Perfect Mate

by Mina Carter

  Finally, he deemed they were clear enough and pounded on the cabin roof again. They’d taken down the gunships and stolen the Project’s transport. For an hour or two, at least until those they’d left alive could summon backup from base, they were safe.

  The vehicles pulled to a stop in the next clearing and the pack de-bused, lean, naked bodies leaping with inhuman grace from the armored vehicles to crowd around Jack.

  “Everyone okay?”

  He did a quick head count as Sanders slid out the cabin of the second vehicle. Instantly, the wolf’s eyes searched the pack, hopping from one member to another until he found what he was looking for. Relief in his eyes as he spotted the tall form of Richards, skipping over the others. Jack sighed inwardly. That was a situation that needed sorting, and quickly.

  “We’re down one,” Richards said bluntly, looking around.

  Jack did a quick head count. “They must have Darce. He wasn’t with Lillian when we found her. We—”

  “Boss, we got a problem.”

  Jack waved his hand at the sound of Nic’s voice behind him. “Hold one, Nic. Right, they have Darce, so we need to go b—”

  “Boss! You reall—”

  “Nic!” He all but roared in frustration, his voice sharp with worry for his second in command. “I’m dealing with some—”

  “Lillian has been shot.”

  Three little words. Unlike those other three little words, these were ones no man wanted to hear in his lifetime. Not when applied to his mate, the woman he loved.

  The ground surged beneath his feet, a great yawning chasm trying to swallow him up. He couldn’t allow that. Gritting his teeth, he forced steel into his backbone and looked at his men anew.

  “Richards, sort a recon. Two men. Find out where Darce is. Don’t let them see you, don’t get caught. Everyone else, secure the perimeter.”

  The orders spilled from his lips automatically, his training taking over despite the fear clawing at his gut. Wheeling, he was around the Humvee in a heartbeat. He wrenched the door open. The smell of blood hit him. Old blood, mixed with dirt. Nic had to be wrong, if his mate had been shot, there would be fresh blood.

  Lillian rested back against the seat, looking pale and still. Jack’s heart plummeted from its sudden leap of hope. Too pale and still. Her chest barely moved, just the slightest flutter to indicate she was still alive.

  “Sweetheart? You okay?”

  He leaned in to brush his fingers over her cheeks. At his touch, her eyelids moved, lashes fluttering like dark crescents on her alabaster cheeks.

  She opened her eyes and smiled. Jack’s fear became crippling, slicing his insides to shreds while he was powerless to do anything about it. Her eyes held Death, and he was almost here.

  “Hiya, handsome.” Her voice was little more than a whisper. “Did we get clear?”

  “Yeah. We’re safe. Sweetheart…look at me,” he ordered as her head fell to the side, her eyes beginning to close.

  “Where are you hurt?”

  He tried to soften his voice, but it still emerged as a bark, raspy with pain and worry. Her head rolled on the back of the seat as she tried to focus on him.

  “Everywhere. My back. I can’t feel my legs, Jack.”

  Panic rang in her voice as she tried to move. Her eyes widened, the whites clearly visible as she struggled against the seat. As she did, her back came away from the vinyl and the scent of blood and worse washed over him.

  He swallowed, fighting back bile as he carried on stroking her cheek to get her to calm down. She was gut-shot. Which meant, out here, she was dead. Internal bleeding and the contents of her stomach or intestine would already be fouling her abdominal cavity.

  “It’s okay, sweetheart. When were you shot?”

  He cast a glance at the door, looking for the bullet holes. There weren’t any. She must have been shot when he was carrying her and he’d missed it under everything else when he’d put her in the car. A low moan welled up and tried to claw its way out of his throat. One he quickly swallowed to avoid panicking her further.

  “Sweetheart, it’s going to be okay. But I need to know…when were you shot? In the Humvee or before?”

  She was panting, her breathing fast and light. He didn’t need to test her pulse to know it would be fast and faint, fluttering like a tiny bird in a cage. Shock. She’d lost too much blood. Tears stabbed the back of his eyes like hot pokers as pain stole his breath.

  “Please Jack, help me.” She lifted her hand from where it rested on the seat. It was covered in fresh blood. Hers. “Please, I don’t want to die.”

  Jack froze as he realized what she was saying. She clutched his arm, her fingers biting deep with the strength of the dying. Her dark eyes pleaded with him, tears spilling over her lashes.

  “I can’t, sweetheart. I wish to God I could, but—”

  Her hand dropped, and his wolf howled in rage at his words. For the first time ever, the beast within raged against him, slamming against the bars of its confinement to be free. Jack gritted his teeth and fought for control as it tried to break loose from its prison of flesh. He could read its intent: to get free and bite Lillian.

  Even if she was bitten as her human heart beat its last, as soon as the LY16 virus was in her system, it would do its insidious work. Because she wasn’t Project, she hadn’t been vaccinated against infection. A bite wouldn’t kill her like the guards…

  “If you don’t, I will.” Nic’s voice rang out, clear as a bell, from behind him. Jack whirled, his chest heaving, and glared at her.

  “Like fuck you will. She doesn’t know what she’s asking. What kind of life she’ll be letting herself in for.”

  “Bullshit!” The female wolf threw back, her eyes blazing with heat. “That’s a cop-out, and you know it. If you don’t, she doesn’t have a life. Period. Get out of the way if you’re too scared to do it.”

  “Stop it, just stop it.” The weak voice from the cabin stopped both of them in their tracks. “Please Jack, I don’t want to die alone.”

  Chapter Twenty-One

  She didn’t have long. Lillian could feel her strength ebbing away as cold dug its sharp fingers into her body. Shock and blood loss, her brain told her. An adult human only needed a thirty percent blood loss for some pretty serious problems to develop. Anything past that and the patient was in deep shit.

  The wetness on the seat and dripping down into the foot well told Lillian she was well past the problem stage and high-tailing it over the deep shit horizon. She welcomed it. If nothing else, the cold numbed the agony that her abdomen had become.

  Jack wheeled around at her words, pulling her into his arms. She went gratefully, craving his hotter-than-human body heat.

  “Its okay, sweetheart, I’m here. I’ll always be here.”

  The low rumble of his voice against her ear was a comfort. Tears coursed down her cheeks as she clung to him. Shivers racked her as her heart fought to pump blood that simply wasn’t there anymore.

  “You can’t stay.” Agony of a different sort raged through her. “They’ll be coming for you. You have to go.”

  He shook his head, the violent movement jostling her. Unable to help herself, she mewled in pain. Hand threaded in her hair, he made her look him in the eye.

  “I am not leaving.”

  A wave of anger washed away the lethargy that was trying to claim her body and drag her down into the depths, like a riptide waiting for the unwary.

  “Don’t you fucking dare!”

  She shoved him away, incandescent with rage. She lashed out. The slap as her hand contacted his cheek rang out like a gunshot.

  “What are you? Some sort of fucking martyr? Don’t you dare use me that way. If you won’t save me, then save yourself. Get out of here and take the fight back to them. Those people came to my hospital and tried to kill people. They tried to kill you. They killed me. And if you won’t save me, you will avenge me. Or, by God, I’ll fucking haunt you.”

  He looked at her. The
n his lips quirked.

  “How can you haunt me if I’m dead too?”

  “I’ll find a fucking way, believe me. Even if I have to drag your sorry ass back into the land of the living to do it!”

  She watched as amusement warred with agony. She knew he considered himself an animal, something less than human. A mistake. Reaching out, she cupped the cheek she’d slapped.

  “Jack. I love you. Whatever and whoever you are. I’ll love you as long as I live, even if it’s a few minutes here in the car, or until we both grow old living in the forest on four paws.” Her voice was soft, her words heartfelt. “Love doesn’t care about appearance. It cares about what’s in here.” She tapped the center of his chest. “Follow your heart. The heart of a good man. It will tell you what to do.”

  Tears streamed down her cheeks unabated. He nodded, his expression shuttered. All hope fled. He was going to let her die, bleed her last in the passenger seat of a stolen military vehicle, rather than turn her into the creature he was. No doubt they would bury her right here, an unmarked grave under the leaves. Would he visit her in the years to come? Or would he walk away and never look back?

  He leaned in, his lips claiming hers in a last kiss. She wrapped one arm around him, the other flopping uselessly at her side. Her heart stuttered in her chest, pounding painfully to pump nothing. Pain gripped her—agonizing, all-encompassing pain—then started to fade away. She breathed out, and her lungs stilled in her chest.

  She was dying. The darkness rose to claim her as Jack’s scent wrapped itself around her. Sorrow filled her. She loved him so much, and she had lost him.

  “I’m so sorry, baby,” he whispered against lips that could barely feel his warmth.

  Then he bit her.

  Fire and pain dragged her from the cold depths she’d fallen into. Hard chains lashed out and wrapped around her body, as a thousand hooks stabbed into her cold flesh. She opened her mouth and screamed as they pulled her into unimaginable heat. Every cell in her being protested, turning her inside out as they tried to escape the agony.

  Dimly, she was aware of being carried. She didn’t care. Whatever they did to her was nothing compared to the torture of her own body. Acid raced through her empty veins, filling them with a fiery liquid that reached every part of her, arms, legs, feet and fingers. She gasped, her back arching so hard she felt each vertebrae break.

  This was it, she was really going to die. Just as she’d seen the guards in the hospital die. In tormented anguished. Perhaps not all people could be changed. Perhaps Jack and the other wolves had been different to start with…

  Her bones snapped and shifted, joints popped and changed configuration. Forcing her eyes open, she looked down. Her body wasn’t her body anymore, but it wasn’t wolf either. Her limbs shifted, changing shape as the skin melted and slithered over them as if it had a mind of its own. She screamed as her mouth changed shape, razor-sharp teeth erupting from her gums to fill the forming muzzle. Her scream altered tone, became a howl of pain and rage.

  “Oh my God, I’m sorry, sweetheart.”

  Jack was at her side, trying to calm her down, his hands smoothing down her changing limbs. Heat replaced the agony in a never-ending cycle. She rolled to the side and vomited up the bile in her stomach until all she could do was dry-heave, that miserable feeling adding to the legion of torment.

  “It’ll be over soon, I promise. Then you’ll be better than new.”

  On her hands and knees, watching her hands change from the delicate, finely boned pianist’s hands her grandfather had always commented on to huge, brutish paws, Lillian held onto his words like a mantra. And, when her back arched again, the vertebrae re-breaking, she took them with her into the welcoming darkness.

  Light. She hated sunlight in her eyes in the morning. Lillian grumbled under her breath and tried to pull the duvet up over her head. Her questing fingers searched for the edge but couldn’t find it. Where had it gone? She patted down her body and then around it. Where was the damn duvet? She’d always been sensitive to the cold. So if she wasn’t covered with the duvet, why was she so warm?

  The sense something was wrong pulled her the rest of the way out of sleep. Opening her eyes, she got a swift impression of swaying branches above her before the brightness forced her to squeeze her eyes shut. Was that the sun? If so, who had turned the brightness up by around a billion watts?

  Cautiously she cracked one eyelid. Yup, those were branches above her. What was she doing in the middle of the woods? She cracked a second eyelid and searched her memory, but it remained stubbornly blank. Something was different, though, she knew that without the aid of memory.

  Yeah, no shit Sherlock. You’re in the middle of the woods, I’d say something’s different, all right. She ignored the sarcastic little voice and rolled to her side. She ached, as if she’d broken every bone in her body.

  “Ugh.” Okay, she wouldn’t try that again for a while.

  Rolling to her feet, she swayed, fighting the dizziness that wanted to drop her back to the sleeping bag she’d been lying on. Confused, she ran a hand over the clothes she had on. Camouflage pants and a wife-beater. They weren’t her clothes. They looked more like…

  The wind changed direction, brushing the hair from her face. Her eyes snapped open. With the wind came something else. Something…amazing. She inhaled deeply. Everything smelled so good. Especially one scent that stood out from the rest. A smell so mouth-wateringly perfect she’d taken two steps in that direction before she realized what she was doing.

  She stopped, jerking to a standstill as memory crashed back, washing over her like a storm driven tidal wave. There was no stopping it or slowing it. Before her eyes, the events of the last few days crammed into her head like a never-ending stream. From Jack being wheeled through the hospital doors blood-soaked and half-crazed to the agony after he’d bitten her, infecting her to save her life.

  She was alive. Jubilation and awe coursed through her as she looked around with new eyes. With werewolf eyes. He’d done it—he’d turned her. Lillian dropped her head back and howled just for the pleasure of hearing the sound well up and rip from her throat.

  “I’m alive.” She giggled and spun in a circle, hugging her arms around her body over what she assumed were Nic’s clothes. “Jack.”

  Taking a deep breath, she found his scent, the perfect one that made her want to drop to the ground and roll in it, and ran. The trees and the undergrowth faded to a blur as she passed, following his trail. She ran for the sheer hell of it, a celebration of love and life, her body strong and whole. She ran to find the man she loved, her mate.

  She laughed as she ran, a light sound of delight. She could feel the energy in her body, a vitality she’d never felt before. Easily, she leaped over a fallen log, the lure of Jack’s scent leading her ever onward. Finally she found him, slowing to a walk as the track petered out into a small clearing on the hillside.

  Jack sat on a boulder, clad only in camouflage pants and his feet bare on the rock in front of him. His shoulders were hunched, a broad line that screamed despair and misery.

  She took a step forward, wary now.

  “Jack?”

  He didn’t turn, didn’t look at her. Her heart stuttered. Something was wrong. Had he changed his mind…didn’t he love her now that she was like him?

  “They took Darce. We couldn’t get to him in time.”

  His voice was low, arms folded over his knees as he looked out over the valley below. The words hit her, twisted something in her heart. Darce had sacrificed himself so she could get away. It wasn’t something she intended to forget. She would fight to the last drop of blood in her veins to free him from the Project.

  She took the last few steps to Jack’s side. All she wanted to do was touch him. His scent called to her, more potent than any drug. She wanted to rub her body against every inch of his, mark him with her own scent so everyone would know he was hers.

  “The others are out securing supplies. I stayed to watch o
ver you until you woke.”

  “And now?” She folded her arms, preparing herself for the words she knew were coming. He didn’t want her now. It had been a mistake.

  “You’re in your first month. You need to learn to control your change. Once you can do that, you can leave.”

  “Leave?” She couldn’t help the tremor of pain in her voice. She’d been right, he realized he’d made a mistake.

  He sighed and stood up, finally facing her for the first time since her conversion. Her gaze wandered over him, drinking in every detail of his appearance. Then she reached his eyes. Pain and fear filled them.

  “You’ll hate me. If you don’t now, you will soon. I made you into an animal and there’s no way to forgive something like that.”

  Love and understanding blossomed in her chest.

  “I don’t hate you, Jack. I never could. I never will. We’ll get Darce back, I promise. All of us, together.”

  Smiling, she stepped forward and reached up to touch his cheek. “You and your men were made what you are in pain and fear. I was made what I am because of love. You gave me the gift of life.”

  She reached up on her tiptoes and brushed her lips over his. “Now let me give you yours back.”

  About the Author

  Born and raised in Middle Earth (otherwise known as the Midlands, England), Mina Carter has (fortunately) never been mistaken for a hobbit. After a slew of careers ranging from logistics to land surveying, she can now be found in the wilds of Leicestershire with her husband and young daughter.

  Eternally curious, Mina never tires of learning new things, dabbling in weird and wonderful things such as aromatherapy, corsetry, chainmail-making, welding, canoeing, shooting and pole-clinging (closely related to pole-dancing but for those terrified of heights and allergic to hitting the floor) to name but a few.