Very little had been taken. He had a stereo and a laptop that he’d left behind, which boggled my mind. He didn’t even take the bedding. Where was he going to go where he didn’t need his own bedding? His parents had helped him out quite a bit with paying for college and all of that, but he hadn’t been answering their calls either. He wasn’t relying on them to pay for whatever he had run off to do.
I picked up the pillow that still held his scent and hugged it to my chest while Dawn poked around the room. She opened a drawer in the dresser to look inside, then gave the closet a peek as well.
It had been two years since my mother had disappeared. There hadn’t been anything dramatic to precede her disappearance like with Hunter, but she had never returned. She had suffered from depression for years—at least as far back since when my toddler sister had drowned—and because she didn’t take anything with her we had all made some obvious, uncomfortable guesses about what happened to her. It was hard not to think the same thoughts again.
“Do you think he’s gone to kill himself?” I asked.
“I doubt it,” said Dawn. “Nobody packs up all their socks and underwear to commit suicide, do they?”
It was a very logical answer, which made me smile a bit. That was just how Dawn had been from the moment I met her and I appreciated it. Her very rational way of thinking coupled with her boundless enthusiasm just made the world seem like a better place in general. Of course, with how very logical she was about everything I knew that I’d always have to keep part of my life secret from her, because I couldn’t expect her to wrap her mind around it all. None of that had been much of an issue until now.
Every time I closed my eyes, I saw Hunter coming back to the pack’s apartment building, our collective den. His clothing was torn from shifting in it and he was covered in blood. Some of it had been his own, but most of it hadn’t. Blood had stained his teeth. Human blood. It was the first big conflict my father had to handle since my grandfather had died the year before and left the pack to him. Perhaps that was why my father was so harsh. Perhaps that was why he refused to explain anything to me.
Dawn came to sit next to me, wrapping an arm around me for a reassuring hug. I leaned into her, trying to absorb some strength through the contact.
“I don’t think a big fight with your dad should be making him react so badly,” she said. “He’ll probably calm down and give you a call soon.”
“You don’t understand how big it was,” I said softly.
I couldn’t tell her that my father had beaten him and thrown him out of the pack for eating human flesh. She didn’t even know what the pack was. It would just sound like psychotic cult ramblings. Instead, I’d just said that they had a big fight because of the tattoos.
My fingers brushed the bandage on my neck and when I concentrated on it I could feel the sting of the healing wound there. She wouldn’t understand what the marks were, either, so they were just matching tattoos as far as she was concerned. She had rolled her eyes and considered it a bit silly, but had accepted the story I gave her all the same.
“Oh. Oh, Sofia...”
I glanced up at Dawn’s anguished voice and followed her gaze over to the nightstand, where a framed picture of Hunter and me was still sitting. The picture had been taken the summer before when he had come home to visit after his first year of college, just before I left to start college myself. We had taken a trip to Pismo Beach along with my brother Aidan. Aidan wasn’t in the picture because he had taken it, so it was just me and Hunter draped around one another and beaming into the camera. I had always admired how striking Hunter looked with his dark auburn hair and eyes a shade of brown that almost perfectly matched the color of dried blood. His skin was at its tannest in the picture, with a few faint freckles showing up here and there. He had a wiry, lanky build, as a lot of werewolves tended to have. Well-muscled, but without any extra bulk that could slow him down. His lips were a touch thin, but soft and expressive. His cheekbones were relatively high and sharp, which was a good word in general to describe his face. Sharp, as if it were chiseled from stone and razor-like edges had been left in place. Beautiful and dangerous.
My vision became blurry with tears and I had to look away. He hadn’t even taken a picture of us with him. He’d just left it. He’d taken his socks and underwear and left our picture and had turned off his phone.
What did it all mean?
“I’m going to call Mama and let her know what’s going on,” I mumbled, pulling my own phone out.
On the second ring, my grandmother picked up. “Did you find him?”
“No, Mama. He’s not here.” My voice cracked on the last word and I had to pause a moment to pull myself together again. My grandmother said nothing. In the background I could hear my younger cousin Ana chattering away. “He took some of his things, but left stuff like his computer. His roommate doesn’t know where he went.”
“I’m so sorry, baby.” I heard her sigh and then the background noise got a lot quieter. I assumed she had stepped into another room. “What about the marks? Can you use them to find him?”
I hesitated, glancing over at Dawn. She politely averted her eyes, but I knew she couldn’t avert her ears.
“No. I can’t...I can’t feel anything at all. Everything just stopped during the fight.”
“But you’d been feeling him before then? You were getting into each other’s heads?”
“A little, I think. I was more aware of him than I am now, definitely.”
“You’ve both got to be open to it for the marks to work, honey.” Her tone was gentle, the one she used to give harsh truths with as little harm as possible. “It sounds like he’s shut you out.”
“I don’t understand why. I just...I just don’t understand any of this. Why did my dad say Hunter was just like his parents? Jay and Paul haven’t...” I trailed off, guiltily glancing toward Dawn. “Have they?”
Mama went quiet for several heavy heartbeats before she spoke again. “He meant Hunter’s birth parents.”
I thought back to the first time I’d laid eyes on Hunter, when he was a frightened little pup of just six years old. A year older than me, lost and alone in the world. Other than his name and his age, he had never said anything about where he came from, claiming instead that he couldn’t remember. I’d been told that Jay found him wandering in the woods all alone, half-starved and scared out of his mind. It sounded like a pretty good reason for a young werewolf to forget his birth pack.
“What do you know about his birth parents?” I pressed.
Mama sighed. “They were man-eaters and your father led a hunting party to stop them. It seemed a kindness that Hunter couldn’t remember and we all agreed to just say he was a lost orphan, to spare him the pain and shame of that.”
I sat there in silence as I reeled from the revelation. No wonder he had run. No wonder he had left instead of waiting for his parents—his real parents, the ones who raised him—to come home from their trip back to the Philippines. It explained some of the irrational dislike my father had displayed toward him in the past, too.
But why hadn’t he given me a chance? I was as lied to as he had been.
“Well.” My voice was flat and dead, without any further hope to it. “Dawn and I are going to drive back once we get a chance to rest. There’s nothing more we can do.”
“Sofia, please don’t hold this against the rest of us. We were trying to protect him, to give him a place in the pack without judgment.”
Fat lot of good that did, I thought bitterly.
Out loud, I said, “Even if I can’t feel him now, will the marks let me know if something happens to him?”
“They will.”
There was that at least. Dawn was right in that he wasn’t dead, because he didn’t feel dead. Cut off from me, yes, but not gone. Just silenced somehow in my head. The ritual to bind us through the mating marks had been my idea, because I wanted something so much more than just words and promises with Hunter. I had wan
ted what my grandparents had, where they could share feelings and even thoughts through their marks. It had strengthened them immensely, as they supported one another metaphysically as well as emotionally. At least until my grandfather had died the year before, likely hastened by his grief for my mother. I’d been warned that the marks wouldn’t be at their full strength until the tattooing we had done to them was fully healed, but even after just a few weeks we’d been able to feel them. Until he cut me off.
“Without the two of you working together, you’re both going to be weakened, though. It’s like you’ve got a big wound in your aura where his should be joined to it,” Mama warned. “This isn’t like a breakup or even a divorce, baby. This is heavy magic and it can’t be ignored.”
I frowned, feeling a touch prickly at her warning. “There isn’t much I can do about that if he’s run away from me, is there?”
“No,” she agreed, sounding mournful. “But you need to know it even so.”
Once I had ended the call, Dawn finally stopped pretending the wall was so fascinating. She gave me a thoughtful look.
“What was that stuff about marks and feeling Hunter?” she asked.
I shook my head to dismiss her question. “Just some superstition of my grandma’s. I think it comes from Jamaica.”
It didn’t, not exactly. I knew that. Originally, it came from feline shape-shifter tribes in Africa and had been brought over to the New World. The old traditions had been kept alive by some very lucky families, like on my maternal side. My mother had inherited a wolf form from her father and that’s what I had inherited as well, but the magic of the cats was still there, carefully kept and tended by Mama.
And now that magic was causing me a great psychic wound.
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Book Four in the Claimed by an Alpha series...
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All her life, Tina Tybault has felt wrong. Troubling dreams, sleepwalking, and adopted parents who locked her up at night didn't help. Instead of the relaxing summer off from college she expected she instead found herself waking up naked in the woods one morning. A gorgeous stranger stood over her, claiming she was in heat and there to be his mate.
***
There was moss under my cheek. I opened my eyes and all I could see was a carpet of green extending outward. The air was cool, much cooler than my bedroom should have been in summer. Then again, my bedroom shouldn’t have had moss and I didn’t generally make it a habit to sleep on the ground. I pushed myself up on my hands, which was when I realized that I was naked and in the middle of the woods.
“Well shit,” I muttered, rubbing one hand over my face.
Vague memories of the night before came drifting back to me, but they weren’t very helpful. Under normal circumstances, I’d dismiss them as dreams. I’d had dreams like this many times before, after all. I’d be running around on all fours, somehow transformed to a wolf, and I’d hunt and eat my kills with impunity. When I was tired, I’d return to my den—my own bedroom—and then wake up in the morning exhausted, but none the worse for wear. A few times I’d had sleepwalking experiences and woken up outside instead of in my bedroom, but those had become less frequent as I’d grown. My parents putting bars on my windows and locking my bedroom at night probably helped curb it.
But now I was in college and living like an independent adult with other students off campus. And the result of that greater freedom was sleepwalking my way out into the woods, apparently. Which was especially strange since I didn’t live particularly close to any woods.
“Are you all right?” a deep, masculine voice asked. There was a faint drawl to it, making me think of Texas or Oklahoma.
I sprang to my feet in a move so quick it would surprise me later when I could reflect on it. I spun to face the voice and saw a man crouched on an outcropping of stone, watching me with an apparently interested look on his face. He had thick black hair that was somewhat shaggy, deep brown eyes, and olive-toned skin. He wore a pair of well broken in jeans and a white t-shirt with a flannel thrown over it. Despite that nod to the coolness of the morning out here in the hills, he wore no shoes.
I crossed one arm across my breasts and tried to cover the rest of my nakedness with my other arm, which wasn’t very effective. “Who are you? Did you...do anything to me?”
One expressive black eyebrow quirked upward. “You don’t remember?”
He braced a hand against the rock he was perched on, then leapt down nimbly into the mossy hollow where I had been resting. He nodded over to a small pile of fur and bones and blood not far from where I had been sleeping. “You seemed a bit out of it when I saw you last night, so I didn’t approach closely. You hunted, ate, and went to sleep. I’ve just been waiting for you to wake up.”
I stared at the shredded remains of the rabbit, feeling my stomach lurch. How many times had I dreamed about hunting like that? Had I done this before while sleepwalking? The idea was terribly disturbing. How did I even know that it was only rabbits I had ever hurt?
When my eyes raised to the man again, I looked at him more closely. It was easier to see him now that he wasn’t crouched up on the rock and it was difficult not to admire what I could see. He was tall, with broad shoulders well-proportioned to his height. His body narrowed down to slim hips and long, muscular legs that were lovingly hugged by his jeans. My eyes traveled up his body back to his face, where full lips were curved into a faintly puzzled smile as he looked me over. His cheekbones were high and prominent, his nose straight and well built. His eyes were almond-shaped and fringed by dark, silky lashes. There was a light dusting of dark stubble across his cheeks, attesting to his claim that he had been watching me all night. He looked like he was a little older than me, perhaps in his mid-twenties or later, but it was difficult to be sure. He was gorgeous, in any case, and I couldn’t remember the last time I’d felt such knee-shaking lust from just one look at a man. It was likely that I’d never felt anything like this before at all.
There were dozens of questions I was desperate to ask, but the most practical came to my tongue first. “Could I borrow your shirt?”
He looked amused, then pulled off the flannel before tossing it to me. I caught it easily and pulled it on, immediately aware of the spicy male musk of his natural scent on it. I could have bathed in that scent, so rich and beguiling it was. The shirt hit me at around mid-thigh, but it covered my breasts, butt, and genitals, so I wasn’t going to complain too much.
“I’m sorry. You must think I’m crazy,” I said.
He cocked his head to the side to regard me curiously. “Must I?”
I stared at him for a moment, then gestured down to the remains of the rabbit. “I wasn’t exactly acting normal last night, was I?”
“No, but I’ve never met a solitary female in heat before.” He shrugged, the soft cotton of his t-shirt drawing tight against the tightly corded muscles of his chest. “I imagine being a little out of it is to be expected.”
I stared at him for a moment, thinking over the bizarre wording he had just used. The only people I’d known to ever use “female” as a noun for identifying women in a sentence like that had been ragingly sexist. Coupling that with him saying I was in heat and the whole thing seemed unspeakably creepy. I hugged the shirt around myself, as if I could will it to cover more.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about, but could you let me borrow your phone or something? I’m in kind of desperate need for pants,” I said.
“Who are you calling?” he asked as he took a few steps closer to me.
I automatically backed up. The hot stranger hadn’t done a thing to make me feel threatened beyond saying some weird stuff, but I just instinctively knew I didn’t want to get too close to him yet. There was some undercurrent going on through all of this that I couldn’t yet make sense of.
“My roommates. One of them should be able to find me and bring me clothes.” I glanced away from the stranger for a moment, noting just how deep the woods looked here. �
��Where are we exactly?”
“Redwood Regional Park.”
That made me stare at him again, shocked by how much distance I had covered in my sleep. The little house we were renting wasn’t that far from the university, but now I was at least ten miles from there. And naked.
“Did you drive me here? How did that happen?” I demanded.
His brows drew together and he looked as if he was trying to figure something out. Something absurd, by the expression on his face. After a moment he closed the distance between us in three quick strides and grabbed hold of my arms, making me yip in shock and fear. Rather than attack me, he buried his face in the side of my neck and inhaled deeply, then followed around to the other side and back into my hair.
There shouldn’t have been anything erotic in something so strange as sniffing me, yet my body felt differently. A rush of arousal that made me light-headed struck me and I wavered a bit on my legs, feeling overwhelmed by his nearness. Even through the flannel I could feel the heat of his hands on my arms. The scent of him on the shirt had been appealing before, but it was nothing in comparison to his presence so close.
When he pulled back from taking my scent, I could see his pupils were dilated and his tan skin was slightly flushed. I wondered if glancing down would find his jeans drawn tight. He released me as if I had burned him and took a few steps backwards to put space between us once again.
“You’re a wolf and you haven’t a clue,” he said at last. “I thought you were just solitary like me, but...you’re not, are you?”
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Book Five in the Claimed by an Alpha series...
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A pregnant librarian isn't the sort of person who should have to worry about an alpha male werewolf, but luck isn't on Fatima Malik's side. After a week of ecstasy in a secluded cabin with Dylan Collinee, she ran, carrying his child. Now Dylan has hunted her down and isn't about to take no for an answer. Yet things are more complicated than a bit of panic over commitment. Fatima is a feline shifter herself and neither the wolves nor the cats are ready to accept such a forbidden mating.
Cat and Mouse (Claimed by an Alpha Paranormal Romance Book 1) Page 7