She laughed at them, her tongue lolling from her mouth, but they were still too exhilarated from their hunt to take offense. There would be other hunts, the wolf promised as much. Those would be successful. Cassidy burned to experience the kill at the end of the chase. It would be her just reward, after all.
Three hours and more had ground by. Seated on the edge of the truck’s bed, Mary Alice kept up her vigil. There was nothing to see from where she sat, and it was the best view her truck had to offer, tucked as it was beneath the trees. She could wish there was less foliage on them. It wasn’t even Halloween yet, and most species except the maples and the occasional other were still partly leaved. Then again, even without the leaves the trees were so dense that there wasn’t much to see.
Would Ruri and Cassidy be back soon? They had to be. She still had to disable the timer from the anklet. Now that Cassidy had made the transformation, she would have to make good on her promise to release the lycan. It wasn’t the first time her mind had come around to this point tonight. The first thing she’d felt upon seeing Cassidy’s wolf form had been loss. She’d thought it had been for the loss of her sister to the virus that mutated her, but now she wasn’t so sure. Cassidy was still around, after all. So what if her sister hadn’t recognized her in the clearing; she’d been through a lot.
And yet, what would she do if Ruri no longer wanted to be around her? Cassidy, she corrected herself hastily. What would she do if Cassidy no longer wanted her around? It was fairly obvious that Ruri wouldn’t want anything to do with her. She already couldn’t stand to be close to her.
Then why all the staring? another corner of her mind whispered back to her. Why does she keep watching?
So maybe losing Cassidy wasn’t the only thing.
And there she was again, back in the same corner she’d talked herself into three times already. It was past time to examine the tangled mass of feelings the lycan inspired in her. There was nothing else to do. She snorted and pushed herself off the truck’s tall side. Leaves crackled under her feet as she paced back and forth.
Of course Ruri wouldn’t stick around. Mary Alice was the one who had kidnapped her and kept her trapped in one place. Lycans didn’t survive long in captivity, she knew that, and not only from her training, but it was something she’d witnessed countless times in the years she’d been doing Uncle Ralph’s dirty work. Lycans might have a den, but they also ranged far and wide, some returning only on occasion. Some might spend more time in the den than others, but even they had to get out regularly.
How would I fit into their world? The notion danced lightly across her thoughts, as if too worrisome to leave a deep impression. Likely if she hadn’t been paying attention, it would have stolen silently through without her notice. Mary Alice spun on her heel and stomped the other direction. There was no way she could live with a pack of lycans. The idea was beyond contemplating, it was so ridiculous. Beyond the logistics of having their executioner living among them, there was no good reason she should want to.
And if it’s the only way to keep Ruri…and my sister? But it wasn’t. It couldn’t be. There were always more options. Her sister would remember her. As for Ruri she would have to…
Let go.
Mary Alice closed her eyes, unprepared for the rush of panicked grief she felt at the idea. Her breath was being stolen from her, whooshing out of her lungs. If someone or something came up on her now, she’d be dead for certain. Standing in the middle of a gravel road with her head down and her hands on her knees was no way to take on the supranormal menace.
“Malice?” Ruri’s voice came from behind her. “Are you all right?”
Determined not to let the werewolf get the drop on her, she spun around and stopped dead in her tracks. Ruri was completely nude, her skin shining coolly in the moonlight. Mismatched glowing eyes drifted at her side, resolving slowly into Cassidy’s crazy coat as she stepped onto the road. It was amazing how well her coat melted into the trees. It might as well have been made for the dappled moonlight that filtered through the spotty canopy.
“I’m fine.” Of course she wasn’t all right, but what else could she do except pretend? “I was worried about you two. We don’t have much time left.”
“Uh huh.” Ruri strode steadily toward her, showing no sign of discomfort at the small stones that rolled beneath her bare feet.
Spots of moonlight floated across her skin, highlighting the dip of her collarbone, the hollow of one hip, here a nipple, and lower… Mary Alice licked her lips almost against her will. She decided that Ruri’s skin couldn’t possibly be as smooth as it looked, but her fingers itched to check.
“Earth to Malice.” Ruri’s voice verged on the edge of outright laughter.
She jerked her eyes up to meet the werewolf’s. Ruri had stopped about five feet away, close enough that she could see every luminous inch of her skin, but not close enough to touch. Cassidy sat by her feet, her amusement unmistakable in the tilt of her head and the way those odd eyes twinkled disconcertingly at her.
“Well, what are you waiting for? Let’s get Cassidy shifted and back in the truck. We have maybe forty-five minutes before the timer’s up.” Her response was cold, and she knew it, but she couldn’t help herself. All she wanted was to take Ruri somewhere for an extended fuck, and she hated herself for it. Not only was the timing atrocious, but she shouldn’t have been feeling the attraction in the first place. As much as she tried to push Ruri away, she was inevitably drawn back to her. Discipline was the key, but she’d had precious little of that since finding Cassidy torn and bloody.
“And whose fault is that?” Ruri stared back at her, refusing to let her eyes go.
Mary Alice looked away first. “It doesn’t change the facts.”
“Well, okay. But have you ever tried to get your sister to do something she didn’t want to?”
“Cassidy?” Mary Alice scoffed at the idea. “She’s fine, a little stubborn maybe. She always comes around to reason eventually.”
“Eventually?” Ruri cocked a mocking eyebrow at her. “We don’t have eventually, remember. Your sister may be one of the most stubborn individuals I’ve ever met, and I’ve only been dealing with her for a few days.”
“Then why are we dicking around?” Mary Alice closed the gap between them in two long steps. Ruri held her ground, drawing herself up to her full height. “Get her to change or get her in the cage.”
“The cage won’t work. She’s immensely strong. She’ll rip through it in a second, and that’s if she consents to being locked in there in the first place.”
“What do you want from me?” The frustration was more than she could bear. Mary Alice could hear her voice rising, and she clenched her fists, digging her nails into her palms, trying to stay focused. The cords on her neck trembled from the strain of holding herself together, but she couldn’t afford to lose it. She wasn’t sure if she was about to break something or burst into tears.
A warm body leaned against the front of her legs, forcing her to fall back a step. The fur along Cassidy’s back raised in mute warning. Her sister wasn’t growling, not yet, but her top lip curled to reveal very large, very sharp teeth. Again, Cassidy had chosen Ruri over her. Anguish overwhelmed her, every fiber of her being focusing on dragging breath into her lungs.
A cool palm on her cheek refocused her from the feeling of drowning on the inside to the mess she had to deal with on the outside. She stared into Ruri’s golden eyes; the werewolf leaned across the wolf who stood between them.
“I want you to ask her to change,” she said as if nothing had happened. As if Mary Alice wasn’t teetering on the edge of control. As if Cassidy wasn’t slipping further and further from her. “I doubt she’ll submit to being ordered around. She certainly won’t to me.” A wry smile told Mary Alice how much that rankled, though Ruri tried to put a good face on it.
Her despair thawed slightly, and Mary Alice sprang upon it, smothering it until only a small kernel of it remained. As hard as she tr
ied, that refused to dissipate. These days it never quite did. It was her constant companion—that and her rage.
She inhaled deeply, finally filling her lungs completely. After holding it for a moment, she let her breath out slowly and looked down at Cassidy’s brindled form, really taking it in for the first time. Her coat was a riot of shades, from white to black to chocolate brown and seemingly all the shades in between. Or most of them, anyway. She saw no sign of golden tawniness in Cassidy’s fur and heaved a breath of relief. If Ruri was to be believed, that meant there was nothing of her DNA in Cassidy’s mix. However, it certainly appeared as if more than one wolf’s DNA had won through. Between the odd eyes and the stripes of color that marked her sister from the top of her shoulders to the base of her tail, there was some definite mixing. She’d never seen a lycan with the variation or pattern that were in Cassidy’s pelt. Had Ruri been keeping something from her?
She shook her head. It doesn’t matter now.
“I don’t have time for this,” she said aloud. The longer they stood around, the more chance there was that they wouldn’t get back home on time. Cassidy looked back at her, unconcerned now that her anger was banked. “Cass, I need you to change back for me.”
The sigh from Ruri was pure irritation and Mary Alice looked over at her. The werewolf rolled her eyes and shook her head.
What? Mary Alice mouthed at her only to receive another eye roll in return.
At her feet Cassidy yawned hugely, then casually paced closer to the edge of the road before sitting down. Her tail cleared a slow swath in the accumulation of dead leaves where dirt met the thin strip of grass before the trees.
That’s right, Ruri had said to ask. It was Mary Alice’s turn to roll her eyes. This was Cassidy to a tee. It had been years since she could order her around by virtue of being the older, and therefore wiser, sister. Even as kids, it had been easier to ask and cajole. If a gentler tone could get them back in the truck, it was worth it.
Mary Alice squatted and settled on her heels. “What do you say, Cass? We need to head home, so I need you to change back.” One of Cassidy’s ears twitched, briefly swiveling to face her, but aside from that, there was no sign her entreaty had worked. She extended her hand toward Cassidy. “Come on, Cass. Please? I don’t want to go home without you.”
The promise to leave her behind hung in the air between them. The only other sound was Ruri’s sharp intake of breath.
“What, you didn’t think I’d let your leg get blown off, did you?” How could Ruri think she’d actually do that? Aside from the fact that Malice had threatened to do just that at almost every turn. “Of course you did, why wouldn’t you? The first thing I’m doing when we get back is removing that fucking anklet. You don’t need it. I don’t know if you ever did.” The last was said to herself, though she was sure both werewolves heard it.
Across from her, Cassidy bounded to her feet before bracing them beneath her. She dropped her head and tucked her tail between her back legs. Every line of her body sang with tension.
Ruri knelt next to her, one arm around her shuddering shoulders. She murmured into Cassidy’s nearest ear, which pricked up, quivering. For a moment everything was still, as if Cassidy and the world around them held their collective breaths. The first crack of bone heralded the reversal of her sister’s transformation. It was much quicker than the tail end she’d seen of Cassidy’s shift into wolf-form. Bone cracked and reformed so quickly it sounded like someone playing with a sheet of bubble wrap. There was none of the fluid expulsion that marked the shift from human to wolf. Instead the hair seemed to withdraw back into her body until Cassidy’s naked form crouched in Ruri’s protective arms. She panted as if she’d just sprinted the last leg of a marathon.
“Not so fast next time,” Ruri said, hugging her arm around heaving shoulders. “Let’s get dressed, and we’ll be ready to go.”
Time indeed. Mary Alice glanced at her wrist, where numbers on her watch face glowed dimly at her. She would have to break the speed limit to make it back in time. They didn’t have far to go, but it was all surface streets. If she was lucky, there wouldn’t be a cop around to catch her blowing through any red lights. They had some wiggle room, but not as much as she would have liked.
“Looks like.” She should have been relieved. But if it was over, why did she have the feeling this had been the easy part?
Chapter Twenty-Four
The drive back had been awkward, to say the least. To combat the pervasive silence in the truck, Mary Alice had finally flipped on the radio and let the local heavy metal station’s pounding drums and crunching guitars wash over her. Usually that kind of music helped her relax and create a focus for her aggression. This time it had the opposite effect. By the time they pulled up in front of the brick warehouse she called home, she practically vibrated with anxiety. The clock in the battered dash of the truck said she had fifteen minutes to spare, but she was pretty sure it was five minutes slow. Or was that fast? At that moment, she doubted herself.
Fumbling under the dash for the opener took far too long, but her questing fingertips finally found the button and she jammed her finger down on it.
“Pull it in next to the first cage,” she said as she slipped out the door. There was no time to wait for an answer. Surely Ruri could drive stick; if she’d been around since there was such a thing as the frontier, surely she’d picked up how to drive a manual transmission. She knew Cassidy couldn’t. That was one lesson she’d never successfully imparted to her younger sister.
The door was open far enough that she could duck under it, though she had to bend at the waist to do so. The dull chunking of the opener’s mechanism echoed dully through the cavernous first floor, following her as she sprinted for the furthest cage from the entrance. The biometric lock sprang open after accepting her palm print, and she rushed to the laptop. Ever the pessimist, she’d set the computer to sleep instead of shutting down. Even so, it still took too long to come back to life. The timer popped up on the screen with one click of the mouse. Ten minutes. Apparently the clock on the dash was slow. Just like that, the timer was reset for another twelve hours. Ruri would be safe now.
Or rather, she would be soon. Mary Alice dropped into the rolling office chair. As usual, it protested her rough treatment by dropping an inch, and she readjusted it without thinking. It shouldn’t take much to shut the timer down completely. The shutdown was simple enough, but she still double-and triple-checked it to make sure it wasn’t set to detonate. That wasn’t enough to be certain, however. She refreshed the software to be positive. It definitely seemed to be disabled.
“Will I live?” Ruri’s voice sounded from behind her. Mary Alice had been concentrating so hard on deactivating the explosive device that she hadn’t heard the truck pull into the building.
“You’re all good.” Mary Alice turned around. Her smile faded when she saw how Cassidy was hanging on the other lycan’s shoulder.
“Fantastic.” Ruri turned to go.
“Hold on.” She stood up and gestured at the chair. “Take a seat. Let’s get that damn thing off you.”
“For real?” Ruri asked, her voice high with surprise.
At her nod, the lycan moved into the small enclosure. Her arm was around Cassidy’s waist and more than half-supporting her, much to Mary Alice’s alarm.
“What’s going on?” She moved toward the two of them before stopping just out of reach. Not sure how to help, she hovered there uncertainly.
“She’s exhausted.” Ruri lowered her gently to the chair. Cassidy seemed loath to give up her grip.
“I’m fine,” Cassidy said, opening her eyes into the tiniest cracks. “I’d like to sleep for a week, but aside from that I feel…great!” A smile lit her face and she allowed her arm to drop.
“Good! That’s really, really good.” Mary Alice pointed Ruri toward desk. “Put your foot up there. I’ll get some tools.”
The implements she needed were one cage over. This one had a more convent
ional combination lock on it, and she spun the dial. The tools were pretty basic, not like the ones she had up on the next floor. Those had a specific purpose. These were the ones she used when tinkering with her truck or on her weapons. The tools she’d used to secure the anklet were close at hand, and she snagged them and hurried back to the other cage.
Ruri had her foot up on the desk and Cassidy was considering the anklet through a slitted gaze.
“It’ll just take a second,” Mary Alice said, ignoring the questioning look her sister sent her way.
“Are you sure you know what you’re doing?” Ruri shifted her weight from her heel to the balls of her foot, like she was getting ready to make a dash for it.
“Of course. I put it there, didn’t I?” She dropped the tools on the table and Ruri jumped. “Hold still.”
Removing the anklet was easy enough, though Ruri twitched her way through the entire maneuver. When it was done, she stood stock still, as if uncertain what to do.
“You’re free to go,” Mary Alice said.
“I know.”
“What do you mean, ‘free to go,’” Cassidy said on top of Ruri’s acknowledgment. “You were holding her here? What the hell, Mary?”
“I did what I had to.” Her voice was stiff, and she knew it. The decision hadn’t been an easy one, but it had been the best course of action. She wasn’t going to argue about it with the person who had benefited most from it. “Cassidy, you’re tired. You should get some rest. Use my bed.”
“If you think—” Cassidy cut off when Mary Alice turned her eyes on her. She said nothing, simply looked at her, daring her to push it.
“Go to bed.”
“We’re going to talk about this,” Cassidy said, pushing past her sister and storming out into the middle of the first floor. “Coming, Ruri?”
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