Bitten & Beholden (Children of Fenrir Book 2)

by Heather McCorkle

  We began to run side by side. All those wonderful scents poured down my throat with each breath, connecting me to every living thing around me, both plant and animal. Most powerful of all was Ty’s evergreen scent with a pleasant underlying musk. It wrapped around me like a favorite sweater or throw blanket, comforting me and making me feel at home in an impossible situation. Less than a mile later, we left the path. The woods didn’t slow us in the slightest. Fallen logs, thick underbrush of brambles and ferns, none of it impeded me, much to my surprise. I leaped, ducked, and dodged through it all at a blinding pace as if part of me intuitively new the landscape before me.

  Everything about it, from the ground beneath my paws to the air moving across my fur and down my tail, felt amazing and natural. Why I had worried so much and feared this for the last two weeks, I couldn’t understand. Deeper into the forest we went until I couldn’t smell or hear any sign of human life at all. Ty kept shooting gazes my way, his eyes filled with joy and pride. Odd that I could tell that about a wolf’s eye, but really, they were still Ty’s eyes. In them I could see him. Just as he was a huge, fine specimen of a man, he was a gorgeous wolf. My wolf self was very attracted to him, so much so that I had to resist the urge to rub against his side and nuzzle my nose into the fur around his neck.

  In this form it wasn’t as hard to resist my desire. I had a feeling that had more to do with the discomforting thought of having sex with another creature—even if we wore the same form—than it did with a reduced desire for Ty. Maybe the idea would become more comfortable with time, maybe it wouldn’t. Regardless, I wasn’t even remotely tempted to cross that line right now.

  Though he led the way with a nod or thrust of his head now and then, Ty kept his pace so that I ran alongside him. Such chivalry made me grin a big wolfy grin. We crossed meadows and thickly forested areas, running without tiring. For a moment, we stopped at stream to drink and nibbled at a few berries before starting back. In every move, sound, scent, and taste I felt the instinct he had been talking about. It made the transition from human to wolf easier, but I also felt how it could get out of control if I let it. The wildness in me reveled in the experience. It awakened something wonderful and free.

  Each scent amplified a thousand-fold, each sound a hundred. Large and small animals scurried about the forest. The prey drew my attention and elicited the urge to give chase, to hunt. I resisted.

  By the time we made it back to the house, dusk had settled over the landscape, casting everything in deep shadows. Under the cover of the huge pine trees that lined the edge of the back lawn, Ty shifted back to human form. His body blurred, then ran like water, becoming that of a man once again. He sat down in the grass and watched me. Seeing him as a man made me want to be human again. The moment I decided to shift, my body reacted by warming up and flowing. Colors changed a little, scents and sounds retreated slightly, and the wildness within tucked away, sated for the moment. My paws became hands, my legs arms. Long black hair spilled down into my vision. I still felt like me. Hell, I felt more like me than I ever had. The same went for my sanity. Of course, it wasn’t likely that an insane person knew they were insane. But if this was insanity, I was good with it.

  Not caring that I was naked, I rolled onto my back in the grass and threw my arms out wide. “That was amazing!”

  The grass was cool and refreshing against the bare skin of my back. Its rich, heady smell poured into me, soothing and relaxing me. A slight chill in the air hardened my nipples, but it wasn’t enough to actually make a varúlfur feel cold. Even in the dark, Ty would be able to see much of me, erect nipples included, but I didn’t care. That wasn’t true, exactly. I wanted him to see me. Low in his throat rumbled something that sounded like a growl filled with desire instead of menace. On all fours, he crawled toward me. Even in human form as he was, it looked as though he stalked me.

  “You shifted and adjusted to it as if you were born to it. Clearly, nature meant for you to be a varúlfur from the start,” he said as he drew closer.

  The light of the rising moon reflected off his eyes like an animal’s, making them seem almost electric blue. It had always been disturbing to me to come across an animal in the dark and see such a thing. This was different. Oddly, I found it sexy as hell on Ty. For a better view of him, I pushed up onto my elbows. The darkness hid more than I liked, but it also created some interesting shadows that played over his chest and gave me a peek-a-boo view of his goods. His scent changed, the musk deepening in a way that made my mouth water. Moving in that sexy stalk/crawl, he straddled me, working his way up my legs until he hovered over me. Looking up into his ice-chip blue eyes, I found I couldn’t breathe. An exquisite lightheadedness seized me.

  “Tell me, Sonya, do you still think your desire was caused by the verða?” he asked.

  I wanted so badly to say yes, to fight the tide rising inside me. My breath caught in my throat when I tried to give voice to the lie. With a great amount of effort, I mustered up my control and ignored my body’s burning need.

  “No, but a pheromone thing maybe,” I whispered.

  He laughed and shook his head. “Varúlfur do not give off any more pheromones than humans.”

  Pink flashed as his tongue slid out and licked his lips. His eyes bore into mine in a way I wanted other parts of him to. “Face it, new wolf, it is me, and only me you are reacting to.”

  The deep rumble of his lusty voice made my mouth dry and my outer labia moist. He was so close to touching my naked body, and I wanted him to so badly. Bumps rose all over me. My breasts ached for his touch. I closed my eyes, but the sight of him hovering over me was burned into the back of my eyelids. His soft breath on my face and the warmth of his skin so close to mine didn’t help either.

  The determination not to make the mistake of casual sex burned through me. But would it be? In two weeks I had learned almost nothing about Raul, and what I had learned wasn’t true. In less than that I had come to know Ty more than I had anyone in the past seven years. I hated that I was trying to rationalize it. Such things only opened me up for pain. Yet Ty felt different from any other man I had ever been attracted to, and not because he was a varúlfur.

  His body shifted, lowering down onto mine in a deliciously hot line. “I am not Raul,” he reminded me, his breath close to my lips. “I want you because you are amazing, funny, and the sexiest woman I have ever met, not because of anything you can give me or do for me.”

  The raw honesty in those words flung my eyes open. Face only inches from mine, he stopped. I searched for the hesitation, the turmoil that always lay within him when we got anything close to being intimate, but it was gone.

  “What about the Council? What about the law, or creed, or whatever against kennari getting involved with their students?”

  “You are through the verða, safe. That was all that mattered to me. I do not care what the Council thinks anymore. What I feel for you is too strong to allow them to govern. My family would understand. They would not see it as being disgraced.”

  Knowing it might be the last chance I had, I took it.

  “I don’t do one-night stands,” I warned.

  One of his hands slid slowly up the side of my body, along my arm, and around the back of my neck to cup it. “Neither do I,” he said before pressing his lips to mine.

  His kiss was every bit as thrilling as I had tried to forget. The gentle exploring of his tongue, which both gave and took, held the possibility of so much more. From his warm, wet mouth to the hardness pressed against my pelvis, he felt amazing and oh-so-right. The contrast to Raul’s cocky danger was so stark it was almost painful. That rightness appealed to me in a powerful way that tried to stir up fear and self-preservation. For once, I shut the instincts down, believing in the reasons why I was attracted to Ty.

  Being in his arms felt good and right. One of his legs nudged between mine. I opened them for him. The slight scruff of his five-o’clock shadow scratched at my hand, thrilling me. His pine and lake water scent
surrounded me, melding with my own scent to become something even more amazing. He tasted like the wild blackberries we had eaten during our run as wolves: rich, sweet, and tart enough to make him delicious. Tongue thrusting deeper into his mouth, I tried to crawl down inside him. But that wasn’t what I wanted, not exactly. I wanted him inside me. My legs lifted to wrap around him, when the night exploded.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Ty

  A loud boom, like thunder colliding directly overhead, broke the quiet night and shook the ground beneath me ever so slightly. Almost as one, Sonya and I leaped to our feet. The sound had come from around the front of the house. For a moment it sounded like hail falling. A piece of blue metal landed not far from my feet. Gods, my truck. The snap and crackle of flames—a lot of them—made me realize the “hail” sound was probably shrapnel from an explosion. Unfortunately, it was not a sound I was unused to. Yellow light flickered from around the edge of the house. Wide eyes on Sonya, I took a step toward the path leading around the house.

  “Go, I’ll be right there,” she said as she scooped her clothes off the ground.

  No way was I leaving her. Gaze scanning the darkness around me, I stepped to where my pants lay on the ground when I saw something moving in the trees at the edge of the lawn. Eyes shone in the black: yellow and bright. They held a sense of malice that made me start toward them. I felt the press of two more figures moving in behind me. Dammit. The bastards had lured me away from Sonya just enough to cut me off from her. The soft brush of shoes against grass behind me stopped me. I turned to see Sonya wrapped in the arms of a man. Growling, I took a step toward her, but the two men who had been flanking me cut me off.

  Instead of struggle, Sonya found her footing and settled her weight down into the ground. She stomped, hard, coming down on her captor’s foot. The man grunted in pain. Arms thrusting out before her lightning fast, she shoved her butt backward at the same time. The second higher pitched grunt of pain told me she had slammed right into her captor’s scrotum. I laughed as she spun out and away from him.

  My own problems moved in on me. Dark as it was, I couldn’t see much more than the shine of his eyes. By concentrating, I adjusted my eyesight to that of my wolf, thereby seeing better in the dark. It was not as good as night-vision goggles, but it was good enough to make out the men’s tall frames. Sliding into a fighting stance, I glanced in the direction of the other set of eyes I had seen in the trees. A second man approached from that direction, shorter than the first, but broader. I growled and bared my fangs at them in warning, but they attacked anyway.

  I sidestepped the attack of the man who had first approached, driving a roundhouse kick into his kidney as I moved. He let out a cry of pain followed by, “Bastard!”

  Having no time to respond, I thrust a back kick out with my other leg that caught the second man in the gut. Air left him in an audible rush as he doubled over. Before he could even think about grabbing my leg, I whipped it back in to my body, chambering it like an arrow preparing to fly again. No easy feat when your balls were swinging free, but I managed without pinching anything vital. The first man took another step toward me and I let that arrow fly in the form of a front kick that drove the ball of my foot between his pectorals. He stumbled back, arms flailing. Movement out of the corner of my eyes told me I did not have time to watch and see if he went down. The second man started to straighten back up. Leaping into the air with one knee to get more lift, I brought my other leg up high and slammed my heel down toward the man’s shoulder. When the strike connected, I whipped my hip back and down, putting all the power and speed into the move that I could, which was a lot.

  The kick was so dangerous that it was illegal in most martial arts tournaments. An axe kick, some called it. It was aptly named considering it could split a person’s skull or crush their spine. In this case, it drove the broad man to the ground, but his bones did not break. It took a lot more than that to break the bones of a varúlfur. I spun back toward the other man, only to find him fleeing into the trees. On instinct, I started to give chase, halting before entering the deeper darkness of the trees to turn back to Sonya. Her attacker had a hold of one of her shoulders and was rearing his fist back.

  Swooping in, I grabbed the man by his fist and hauled him backward. He was shorter than me by at least half a foot, but I didn’t stop once his feet were off the ground. I lifted him as high as my reach would allow, letting him dangle, choking, legs kicking at the air. It forced me to hold him out away from myself so he could not reach my balls, but my varúlfur strength made it easy. Nor did it hurt that I spent at least an hour a day in my home gym.

  “You son of a hóra! How dare you come to my home, threaten my nemi, and blow up my truck!” I roared.

  Letting out a vicious growl, I threw the man to the ground, following him down to pin him there with a hand on his chest. My fingernails grew into claws that punctured the man’s shirt. The material around each claw began to darken and the tang of blood mixed with the smoke that flavored the air. His heart pulsed directly beneath my hand. Pissed as I was, all it would take was closing my fist. Eyes so wide I could see the whites around them, the man whimpered and went very still.

  “James and Calder made me. I didn’t want to come after you, never you, but we had to,” the man said in a voice that shook so badly I barely understood it.

  “Isak did not send you?” I demanded in a cold, calculating voice.

  If it was Isak, his alpha, I would kill the man, regardless of what that meant.

  “He doesn’t even know we’re here,” the man said.

  My fingers clenched a bit and flesh tore beneath my claws. The man cried out, his legs twitching, but he did not try to get up. “And are you prepared to die for what these two want? Neither of them is your alpha.”

  “No, but they’ll hurt someone I care about if I don’t help them,” the man groaned, the word laced with more pain than I would have thought only one word could hold.

  “Why are they doing this?” Ty’s words held a weight of compulsion.

  “Because she’s special. They want to use her to change the world. That’s all I know, I swear it. Calder because he’s bat-shit crazy, and James because he wants to live in the open, have the same rights as humans,” he whined.

  The shine of his eyes disappeared as his lips slid closed. His chin lifted a bit as if he were preparing to die with honor, or bracing for the pain. Despite being pissed at him, a reluctant respect bloomed.

  “Ty, don’t, please. I don’t want anyone to die because of me, not even this bastard,” Sonya said.

  I heard her soft steps approach a moment before she laid a hesitant hand on my bare shoulder. The warmth from her skin and power seeped inside, brought a sense of calm. A sigh shuddered through me. I withdrew my claws and rose to my feet. Her hand slid from my shoulder as my height took it out of her reach, but she let it slide to the middle of my back and rest there. Her touch continued to soothe me, helping me to breathe easier, to think past the rage.

  “She saved your life today. Remember that, because I will not spare it again,” I said through clenched teeth.

  The man crab-crawled backward. He did not pause to roll over and scramble to his feet until he had reached the trees.

  “Oh God, Ty, your truck,” she said, a piece of metal in hand.

  She turned and ran for the front of the house. Hesitating, I scanned the trees, listening hard and smelling the air. It was difficult to tell over the crackle of a raging fire and the scent of the smoke, but I didn’t think anyone else was around. Barefoot but not even feeling the rocks, I ran onto the gravel drive after her. Flames engulfed the front end and cab of my truck, their orange and yellow fingers reaching high into the night, banishing the darkness. Sonya stood before it, fire extinguisher thrust too close to the flames. I could smell that the heat was searing her flesh. The white foam disappeared into the roaring flames, hardly making a dent. I ran to her, clamped hands around her waist, and hauled her back.
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  “Sonya, no, it is only a truck,” I said.

  Her lips curled back from fangs. “But it’s your truck and it’s my fault,” she protested.

  I picked her up and carried her back several feet. She threw the useless fire extinguisher on the ground and turned to me. Fire reflected in her angry eyes. I rubbed my hands up and down her already healing arms, lending my power to hers to help speed the process.

  “It is just a truck. We are not immortal, only hard to kill. Fire is one of the things that can do a good job of it, though,” I said.

  Her gaze flicked to the impossible inferno that now engulfed my truck, then to her Jeep parked on the other side of the circular drive. “We should at least go after them.”

  I shook my head. “Their scent is all over the hood of your Jeep. I am sure they disabled it so no one could follow them.”

  “But…”

  My brows drew together and I took her face in my hands. “But nothing. The truck can be replaced, you cannot,” I said.

  She dropped her gaze. I moved closer, acutely aware that I was still naked. My relief over her being all right morphed into something deeper, more profound. Her eyes bore into mine and her hands started to work their way up my bare back as she leaned closer. The loud blare of a fire engine’s siren echoed from somewhere far away.

  “Dammit,” I swore as I pulled away.

  I took hold of one of her hands as I started to return to the backyard. “I have got to get some clothes on before they get here,” I said.