by Hettie Ivers
Raul repeatedly assured me that I was a sexy bitch—both in my human and in my animal form.
He had shared a portion of his werelock powers with me a few days after my initial transition. It was decided beforehand that Mike would be prepared to step in and take over as Alpha should Raul’s powers weaken significantly. But to everyone’s surprise and relief, Raul’s powers didn’t diminish at all after sharing what he had with me.
Rafe attributed the phenomenon to Sloane. I didn’t quite follow how he’d arrived at that correlation, but I was thankful for whatever had caused it.
It seemed that others shared Rafe’s theory, however, because as word spread that Raul was still Alpha of the Salvatella pack even after being mated to a common werewolf, it spawned a bit more fear and suspicion within the werelock world about Sloane—the Rogue werelock and embodiment of a dark curse—who had previously demonstrated the ability to seize and redistribute power at whim when she’d pulled powers from Gabe to give to Avery.
“Okay, that was good,” Raul coached me. “But try doing it a little faster next time.”
He had teleported Sloane, Kitsune, and me to Big Basin. It was early morning, and we’d stopped at a secluded spot along the trail so that I could practice my shifting.
I’d felt a little self-conscious practicing it at the Bariloche compound where so many experienced werelocks and werewolves could see me. So Raul had suggested I might be more comfortable doing it here, on my home turf in NoCal, until I gained more confidence with the process.
Sloane, who herself had never even shifted before, kept dropping quiet, stoic commentary about how I needed to be faster at it, more graceful. She kept mumbling to herself about how she could do it so much better than I could.
But despite her criticism, she seemed to be warming up to me—at least a little bit, I thought. Possibly she was simply resigned to tolerating me, though, since Mike and Rafe had straight-out told her that my death would trigger Raul’s death now. Basically, they’d explained to her that she couldn’t kill me without losing her favorite manny in the process.
I’d just shifted for the tenth time in a row, and Raul was giving me pointers inside my head, when suddenly he stopped talking mid-critique, his words in my mind trailing off with a quiet, “Ah, shit.”
I turned my muzzle in the direction of Raul’s troubled gaze and spied a tall, well-muscled, naked man standing thirty feet away from us up the trail. His hair was brown—although it was tough to say whether that was simply from all the mud that was caked in it. His body was smudged and streaked with mud as well, and he had leaf litter sticking to him in random places.
He looked familiar, but I couldn’t place where I’d seen him before. At first glance, he reminded me of the British male supermodel, David Gandy—if Gandy had been a dirty, feral-looking homeless man flashing people on nature trails. And also a werelock.
The werelock’s eyes, which glowed a cold, killer-blue shade, were pinned squarely on my mate, when suddenly it hit me where I’d seen him before.
“Isn’t that the Reinoso pack doctor? Kai?” I telepathically asked Raul, who was still inside my head.
“Stay with Sloane,” Raul ordered inside my mind, just as the homeless-looking David Gandy doppelganger burst into a giant white wolf.
THE END
(Until sexy werelocks throw down again in Seer.)
SEER
A Werelock Evolution Series Duet
The snow crunched beneath my knee-high, wedge-heeled UGG boots as I ran.
Holy shit, I was going to die.
I could hear the beast snarling behind me. Even with the adrenaline fueling me, I could feel myself slowing down, my thighs growing numb despite my exertion as the cold, wet air battered my bare skin.
Why, oh, why, had I worn such a short skirt?
Why was I in a spaghetti-strap tank top?
I was going to be mauled to death. How much would be left of me, I wondered? Would they have to rely on dental records? Would they call my mom to come ID my teeth?
God, I’d carry the guilt of her trauma with me for all eternity. I could hear the sound of her screaming in the morgue as surely as I could hear my own screams now.
What had possessed me to take a stroll through the woods alone in the middle of the night? Why hadn’t I thought to grab a jacket?
Or a taser?
A phone with a compass app would be wildly useful right now as well. I had no idea in what direction I was running anymore. How could I have strayed so far from campus so quickly?
I heard a warning growl a second before the animal’s maw clamped around my right ankle and I went flying forward to the ground, snow filling my mouth and silencing my scream as razor-sharp teeth sank through the material of my boot, through flesh, to pierce the bone that lay beneath.
Tears sprang to my eyes and I flailed my limbs, trying to breathe amid the pain and fear choking me. Right as I managed to lift my face from the snow and inhale enough air into my lungs to scream again, the huge white hound from hell unclenched his jaw just long enough to reposition his dagger teeth, fitting more of my lower leg into his mouth along with my ankle, before clamping down again, harder than the first time.
My vision went black. I was sure he’d bitten clean through my bones.
Good God, the pain! This couldn’t be real.
When the wolf unclenched his vicious maw and released my ankle for a second time, I breathed through the overwhelming agony and utilized all of my adrenaline to attempt a mad, desperate scramble to get to my knees.
But I didn’t make it. The beast’s mammoth, unforgiving jaw closed over the fractured bones in my ankle for a third time, and I screamed until my vision narrowed and my face tingled with that unpleasant, telltale nauseating heat that always seemed to precede loss of consciousness.
No, no, no—don’t lose consciousness now. Not now!
When the devil relinquished my ankle for a third time, I was too drained and disoriented to move—all of my effort focused on remaining conscious as my weakening body braced itself for the next horrible crunch of pain to come.
But it didn’t.
The killer wolf made a somber baying sound instead—as if he were the injured, distraught party. And he began licking my bare toes.
What the—he’d gotten my whole boot off somehow. When and how had he done that?
Oh, fuck, he was going to start eating me ... commencing with my destroyed ankle.
Face down in the snow, I began to sob as my tormentor’s rough-textured tongue licked over my broken, open flesh and mangled bones. The licks stung like hell, and yet, at the same time, they felt strangely healing—as if the pain was beginning to lessen the longer he licked. I knew it was my mind playing tricks on me.
Or perhaps hypothermia setting in.
The beast made a sad whining noise as he licked up the back of my bare leg.
Oh, God.
I willed my body to move. To crawl. To roll—to do anything to get away.
But my body ignored me. Failed me. I couldn’t even feel my face anymore. Nor could I feel my hands.
But I could hear the sound of my own weeping into the snow.
I felt warm fur brush against my arms, felt a snout pressing into the back of my spinning head. Then I felt my body being rolled over in the snow.
No, no, no—I wanted to stay face down!
Face down was no safer, I knew, but I was terrified of the animal attacking my face next.
And as my terrible luck would have it, the beast’s tongue was on my face before I’d taken my next ragged breath, the heat of his licks making my frozen skin tingle with pins and needles as it came alive with sensation once more.
Great. Now I’d feel everything when he tore the flesh from my skull.
I didn’t dare open my eyes. The memory of the hungry look I had seen in the white wolf’s glowing blue eyes when I’d first spied him silently stalking me through the trees sent an awful shiver through me.
I was certain
he intended to eat me.
I racked my brain trying to recall what approach people said was best when confronted with an enormous killer wolf in the wild.
Should I play dead now? Should I muster whatever strength I had left and try to act intimidating? The latter was laughable. I wasn’t doing well with the former either, since I couldn’t stop crying. And my tormentor knew it—he was lapping up my tears as if my eyes were leaking candy.
Was he fucking with me before he tore my head off, I wondered?
I was so cold and in so much pain I couldn’t think straight. So I simply lay there, quietly crying, immobilized by fear, enduring the wolf’s attentions to my face as I fought the pull of unconsciousness threatening to take me under.
I must have lost the battle, because I came to with an internal start as a large, warm hand wrapped around my wrist and two fingers honed in on my pulse.
“Dying,” I managed to whisper through frozen lips.
“Relax,” a firm baritone voice instructed as fingers palpated my neck next. “Everything’s going to be fine.”
I’d been saved?
Was I in a hospital?
No, I could hear the wind and other quiet noises of the night. I was in the forest still.
But I’d been found. I’d been saved!
I felt my facial muscles tremble convulsively, my features scrunching up as I released a soft sob of relief.
I was going to live.
“Shh—there, there,” the stranger soothed impassively.
He didn’t sound like a student. He sounded older. More … worldly. Sophisticated. Maybe a member of the faculty who lived near campus had heard me screaming and rushed to my rescue.
“I’m a doctor,” he told me as his fingers brushed away my freely flowing tears that the white wolf had been lapping up moments ago.
The wolf! He’d be back in no time to kill us both.
“Danger,” I managed to croak in between sniffles. “Wolf,” I warned my rescuer.
He hummed in acknowledgement, in an odd manner that managed to be both reassuring and yet somehow … patronizing—almost the way a parent might acknowledge while dismissing a child’s claim that a monster lay beneath their bed.
Did he not see the damage the wild beast had done to my ankle? I’d be lucky to be able to walk on it ever again.
“Is it terribly painful?” he asked, his voice smooth. Calm.
Eerily so.
“Yes,” I sobbed.
Was he kidding?
“I’m sorry to hear that,” he said in an even tone. His cultured voice was deep and soothing as it poured over me, making me feel safe. And yet … there was something else in his tone that I couldn’t quite reconcile.
I opened my waterlogged eyes and saw bright blue ones staring down at me from a gorgeous male face that belonged on a billboard model and not on a doctor who made forest calls in the middle of the night.
Jesus, where had this guy come from?
What was he doing here in Bumfuck, Washington, coming to the aid of a screaming coed getting mauled by a rabid wolf?
Wait—why was he looking at me like that? Why wasn’t he inspecting my half-chewed ankle?
Oh, my God. Was he—?
He seemed somehow … turned on … by my current condition. Aroused by the fact that I was injured and scared and in distress. Excited by the notion that I was utterly helpless—stranded in the woods and liable to die of hypothermia if the white wolf didn’t come back to finish me off first.
I wasn’t sure how I knew this. But something about this beautiful man claiming to be a doctor was off. Maybe it was the fact that his pupils were dilated and his lips were parted as he stared down at me.
Or maybe it was because he wasn’t wearing any clothes.
Dear Lord, he wasn’t wearing clothes!
Or … it might’ve been the fact that his warm hand was swiftly working its way up between my semi-frozen, parted thighs now.
I realized that my skirt had ridden all the way up and my thong-clad ass was directly against the snow, my ass cheeks all but frozen.
“Are you very scared?” he asked as his hot fingertips slipped the snow-soaked swath of thin fabric covering my crotch aside.
I wanted to say no, knowing the right thing would be to deny him the pleasure of seeing my fear. Instinctively, I knew my fear was what he wanted, what he hungered for as his nostrils flared and his pupils dilated further—his mouth all but salivating as he awaited my answer, his fingers poised against my freezing, smooth lower lips.
I knew I should defy him and say that I wasn’t scared, even though he’d know that it was a lie. But some dark, deviant part of me wanted to feed this stranger’s sinister desire—to give him a taste and see what it felt like.
To see what his fingers would do next if I said yes.
“Yes,” I mouthed.
As I watched his throat muscles work and his eyes roll back, the lids falling to half-mast, I knew in an instant I’d just opened a door within myself that I could never again seal shut.
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THANK YOU, dear readers!
Thank you for reading Just Like Animals (Werelock Evolution, Book 5). If you enjoyed reading this story, I hope that you will consider leaving a few words in a review to help other readers discover it. Every review is very much appreciated.
If you’d like to check out other books that I’ve written, please feel free to visit my website at www.hettieivers.com, sign up for my Newsletter, friend me on Facebook, or join my Facebook Reader Group to keep in touch.
Warmest Regards,
Hettie
Acknowledgments
To my awesome professional editor big sis, thank you for taking time out from reviewing and editing critical life-saving medical publications in order to point out (with a Jerry Seinfeld inflection), “Now we need something here,” each time it was required this Werelock Evolution installment.
To my amazing husband, thank you for always being so supportive of my writing hobby, for beta-reading chapters on demand, and for making me laugh myself silly with your portrayals of my werelock characters. I will take your recommendation to write a Vamplock series under serious consideration.
To my awesome friends Lauren, Sheena, and Erin: Thank you for being early readers/beta testers/bouncers-of-ideas at various points in this process for me. I am so thankful for your honest feedback and your kind encouragement for this story!
Thank you to Lauren for urging me to lose my literary anal cherry with this book. #RemyInterruptus
A special thanks to Sheena for tirelessly spreading my name, banners, and covers all over Facebook on a daily basis. I don’t know what I did to deserve your support, but you’re beyond amazing, and I really appreciate you!
To my longtime SOAM readers and all of the fabulous ladies in my reader group, thank you for your ongoing friendship and support, and for the countless hours of fun, laughter, and fantastic female camaraderie!
Excerpt from SLIP OF FATE
(Werelock Evolution, Book 1)
I wasn’t sure what I’d expected to find when we approached the foyer, but the scene we came upon was far worse than any I could’ve envisioned.
There were more people gathered in the semi-cylindrical receiving area than before. We entered the open room, and Alessandra deposited me on my feet in time to see Felix suspended by his throat against a wall, his feet dangling at least a foot off the ground, his broken arms hanging uselessly at his sides.
A tall, dark-haired, formidable man in a tuxedo was holding him up by the neck with just one hand. Felix’s eyes bugged out in horror and his face went from red to purple to blue while the cruel man, whose face was turned from me, proceeded to mercilessly crush his windpipe.
My first instinct was to scream at the faceless, heartless man to stop and let him go, but the words died in my throat and ice coursed through my veins as he leaned in closer to my dying abductor and rasped, “No deal, Felix. I’ve no need of Raul’s wort
hless sister. Not as bait, as a trade for your son, or otherwise.”
He spoke in a forbidding, deep whisper, presumably meant for Felix’s dying ears, yet the words were clearly heard by everyone in the otherwise silent hall as they resonated off the stone walls.
“Raul’s dead,” he hissed. “I saw to it myself days ago. And thanks to you, his sister will be dead soon, too.”
Time and space ceased to exist as I sought to reconcile the meaning of his words. Raul was dead?
“So you’ve wasted your time,” he sneered, “forfeited four lives, and shortened your son’s allotted time left by coming here and interrupting my dinner.”
He’d died just days ago?
Raul was dead?
I’d never borne witness to much violence in my lifetime, let alone seen a man murdered right before my eyes, and yet I barely registered the visual of Felix’s eyes rolling back and becoming lifeless as the final vestiges of his very being were squeezed from him.
I don’t know how long I stood stock still, my own eyes wide and glazed over with terror, before the dark-haired devil whom I knew had to be the infamous Alex turned away from his fresh kill to visibly sniff in my direction like some depraved, wild animal honing in on his next unfortunate prey.
As his cold, dark eyes alighted upon me, they widened perceptibly. Felix’s dead body was dropped like a sack of trash a millisecond later as the dinner party host I’d so erroneously assumed would be civilized turned his imposing frame in my direction.
He was darkly handsome like Alcaeus, with facial features that more closely resembled Remy’s, but with none of the playfulness or boyishness of either of the two men. And his eyes were unlike any of his siblings’. They were a deep, dark shade of brown. His jet-black hair was cropped short, and he was expertly groomed and outfitted as if he’d stepped off the pages of GQ.