Defiant (Blaze Trilogy Book 1)

by H G Lynch

  I blinked, taken aback by the swiftness of her change in attitude. Her fingertips roamed my palm, sending cold sparks up my arm and making my heart do trippy things. She leaned even closer, until I could taste her breath on my lips, until I thought she was going to kiss me.

  She turned her face a little and whispered in my ear, “Close your eyes.”

  I shivered helplessly at the slightly husky tone to her voice and the feeling of her cool breath twitching the hair tucked behind my ear. I was certain she could feel my hands shaking. I did as she said and closed my eyes, licking my lips anxiously.

  Then her fingers were stroking my palm again. Light touches drawing lines on my skin, tracing patterns on my hand, feeling the joints of my fingers. She used the end of her thumb to ring circles around my palm; it felt oddly sensual.

  I felt just one fingertip trace a straight line, slightly diagonal across my palm, and Poppy said, in a voice so soft I barely heard her over the sounds of my own heart thudding erratically and the wind rustling the leaves on the trees, “This is your love line. And you know what it tells me, sunshine?”

  Oh God. Shakily, I lied and said, “Not a clue.”

  When she spoke again, her voice was right by my ear, and I felt her hair tickle my neck as her fingers slid into my hair. I gasped before I could stop myself, my blood pressure skyrocketing and my heart rate accelerating faster than a Lamborghini on a straight country road.

  “Your love line is short. You know what that means?” She paused. Then her lips brushed my jaw as she whispered, “It means that you’re already in love, sunshine.” She laughed breathlessly. “I wonder who you’re in love with, Anson.”

  She leaned back, still holding my hand, and I cautiously opened my eyes. She was sitting in front of me, close enough that her knees were touching mine, and her eyes were fixed on my face intently, waiting. My brain threw scattered thoughts around inside my skull, none of them any use to me. What was I supposed to say? Was I meant to admit it? Or was she just playing with me?

  I didn’t have to wonder for long because she smiled the most beautiful smile I’d ever seen and said to me, “You want to know a secret, sunshine?”

  Confused and stunned, I merely nodded. Her eyes were very bright, and her pale skin seemed to glow with light as she lifted the hand not holding mine to touch my face. “My secret is that I’m in love too. I shouldn’t be, but I am. I’m in love with you.”

  My heart burst open in my chest, and I was soaring somewhere beyond reality. I didn’t know what to say. So I didn’t bother using words. I let my body do the talking, and kissed her.

  The kiss started out slow and light, but then she wound her fingers into my hair and pulled me closer. I instinctively kissed her harder. Wrapping one arm around her waist, I held her against me and lay back, pulling her down on top of me. Her slight weight pressed down on me, and her legs tangled with mine. The smell of her skin and hair was making me crazy.

  Her hands moved out of my hair and slid down my chest, knotting in my shirt for a moment before sliding under it. The feeling of her fingers on the skin of my abdomen filled me with an achy burning, but at the same time, I was wracked with delectable shivers. It was as if my body was tearing itself apart in two opposing ways, but it felt so, so good, I never wanted it to end.

  ** Poppy **

  I couldn’t believe I’d said it. I’d told him. I’d told him I loved him, and I knew he loved me too. The rest of the world could blow up for all I cared. I was perfectly happy right there, in Anson’s arms, with him kissing me as if he thought it was all a dream. It was intense, brilliant, and hot. My fangs were pulsing to be released from their sheaths in my gums, but I held them back desperately because I just couldn’t stand to stop kissing him yet.

  He groaned against my lips and it made my insides spark with fire. My skin tingled where it touched his. I slipped my hands under his t-shirt and ran my fingers over the hard, lean muscles of his chest and abdomen. He was more muscled than I’d thought, but still slender. His skin was hot and smooth, and he shuddered when I dipped my finger around his bellybutton.

  Suddenly, he rolled me over and hovered over me, tearing his lips from mine. He was breathing hard, and I wished I could feel breathlessness again, instead of just the tightness around my lungs. I wished I could feel my heart hammering against my ribs the way I could hear his hammering. I could feel it pounding through his skin like a bird caged behind his ribs and fluttering to get free.

  His lips brushed my cheek as he murmured, “God, your hair smells nice.” His voice was low, husky, and rough.

  I laughed quietly at his comment, wondering if he’d only just noticed, or if he’d been able to smell my hair all along. He shouldn’t have been able to smell my natural scent, but clearly he could. It added to my certainty of what he was. Anson wasn’t just any boy. He wasn’t even just the boy I loved. No, he was even more than that, and I hoped like mad it would be his salvation if the time came that he needed saving from my fate. I couldn’t believe I hadn’t worked it out before, but it wasn’t until he’d told me when his birthday was that I figured it out. Once I told Lyle my theory, he’d be sure to understand why Anson couldn’t be Turned.

  “God, your skin smells good,” I whispered back. It was true. His skin smelled like salt, soap, blood, and leaves. It made my canines ache. I wanted to bite him. It was ridiculous and insane because I’d never ever wanted to bite a human, but somehow, I just knew he would taste delicious.

  Anson laughed, a throaty, unsteady sound, and ran his fingers through my hair. I opened my eyes to look at him. His red hair was a mess, his cheeks were flushed, his lips were darkened from the kissing, and he looked exactly like everything I’d ever wanted.

  As if sensing that I was staring at him, his eyes flicked open, and if I’d been human, I would have caught my breath at the look in his eyes. They were so dark, darker than sapphire, dark as the sky above us. Desire poured off him in vital, delicious waves. I could practically taste it in the air between us as he slid his hands slowly down my back to my hips.

  His thumbs brushed the skin just above the waistband of my jeans, and I gasped involuntarily. His lips curved into a slight smile, his eyes never leaving mine as, centimetre by centimetre, he slid my t-shirt up past my waist to my ribs. His fingers grazed my skin tauntingly, running over the ridges, and stopped just below my bra.

  I waited, tense, for him to keep going, but he didn’t. He just stared at me for a bit, and then let his gaze fall to examine the skin he’d exposed. His chest stopped moving, and I could feel the tension in his muscles, his fingertips pressing into my shoulder blades.

  His hands fell away from my ribs, and my shirt slid back into place. An odd mix of relief and disappointment made my shoulders slump. He noticed and smiled gently. He raised a hand and brushed his thumb along my cheekbone.

  “I think that’s enough fireworks for tonight. Don’t you?”

  I nodded.

  “We have time, after all. No need to rush this.”

  Abruptly, the wind shifted and instead of smelling Anson’s soapy, clean scent, I smelled something far muskier and wilder, something so familiar it was ingrained in my twisted DNA to run or fight as soon as the scent touched my nose. I had barely sprung off Anson before my fangs popped out. Crouching, muscles coiled, I quit breathing and listened hard, stilling myself to stone.

  At first, all I could hear was the wind rattling the leaves on the trees, the birds calling to one another in fluting tones, Anson’s breathing, and his heart beating. Then I heard what I’d been listening for—the heavy footfalls of a large animal. A wolf. But not just any old wolf. There weren’t any wild wolves left in the United Kingdom, as far as I knew. This was a Wolf, with a capital W. A Werewolf.

  There was a Werewolf in the trees not thirty meters from me, and Anson was sitting right behind me. This was very, very bad.

  Cautiously, I got to my feet and stared into the trees around us. The Wolf was moving, circling us. I spun slowly on
my heel to follow the sound of its footfalls on the soft dirt ground and the rasp of its deep breathing. My eyes raked the shadows under the leafy boughs, picking out the shifting limbs of the bushes and ferns, the individual leaves on every branch as clear as daylight—one of the perks of being an undead predator.

  A dark form slunk between the trees so fast it would have been nothing more than a black blur to the human eye. To me, it was a long, low shape on four slender legs, chased by a thick tail. Pale light, sinking through the leaves from the stars above, caught streaks of silver in the Wolf’s fur. It was getting closer, the scent stronger. It made my skin crawl, and my muscles stretched as adrenalin spilled into my veins. My stomach tightened and twisted.

  “Poppy? Poppy, what’s wrong?” Anson asked quietly.

  I wanted to reassure him, to turn around and smile and tell him it was nothing but we should be heading back to civilisation. But I couldn’t. The Wolf had seen me with him. It had picked up his scent. Even if we left, and the Wolf didn’t attack us or follow us, it would find Anson the next time he left the house. Nothing would stop it from tearing him apart. That was what the Wolves did to our targets, and to anyone of our kind who wasn’t careful enough. That was why we had to move fast when we found a suitable target, to Turn them and get them to the Academy to be trained before the Wolves got to them.

  The Wolf had a lock on Anson. I had to stop it before it got back to the rest of its pack and passed on the information, or else Anson would be in real danger. If I wanted to keep Anson safe and keep him human, I had to kill the Wolf.

  My head snapped up at the sound of a branch cracking, far too close for comfort. I glared into the space under the boughs of a nearby oak tree, listening carefully in the fear that there might be more than one Wolf circling us. The pace of the other person’s—if you could call a Werewolf a person—breathing was slower, the footfalls were lighter. I tilted my head, frowning. There wasn’t a Wolf in those trees anymore, but I could still smell it. The footfalls were those of a human.

  Then I saw it, him, whatever. The Werewolf had Changed. He emerged from behind a tree on two legs, unclothed but for a pair of ragged, dirty shorts. He was tall and lean with stringy muscles and knotted shoulder-length hair. His eyes shone with reflected light, like an animals’, until he stepped out of the shadows of the trees and into the light of the clearing. His thin legs were caked in mud up to the knee, and the crescents of his toenails and fingernails were black. I recognised him. He was a fairly new Wolf, Changed only eight or nine months before. He’d been my last target before Nathan. His name was Jason.

  He grinned at me viciously, showing wide, sharp teeth stained with blood from whatever woodland creature he’d been snacking on before he’d picked up my scent on the wind. I hoped it was a woodland creature, and not a person, but with the Wolves you could never be sure. Most of them tried to avoid eating humans, but sometimes the primal animal in them took over so completely that they ended up attacking a human, oblivious to what they were doing until they Changed back.

  When they attacked a human, someone from the Academy had to take them out. It was part of why our races hated each other, why we were always at war. Occasionally, one of our kind went rogue and munched on a human, but we preferred to deal with our own kind. Like with Nathan. The Wolves didn’t deal with the law-breakers in their packs because they were so common that they’d be killing half their population.

  A hand touched my arm, and I very nearly ripped it off before I realised it was Anson. I flinched but didn’t turn to face him, not with my fangs refusing to retract in the presence of a threat. The Wolf boy’s eyes narrowed and flickered to Anson before jumping back to me. A cruel, cold smirk curled his lips and he shook his head slowly.

  “Oh, naughty girl, Poppy,” Jason clucked his tongue.

  I tensed. I’d hated Jason when I’d been assigned to Turn him, and I hated him infinitely more now. He was obnoxious and lecherous, but he’d fit the profile for a recruitment at the time. Then he’d been bitten by one of the Wolves and had Changed.

  Anson’s fingers tightened on my shoulder. I had to focus on the Wolf, on keeping Anson safe. Glaring at Jason, I said, “You shouldn’t be here, Jason. You know what I have to do now.” It just had to be tonight, didn’t it? I thought bitterly.

  Jason chuckled. “Yeah, yeah, you have to kick my ass. You can try. First, answer me this. Do Lyle and Leo know about your human boy toy? I bet they don’t. Oh, you’re going to be in so much trouble when they find out. Have you had sex with him yet? That’s illegal in your world, right? I wonder how many rules you’ve broken already. At least four, maybe five.”

  He was enjoying trying to mess with me, but I refused to let him see it was working. My nerves were strung so taut that it was almost painful, muscles rubbing across each other like a bow across the strings of a fiddle. I could feel Anson beside me, sense his rising anger. I had to convince Jason that Anson was just another target to me. He’d be in less danger if the Wolves thought he was just any human boy being recruited. If they knew what he was to me, there was no telling what they’d do to him. They might Change him, or they might torture him for information, or they’d do it just to hurt me.

  “Of course Lyle and Leo know. They wouldn’t even be here if this wasn’t an assignment, would they? How about you just run back to your doghouse, take a flea bath or something. There’s nothing to see here, nothing to interest you.” The hairs on the back of my neck were prickling, and there was a horrible slimy finger running over each vertebrae of my spine, spilling cold goo into the gaps in between. It was awful, but I knew the longer I talked, the more uncomfortable Jason got, too. I could see it in the hunching of his shoulders and the way he bared his teeth, even when he wasn’t grinning.

  I wondered how long he could stay human that close to me. He was young, so probably not much longer. He would burst out of his human skin, Change into a Wolf, in no more than ten minutes. If he Changed in front of Anson, I’d have some serious explaining to do, and I wasn’t sure I could explain Lycanthropy without explaining what I was. I needed to get him out of there, or get Anson out of there. But I knew, without a doubt, that Anson wasn’t going anywhere without me. He wouldn’t leave me with the git, which was really sweet, but also very bad for us both.

  Jason stepped forward menacingly, his eyes narrowed. He tilted is head thoughtfully even as a shudder wracked his slim body, the first sign that his instincts were roaring at him to Change. My stomach sank uneasily.

  “No, this isn’t just an assignment. He’s not just another target.” He jerked his chin at Anson, who jolted as if he’d been shocked, his fingers tightening further on my arm. I was sure he didn’t realise how hard he was gripping. “Nah, you never looked at me like that. You never even looked at Nathan like that.”

  “Don’t you talk about Nathan! You didn’t know anything about him. You don’t know anything about me, either. Jason, just get out of here while you still have your legs,” I snapped, glowering at him furiously. I wanted to claw his face off for mentioning Nathan.

  Anson moved forward, pushing me behind him. His jaw was set, and his eyes were cold and fixed angrily on Jason. “Look, I don’t know who you are or what you want, but Poppy clearly doesn’t want to see you, so I suggest you get out of here,” he said in a low, controlled voice. It was the same dark voice he’d used when he’d been talking to Jake the night of the party.

  Sneering, Jason chuckled. His voice, when he spoke, was condescending. “Of course you don’t know who I am. You don’t even know who she is. Don’t try to pick a fight with someone outside your weight class.”

  “I know enough,” Anson growled.

  “I doubt that.” Jason grinned unpleasantly. Another shudder visibly shook his body, and then another.

  I bit my lip, frowning. He had minutes before he Changed, but he didn’t look as if he was prepared to leave. The angrier he got, the sooner he’d Change. “Has she told you who Lyle is? Let me guess, she said he’s her bro
ther. And her cousin, Leo, is just staying with them for a while. Have you seen her fight? Probably not, I guess, since one of those rules of her kind says she can’t show off in front of the humans. There are no marks on your neck, so she hasn’t bitten you…yet, anyway. How long have you known her? A week, maybe two?”

  “Three weeks. Not that it’s any of your business.”

  Jason nodded. “Hmm. She should have Turned you by now. I wonder why she hasn’t.”

  He cut his gaze to me knowingly, and I gritted my teeth.

  He gestured to the decanter full of red liquid sitting on the ground. “Do you know what’s in that? Blood. She’s got you drinking blood before she even—”

  I gasped, outraged, horrified. “It’s not blood! I wouldn’t do that to him! It’s just wine!”

  “What the hell are you talking about? Whoever you are, just get out of here. You’re clearly high or drunk or something. Go sleep it off instead of interrupting people’s dates,” Anson snarled, his blue eyes flashing with anger and confusion. His shoulders were tense, his chin tipped up. He looked as if he wanted to punch Jason.

  Truthfully, I wanted to do the same. I was terrified Anson would believe what he was saying, question me, and yell at me for the truth. If he did, I’d tell him the truth and hope for the best. Lyle had said his ignorance would save him, but I didn’t think it would. It might—might—keep him from being Turned, but it would almost definitely get him killed by Wolves. Dead was worse than Turned, and Changed was hardly any better than dead.

  With savage force, another shudder shook Jason’s body, hard enough to rattle his bones. He grunted in pain and doubled over, panting. He was out of time. He’d been close to me for too long. The Wolf inside him was forcing its way to the surface. He was going to Change any second, and I had no time to get Anson out of here.

  I barely had time to push Anson back, making him stumble and fall to the ground, before Jason let out an ear-shredding howl of agony, and his human skin ripped apart as his bones cracked and shifted. His jawbone crumpled and reformed, stretching into a muzzle. His teeth lengthened and yellowed, his nails popped out of his fingertips and curled into thick, inch-long claws. He fell to his knees, his fingers digging gouges in the dirt. I could hear his bones bursting out their sockets and his lungs crackling as he heaved white foam onto the ground. His eyes rolled back into his skull as he spasmed.