by PM Drummond
I groped around to check the door locks. Following the steering column, I found the key and I turned it—nothing, not even a click.
The blackness faded as my eyes adjusted to the dim light. Shadowy gray figures emerged from the gloom and materialized into several huge wolves. Their heads cleared the Escort’s hood with ease. They surrounded the car. A male, larger than the rest, jumped on the hood, lowered his head and bared his teeth. Movement to my left spun my attention to the driver’s window, and I yelped as a wolf growled and salivated on the glass. It pressed its face to the window and glared at me with one blue eye and one green eye.
The wolves’ raw energy signal was oddly familiar. Power danced along my skin and tingled up my spinal cord into my brain. Something brushed my neck, and I screamed. I reached back and grabbed my rising static-filled ponytail and forced it back down.
“Calm down, Marlee,” I said. “You’re in here. They’re out there. Now would not be a good time to overcharge and break another window.”
Another wolf jumped on the hood then up on the roof. The thin metal above popped and dented under the massive animal’s weight, and I clamped my hand over my mouth to stifle a scream.
The large male on the hood jumped down and ran into the woods. Another wolf took his place and stared into my eyes. I gasped when I caught shreds of thought.
Intruder. Kill.
Animals had always been blank slates to me, but these wolves exuded bits of readable thought.
I pulled my hands from my mouth.
“No, please,” I said to the wolf on the hood. “I mean no harm.”
The wolf pulled its head back and stopped growling. I thought it had understood me until it turned its head to the left.
A figure, taller than a wolf, emerged from the trees. As it stepped in front of the car, I realized it was a man—a really, really naked man. He strode to the driver’s side of the car with sinewy grace. He reached out and stroked the neck and back of the wolf on the hood, then gently nudged the wolf with the two different colored eyes away from the driver’s side window.
A voice in my head startled me, but I realized it was my own voice. It was having an argument with itself. It seemed half of my brain, the part that had never seen a naked man, wanted me to look away in embarrassment. The other half of my brain, the part that had always wanted to see a naked man, wanted me to gawk at his exquisite nudity.
Six feet of bronze muscle, he towered over the car. This close, it wasn’t too dark to see that there wasn’t a tan line to be found anywhere on his rippled stomach or perfectly formed thighs.
A smile jerked a few times at the side of my mouth before it leveled out into what I was sure was a stupid grin. He didn’t smile back.
Sable brown eyes regarded me with a mixture of curiosity and menace. His face matched his body—tanned and hard—with at least a day’s growth of chocolate-brown beard echoing the fine pelt of hair on his chest, which narrowed to a little line down the center of his stomach to the region I was trying to ignore. His hair fell to his shoulders in soft waves.
The man and the animals around the car formed a blanket of raw energy. My skin itched as it absorbed their power, which I’d have to dissipate soon, willingly or not. The new pills weren’t working anymore, but I took a couple more anyway.
The wolf on top of the car moved and the roof metal flexed and popped. I jumped, and the rear-view mirror shattered.
The man at the window looked at the cracked mirror then to me. He slid his hand over the window, and his brow dipped. He felt my power, which meant he wasn’t a normal human, which meant I was probably in the right place. Vampires probably didn’t have normal human friends.
He stood, whistled and pointed to the trees. The wolves bolted into the forest without a look back.
“It’s safe now,” he said. “You can come out now.”
Oh yeah, perfectly safe out there in the dark with the gorgeous naked man. My mutinous gaze raked him up and down, ending at his now amused brown eyes.
He grinned and his whole face warmed with mischief.
“Unlock the door, Marlena,” he said. “I won’t bite.”
My head shook from side to side of its own volition. Obviously, it agreed with my hands and didn’t want to open the door either.
The man leaned over and put his hands on his knees.
“I’m sorry we frightened you. We don’t get many visitors. Rune called and told me you were coming.”
He reached over and tugged at the door handle.
“Unlock the door. I guarantee your safety. Rune made me swear to it, and oaths to Rune are blood binding.”
My shaking hand grabbed the door handle and tugged twice before the door opened. I held the handle and glanced around the car.
“They’re gone,” the man said. “They won’t return.”
I opened the door inch by inch then got out on wobbly legs.
He held his hand out.
“My name is Bader.”
Ingrained politeness won out on sheer terror, and I shook his hand. Crackling heat danced from his warm palm up my arm. His smile faltered. He pulled his hand back and inspected his palm.
Curiosity surged from him as he looked back to me.
“Rune said you were a special friend.” He looked to the lightening sky. “You’re obviously not of his kind. What exactly are you?”
“I don’t know,” I said. The words and the realization came as one. I rubbed my arms. “Right now, I feel like Alice down the rabbit hole.”
I scanned the trees and road. Then I scanned his body, but I caught myself and jerked my gaze back to his face.
He laughed.
“God, I’m sorry. I forget sometimes that not everyone is comfortable naked in the forest.” He glanced at the Escort. “I take it this is going no farther. Let me grab your bag. The compound is a little over a mile up the road.”
I watched him open the back door of the car, lean in, and grab my small suitcase, proving my lack of virtue, willpower, and tact. He backed out of the car and closed the door.
“Do you want what’s left of the groceries in the front?” His grin beamed, and his eyes sparkled in the early morning light. He knew I was embarrassed, and he was enjoying it.
“Yeah,” I said. “I’ll get them, though.” I leaned into the car and grabbed my one remaining sack of junk food and my backpack. “Maybe we can tape together some clothes for you out of the paper bag when I’m finished.”
I stood and looped my arms through the backpack straps. His grin broadened and gave way to a howling laugh. He turned and walked down the road.
“Rune said you were a smartass when you were tired, scared, stressed, threatened.” He counted of the list on his free hand then shrugged. “Hell, he pretty much just said you were always a smart ass,” he said.
I hurried to catch up with his striding gait.
“Great, a character reference from a vampire to a guy who owns ravenous wolves.”
“Nobody owns them. We all just live together.”
“Oh.” I stumbled on something. How the heck did he walk across this nature’s minefield in the dark, barefoot, without killing himself?
“What else did Rune say about me?” I grimaced after I said it. It was something a teenager would say.
“Not much else. Just that you were special to him, and that if I let you come to harm he’d rip my throat out.”
His nonchalant tone and sincerity stopped me. Bader stopped and turned.
“You’re serious?” I asked the question but already sensed the answer. Lack of sleep, stress, and the slight buzz from all the sugar, caffeine, my new best friend Midol, and sedatives shifted my world into surreal mode—that dreamy sensation that none of this was real.
“Dead serious. It’s a blood oath. I’ve seen him do worse.”
My dream world tilted. I swayed and reached my arm out. Bader closed the five-foot gap between us in an instant and grabbed my arm.
“Whoa easy,” he said and lif
ted the grocery bag from my arm. “Not to worry. I won’t let anything happen to you.”
He lifted my chin and checked my eyes. “I would have looked after you if he had just asked. He only threatens because he still thinks of me as a child and not a thirty-two-year-old man.”
My scattered wits reassembled themselves, but I needed a few minutes to try to get a handle on my energy level. “You don’t look thirty-two.”
“What can I say. My family is blessed with good health and complexions.”
A grin lifted his mouth, and he pushed my hair from my eyes with one finger.
“Are you going to make it, or do I carry you?”
The thought of being carried by a naked man, especially one who looked like Bader, shot a jolt through me.
I pulled away from him. A sharp crack split the air and seconds later, a fifteen-foot pine tree crashed onto the Escort.
Bader and I both jumped and yelled at the same time. He put a hand on his chest and regarded me wide-eyed.
“Rune said you were telekinetic, but he didn’t give details. I thought maybe you moved spoons and pencils and stuff.”
I’d felt that pine-tree killing pulse right down to my toes, and it hurt. I rubbed my temples and fought the urge to cry or scream or stomp my feet and cuss.
Bader held up his hand.
“Hey it’s cool with me. That’s not the strangest thing I’ve seen, by a long shot.”
I felt my energy building again, and I silently cursed the makers of energy drinks and Twinkies. I needed to burn off some of this rampant power before I brought a ponderosa pine down on our heads.
“Hold on a minute,” I said. I took a few steps toward the car and held my hands out.
I felt Bader looking at me. I hated being looked at. It’s one of the reasons I’d perfected my wallflower disappearing act. I usually blended in so well, people didn’t notice me at all. I scanned our surroundings. It would be impossible to disappear with only two people in a remote forest.
“Bader.” He stood staring at me like a spectator at a Monster Truck show—ready to be amazed, but poised to take flight in case something went wrong.
He blinked a few times but said nothing.
“Would you please turn around?” I said.
“Why?”
“I’ve never really done this with somebody watching. Well . . . not on purpose anyway.”
It was like adjusting creeping underwear. You had to do it to be comfortable, but you didn’t want people to see you do it.
He walked around a nearby pine and stood with his back to it and me. I raised my hands toward the car again. Energy gathered in my shoulders, and with a mental shove, I released it down my arms in an almost steady, almost controlled stream. The tree lifted off the car, and twirling like a huge car wash brush, it spun its way to the end of the Escort and dropped to the ground.
When I turned, Bader was just ducking back behind the tree. I rolled my eyes and sighed. I stomped down the road and spoke to him as I passed. “You peeked.”
“Yes.” He fell into step beside me. “That was amazing.”
Being irritating and nosy must have been a prerequisite of being Rune’s friend.
“Why did you want me to turn around?”
“I just—” I shrugged and threw my palms out in the air.
“I just,” My hands dropped and slapped my jeans. “Hell, I don’t know, okay? It’s just not something I want people to see.” And now I’m so far down the rabbit hole, I’m cussing. I hate cussing. My dad is the cusser in the family.
“But what you can do is amazing. You’re amazing.”
“Yeah, yeah, and fascinating and marvelous, I’ve been through all the adjectives with Rune. It just tends to freak normal people out.” I shot a glance his way. “No offense.”
He chuckled. “Perfectly all right. I’m not normal. Don’t want to be.”
His eyes registered sincerity. Strange, I’d almost forgotten he was nude. I jerked my gaze back forward.
“Yeah, funny what you can get used to, but I’d rather my little oddity would go away. I want to be normal.”
“No such thing.” He rooted around in my grocery bag. “People can be common, but no one’s really normal.”
He sounded just like Rune.
“So how long have you known Rune?” I asked.
Bader took a giant pixie stick out of the bag and grimaced at it.
“All my life. He and Griss have been friends of my people for a couple of hundred years. Actually, we knew Griss first.”
“Your people? Are you Indian or something?” What kind of people lived in a compound?
He smiled, and his eyes sparked with mischief again.
“Or something.” He dropped the two-foot pixie stick back in the bag. “You know Griss?”
I must have made a face because Bader laughed.
“Oh yeah, you know him. Anyway, Rune and Griss come up here every year or so and hang out with us. They’re good friends. If we ever need help, they’re the first to show up. You can’t say that about many of your so-called normal people. In fact, none that I know of.”
“So you’re not afraid of him?”
Bader lifted my last energy drink out of the sack, read the ingredients, and grimaced again.
“I didn’t say that. He scares the shit out of me sometimes. Having him and Griss as friends is like having a tiger as a pet. You always know in the back of your mind they could kill you. You never want to show them your underbelly. Well, you know, you probably feel the same way, right?”
He dropped the drink back in the bag.
“Yeah, well no, not exactly. I still don’t know if I want the tiger as a pet.”
“Ah,” he said. “Still want to be common.”
”Normal.”
”Same thing.”
We reached a fork in the road and Bader pointed to the right where the two ruts we followed wound upward through the trees.
I trudged up the road, thinking that if I lived in a place like this, I wouldn’t need my kick-aerobics DVDs. Bader carried my suitcase and the grocery bag in one arm and loped along like the weight and the incline didn’t exist.
I stopped to suck in some air before I could continue. “So,” I said. “How much do you know about Rune?”
Bader shrugged. “I know a lot, and I know hardly anything. Almost all that I do know, came from Griss. He told us that Rune was born sometime in the three hundreds BC Athens. He and his father, Protagoras, were traveling teachers.”
“Protagoras? Is that the math guy?”
“No. That’s Pythagoras. Protagoras was a philosopher and pretty radical for his time. I did a paper on him in college since I sort of had a connection to him through Rune. Protagoras is the one who came up with the quote about all things being a measure of man. In other words, laws, customs, right, and wrong all are just what man says they are. There are no right and wrong unless man says so.”
“Rune told me that in almost those exact words,” I said.
“Sounds like him. After all, he taught the stuff under his father for years. His father also was the guy who started most of the rules for grammar. Have you ever noticed how properly Rune speaks?”
“I thought it was just a part of the whole accent thing.”
“Nope.” Bader scoffed. “Hell, he only sporadically started using contractions in the last ten years or so. It still sounds weird to hear him say words like won’t or can’t. It’s like hearing a preacher cuss.”
“What about Griss? What’s the story with those two?”
“From what I’ve been able to gather,” Bader said. “Rune was locked in a silver coffin at Lindesfarne.”
“What’s a Lindesfarne?”
“A monastery in England, I think. Anyway, the Vikings heard rumors about this silver coffin and they raided Lindesfarne. They found the coffin and opened it and got a big surprise.”
“Rune?”
“A very hungry, very angry at being disturbed, Rune. I guess he�
��d been locked away for a couple hundred years at that point and he’d worked up a good appetite. So he killed all the Vikings that opened the coffin but one who managed to talk his way out of it.”
“That was Griss, I take it?”
“Yep, that was our Griss. Those two have a sort of symbiotic relationship.”
“How so?”
“Griss reminds Rune how enjoyable life is and keeps him from going to ground again, and Rune bails Griss out of all the trouble he gets into.”
“What’s going to ground?”
“It’s what vampires do when they get fed up with the monotony of living for so long.” Bader glanced at the lightening sky. “That or watch the sun rise.”
I remembered the mural in Rune’s office, and I shivered.
“What do they do when they go to ground?”
“They lock themselves into a coffin and sort of hibernate.”
“Oh.” Something else I didn’t know three days ago and really didn’t care to know now. I filed it away with the other million and two things I didn’t want to deal with, but that mental closet was getting pretty full, especially after this week.
I wiped sweat from my forehead.
“So does this compound of yours really exist?”
“It’s just around the next corner. Keep your shirt on.”
“Oh that’s a good one coming from you.”
He looked down at his body, and we both laughed. For me, it was one of those soul-cleansing laughs, one of those “Hey look at me, I’m still alive” relief laughs bordering on a “Hey, I may be completely losing it” laugh.
Talking to Bader was comfortable. It was hard to believe I’d thought him menacing at first. He was like a big friendly dog—a big, naked, tanned, drop-dead gorgeous, friendly dog.
Yep, he fit in nicely with the Cheshire Cat and White Rabbit in the rabbit hole that’d become my life.
CHAPTER EIGHT
WHO LET THE DOGS OUT?
We rounded the last curve, and the forest retreated to reveal an enormous square clearing. A mammoth tree commanded the center. Its branches swept out twenty feet from a trunk as big around as the now-deceased Escort. The lowest of its branches hung ten feet from the smooth, hard dirt below, creating a living twenty-four-foot-round canopy. Rough-hewn wooden tables and benches rested underneath, behind a stone barbecue grill that was almost as long as the canopy was wide.