by Anya Nowlan
But it was perhaps the heavy curve of his lip that caught her the most, the kind of lips that were made for smiling yet looked like they never did, considering by the downturned corners in his fitful rest.
I wonder what they would be like to kiss…
Nia rolled her eyes immediately after that thought struck her and shuffled a tiny bit further from him.
You can’t be this ridiculous. He’s a danger, a beast let loose in your jungle. A killer! The fact that you haven’t gotten laid since leaving New York should not mean that you start drooling over every man you see! Especially if he just killed a guy right before you.
Her mind wanted to eagerly add that the guy that he had killed had totally had it coming and he had definitely done the world a huge favor for taking him out, but she brushed the thought away. She didn’t need any help with liking him, even if he was a bit crude in his movement and overly confident in the fact that he could not be seen or heard in the forest. It was something that many men who were not from these woods were guilty of, yet she found herself all too eager to excuse him this flaw.
Nia sighed, peering at the pile of gear lined up at his feet, set there so it would be harder for him to get to it when he woke up. He was obviously some sort of Special Forces and obviously an American considering the gear and the murmured words she’d heard him speak when he thought he was alone, but actually Nia had been very close all the while. He carried more knives on him than a professional chef and she was still unsure if she’d managed to pick all of them off of him or if she’d missed one… or five.
At least he should be able to kill you fast, if he wants to, she pondered with a soft snort.
The soldier fidgeted in his sleep and she tensed up, straightening up a little. He turned on his side and then whipped back, hitting her with his arm slightly. That seemed to have been the last straw because he sprung up like someone had poked him with a cattle prod, growling like a wild animal.
His eyes flashed a brilliant, terrifying golden and Nia could feel her gaze reacting the same, her animal reacting with all the long-learned skills of self-preservation that she had to force down in herself when she was in human form. As fast as he’d sat up, he plonked down on the makeshift straw bed again, groaning and bringing his hands to his head.
“Where the fuck am I!? And who the fuck are you!?” he demanded, his voice closely resembling the sound a chainsaw would make after a night of heavy drinking.
“Hey, do you want to keep it down a little, T. Dremmons, or are you out to get both of us killed?” Nia chided, her heart pounding out of her chest from his violent awakening.
She had to take a few deep breaths as he seemed to mull over this information, still keeping his hands cupped over his eyes. Either he was not a morning kind of guy, or the shrapnel that had hit him in the forehead had knocked things around enough for his vision to still be slightly impaired. Either case seemed likely enough.
“I’m Nia,” she added after a moment of pondering how to phrase the current situation without making it sound worse than it was.
Giving him her name seemed like the least damaging thing she could do.
And gods did he sound sexy, even with that hissing snarl of a voice of his. It was almost unfair, really.
“You didn’t answer my question, Nia,” he growled, and it sent a happy shiver down her spine to hear him say her name.
Again, rationality told her to put as much distance between herself and him as she could, but apparently she was doing really well with forgetting about her desire to live to see another day. Poking at this big beast of a man seemed like such a better idea.
“I answered half of it,” she said with a shrug, leaning comfortably against the tree trunk now, easing into the would-be conversation.
“Smartass,” he grumbled, moving his fingers a bit to peek out from between them before smacking them shut again, groaning.
“Maybe,” she agreed with a grin. “But I’m not the one clutching my head on the jungle floor, not knowing where he is or how he got here, so maybe you should try and show me a smidgen of respect and good manners before you start mouthing off, huh?”
“Who uses the word ‘smidgen’ anymore?” he grumbled, obviously in a mood to pout a little.
For a man who could probably toss her like a baseball if he needed to, the little temper tantrum was oddly cute.
Clear signs that you’ve been in the sun for too long.
“Fine,” he sighed. “Nia, could you please tell me how the fuck I got here, please and thank you.”
She grinned, shaking her head. “I guess this has to count as an improvement in your case. I dragged you here, no small feat by the way, when you passed out from the blast.”
It was only half a lie. She had dragged him, using the downward sloping ground to aid her and fashioning a quick gurney out of palm leaves and vines, taking him to the river and then letting the water float him down further. His clothes were all dry now so he would never be able to tell, hopefully – she’d made sure that his bag was kept dry, as well as his assault rifle, which looked properly terrifying – but she wasn’t about to volunteer the information that she had been the reason why he had lost consciousness.
She wasn’t that suicidal.
“And where’s ‘here’?”
“We’re still where you started, Captain America. In the Borneo jungle, just north of where all the rich people come to look at the wonders of the ‘wild and untamed’ nature,” Nia said with a snort, her hint of derision at one of the high-end lodges that was close by but not very carefully concealed. “About a mile down from where you were last.”
“And where’s my gear?” he asked after a moment had passed, apparently satisfied with her answer.
“By your feet. If you push your foot out a little you should be able to feel it.”
“… why are my feet wet?”
Dammit.
“Long story,” Nia said, fighting down a hint of blush on her cheeks, which he luckily enough wouldn’t be able to see because he was still reveling in his self-imposed darkness. “Are we done with the one-sided questions and answers round now? Can I ask something?”
He paused, seeming to ponder this notion that anyone but him had some kind of rights or options in life. Finally, with a sigh, he moved his head ever so slightly in a way that could have been a confirmation. Nia decided to take it as such anyway.
“What’s the T in T. Dremmons stand for, soldier?”
“How do you know I’m T. Dremmons to begin with?”
“I read it off the dogtags, genius.”
“It’s Thor. And remind me to toss those things. Sentimental keepsakes can apparently only get you in more trouble than they’re worth in obscure locations like Borneo,” he grumbled, sounding like a grouchy teenager.
It was adorable. Or at least as adorable as a 6’4’’ man battling temporary blindness could be. Which was still pretty damn adorable.
“Thor,” she said, rolling his name over her tongue. “I like that. Okay, Thor, seeing as I’m asking the questions now, do you want to tell me why you’re running around my jungle, shooting people?”
She had a good enough guess, but might as well hear it from the horse’s mouth, as it were.
“No,” he said simply. “And how do you know I shot anyone?”
“You’re armed to the teeth, which was my first guess,” Nia started, rolling her eyes. “And the fact that I watched you shoot a guy through his skull was my second one, obscure as it was.”
He tensed visibly when she said that and the gears whirred to life in Nia’s head. Before he could do anything about this new tidbit of information, she rushed to correct herself. Even without his vision, it wouldn’t take much for a guy like him to reach out and choke her where she sat.
“I was there, I followed you all day. No I’m not with them. Please don’t kill me!”
She rattled the words out like every split second that she missed could have meant her life. It probably did. Thor sta
yed coiled up like a rattlesnake before he let out a breath and tried peeking out from between his fingers again. This time, it seemed to stick and he slowly lowered his hands, though he was squinting hard.
“Why should I believe that you’re not with them?” he asked.
“Because if I were, I don’t think you’d be here right now, but at one of their little underground lairs, being strung up and whipped and tortured for information,” Nia said, her somewhat cheery countenance falling off of her like a cloak.
She’d never been captured by the men who prowled these jungles over the last few years, but she knew that if they caught her, she would probably never be let out of there again.
“Fair enough,” Thor said soon after, staring up at the rickety roof of their shelter.
Nia relaxed a little, letting out a breath she hadn’t known she was holding. She frowned, looking at the man next to her. His eyes were slightly milky at the edges and she knew far too well what that meant.
“Nia,” he begun, not moving his head.
“Yes, Thor?”
“I can’t see a fucking thing.”
Three
Thor
“Where are we going?” Thor asked, sensing the irritation in his voice and doing nothing about clearing it out.
Thor Dremmons was not having a good few days. Not only had he spent a completely useless day up a tree, waiting for prey that never showed up, but he’d also almost died via subpar firepower, watched his whole squad either get killed or captured, apparently passed out and now he couldn’t even see more than the occasional flash of light or a whiff of a shadow.
To add insult to injury, he’d gotten out-stalked by a girl. And not only a girl, but someone who was clearly not a predator, obviously not military trained and smelled like goddamn daisies.
Daisies!
He was going to need at least three bottles of Jack Daniels to drink this mission away, if he ever made it out of the damnable jungle.
“Are you always this nosy?” she asked, laughter in her tone.
At least someone was finding this funny.
“Are you always this annoying?” he shot back, immediately regretting sounding like a jerk.
Why do you care? Snap out of it. You’re getting carted around the jungle by a crazy woman who sleeps under trees for fun. This is no time to grow a conscience.
“Most of the time, yes,” she replied, snickering as she squeezed his hand.
Every time she did that, a bolt of lightning rocketed through him. Where their skin touched, he could feel warmth glowing and spreading up along his arm and then through him. His panther was practically purring, apparently only needing to touch the hand of a woman to completely disregard the fact that he’d suddenly lost his vision – the most important sense in the arsenal of a sniper.
It felt familiar. It felt like something he’d known and had tried so hard to forget about.
For a moment, he wanted to rasp his hand out of her grip, but he caught himself before he could do something so dumb. Not only did he not want to lose her touch, but he also had to admit to himself that he was as helpless as a kitten alone right now. All he could do without his eyesight was lay low, curl up under some brushes and hope for things to change. That didn’t exactly sound like a plan worthy of committing to right then and there.
“I’m taking you back home,” she said, putting her other hand on his arm for a moment to help him down a steeper slope before he could find support on a nearby tree trunk. “We’ll see about fixing up those eyes of yours.”
“I’m not going to let you perform some odd jungle voodoo magic on me, woman,” he grumbled back, completely embarrassed by how helpless he was.
He’d probably spoken to Nia more in the last hour, since he’d woken up, than he had to all of Shifter Squad Nine over the year of their joint deployments. Thor wasn’t sure whether it was supposed to reflect negatively on himself or Shifter Squad Nine, or positively on Nia, but something odd was going on. Though he still sounded like himself, he didn’t mind talking to Nia. Quite the contrary, really. He wanted to hear her voice. The more she said, the better.
Must be the loss of vision. You’re relying on audible sounds more, he told himself, bullshitting himself with the straightest of faces.
Being in the jungle, it wasn’t exactly like there wasn’t anything to listen to. People rarely realized this when thinking about the jungles, but those primary forests, deep and thick, were some of the noisiest places on earth. Endless variations of birds, critters, bugs and even foliage combined together to make some of the worst ruckus that Thor had been graced with. Any sensible man would lose their mind if they tried to listen to every damn thing that was going on at any one time in even the tiniest stitch of jungle.
“I don’t think you have much of a choice, soldier,” she teased.
“How do you figure that?” he asked, playing along – which was another completely uncharacteristic thing that he sort of wished he could stop doing, but knew he wouldn’t. “And technically it should be ‘sailor’.”
“Yeah, I doubt that. If the US Marines or Navy SEALs were in the jungles trying to spook out the Creepers, I’m sure we would have figured it out earlier,” she said with a snort. “You’re as active duty as I am a Nuclear Physicist. I bet you’re in one of those mercenary for hire outfits, a trained killer let loose upon the unsuspecting world, no creed, no honor, no nothing.”
Nia’s voice rose and fell as she described Thor’s being in vivid colors, not missing the mark by much. From the corner of his eye, he could see faint movement when she whisked her hand through the air to accentuate her words and he sighed, shaking his head. This woman was far too clever for her own good.
“I’m right, aren’t I?”
“For your own safety, I won’t answer that,” he said tersely, trying to hide his amusement under a guise of annoyance. “But Creepers? Is that what you call the…”
“The werewolves?” Nia finished when Thor stumbled on his words, ascending a steep incline for a few steps and losing track of his train of thought. “Yeah. We call them Creepers, because they creep around the forest, trying to get everything good out of it. It’s sort of historical, really. The name used to be used for poachers and illegal loggers, but we haven’t had those for a long, long time. Now, it’s a whole new kind of danger.”
Her tone fell a little as she explained and Thor found himself nodding. He was yet to ask who ‘we’ was – maybe her and a husband? boyfriend? Thor didn’t want to know – but it sounded reasonable enough. Though Shifter Squad Nine knew that the outfit working around here was either The Arctics themselves or a close subsidiary, that wasn’t exactly the kind of information that was passed around freely.
Out of habit, he touched his ear, activating the radio link for a moment before killing it, hearing nothing but static. He wasn’t even sure if he was expecting to hear anything else.
“Do you know anything about my squad?” he asked after a while of walking quietly, the jungle filling the silence between them.
She hesitated before answering and Thor squeezed her hand to urge her into talking.
“I’m a big boy, I can take it,” he said, uttering the lame joke first and wanting to smack himself for it second.
Spirits above, I think the shrapnel did more than just take my eyesight. I think it had to take half my IQ with it, he thought bitterly, feeling a streak of regret shoot through him.
Since Ashley, there had been plenty of other women. None of them had meant anything, of course – they were just there to scratch an itch and he’d leave before any of them woke up. Yet with Nia, he found himself actually caring about what she thought of him. That was new. And terrifying.
“I didn’t really stay around to watch, but that guy in the helicopter? I saw him jump out before the blast hit,” she said, her tone as neutral as she could probably keep it, neither giving him hope nor killing it outright.
“Okay. So they might be alive,” he said with a nod, his co
untenance unchanging.
There wasn’t a single man on the squad he’d call a friend. Hell, there wasn’t a person left on earth who could claim that title. The one person he felt some kind of a connection to was a cousin of his who had moved to Shifter Grove some years ago. But he hadn’t seen Diesel in years despite the large werepanther having helped Shifter Squad Six at one point on a mission. The shifter SEAL community wasn’t that big and odds were that no man was further than two degrees of separation away from any other SEAL, ex or currently serving in the forces.
Despite the fact that Thor wouldn’t exactly willingly share a drink with the Squad Nine guys, that annoying twinge of duty still tugged at him, rearing its ugly head at the worst of times. If they were alive somewhere, it would be his job, if he could do it, to get them out. It was sort of becoming a thing anyway. He’d bailed those knuckleheads out of some deep shit before and he was sure he’d get to do it again, Dice’s little excursion outside of Abu Dhabi being the most prominent memory that he had.
“They might,” she agreed. “Careful, some rocks here.”
She let go of his hand for a moment, gripping his wrist and leading him to touch mossy boulders that felt like no one had stepped on them in centuries.
“We need to climb up here. Are you up for it?” she asked, sounding gentle.
Fucking hell, I wish I could see her, he thought absently, nodding his confirmation to Nia.
He’d only held her hand and heard her voice – her infuriating, mocking, laughing, cheerful voice – and he was already finding himself sort of… smitten. It was as unexpected as it was oddly pleasant, lighting a spark in him that he had presumed long dead and gone. Thor wasn’t entirely sure that he needed to know that he could still be interested in a woman for more than just sex.
Fuck that, you’re just feeling vulnerable and… whatever.