Thorne Bay

by Jeanine Croft

  Tonight’s transformation had been nothing like my last. My eyes dropped to the fierce-looking black paws beneath me, so much larger than a wolf’s. I turned my head around to my powerful flanks and obsidian pelt, mesmerized by the changes wrought by the harvest moon, and amused by the little patch of white over my heart. More than anything, I was elated and relieved to be myself. Perhaps not physiologically but certainly cognitively. Without the trauma of fighting the change, there had been no blackout. In fact, there had been considerably less pain, likely due to the analgesic hormones that had flooded my blood right before I’d started shifting.

  For the first time since Nicole stole my humanity, I felt a newborn flicker of unadulterated excitement and confidence, as of a young wolf set free from her cage. My self-loathing and fear had impounded her for so long now, murderer that I was. I acknowledged the insidious sting of guilt with a whine. After all, I didn’t deserve to feel happy. But I’d promised to let go, so I surrendered all those useless trammels to the night, giving in to the frisking spirit of my primal self, trusting her. She wanted to be free if only just for one night. Unfettered, I hurtled into the hemlock woodland to find my mate.

  I could smell him and I knew he sensed me too. That earthy lupine musk was beckoning me into his lair. He was waiting.

  40

  Love And Death

  Tristan had made it easy for me to find him. I heard him before I saw him. He was twisting playfully on his back like a great black grizzled shepherd, grunting in pleasure as I loped onto the scene. Having noticed me, he stilled his supine back-scratching and grinned that wolfish upside-down grin, tongue lolling out between long white fangs. Infused with moonlight, his eyes appeared more yellow than cerulean green. Wolf yellow—a dead giveaway that he was either furious or lustful. Tonight my bet was on the latter. Though the creature before me looked nothing like Tristan, the spice of its scent was unmistakably his.

  The fur around his muzzle was far darker than the rest of his head and his gleaming black mane was shot through with chestnut and sable. The fur directly over his spine was a little longer than the rest of his torso and matched his mane except that it was brindled with inky streaks. But the browns gradually faded over his flanks so that the majority of his coat was as stygian as the night that cloaked us.

  Edging closer, I sampled that fascinating musk that was no longer diluted by distance. It was divinely masculine. Tristan gave a waggish grunt as he rolled onto his belly to watch me. He was so much like a bear in proportions, from that stumpy tail to those massive shoulders. All except his head. That was far more canine in physiognomy. Not for a moment could he be mistaken for one or the other, at least not in good daylight. To look at him was to know you were seeing something impossible. The paws were too simian, as was the intelligence burning in his otherworldly eyes. Whether or not one was familiar with the word, you couldn’t help but know, deep down in your bones, that you were looking at a werewolf. And this werewolf was studying me just as avidly as I examined him. There was a patient curiosity in his body language that beguiled me into playfulness.

  I closed the distance and pushed my muzzle into his shaggy neck before running my head along his shoulders, down his ribs and over his flanks like a large cat. He, in turn, began to do the same to me. Unlike me, I knew that Tristan would be just as comfortable standing on hind legs, but he remained on all fours like a lovable shepherd, relishing my affection.

  Unexpectedly, I felt his teeth graze mischievously over my ear and then my foreleg, tugging and nipping until I reciprocated in turn. Soon we were scuffling and wrestling on the damp earth like children, each vying for the upper hand. Finding myself continuously outmaneuvered by Tristan’s colossal bulk (in spite of it really), I took the first opportunity to bolt away. He, of course, bounded after me with long, eager strides. I was convinced, though, that my speed (seeing as I was so much rangier) would be far superior to his and that I would easily outpace him in a race. However, I soon discovered that Tristan’s muscles had been honed for speed for far longer than mine had and he expertly cut me off, as though I was some yearling doe, swiping me off balance. We tumbled headlong down a small hill into a bank of dead leaves, yipping heartily as we continued to play.

  Never had I ever felt so alive and free. No shadow of looming tragedy could touch me here in this magical dell. No judgment could penetrate the thick canopies shielding our lively antics. The moon, at least for tonight, cloistered and possessed us. We were just two souls discovering one heart’s twin in the other, familiarizing ourselves with all the beautiful scents and textures of the other’s body.

  We hunted. We rested curled up tight against each other so that we appeared as one creature. But we were too unruly to remain still for long, so we resumed our playing again till the small hours of the morning. By now, there were amorous undertones to our capering that waxed even as the moon dropped below the trees. The bites became more sensual and the nuzzling more heated. My blood burned for him as intensely in this body as it did in my lesser, naked flesh.

  Tristan pinioned me to the forest floor with weighty forepaws, licking the side of my face as I squirmed provocatively. From my throat erupted dulcet canine purrs that were instantly matched by his deeper, male resonance. I closed my eyes and felt my body writhe and undulate as our heavy panting muffled the romance of the night and the crickets still playing their dark violins. My muscles shivered and trembled underneath him as he ran a long red tongue over my belly, the hair there rapidly falling away beneath the hot strokes.

  Then I was naked again, the night air rushing against me where, moments before, there had been a thick coarse pelt. When I opened my eyes, it was a human-looking Tristan that loomed over me, grinning wickedly. Human-looking except for his long teeth and burning eyes. His canines had not yet lost their predatory edges, and nor had they retracted out of view. Far from being disturbed by the sight, I felt my womb clench with excitement. My need for him was a powerful impulse that blotted out all my former, human timidity. Grabbing him firmly behind his neck, I pulled him down flush against my breasts and delved his mouth with hungry strokes. This seemed to precipitate Tristan into a lustful frenzy. His kisses became almost painful, gloriously so, as he devoured me. I knew that, had I been less than superhuman, I’d have been black and blue by morning. This new body welcomed the violence and fervency of our lovemaking. It craved the feral edge of each hungry, bruising kiss he bestowed.

  Iron fingers thrust their way along my ribs and anchored themselves to my hips as he roughly nudged my thighs apart. I growled, pleasure-soaked, as he dragged his canines over my jaw and closed them over my neck. Not hard enough to break the skin, though, only to mark me with shameless passion. Lost in my own delirium, I clawed at his back and bit at his own neck, bent on tasting every inch of him too. When the faint hint of copper infused my mouth I realized, belatedly, that my teeth and claws, like Tristan’s, were also still preternaturally sharp. I gentled my biting after that, but only marginally.

  Surprising him suddenly, I pushed Tristan to the side and onto his back so that I could climb on top of him. From this vantage point, I felt sensuous. Inordinate feminine power seemed to hum in my breast as he gazed up at me with molten eyes. I tossed my head back as he pressed a hot palm to each tender breast, his kneading no longer as rough as before. The way he drank me in, thumbing my peaked nipples, gaze awed and primed with unrestrained lust, only served to heighten my own ravening appetite. It was the work of a second to lift myself up and onto his steely length. Then, with exquisite and deliberate languor, I sank down onto him. His breath hissed out, torrid with the effort of holding himself still, his fingers gouging deeper into my hips, though his claws were retracted. I could feel his sinews bunching with latent, savage energy. I moved with long strokes up and down his iron body, grinding with a slowness that was in desperate contrast to the heady ferocity that had gripped us before.

  Finally, having withstood it as long as he was able, Tristan assumed the lead, infusing
our lovemaking with bestial passion. It was all I could do to hold on as he bucked fiercely beneath me. Soon I was matching his rhythm, riding his untamed wolf up a jagged incline as the pressure built and vibrated between us. It was a fierce mating. Teeth and claws were once more employed to rake and taste.

  That glorious knot between my thighs began to tighten and pulse as I moved against him. It became so overwhelming that I cried out, giving voice to the release that radiated from our joined bodies. My body was seized with a blinding palsy so vibrant and all-consuming that once the violent climax ebbed from my core, leaving me shaken and raw, I nearly fainted. Tristan, having already undergone his own debilitating release, caught me to him as he sat up.

  We sat like that for ages, my legs clamped tightly around his lean waist as he held me close. We were so deeply connected that any words spoken just then would have felt profane. The silence was profound and resonant—a pause in time. No two beings could’ve been any closer and yet I’d have pulled him nearer, and deeper, if I could have. I’d have fused my soul to his. Maybe I just had.

  “I love you,” he said into the stillness, voice still gruff and primal.

  I tightened my arms around him, feeling overmastered by the intensity of what I felt for him. Love seemed too tame a word for what connected us. I could define it only as pure and transcendent—I’d give my life for him without a moment’s hesitation.

  We dozed after that, waking every now and then to slake our hunger again and again. By dawn, I was finally, utterly, beauteously depleted. Neither the rocks poking my shoulder or the twigs spearing my flanks could induce me to move away from Tristan’s side. My head was nestled peacefully at his shoulder, my arm was thrown over his abdomen, and our legs were locked in a lover’s knot. The indigo sky was already quickening with lilac. As before, nothing worried me here, cocooned as I was by Tristan’s protective warmth. Not even the possibility of puppies.

  I almost giggled at the thought. I’d asked him about that after another bout of exuberant lovemaking. We’d been at it enough times to repopulate the earth ten times over with were-kids. But he’d laughed, unconcerned, and assured me matter-of-factly that I wasn’t ovulating. That awkward conversation still replaying in my head, I drifted into a deep sleep as the birds began to rouse themselves from their aerial beds.

  * * *

  “Evan.” Tristan’s fingers, though gentle, were insistent as he tightened them on my hip. “Evan,” he said again, this time a little louder, adding a small shake for good measure.

  I muttered incoherently and lifted one heavy eyelid. When his face swam into focus, I became instantly alert, disturbed by the wary tightness around his eyes. He wasn’t looking at me but past my shoulder. “What time is it?” I pushed myself upright.

  But before Tristan could answer, I became aware of an unfamiliar scent obtruding our privacy. At the very same moment, a stranger cleared his throat. My head nearly flew off my shoulders, I turned it so quickly, recoiling at the sight of not one but two men in our midst: Dean and a stern-looking stranger.

  It was the latter’s cold voice that answered me instead. “Time, Miss Spencer, to get up.”

  My hands, by this time, had already flown up to shield my chest from his frigid gaze, but the man was far more interested in blasting Tristan with uncanny cyan eyes than noticing my meager breasts. A cyanide gaze, I thought morbidly.

  “You’ve both wasted enough of my time.” That said, he gave us his broad back and stalked past Dean who had, all the while, been leaning impassively against a tree.

  “You could’ve warned us,” Tristan grumbled at his brother, helping me up before distractedly pulling leaves out of my hair.

  Dean shrugged inscrutably. “Yeah”—with a roll of his eyes—“because Max definitely would’ve listened if I’d told him to stay put while I sniffed your ass out.”

  “Wait!” My face blanched as I looked back and forth between the brothers, my nakedness forgotten. “That was your dad?” Awkward!

  “No,” said Dean. “That’s Tristan’s dad. I don’t have one.” Then, like his estranged father before him, he marched off too, leaving us to make our way back to the truck and into our clothes.

  I for one was burning with mortification, but Tristan’s mood seemed to vacillate between brooding reticence and tangible unease, though I couldn’t tell if the unease was because of his father’s displeasure (somehow I doubted this) or because he sensed something awful brewing in our immediate future. At any rate, we reached Dean’s house all too soon, the grounds were packed with unfamiliar cars. The place was evidently overrun with wolves, and that did not bode well for me. Once the engine had been silenced, neither one of us appeared in any rush to meet the inevitable.

  “Dean looks a lot like Max,” I said into the quiet.

  “Don’t tell him that.”

  Tristan likely resembled his mother in all but the eyes. Those he definitely shared with his father. But Max’s were a more glacial shade, whereas Tristan’s greens and blues were flecked with golden warmth. In fact, I could still feel Max’s glare cutting over me like honed dry ice. Shivering, I reached for Tristan’s hand.

  He lifted my fingers to his lips. “We better get this over with.”

  “Or we could just run away?” I suggested hopefully.

  Just then, as if my whispered words had been heard, the door flew open and Max prowled out onto the front porch. “Well?” he asked pointedly, voice stentorian and curt.

  He’d definitely been listening out for Tristan’s truck, I decided. Thick, corded arms were folded thunderously over his chest as he waited. The guy was even tetchier than my grandad.

  My stomach quickly filled with dread. Max was an imposing man of an indeterminate age, though the hint of grey at his temples and the deep furrows at his brow were attestation enough of his seniority. Of his primacy. Not for the first time, I wondered about Tristan’s age.

  Not wanting to appear meek, I tried to emulate Tristan’s steely calm. Saying nothing, he gave my hand a squeeze. His other hand was poised to open the door, but Dean’s sudden emergence onto the porch forestalled him. The expression Dean wore had stilled my hand too. I’d never seen him like this. Cedar eyes stared starkly at us, haggard and bleak as Death itself.

  “Something’s wrong,” Tristan whispered, frowning, his hand tightening on mine before he released me altogether and threw open his door. It certainly seemed as though something had happened in the space it had taken us to dress ourselves and drive to the house.

  Side by side, we proceeded to the waiting alphas, Tristan’s quiet gravitas anything but submissive of fearful. My heart, however, thundered with dread. I ascended the steps and met Max’s brittle gaze and then Dean’s red eyes with affected steadiness.

  Without preamble, though, Max immediately shattered my poise into a million tiny pieces. “Lydia’s dead,” he said grimly. Seeing that both Tristan and I had been dealt a crippling blow to the gut, he gestured us inside with a peremptory nod. “Step inside, Miss Spencer. You and I have a lot to talk about.”

  41

  Airwolf

  A lusty fire snapped and roiled along the red cedar logs glowing in the grate, but Dean’s library was eerily cold and stifling this morning. This was still far preferable to—far warmer than—the frigid atmosphere in the living room. Of all the baleful glares that had left their kerfs across my burning face (and there had been many, most of whom had been direful Yukon strangers), James’ had penetrated deepest. I felt his condemning eyes the keenest—I had, after all, killed his twin. With her death on my hands, I’d forever lost what tentative esteem I’d had in Dean’s pack. If Dean himself had not been standing behind James, his heavy paw on the man’s shoulder, I was sure James would have flown at me with claws and fangs. His body had trembled with violence as I passed them by.

  The cold, quiet click of the library door shutting behind me, therefore, had been oddly welcome. Only for a very brief moment, though. The glares of the wolves in the mural, on the w
all behind Dean’s desk, quickly took up where the others’ had left off, leering knowingly at me. Hatefully.

  God, these people were not, and had never been, subtle at all. The place was rife with wolfy paraphernalia. It shouldn’t have taken a bite to force me to see what had always been glaring right under my nose. That surely said something about human cynicism and happy ignorance. No one believed in much of anything anymore, let alone Sasquatch and werewolves. Things that were different and inexplicable were resolutely disregarded. Squelched. The world was full of happy idiots. But I was no longer ignorant of the paranormal. There were indeed monsters in the world and I had proven myself the worst of them.

  “Your presence, Tristan, isn’t required here.” Max had been surveying the grounds outside the library window with a critical eye. Now that captious gaze was pinned to me as he seated himself at Dean’s heavy walnut desk.

  “Noted,” Tristan drawled, clearly having no intention of leaving me.

  His father’s stern brow fell lower still. “Am I to understand you feel somehow responsible for the girl?”

  “You are to understand that exactly.”

  Dean and I were the only two who had yet to speak, my eyes volleying back and forth between the frosty interlocutors. Other than a brief flash of irritation, when his father had seated himself at his desk, Dean, for his part, had remained silently cold and inscrutable.

  “You’d better not be implying—” through gritted fangs “—what I think you’re implying, son.” The guy could barely pass for human.