Half Wolf

by Linda Thomas-Sundstrom

  “You’ve got to avoid staying for long in direct moonlight. It all takes time. You’ll thank me later if you listen. It’s a miracle you’re here at all.”

  Each word he spoke in that mesmerizing tone served to spread the wildfires already kindling inside her. Only this guy, whoever he really was, could affect her like this. His powerful body, chiseled face and incredible eyes were a turn-on that made her want to jump his bones.

  She felt like an animal.

  If she could just wrap her arms around his broad shoulders, then lift her legs to encircle his strong thighs, the place inside her that was thrumming with a need for intimacy would perhaps be appeased. As inexplicable as it was, she was tethered to this sexy beast by an invisible chain. His breath had meant her survival. Part of him was already inside her.

  Or had she made that up?

  “Tell me your name,” she said.

  “Michael.”

  Michael. Like the archangel. She remembered hearing him tell her this before in a conversation that seemed to have taken place a long time ago.

  “Two days old?” she said, remembering what he’d just said.

  He shook his head. “Explanations later. For now, it’s enough that you’re alive and walking.”

  More than alive, Kaitlin thought. And how could she think about later when Michael’s expression told her he shared her hunger and was fighting to keep from letting his hunger out? Weren’t people supposed to live in the now? Experience each moment as if it were their last?

  Had she confronted that last moment recently?

  “I want to feel,” she whispered hoarsely, afraid to think back. “I need to know everything life has to offer.”

  “Yes, but for you tonight is merely a dream.”

  “That’s why you’re here, Michael? I’ve dreamed you up?”

  He took her hand in his and placed her open palm on his chest, making his remark about dreams seem ludicrous. This guy was solid sculpted male goodness through and through.

  “Enjoy this while you can because if it’s all good, you’ll be back to reality tomorrow,” he said.

  Another word floated through Kaitlin’s mind as if Michael had conjured it. College. Not a totally unfamiliar word, yet too distant to capture with a focus that already moved back to Michael’s taut body and the hardness below his waist that she knew was in her honor.

  “You want me,” she whispered.

  “Like I said, you know nothing.” Michael reached up to move a tangle of her hair back from her face, showing off arms corded with power and tension. No tats covered his biceps. His skin was actually sun-bronzed.

  Waves of lust struck Kaitlin so strongly that she would have swayed if he hadn’t pinned her to the tree.

  “I know this isn’t normal,” she said.

  “Not for you,” he agreed. “Not yet. Your feelings are tied to what happened.”

  Do not think back, her mind warned. You’ll be sorry if you do.

  Kaitlin glanced sideways. “No one is around?”

  “No one you can see.”

  Michael’s remark triggered a memory she had just warned herself not to find. Things hid in the dark. Bad things.

  Catching a whiff of some new scent, Kaitlin struggled to place it. She reached for her throat, found the rough surface of the bandage and pressed there. The sharp-edged pain beneath that touch caused the night to close in.

  “Oh, no, you don’t.” Michael’s hands tugged her fingers from her neck.

  “What…” Nearly breathless, Kaitlin started over. “What’s wrong with me?”

  “Nothing we can’t deal with.” Michael’s voice deepened further as he glanced up at a patch of night sky visible through the branches.

  Kaitlin followed his gaze. “Will I remember this dream?”

  She ran her palm over his chest, outlining one scroll of the tattoos. Michael twitched, stopped her progress with a tight grip on her wrist and shook his head.

  “It wouldn’t be fair for me to take you up on that,” he said.

  Her eyes strayed. “What does it matter, if it’s a dream?”

  “It matters,” he said. “And you will remember it all eventually.”

  She pulled away from his grip and moved her hand to his shoulder, where moonlight helped to outline his exquisite muscular shape. He stopped her again with a firm hand and a nebulous whispered comment. “You don’t, as yet, know anything. It’s hard for me to…”

  He backed up, stood tall, drenched in moonlight. The first pop Kaitlin heard after his little speech was a muted sound. There was no mistaking the second for anything benign. Or the third.

  Like a series of pinging buttons on an overstretched shirt, the bones of Michael’s jaw began to unhinge. The beautiful, sharp-featured face in front of her began to stretch. Michael’s dark hair lengthened as if someone invisible had tugged at the roots. His muscles danced as though something alive under the skin wanted to get out.

  As he dropped to a crouch, the scrolling tattoos on his chest began to spread, covering muscle, turning his skin dark. Then his legs furred up in fluid series of swishes and cracks.

  One minute the man had been there, and the next minute, something else appeared that uttered a reverberating growl. When his head lifted, familiar green eyes looked out, but it was no longer Michael, the angel’s namesake, facing her. It was an animal, dark as the night, tall as her thighs. Sleek. Primal. Down on all fours.

  Michael had turned into a wolf.

  And he had been right about one thing.

  She didn’t yet know anything about what was going on.

  Chapter 3

  Kaitlin woke up screaming, her body prepared to fight. Fists curled, mouth open, she felt trapped and unable to flee the nightmare because something was holding her down.

  She kicked out with her legs and opened her eyes. Expecting to see a big wolf leaning over her, she instead found another image. Trees.

  Hell, yes. There were trees in her sightline, and not the living kind. She was looking at a picture, a poster of a forest, on the wall above a desk that held a retro lava lamp, a silver telephone and an open laptop computer.

  Hesitating, consciously attempting to quiet her churning insides, Kaitlin’s mind filled in the gaps. These were her things. Familiar things. She wasn’t outside, running in a moonlit field. Nor was she pinned to a tree by a naked man.

  This was her apartment.

  But she wasn’t alone.

  Fine hairs at the nape of Kaitlin’s neck prickled with leftover panic as she turned her head. No wolf waited there with its black fur gleaming. A woman, a stranger, sat on the edge of her bed.

  “Kaitlin, is it?” her uninvited visitor asked.

  Kaitlin sat up to find that she’d been trapped by nothing more than a tangle of sheets. Eyeing the stranger, she scooted backward against the headboard. Quivers of muscle soreness accompanied her movement. She looked down to find her arms covered in red scratches already starting to scab.

  Instinctively, Kaitlin reached for her neck.

  “That bandage won’t be necessary for long,” the woman said. “You’ll have a pretty little scar that I suppose you can consider your first war wound.”

  The woman was close to Kaitlin in age—maybe twenty-three or four, with deeply tanned olive skin and glossy black hair that hung halfway down her back. Nothing out of the ordinary presented itself in the woman’s face or body. The problem was her eyes, which were an unusual shade of green that Kaitlin had seen before.

  Fingering the bandage taped to her neck, Kaitlin’s fear escalated. She tore off the bandage and winced at the raw, extremely sensitive puckered line of raised skin beneath her right ear.

  That can’t be right. I’m awake now.

  Dizziness threatened as flashes of memory returned. Night. Blood. An attacker with incredible strength. In that nightmare, she had been mauled by a monster.

  Her eyes swept the room in a desperate attempt to set things straight. No man, wolfish or otherwise, sat on the be
d, or appeared anywhere else in the small studio apartment. Morning light seeped through the filmy curtains. There was no brown bedspread. She sat on familiar worn floral sheets.

  “Kaitlin?” her visitor repeated.

  “You can’t be real.” Kaitlin avoided the woman’s green-eyed stare.

  “Really? Then I wonder why I bothered to brush my hair. Still, I guess you’d have to think that way, wouldn’t you, since your reality is being inconveniently rearranged.”

  “Who are you?”

  Her visitor tossed her hair, scattering a whole bunch of scents into the air at once: soap, lipstick and something else Kaitlin had no time to pin down. Damp fur?

  Also, now that she thought about it, other smells came to her above and beyond those: dust, pencil lead, chemicals from the lava lamp and a pair of dirty socks stashed under the bed. She also smelled the iron tang of anxiety. Her anxiety. Because, hell…the crisp denim of this stranger’s dark blue jeans had a unique smell. Also discernible was the scent of the worn-out fabric of her own T-shirt. Edging those smells was a lingering odor of badly injured skin, blood and matted hair.

  Her hands fell like rocks to the mattress as she studied the scratches crisscrossing her forearms.

  “Looks like you might have picked those up last night,” her visitor said. “Sometimes puppies forget how vulnerable their skin really is.”

  “Who are you?” Kaitlin repeated.

  “I’m Rena. And you, it seems, are Michael’s little secret. Until now.”

  Michael. That name belonged in a dream. Kaitlin refused to let this woman see her shake. She swallowed a rising protest.

  “He hasn’t told us about you,” Rena continued. “Since Michael has been MIA for a few days, I got worried and followed him here.”

  Michael was here? Yes. With her eyes closed, Kaitlin found hints of her dream man in the room. There were scents of shaving cream, faded jeans and musky maleness.

  “Who are you, exactly?” she asked Rena, her voice faint.

  “Kind of a new relative. A distant cousin.”

  That made no sense at all. Kaitlin tried another tactic. “What do you want?”

  “Merely to see you and find out why Michael would do something like this. I suppose he wanted to ease you through the process on his own first, before letting us know what he’d done.”

  “What process would that be?”

  In Kaitlin’s mind the word wolf kept flashing. Fragments of what she’d begun to worry had not been a dream began to coalesce. In it, the man this woman spoke of had turned into an animal right before her eyes.

  The fine line between reason and insanity made Kaitlin’s nerve endings fire. As she wrapped her arms around her knees and considered Rena carefully, fear continued to make her heart race.

  She looked again at the scratches on her arms. Had she gotten those from being pressed to the bark of a tree, or from a madman trying to kill her in the park?

  Rena’s smile suggested that none of these panic attacks Kaitlin was having might be warranted. Whoever this Michael guy was, and whatever kind of trauma she had been through, she couldn’t believe there were alternate species in the world. If she’d had an accident and some guy named Michael, acting like a Good Samaritan, had helped her home, possibly jealousy was what had brought Rena here today. Rena could be Michael’s girlfriend. His lover.

  As calmly as she could, Kaitlin met Rena’s scrutinizing gaze. “Where did your friend go?”

  “To the corner store, probably to bring you something to eat,” Rena said. “We need to keep our strength up and require lots of fuel. More than usual.”

  “We, as in what? Wolves?” Kaitlin asked cynically.

  Rena smiled again, flashing very white teeth that almost made the idea of wolves seem plausible.

  “He didn’t have to bother. I’m not hungry,” Kaitlin said. In fact, she was sure she’d never be hungry again.

  “You’ll be hungry as soon as you smell the food,” Rena told her. “Our metabolisms run hot.”

  In her dream, Michael had been hot in more ways than one. But Kaitlin couldn’t turn inward to look for answers to the problems at hand with this woman staring at her. In another minute, she’d sprint for the door.

  “It wasn’t a dream, you know,” Rena said as if she had the ability to read Kaitlin’s mind. “You’ll find that out soon enough.”

  Rena seemed to be waiting for her to say something, as if they were going to have a conversation that made sense. All Kaitlin could get out was, “What day is it?”

  “Monday.”

  “That can’t be right. I couldn’t have lost two days.”

  With another glance at the discarded bandage, Kaitlin added, “What is going on? Really going on, I mean?”

  Rena stood up. “I’m sorry I can’t explain it to you, Kaitlin. For the time being, I guess I’m not supposed to know you exist. Imagine my surprise in finding out that you do.”

  Kaitlin was feeling stranger by the minute because Rena was fairly convincing. She decided to go for broke, hoping that when this woman she had never seen before heard what she had to say, Rena would laugh her head off and hit the road.

  “Are you a wolf, Rena?”

  “You can’t tell?” Rena countered noncommittally.

  “Hell, I’m not even sure I’m awake.”

  “Then the answer is yes.”

  Yes…

  The room suddenly felt cramped. Too many ridiculous ideas were taking up space, and the air seemed to beat with a foreign rhythm. Kaitlin blinked slowly to get her bearings and went for round two of the most inconceivable questions possible. “So, that would make you and Michael part of a group of…wolves?”

  The question sounded silly in a truly horrifying way. Rena didn’t laugh, though. She said, “You call us werewolves. And we call ourselves a pack.”

  Werewolves. Pack. Kaitlin’s stomach tightened. Her next question bordered on hysterics. “You believe that? For real?”

  Rena held up a hand in a gesture that indicated she was telling the truth. Scout’s honor, or some such equivalent thing for females.

  Kaitlin stared at the pretty, rather feline-featured visitor. “How many of you are there in this pack?”

  “Four. There are four of us here, and then there’s you.”

  The hairs at the nape of Kaitlin’s neck stood up. Chills iced her spinal column as phrases came back with a startling clarity—bits of words the Michael in the nightmare had used.

  It’s the only way you’ll make it. And Remember that I gave you a choice.

  She did not want to ask the next question and knew Rena anticipated it, because the scent of Rena’s excitement wafted in the air.

  “Are you hinting that I’ve become one of you?”

  Glancing sideways to view her image in the wall mirror, Kaitlin found a pasty-complexioned, tangle-haired version of herself. But it was Kaitlin Davies who looked back.

  Rena smoothed the creases from her jeans with both hands. “Not quite one of us. I suppose you’ll be accepted by the pack if he wants you to be, though, since…”

  “Since what?” Even short pauses in Rena’s partial explanations were intolerable.

  “Well, it’s not my place to assume anything or tell you more. You’re Michael’s pet project, so he will have to explain.”

  “What is he, the king?”

  “Alpha,” Rena corrected, walking to the door. She opened it before anyone had knocked, and then stepped back to make way for the man who suddenly filled the doorway.

  Chapter 4

  Michael stopped on the threshold of Kaitlin’s apartment. He looked first to Rena, who nodded her head before slipping past him. Damn it. Rena knew about Kaitlin, which meant they probably all knew.

  His gaze slipped to the waif on the bed who had compressed herself into a tight ball near the headboard. The auburn-haired beauty was staring at him with a wide-eyed, stunned expression, as though she’d seen a ghost.

  Because the bandage he’d taped to
her neck had been removed, he knew what was coming. Hard questions and demands for explanations would be the next things out of her mouth.

  Really, this nursemaid routine didn’t suit him. He was better at chasing bad guys. And Rena had no right to jump on his parade.

  “I see you’ve met Rena.”

  He leaned against the doorjamb, not quite sure what to say now that Kaitlin was fully awake. She was staring. Her eyes were clear and focused.

  “I didn’t tell the others about you because I wanted to make sure you were all right first. Otherwise…”

  She finished the remark for him in a voice that was stronger than he would have expected. “Otherwise there might not be any me to tell them about, since I’d be dead.”

  He could sense the fear radiating off her in waves similar to the rippling heat of a desert mirage. Only colder. He felt that fear from six feet away. Yet Kaitlin was showing an inkling of the spirit that had attracted him to her in the first place. Even half-dead, he’d sensed she was a fighter.

  He couldn’t look away from the tight, pale face that wasn’t quite like any other human’s face he’d seen. Light, this time from streaks of morning sun, seemed to caress Kaitlin’s delicate contours. He’d noticed those contours from the start, too. What he’d failed to remember correctly was the impact she had on him when those big eyes of hers were open. This fragile flower took his breath away.

  And if he admitted that to anyone, or took it too seriously, he would no longer resemble the wolf he’d always thought he was, and he would dishonor his fallen mother’s memory.

  Humans were a fickle, dangerous species. Some were even his enemies. And here he was, protecting one from things that went bump in the night.

  He observed Kaitlin steadily. “You’re pale, but looking better. Does your neck hurt very badly?”

  “Bad enough,” she said.

  Life pulsed beneath her skin. In this case, he could sense anger, an indication of her turnaround, and yet Kaitlin looked even more waifish than before. Already thin, she’d lost more weight in the past two days—a sign of her new, faster metabolism kicking in. If she didn’t eat something soon, her nerves would fry.