Rivals (Shifter Island #2) (5 page)

“Don’t stop,” she told him.

He chuckled softly and leaned down to nudge her with his nose, then plunged his tongue inside her. In and out, in and out, as he slid his hands under her backside and squeezed. He was masterful, as if he was so completely in sync with her that he knew exactly how much pressure to apply, how long his strokes should be, how long they should last. He brought her to the brink—one so high up that she felt a rush of vertigo—then let her slide back a little. Brought her there again, then withdrew.

“Oh, God,” she moaned, digging her fingers into the ground, thrusting herself toward him. “God, Aaron, God, don’t stop.”

It was delicious torment. Endless, spectacular torment.

Then, at last, he pushed her over the edge and she cried out, let out a scream that everyone in the world must be able to hear. Every nerve in her body seemed to catch fire all at once and burn white-hot. She could barely breathe, could feel her heart thundering against her ribs. There were tears streaming down her cheeks into her ears as the heat ebbed slowly away, and for a moment she couldn’t feel him there, didn’t know where he’d gone.

Please
, she thought.
Please don’t go.

She struggled to sit up, thinking she might die suddenly if he was truly gone. But he was still there, sitting cross-legged on the ground, looking as calm and unbothered as if he’d been listening to someone read a book aloud.

“You like that,” he quipped.

She swatted him hard on one of his muscular shoulders. That made him grin harder, as if he’d just played some spectacular joke on her.

“I thought you were gone,” she said past the enormous lump in her throat.

He was silent for a moment, solemn now. “I will never be gone, Abby,” he told her. “I will never, ever be gone.”

Aaron woke deep in the woods, back in human form, curled up in a bed of moss and fallen leaves. The early morning was cool enough that he shivered as he stood up, wishing that the wolf had chosen to fall asleep a little closer to his clothing. Running back to where he’d left his jeans and shirt warmed him up, though, and by the time he reached them he felt comfortable.

For more than one reason, he realized.

He’d been with Abby during the night, in the dream world made possible by the bond.

Abby…

He’d never experienced the dream world before, but had heard enough of the other wolves talk about it that it had come as no surprise to him. In fact, he’d gone to sleep hoping that it would happen, that he could make love with his mate even though she was tucked up safely in Granny Sara’s house, out of his reach.

That wouldn’t last much longer, he promised himself. He’d find out who had attacked Luca, then he and Abby could stand in front of the elders.

Voices in the woods caught his attention, Caleb’s among them.

He’d never thought of any of his packmates as being particularly inept or stupid, but they were taking far too much time with this. Luca hadn’t been attacked by a spirit, something with no shape, no scent; he’d been attacked by another wolf.

There were clues. There had to be clues.

Rather than join those who were still searching the glens, he returned to the last place he had seen his brother: the clearing around the stream, where he and Abby had been bathing in the deeper water of the pool. Because he knew exactly where his brother had stood, he was easily able to find Luca’s footprints and then follow them into the woods. He saw where Luca had shifted, and where the trail went from there. Not back toward the settlement; Luca had headed toward the rocky banks of the island’s southern shore, the place where the boats were kept.

There, Aaron picked up the traces of a different kind of scent. Luca had been angry and frustrated up to that point. But here, where the island met the sea, his thoughts and emotions had turned.

He’d been thinking of the human girl he’d left behind.

Had mourned for her.

That scent was all over the ground, all over the foliage: terrible need, desire, love, loneliness. It was so thick, almost a full day later, that it made Aaron’s heart ache. Luca had left someone he loved behind—someone he had never even spoken about to Aaron before yesterday.

Had he spoken to
anyone
about her? Aaron wondered. Did she still speak about Luca? Did she still care?

It was an awful situation, bad enough that he tipped back his head and howled out over the water.

The mainland wasn’t visible from where he was standing, but he could picture it: noisy, crowded, full of vile smells. He’d found nothing there that had appealed to him enough to make him want to stay, although some of the humans had been friendly and kind. It was an ugly place, really, completely unlike the island.

Could he go back there, and stay, if Abby wanted him to?

Was that what Luca had been thinking about when he’d sat here a day ago? He’d mentioned a quest to their mother. Had he been looking at the boats yesterday, thinking about going back now to find the girl he loved so much?

Allison.

You should have gone
, Aaron thought.
Then none of this would have happened. You’d be safe now. Unharmed.

Shaking his head, he moved away from the shore, back into the woods.

He hadn’t gone very far when he picked up yet another scent, one he wouldn’t have been able to detect if the wolf who’d left it hadn’t been so upset.

“Katrin.”

She turned her head to look at him, though her hands didn’t leave the little plants she was tending. “Aaron,” she said quietly, then went back to her work. As he’d seen her do many times, she was plucking dead leaves from the plants and working the soil at the bases of the stems, looking for insects.

“You fought with Luca yesterday,” he said.

Her shoulders stiffened and her breath came out in a huff. “When is Luca not quarreling with someone? He fought with
you
yesterday, didn’t he? That’s who your brother is.”

“Near the boats. Your scent is there.”

“It’s not your concern, Aaron.”

“I think it is my concern, Katrin. I think it’s very much my concern. My brother is lying in that house”—he jerked his head toward home—“unconscious, and he very well may die. He was attacked by someone who stabbed him nearly to death. So, yes, it is my concern who he had words with yesterday.”

He moved around her family’s garden bed and stood staring at her with his fists on his hips until she surrendered and stood up. Almost unconsciously, she brushed the dirt from her hands. He could see her fighting to remain calm; her wolf’s frenzied struggling was very visible in her eyes.

“Did you do this, Kat?” he asked. “Did you attack Luca? If I go back and scent him carefully, will I smell you on him?”

Her head jerked from side to side.

“
Katrin
.”

He tried to tell himself that she would never have done that. That she and Luca had been fast friends for so long that she would never want to harm him—but if she felt the call, the need to mate with him, even though he’d been refusing her for years… That sort of thing could be overwhelming. He’d seen wolves, both male and female, come back to the settlement looking for the healer after a mating approach had gotten out of hand. It was a deeply primal urge all of them understood, one that sometimes drove them to do stupid things.

“Katrin,” he said more softly.

Her eyes were welling with tears. She turned away from him abruptly and tried to scrub the tears away with her still-dirty hands. Her shoulders shook as she sobbed, and when he went to her to comfort her, she pushed him away.

“He won’t see,” she moaned. “He refuses to see.”

Aaron had known her his entire life, knew her more than well enough to understand that she was weeping not because Luca had turned her away but because he was so close to death. That knowledge gripped him deep in his gut and made him confront for the first time that his brother could very well die before the sun went down again.

“We should go to him,” he said softly, and was grateful when Katrin didn’t refuse.

The house was so still and silent when they arrived that Aaron thought immediately that the worst had already happened, that Luca had died sometime during the night. He could barely breathe until he forced himself to look into his and Luca’s room and saw his brother’s chest rising and falling and heard the faint rasp of his breathing. It might be his imagination, he thought, but to his eyes Luca looked the smallest bit better than he had the evening before.

Behind him, Katrin groaned. When he turned, she was leaning heavily against the door frame.

And across the main room, Jeremiah was sitting slumped in his favorite chair, the one nearest the fireplace. Aaron had never seen him look so weak and defeated. It was no doubt from exhaustion, but still, his father had always been a force to be reckoned with, one of the most strong-willed wolves in the pack. To see him so defenseless now was a powerful blow.

“Where’s Mother?” Aaron asked in as low a tone as he could.

Jeremiah tipped his head toward the closed bedroom door. “Sleeping. She was restless all night, but she’s finally sleeping. Don’t disturb her.” To Katrin he said, “Sit with Luca if you like.”

“He wouldn’t want me,” she said.

“Be a friend,” Jeremiah countered. “Not a fool.”

She gave in to that and sank down on the chair that Aaron had pulled up beside Luca’s bed the day before. Aaron saw her hand flutter; clearly, she wanted to take Luca’s hand but thought it was better not to.

Once again, he tried to wonder if she was guilty.

“Come and sit,” Jeremiah said.

Feeling more than a little exhaustion himself, in spite of the hours of rest he’d gotten and the comfort of Abby’s company—and their mating—in his dream, Aaron wobbled a little as he sat down. His legs felt like they might object to his trying to stand up again, and he hoped he’d have no reason to rise for at least a few minutes, that his father wouldn’t send him off to do something.

“Do you understand your position?” Jeremiah asked.

Aaron raised a brow in response. “In what respect?”

“In respect to this family. To the pack.”

“I’ve always understood that, Father. I’m loyal to both. You know that. I don’t think I’ve ever given you reason to doubt that.”

Jeremiah grumbled softly. “If Luca cannot heal, if it happens that we lose him, you become the eldest son. The only son. When I go, you become the head of the family. Its patriarch.”

That was something Aaron had never really pondered, but he said, “I know.”

“And you would do that with a human at your side.”

Now?
Aaron thought.
We’re going back to that now, when Luca is lying there with poison in his veins?

He thought about Luca’s human girl, his beloved Allison, and for a moment considered blurting the information out to his father, that Luca too had given his heart to a mainlander. He stopped himself only when he caught sight of Katrin sitting with her face buried in her hands, consumed with grief.

“Can you fulfill those responsibilities?” Jeremiah asked. “You, who’ve sidestepped the rules time and again?”

“You talk as if I’m the only one who’s ever done that.”

It was part of their rites of passage: questioning, arguing, flaunting the rules. Running away. Indiscriminate mating. That was partly why the elders had begun shipping each adolescent to the mainland for a few months, so they could see what the “other” world was like. So they could be among humans.

Once in a while, a young wolf refused to come back. He or she would run off to join another pack, or would fade into human society, never to be heard from again.

The elders had always seemed to understand that need to balk, to question. After all, they had been through it themselves.

“This family is precious to me,” Aaron said. “That has never not been true, even during my Involvement with the humans.”

His father’s hands were trembling. Aaron had never seen that happen before, even when his father was enraged, even when his wolf was all but clawing out through his chest and Jeremiah was doing his utmost to hold it back. It made Aaron think that in all the world, there was nothing as powerful as grief—even when there was nothing to grieve, not yet, because Luca was still alive.

“I’m loyal to this family,” Aaron said. “To the pack. That will always be true. I’ll fulfill my responsibilities, whatever they are. But, Father—I will do it with Abby at my side.”

Jeremiah’s features sharpened, turned angry and confrontational.

“Do you want to fight me?” Aaron asked. “Will that solve something? Then come to the clearing and fight.”

For a long, painful stretch of time, Jeremiah was silent.

Then he said, in such a way that it seemed to come from the very core of him, “Leave me. I need to think.”

There was a place in the woods Aaron had discovered as a very young wolf, one where the rest of the pack didn’t seem to go. His young self had delighted in that, in finding a secret place, a spot he could sit in to think, to drink in the sounds and smells of the island, to wonder what the future would bring. To the best of his knowledge, even now no one else went there, which made him wonder if it was enchanted somehow, if that particular place was intended just for him.

When he was a boy, it had seemed enormous, a world separate from everywhere else. Now he could see that it was just a tiny clear spot in the middle of a cluster of trees, half-full of ferns and low shrubs, with barely enough room for him to sit.

Still, it was big enough.

He brushed aside a wide stripe of acorn caps to smooth the ground and sat down cross-legged, then lifted his knees and wrapped his arms around his legs, making himself smaller, a part of his surroundings, truly hidden by the ferns and bushes.

Abby found him anyway.

“You should be with Granny Sara,” he told her with some alarm as she struggled to sit down close to him. “It’s not safe out here.”

She grunted and shook her head. “I can’t—he won’t leave.”

“Who?”

“Micah.”

Aaron’s wolf stirred inside him. “Micah? What’s he doing there? He has his own house.”

“I don’t know.”

“How long has he been there?”

“Since yesterday. In the afternoon, I guess. I don’t know what time it was. I thought he might leave when it got dark, but he spent the whole night huddled up in front of the fire.” She made a face. “He wanted an actual fire. It’s as hot as a sauna in there now, but he says he’s still cold. And he just—he keeps looking at me. It gave me the creeps. I had to leave.”

When Aaron bristled, she gestured to quiet him. “He’s got more right to be there than I do. He’s her grandson, she said.” Again, she shook her head. “It’s all right. It’s fine. I’d—I’d rather be with you anyway.”

The smile that flooded across her face seemed brighter than the morning sunlight filtering down through the trees. Yes, they’d been together during the dream, but to Aaron it seemed like forever since he’d held her, touched her skin, listened to the sweet sound of her voice. She was close enough now that a warmth kindled in his belly and his cock stirred awake in the confines of his jeans.

“Will it be a long time?” she asked. “Till the elders can see us again?” Then her eyes widened. “I’m sorry. That was awful of me. How’s your brother? Is he–”

“No change.”

“I’m sorry.”

There
had
been a change, Aaron reminded himself. There was a bit more color in Luca’s face this morning. He hadn’t seemed to be struggling, just resting, sunk in a deep, healing sleep.

Maybe hope was doing its job, after all. He wasn’t foolish enough to truly believe that, but it was something to hold on to.

“Have they figured out who—” Abby began.

“No. There are too many scents. No real clues.” He shook his head.

She opened her mouth to say something, then closed it again. He peered at her curiously, encouraging her to speak, but some time went by before she said anything.

“I just… You know, on the mainland, we’ve got better ways of looking for clues than sniffing people.”

“It tells us a great deal.”

“And right now it’s not telling you anything. If you had other ways—”

Aaron shook his head again. “With machines, and chemicals? We can’t, Abby. It’s not our way. We have to do what’s always been done, and trust that what’s meant to happen will happen.” She scoffed at that a little, so he said, “If you intend to stay here, you’ll need to do that too. Trust. And you’ll need to be strong.”

She sighed. “All right. If you need me to be, I’ll do the best I can.” Then she wrapped a hand around one of his and squeezed it. To his surprise, her touch made him feel a surge of sadness, but whether it was for her or for himself, he couldn’t tell. “We’ll be together,” she said firmly. “We can handle anything, if we’re together.”

He took her head in his hands and kissed her tenderly, then let her go. “There’ll be a lot of pressure. Particularly after what’s happened.”

“I understand.”

He wasn’t sure she did. No; he was sure she didn’t. She’d seen only a glimpse of what life was like here on the island, had spent only a few days without the comforts and conveniences she was used to. No matter where she lived on the mainland, he was certain she could have a hot bath with only a couple of minutes’ preparation. She could go to a store and pick out any type of food she had a craving for. She had no need to fear any but the most violent of storms. It was no easy thing to move from a life like that to life among the pack.

What if she changed her mind? he wondered. In a month, a year? If she became pregnant and refused to believe that the child could be born safely in a place like this?

The elders would ask questions like that, and wouldn’t be swayed by her assurances that she’d be fine.

“Where was that place?” she asked.

He almost didn’t hear the question, he was so lost in his own thoughts. He had to blink them away and clear his head with a couple of deep breaths. He almost asked her what place she meant, but understood when he looked into her eyes. She meant the dream place, that field of flowers.

“Your imagination, I suppose,” he said. “I don’t really know.”

“It was beautiful.”

“Yes. It was.”

“It was… Everything seemed so simple there. Just you and me. It’s like that at the cabin. Everything’s so basic. I love it there. I don’t understand why it’s used as a punishment. It didn’t seem like a punishment to me.”

The bond
, Aaron thought. She wouldn’t have felt like she was being punished if they’d been stranded on a rock in the middle of the ocean, without food or fresh water, being constantly battered by the waves. The bond made everything feel not only tolerable, but extraordinary. Remarkable. Special.

You should take her home
, he thought.
Let her be back among her people for a few days, then ask her again where she wants to be.

She reached for him, and he wanted nothing more than to make love with her again, to ignore the rest of the world as if it were no more real than that field of flowers in the dreamland.

“Will you do it?” she asked.

“Do what?”

“Do… what you do. Turn into a wolf. Show me.”

“Abby, this… this isn’t a good time.”

But when the right time might be, he couldn’t decide, so, nodding, he pulled off his jeans and shirt and shoes and set them aside. He crouched down, low to the ground, hands splayed open in front of him. He took a couple of deep breaths to steady himself, then lowered the walls that held the wolf at bay.

The shift was never painless. This time was worst than most, because he was afraid he’d open his eyes to find that Abby had run away.

His bones and muscles contorted and reshaped themselves. Fur emerged from his skin.

He was a beautiful animal, he’d been told. Graceful, powerful, golden-eyed. Only the fur on his back and head was dark; the rest of it was blond, almost white. He was long-legged, for a wolf, with a thick, expressive tail. He’d never been injured, had no ragged ear, no scars, no missing toes. Most of the time, he was proud and confident. He had no reason not to be.

He opened his eyes, thinking he would find himself alone, but Abby was kneeling on the ground only a few steps away. She seemed ready to coax him to come closer.

I’m not a dog
, Abby, he thought.

“Can you understand me now?” she asked.

He nodded.

“You just can’t speak.”

He shook his head. Then he flared his nostrils, searching for her scent. There was no fear in it. No arousal, either. Just… curiosity.

After a minute he padded over to her and gave her a warning look, a sternly cocked brow. He supposed her natural instinct was to pet him, to scratch him behind the ears. That would feel good to the wolf, because he trusted her, had bonded with her, but it would be a mistake to relax like that now, to let down his guard.

“I don’t know what to think,” she sighed. “This is—I keep thinking I’ll wake up, and I’ll be back in bed at Dolphin Cove.”

Aaron stepped back and pulled in a deep breath. A minute later, he was a man again.

“Dolphins?” he said. “There are no dolphins here.”

Abby sighed. “It’s the resort I was at. Maybe they figured they wouldn’t get as many customers if they called it Shark Cove, or Funny Ugly Fish Cove. I don’t know. I live on a street called Elm Crest, and there aren’t any elms there. All the elms died fifty years ago. People do stupid things. They give things stupid names. It’s all about the PR.” Shaking her head, she looked past him in the direction of the settlement. “Are you still you?” she asked. “When you’re… like that? The wolf?”

“Mostly.”

“Do you still…”

She cut herself off. Suddenly, she looked wistful, like the little girl who’d been told long ago that there would be no more car trips with her mother.

“Do I what?” Aaron asked.

“Do you care about me? When you’re that… other?”

“With every beat of my heart,” Aaron said.

He listened for the beat of her heart, the sound of her breathing. No, she wasn’t afraid. She truly wasn’t afraid—not here, now, with him. Grateful for that beyond words, Aaron leaned in to her and kissed her softly.

Then, so suddenly that it made Aaron’s heart leap in his chest, Daniel’s voice interrupted them.

Daniel, saying Aaron’s name in a growl.

When Aaron looked up, the watcher was standing there, with Caleb and Mason behind him, and several of the younger wolves behind them.

There was no mistaking their intentions.

“Come away from the human,” Daniel said. “Do it now.”