Tao of Love 3: Kiss of the Twin Werewolves

by Sedonia Guillone

  The guard stood before him. “Come on.” The uniformed man’s voice was more like a bark. So cold and unkind. “Get up. They’re waiting for you in the visitor room.”

  Slowly, with all the effort he possessed, he pushed himself up to a sitting position. The bit of effort tired him and he slumped over, his elbows on his knees.

  The guard grasped his upper arms and tugged him to his feet. “I hope one of them’s a doctor,” he said. “You look like shit hit with a hammer.”

  He steadied his weight onto both sandaled feet while the guard clamped handcuffs on his wrists. That done, the guard grasped his upper arm again and propelled him out of the cell, into the corridor.

  At first, the guard had to half drag him through the corridors, but as he walked, he felt a bit of qi trickle into him, into his limbs, down his back and into his chest. His heart sped up to a normal beat and his breathing came more easily. He walked more steadily, not needing the guard’s rough support and he grew alert, understanding that someone important was waiting for him.

  They came to a stop in front of one door. Another guard stood there and unlocked it.

  His heart quickened yet more as the deadbolt turned, echoing through his sharpened senses.

  A scent, the scent of a woman’s musky yin dew met his nostrils. A woman was in that room. A woman who stirred his yang force. His groin tightened, his male shaft twitched in response to the tangy musk of woman in the air.

  The door opened and the guard led him inside to a white-walled room full of tables and chairs, empty but for two people, a man and a woman.

  He looked at them. At her. At the golden hair and green eyes he’d been seeing in his dreams. She was here.

  His blood ignited in his veins and he whimpered.

  Then he lunged for her.

  The guards tackled him. He struggled to get to her, but they yanked him back, keeping a stranglehold on him.

  Meg stared, her eyes as wide as they could open.

  The two men were dragging Jie’s...twin?...away. The man could only whimper and growl and struggle.

  Jie? No, it couldn’t be. But it was. His presence defied all reason. This was a completely separate being. His hair was long and he had a beard. But it was Jie. She felt the man’s energy in the room, his scent, identical to Jie’s carried to her. No doubt in her mind or heart. A woman knew a man she’d taken inside her.

  Then she came out of shock. Meg felt his desperation inside her as if it were her own. He needed her. Badly. He wasn’t going to hurt her. She knew that.

  “Stop!” she cried. “Stop!”

  The guards froze by the door, the twisting, writhing man in their grip. He grunted and whimpered, his large eyes desperate, pleading with her.

  She stepped forward but Jie grabbed her wrist. She whirled around, her gaze met Jie’s hard brown stare.

  “Meg, he’s dangerous.”

  It wasn’t true. It just so wasn’t true, she knew it in her deepest marrow. With surprising strength, she twisted her arm from Jie’s grasp. “He won’t hurt me.” She lowered her voice to a whisper and switched to English, hoping the guards wouldn’t understand. “He’s you.”

  Jie stared at her. His lips parted to speak, but Meg turned quickly back around and started again for the prisoner...for...Jie.

  The longhaired man was watching her, his eyes wide, still pleading. His chest heaved from the exertion of his struggle. He lunged again, but the guards held him firmly in place.

  Meg looked at the larger guard. “Let him go,” she ordered in Mandarin. “He won’t hurt me.”

  “He must stay cuffed,” the guard answered.

  She gave the guard a hard look just as Jie came up close behind her, hovering protectively. “Fine,” she said, “but stop hurting him.”

  The guards released the man and he bounded forward.

  Meg thought he’d grab her but he fell to his knees before her. Locks of his smooth raven hair fell across his pleading eyes. His hands came up in a begging gesture and he grunted.

  She stared back at him, listened to his guttural sounds, saw his Adam’s apple slide in his throat. In just those few moments of looking at him, she saw who he was. Every bit of him was Jie, every hair, every eyelash, the full curves of his lips and the pattern of beard on his jaw and upper lip. Had Jie grown his facial hair, he’d have exactly the same thickness of beard, fuller around the chin, thinning out as it moved along his jaw and up his cheeks. “Jie,” she whispered.

  “What?” Jie answered behind her.

  She glanced at him over her shoulder. “No,” she said softly. “I mean...Jie.” She gestured to the man on his knees.

  He whimpered. Please, come to me, the sound said to her.

  She understood. She stepped toward him.

  He fell against her. His cheek sank against the softness of her belly.

  Her heart melted. She embraced him, rested one hand on his heaving back through his rumpled baggy shirt and caressed his hair with the other as if he were a child. He was masculine, a strong man, an exact likeness to Jie, yet he emanated a childlike need, the very wild, unfettered creature that Jie detested in himself. “It’s all right,” she crooned, still stroking his hair. “We’re here now. You’re not alone anymore.”

  She didn’t understand where the words were coming from in her, but they flowed out. She sensed he needed to hear these words. She knew he was lost and alone and frightened, knew him, felt everything about him, and the longer she stood stroking his hair and feeling his strong back under her other hand, the more knowledge poured into her.

  Jie materialized at her side. He stood, staring down at the kneeling man whose face was pressed into her stomach. Jie’s expression was a mixture of shock and of the practiced ability to remain inscrutable, but she sensed the churning of emotions, the warring forces in his heart.

  “This cannot be,” he whispered. “I have no brother.” He glanced at Meg. “None that I know of.”

  “Your godfather knew he was you, Jie, just as I do,” she said. Then it hit her. A shiver passed up her spine. “Jie, when did Master Li first see him?”

  “Maybe ten days ago. My godfather said he appeared out of nowhere.”

  The shiver in her body intensified. The knowledge of what had actually happened nearly shattered her balance, almost sent her crumpling to the floor.

  The exercises. The Dragon-Tigress practices she and Jie had been doing the past few months. Since they’d performed the exercises, the cleansing and purifying of their yin and yang, and since Jie had been holding in his yang force by not ejaculating and then taking her yin inside him and mixing it to strengthen his qi, he’d not once changed into a werewolf.

  But the werewolf hadn’t disappeared. He’d split off.

  The revelation was blinding. She gasped.

  “What is it, Meg?” Jie’s voice was tightly controlled and she heard the rage simmering underneath. He was obviously not at all happy about this man on his knees before her, taking comfort from her.

  She heaved a deep breath, unable to speak right away. She waited for the shock of revelation to pass before she tried to answer. “Jie,” she said, “Something really bad has happened.”

  His almond eyes widened and he continued to stare at her. “What has happened?”

  Her hand rested on the kneeling man’s head and she smoothed his hair back. He seemed oblivious to the conversation going on, seeming to want only his rest against Meg and to have her stroke him comfortingly. “Jie, you’ve...you’ve split off. This man...he is you. And...” She glanced down and then back up at Jie. “He needs the qi we’ve stolen from him.

  Chapter Four

  Jie stared at Meg, his heart racing. He was too stunned to answer her immediately. The man on his knees, supposedly his...other half...the man in his earlier visions, or whoever the hell he was, stirred, obviously drinking in Meg’s soft beauty and comfort. An impulse seized Jie to grab that man and yank him off his woman, but another inner movement stayed him. He hated violence, d
etested the raging emotions inside him and had no wish to visit them upon this man who didn’t seem to have any intention of harm.

  Jie swallowed hard and cleared his throat. “How can you possibly know this?” His tone was churlish, petulant. Not what he’d intended.

  Meg frowned. “I don’t know how I know it, Jie. It just came to me.” She leaned in slightly, lowered her voice again. “Let’s be honest. How much weirder can it be than changing into a...you-know-what...every full moon?”

  She was right, of course. He hated to admit it. Life was a mysterious thing, and he’d never fully understand it no matter how long he lived. Even in the wake of his parents’ murders he’d still been able to explain the violence as the result of man’s potential for senseless inhumanity. However, that one bite he’d received out on the plains that night three years earlier, the bite that had made him a lang ren, had utterly destroyed his belief in an ordered universe that contained an explanation for everything. Not even the concept of alchemy could explain this transformation from homo sapiens to canis lupus.

  Without responding he let his gaze lower to the kneeling man. Slowly, carefully, Jie studied every inch of him, sought out some part of his skin or hair or features that wasn’t identical. So far, he couldn’t find one skin cell that appeared different.

  Jie knelt in closer. The man cringed, his eyes -- mirror eyes to Jie’s -- wide and frightened.

  Without words, Jie sensed the man felt hated by him. Fear radiated from his eyes, a kind of terror that made Jie feel monstrous. “I won’t hurt you,” Jie murmured. “I promise.” He waited another moment, allowing the frightened man to become accustomed to his nearness. Jie could see that although he’d spoken gently and had meant his words, his scared double didn’t believe him.

  “Jie, what are you going to do?” Meg’s voice sliced through the tense silence.

  He looked up at her, shamed further by the protective note in her voice. He had to remind himself that she believed the man kneeling before her was him, not some other man. Jie needed to believe that otherwise she might not have let this wild stranger so close to her. “I need to see his back,” he answered. “I want to see the scar. Li told me he’d seen it.”

  Her eyes widened. “The scar from the bottle?”

  He nodded and turned his attention back on the cringing man. Jie felt himself soften a bit toward him. He hated that he’d inspired the man’s fear. Having grown up with Buddhist monks, the concept of harmlessness had been ingrained in him from an early age. The fact that he’d gone through a tough period, fighting in a gang, was a memory of shame for him. He was, after all, a physician now, a healer above anything else. And if Meg was right, if he’d stolen this man’s life force, he would, as a matter of honor and decency, need to find a way to return it. But how to do that was to be figured out later. First he needed to see the scar. He reached out again.

  The man flinched and reached up, grasped Meg’s pant leg with both cuffed hands.

  Meg knelt down and placed her hands on his shoulders. She smiled at him gently. “No one is going to hurt you.” Her voice was soft, crooning, as if she were speaking to a child. “I just need to lift your shirt, all right?”

  Jie watched the man stare at Meg. When he looked at her, there was no fear in his eyes, only trust. Jie understood that feeling because Meg inspired the same faith in him as well. In all his life he’d never known a gentler woman.

  Meg reached around, took hold of the man’s baggy shirt, a shirt Jie now recognized as one of his own with the tiny hole in the left elbow, and slowly lifted it.

  Jie peered at his double’s back. His gaze landed on the scar, the pale, jagged line the broken bottle had left so many years before in a street fight. The scar Jie had managed to hide even from his godfather until it was healed enough not to make Li frantic when Jie returned to Xiahe months later and Li finally did see his injury.

  “My god,” Jie whispered. Without thinking, he reached out and touched the damaged skin.

  The man yelped softly and grasped Meg, pressed against her like a child seeking protection. She hugged him. “It’s all right, Shao,” she said softly.

  Jie looked at her. Shao? He didn’t recall being told the man’s name. Out of the corner of his eye, Jie saw her slender hand moving again on...Shao’s...hair. Jie realized in that moment that Meg had named him.

  “It’s the same scar, isn’t it, Jie?” she asked.

  He looked up at Meg. “Yes. Identical.” He heard the wonder in his own voice. A nagging feeling told him Meg was absolutely right about Shao’s existence, as much as he absolutely did not want to believe it. He released the shirt, letting it cover Shao’s back again and slowly rose up. “I can see why Su Lin thought he was me.”

  Meg looked at him with a knowing expression. She remained quiet and he knew why. He knew she wouldn’t correct him in front of the guards. Su Lin had known it was Jie for the same reason Meg knew.

  “Jie.” Meg’s gaze had misted over. “We can’t leave him here. You know that, don’t you?” Her hand passed over Shao’s hair again, brushed it gently away from his face. “He doesn’t look well.”

  Jie bowed his head. He was not happy about keeping this man with Meg. But there was nothing he could do. Every lesson about compassion the monks had taught him, every principle he’d absorbed as his own after years of suffering made it impossible to abandon Shao. What was worse, if Meg was right about the Dragon-Tigress exercises, then Jie had actually hurt Shao by stealing Shao’s qi. “I know,” he said softly.

  He turned to the guard. “We’ll pay his bail and take him with us.”

  Meg rose and slipped her hand around Shao’s arm. In quiet tones, she urged him to stand with her. She waited with Shao while Jie paid the bail and went through the paperwork. The process took a while, but finally they were free to leave and Jie got them into a cab to the hotel.

  Shao sat between them in the back seat of the taxi, his manner subdued, obviously weak from the lack of life force. The most animation he’d shown was when he’d first seen Meg in the visiting room.

  The thought disturbed Jie deeply. He sensed that Shao had smelled her yin dew, just as Jie always did when he was near her. Her scent was tangy, potent, intoxicating. From the first moment he’d walked into her grandfather’s market in Chinatown months ago, her feminine musk had hung in the air, rousing his hunger.

  “I want to feel Shao’s pulse,” he said quietly. He reached for Shao’s hand, surprised when the man only flinched but didn’t try to pull away or climb all over Meg for protection. Perhaps Jie’s inner softening toward him had helped.

  He put his fingertips over Shao’s pulse and listened, concentrated all his attention on the tiny beat throbbing against the pads of his index and middle fingers. Yes, Meg was right. Shao wasn’t well. From what Jie could feel, Shao would have died if left any longer in the jail. The entire man’s systems, his glands and organs, were all weakened. Strangely, there was no other hint of disease in his bloodstream or elsewhere. He was simply drained, robbed of qi, just as Meg had said.

  Jie sighed and gently set Shao’s hand down to rest on the seat between them. He didn’t even want to consider the way in which they might have to restore Shao’s qi. The theft of it had involved sexual activity with Meg. He forced his mind onto another aspect of the situation at hand.

  “Meg.”

  She looked at him, her pretty face half in shadows. The colorful lights of the night-lit storefronts reflected on her skin and hair. “Yes?”

  He glanced at the man between them before venturing his question. “If Shao and I are the same person, why did you name him Shao?”

  To his surprise, a tiny smile teased the corners of her sweetly ripe lips. “He’s Xiao Jie,” she said softly. “Little Jie. The part of you that’s hungry for love. An unwanted child, lost and alone. The ugly beast no one wants because he doesn’t fit their idea of perfection. Only, they’re wrong. He’s beautiful and good.” She looked down and her features darkened with obv
ious sadness. “Xiao Jie was cast out of you because you didn’t want him. Like an orphan.”

  Jie stared at her, unable to respond to her strong sad words. He remained silent until the taxi pulled up to the front entrance of the Shangri-La.

  * * * * *

  Meg’s heart was still pounding when the taxi came to a stop in front of the hotel. Jie hadn’t spoken a word since she’d answered his question about Shao’s name. As soon as she’d said the words, Jie’s eyes had widened, fraught with a pained, shamed expression. Emotions, one after the other, had passed across his handsome features and the whole time he remained silent, she’d sensed him rejecting, resenting and reflecting all at once.

  However, no fear of Jie’s anger or rejection could sway her from what she knew was true. Shao was Jie, the deepest, sweetest, wildest part of him. The more disturbing, horrifying truth she’d understood when she’d realized why Shao existed was that not only would Shao grow increasingly more ill without the necessary healing to make him whole again, but so would Jie. And then, they would have both died.

  Without Jie, Meg’s life could not go on. He was her mate, the other half of her heart and soul. No matter how he reacted to Shao, she knew the truth and would see that healing took place.

  Jie paid the driver and opened the door. “Come,” he murmured. “Let’s go upstairs.”

  She nodded and took Shao’s hand, gently urged him to slide across the seat after her and out of the cab. She felt his strength waning again and held him close, half-supporting his weight against her as they followed Jie through the glass doors into the lobby.

  “Jie, he needs to eat,” she said as they walked in the direction of the elevators.

  Jie pushed the up button and turned to her, his face an unreadable mask. “I’ll order something to be delivered to the room.”

  She nodded. They were alone in the elevator and she continued to watch Jie’s face. Her heart ached at his remote behavior. “Jie, please talk to me. I’m sorry if what I said hurt you.”