Blood of Eden: A wolf shifter romantic suspense (The Guardians Book 1)

by JJ King

  The darkness of night closed around her and offered her a solace that calmed her mind enough for her to recall her dream. Never one to dream much in the first place Katherine tried to grasp her fleeting nightmare and felt it slip further out of reach the harder she tried.

  Bits and pieces floated to the surface of her memory and Katherine closed her eyes against the images bombarding her again, images of Quinn flying back against that wall. She couldn’t see the entire picture clearly, but Katherine couldn’t get the image of Quinn’s body being violated, desecrated with unholy silver, out of her head. Katherine closed her eyes and let the tears escape one by one until her face was damp and traced in salty rivulets. She blinked back her tears and opened her eyes. It wasn’t safe anymore to close them. Her mind was determined to betray her sensibilities and force her to relive the atrocity of watching what she had believed to be her soul mate’s violent murder.

  Steeling herself, Katherine forced her body to relax and settle back against her pillows. She breathed deeply and closed her eyes, embracing the inevitable. A moment passed and Katherine remained still, closing off her mind to anything but the memory. She refused to be haunted, even by her own mind. She would confront this, and get past it. After all, Quinn hadn’t died. She wasn’t alone.

  A flash of sound ricocheted through Katherine’s mind, heavy boots falling on concrete. She breathed through the terror that filled her unconsciously and let the impressions fill her, take her away. Katherine could see the alley clearly now, dark shadows and an extreme lack of color, of vitality.

  Ragged breathing and shouts. A thunderous heartbeat that encompassed everything.

  Katherine focused her thoughts on Quinn and tried to ignore the emotions that she had felt that night. She needed to see it. She needed to watch Quinn die again to know that he was truly still alive. She needed to work through her fears.

  Katherine saw it then; saw Quinn’s face through the shadows of memory just as the bullet tore through his chest.

  She dragged in a painful breath as the picture clarified in her memory, allowing her to see. Katherine gazed inwardly at the man she loved and mentally locked her eyes with his. His eyes, his beautiful eyes, were so wide with wonder and… Katherine froze and tried to recall the image more clearly.

  His eyes.

  She recalled Quinn’s eyes as the bullet ripped through his chest. There had been a wonder, yes, absolutely. But the fear that Katherine would have expected at the prospect of certain death was absent as if Quinn feared nothing, not even death itself. Katherine’s stomach clenched ferociously and she felt an overwhelming urge to throw up.

  Swallowing deeply and breathing in the cool night air Katherine reasoned with herself that any true warrior would face death with such ambivalence. Death was just another adventure wasn’t it?

  Katherine pushed back the sheets from around her body and stood, ignoring the lamp by the bedside table. Her eyes adjusted easily to the darkness and she felt more at home, at peace, and able to think in the cool of the night. She walked to the window and stood there silently, taking in the scenery, the lights of the city, and tried not to ask herself the one question she wanted most to ask.

  Why hadn’t he feared being taken away from her?

  Guilt washed over her but it didn’t remove the question burning through her mind. She rested her forehead against the cool window pane and tried to imagine what Quinn had been thinking, feeling, in that moment. She swallowed her pride and overwhelming desire to be the most important part of Quinn’s life and acknowledged that in those chaotic moments she too had thought of her own death. Of course, she had felt the pain of believing Quinn to be dead, but her own survival instinct had taken over almost immediately and she had run because she had needed to run. Far be it from her to deny Quinn the same instinctual defenses that she herself had experienced.

  Katherine was much too intelligent and much too insightful to ignore the implications of natural instinct. Her kind had survived as long as they had by embracing their instincts, well some of their instincts at least.

  Still, it bothered her that Quinn had shown so little reaction to such an incredibly close call. Here she was, awake at all hours of the night, raking her mind over and over for details while he was off God knows where. The injustice and inequality of the moment filled her temporarily with spite, and despite the pettiness of the emotion, Katherine felt better, more like herself.

  She wasn’t used to having a mate, one wolf to come home to, so to speak. It was unsettling at times and definitely made her feel like less of a warrior and more of a domesticated puppy. Katherine frowned deeply and pouted, then stopped and laughed aloud. She had just pouted! Never in her life as an adult wolf had she, Katherine LaFlamme, pouted for any man. Except her dad, and that didn’t count. This was getting ridiculous. Katherine refused to lose her identity for any man, whether she loved him or not. Making a silent promise to herself to return to normal, Katherine turned from the window and climbed back into her waiting bed, her eyes closing as her head hit the pillow. She fell immediately back into the same dream.

  She awoke screaming violently. Her ragged voice tore through the solitude of the night as she leaped up in her bed balancing on her hands and knees while she tried to regain her breathing. The echo ricocheted off the walls as she once again relieved that dreaded moment.

  His heart.

  Her heart.

  Katherine’s eyes refused to do anything but gape into the dark abyss of her room. The bullet had hit his heart, she was sure of it. She had seen it. She had never been surer of anything in her life. He should be dead.

  She put her hand to her chest and felt her heart beating beneath it. She couldn’t wrap her mind around it but she knew that she, too, had been shot at close range. She could still feel the bullet exploding into her body and the fire that chased it. She should be dead.

  This time, she couldn’t find it within herself to question the images that filled her mind. She knew without a doubt that she had watched first Quinn then herself be shot through the heart by the hunter.

  How the hell were they both still alive?

  Chapter Twenty Four

  Katherine sat quietly at the unfamiliar kitchen table staring at the tiny vase full of daisies and the short “I’ll be back soon” note Quinn had left for her next to the coffee pot. The early morning light shone brilliantly through the sliding doors that led to the apartment’s small patio and warmed Katherine as she sat in its rays. She mindlessly sipped at her usually appreciated first coffee of the day while reviewing the details of last night’s revelation and tried to make sense of her thoughts in the light of day.

  She had known, despite the proof to the contrary, that she had seen the bullet pierce Quinn’s heart. Someone who always operated on instinct, Katherine had pushed aside those instincts due to the irrefutable fact of Quinn’s existence. He was alive, yet Katherine knew on a basic level that he should be dead. The knowledge that he had to be an aberration both relieved Katherine and scared her.

  She relied on logic every single day yet here she was a witness to an improbability, or rather impossibility, as far as she knew. There was nothing logical about it.

  Of course, there were always folktales of wolves surviving direct shots to the heart or brain to be considered, but as far as she had always known, those were simply stories to be told to children and during adolescent drinking excursions. She’d told the tales more than once herself, and knew by memory the usual stories. They always involved an exception wolf, strong, beautiful, and virile, who fought the hunters on behalf of his or her kind, and then disappeared into the depths of the forest never to be heard of or seen again. Every young wolf had heard those tales.

  Katherine pondered the probability of the tales being rooted in reality then remembered that her cousin Damien was a professor of folklore at McGill University in Montreal. He loved to go on and on about mythology so maybe he would know something, anything that would even partially reassure her that she
wasn’t going insane.

  She went back to the room and searched her pockets and various leather pouches for her Blackberry and wasn’t surprised when she found it smashed to pieces, having been hit by one of the bullets that had pierced her skin. Without it, she felt a moment of helplessness until she remembered the laptop she’d seen moments earlier in the kitchen. Canada 411 it would have to be.

  She went back to the kitchen and refilled her coffee mug before sitting at the table and opening the small laptop. It booted quickly and she was pleasantly surprised that it didn’t ask for a password. She knew it wasn’t his normal one, though, and she doubted the other, larger laptop was as easily accessed as this one.

  She pulled up Internet Explorer and Googled “Canada 411.” Damien’s number was listed and easy to find so she jotted it down on a sticky note then shut down the laptop. There was a portable phone next to her so she grabbed that, tucked it under her arm, grabbed a can of Pepsi from the fridge and walked to the living room where she’d seen a particularly comfortable-looking leather chair that would suit her lounging purposes.

  The phone rang four times before it was picked up and a very sluggish voice muttered deeply into the receiver, “Do you know what time it is?”

  Katherine laughed and then glanced at the clock, 6:32 am. Not that early. “Hey, Damien. It’s Katherine, and it is not early. The sun rose an hour ago. I see you’re becoming lazy in your old age.” She smiled into the receiver as she heard his groan and exclamation of indignation. In truth, he was only three months older than she was, but it always made her happy to point out those three months.

  They chatted about family for a few moments while Damien got up and puttered out to the bathroom to relieve nature. They had always been close cousins and neither really cared much about bodily functions. Things like that were moot when you tended to become a wolf from time to time.

  Katherine listened to her cousin go on and on about his family and knew that he had found what everyone searched for in life, a real love. Damien had a very handsome life partner named Joel as well as a five-month-old daughter named Angelica that they had adopted when a new mother within the pack was killed tragically in a car accident.

  Katherine had only seen emailed pictures of Angelica so far, but she’d seen enough to know that the little girl was the splitting image of her mother, Jayme, a close childhood friend of Katherine’s that she still mourned. Jayme’s death had been so quick and thoughtless; a drunk driver had run her off the road as she drove to pick up her infant daughter from the babysitter’s.

  Katherine was happy for Damien and Joel, but she knew that their happiness came at the expense of another life, and for that she was sad. She knew that they felt the pull of emotions too. A love so deep for their new tiny daughter as well as searing pain that she would never know the woman who birthed her, and loved her every moment of her early life.

  Finally, Damien got around to business and asked Katherine the reason behind her early morning phone call. Katherine decided to come straight to the point and asked, “I want to ask you a few questions about wolf lore. Specifically, any stories dealing with regeneration to the heart.”

  Damien laughed aloud, “Really? That’s what you called about? Katherine, you know the stories as well as I do. I think you actually told me the first tale I ever heard about it.”

  “I know Damien, but I was wondering if maybe you had done any additional research into the tales. Anything you know would be a great help.” Katherine tried to sound nonchalant as she questioned her cousin, but she feared that she was coming across slightly desperate. Fortunately for her, Damien was more than just a cousin; he was a geeky academic who often assumed that most people were as interested in his work as he was himself.

  “Ok. Well, I did write an article about wolf lore for a Folklore journal recently and I touched on the regeneration myth.”

  Katherine heard Damien sifting through papers.

  “Here it is,” he said, “you’ll love this. Remember Tabitha’s great Aunt Roslyn? She’s ancient, like close to nine hundred. So basically she’s been around since the dawn of time and she’s this amazing fount of information. She has stories that haven’t been told in generations. She told me this one story that I put into the article about an ancient wolf named Isaac who couldn’t be killed by any object, silver or not. The story went that he was descended from an ancient line of wolves who were the guardians of our kind. They lived much longer than we live, which, in human years would mean the equivalent of basically eons. Our people have been known to live more than a thousand years if they’re lucky. Most only live to be around Roslyn’s age. I say just, but seriously, that’s a ripe old age for anyone.”

  Katherine heard Damien sigh deeply, “Katherine, you know better than most just how hard it is to live among humans when they live for so short a time. It’s hard to see them age and die while we stay young. Our careers are precarious and we’re forced to move around, never really getting to settle into one life, one group of friends. In the human world we’re limited, and sometimes it gets really hard. Fortunately for us, we have lots of family who are just like us, and who understand us.”

  He paused for a moment then clicked his tongue as if reminding himself what the real conversation was about. “But, I digress. I was telling you about Isaac.”

  Katherine heard Damien flipping quickly through the pages of another book and smiled, he sure loved his books.

  “Roslyn told me that there was an ancient line of wolves dating back to the Garden of Eden. The story basically says that we’re the descents of Cain, as in Cain and Abel the sons of Adam and Eve. If you’ll remember your Bible, Cain was jealous of Abel’s relationship with God and he killed his brother in an angry fit and was cursed by God for the rest of eternity. His descendants were to bear a mark for all to see that would identify them as the children of Cain and they would be considered monsters. He became one of us.

  But he wasn’t abandoned by God. Cain’s ancestors, us wolves, were given the ability to move from the animal realm to the human and we were gifted with long life so as to be able to see the drift of time. Our kind was given free will, the most precious of all gifts but we were also given a bone-deep desire to defend humans against evil.

  But, like all gifts, there are some who will ignore the blessing and use anything for their own personal gain. Some wolves were born without the inner moral compass that we were born with, like modern psychopaths, and they used their abilities for evil purposes.

  So, the guardians were given guardians. The old ones chose a family, a line of warriors who were renowned for their strength, intelligence and, most importantly, compassion, and gave them the opportunity to keep watch over all of wolf kind. They were given the chance to decline, but they chose to become the guardians of all, the Geliget. The word is an old Mi’kmaq derivative for guardian or protector and it’s obviously not the original term used, but it’s what the Mi’kmaq people called them.”

  Katherine listened with every ounce of her soul, feeling shivers pass over every square inch of her skin. Her breathing was loud so she put her palm over the mouthpiece so Damien wouldn’t hear her panting like a pup, but she couldn’t seem to stop.

  He’d stopped to take a drink of something, probably coffee, so she waited for a second then urged him on, “What else?”

  Damien swallowed loudly and laughed into the phone. “Fascinating stuff, isn’t it? See, I told you my work was interesting but would you listen? And did you ever stop teasing me once? No.”

  He was about to continue with a stream of good-natured cousin berating when she jumped in and cut him off. “I’m apologizing now Damien. It really is fascinating.” She felt an urgent need for him to continue with the story as if her nature needed to hear it. “What else do you know about these Geliget?”

  Damien slipped easily back into professor mode and began to lecture again. “Well, basically there is little known about the Geliget but the stories say that they watch and hide awa
y until it becomes absolutely necessary for them to intervene. Only the direst of circumstances could bring a member of the Geliget out into the open. Isaac was the first of the Geliget to be turned, the oldest and wisest of all wolf kind; even his name means origin. He was said to have been the one who formed the clans, who appointed the first Alpha and who watches your family personally.”

  Katherine sat back in her chair and breathed deeply, thinking furiously as Damien continued speaking about the tradition of Packs having Old One protectors.

  Was Quinn a member of this family? Was he a Guardian? Was he immortal? Was any of this even possible? There had to be some kind of explanation to what she knew to be true. Quinn was alive when he should be dead and this was perhaps as good an explanation as any.

  But then why was she alive? She wasn’t part of any mythical group as far as she knew.

  “Are they immortal?” she interrupted Damien who stopped and took a moment to realize what she was asking about.

  “The Geliget? Well, as far as Roslyn knew, the story went that they weren’t exactly immortal. They were just gifted with extraordinary long lives. In order to guide us, they had to be able to see long into the past and so, along with their amazing restorative abilities, they seem immortal. Plus they couldn’t be killed by silver like we can.”