She didn’t, not really. As soon as Eve turned the knob and pulled, the door flew open, and a fierce gust of wind shoved the woman back a whole two steps.
“There’s no one there,” Eve said, shouting over the mounting howl of wind as Tristan rushed back from the kitchen to put himself between the woman and the gaping doorway.
And just that quickly, the gale fell still. The roar rang in Eve’s ears a few seconds more, then faded. She thought… she thought she heard steps on the wooden porch, but again, she saw no one.
“The back door,” Tristan said in a low rasp. “Get to the back door, Eve. Run.” And he whirled from the door shoving her ahead of him.
Chapter Five
No time for questions, obviously. By the time Eve and Tristan hit her back door, he had her by the hand pulling her instead of pushing the girl from behind.
“My car.” Panting, Eve pointed toward the freestanding garage just behind her cottage. “Damn. My car keys. Inside.” She was trying to twist around and motion back toward the house.
“Don’t look back, Eve,” Tristan warned so sternly, so dead seriously that she didn’t even argue. Running and pulling the woman with him, he was still faster than Eve could have been on her own. He moved like a natural runner. “It doesn’t matter about the keys. Our cars won’t start.”
“What? How do you—?” she started to ask, then caught a look at her little silver sedan sitting on the gravel drive in the dark—with four flat tires and its hood unlatched and gaping open just a few inches. When she squinted, she saw the hoses sticking out. “Who would…?”
“Not who, princess. What.”
If this was one of Evergreen’s superstitions, someone—not just Tristan—was taking it very seriously.
Leading her away from the house and into the trees, Tristan proved infinitely more sure-footed than Eve, who tripped and huffed along behind him. She was always about to fall, sustained only by Tristan’s hold on her.
The first howl, from far behind them near the house, made Eve’s heart pump double-time. A second later, a whole chorus of the menacing yowls convinced the girl that putting as much distance between them and that noise was a much better use of her breath than asking questions.
Only after they’d run a mile, maybe a mile and a half, did Tristan slow them to a stop and draw Eve down to huddle low with him behind a stand of boulders. She kept quiet, still, close to Destry, trusting him instinctively to know what they needed to do. He caught his breath and calmed by slow degrees as they crouched and clung together, hidden by the darkness and the stones. When Tristan turned his face upward to stare at the treetops and listen, Eve realized the wind had died away. It left behind a fragile silence and taut nerves.
Destry looked down and kissed Eve’s forehead. “Are you okay?” Whispering, he examined her for injuries.
“I am,” she assured him. “Just confused and cold.” Eve could picture exactly where her coat lay on the entryway floor, and she assumed Tristan had shrugged his off in the kitchen.
He pulled Eve closer, hugged her, rubbed her arms to relieve the worst bite of the December night. “This isn’t the way I wanted us to spend our first night together and sure as hell not the way I’d have explained about us and Evergreen.”
“Us,” she repeated slowly, pensively. “You don’t mean you and me, do you?”
“In a way you are like us, but… no. I mean me, Tom, Mrs. Holdan and Bertha, and Cal, even. Just about everyone who lives in Evergreen.”
“Okay, the timing might be the worst ever, but I have to ask now. What is this about?” Was everyone in the town crazy? Was there an old asylum tucked up in the mountains above Evergreen, or had Eve seen too many horror movies about inmate escapes from mental wards?
“It’s about the longest night of Yuletide and why no one from Evergreen would let themselves get caught outside away from home this late.” Tristan let out a long breath that he was obviously using to steady himself and focus his thoughts. “No one but us, princess.”
Cautiously, watchfully, the man stood up, then pulled Eve back to her feet. Tristan walked her to high ground, to find a view over Evergreen and the slope up to a fair number of the homes above town, Eve’s included. The community slept now, all but dark, carnival rides and streetlights shut off.
By the light of the moon, however, Eve could just make out the unnaturally isolated movement of the treetops in one particular spot along the mountainside, near her own house. The boughs stirred there by a wind that swirled around far too discrete an area, not in a stream of flowing air, not the way a flurry normally moved.
“What is it?” she asked in as small a whisper as she could muster and still have Tristan hear her.
“It’s a rustling in the trees first, then a wind that smells of an approaching storm. When it gets close enough, you hear the hounds. Sometimes it’s just the hounds. Other times, it’s wolves.”
The memory of that yowling made Eve’s ears ache.
“The Wild Hunt. On Yuletide’s Eve, December 21, it’s at the height of strength and number.”
“Tonight,” Eve said, mumbling with chilled lips. The night was getting colder by the minute, and her face already burned with the bite of frost. Each weak breath produced a white puff in the still air. “But what is the Wild Hunt?”
“A supernatural host of hounds, wolves, hellish steeds, inhuman hunters. All running down their quarry in the storm that shakes the forest before them.”
“People? They hunt people?” Eve caught herself asking the question without doubting Tristan’s explanation, which made no sense given her skeptical nature.
Tristan shifted his gaze to study Eve’s expression for a moment, before drawing his thumb along the line of her jaw. “Not people, or not normal people, anyway. They hunt very specific quarry, and we both qualify, princess.”
“How do I qualify as not normal?” she asked. This night was not normal. This town was not normal. The people in it, or at least some of them, were certainly not normal, but…. The people in the town…. “Are you saying something about my family, my grandparents?”
“Your last name is Alfred.”
“Yeah, it’s an old English name, I know.”
“Eve, it means ‘elf ruler’.”
On any other night, Eve would have felt assured she wasn’t being told she was an elf. This was the first night, however, she’d ever brought a gorgeous man home and nearly had sex with him, only to be driven out of her house into the night by a strange gust of wind and howling dogs.
His lips brushing Eve’s with intimacy that seemed torturous and teasing in the moment, Tristan whispered a familiar stanza. “A daughter is birthed by Elf-Splendor, the Sun Goddess, after she is swallowed by the wolf. She, the New Sun, shall ride as the gods are dying the old paths of her mother.”
“Cal Lovell recited that in your classroom today, I remember, but I still don’t underst—.”
“The Wild Hunt may pursue many different kinds of quarry, but it prizes only three: a wild boar, a white horse,…or a fae maiden.”
Eve reared back despite her own resistance, despite her hunger to feel Destry kiss her again—that and more. “So I’m descended from elves, you’re saying. And I’m a maiden. I get that part.”
“And you forgot to leave an offering out for the fae tonight. Then when the knock came, you opened the door.”
Frowning, frustrated, and cold, Eve snapped, “So that knock on the door was The Wild Hunt asking if I could come out to play?”
“It was the supernatural world demanding you acknowledge it after your offense—at the carnival, then with the food.”
Stung by the reminder of how rude she’d been, Eve bit down on her mood and the upwelling of sarcastic comebacks pushing at the base of her throat. Whatever was actually going on, she had enough to regret for one night. She bowed her head, but Tristan crooked his finger under Eve’s chin to make her look at him.
“Don’t hide from me, too, princess.”
Sh
e chuckled briefly, sullenly. “Elf princess.”
“Elf princess,” he agreed.
The natural next question crept up on Eve when she wasn’t paying attention, as she gazed into Tristan Destry’s face. Even by moonlight, their color hidden, his eyes gleamed. Not with otherworldly power, just with amazing fucking sex appeal. The long hair didn’t hurt, either.
“You said The Wild Hunt chases three prizes. If I’m the fae maiden,… what are you?”
Chapter Six
Even from a distance, the rustle of leaves as the wind picked up was enough to cut Tristan short before he could answer. Both he and Eve could see plainly from their vantage point that the peculiar churning of branches, reflecting the moonlight, was moving directly from her house toward their current hiding place.
Destry grabbed Eve’s hand and got them both moving again. “The Hunt is on the move, and it has our scent.”
Eve dragged her heels this time and not just because the hitch in her side from running that first mile at record pace returned almost immediately. “Tristan, stop. I’m not sure I believe any of this.”
“It doesn’t matter to the Hunt what you believe, Eve. The result is the same when they catch you. No one sees you ever again.” The man looked back at her, his step still not slowing or faltering, his grip on her wrist tighter than ever. “I’m not going to let them take you, even if you don’t believe. I couldn’t live with getting you caught because….”
“Because?”
“Because I couldn’t stay patient and wait until after Yule to ask you out.”
A legitimate date? It really had been an honest to gosh date? What a time to find out.
Stupid as it was, girlish and silly, the idea that Tristan Destry actually liked her made Eve at least a little more cooperative, a little more determined to avoid whatever that was pursuing them. Eve panted, running a few steps, tripping, then scrambling to get her legs solidly underneath her again. The woman hadn’t been all that bothered about being on the chunky side up to that moment. It was her natural shape. But she’d have been grateful for maybe five less pounds and better cardio right then. Just five, that was all she asked. At this rate, they’d be gone by morning, assuming Eve herself wasn’t gone with them.
The memory of Bertha at the Winter Carnival predicting that Eve would have a hangover from the brandy if she hadn’t run away bristled in a tangible shiver up the girl’s back. It was the only thing colder than the darkness around them. Much more of this and Eve knew she wouldn’t be able to feel her feet. They were practically ice blocks as it was. Which was what made her stumble again and finally actually fall, bringing their flight to a painful and graceless halt.
“This is no good.” Tristan was shaking his head no as he checked Eve’s swelling ankle.
“I can still move it, so it’s not broken.”
“But it is twisted badly enough to slow us down… too much.”
Tristan’s pronouncement left a nauseated fluttering in the bottom of Eve’s stomach. It took a few seconds for her to work up the courage to ask, “Are you leaving me behind?”
“What? No, I’m….” A look of realization replaced the denial on Tristan’s shadowed face. As he turned the thought over in his head, Destry’s expression grew darker, more sullen, resigned. “Yeah, maybe,” he said, amending himself. “It might be the only way to lead them away from you.”
“To do what? No, that’s not what I was suggesting. I don’t need you to… to sacrifice yourself as some kind of decoy, and I don’t want you to leave me alone.” Embarrassment rushed up on Eve when she heard how desperate she sounded. “I mean, you’re the one who supposedly knows all the mythology behind this, right?” she asked, trying to seem more practical than needy.
“They’d have my scent from finding my coat back at your house,” Tristan told her, but it sounded more like he was just reasoning his plan out aloud for himself. “They’ll know what I am, and—.”
“And what?” Eve fought down, swallowed down, her panic. That was the number one reason for not believing in myths and monsters right there—she didn’t have to be afraid of what she didn’t believe in. And she didn’t have to be afraid for Tristan. “What are you?”
The sudden, forceful kiss that laid Eve out beneath Destry’s long, firm body wasn’t an answer of any kind, at least not that she could interpret. She couldn’t resist it, anyway. A bed of pine needles cushioned her head as Tristan’s kiss mounted in hunger and ferocity. He only stopped his searching hands from pulling at Eve’s sweater by reaching instead under her thighs to pull her legs wide and hook them high over his hips. She was spread for him but for their clothing, and that did nothing to keep Eve from feeling the enormity of the erection pressed demandingly at the juncture of her thighs.
Not normal people—that was what Tristan had said, that many of the residents of Evergreen weren’t normal people, and he’d included himself. Seeing everything she’d witnessed that night, struggling to flee through the forest while the effort had been minimal for him, feeling now the distressing and thrilling proportion of the man’s sex, Eve finally questioned whether Tristan Destry was a man at all.
Breathless, he drew back from Eve’s lips just enough to gasp, just enough to mutter again with his mouth brushing hers. “Now that I feel you under me, I don’t want to give you up. Do you understand at all how good you feel to me, princess? How warm and soft, even on a cold night, even on the hard ground?” Tristan huffed and then groaned low as he lost his hold on himself and spent long moments they didn’t have to spare mercilessly laving and nipping Eve’s bare throat with ravenous kisses.
Eve’s skin tingled and burned from the light bristle of whiskers that had risen on Tristan’s cheeks and chin after a whole day. Her blood seemed to course inside her in a hot rush. She thought she could feel her pulse throbbing at the end of every nerve, in her tongue, even in her pussy and the tender bud of her clitoris.
Sucking in his breath with clenched teeth, Destry made himself pull away again. He put his hands flat on the ground on either side of Eve’s shoulders and pushed back, arms shaking with tension and effort, as though he had to fight himself to rise. On his knees above Eve, gazing down at her and still breathing hard and heavy with lust, Tristan peeled his heavy sweater over his head. Bared, his chest was even more developed and defined than she had imagined, with that lewdly enticing V of pelvic muscle bulging below his abs and trailing down into the waistband of his jeans.
God, yes. God, no. That was all Eve could think, in alternating waves of anticipation and dread, as Tristan Destry started to unbuckle his belt above the straining ridge of his erection.
“Goddesses willing,” he said as he came up off one knee and then the other to his feet, “I’ll get the chance to do this properly.”
The mixed signals crossed in Eve’s head, foggy as her thoughts were. But she wasn’t mistaken. Tristan was undressing as though he was about it take her while at the same time he was backing away.
Eve folded her arms back to push herself up onto her elbows. “Tristan, what are you—?”
“You have to trust me, princess. Don’t be afraid.”
Afraid of Tristan? What did she have to be afraid of?
She didn’t think—well, not really—that he meant he thought she’d be scared of the size of him when at last his boots and jeans came off and he stood naked and rampant before her. For all the weight and substance to the bands of muscle cording Tristan’s arms and legs, to his torso and the enticing glimpse of his ass in profile, his erect cock was still far more than Eve was prepared to see—or imagine feeling. And yet her sex pulsed inside her, clenching down to her core with the wicked desire to have Tristan’s huge cock drive into her farther than any other man had, farther than she thought she could take and then more.
“Listen for the wind and the howling, princess,” he told her, standing proud and tall and gorgeous before her, his skin mottled by moonlight and the shifting pattern of leaves. “You’ll know they’ve caught
my scent and followed me when the storm moves past you and recedes.”
Then, before she could pepper him with panicked questions, Tristan turned away from Eve and… and spilled out of himself into a new shape. From the place where Tristan Destry had been standing, a huge white stallion shot away into the trees with snorting fury and mane flying behind him.
Chapter Seven
Eve wanted to tell herself she was just disoriented. She’d had too much eggnog and brandy at the carnival. She hadn’t just seen…. What? Tristan Destry turn into a mythic stallion and race off to lead the hounds of The Wild Hunt away from her?
Sitting with her back pressed to the rough bark of a tree, as she listened, Eve’s head felt all too clear. Maybe it was the adrenaline of being left to her own resources, to find her way out of the woods alone at night with a storm overhead.
A storm…. Tristan had warned Eve that the winds would follow The Wild Hunt. It wasn’t just wind but icy, biting raindrops striking Eve’s cheek that recalled her focus and what the man—the werehorse—had said to her. Being caught out in the cold without a coat was dangerous enough, but getting wet, too?
The woman fought her frost-numbed limbs to climb to her feet, only to scan the woods around her for some idea of where she should go. She couldn’t just try to wander home to bed, not with whatever this Wild Hunt was, stalking through the forest around her house. And not while Tristan was out there alone as well. She couldn’t just find shelter for herself and leave him to his fate.
Find help, that was what she’d do. Eve knew there were at least a half dozen houses along the same road as hers, farther along and away from town. If she was lucky, they’d have put their offerings out for the faeries and wouldn’t be afraid to answer when she came pounding at their door. Eve tried not to unravel the flawed logic behind that as she forged into the woods without a trail or any reliable sense of direction.
Shifter Wonderland: Twelve BBW Paranormal Holiday Shape Shifter Romances Page 44