by Hettie Ivers
“He’s not hurting her. And it’s not his intention to do so—least not tonight,” Michael assured me seconds before Kendall’s mewling turned to panted, repeated shouts of “oh, God,” signaling her approaching orgasm.
Despite my dislike of Emil, I had to admit, never in the two years that we’d been roommates had I ever heard any of the men Kendall brought home get her off like that. To me, it had always been one of the saddest things about her ongoing promiscuity—the fact that she never seemed to get much satisfaction out of it.
It certainly sounded like she was now. My eyes drifted to the wall as idly I wondered what it’d be like to have sex like that—to endure so many great orgasms you had to beg the guy to stop. ’Course, I still wasn’t certain Kendall was one hundred percent on board with what was happening in there.
Michael cleared his throat softly, and I looked up to find his heavily lidded gaze on me, his jaw tight. “She likes it. Trust me. I would stop Emil if I thought she didn’t—if I thought she was in danger.”
I believed him. I wasn’t sure why.
“Because you know you can trust me. I’m here to protect you and your roommate. Isn’t that right, Casper?”
As Kendall started squealing and coming apart, the lamp on my nightstand came on, momentarily blinding me. Then it went out again, only to rapidly switch on and off one more time.
Two blinks.
“See?” The corner of Michael’s mouth tilted up in a smile that was just shy of a smirk. “Two blinks means yes, remember?” He adjusted the covers under my chin. “Casper trusts me.”
How did he know about—?
“It’s my business to know.” His smile broadened. “Now, since I’m here to protect you—and no doubt in for a long, uncomfortable night of it—how about you repay the favor and save me a Google search by giving me your mom’s address?”
I didn’t give it out loud—because I couldn’t—but Babs’s address popped into my head, and I knew that somehow Michael saw it as plainly as if I’d handed it to him. Because he thanked me, and then he told me that the more I cooperated, the easier it would be for him to protect me from threats like Emil.
Wait—why did he need my mom’s address? What was he going to—?
“Go back to sleep, Lauren. Your mother is safe. And you won’t remember any of this in the morning.” He stood and turned away from the bed. “I’ll stay and make sure Emil doesn’t touch your mind or get too rough with Kendall.”
No. I didn’t want to fall asleep with Michael in my bedroom—watching me and listening in on my mind! But as soon as he suggested it, I could no longer keep my eyes open. And I drifted to sleep moments later to the muffled sounds of Emil grunting and growling as he fucked Kendall through another orgasm on the other side of my bedroom wall.
14
Kai
Go back.
Kill them all.
Eliminate every threat.
I kept running. Lauren wasn’t mine to defend. She wasn’t mine to claim.
Poachers. Focus on the poachers ahead.
I’d teleported from Washington to northern Canada and had been running—and attacking—in wolf form ever since. I’d taken my old route, crossing ice bridges through the Queen Elizabeth Islands, over Nares Strait, and into Greenland.
My wolf needed to kill. I needed to kill. Poachers made easy, guilt-free targets. And this was my world to defend: this barren landscape of snow and polar ice caps. How apropos.
Emotionally, I was as destitute as this land that had spawned me, as morally bereft as every poacher whose blood I spilled. I was a monster living on borrowed time, pretending to be a man, making believe that I contributed to a world in which I had never belonged. And this was my legacy: a frozen wasteland that was swiftly coming undone, thawing too quickly for the earth to digest its runoff.
I didn’t enjoy visiting here. Hadn’t been back in years. I preferred not to ponder my unexplainable origin. Returning to my homeland was always a harsh reality check. It drudged up unpleasant musings I didn’t otherwise allow myself to consider anymore, such as what my life might’ve been like if Antonio Reinoso had never found me—had never adopted me as part of his pack and forever altered the course of my existence. How much longer might I have survived? Would I ever have found my human form without the coaching and assistance of Alpha Antonio?
Antonio had discovered me—a savage arctic wolf existing in the wild—while on an expedition to Greenland. He’d identified me as a werelock and had captured and brought me back with him to Brazil. Antonio was the one who had taught me to accept my human form and to behave as a man instead of the beast I was by nature. During the seven-month journey by boat from Greenland to Brazil, he’d taught me to shift for the first time, to walk and talk and adopt the behaviors of a “civilized” being.
Antonio had taken me in and made me an integral part of his pack—of his own family. Eventually, through Antonio’s guidance, I’d learned to control my violent urges and my morbid obsession with pain, to channel my grisly fascination with dismemberment into the study of medicine and healing. Antonio had been a father to me, and his son, Alcaeus, had been my lifelong best friend.
Returning to Greenland would always bring back memories of my early years with Antonio and his family. But now, ever since seeing Lauren’s vision of my childhood here, my thoughts kept drifting back to my very first experience with seers.
It was in 1619, ten months into my immersion in the Reinoso pack, that Alpha Antonio’s wife, Alyana, began inviting seers from far and wide to visit our small compound in São Vicente, Brazil, so that they might have a look at me. No doubt, Alyana and Antonio were hoping that the seers would validate their own assessment of what I was—and more importantly, that the seers would provide insight into what my future might hold.
“I named him Kai,” Alpha Antonio announced to the gathering of seers, “because that was the sound he repeated upon shifting into his human form for the very first time.”
“Until nine and a half months ago,” Alyana inserted, directing her words to the weathered woman on her right who appeared to be the leader of this group of “seer” humans, “the boy had only existed in his wolf form. We estimate his age to be sixteen years, slightly older than our son, Alcaeus. He guards his mind well, but from what we were able to glean from his memories, he has no recollection of his parents, no memory of ever existing as anything but a wolf in the wild.”
“Mamma says he’s a werewolf reared in reverse,” Alessandra, Alyana and Antonio’s four-year-old daughter, chimed in from her seat next to mine, as if she were part of the conversation between the adults.
“Alessandra.” Alyana’s sharp hazel eyes cut to her precocious little girl. “Seen and not heard.”
“Yes, Mamma.”
Alessandra—or Lessa, as her father and brother preferred to call her—spoke and read English and Portuguese, the main languages of my new pack, far better than I could. She often pointed this out to me whenever Alyana made us sit and practice our reading together.
“I happened upon the boy in Greenland,” Antonio said. “Found him living amongst a small pack of common arctic wolves obliged to tolerate his presence only because they had to. They were terrified of him, those poor mutts.” Antonio let out a great guffaw, prompting Lessa to giggle behind her hand.
None of the seers laughed. Several fidgeted in their seats, some shot furtive glances at one another, and a few hushed whispers passed through the crowd. Upon their arrival, all of them had smelled nervous. Afraid. And none had looked me directly in the eyes.
“It seems our young Kai had been ruling the whole island with an iron paw,” Antonio proceeded with his tale. “From what I saw in his memories, the boy had taken to literally biting the heads off of any wolves who dared challenge his authority, as well as any of the Inuit who threatened him.”
“Heavens!” the old woman next to Alyana exclaimed, making several odd hand gestures over herself. Her anxious, light brown eyes flicked in my d
irection, then quickly darted away.
“In fact, I narrowly escaped decapitation myself during our first encounter,” Antonio relayed with a broad grin. “That’s how we met. Kai snuck up and attacked me—attempted to take my whole head off in one bite.” He chuckled once more. “It required the strength and magic of every werewolf and werelock I had with me on the expedition to subdue him.”
“Heartbreaking, isn’t it?” Alyana lamented, her sympathetic gaze slowly shifting from me to the woman beside her. “To think how alone the poor boy was.”
I felt a strange fluttering sensation in my stomach whenever Alyana gave me those soft, motherly looks of hers. She was the most beautiful being I’d ever seen.
The old seer woman’s eyes widened. Eventually, she nodded and mumbled in agreement.
“It took me two weeks to get him to shift into his human form for the first time,” Antonio continued. “Naturally, he still prefers his wolf form. I have to wonder if he might always.” He frowned. “But I’d say our greater concern is his fixation with dismantling living creatures in order to put them back together again. Most notably, himself.”
The roomful of seers went silent. And utterly motionless.
Lessa leaned toward a young seer woman who was sitting closest to her, and said loudly enough for the whole drawing room to hear, “He likes to tear his own limbs off and watch them grow back. Papa says he heals faster than any werelock he’s ever seen.”
“Alessandra!”
“Yes, Mamma?”
“Not appropriate conversation for young ladies.”
“Pardon, Mamma.”
“Seen and not heard,” Alyana reminded her daughter yet again. The little girl pursed her lips and nodded dutifully, slinking back in her chair as her mother returned her attention to the head seer. “I imagine you know the main reason we asked you here. You are familiar with the famed Norse legends about a werewolf bringing about the end of the world, yes?”
“Yes,” the old lady acknowledged.
“We heard that Nordic werewolves were persecuted to the point of extinction as a result,” Alyana said. “We’d been told none had survived to see the beginning of the seventeenth century, and that seers around the globe had confirmed the extinction of the arctic werewolf.”
“Yes,” the old woman affirmed. Fleetingly, her gaze drifted to me. “That is correct. None survived.”
“None but this one,” Antonio contradicted. “This boy—Kai—survived. We believe he is of Nordic werewolf and Inuit Shaman descent. His scent marks him a werelock, as do his strength and regenerative capabilities.”
“We believe he is the very last of the arctic werewolves.” Alyana’s hazel eyes sparkled with excitement. “The only white werewolf to survive extinction.”
The old lady bit her lip. “Perhaps,” she murmured distractedly. “Perhaps.”
“Perhaps?” Antonio balked. “Do you not believe us? Shall we have him shift into his white wolf form so you can see?”
The head seer raised her forefinger and shook her head. “I’m getting a vision.”
While Antonio and Alyana remained focused on the leader of the seers, my eyes skirted the room, catching the subtle knowing looks shared between the others. They disagreed with Antonio and Alyana’s assessment of me. They didn’t think I was a werelock. They knew, just as I did, that I didn’t belong here, either. I didn’t belong anywhere. There was no place for me but the cave on the island. I had to get back there.
“Kai!” Antonio’s son Alcaeus called out to me from the arched entryway. “Kai!”
I turned in his direction in time to see a long spear fly through the air and land in my right foot—the sharp tip piercing my shoe and stabbing clear through my foot to embed itself into the floor beneath.
“Alcaeus!” Alyana cried. “What did I tell you about staking people with javelins in the house?”
Alcaeus’s face screwed up. “Not to do it?”
Within seconds, Alyana had crossed the great room in order to thwack her son on the back of his head. Now she was dragging him by the ear over to me, the heavy, long skirt of her fancy dress rustling with every angry step she took.
Alyana and Antonio frequently disciplined Alcaeus. I got a weird ache in my chest whenever I witnessed it—similar to the way I had often felt watching the wolves in Greenland discipline their pups. It wasn’t an acute pain, and yet it was the very worst sensation—one I avoided at all cost. The slight discomfort in my foot from the javelin that was embedded in it was hardly enough to distract me, and I itched to shift and bite my arm off now, to claw my chest open and remove ribs—
“He was supposed to catch it,” Alcaeus bemoaned.
“Apologize to your friend,” Alyana ordered. “And heal the wound you made.”
“Mea culpa,” Alcaeus apologized as he yanked the spear from my foot.
“Kai looks like he’s going to cry,” Lessa declared, her small finger pointed at me.
“You are excused to your room, Alessandra Lucia Reinoso,” Alyana scolded.
“But Alcaeus threw a javelin in the house,” the little girl protested, her lip wobbling. “Why does he get to stay for the seer meeting?”
“Come now, darling,” Antonio implored his wife on his daughter’s behalf. “She didn’t say anything so terrible.”
“She has just questioned my authority and talked back to me, Antonio.”
“Well, I thought she made a fair point about Alcaeus’s punishment being more lenient than hers.”
“I have yet to mete out his punishment with a birch rod!”
Lessa began to cry. “Papa, can’t I stay? I want to ask the head crone when I shall meet my true fated mate: the prince of all werelocks.”
While Alyana looked ready to explode on the spot, Antonio swung Lessa up into his arms and proceeded to cuddle and comfort his daughter. “Lessa, this meeting is about Kai. We’ll ask the seers about your werelock prince another time.”
“It’s always about Kai,” Lessa wailed. “Ever since you came back with him, you and Mamma spend all your time worrying about Kai instead of me and Alcaeus.”
“I don’t mind it,” Alcaeus was quick to interject, giving his sister a meaningful look that said he preferred having his parents’ attention diverted from him.
“Heal his foot and go to your room, Alcaeus. I will deal with you later.”
“He doesn’t need my help healing,” Alcaeus argued matter-of-factly. “Kai heals faster than I do. He spends his time in his room hacking himself up instead of outside learning to throw—and catch—javelins with me.”
“It’s because he wants Mamma to hit him on the head and pull his ear,” Lessa said with a sniffle.
“That is enough, Alessandra. Antonio, put her down. She needs to go to her room.”
“Ma’am, if I may be so bold,” the old seer woman spoke up. “I believe your daughter is right: the boy craves discipline from you. I think he’s only received the wrong kind of punishment within his previous packs—among the common wolves. He’s witnessing discipline with positive intention for the first time. I think he wants you to punish him as you do your son, Alcaeus.”
Alyana’s brow creased. “Well, I—I don’t think I …” She glanced from the seer woman to me, and then to Antonio, who looked to be quietly pondering the old woman’s suggestion. After a moment, he gave his wife a subtle nod. Alyana’s expression remained troubled as she murmured, “Well ... I suppose I—”
“I’m okay with it,” Alcaeus offered, raising his hand with the bloody javelin in it in the air.
“To your room, Alcaeus!” Alyana erupted, extending her pointer finger in the direction of the doorway through which he’d entered. “Surrender the javelin to the guard on your way out.”
As Alcaeus took his leave, Alyana smoothed her hands over the waist of her dress. Directing her words to the gathering of seers, she said, “If you will excuse me a moment.” She strode over to where I was sitting, took hold of my ear in a grip that was surprisingly
uncomfortable, yanked me up from my seat, marched me over to an unoccupied corner of the room, and guided me to sit on one of the footstools.
My heart pounded with anticipation as she leaned over me, giving my ear another hard yank for good measure as her dazzling hazel eyes narrowed. “Kai, you will stop tearing your limbs off,” she said in her most stern, motherly tone of voice. “Do you hear me? It is not appropriate behavior to sit sulking in your room dismembering yourself.” She released my ear in order to whack me on the back of my head.
It didn’t hurt. At all. It was … soothing. Centering. Suddenly, it felt like I could breathe easier.
“If I hear about you harming yourself again, I’ll use the birch rod.”
Warmth spread through my chest at the threat of the rod I’d seen her use on Alcaeus—with regularity. I knew the birch rod wouldn’t hurt either. I’d already tried it on myself in private after witnessing Alcaeus’s punishments.
“Kai?” One elegant brow arched sharply at me. “What do you have to say for yourself?”
“Mea culpa?”
The seer woman had been right. I soon came to cherish being punished by Alyana. Over the years, I saw how the discipline of children could take many forms. There was punishing with the intent to harm; punishing with the intent to shame; and punishing out of love with the intent to shape—to teach respect and healthy boundaries and instill the kind of self-discipline that would keep a being safe. The latter had been missing entirely from my experience up until that day.
But I realized now there were other takeaways from my initial meeting with the seers that I hadn’t considered before. Because after conveying to Alyana the importance of disciplining me to prevent me from continuing my self-mutilation, the old seer woman had also told Antonio and Alyana that she thought it best if I were shielded from violence and fighting as much as possible, saying that I wasn’t suited for battle. Antonio had questioned her wisdom in this, voicing his dissent and disappointment, as initially he had viewed the combination of my savage fighting skills and rapid healing capability as my best asset—potentially my greatest future contribution to his pack.