Her arrival hadn’t been subtle. Ruri looked back over her shoulder. She shook her head and tipped it away, indicating Mary Alice should leave. There was no way that was going to happen, but maybe she didn’t need to loom quite so dramatically in the entrance.
She lifted the door and tried to swing it closed quietly. Whatever Ruri had done to get through it had bent it and it no longer closed completely. One hasp had been torn off its hinge and lay ten feet away, the padlock still attached to it. How would she lock her sister in now? How would she keep her safe?
Why couldn’t she help Cassidy?
There was no way she would allow Ruri to cut her out of taking care of her sister. At a loss for what else to do, Mary Alice carried a wooden chair over from the kitchen and dropped into it, her eyes on the gap where the door didn’t quite meet up with the box. She settled in to watch for as long as she needed to.
Ruri knew very well Malice still lurked just beyond the door. She hadn’t meant to upset her, but the presence of both of them seemed to be upsetting Cassidy. The poor not-quite-wolven trembled in her arms, her emotions a quivering knot of smells that tickled Ruri’s nose. She was in quite the state. Not unexpectedly given her distress, her wolven features had come to the fore. Sharp teeth protruded from her gums, matching the sharpness of the nails from her fingertips. Her body was covered with a sparse coat of what could generously be described as fur. It varied greatly in coverage. Some places it was almost nonexistent and in others, especially around the back of her neck, genitals, and the base of her spine it was almost opaque. The fur shifted in color from white through shades of gray and brown. In a couple of patches it was a dark charcoal that was nearly black. Her eyes had changed also, this time to emerald green.
The scream had verged on a howl and Ruri wondered if Cassidy was trying to find her packmates. She had none; the closest she had was her sister.
There was a sharp pain on her shoulder, and Ruri looked down to find it bleeding slightly and Cassidy watching her with those emerald eyes. She grinned up at her. You little… Cassidy had just nipped her.
Ruri leaned forward and clashed her teeth together right in front of Cassidy’s face. The snap was loud enough to reverberate in the small space and Cassidy shrank back, turning her face away. Good. There was no way she was going to let a sick wolven play dominance games with her. If she’d made it through the transformation in a normal pack, Cassidy would have started at the bottom of that pack’s dominance structure. Until she figured out what she was about, she would stay there. It was usually impossible to tell how dominant a wolven was until after the transition was complete and the new wolf had figured out which end was up, so to speak. It took a while to learn the limits of the new body.
Ruri smiled. She had chafed at being counted among her pack’s lowest when she first turned. Many of the scars along her back and flanks had come from that period. Each one had been a lesson, a painful and humiliating one, but one she’d taken to heart. She’d quickly won her way off the bottom rung, but it had taken her decades to reach the level of Beta. Cassidy would have to navigate her own path through the hierarchy of whichever pack took her in.
A soft “oof” in her ear clued her in to the fact that she’d tightened her hold around Cassidy. Ruri loosened up without letting go. Cassidy would go on her way soon enough, but it didn’t have to be now. It couldn’t be now, not when she had yet to go through a full transformation.
Slowly, Cassidy’s agitation ebbed. Her anxiety melted away and she fell into an exhausted slumber. Her hands and ears twitched in whatever dreamscape she ran through. Ruri envied her, in some ways. For a moment she considered curling up around the troubled wolven, but decided against it. She had to face Malice sometime. With deliberate care, she eased herself out from Cassidy’s grasp. Cassidy whined slightly and sniffed the air as if looking for her but didn’t wake.
The door to the box was mostly closed but not latched. It would take a lot of work for the box to lock again, Ruri had seen to that. Perhaps she’d used a little more force than truly necessary to rip the hasp off the door, but in that moment all her frustration had boiled over at once. Frustration at Malice’s refusal, anger at being trapped like an animal, rage at what happened to her pack. Finally it had a focus, and the hasp hadn’t stood a chance. Neither had the door.
She lifted it carefully to avoid waking Cassidy. Ten feet in front of the door, arranged in a sulky pose on a chair from the kitchen, was Malice. The human’s anger no longer really worried Ruri, though she wasn’t sure exactly why. Something had changed, and she stood for a long while as she contemplated her captor.
“What happened?” Malice asked, her voice pitched barely loud enough to carry to her ears.
Ruri held a finger to her lips and smiled wryly inside at the flicker of irritation that skittered across Malice’s face. Taking care not to let any of her amusement show, she turned with exaggerated caution and closed the door to the box.
Malice sat back and pulled her ankle over her knee before crossing her arms and settling further into the chair. She never broke eye contact with Ruri.
That was what had changed. Malice was scared of her. She was trying a little too hard to appear unconcerned, but Ruri knew better. Fear skittered along beneath a layer of sex and arousal. What had Malice been up to? The same thing she had, it seemed. Ruri sashayed forward, her hips rolling provocatively before stopping in front of Malice. She propped her hand on one hip and stared back at the Hunter.
The human looked away first, another spike of fear streaking through her scent.
“Hell if I know.” Taking pity at the stricken look in Malice’s eyes, Ruri leaned forward and took her hand, pulling her out of the chair in one yank.
Instead of flying into her arms as she’d intended, Malice stopped suddenly, like she’d somehow doubled her gravity. “We can’t leave her unsecured.”
“She’s asleep. She’ll be fine for a few moments.” Ruri walked away, toward the living room, confident Malice would follow.
“Did you really have to bust down the door?”
The look Ruri shot over her shoulder was one of intentionally mild reproof, but Malice still flushed an embarrassed red.
“No keys, remember?”
“Yeah, I know. I’ll give you a key when I fix it.”
“I don’t think we have that much time.” Ruri perched on the arm of the sofa. She looked out the large windows that dominated most of the far wall. The glass in them was frosted, but one was tilted open and she could see outside. It was a crisp autumn day from the blue of the sky and the chill of the air inside the large room. She didn’t have to watch Malice to know she was upset. Fear and shame trickled into her nostrils again, and she wondered if she would ever smell happiness from the woman.
“What do you mean?” Malice asked quietly.
“She’s starting to go into heat.” At Malice’s blank stare, Ruri released a loud sigh. “Your government doesn’t know nearly as much as it thinks it does. We wolven, the women I mean, go into heat. It’s a period of fertility, sort of the opposite of your period.”
“So?”
“So she’s going to go into it in a couple of days, three or four at the most. If we can’t get her to shift before then, we’ll probably lose her. The wolves fighting within her will try to come forth at the same time to mate. The call will be undeniable, and if one hasn’t come out on top…” She trailed off, not sure how to continue. She’d only heard stories of two-sire wolven; she’d never seen one herself. No one talked about what happened when the change went bad. They just mourned the never-wolven and moved on. One thing the stories did agree on was that they didn’t have much time, and the onset of the first heat in females seemed to be a major milestone that couldn’t be missed, second only to the first full moon.
“Then we delay the heat. Surely you know how to do that.”
“And then? The full moon is a week away. Even if I could stop her heat, which I can’t, the moon will force her.”
“I didn’t say that. All I’m saying is we’re running out of time. She’s gotten better than where she was when you first brought me here, but she’s still stuck. I’m going to have to try some more…drastic methods.”
“Drastic.” It wasn’t a question. “I don’t like the sound of that. Drastic always has the possibility of going off the rails.”
“It’s a possibility, yes.” Ruri wasn’t going to deny that, but she had as much to lose here as Malice did. Cassidy was starting to feel, if not like pack, like something close to it. She carefully didn’t examine what her relationship with Malice felt like. “But possibility means it isn’t graven in stone. If we don’t try we will probably lose her when she hits her heat. If she manages to survive that”—Ruri held up her hand when Malice perked up at the qualifier—“which would be nothing short of a miracle, then we will lose her at the full moon.”
Malice sat back in the chair in defeat. “What are you thinking?”
“I want to take her out on a run.”
Chapter Twenty
“A run?” Mary Alice stared at the werewolf. She realized her mouth was hanging open and closed it with a snap. “Are you insane? There’s no way that is ever going to happen.” The last thing she needed was to expose Cassidy to the outside world before she learned to control herself. Not to mention, the explosive anklet would need to be modified.
“It’s not crazy,” Ruri said with quiet dignity. “We need to pull one wolf out before Cassidy either goes into heat or deals with the pull of the full moon. To do that, we need something that will convince the wolves fighting each other within her to go all in. When one of them comes to the fore, then that’s the one who will complete the transformation.”
There it was again. This wasn’t the first time Ruri had referred to the wolf half of the werewolf as if it was a separate entity. Her training hadn’t included much discussion of lycan psychology; it had focused almost entirely on physiology. Mary Alice knew dozens of ways to take a lycan down, but she didn’t know what made them tick. It wasn’t anything she’d seen as a shortcoming until Cassidy’s attack. Now she wished she knew more about them in general and Ruri in particular. Ruri? No, she’d meant Cassidy.
“You make it sound like you aren’t the wolf,” Mary Alice said when she realized the silence had gone on too long. “How can you be separate from the wolf? It’s not like you go somewhere when you shift to wolf form.”
“It’s true, I don’t.” Ruri smiled crookedly at her. Mary Alice hadn’t noticed before how one side of her mouth pulled a smidge higher than the other. Of course, she hadn’t seen Ruri smile a whole lot either. It was adorable and Mary Alice found herself wishing she could see it more frequently.
Stop that, she said to herself. Then aloud: “What do you mean?”
“It’s hard to explain. I am the wolf and she is me. We’re the same, but we aren’t.” She shrugged, her blond hair bouncing slightly around her shoulders. “I’m not even sure if everyone experiences it the same way, but most of the wolven I know talk about their wolf sides as separate from their human sides. I can feel her in me when I’m human, just as I’m sure she feels me. I think part of it is that we’re so different, our human and wolven halves.”
“I still don’t understand.” It sounded like Ruri experienced some sort of multiple personality-type thing. She cursed herself again for her lack of understanding about general psychology. None of this made sense and she didn’t have the background or the vocabulary to get a decent handle on it.
“We have different priorities. When I’m in full wolf form, everything is so simple. I only have a few things to concentrate on and none of the complications of human life. The wolf sees things in very stark terms and she doesn’t tend to dwell. You know what being human is like.” There was that crooked smirk again. “It’s full of complications and even when you think you know what’s going on, you second-guess it. Things come back to gnaw on the back of your brain, even if it’s something that happened years ago. The wolf lets all of that go. For me, anyway, it’s easier to think of her and her instincts as a separate part of my personality, though she isn’t, not really.”
“So Cassidy will be like that?”
“Most wolven I’ve known are like that. The problem is Cassidy has five different wolves howling at her right now, each one with a different primal urge or directive to compete for her attention.”
“Wow. I thought maybe if she…” Mary Alice couldn’t finish the sentence. If what Ruri was saying was true, then her assumptions had been totally off base. Not only off base, but dangerous, both to Cassidy and to the public.
“Maybe if she tried really hard she’d be able to figure things out through sheer force of will?” Ruri’s smile was bitter. “She probably thinks the same thing, or she did. The hardest part of becoming wolven, of going through that first transformation, is realizing you can’t force the wolf. You have to let go and give in. The wolf moves through you and you are the wolf, but you can’t force it to do anything, not really.
“Did you know that a lot of new wolven can hold it together for a while after they get infected? Eventually they start losing time as the wolf forces its way out. Those are the ones who probably won’t make it. Either they lose themselves completely in the wolf and are never seen again in human form, or their minds can’t handle it and they sort of shut down and waste away.”
“And Cassidy’s problems are different?”
“Hell yes, they are. She never had the option to ignore the wolf, not with five of them inside her howling at each other and her for dominance.”
It had seemed to Mary Alice that Cassidy had been getting better over the past few days. She’d become less desperate and had calmed down, but Ruri’s information cast that development in a terrifying new light. Despite her cautiously growing optimism, desperation boiled over within her again. It pushed at her, drove her to consider what she knew was beyond all common sense.
“We can’t make this run happen during the day.”
The look Ruri shot her was equal parts exasperation and irritation. “Really.”
The flush that rose to fill her cheeks with heat was her own fault, and Mary Alice knew it. “Yes, really. I’m not going to let you bust this.” The words were condescending, and she knew it, but she hated being embarrassed.
“Thanks for the concern. I wonder how we managed to survive so long without accidentally betraying ourselves to pitchfork-wielding mobs. It’s so great to have you to keep me from making a terrible mistake.”
Ruri’s eyes sparked with irritation. Her hands were on her hips where she still sat perched on the sofa’s arm. The embarrassment that had burned so strongly within her disappeared when Mary Alice realized how sexy the lycan looked when she was angry. Energy swirled around her, and though she was still skinny enough that Mary Alice was sure a stiff wind would blow her over, she suddenly wondered if she could actually take Ruri in a fight. Being presented with an equal made her mouth go dry and heat kindled again in her center.
“I’ll think about it,” Mary Alice said, pushing herself off the sofa. She had to get away from the lycan. The urge to reach out and slide her fingers through Ruri’s hair was almost irresistible. Besides, there was still work to do. Uncle Ralph needed that report and wouldn’t get off her back until she provided it. Protecting Cassidy required more than merely making sure her transformation happened. It would mean nothing if the world was waiting for her when she finally came out.
Ruri watched Malice’s retreating back with disbelief. How could she up and leave in the middle of their conversation? She thought she’d finally made some progress with the human, and she just left. And after insulting her, no less. Who did Malice think she was?
The answer to that was clear, at least. Malice thought she was in char
ge, and while the damned device was on her ankle, she was. That wouldn’t last forever. Ruri wondered if Malice had considered what might happen after. Would she really go through with allowing the bracelet to detonate and take Ruri’s leg if Cassidy didn’t survive? She still didn’t think so, but Malice seemed more erratic. That could be to her advantage, potentially. Erratic meant mistakes, but the wrong mistake meant Ruri would be short a leg. On the other hand, it might mean Ruri being able to win her way free.
And if Cassidy did survive; what then? Malice hadn’t realized yet that Cassidy wouldn’t be around whether she made it through the shift or not. Wolven didn’t tend to stay with their human families, not when they were likely to be hunted down and slaughtered upon discovery. Malice already knew her sister’s secret, so things might be different, but Ruri didn’t think so. The bonds of other wolven held so much more tightly than those of human families; that was simply the way things were.
What would Malice do if Ruri managed to save Cassidy? Surely she didn’t think the insult of caging a wolf would go unanswered. Her wolf shifted within her, mute agreement in the way she wrapped Ruri’s core self with soft fur and reassurance.
Yet, before Malice had left, she could have sworn the woman’s pupils had widened in what she was almost certain was arousal. It was hard to tell from her scent, given the anger that had poured off her after she’d made the asinine statement about going on the run at night. What right did Malice have to be angry over her response? She was the one who’d been insulted.
Strangely, the wolf hadn’t reacted to the change in emotion. Usually, that part of her was ready to take on any show of aggression. Her wolf didn’t tolerate such things; it was part of what had made her so successful at the pack’s higher levels. Malice didn’t seem to elicit the usual reactions from the wolf, however. If anything, what she felt from the wolf in regard to Malice was rough affection.
Even now, when the wolf agreed that Malice needed to pay for their imprisonment, Ruri didn’t get the feeling that she wanted to kill the human. She needed to be punished, certainly, but nothing permanent. Perhaps a strong nip to the ears and a gentler one at the flank. Ruri swallowed hard at the phantom sensation of closing her teeth around the nape of Malice’s neck. It was unmistakable; she could almost feel warm skin between her teeth.
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