Wolf (12 page)

He smiled for the first time. “You was worried about us, huh?”

She smiled back at him. “Of course I was. Why wouldn’t I be?”

He shrugged. “I thought, maybe, you was cryin’ ‘cause we scared you so bad,
chère
.”

The urge to comfort him as she had Mac smote her. She struggled against it for fear Mac would take exception and she’d precipitate another fight. She didn’t want them fighting with each because of her. They’d been friends and close companions for years.

She didn’t want to ruin that for them. She especially didn’t want to when she knew they depended on one another more now than ever. “I wasn’t afraid when I saw y’all. I was relieved because I knew you’d come to protect me.”

Hawk returned in the middle of that explanation. He flicked a censorious frown at her as he squatted down and carefully placed the pot of water he’d brought in the edge of the fire. “That why you didn’t call out? You worried about us getting hurt?”

Sylvie looked at him in dismay. “I was too afraid to call out.”

His lips tightened. “You were trying to keep quiet. I saw you, so don’t bother to lie about it.”

“If I’d screamed they could’ve heard me to the coast!” she said a little defensively.

“I don’t give a fuck if they heard you in China!” Hawk growled. “That damned cat would’ve eat you alive, baby! Did you think about that?”

Sylvie bit her lip.

“Oh hell! Don’t start crying at me, damn it! You scared me out of ten years of my life and I’m pissed off about it! I ought to beat your ass!”

“I doan think I’ll let you do that,
mon ami
,” Beau said tightly.

Hawk glared at him. “I didn’t say I was going to, god damn it! I said I ought to.”

Sylvie swallowed against the knot of emotion in her throat. “I promised I wouldn’t cause any trouble,” she reminded him.

“And you think getting’ mauled …! Never mind!” he said gruffly, dragging her up against his side and squeezing her hard. “Don’t cry! Everybody will be trying to kick my ass and I’m too damned tired and weak from fright to handle it right now. Just don’t do anything like that anymore!”

Sylvie would’ve chuckled at that if he hadn’t been squeezing the breath out of her. Luckily, he was satisfied to give her a quick squeeze and let go of her.

“God! I hope they find something big. I could eat the ass end of a buffalo,” he muttered when he released her.

* * * *

When Mac had found a likely looking spot near the stream again and settled to wait, he found himself thinking over what Sylvie had said. At least, he did once he’d managed to put their lovemaking from his mind, which took him a while. Little by little, though, he turned his mind from his satisfaction about that to dissatisfaction about his
67 complaining stomach and, as he did, he thought about what she’d said, wondering about it.

She was right, he finally concluded. He hadn’t really been aware of calling the change when he needed it, but he had willed himself to change because he’d needed to move faster to reach her in time. That led him to wonder if he could call it at any time he felt a need for the expansion of his senses and abilities. Closing his eyes, he focused on trying to summon it. Nothing happened. He didn’t feel the strange disorientation or the stinging that he usually felt when his flesh began to remold itself.

Cavanaugh was staring at him curiously when he opened his eyes again.

“What’re you doing?”

Mac released a huff of disgust. “Nothing I don’t guess.” He debated with himself briefly. “Sylvie thinks we can control it, make it happen when we want to and change back when we want to.”

Cavanaugh looked at him like he’d lost his mind. “I don’t know about you, but it scares the shit out of me every time I feel it coming over me. I don’t fucking
want
to call it.”

Mac shrugged. “It would make it easier to catch something to eat. I’m fucking starving. It’s like … it takes everything out of me every time and I’m so hungry afterward my stomach feels like it’s going to cave in.”

Cavanaugh rubbed his stomach. “Don’t remind me. I’m trying not to think about it.”

Mac closed his eyes again. This time, instead of chanting in his head, he focused on his body as he might when he was trying to gather himself to jump. Almost immediately, he felt the strange sense of floating. He forced himself to relax, to let it happen instead of struggling against it as he usually did. He felt his body remolding itself, but this time, he didn’t feel the burning pain—some discomfort but nothing like he’d felt at other times.

When he opened his eyes, he discovered that Cavanaugh was gaping at him as if he’d never seen him like that before.

He also discovered when he tried to speak that all that came out was a strange sound.

“How the fuck did you do that?”

Mac stared at him uneasily and finally tipped his head to look down at himself.

The fur was there, and the paws tipped with lethal claws, but his arms didn’t look long and thick and his pants looked strangely empty. His heart jerked in fear and then he realized his legs had shortened to match his arms.

His fucking
dick
was hairy!

What the fuck?

“You look … like a
—a really big, really fucking scary looking
.”

Startled but feeling a great deal of relief, Mac focused on trying to change back.

Satisfied that he actually did have control, he stopped in half transition and focused on trying to regain the form of a
. He met Cavanaugh’s gaze for a long moment when he’d fully transitioned and then lifted his head, seeking prey. Almost immediately, he caught scent of a peccary. He began following the scent, but when he’d gone a short distance, he stopped and looked back at Cavanaugh.

After staring at him for a long moment, Cavanaugh closed his eyes and focused
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on trying to summon the change. Mac watched as he shifted from man to beast man and then to a form he assumed was much like his own. Uttering a soft whine, Cavanaugh scented the air and then followed him.

Mac felt a sense of exhilaration as he bounded through the forest, an odd mixture of anticipation and the hunger that had driven him to try to summon the change. His mouth began to water as the scent grew stronger and the certainty settled in him that he was closing in on his prey. His ears picked up the faint sounds of pig-like noises in the distance and he tested the wind again to make certain it wasn’t carrying his scent to his prey.

The currents shifted around him and, as they did, he changed directions, moving steadily toward the family of peccary, more stealthily as he realized he was virtually upon them. Jerking his head as a signal to Cavanaugh when he finally gained a vantage point that allowed him to see the peccaries, he moved in the opposite direction.

The peccary caught their scent, stiffened for a moment and lifted their heads, snuffling at the air. Screaming, they began to dart away in as many different directions as there were peccary. Mac marked his target and leapt into the center of them even as they began to scatter, catching the beast he’d chosen by the throat and shaking his head to tear the flesh. It screamed again, gurgling as he locked his jaws tighter. The fight went out of it abruptly and a sense of triumph rushed through him. Lifting his head, he uttered a cry of victory to the heavens, urging the rest of his pack to join them in their feast.

Cavanaugh, who’d killed his own, joined him, uttering a series of yips.

* * * *

Sylvie shuddered as the distant sound of howling wolves drifted to her on the night air. She rubbed her hands along her arms to smooth the goosebumps that had leapt to life. “They have wolves … here?” Neither Beau nor Hawk answered her. They’d stiffened just as she had at the sound. It unnerved her when they both stood abruptly, glancing around as if trying to pinpoint the direction of the howls.

“Hawk? Beau?”

Neither man seemed to hear her. Instead, they began to move away from the fire, slowly at first and then rushing. Dumbfounded, fearful that the wolves were coming to attack, she shot to her feet to stare after them. She was about to call to them again when she saw them change. Almost from one stride to the next, they shifted from man to man beast—and then into wolves.

Sylvie blinked, feeling her jaw slide to half-mast in stunned disbelief, but there was no disputing that, where they’d been before, she saw wolves bounding away until they disappeared into the shadows of the jungle. She wasn’t certain how long she stood staring at the darkness where they disappeared when she heard more howls, closer than before.

She sank weakly to the ground again. Hawk and Beau coming back, she wondered? Or the pair that had called before?

Called
to
them, she realized abruptly.

It had to have been Mac and Cavanaugh, but how?

It was hard enough to swallow that they could transform themselves from men into man beasts, but wolves?

She was insane! If they could mutate at will from one thing to another, there was
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no reason why they had to take any specific form! Or maybe they did? Maybe they just hadn’t completely changed before?

There was no point in searching her mind for any answers. Nothing in the world could do what they’d done—even as men—nothing
known
. Nothing accepted as ‘real’, she realized, because no one believed such a thing as werewolves actually existed. She certainly hadn’t. She wasn’t sure she could accept it having seen it with her own eyes, but how else to explain it? Dementia?

She could believe that whatever they had contracted in the jungle might make them hallucinate, but they weren’t just imagining that they were changing, they
were
morphing.

Unless she was hallucinating because she’d contracted it, too?

If she was, she decided a lot of other people had also been affected. The men who’d experimented on them and that were determined to chase them down and destroy them obviously believed.

A rustle in the underbrush drew her from her thoughts after a time and she felt her heart accelerate with sudden fear. Cautiously, she rose up and stared into the darkness, hoping against hope that she would see the men returning.

She didn’t see the men. She saw four pairs of eyes staring straight at her from the underbrush. The eyes glowed eerily in the light from the campfire. “Mac?” she whispered shakily, too unnerved to manage more.

One of the wolves lifted its head. After staring at her for a long moment, he lowered his head again to something in the grass at his feet—and then Mac stood up and began striding toward her.

Shaking with relief, Sylvie tried to get up and finally gave up and sat back as Mac strolled into the small clearing stark naked and dropped something that looked like a pig.

As she stared at the thing in horror, a second one hit the ground and she looked to see Cavanaugh, equally naked and obviously happy to see her.

“You gonna carve it up with that thing?” Hawk asked drily.

Thankfully, Hawk and Beau were wearing their pants, though it appeared they’d just skimmed into them. Beau was still closing his fly and, although Hawk had zipped his, he’d left the waistband open and a lot of interesting skin showing that made Sylvie’s belly flutter.

Cavanaugh shot him a bird. “I left my pants when I shifted.”

“That’s something that’s going to be a real pain in the ass,” Mac said irritably.

“Who’s skinning? I don’t have my knife either.”

“We’ll clean them since you two took them down and y’all can go get your pants.” He glanced at Sylvie as he shouldered one of the wild pigs. “Anything gets after you, you scream like a banshee. Got it?”

Sylvie smiled at him a little weakly. “Scream like a banshee,” she repeated obediently, wondering if he had any idea how ironic it was for her to scream for predators to rush to her aid that were probably twice as dangerous as anything else in the jungle.

His eyes gleamed, but he merely turned and left, following Beau, who’d already grabbed one of the pigs.

They’d cleaned both and returned before Mac and Cavanaugh finally got back.

Mac’s eyes were gleaming with excitement when he crouched down beside her. She could feel the energy radiating from him.

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“I guess you were right,” he said finally. “You just have to accept the things you can’t change.”

She managed a tentative smile. She
was
glad that he seemed more at ease, but she thought he hadn’t accepted so much as he’d embraced it and she couldn’t help but worry how it would change him.

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They all changed. Sylvie spent most of her time trying to convince herself that they hadn’t or that it was something else. They’d been practically strangers, but their circumstances had been extreme. They’d been thrown together in a survival situation where there wasn’t a lot of room for social graces. She’d felt, even though she’d only been with them a few days, that she knew them and knew them well, quite possibly better than anyone else since they’d shown each other sides of themselves that few people ever saw. She knew very little about their pasts, but she knew
them
. They had all the qualities a woman looked for in a man. They were strong, hard working, responsible, protective, and competent. Beyond those things, they were handsome and charming, honest and honorable.

They didn’t lose any of those fine qualities. The change was far more subtle than that, so elusive she couldn’t quite pinpoint why she felt they had changed.

Then again, maybe it was purely her imagination?

Maybe she was noticing the effect of the changes around them on their behavior and not an actual shift in their fundamental character?

The discovery that they actually had control of the changes in them and that it could be used to their benefit had relieved their anxiety and tension. It had lifted a burden from their shoulders that she hadn’t understood or realized how deeply it was bothering them until it was gone.

She supposed it was even understandable that the discovery that they could do something no one else was capable of would go to their heads and that it would be something exciting, something they would want to explore and understand to the fullest.

It was their absorption with it, she finally decided, that was worrying her. They’d been handed amazing powers. Would it corrupt them? Would they become arrogant with it? Become so self-absorbed that they lost their empathy with ‘lesser mortals’?

They weren’t completely absorbed with it. No one had actually said anything, not to her or within her hearing anyway, but they knew she’d been intimate with Mac. She’d been keenly aware of their physical needs before she’d managed to have her way with Mac. She thought that was at least part of the reason she’d been so preoccupied with sex herself—still was. They were young, handsome, and virile and that was enough to make it hard for her to ignore her own needs. Add horny to the mixture and it was no wonder she’d been aroused to such a state herself that she was practically champing at the bit for them to
get
hold of her.

That dangerously explosive aspect of their situation was worse, not better, after she’d had sex with Mac. The others knew and it was like waving a steak under the nose of a starving man. She’d ‘fed’ one. The others wanted their piece.

She wouldn’t have minded obliging them. She had a thing for Mac, but she was a long way from immune to the others and she knew her ‘thing’ with Mac wasn’t going anywhere. She also knew it was dangerous for her to allow herself to begin to think it might and, for that reason and others, it would be better not to play favorites. Because
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playing favorites was liable to turn them against each other and she didn’t want that.

Unfortunately, giving freely to the ‘cause’ might also create friction between them, especially if Mac was possessive about his pussy, and he appeared to be. He’d seemed to be possessive before, but she wasn’t sure if it was him guarding the only available

‘source’ or if he’d just been trying to protect her from being gangbanged.

She didn’t honestly know
what
to do. She didn’t think it was a healthy situation, though. Ordinarily, she wouldn’t have considered that she was under any obligation to appease their physical needs just because she was there. For her, it was personal, and they had no right to expect her to put out just because they needed the relief and she was handy. Ordinarily, she would’ve felt abused to be looked upon as ‘the pussy’ instead of Sylvie, a person who had value well beyond what she was carrying between her legs.

There was no considering the situation as typical, though. No one had choices.

None of the men had access to other women, and she was experienced enough and savvy enough to understand that the sex drive of men, particularly young men, was completely different than it was for women. They got build up pain—or blue balls as they often referred to it. She didn’t have balls herself, but she’d experienced pressure pain before and it was no picnic even if it wasn’t life threatening.

Maybe, she thought,
that
was why they seemed different, seemed as if they’d changed? They knew she’d given and it rankled that she was holding out on them?

She didn’t think Mac had kissed and told. She wouldn’t have been tremendously surprised if he had. They were buddies and buddies, she knew, often told each other things just like girls told their best friends things. She would’ve been disappointed in him if he had, but she didn’t think he had. She actually didn’t think he needed to.

He’d been so perky since they’d had sex that it was hard to miss and harder to misinterpret.

As pleased as she was about it, both with herself and him, she did wish he’d managed to be a little less obvious. Maybe then the others wouldn’t be staring holes in her all the time and looking at her like they couldn’t decide whether they most wanted to strangle her for holding out, or eat her alive.

He made it more obvious the following day. They broke for camp earlier than they had on either of the previous days and Mac made a point of assigning himself the task of ‘keeping an eye’ on her while she bathed. Despite her embarrassment and uneasiness about it, her blood began to surge with anticipation the moment he announced that he’d go down to the lake with her while the others hunted for food and set up camp.

Hope and doubt warred within her when he walked her down. He seemed tense, maybe even a little distracted, and that actually didn’t augur well for what she’d thought he had in mind. When they reached the small pool of water, he left her standing on the bank and disappeared. She waited hopefully, and waited. She’d just decided she’d completely misunderstood when he reappeared.

“I found a better place,” he said, taking her hand and leading her off into the brush. After a few minutes, they reached an area where the brush had been thoroughly flattened, as if a small herd of some wild animals had settled there briefly, that almost seemed to create a nest.

Stopping when they’d reached the center, Mac turned to her, grasped the bottom of her shirt and pulled it off over her head before she’d entirely grasped his intentions.

Dropping it, he dragged her against his chest and lowered his head to match his mouth to
73

hers in almost the same motion, so swiftly it was dizzying and completely disorienting—

especially since he carried her down onto the grass. They broke contact briefly on touchdown, but she’d barely had time to suck in a breath when he was all over her.

Vaguely disoriented, even faintly alarmed by his feverish assault, it took a handful of moments for the heat to kick in. Sylvie had just begun swimming in the euphoric drug of desire, when Mac broke from her lips and transferred his attention to her upper torso, alternately nuzzling and nibbling and sucking openmouthed kisses all along her face and neck, her upper chest and her breasts until she was so dizzy she felt as if she was floating. He moved restlessly against her as he returned to her lips, rubbing his bare chest and belly against hers and arousing her senses until she felt as feverish and needy as he seemed to be, began thrashing against him with a matching desperation.

He pulled away almost the moment she did, caught the waist of her pants and snatched them off of her. Falling over her again, he pressed the hard ridge of his erection rhythmically against her mound, insinuated his hips between her thighs.

She was warm and wet—eager for him when she felt him reach between them, unfasten his pants and guide himself to the mouth of her sex. She lifted to meet him, helping him attain the deep connection she was already aching for—had ached for almost from the time he’d left her the night before. The battle for possession almost undid them both, almost finished it before they’d even started. Her flesh clung to his feverishly despite the moisture that had coated her inner walls. It was almost too much to take and still maintain any control.

She shuddered ecstatically when she finally felt him grinding against her, enjoying their deep connection in and of itself enough she almost yielded to the urge to ask him just to stay that way for a few moments so that she could enjoy it more fully.

The moment he began to move rhythmically, however, stirring the heat inside of her, she completely forgot the urge. This was better, much better.

She clung to the precipice as long as she could, clung to him, as thrilled by the bunching and flexing of his muscles beneath her palms as she was enthralled by the feel of his cock coasting back and forth along her channel. Too soon, it seemed to her, she reached a point of no return, where she couldn’t keep her body in abeyance any longer.

The bubble of pleasurable tension that had been building and building shattered. She gulped back a sharp cry at the force of it, burrowed her face against him, and groaned mindlessly as the convulsions rocked her.

He released a pent up breath of his own in a ragged groan, began to shake and then to drive himself into her in hard, fast thrusts, arching his back and grinding against her as his body yielded up his seed. Still drifting in her own private utopia, she watched his face from beneath her lashes as it contorted with ecstasy, feeling a rush that made goosebumps break out all over her, feeling a sense of euphoria and satisfaction that almost surpassed the glorious sense of release that had just consumed her.

He allowed his head to drop forward on his shoulders as the powerful release drained him. He studied her face when he opened his eyes. Lowering himself to rest against her, he covered her mouth in a leisurely kiss and finally rolled off of her. The brush crackled as he settled on his back, draping an arm across his eyes.

The jungle was muggy. She understood the desire to cool off. She really did.

The kiss had been his praise and his appreciation and should’ve appeased her, but she wanted a little cuddling. When she’d cooled a little herself, she rolled onto her side to
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study him, wondering if he’d drifted off. It was impossible to tell when she could only see the lower part of his face, but he lay so still ….

She sighed, dismissing the urge to touch. It would wake him and he was tired.

None of them had gotten much sleep. They only paused briefly to allow a few hours of rest and even then the men rotated. Someone was always awake and on watch.

She frowned at that thought. She couldn’t remember that they had the night before, but it had been part of the established routine in the beginning. Maybe she hadn’t noticed?

They hadn’t moved in formation during the day either. From the time they’d left the coast, they’d moved single file through the forest—one man at point, one guarding the rear. She supposed, loosely, they’d still had a man at point and one to guard the rear, but they hadn’t traveled single file. They’d spread out through the brush, sometimes disappearing for brief periods before they reappeared again. One or the other had always walked with her, or carried her when she got so tired she was staggering, but they hadn’t bunched up like before.

A new tactic to make it harder to follow them?

Or was it that they no longer needed to have eye contact to communicate with one another? Had their senses and their awareness of their surroundings expanded to such a degree that they could survey a much wider swath of the jungle by spreading out?

Mac hadn’t sent anyone back to check their back-trail the night before either.

Maybe they were convinced that they’d managed to completely elude their hunters, that they hadn’t discovered where they landed and went in to the jungle?

Mac roused. “It burns,” he muttered.

She wondered if he was dreaming. “What burns?”

“Your eyes. They’re burning a hole in me,” he murmured, his lips curling up at one corner.

Embarrassed that he knew she’d been staring, she chuckled. “I was just wondering when you were going to take your pants off to do me, big boy!” she said teasingly.

He lifted his head and looked down at himself. “I guess when I’m not in such a big hurry to get inside you that I don’t feel like waiting to get shed of them,” he responded huskily, his eyes gleaming now.

“Ah! Any day now!”

“Yeah—any day—maybe fifty or sixty years down the road.”

Sylvie felt her throat close. She knew he was just joking but it still gave her a pang, knowing it probably wouldn’t even be fifty or sixty days. She didn’t want to think about it, though. Smiling with an effort, she sat up. “God I need a bath! I’m so sticky!”

He chuckled. “Sorry about that. I was backed up. You’re lucky I didn’t blow your brains out the first time.”

“Gross!” Sylvie felt her face heat. She laughed, even though she was horrified.

“I was talking about the sweat.”

He grinned at her. “It’s hard work. I’m a little out of shape. Next time I’ll fuck up again. It’s less work when you’re doing the pushups.”

Shaking her head, Sylvie got up. “Come on, lazy. Let’s get a bath and get back before everybody starts to wonder what’s taking us so long.”