Once Bitten_Wolves of Hemlock Hollow

by Heather McCorkle

  Table of Contents

  Dedication

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Pack breakdown

  Glossary

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Discover more Entangled Select Otherworld titles… Drakon’s Prey

  Taming the Pack: Complete Series

  The Black Lily

  Wolf Moon

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

  Copyright © 2017 by Heather McCorkle. All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce, distribute, or transmit in any form or by any means. For information regarding subsidiary rights, please contact the Publisher.

  Entangled Publishing, LLC

  2614 South Timberline Road

  Suite 109

  Fort Collins, CO 80525

  Visit our website at www.entangledpublishing.com.

  Select Otherworld is an imprint of Entangled Publishing, LLC.

  Edited by Tera Cuskaden

  Cover design by Cora Graphics

  Cover art from DepositPhotos

  ISBN 978-1-63375-931-2

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  First Edition April 2017

  For the Viking who keeps me warm at night.

  Chapter One

  Sonya

  Caught up in the moment as I was, I didn’t see fate coming for me. I should have. There were signs. Like the animalistic growl rumbling in his chest as he kissed a wet line down my jaw to my neck. I wasn’t about to protest. The primal sound of it was sexy as hell. His incredible amber eyes developed a shine about them that seemed unnatural, but I figured that was the drinks we’d had earlier getting to me. His hips ground against mine, pushing me into the door to my downstairs apartment.

  Again he asked to go inside, and again I refused. He was attractive enough, and I certainly had nothing against premarital sex, but casual sex was another thing altogether. Especially with a guy I had only met two weeks ago. It was bad enough that we were making out in the dark alley in front of my low-income apartment where my sketchy neighbors could come out at any moment. But then, Twin Falls, Idaho, wasn’t exactly a hopping town after midnight. And seeing as my apartment building was only a little two-story number that housed less than fifty, the odds of anyone being around were slim to none. All the more reason not to go inside where temptation would lead me somewhere I wasn’t willing to go yet.

  The gentle nips at my neck grew harder. Walking that razor edge of pleasure/pain made my blood pump so hard the cool Idaho night felt more like Arizona in the midst of summer. Until impossibly sharp teeth grazed the sensitive skin of my neck.

  “Ouch!”

  Those teeth broke through my skin and sank deep into the muscles and meat of my neck. I screamed and writhed in pain but he had locked onto me with the strength of a boa constrictor. After an excruciating few seconds, his teeth withdrew from me in a rush.

  One moment he was pressed against me, the next he leaped back and stood against the building across the alley as if using it to brace himself. His mouth hung open and within it, not one set of fangs shone in the streetlight, but two. A set on the top and a set on the bottom, much like a canine. The worst part; they were covered in my blood. My blood.

  “What the hell?” I yelled, a hand going to my neck.

  My fingers came away slick and sticky with blood. He stood there, staring at me with those gleaming eyes, blood trickling over his bottom lip. Slowly, like a cat’s claws, his fangs retracted until they looked like no more than overly pointy teeth. Before tonight I had thought his toothy smile looked sexy. Now, not so much. If it weren’t for the blood making a steady trail down his chin, I would have thought I’d imagined the whole thing. Then there was the pain.

  Keeping my eyes on him, I fumbled in my pocket for my keys while the other searched for the mace I kept on me. My fingers settled around the metal canister. Hand so steady it surprised even me, I took it out, flicked my thumb under the safety cap, and pointed it at him. The bastard just grinned. A cold chill of fear threatened to extinguish my anger.

  “What. The. Hell?” I demanded slower, emphasizing each word, desperate to hang on to the anger that gave me courage.

  His shoulders sagged, his defined chest caving in on itself as if he were trying to melt back into the wall. The button-up shirt he wore lay splayed open, giving me a good view of the blood that dripped from his chin onto his pale pecs. Only moments ago I had opened that shirt in my eagerness to touch his bare flesh. The memory made me shiver with revulsion. That gorgeous, fit body of his suddenly seemed to sport more hair than I remembered. Hair covered his bare chest where I didn’t recall him having any before, and the line of it from his belly button down into the waistband of his jeans had definitely thickened. The hand holding the mace began to shake, and I loathed myself a little for the weakness. He looked past the mace at me with something close to contempt.

  “I’m sorry it had to be like this. I didn’t want it to, I swear,” he said.

  Straightening, he adjusted the erection pushing against the fly of his jeans, taking his time as if I weren’t pointing mace at his half-naked body. The front step swam a bit. Damn, how deep had he bitten into me? I pressed one hand to the wound and kept the mace trained on him with the other. Freaked out and feeling exposed, I wanted nothing more than to dig my keys out of my jeans pocket and open my apartment door, but I didn’t dare. Dropping my guard even a little wasn’t an option.

  Hot, sticky blood oozed through my fingers and ran down my neck. “You bit me, you son of a bitch!”

  Going stiff, he stood up straighter, eyes darting down the alley in both directions. The alley swam, and not in a pleasant, too-much-Jack-Daniels kind of way.

  “Get away from me, Raul. Now,” I said, doing my best to sound like the badass I totally did not feel like at the moment.

  Soft yellow light from headlights outlined his spiky brown hair. Someone had parked at the other end, beyond the small bit of green space that edged the building. When the lights didn’t switch off, I realized whoever it was wanted to see us. I called out for help. The blinding bright light hid Raul’s expression from me until he turned his back to it. Damned if he didn’t look a bit smug—and beneath it, worried. The second part I liked; the first made me even more concerned than I already was.

  He started down the sidewalk, moving away from the headlights. “See you soon, doll,” he said in a sexy tone that made me want to vomit.

  The headlights bounced off the green thread of the top rocker sewn to his black Cordura jacket. No matter how many times I had asked, he’d never told me what AVW—stitched onto the top rocker—stood for. The bottom rocker read Montana, revealing he belon
ged to some kind of group out of that state. Beyond that, I knew very little. Between the rockers sat a patch with strange symbols of circling knotwork woven into the shape of a canine with Norse runes all around it. That told me even less. Damn it, I should have known better.

  “Not a chance, you freak. You ever come back here and I will kill you.”

  I couldn’t even bring myself to kill spiders, but he didn’t know that.

  White teeth flashed in a grin before he dashed off. I wanted to follow him, make sure he left, but I couldn’t move. Hell, I couldn’t hold the mace up anymore. Before it could fall, I shoved it in my pocket, having to try twice. Soft footsteps padded from the direction of the headlights. While my fuzzy mind regretted having pocketed the mace, part of me realized it was probably a concerned neighbor who had heard me yell. But none of my neighbors were as tall and muscular as the man who came running down the alley toward me. I wasn’t sure if it was the headlights, or if he had short golden hair, but one thing I couldn’t miss were his ice-blue eyes. A woman could get caught in eyes like that. The man looked like he’d walked right out of one of the old Norse legends my dad had liked to tell me when I was a kid.

  Everything swayed. Or maybe it was me; I couldn’t tell. Strong hands gripped my arms, holding me upright. The skin of his hands tingled against my arms, growing warmer the longer he held on, until it felt like we might melt together into one. Something in my fuzzy brain tried to tell me that wouldn’t be a bad thing, not at all. Those ice-blue eyes snagged my gaze and held on with a vengeance. Heat to rival that of an inferno lay behind those glacial blues and it pulled at me as if it wanted to consume me.

  “You should get inside and lock the door behind you. I will go after him,” said a voice with the right timbre to set my nerves vibrating in a very good way.

  Survival instincts broke through the haze caused by blood loss. Yeah, that had to be it, the blood loss. I thrust my hand in my pocket and it came back out with my keys. As I turned them in the lock, I forced my weary head up so I could look at the blond man one more time. I wanted to remember his face, and not just because he was the only witness to the assault on me.

  “Careful, he’s dangerous,” I warned.

  “So am I. Do not worry about me. I will be back to make sure you are all right,” he said.

  I turned the knob and nearly fell as the door opened inward. Just before I closed it, I heard the blond man curse in a language I didn’t recognize but that tickled at my memory. Several sets of footsteps pounded on the pavement. I slammed the door shut, threw the deadbolt, and bolted the other two locks for good measure. On weak legs I made my way to the bedroom, using the walls and furniture to keep myself upright. Coagulating blood forced me to peel my hand from my neck so I could use it.

  Blood ran in a hot trail from the wound, down my neck and between my breasts. In this light I couldn’t tell by the color alone how bad it was, but the flow was entirely too steady for my comfort. The fact that my heart was working overtime from the stress surely didn’t help. Halfway there, with my stomach threatening to revolt and my vision swimming, I realized I should have grabbed my cell phone off the coffee table. Too late now. Besides, I didn’t want the cops involved. Damn police only made things worse, a lesson I had learned all too well growing up. I’d go back for the phone in a moment and call Nikki from work. She’d take me to the hospital faster than an ambulance could get here. First, I had to stop the bleeding, and I was closer to the bathroom than the living room. Shock would soon slow my heart and with it my blood flow, giving me plenty of time to get to an ER. With six years into my medical degree I could do just as much—or more, in most cases—to stop the bleeding as an EMT anyway.

  Hoping I didn’t split my head open on the doorframe, I let go of the wall and took a leap of faith by crossing the open space to the bathroom. My hand left a bloody streak on the door as I stumbled through. The vanity offered me something stable to lean on and was thankfully at the right height so I didn’t have to lift my hand to do so, because at that point, I didn’t think I could.

  From within the vanity mirror my ghost stared back at me. Or at least that’s what it looked like. My bronze skin looked sickly pale, a hue I strove hard to avoid with as many hours in the sun as I could manage while working full time at the bar and studying for med school. Blood stained my straight-as-an-arrow black hair, making it cling to my neck and left breast. I didn’t want to peel away the hair, didn’t want to see, but I had to. Swallowing my fear, I pulled my hair away from my neck. The pain caused my vision to go dark, but it came back after a few blinks.

  Bright red blood flowed from not one but four sets of holes in my neck, two above and two below my carotid. They weren’t deep enough to show muscle or bone, but the sight of them was enough to make my stomach twist. I definitely should have grabbed my cell phone. I could have at least called one of the waitresses from the bar to come get me. With one hand bracing myself against the sink, I opened the vanity with the other and grabbed the hydrogen peroxide. The way I figured it, a biker guy with a bizarre biting fetish and weird teeth was likely to carry some kind of germs. Even if he didn’t, I wanted to boil the freak’s saliva from my skin and this was the best way I could do it without actually using boiling water.

  White-hot agony exploded into my neck as I poured the bottle of peroxide onto the wounds. My vision went black and this time it didn’t clear.

  Chapter Two

  Ty

  The apartment buildings rising to either side zipped by in a blur as my feet ate up the pavement, but it was not fast enough. He was pulling away. Eyes gleamed from the darkness as he chanced a look back at me. Damn, but the wiry little bastard was fast. A solid thud resounded as he leaped up onto and over the wooden fence at the end of the alley. To get more air, I bounced a foot off the concrete block wall of the closest apartment, then landed on top of the fence. I could have jumped straight up and cleared the six-foot height, but someone could have been watching. Better to make it look like I was just a fan of the move from old kung fu movies rather than have someone suspect the truth.

  As I descended I scanned the area. An open green space stretched in all directions with a lawn that went for acres dotted with trees and bushes. My gaze cut through the dark easily enough, locating him already halfway across the lawn, the metallic green threads of those damn rockers of his gleaming in the moonlight. No one but him was in the immediate area.

  “Raul, stop now and I’ll go easier on you!” I yelled. I didn’t need to see his face to know it was him. I’d know that detestable pine, Cordura, and exhaust stench anywhere.

  He flipped me the bird. I jumped from the top of the fence with everything I had, launching myself close to thirty feet. Wood splintered and cracked but it didn’t sound like the fence came down, so I didn’t bother to look back. The moment my feet touched the grass I took off. The whites of Raul’s eyes reflected the moonlight as he stumbled backward, mouth agape. He only got a few paces before I caught him within the shadow of a huge fir tree. I grabbed the back of his Cordura jacket—and a bit of his hair—and tossed him to the ground. He landed on his back and froze halfway up on his elbows. His breath came in gasps that had more to do with the stench of fear wafting off him than with being out of air. Rank as it was, the fear smelled better than that nasty cologne he was wearing. No doubt that had been a ploy to throw me off his scent. And it had worked, for a while.

  “You just bit a woman. The Council will have your hide for that,” I said.

  Not just any woman, but one with eyes like tiger’s eye gems that felt like they had tried to pull my soul into them. Even now I could not get her out of my mind.

  “Stay out of this. It doesn’t concern you,” he demanded as he started to rise to his feet.

  Fists closing, my chest rumbled with a sound that made him freeze before he could even get both legs beneath him.

  “You are in my territory, which means it concerns me. And you broke one of the oldest laws, which means it concer
ns the Council. I am taking you back to Hemlock Hollow,” I said.

  Light footsteps approached from all sides, but I didn’t dare take my eyes off Raul. Lips quirking up into a smirk, he rose into a crouch.

  “I don’t think so. Like I said, this doesn’t concern you,” he said, voice filled with that damn bravado of his again.

  But it was a misplaced bravado, because the ones I smelled in the darkness were not all his people. His people were closer, but others were coming. I would just have to hold out. Raul stood and crossed his arms while others leaped at me from the shadows. Dodging, I avoided the man coming at me from my right. I planted my foot into his back, right on the middle patch of his jacket, and sent him sprawling. Another came at me from behind. Lunging back and crouching at the same time, I grabbed his leg, yanked, and sent him flying over my back. Grunts and curses told me he had collided with either Raul or the other one. A fist flew at me from the left, my instincts pulling my face out of its path a second before it could connect. I grabbed ahold of the wrist attached to it, yanked it forward and down, and flipped the man onto his back.

  They came at me again, slower but no less determined. I took them down yet again, bloodying a few lips and blackening a few eyes in the process. If they kept it up they would soon force me to do much more than that. The way they panted and heaved meant they would get desperate during the next round, which meant things were about to get bloody.

  From the shadows, Raul came at me, swinging what looked like a baseball bat. It connected hard with my left shoulder and knocked me off balance.

  “Go the hell down, Viðarrson,” he said, voice little more than a growl.

  He swung again, but this time I grabbed it in mid-swing and tore it from him. His eyes shot wide open, but to his credit, he didn’t cower. That was, I was certain, mostly because of his buddy trying to sneak up behind me. Without looking, I sidestepped and ducked, then whipped the bat around behind me to connect with the bastard’s midsection with a swing that would have earned me a home run. The others hesitated like they did not want to go another round. One of them suddenly slumped to the ground as if the very thought made him faint dead away.