Change For Me (Werewolf Romance) (The Alpha's Kiss) (21 page)

“What is it, Devin?” I turned, for some reason emboldened by the vulnerability in his voice. Upon seeing him again, I wasn’t terribly surprised to see that he was the same Devin as always. “I can’t tell you’re not yourself. Something’s bothering you.”

Thankfully he didn’t catch my tongue slip. “If I can help,” I continued, “just say so.”

“The old man,” he growled through clenched teeth. “That old, old bastard, he ruined everything. He wants to wipe us out, to control everyone, and he wants to make sure Damon takes over for him. To... to finish his work.”

“Poko?” my eyes grew wide. “What does he have to do with any of this?”

Devin scoffed. “No wonder you didn’t piss yourself when you saw me.”

I waved my hand, dismissing him. “I’m well aware of what’s going on,” I said. In truth, it was pure fear that kept me so calm. I might laugh a lot at the wrong times, but at least it keeps me sort of level headed. “But what does Poko have to do with any of this?”

“I have to do this, I have no choice.” Damon clenched his fists, drove them against a dust-covered table top so hard I thought it would break. “He wants us all dead. He wants to control—”

“Everyone, he wants to control everyone,” I said, taking him off guard. “Yes, but
why
? This is a part of this whole story I’ve never heard.”

Confusion descended over Devin’s face, clouding his vision. He opened his mouth, acted like he was about to answer me, and then clapped it shut.

“I know your tricks,” he said. “I’ve been warned about them. About everything you might try to confuse me. Acting like you care, acting like you have any interest at all in the Carak or what’s going to happen to us. No! No, no, no! I won’t fall for it, I—”

“Devin,” I put my hand on his shaking shoulder. “I’m not... I don’t know how to answer you, but I’m not out to get you. I just want to know the truth. I’m caught right in the middle of all this and I’m not even sure why. Please, I’m asking because I
do
care.”

“No!” he snapped. His eyes darkened again, and he slumped over, bobbing back and forth like his waist was a knee joint. “No, no, I know your tricks, harpy!”

“You did not just call me a harpy.”

“Quiet! The old man killed my father.” Devin snorted from somewhere deep in his throat and threw his head back so hard that he wrenched himself. “He wants us dead so he can control the whole region. So the Skarachee will have no competition, so they can take... take...”

“Take what, Devin?” I urged. “Help me understand!”

“You want us dead, too. I see it in your eyes.”

Before my eyes, he grew, muscles pulsing and stretching, until he towered at least two heads above me. Something was fighting inside Devin’s head, almost visibly. Tearing him one way, then the other, he stood before me, terrified, but unable to contain himself. Back and forth he shook his head, then his body.

“I don’t... no, Devin, I just want to understand.”

With a snarl, and a roar, he grabbed my wrists again, wrenching me back and forth. “No!” he shouted, for about the hundredth time, as he bent to heave a huge cellar door up, he shoved me toward it.

“I won’t... can’t... let this... happen again. This is
my
destiny.”

He thrust me forward. I stepped down hard, concrete under my heel, and then tripped into the darkness.

When my knee crunched against the dirt floor, and my wrists caught my weight, all I could think was:
at least it was only three steps.

The vague light from outside narrowed to a sliver and then went dark as the cellar door slammed shut. Metal scraped on metal, and I heard a clunk. Slowly, carefully, I made my way to the closest wall. Cold stone, rough stone, against my palm.

Sliding down, my shirt caught on the bricks.

A sliver of light hit the ground immediately in front of the stairs, and drew my eyes to a tiny little slat of a window, barred of course.

Above me, and outside, I heard what must have been the front door of this strange little hut slam shut.

At that sound – the heavy thunk of wood, the scrape of metal – all the emotions I should have felt since Devin nabbed me came out in a rush of hot tears that soaked my cheeks.

“Please hurry, Damon,” I whispered into the dark, squeezing the fang around my neck. “Please.”

––––––––

“W
e have to do something,” Damon said, pacing back and forth along the wall of the tiny kitchen. It took him three steps to cross the whole room. “I... I have to do something.”

Joe sipped his coffee. “What does the old man say?”

“I can’t go to him. I’ve got to do this on my own, I just know it. This is part of my trial, my test.”

“It’s very hard for me to remain calm about this,” Joe said in a measured voice. “Especially considering that the girl you’re talking about having vanished is my daughter.”

“Granddaughter,” Damon corrected. “Sorry, I didn’t mean anything by that.”

“It’s fine. But my point is, if you get all excited, you never know what’ll happen. I learned that way back when my old friend was dealing with, well, I suppose this young’un’s father.”

Damon stared at him, crinkled up forehead asking questions that his mouth didn’t.

Joe let out a whistle, then a laugh. “So I take it you don’t know that story? Calm down a second, sit. You pacing is making me tired. Back and forth, back and forth. Look, my Leroy’s missing and I’m telling
you
to sit the hell down. Give it a shot.”

With a grunt, Damon sat down and then gave a weary sigh. Sitting on the table in front of him was a folder with a bunch of printed out papers that he opened and started absent-mindedly thumbing through.

“Now, good. Take a few breaths.”

Damon grunted his assent, but stared intently at whatever it was in front of him, which in turn, drew Joe’s attention.

“What is all that?” he said. “Lily’s story?”

Sucking a breath through his nose, Damon said, “No, it’s just notes but...”

“Anyway, how do you know that this young Carak has her?”

“Who else would?” Damon answered. “Wouldn’t make sense.”

Pushing his glasses up on his forehead and pinching the bridge of his nose, Joe leaned back in his chair. “What if she just needed some time alone? I mean, you two have been pretty intense these last few weeks.”

“Uh-huh. Could be.”

“Damon? Are you paying attention to me?”

“Yeah, sure.”

Joe relaxed his legs and the chair legs hit the floor one after the other, jolting Damon upright. He went right back to rifling through the papers. One after another, he stared at whatever was on them, scanned from top to bottom, and then went on to the next one. Soon, a pile of roughly stacked papers sat underneath his right hand as he stared at another.

“Have you read any of these?” he said as he turned another one face down. When he finally looked up at Joe, Damon’s face had gone a little gray.

“No,” Joe replied. “Why? They’re just papers for her story.”

Damon’s hands were trembling. “She,” he swallowed, “she talked to Poko. He told her more than he ever told me. About my parents, the clans, everything.”

“Ah,” Joe trailed off, pulling in a deep breath and rocking his chair backward again. “I suppose you had to find out sometimes. Is that the one about—”

“We used to be one clan? One clan? Why was I never told this? Why did he lie to me?”

It was the older man’s turn to stand up. He took his cup of coffee with him, more for something to hold onto than to drink. “I never liked it,” he said. “I didn’t understand what happened then, and I still don’t.”

“I just... how is this possible? Why did he never tell me?”

“Tell you what, son?” Joe circled the table and bent over Damon’s shoulder.

“That when he killed Devin’s elder, he separated the clans? That the Carak and Skarachee used to be the
same clan
?” Damon’s heart sank as he read further. “Oh no,” he said, his voice trailing off. “Oh my God, this can’t be true.”

Joe read ahead and knew what he was about to say, but all he did was squeeze the younger man’s shoulders. “He did it for a reason, Damon. They were wild, they wanted to be—”

“He’s my brother.”

Damon stood up from the table, pushing the chair backwards, scuffing against the linoleum. “It’s true, isn’t it? Why the hell did Poko never tell me? He’s been getting me ready for some... I don’t know, some ritual transformation, feeding me all this stuff about Lily being my mate. And he just left off the part that the Carak alpha, Devin, the guy I’ve been talking about murdering if he hurts Lily... is my brother.”

“Does it make any difference?” Joe said. “Do you still think he has her?”

“I know he does,” Damon said. “And no, it doesn’t make any difference. Except that now I know why I can feel him. Now I know why I can smell him even when he’s a hundred miles away. And I know why he keeps healing just like me.”

He slammed his hands on the table.

“Where are you going?” Joe said, suddenly very afraid for the answer.

“To get my mate. Poko didn’t tell me because he wanted to protect me.”

Joe tilted his head in agreement.

“I don’t need his protection anymore. I’m doing this on my own, I don’t care
what
happens. I’m getting her back.”

He pushed past the table, straight out the back door. The swinging screen caught a wind and thumped against the house before coming back closed.

“Good,” Joe said under his breath. “You’re exactly the man he thinks you are.”

As the young man pushed open the door and stepped into the late afternoon sun, Joe turned back to the living room and addressed what seemed to be a discarded pile of laundry.

“I don’t know why you insisted on hiding, Pokorann, but you can come out now, old friend.”

Poko stood, slowly stretching his back and extending his arms above his head. “You’re the only one who remembers that name,” he chuckled. “Skarachee can sense each other,” he said. “It took all my concentration to hide myself from him, but I needed to know.”

“Know what?” Joe asked, running his hands through his thinning hair. “If that bastard really does have Lily, I’ll—”

Poko smiled one of his Cheshire grins, sightless, white eyes gleaming. “She is safe, dear friend. She is in the clutches of the Carak alpha, but my cub is...” the ancient man shook his head. “Damon is ready. His transformation began when he cast aside his doubt and refused my help. This other one, this Carak alpha, he...”

Joe chewed on his lip. “He’s what, Poko?”

“He is wild and undisciplined. He fights, but does not know why. He cannot win. Damon, he fights for a purpose, and because he believes in something. His mind is as sharp as his body is strong.”

“What does he fight for? The clans?” Joe asked.

“No,” Poko smiled. “For love.”

*

T
he bike roared to life, the throttle pumping against Damon’s thighs in time with his pounding heart.

He reached to the tooth pendant that Poko gave him, the one that always hung around his neck, but it took a second when all he felt was bare skin to remember he’d snuck it into Lily’s pocket that night.

That night, he remembered, when he marked her, made her his; that night felt like a million years ago as desert road disappeared into the horizon behind Damon’s thumping engine.

His bike pointed due south, a direction Damon never went if he could help it. No matter what his relation to Devin actually was, and no matter what the Carak used to be, he avoided the south because Poko always told him that’s where they made their lairs. Somewhere out in the desert between Arizona and the southern-California wasteland, the Carak reigned.

“Hell of a kingdom,” Damon said with a snort as he pulled to the shoulder to try and get his bearings. “Hope it was worth it.”

Turning left and right, he scanned the horizon with his inhumanly sharp vision, smelled the air with his impossibly attuned nose. Aside from the three saguaro cactuses off to his left, one of which had a vulture sitting on top of it that reminded him of an old Western movie, there was nothing to see. No life, not even a tiny lizard or anything of the sort, scurried in front of him. It was just... dead.

His boots scraped against the ground. Damon dug his toe into a crack as a hot wind blew across the desert, and he pried up a scale of earth, kicking it down the way.

Lifting his head to the dusky sky, Damon stared up at a streak of Milky Way, then to a couple of dippers. With a sidelong glance, he looked over at the sun, which was still about a half-hour from fully set.

Wait, how am I seeing stars?

Then he smelled the air. How had he not noticed before? His brother’s scent was so clear to Damon that he may as well have had a marked-out line on a GPS screen. He looked back and forth, squinted his eyes in thought.

Is this the transformation? But what about the ritual? Riding a motorcycle halfway to nowhere isn’t much of a rite of passage
.

Still, something was different. Lifting a hand as a slight breeze kicked up, Damon felt tiny flecks of dust strike his fingertips and roll slowly around them. When he looked back up to the sky, he saw a comet that he was certain he’d never seen before.

He wondered, but shook his head anyway, casting off the thoughts. Whatever it was had to wait, his mate needed him. Almost immediately he said, “Lily,” out loud, like he was testing the words. “She’s not ‘my mate,’ she’s more than that,” he grumbled, throwing his leg back over the saddle of his motorcycle and kicking the throttle. “She’s more than a mate, more than a thing... she’s...”

Damon finished, but the bike’s engine blasted off, drowning out all the sounds.

Pulling another lung full of dusty air, he caught Devin’s odor further south, though the road turned west.

“You’re not getting away from me,” he growled. “Not a chance in hell.”

Digging his heel into the ground, Damon twisted his handlebars and revved the engine. His back tire spun, screaming against the pavement like a monsoon’s opening thunder peal washing over a valley.

As the rubber hit the dirt, it almost slid, but he kept his balance. Suddenly, the tires went quiet, muffled by the hard, cracked earth.