“No, you have a fucking problem,” came Dean’s deep familiar timbre. “I told you—”
“So you’ve heard?”
“Everyone’s fucking heard! The Council’s on the rampage.”
Tristan’s mouth tightened grimly. “How’d they find out? It only just happened.”
“Doesn’t matter.” There was something of both dread and sympathy in Dean’s voice that further sickened me. “You need to get both your asses back here. Now.”
“Already got Alex booking our tickets.” With an impatient jerk of his head, Tristan gestured for me to get packing.
Normally, I’d have gotten my dander up at his uncharacteristic brusqueness, but these were extenuating circumstances. My boyfriend’s wolf was very near the surface, and I took the warning instantly to heart, nodding acquiescently. There was time enough later, if I survived, to bark back at him.
At least I’d not been forsaken. The second most awful feeling in the world (after manslaughter) was oppressive, maddening solitude. I’d been surrounded with familial love all month and had never felt more alone. But now Tristan was here!
I left Tristan on my porch, brainstorming with Dean, as I slipped indoors, still unsure of what exactly I was going to say to Mom. Explaining my sudden departure to an already fretful and histrionic mother was going to be extremely awkward. I’d need a good bullshit story, and the only one I believed she’d accept was one in which I professed desperate and irrational love. That she would understand perfectly—she’d fallen victim to it enough times herself. I’d explain that I’d been acting so out of character because of how much I’d been missing Tristan (true enough). And here he was, finally, demanding that I return with him (no lie there either). I’d just tell her I was terrified of the monstrous bear on the loose and that Tristan was taking me away till the ‘animal’ was caught. We’d leave tonight. She’d find it odd and rash, but incredibly romantic.
A beautifully fabricated bit of bullshit, I thought with a satisfied nod, sprinting upstairs.
“I don’t know where the hell she is!” Tristan’s growled response was too low for human ears, but I caught his words easily enough despite the ambient noise of the street. “She’s not answering her phone…” His conversation receded as he stalked off to pace in my driveway.
Briefly, I wondered who they were referring to, but as I hesitated outside my mother’s bedroom door, my thoughts were instantly refocused on my looming deception. I hated lying to her, but, sadly, it was becoming easier and easier to do so. And she would never question me because the old Evan never lied. “Mom?” I called out softly, crossing over the threshold. Here we go…
* * *
“Did you hate him?”
“Huh?” I’d been staring out the window, distracted by somber thoughts and passing shadows. Tearing my eyes away from the black woods towering over the lonely road, I peered around to study Tristan’s obscured profile.
“Did you hate Andy?” he asked again.
“No!” Aghast, I glared back out the window. We’d spoken very little since leaving West Palm Beach, each of us lost in our own gloomy thoughts. Now that we were minutes away from pulling into Dean’s driveway, the tension inflamed.
I could feel Tristan’s eyes probe me in the darkness. “So why did you kill him?”
“I don’t know!” My eyes heated with fresh tears. “I was hoping you could tell me that.” Then again, I wasn’t sure I was ready to hear him say he’d been mistaken and that I actually was rabid.
“Did you want to hurt him?”
“I don’t know. Maybe.” I shook my head, confused. “I overheard him say some hurtful things.” The answer to his first question, though, was unequivocally no. I hadn’t wanted Andy dead, not even in a blind rage. “But I didn’t hate him, Tristan, and I didn’t want him dead. No life is mine to take. Clearly, though, I can’t control the mutt inside me.”
After a thoughtful silence, Tristan said, “So you think your wolf is a disparate entity? Your own Mr. Hyde?”
It wasn’t lost on me that this was a comparison I’d used before. “Yes, she is.” She was a stranger that terrified me as no other could.
“No, Evan. It’s nothing like split personalities. You never disappear, you just become more primal. That’s essentially you in there underneath the fur. Your skin changes, not you.”
“Then why did I kill Andy?” I sobbed. We were going around in circles here. “You said I’m not rabid!”
“You’re not.” He gave a dreary shrug. “The only thing that makes sense is that you must have hated him.”
Why did I not believe him? I sensed a heavy uncertainty in him.
“Your wolf,” he continued, “is just a magnification of all your most powerful and primitive emotions, but she’d never act against your basic nature or contrary to your desires. She is you.”
“Then clearly my wiring’s all fucked up!” I lifted my hands up as though I could still see them imbrued with blood. “I killed an innocent man. That makes me a rabid mutt!”
Abruptly, he pulled his truck over to the edge of the road. “Evan, look at me.”
When I’d finally fastened my watery gaze to him, he pulled my hands to his mouth and kissed my knuckles tenderly. The red haze dissipated from my gaze.
“The only fucked up thing here is what Nicole did to you,” he said. “But not for a single moment have I questioned who you are. You’ve always been honest, and quirky, and beautiful, and kind. That was all I saw in the eyes of the beautiful wolf you became that night you first changed. You were in there. I know you’re not rabid.”
“You don’t think I’m damaged?” I asked in a small voice. “Promise?”
“Never have I ever. And I have never met someone like you.” Citrine flared in his eyes, warm and sincere, as he leaned closer. “I love you, Evan. To me, there is no woman more perfect than you.”
“What?” This I had not expected. That such a simple and heartfelt confession was powerful enough to strip me bare, and touch my soul, was staggering.
“I love you.” He kissed me then, lips in fierce espousal of his claim. A kiss that left no doubt of his feelings. After a hot minute, he pulled away. His breathing was as ragged as mine. “Even if we have to run away and live like strays, I won’t let the Council hurt you. You’re mine. And I was yours the moment you threw that condom at me.” Playful, yet no less genuine, he kissed me again.
Unable to help the giddiness that burbled from my lips, I laughed. “You love me?” I ran my tongue tentatively over my lips, wanting to savor his revelation as much as his beautiful kiss.
“I do.” He smiled gently.
I tried not to feel unworthy or afraid. “I love you too, Tristan.” Even so, I felt my brow pucker with dread.
“What is it.” His expression quickly mirrored mine.
“Nothing sane attacks what it loves, Tristan.” I’d almost done to him what I’d succeeded in doing to Andy. “What’s wrong with me?”
“You’ve never hurt me.” Tristan kissed my brow and then tucked my head under his chin. “Not on purpose.”
Confused, I blinked up at him, tracing my finger over that scar at his jaw. A testament to the violence I was capable of. “You’re sure of that?”
“Self-preservation—you thought I was attacking you. Maybe you didn’t at first recognize my musk. Maybe the forest reeked of the others and it all overpowered your keener senses and threw you into confusion. I dunno.” He gave a wry sigh. “Evan, the first change is the most traumatic. None more so than yours. Your instinct was to fight and get away, but I knocked you from the road and held you down. Of course you attacked me, any threatened wolf would have.” His thumb brushed the corner of my mouth. “But you also saved me from that grizzly. You made that bear your bitch.”
Well, I’d been mostly human then. “I didn’t know you were conscious for that?”
He shrugged. “Only just.”
I was still so deeply reviled at myself despite that he adamantly dow
nplayed my assault. “I wish I was conscious of what happened with Andy.” Or maybe (like when I’d attacked Tristan) it was better that I didn’t retain any egregious full moon memories.
“Me too.” Suddenly Tristan was reaching for his phone again, but this time the line went straight to an automated voicemail. He growled in frustration.
“Who do you keep trying to call?” I’d meant to ask him this earlier.
“Lydia.”
“Why?”
“Because she was told to watch over you until you—”
“What?!” I’d been inundated with so many odd sensations since my first change that I’d completely disregarded the feelings of being watched as nothing but wolfy paranoia—a result of cutting myself off from the pack. “You had me spied on?”
“No, I had you protected. You needed space from us, I get that, but until you can control the change I had to placate the others somehow. Dean wouldn’t have let you go otherwise.”
I was trying not to get my knickers in a knot, but I couldn’t help feeling affronted that he’d arranged to have me followed without even warning me. “The others?”
“The Council Of Alphas.”
That sounded pretty official. I clamped my bottom lip thoughtfully between my teeth. “Oh.” Still…
“I couldn’t watch you myself since I knew it was me you wanted space from, so I sent Lydia. I know you like and trust her more than the others.” With one more last disgusted look at his phone, Tristan chucked it in the center console, a gruff sigh issuing into the darkness as he leaned back against his headrest. In the gloaming, his pensive gaze suddenly took on an eerie incandescence as it settled on me. “How do you feel right now?”
Confused, I lifted a shoulder diffidently. Well, considering I’m a mutt with anger issues… “Fine, I guess.”
“No pains?” he asked pointedly. “No weird sensations?”
My eyes shifted past him to the bloated moon mounting the jagged horizon. The last time I’d looked up at a full moon it had been with canine eyes. Beautiful as it was, the moon filled me with dread and humility. Though there was no sharp, foreboding migraine gathering in my skull, I still perceived a deep hum of power radiating straight to my bones. “I feel…I feel strange.” Brooding, I looked back at him. “But there’s no pain.”
Tristan’s mouth quirked in that boyish way that always left my heart stuttering. It was kind of an inappropriate time to be amused, what with the Council of Alphas’ wrath hanging over me like the Sword of Damocles. There had, however, been nothing blithe about his brief half-smile. There had been something almost wistful in that left dimple. Something sad. “We have tonight, Evan. Come morning, everything will change, and not necessarily for the better.” He leaned in closer so that his breath fell like silk again my lips. “Wanna steal a moment in time for ourselves?”
“What do you mean?”
“Pretend we’re the only people in the world and that tomorrow will never intrude.”
I nodded slowly, completely seduced by the moonbeams filling the hush, and utterly lost in the amber flecks pulsing amidst the lambent green of my lover’s otherworldly eyes.
“Wanna try and change on your own?”
It took me a moment to comprehend his meaning, but when I did I leaned back, wary. “Shift? Like now?”
“Like right now,” he said, taking a teasing nip at my bottom lip.
“I thought you said it would take me years before I could shift at will?”
“This cycle’s different—you’ve already peaked.” He paused to search for a better explanation. “You’ve vented the steam and now there’s no more pressure; but the moon’s still full, so it should happen easily enough if you try. The real challenge is learning to shift out of cycle. That’s what takes a while to master.”
“It hurts, though.” That was an understatement.
“The first time always does. It’s awful for everyone, and its worse for those like you.”
I twisted my hair nervously around my finger. What he was suggesting was surely tantamount to asking a woman to go through childbirth again hours after she’d already pushed triplets out. Without an epidural! Madness.
“It won’t hurt if you don’t fight it. Try, Evan.” He gently kissed the base of my neck near where I knew the silver scars of the bite were just barely visible. The same scars I’d taken pains to hide from my mother. “Please. For me.”
“I don’t know how. I hate myself, Tristan. I hate what I’ve done. I’m a monster!”
“Stop it.” His voice lowered with unsuppressed anger. “You’re innocent until proven guilty. Flip the switch, Evan. You have to conceptualize the world through a new paradigm. Like a Gestalt shift—change your perception. Tonight. Right now.”
“I don’t know if I can.” I was trembling.
“Then let me have your guilt.” The yellow in his eyes flickered in the dark. “Let me worry about tomorrow. Learn to let go, or it’ll drive you mad. Compartmentalize. Flip the switch,” he said again. “Right now. For tonight at least let’s be the Tristan and Evan of old.”
Though my gut clenched fearfully, I finally relented and gave him an uncertain nod. I had to trust that he knew what he was asking me to do. God knew I wanted to shift my perception—I hated hating myself even more than I hated what I’d done to Andy. “Okay. I’ll try.”
No sooner had I uttered my assent than Tristan shifted the truck into gear, the tires protesting as he sped back onto the road. There was a determined edge of excitement in his mien. The miles we ate up stretched quietly as I glared with distrust at the moon. Unexpectedly, Tristan veered onto an overgrown track that might once have been a dirt road or a hidden driveway, the trees serried and darker here. The adumbrative foliage brushed ardently at the passing truck like eager black tongues drawing us into the otherworld. He parked his truck deep in the woods, the stillness of the witching hour creeping in as he killed the engine and opened his door.
“How do I…?” The theory of werewolfing was simple enough, but now that it was time for me to actually shift on my own, I was lost as to how I might flick the physical switch. The mental shift I was still working on.
Understanding my plight, Tristan ran a confident finger down the buttons of my shirtfront. “Start by undressing, beautiful.”
I looked pointedly at the woods around us and then narrowed my eyes at him. “Is this some kind of freaky werewolf porno?”
He winked and pulled his shirt off. “It could be…”
Since we were, after all, stealing time and reality couldn’t obtrude here in our stolen midnight bubble, I gave a loud wolf whistle (like the Evan of yore would have done) and feasted my gaze on his powerful sinews, forcing the weight of my woes to the outback of my troubled psyche.
Now completely naked, Tristan fixed wolfen eyes to me and waited. “Your turn.”
When my clothes had been piled atop his, I shrugged self-consciously and averted my face back to the moon. “Now what?”
“Now,” he said, moving to run his fingers softly over my midriff and up my sternum to my neck, “you welcome it in.”
“That’s what he said…”
As I’d expected, he chuckled, both amused and aroused. Something intoxicating and electrifying gathered and thrummed in the air between us. Whatever primitive emanation it was that murmured into me, whether from the moon or the heat of the werewolf beside me, it stirred a dark fever in my blood.
“You’ve resisted it till now.” His silken tone only kindled my desire the more. His nose flared, drawing my scent in, as preternatural eyes bored into mine, his chest rising and falling with increasing rapidity. An unrestrained passion billowed—the desperate want of flesh (my flesh) and the need to answer the moon’s sylvan call. “You’ve hated and distrusted it.”
“Yes.” It was more a groan than a simple word. Already my voice was guttural like his.
“But not tonight.” Tristan backed away from me suddenly, the cold biting where his spicy warmth had disappeared.
“No more fighting it. Now you draw it in. Embrace it.” And then he was running into the woods with one last challenging smirk over his shoulder. “Unless you’d rather wait here…like prey?”
“What?” The wilderness had already swallowed him up, and only the trees caught my glare. “Tristan!”
I was uncertain whether or not he was giving me privacy to change or if he was unwilling to shift in front of me just yet, worried that I’d been conditioned to fear the sight since Lupum Caedes. Either way, he’d be back in one form or another and I didn’t want to remain here naked and meek. I was sick to death of being afraid and defenseless. With a bolstering shake of my head, climbing down from the truck, I took a deep breath. Then I lifted my face to the moonlight peering through the canopy.
“Okay then”—gesturing the moon over with a dubious crook of my fingers—“come at me, bro.”
At first, nothing happened, and the gooseflesh rippling over my skin was nothing more than the brush of the falling temperature, a sensual, momentary night whisper. But at length, I felt an answering pulse beat surging from my core. I let it coalesce and expand, ignoring the panic that threatened to do the same. This time, the pain came in pleasurable and undulating spells as I let it perfuse my body. For a brief moment, I was compelled to fight it, an unconscious impulse, and the pain spiked sharply and instantly—a slap to curb my remonstrance. I took another deep, calming gulp of air and opened myself up to it again, drawing in that argent power nudging at my periphery, pulling firmly at my bones and plucking at my muscles with invisible fingers.
The sounds of the insects and the night birds magnified so that every voice became distinct and multifaceted. The verdurous colors of the forest rushed over me and swelled into me as I gasped with the fullness of it. I felt my skin erupt with hair. Felt my teeth protract from my gums with numbing, copper-soaked jolts. My jaws shifted and lengthened to make room for the growing fangs and my nails became black as they jutted into the earth. Then, with an almighty popping and rippling, my chest burst with a euphoric animalistic cry before, finally, I collapsed to the ground in a sated mass of fangs and fur.
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