or what she wanted to say. Julia licked her lips before she spoke.