They fly through the woods, the darkness and lack of moonlight inconsequential.
Everything is shades of gray fading to black. The deepest part of night has come, and suddenly, he scents and sights what made Neil increase their pace.
Humans.
Then the smell hits him.
The bitch they’d scented that Neil had gone on about—the royal cunt.
Tahlia.
The smell of her is everywhere.
Unease edges beneath Bray’s skin. It is the smell of her and something underneath all that—female Were in need of breeding.
But blood covers all of that. Her blood.
Neil grabs the trunk of a tree to halt his progress, the momentum of his body snapping it partway.
Bray copies the move with a tree behind Neil’s and nearly falls into his back.
Sheer luck keeps him upright as he whips around the trunk and grabs the other side with his other arm.
Earl and Billy couldn’t keep up and have already slowed.
Ahead, humans surround the glowing embers of a fire.
Looks like they’ve been hitting some shit, and Bray suddenly burns with need. How long has it been since he had a bump? A decent shot of booze? Fucking forever.
A frightening dread steals over him. The drugs and booze don’t hold the appeal they once did.
He’s becoming something else. And the shedding of the habit he’d loved so much is terrifying to Bray.
Of course, that realization doesn’t make him relieved or happy like some fucking simp sprouting a uterus. Nah. Makes him angry as fuck and meaner than a snake.
Dropping from his hug of the tree, he follows Neil.
Fuck going human, he thinks, and on the heels of that thought, Bray determines he’s not changing back to human until Neil does. Not repeating that shit.
His eyes scan the derelict humans around the fire. They’re all going to die. Mr. Perfect Lanarre has allowed them to see him wolfen. He won’t leave witnesses.
The humansʼ eyes widen. Two men and one bitch with fucked up eyes and no teeth. The scent of Tahlia is chokingly thick.
“Hey, man,” Earl says, voice shaking, “I think they hurt the Were girl.”
“Silence,” Neil says, planting his muscular legs wide. His impressive junk swings between them.
Earl wisely shuts his trap. If Bray sniffed out Tahlia’s smell that readily, Earl probably smelled way more details. And Bray knows the Lanarre dude did.
He walks to the fire, and the woman tries to scuttle away, blind from what looks like thumbs to the eyes.
Causally, Neil leaps to her side and cuts her throat with a talon. Her throat spits blood from between her fingers.
Distracting as fuck.
He shoves her backward with a palm, and she falls off the log she was sitting on. Soft gurgling choking sounds reach Bray as Neil approaches, but his eyes are already on the three human males.
Bray almost feels sorry for the human. But from somewhere deep inside him, an instinctive indignation rises. They hurt a Were female. An important one.
And Bray wants them to pay.
The instinct part of being a Were is really weird shit, and it’s getting weirder each day.
Bray hopes he’s not getting soft.
“As you were,” Neil breathes the command, and his words blanket the humans.
They’re big dudes, who obviously have no money. But plenty of paraphernalia hanging around says drugs.
“Hey, man, don’t know what the fuck ya are, but we don’t want no trouble.”
Without hesitating, Neil grabs the first male from his perch. He straight arms the human in front of him, letting the man’s feet dangle in the air. He’s a big guy, but Neil is almost seven feet tall, taller than him by half a foot.
And there is no counter to the absolute strength of a Were. Then after factoring in the Lanarre part?
Unstoppable.
Neil shakes him, and the human’s head whips back and forth, just short of rattling teeth. “Was there a female who you came upon?”
Bray shakes his head. “Let me take it from here, bud,” Bray says. “Your bullshit speech will confuse his small brain.”
The man rolls his eyes to Bray, and it clicks. They’re the same kind of man.
Bray knows this type of guy.
“Set him down, Neil.”
Amazingly, Neil does.
“Hey, man, like I said, we don’t—”
“Cut the shit, man. I know you wanted to score.”
His eyes slide from scared to crafty in a moment. Don’t matter that Bray and Neil look like half-wolf. The dude is too high to have really absorbed that his ass is cooked.
It’s all about the score.
Which Bray understands perfectly.
“Didn’t mean nothing. Bitch looked like she had some green.”
“Did she?” Bray asks softly.
He whips his head back and forth. “No, man. Don’t know.” He gives a nervous chuckle, and Bray’s nose scrunches from the mixed scent of human body odor, blood, injuries and fear—combined with a senseless hope of escape.
“Bitch wouldn’t let us touch her.”
“Because she fought us. Fought us hard,” the other man to his left says.
“You beat on her some to loosen up cash, though, right?”
“Got her a good one.”
Neil laughs. “That is why you two do not rush me—or my associates.”
He begins to walk a circle around the men, giving a dismissive glance at the female who’s bled out. Her sightless and scooped-out eyes stare at nothing, the firelight causing hopping shadows of light and darkness to animate her slack face.
His face moves from false humor to terrifying. “You are too injured to do so.”
If Bray didn’t know Neil wanted him alive for his purposes, he would be long gone. But the male’s attention isn’t on Bray—it’s on the human males.
“What did you do to her, and how did she escape?”
Neil lashes the man in the chest with his talons, and red lines form, spreading around the gashes to reveal barely healed ones there already.
Neil’s nostrils flare, and Bray knows this guy isn’t long for the world.
“What and where?”
Hauling the male up, Bray stays with the first one as he sways.
The pungent smell of urine reaches Bray, and Neil roars his frustration as piss soaks the male’s pants.
“Broke her ribs, I figure. Knifed her.”
“Where?” Neil repeats in a hiss.
“Went up there. We followed her, but somebody picked her up.”
“In a human vehicle?”
He nods swiftly. “Yeah, man, what else would it be?”
“So you couldn’t finish her because a human picked up a beaten, bleeding female.” Neil’s voice goes low. “A Lanarre princess.”
He shrugs, trying to inch away. “Yeah, man, whatever you say. Princess or whatever. We just wanted what she had.”
Cash or drugs.
In his limited thinking, why else would a young woman be running around in the middle of the night?
“You could never have what Tahlia possessed, you foolish human.”
Bray doesn’t see it happen. Neil is like greased lightning.
One minute, the male is standing before him, sweat and urine stained clothing plastered against his rank body.
The next, his breathing tube has been torn from his body and lies in a steaming pile of gleaming ivory on the forest floor.
Neil meets his eyes.
Bray turns to the other male, and with a vengeance born of instinct alone, he repeats what Neil did.
Blood spatter flies, and Bray closes his eyes against the spray a split second before it slaps his face like a hot, wet palm.
When all the bodies lay bleeding and dismembered, Neil turns to Bray, his slowly spinning silver eyes sweeping slowly over his naked body.
This gonna get weird? Bray wonders.
“You
did well,” Neil says then tacks on, “You would have been a formidable male, had you been born.”
It’s one of those compliments that’s buried in an insult. But Bray knows Neil didn’t mean it like that. He’s just too much of an asshole to ever give someone praise.
Not in him.
They move up the embankment—him, Neil, plus a dazed Billy and Earl. When they arrive nearly at the top, cars whiz by, blowing back the drizzling rain that’s started up.
“We stay wolfen. Move south.”
Bray wants food.
Neil’s spinning eyes turn to Bray. “Find food.”
“What? Like a deer prancing around or burgers?”
“Exactly like.”
Shit. Bray’s always just stayed in human form and gone to fucking Mickey D’s or some shit.
“Can I really take down a deer?”
Neil’s frown becomes a scowl. “Do you need an object lesson, Bray?”
Bray’s not entirely sure what he was just asked and didn’t like the way Neil said his name, making it sound like a swear word. But he doesn’t want to look like a chump, either.
“Yeah.”
“The gorilla is not the king of this jungle,” Neil answers cryptically.
Huh?
“Watch.”
Billy and Earl crowd behind Bray as Neil closes his eyes. Slowly spinning, he spreads his arms from his sides and turns.
Suddenly, his chin dips forward, and he arrests his progress, eyes open. They revolve so fast, they’re nothing but molten mercury holes where his eyes should be.
Neil leaps, tearing through the woods.
Heartbeats stacking, Bray waits with baited breath.
“Come!” Neil roars.
Bray charges forward, his buddies at his heels.
A huge bear is up on hind legs. It’s taller than Neil in wolfen.
Fuck.
Its shoulders bunch, and the huge animal lowers its head. With a mighty roar, it charges Neil, who stands as though unaffected.
Bray doesn’t think shit through. His body takes over, leaping. He slams into the bear, hugging it under its armpits and tossing it to the side.
A mighty paw rises, swiping at Bray, and four stripes of burning agony lance his chest.
His own talons rise and fall, stabbing with a speed he wasn’t prepared to own.
But own it, he does.
Bray stabs the throat of the bear until the throat is so much ruined meat.
“Very good.”
Bray stands on shaking legs.
Neil leans over, sawing the bear from breastbone to groin with a practiced talon.
Entrails glisten inside, but it is the heart and liver that Bray’s eyes latch on to.
“Go ahead. It is your kill. Feast,” Neil encourages.
Bray doesn’t need much help. Biology takes over, and he lands on the still-warm carcass.
Falling away only when a hand shoves him. He rolls over, his stomach so full, the contents bulge like he’s preggers.
Bray lies on his back, body lax with the feed, and stares up at the canopy of woods. Starlight fades as the day threatens while the sounds of Earl, Billy, and Neil eating reach him as if from a great distance.
His last thought before sleep engulfs him is that maybe the Were gig is not as bad as he thought.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
Jenni
Y ou don’t have to do this,” Quill says. Jenni gulps at the sight of him.
She’s not been with a man since Lance.
Talk about mercy fucks. When Quill used that expression, it had bummed Jenni out. Totally.
The last couple of times she’d been with Lance, she could tell his heart hadn’t been in it. And how was she supposed to enjoy the last few times she assumed she would be able to have sex if her partner could barely contain his lack of enthusiasm? The answer was she couldn’t.
What happened with Lance was miserable.
But that was over with. She and Quill talked at the beach, and she’d told him the entire, embarrassing truth about her and Lance.
She’s getting that the Were move fast. The entire race of them.
Jenni was human less than two months ago, and she’s accustomed to deliberating on choices.
Hell, her life was ending so choice was damned important.
The Were are a decisive group. Jenni assumes it’s because they’re an instinctive species, and there’s not been a lot of intellectualizing circumstance.
The beast must be a helluva a navigator.
Jenni looks up at Quill. He just came in the front door of the place she’s been staying and dumped three man-sized duffels in her tiny entryway.
He took the time to shower off the remnants of shifting to wolfen and smells wonderful. Her inner wolf, as Jenni thinks of her, can smell his wildness like a raw fragrance of earth, wind, and trees.
And under all that, her beast knows his.
Jenni reaches for him as he does her.
She scents his nervousness like she feels her own.
“Let me lead.”
Quill shakes his head. “I’m worried about losing it, hurting you—”
Jenni puts her fingers to his lips. “You can’t hurt me, Quill. You saved me.”
She runs her fingers from his strong jaw, rigid with control, to his collarbone, because Quill came to her shirtless.
Tracing her fingers down the center of his chest, Jenni feels the shiver of his body underneath her touch and sighs.
This is what it will be.
Quill’s body sings with tension, and Jenni knows she’s tempting him as her fingers find the waistband of his athletic pants and run lightly along the rim.
His breath catches as a single digit sinks beneath.
Quill grabs her hand. “No.”
Jenni’s eyes rise from where his cock strains just beneath her touch to his eyes.
They’re wolfen silver.
“I can’t hang on. I can’t stand here while you touch me like this. No Alpha could.”
“You mean no Alpha who’s claimed a female.”
“Yes,” he hisses between his teeth.
“Then don’t.”
Quill doesn’t hesitate. Grabbing her butt cheeks, he lifts Jenni, and her legs wind his narrow waist.
They groan as one. Jenni’s head dips to his bare muscled shoulder, and his temple is pressed against her head.
“Moon help me,” he breathes, sinking his hardness between her softness.
“Don’t stop, Quill,” Jenni says and dives toward his lips.
He turns his head to meet hers, and they collide, sucking, licking, and pressing.
Jenni wraps her arms around his nape, bouncing within his hold, her excitement matching his. Pressing her breasts to his chest, she hangs on for dear life as Quill strides to the back room, where a large bed nearly meets the walls.
Bracing his hand against the small of her back, Quill dumps them on the bed.
His head rises, and a ray of light pierces the shadowed confines of the room through a break in the curtain, turning his bright hair to low crimson embers.
Jenni spears that hair with trembling fingers, dragging his face down to her own.
They kiss, tangling up in each other’s arms.
Quill growls, coming up for air. “I need to—I’m sorry.”
Jenni shakes her head. “I know what I started. I’m a big girl.”
Humor replaces the passion for a thrilling moment, his grin supplanting his lust. “No you’re not. You’re tiny.” His expression sobers, and he dips his lips to nuzzle at her neck.
Right over the scar he put there to save her life.
Then Quill is stripping the clothes from her body. Panties, bra, lightweight pants, and T-shirt flutter to the floor, and he rises to his knees.
The full glory of his maleness is there before Jenni, and she wraps her fingers around him. They don’t meet, and she has a moment to ponder taking that all inside her, but at that precise moment, Quill’s head kicks
back, the tendons on either side of his throat straining.
Jenni sits up, pressing the side of her face against his hardness. Her breath is hot on his flesh as she says, “I want this. I want you, Quill.”
He reaches beneath her arms and hauls her up and against him. “If I take you, I won’t be able to give you up, and you still think as a human.”
Jenni believes her perspective is shifting hard.
“Not so much,” she whispers.
Quill hikes her with one hand beneath her butt and another at mid back then gently lowers her to the bed beneath him.
Eyes silver, he stares at every part of her, and Jenni thinks to close her legs. He must sense something because he puts gentle hands on either thigh, his thumbs stroking the soft flesh.
“I’ll be there for a while, so let me feast my eyes.”
Jenni feels her eyes widen. Lance would have to be coaxed, but this is the benefit of being Lycan now. There is no hiding how they feel with each other.
She can scent his desire. It has a unique flavor, and like she was told when she first entered the pack, she would begin to differentiate what scents flavored with which emotions.
Like now.
With Quill.
His desire smells like honey on her tongue. And she wants that sweetness on her body, inside of her, smothering her.
Parking his large hands beneath her butt cheeks, Quill lifts her hips as he bends over her smaller body.
Instead of going for the obvious, he lays the side of his face against her inner thigh. His nose brushes her core, and Jenni gasps at the unexpected touch.
As he grips her tighter, his breath bathes her entrance, and with a finesse she’s never experienced, he gives the barest stroke of his tongue over her clit. Her hips buck in his hands.
“Good?” His voice is a whisper.
Her fingers move into his hair again. “Yeah—yes.”
She feels his lips smile against her, then his kisses steal her breath, first at the crease of thigh to her heat, then up to her clit where he lands.
Ferociously, he kisses the sensitive bundle of nerves, licking, pecking, and sucking.
When his finger enters her as he sucks her clit, the orgasm takes Jenni by surprise, and she lifts her hips to catch every lick and push of his finger while she pulses her brains out for him.
Quill doesn’t let up, keeping the pressure of his lips as he pumps his finger inside her.
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