by Eve Langlais
“Worked hard today,” Stephen mumbled. “Didn’t eat till dinner. You see the snow out there I shoveled?”
Jerry cackled and even Tyler grinned while he refilled his cup for the second time. Emily returned a moment later with Stephen’s glass filled with four fingers of Scotch. She handed it to him, her fingers lingering a moment on his and then she waited while he took a drink to make sure he was pleased with it.
“Thanks,” he slurred with his eyes staring at her hard nipples poking through her filmy outfit.
Emily straightened and walked back to Hunter’s side. She sank down to her knees and leaned against him, resting her head on his thigh before turning to kiss his knee.
Their gazes alternated between Emily and the stove. She made no effort to hide anything; instead, she focused on rubbing Hunter’s leg and making herself as available as possible. Or as available as Hunter would let her be. She rose when someone needed their drinks topped off.
A few attempts at conversation were made but they faltered and lapsed back into drunken silence. Stephen jerked in his chair and dropped his tumbler. The heavy glass bounced on the wooden floor, spilling the remains of his drink as it rolled. “Shit,” he slurred and jerked up. “I’m drunk.”
Hunter laughed and Jerry giggled. “Go to bed,” Tyler slurred. “Got a big day tomorrow.”
Stephen nodded and tried to rise. He slumped back in his chair and let out a drunken sigh.
Jerry stumbled to his feet and staggered over to Stephen. “Come on, moose–killer,” the lawyer cackled. He grabbed Stephen’s hand and the two managed to stagger off towards the ladder that led to the loft. One closed bedroom and an open area with two beds awaited them.
Emily and Hunter watched them climb the ladder without incident. “I’ll be damned,” Hunter mumbled.
“Moose–killer? What’s up with that?” Emily asked.
Hunter jerked his head around to stare at her. His eyes narrowed and then he forced out a laugh. “Hunting,” he said and waved his hand. “He wanted this great big moose and ended up getting a little one.”
Emily hid her gasp behind her hand and then giggled. “Hey, where are your guns? I haven’t seen them anywhere.”
“Guns?” Hunter frowned. “Locked up. We’ll get them out tomorrow.”
“Oh.”She pouted and then shrugged. She turned and glanced at Tyler. The PI was passed out in his chair with drool running down his chin. She giggled and turned back to Hunter. “I’m going to have my way with you right here, in the middle of this cabin. If your friends woke up, they could see me fucking you.”
Hunter gawked at her. “What? No you’re not! Bedroom.”
Emily shook her head. “Uh uh, I want you, baby. I want you here. You don’t even know what a turn–on this is. Huge fantasy. Like, huge!”
Emily stood up and grabbed his hand. She pulled it up under her skirt and pressed his fingers against her uncovered slit. Hunter’s eyes widened. “Whoa. I think I just splashed.”
Emily let out a shuddering groan. “Yes, you did. Oh my God! I’m going to–wait.”
Hunter watched as she stepped back and fumbled to release the clips on her garters. She lifted her skirt and yanked it up, proving that the top was attached to it. She pulled it over her head and threw it on the ground, leaving her wearing only her heels and stockings. She didn’t waste any time before straddling his hand that Hunter hadn’t bother pulling back.
He slid his fingers through her folds and buried two fingers inside her. She let out a moan and shuddered. “Oh baby, I’m gonna cum. Keep doing that!”
Hunter grinned and shook his head, chasing away the shadows that were creeping in on the edges of his vision. He pulled his fingers out with a squishing noise, earning a groan from her. He slid them across her skin behind her pussy and murmured, “Earn it!”
Emily’s breath caught in her throat. “You dirty man,” she hissed. “I’ve never done that!”
“First time for everything,” he managed.
She bit her lips and then shuddered again as his palm and wrist pressed against her wet sex. “I wanted to save that for later,” she whispered.
“Uh uh,” Hunter mumbled. “Now.”
She nodded. “Go big or go home. Okay, baby,” she said and reached down to hold his hand steady between her legs. She shifted, rocking her hips as his fingertips caught in her other special place. She was so wet her juices were everywhere, including his fingers. She was sloppy wet; it was now or never. She pushed his fingertips and rolled her hips, forcing the tip of his thick middle finger start to penetrate her almost before she realized what had happened.
“Oh fuck!” she whimpered. “Wait! Stop! Oh, it–oh!”
Hunter ground his wrist against her clitoris and sent her body from being stiff and in shock to trembling and then jerking as he overloaded her senses. She managed to stay upright for a few more seconds before she fell forward and landed on top of him. His hand slipped free but she managed to straddle his leg and continued to grind against him while he rode her surprise orgasm out.
When her body stopped jerking, she picked her face up from Hunter’s chest and saw him staring at her with dazed over eyes. She pressed her lips against his neck and inhaled his manly scent. She licked him, tasting him before rising up to press her lips against his. He twitched against her but couldn’t manage to return her kiss.
Emily sighed and stood up. She glanced at Tyler and frowned. He was out cold, thanks to the potatoes and a full bottle of wine she’d spiked. She turned back to Hunter and grabbed his hands in hers. One of them was sticky with her juices, earning a sad smile from her. “Come on, lover boy. I promised you an amazing night and I’m going to make good on it.”
Hunter grunted and managed to rouse himself enough to let her help him stagger back to the bedroom. She guided him to the bed and pushed him onto it. Hunter fell with a grunt. Emily grabbed his running pants and yanked them down, revealing his half swollen member. She licked her lips and glanced up at him.
“You’re not going to be good for much, baby,” she said. “Sorry about that. You might have had a little too much to drink.”
Hunter’s breath hissed through his mouth as he tried, and failed, to respond.
“Don’t worry. I’m going to take care of you. I won’t stop until you do. Don’t hold back, baby, just let it happen. I’m going to make you sleep so good.”
She crawled up on the bed and straddled his legs. She licked her lips again and reached for him. “I have to admit,” she whispered, “I’m going to miss this.”
Chapter Sixteen
Hunter twitched. Something tapped him again, this time on the lip. It made his skin itch and spread, traveling over the curve of his lip and into his mouth. Hunter tasted the rich coppery fluid and inhaled the scent of blood. Fresh blood. His eyes opened and he stared up at the log ceiling where crimson gathered and dripped onto the bed.
He closed his mouth and swallowed the taste down, igniting a rumble deep in his belly. The beast that lay caged within pulled at his chains. He’d waited long enough. The promised hunt was at hand and Hunter struggled to contain the hunter within him.
Had they started without him? That didn’t make sense. They were a pack. Brothers bound by the gift they shared. Besides, the plan was for them to leave first and either force Emily out into the forest or stalk her in the cabin if she refused to leave. It was brutal, but it was the hunt that the wolf inside them demanded. Normal lives were not for them.
Hunter licked his lips, tasting more of the blood. His body quivered, struggling to shift and transform. He shook his head and bit back a growl. Whatever was going on wasn’t right. It was too quiet. He shifted and rolled onto his side, struggling to understand why his arms and legs felt numb.
He managed to look down and saw that he was naked. He squinted, staring at his crotch and slowly piecing together disjointed memories of Emily going down on him. He’d passed out from the single glass of Scotch but he remembered her telling him not to wor
ry, that she’d take care of him.
His eyes flicked up to the ceiling again as an icy chill crept down his spine. Had she just taken care of his partners as well?
Hunter pushed himself and tried to sit up. He ended up rolling off the side of the bed and crashing onto the floor. Hunter’s breath exploded from his chest and he lay gasping. He felt exhausted and weak. Pathetic. What was wrong with him?
The sound of wood against wood grabbed his attention. He tried to stifle his panting and look back. It was Emily; it had to be. He recognized the same sound of her heels against the wood floor. And it was getting louder–she was coming closer.
The footsteps stopped. “Oh, poor baby, you fell out of bed.”
Hunter twisted and tried to look back. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Emily standing, still wearing her heels and white stockings. She looked different. Her stockings were stained and dark in spots. Her skin was discolored as well. He twisted some more to try to see her. His vision was blurry but he could smell the blood painting her skin. His eyes, even unfocused, were drawn to the flash of silver in her hand.
“What–” he gasped.
“I’m sorry, baby. You weren’t supposed to wake up.”
Hunter flopped over onto his back and found the strength to pull himself back across the floor a few inches away from her. “What are you doing?” he gasped.
“Nightshade,” she said. “A mixture in the potatoes dulled your senses so you wouldn’t smell or taste it in your drinks. Even so, it takes a lot to kill monsters like you. Too much to hide. But incapacitating you? That I could do.”
“Why?”
Her face underwent a transformation. She shuddered and snarled while saying, “Because you’re evil! You’re monsters! You brought me up here to kill me. Don’t deny it!”
Hunter shook his head but said nothing.
“It was someone like you who killed my dad,” she continued. She held up the knife in her hand and turned it, letting the firelight from the stove glint off of it. “Silver. Your kind won’t heal from this.”
“Pal–Paladin?” Hunter stammered, naming off the sect of religious zealots who were known to hunt his kind.
Emily frowned and lowered the blade a few inches. “What? What’s a Paladin?”
Hunter shook his head.
“Tell me!” she hissed and stepped forward.
“Church,” he spat out. “A secretive cult.”
“Oh,” she said and then shrugged. “No, I’m a wolf hunter. We’re not part of any religion. We don’t need God to have a reason to kill monsters like you–we’ve all got our own reasons.”
Hunter glanced around and felt his arms tingling. Feeling was returning, but it wouldn’t be in time. The wolf inside him was snapping and roaring. It wanted to be let loose but he didn’t know if he could. Would he be stuck in the agony of a half–shifted state? Would that kill him? Would it show Emily he really was a monster? Would it make it easier for her to hurt him?
“I had fun with you, though,” Emily said, dropping the hate from her voice. “You treated me very good and, even if you are a self–centered son of a bitch, you know how to fuck.”
“Em–stop. You don’t need to do this.”
She laughed. “I don’t? You think we can just go back to normal now? Jerry and Stephen are dead already. Tyler’s bleeding out, but I didn’t have a chance to finish him before I heard you in here. How would we explain that?”
Hunter’s mouth hung open while he struggled with what she’d admitted. His eyes flicked to the ceiling again where the blood fell. Of course, it made sense. Why else would there be blood up there? The blood had woken him up. It had given him some control over himself. It made the beast within hunger for more.
“Are you growling at me?” Emily asked. She laughed. “That’s a hell of a plan.”
“Hunting accidents,” Hunter gasped. “Then you get what you want. Everything you said you wanted.”
“Sure, until you find a way to kill me when I’m not looking,” Emily spat, her mood shifting again.
“No!” Hunter shook his head. “I wouldn’t. I–look, this was hard. For me. I did it because I had to. For the pack. I was–”
“Your pack’s dead now!” she snarled and took another step forward.
“Right!” Hunter grabbed at what she said. “So nobody can stop me from loving you.”
Emily hesitated, her eyelids twitching. She bit her lip and then jerked her head back and forth. “No! You’re vicious! Heartless. A butcher. I’ve seen what your kind does. You’re a lawyer–you’re probably even worse than the one that killed my daddy!”
“Emily, no!” Hunter gasped, but she was beyond talking. She stalked towards him, a vision of violent beauty in her bloodstained lingerie. He jerked his wooden arms up to defend himself and smacked himself in the face with his own hand. The wolf inside him demanded release and he cried out, releasing his mental restraints and calling on it. It was his only chance.
An explosion crashed through the house and left him stunned before he could begin to shift. Through the ringing in his ears, he heard Emily cry out. He let his arms fall and caught a glimpse of her rolling off the end of the bed.
Hunter rolled and floundered, twisting himself and managing to stare under the bed. The knife lay on the floor at the foot of the bed, gleaming a seductive look of purity that he knew would burn him as badly as shoving his fist in the stove. Emily was swearing and crying from the far side of the bed. She scrambled and fell and then tried again. He couldn’t make her out well enough to know what had happened to her, but the blood on the floor made him certain she’d been hurt.
He crawled around the foot of the bed and stared at the knife. On the far side, Emily emerged on her knees and one hand. The other she clutched to her side in an attempt to stem the blood that was leaking through her fingers. Their eyes met and shared their fear and uncertainty. Emily’s face contorted, her eyes narrowing and her teeth bared in a snarl that seemed at home in the harsh northern climate. Her eyes dropped to the knife and her body tightened.
Hunter knew what he had to do if he hoped to survive to see the morning. He called the wolf and heard himself scream as his muscles and ligaments stretched and popped. His bones reshaped and rearranged themselves, distorting his skin even as fur burst from his pores. The poison slowed him and made the agony of shifting a hundred times worse. He didn’t know whether he was alive, dead, or if he even still had a body to call on when he ordered his canine legs to dig their claws into the floorboards and propel him towards the woman scrambling to pick up the wretched silver blade.
Chapter Seventeen
“Oh fuck!”
Hunter jerked his head up at the interruption. He snarled, blood dripping from his teeth. A woman stood in the middle of the living room, a rifle at her shoulder but pointing at the ground between them. She jerked it up again and pointed it at him.
“Don’t move! Oh my–Jesus! Emily? Is that–Is she–Oh fuck!”
Hunter forced the rage and hunger down. Slowly he stilled his quivering lips and stood tall in the room over the body of his prey. Emily’s last breath gargled in the shredded ruin of her throat and her hand fell to the floor. The knife she’d tried to kill him with was knocked to the side where she’d dropped it.
He licked his furry lips and stepped away from Emily’s body. The shift to a wolf had burned the poison out of his system and left him parched. The smell of Emily’s blood and the taste on his lips called out to the wolf in him. He started to dip his head and then raised it back up to stare at Tiffany.
“You killed her,” she whispered as the gun lowered a few inches.
Hunter’s ears perked up and he turned to look at the hole in her side that led to a larger exit wound on her back. He looked back at Tiffany and let out a soft woof.
“Oh fuck,” she whispered. She glanced to the side and then back, her lips caught between her teeth. “Mr. Caskins is bleeding pretty bad. Um, Mr. Wynn, that is you, right? I mean, I can’t rea
lly tell but I think it’s you. The way you’re looking at me, I mean. I’ve seen that look, like you want to eat me up. I never, um, never really thought about it literally, though. You’re not going to, are you?”
Hunter took a deep breath and let it out. He closed his eyes and forced the raging wolf back inside. He heard Tiffany cry out from a thousand miles away as his body reshaped itself into a man. He looked up from his hands and knees at her.
“Oh fuck, that’s creepy,” Tiffany whispered. She’d lowered the gun enough that it was pointing at the floor between them again. “I was right, it is you.”
“Put the gun down,” Hunter demanded as he stood up.
“What? Why? Duh, because you’re afraid of it. Um, no. Not yet. It’s got silver bullets in it, just so you know.”
Hunter’s eyes narrowed. “What? You knew?”
She nodded. “We worked together,” she said with a glance at Emily.
Hunter glanced back at Emily. “You shot her.”
Tiffany let out a ragged sigh. “I–she–I did.”
Hunter stared at her for a long moment and then moved to the door of his bedroom. She shifted, stepping back with each step he moved forward, but she kept the gun pointed at the floor. He looked to the side where Tyler was sitting in his chair with blood soaking his shirt on his side. It dripped on the floor in a steady stream.
Hunter scowled. The knife was silver; the wound would take too long to heal. He walked across the room and grabbed Tyler’s shirt, tearing it and staring at the wound in his side. Each shallow breath the man took caused bloody bubbles to seep out of the wound and run down his side. Hunter shook his head and turned away. “Fuck.”
“You can’t save him?”
“Silver,” Hunter said. “And he’s been poisoned with nightshade.”
Tiffany nodded. “That slows your healing and makes you vulnerable. How did you survive?”
“I didn’t have as much,” Hunter said. He turned to face her. “You’re one of these wolf hunters?”