by Jade Alters
Sex with a werewolf might just take “love bite” to a whole other level where I didn't want to go. That was the last thought I had before my mind finally had enough and shut down. The darkness consumed me, sucking me down into its warm abyss. It was almost a shame they didn't let me stay there...at least in there, nothing wore fur and went bump in the night.
7
Courtney
“Maybe we should throw cold water on her.”
“She just fainted. She'll wake up, eventually.”
“You think it was the wolf or the impressive...”
“Shut up, Will.”
Laughing, “Well, she did say she was impressed. It's a good thing I didn't show her mine.”
“Shut up Will!” More laughter, and voices colliding in my head at the same time. Then suddenly the memories...Clay changing into a wolf, right before my eyes. He didn't just tell me some crazy story that I was supposed to believe. He showed me what he was...what he could do.
“Seriously, how long are we going to let her sleep?” That was Manny, of course, always in a hurry. “We need to get back on our way.”
“Why? What are we in a hurry for?” Titan, in his calm voice.
“Because...” He hesitated like he didn't know either, and then all at once he said, “Because, I want a fucking real meal, okay? And a cup of coffee. Doesn't anyone else want a fucking cup of coffee?”
I pulled open my eyes and found myself flat on my back, on top of a sleeping bag, with all four men staring down at me.
“I do,” I said, looking into Manny's chocolate eyes. “A double espresso would be nice.” Strangely, I didn't have to force the smile. Maybe I had lost my mind a little bit in the past 24 hours.
They all smiled too, even Manny. I kept my eyes locked into his for a second and I felt something pass between us. Clay was the one that broke the spell. ‘
“You okay?” I moved my eyes to his beautiful green ones...and then I had a vision of what he looked like before he changed, when he was stripped of that uniform and for just a second, he was neither soldier, nor wolf. He was pure man. A shudder ripped across every nerve ending in my body.
“Courtney?” The concern in his eyes deepened and I suddenly felt ashamed of myself again.
“I'm okay,” I said, trying to sit up. As I did, I was assaulted by a wave of nausea.
“Easy,” Clay said, sliding a hand underneath me. “Back up Bozo's and give her some air.”
The other three men backed up. The air was still thick and stifling. Clay helped me to a sitting position and the leather canteen was pressed to my lips.
“Drink,” he said, softly.
I did as I was told. When I finished Clay said, “I'm sorry I shocked you. I've never transformed for a human before but I can imagine how terrifying it must have been.”
It was terrifying, I thought, but more so because I was not just frightened, I was also turned on. It wasn't the wolf that did that though, thank God...it was the man. But still, this wasn't the time, or the place.
I had to pull myself together.
“Shit, it was terrifying the first time I saw you transform,” Will said, “And I'd already done it myself a few times.” Clay chuckled and I smiled at Will. I was thankful for his light-hardheartedness. It allowed me a few seconds to pull myself together.
I wiped the sweat off my face with the back of my hand and in a shaky voice I asked the question that was gnawing at me the most.
“Why? Why did he do this to you? Why would he turn you into...” I didn't want to say, “animals” but that was exactly it, wasn't it?
“Animals?” Manny finished for me, and whatever passed between them a few seconds before was gone. His brown eyes were smoldering once again.
“He did it to save us,” Titan said, drawing my attention in his direction. “We had been through so much together, we were like a family and the lieutenant was more like our father than our commander. He was devastated when he found us near death. He was privy to an experimental research facility that was operating in these mountains. He went there and he begged them to help us.” Titan's voice faded away as he said, “He sacrificed himself for us.” Before I said anything else Clay picked up Titan's story.
“It was the only way for him to save us. We were too far away from anywhere that a chopper could have landed to pick us up. If he'd called in troops to come in and treat us and carry us out, we never would have made it. So he had two choices, let us die...or let them change us.”
“How?” I asked.
“How did they make you...?” I was having a hard time saying it, and the men looked like they had just as hard of a time remembering it.
Will had lost his smile.
Manny's dark features were smoldering once more.
Clay's green eyes looked so sad that he physically ached to reach out to him...it was Titan again who in a soft, slightly shaky voice said, “They injected us with DNA from their “test subjects.” Making a distasteful face he said, “The lab...the research facility was put in place here, supposedly to study the wolves that were indigenous to this area. There had been some strange sightings and reports and some of the army personnel stationed near here had gone missing. So the government built this facility that we refer to as “The tower.” It's in a remote area at the very top of the mountain and it's gated...like a prison, with razor wire on top, an electrified fence and some really obnoxious alarms. It was highly classified and only a handful of people in the world even know that it's there. Our Lieutenant knew it was there, and he knew what kind of work they were doing. He left us, dying, and on the verge of death himself, he went there to beg for help.”
“The powers that be supposedly didn't know what was really going on. They were catching the wolves...the shifters, the humans who could change into wolves. They held them in cages too small for them to change from one form to the other in, and they did experiments on them.”
I couldn't believe it, but I actually felt empathy for the werewolves...or shifters, or whatever they were. Did that mean I believed they existed? I really felt as if I might be losing my mind, but sill said, “They just caught them...and kept them in cages? Like lab rats? That's horrible...”
“Yeah, it was,” Clay agreed. “It is. They treat them like animals...I can vouch for them, at least now, that they're not animals, at least not completely.”
“So when your lieutenant went to these people, they agreed to help you?”
“Yes, but for their own personal gain,” Clay said. “The shifters they captured had become listless, uncooperative. They'd made the mistake of keeping them in the dark for too long. They had become more animal than human. They still had more experiments they wanted to do. They wanted to see if they could control them...use them for warfare. But they had all but beaten the life out of the ones they had...and those people weren't trained for combat anyways, but we were.”
I gasped. “They are using you all to...build an army?”
“We're just the first leg of the experiment,” Clay said, “But yes, if they were to find a way to successfully control us, their plan would be to “recruit” more and more men until they had an army of virtually unstoppable beings.”
“I don't know any of you well, but so far you don't seem like the type that could be controlled by anyone.”
“Our Lieutenant is in a cage, under that tower. We were promised that if we followed orders for two years...did everything they told us to do, he would stay alive and at the end of the two years they'd release him.”
“How long has it been?”
“One year, six months and nine days,” Will said, flatly.
“And the four...”
“Five,” Manny said. “There were five of us. The only way to kill one of us is to separate our heads from our bodies so that we can't heal ourselves. Mitchell was torn apart in that explosion or he would be here too.”
“The five of you,” I said, “What happens to you after the two years?”
“They relea
se us, supposedly. We finally get our honorable discharge,” Titan said.
Clay sighed. “We don't honestly believe they'll ever just release us. We know way too much. We've spent this year and a half following orders, but at the same time trying to come up with a plan to foil theirs. When we found out that they had brought the doctors here to somehow use them as their next experiment, we arranged the escape that went so badly today. They weren't supposed to know that we were involved in any part of it other than getting you and the doctors to safety.”
“But they found out,” I said, thinking aloud. “Obviously. That explosion, the deaths, that was your punishment for disobeying orders?”
“More like a warning I think,” Titan said, softly.
Manny was nodding. “Yeah, they were showing off, letting us know who was in charge. Letting us know what would happen to us all if we dared to disobey their orders again.”
“So what are their orders now?”
“To bring you to the tower,” Manny said.
My mouth was dry as I asked, “So...you're taking me to them?”
“We don't have a choice,” Clay said. My heart slid down into my stomach. I thought these men were protecting me, but actually they were just my escorts...to hell.
The next 24 hours chaos reigned inside my head. I stopped asking questions. I had heard enough, at least for one day. Instead I walked and tried to sort it all out for myself in my head.
First off, I needed to put my guard back up. I hadn't trusted these guys at first, but then I'd convinced myself that I didn't really have a choice. Now, I was back to not trusting them.
Were they protecting me...or walking me to my own doom? Who the fuck knew? As far as getting away from them went, I didn't really have that option. I knew nothing about where we were or survival in the wilderness, so I was stuck going wherever they wanted to take me...but maybe along the way I could change their mind about what they did with me when they got there.
The werewolf thing was almost too much for me to process. Now, not only was I sleeping next to four extremely large, strong men...but werewolves as well? My mind still didn't want to believe it. I was trying to figure out how Clay could have caused the illusion that his bones and muscles and joints were stretching and changing and the hair on his body was growing.
It should have been too much for my human brain to handle on top of everything else, but once I had calmed down, something about it had put me oddly at peace, the way I was when one of them touched me softly. It was a kind of peace deep inside of me that I didn't know how to explain, even to myself.
The fact that it didn't make any sense was what was causing me that anxiety, not the fact that Clay or any of them were wolves.
Then there was my father.
They wanted me to believe he had something to do with all of this. The General was not a nice man...but he was not a monster either, was he? If I believed he had somehow taken part in setting me up to be sent there to be used in some horrible experiment, then he would be.
But I didn't believe that...did I? I thought back over all the years and his trips home. When they were in public he always put on a happy face. His “little family” as he called them, was his world.
Everyone commented on what a good family man he was. But behind closed doors he barely spoke to my mother, unless it was to criticize her...and he never let me forget that I was a constant disappointment.
But to send me to my certain death? No way. At least I didn't think so, or I didn't want to think so.
In reality it was all because of him that I was here.
He'd gotten me the job.
The man that hired me was an old army buddy of his. The man that sent me here...but that would mean they were in collusion and that man knew about all of this as well. It all sounded so, paranoid.
I didn't want to believe my own flesh and blood had set me up, but sadly I could easily believe that he knew about this tower and the horrible things that went on there. I supposed it wasn't much more of a stretch to believe he might not care enough about his own family that he would sacrifice me for something he wanted. But what was it that he might get out of it? Were they paying for me? Did he have a stake in this “army” they wanted to create?
That night when we finally got to the cave we would bed down in, my head was throbbing. The men all tried talking to me, except Manny who still looked at me like maybe I was the wolf and the one to be wary of.
I more or less ignored them all and lay in my sleeping bag with my eyes closed wondering if I'd be better off if one of them just grew thirsty for blood in the middle of the night and ate me.
I eventually slept, but my sleep was haunted by dreams of being held in chains, naked, against a wall. I could feel the chains burning my skin and I woke up covered in a sheen of sweat. I told myself it was just the manifestation of all the anxiety...but it had felt so real.
The next day we walked again, for hours. I was feeling weak and exhausted. Every muscle in my body ached. I could tell that the men weren't affected by the exercise the way I was. They could probably keep moving all day and night without stopping at all if not for me. I did appreciate the breaks, but I was still angry with them.
Of course I knew that if everything they told me was true, that was unfair. They didn't have any more choice than I did.
In their defense, and for some crazy reason by the third day, my mind was looking for a defense for them, they did try to save me once. They kidnapped me off that base and arranged for that plane to pick me up. They lost their teammate in the process, and taking me to the tower was about saving another one.
So maybe I was being too hard on them, or maybe I was developing that syndrome that people get when someone kidnaps them. I had learned about it in one of my classes in college. It was called Stockholm syndrome.
It's a psychological alliance that kidnap victims develop for their captors. It's part of the survival instinct. No matter how doomed you are...most people just can't accept that there's no hope. To believe you've bonded with your captors is to give your mind and your heart some semblance of hope...a shred of possibility for a future that shouldn't exist. I couldn't help it though, even with Manny as grumpy as he was, I felt something toward each of them.
I was attracted to them all, they were gorgeous men. But it was more than that. I'd begun to develop a sense of kinship toward them as well.
“We'll bunk here tonight,” Manny said, stopping at the entrance of what looked like an even smaller cave than the one we had slept in the night before.
Titan dropped his things and said, “Somebody make a fire. I'm going to get something decent to eat tonight.”
At the mention of food, my stomach rumbled. Even starving, I'd hardly been able to stomach the MRE's we were still working on as our primary source of nourishment.
Will kept talking about rabbit the night before. I had never eaten rabbit, but at that point I almost thought I might be able to eat it raw. I was actually craving meat...a big, thick, juicy steak would be nice. But at this point, I'd take anything that was fresh and not out of an aluminum package.
“I'll go get the firewood,” Clay said. In the midst of everything swirling through my head throughout the day, I had tried hard to find a positive.
The fact that we had climbed high enough that we were finally in the midst of trees...like a real forest, was the first, and really only one I came up with.
If I looked harder, I supposed I could add that the air was easier to breathe and it didn't get quite as hot during the day. I didn't get as sweaty and there was a stream that ran all the way along the path we were walking, so washing up or just refreshing myself on a break was a lot easier.
“I'll go too,” I heard myself saying, before I'd even thought that through.
Did I want to be alone in a forest with a wolf?
Maybe that wouldn't have been my first choice, but in all honesty, I’d been alone with four of them for three days. If they wanted to eat me, they would have d
one it by now.
Clay looked like he might argue with me, but stopped himself and simply nodded. He left his things at the campsite, taking only his small pistol with him and a knife. As I followed him off the path and toward a thick clump of trees, we were both silent.
But we as they entered under the canopy that blocked out most of what was left of the sun's rays for the evening, Clay said,
“You might want to hold onto me. We won't go in too far, but it will get darker before it gets lighter.”
I had noticed over the past few days that my eyesight seemed to be getting keener in the dark. I wrote it off to just spending so much time in it. But arguing with Clay was not worth it, so I took hold of the back of his shirt and tried not to notice how I could feel the heat of his body shooting up my arm and into my body as I followed along.
The attraction I felt to him was just slightly stronger than what I felt toward the other men, and had been growing even stronger by the day. I could tell by the way he looked at me that he felt it too.
Oddly enough, I could tell they all felt something when they were was close to me...even Manny. Sometimes thoughts of Clay in the nude right before he transformed would find their way back into my head and lead to thoughts that I was even ashamed to have in private.
I was no virgin, but I wasn't overly experienced either. What I saw in my mind's eye when I let my guard down and thought about touching one of the men...was savage, hot, sweaty, almost primal sex. I craved it a little more every day and although I was sure there was more to it, I tried to write it off to hormones and the doctor changing my birth control pills right before I left the states. Whatever it was seemed to be stronger out there in the woods, with the sights and smells of nature all around me...and Clay, big, strong and sexy, right in front of me.
