Wolf Instinct

by Paige Tyler

Bloody hell.

  He didn’t have a clue what to say.

  Chapter 10

  Neither of them said a word, and the longer the silence stretched out, the more painful it became. But Alyssa couldn’t seem to come up with something to say right then. Her head was spinning too fast. After the past year and a half, she thought she’d be immune to shock and surprise, but she’d been wrong.

  Alyssa darted a glance at Zane, watching out of the corner of her eye as he walked over to stand in front of one of the ancient-looking wall murals, studying it as if he were interested in every small detail. His back and shoulders were stiff, his jaw clenched tight. Just another indication of how pissed he was at her.

  When she couldn’t take the silence—and the way he was ignoring her—any longer, she forced herself to say the first thing that popped into her head. “So, you’re a…?”

  “Monster?” Zane finished for her when she hesitated. “Yeah, pretty much.”

  “I was going to say werewolf,” she snapped.

  What the hell was his problem? She supposed he was mad she knew his little werewolf secret, but that didn’t explain the disgust dripping from his words or the way he looked at her like she was something on his shoe he’d prefer to scrape off with a stick. Seeing him regard her that way made her feel physically ill. She honestly felt like she was going to throw up every time he glanced her way—when he bothered looking at her at all.

  “Yes, I’m a werewolf.” Zane glanced at her briefly before turning back to the wall mural. “Does it make you feel better to hear me say it out loud?”

  She refused to respond to his sarcasm, letting it wash over her without allowing it to seep into the cracks of the wall that had already formed around her heart. But it hurt all the same, even if she didn’t want it to. As she sat in the comfortable leather chair, she tried to understand why his sharp tone bothered her as much as it did. He didn’t think much of her, that was obvious. Why couldn’t she feel the same about him?

  “Were you bitten?” she asked. “Is that how you became a werewolf?”

  Zane turned to look at her sharply. “You’re telling me you’ve been traveling all over the globe investigating werewolf murders for over a year and you don’t know how we’re created?”

  It took Alyssa several moments to realize what Zane was talking about, but when everything finally clicked into place, a lot of confusing cases she’d worked suddenly made a lot more sense.

  “Not all those cases involved werewolves. In fact, most of them didn’t. But now that I know about werewolves—and hunters—some of the cases we couldn’t solve make a lot more sense.”

  Zane’s eyes narrowed in suspicion. Finally, he turned back to the mural. “We thought you were on the trail of the hunters—or working with them.”

  The accusation, even delivered as casually as it was, felt like a punch in the stomach. “You really think I’d be involved with scumbags who track down and execute people like you because they’re different?”

  He didn’t look at her. “I’ve realized I don’t really know anything about you. I could hear your heart beating as that vampire came at you with his fangs and claws out, ready to tear you apart. You were as calm as if you were taking a walk in the park. So don’t try telling me this is the first time you’ve faced monsters—or the first time you killed them.”

  The accusation tore the breath from her lungs. But this one hit closer to home, because there was a grain of truth to it.

  “Yes,” she ground out through clenched teeth. “There have been occasions where I’ve had to deal with things that most other people will never have to even know about, much less see. Not werewolves or vampires, but things that leave me with nightmares. But no matter how scary they were, I’ve never killed anything that wasn’t trying to kill me first. As a cop, you should understand that.”

  Zane glanced at her, his expression softening. “I do understand. I apologize.”

  That made her feel a little better, at least. Alyssa knew she should say something else while he might be willing to listen to her, but no words would come. She was terrified of opening her mouth and shoving her foot in it again.

  “I didn’t become a werewolf by getting bitten,” he said suddenly, catching her off guard. “It doesn’t work that way. So you don’t have to worry about it happening to you even though I nipped you when we were…together.”

  Her breath hitched. To tell the truth, she hadn’t even thought about that, but now that he mentioned it, she couldn’t help remembering the love bites he’d given her neck and shoulders when they’d made love. She supposed it was good that she didn’t need to worry about turning into a werewolf even as part of her wondered if it would be all that bad.

  She shook that crazy thought off, waiting for him to tell her the rest of the story. When he didn’t, she realized she needed to nudge him a little. But gently.

  “If a bite doesn’t do it, how does it work?”

  He took a deep breath, then moved away from the wall mural, coming over to lean back against the desk, arms folded. Alyssa saw the doubt on his face as he stared down at the floor, like he was hesitant to tell her anything about his kind for fear of where that information would end up.

  “Nothing you tell me will ever reach the people I work for,” she assured him. “You have my word on that—if that’s worth anything to you.”

  Zane’s expression was hard to read, but after a moment, he seemed to have finally made up his mind. “People who become werewolves are born with a genetic marker in their DNA. If they go through a traumatic event, the gene flips on and they become a werewolf. It can’t be passed on any other way. Every werewolf is born in violence and pain.”

  The thought of Zane going through something so awful made her heart hurt. Knowing what she already did about him, it wasn’t difficult figuring out exactly what that event had been.

  “The battle in Afghanistan,” she murmured. “When you told me you’d come back as a monster, that’s what you meant. What you went through over there turned you into a werewolf.”

  He nodded, his eyes a little distant. “I didn’t realize it at first, of course. I just thought I was dealing with survivor’s guilt or PTSD. Hell, for a while I thought it was brain damage from all the concussions I’d suffered. But it takes a while for the werewolf traits to come out. I’d been having nightmares from day one, but it wasn’t until a month after I got back that I started waking up in the middle of the night growling and tearing the bed apart with my claws. A little while after that, my fangs showed up. Sienna left shortly after that. The rest you know. Gage found me and brought me back to Dallas and put me on his SWAT team, and now I’m in LA fighting vampires.”

  “Are the claws and the fangs all there is?”

  “Isn’t that enough?”

  That small gain she’d thought was there after the apology was gone again, and she hated the way he refused to look at her. It was hard to believe that only a little while ago they’d been in each other’s arms, making love and trusting each other. How could things change so fast?

  “I just wondered if it went further than that,” she said after a moment. “If some werewolves could shift all the way. You know, like in some of the movies when they turn into wolves?”

  She realized how stupid that sounded the second the words were out of her mouth, but then noticed Zane wasn’t laughing.

  “The simple answer to your question is yes,” he said, finally looking at her. “Some alphas can shift completely into wolf form—four legs, bushy tail, and the big, long snout.”

  She tried to keep her mouth from hanging open and failed. “Seriously? You can turn into a wolf? You’re an alpha, right?”

  “I’m an alpha, but I can’t shift any further than what you saw earlier,” Zane said. “And before you ask, the basic theory is that only alphas who are—I guess the best way to put it would be—comfortable in their own skin can handle a full shift. As you can probably imagine, that’s not really how anyone would describe me.�
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  All Alyssa had to think about was how many times Zane had called himself a monster to understand what he was getting at. It was too bad. She had a sudden image of him with a thick wolf coat and a bushy tail and realized she would have loved to see that. The tattoo she’d seen on his chest made a lot more sense now, that was for sure.

  “Is there anything else you want to know about werewolves?” he asked, his mouth curving slightly, as if he could tell what she was thinking.

  She thought about the injury they’d spent so much time talking about the night before. “Was the damage to your arm caused by a silver bullet?”

  Zane chuckled a little at that. She considered that show of amusement another step forward. Okay, maybe half a step.

  “You really do watch too much TV, don’t you?” he quipped. She was embarrassed at how even that lukewarm response made a wave of pleasure blossom inside her. “No, it wasn’t silver they shot me with. In fact, silver doesn’t hurt any worse than lead does, though neither is fun to get shot with. In the case of my arm, the hunters developed a concentrated form of synthetic poisonous wolfsbane they put in their bullets. They knew what they were doing when they made it. Just a flesh wound in the arm nearly killed me. The doctor had to put me into a medically induced coma until he could come up with an antidote.”

  She tried to hide it, but Alyssa knew Zane noticed her hyperventilating a little at the thought of him lying in a hospital bed, cocooned with tubes and wires, little boxes beeping and blinking in the background.

  “Now that you know all of my secrets, what about you?” he murmured.

  Alyssa forced herself to slow her breathing. “I don’t think my secrets compare to yours. There’s nothing special about me. I don’t have claws or fangs. I can’t fight a vampire hand-to-hand or track a bad guy by scent.”

  “I wasn’t looking for a competition. Tell me about the stuff you hid from me before. Like how you ended up hunting monsters for the FBI.”

  Monsters.

  She hated how often he used that word. She’d never thought of it as being a loaded term until he said it. The fact that he used it interchangeably for both the things she’d been forced to kill and when referring to himself bothered her the most.

  “It started when I was assigned to the Sacramento field office.” Crap, she was violating so many rules by doing this, but she was going to do it anyway. Outside of her boss, no one knew this story, not even Christine. “I was assigned to a serial killer task force looking for a guy they called the ‘Sacramento Hunter.’ He liked to grab his victims, hold them for a couple days, then let them go so he could chase them on foot and kill them. The guy was vicious as hell, too. He tore his victims to shreds.”

  “He was a supernatural creature?”

  She shook her head, remembering that exciting yet terrifying case. “I don’t know. Actually, I never even saw the killer until he was dead. The supernatural creature I saw was the agent sent in from the Department of Homeland Security. The moment I saw him, I knew there was something different about him. He did things a person shouldn’t be able to do. He ran way too fast, seemed to be able to see in the dark, and could track the killer by scent. When he finally caught the killer, the guy was torn to pieces the same as the killer’s victims.”

  Alyssa saw wheels spinning in Zane’s head as he thought about that. “Do you think the guy from DHS was a werewolf?”

  She nodded. “I didn’t realize it at the time. I just thought he was different. But knowing what I know about you now, yeah, I think maybe he was a werewolf.”

  “What happened?” he asked, genuinely curious.

  “Being the dutiful and conscientious FBI agent I was at the time, I put all my thoughts and suspicions in my official report, suggesting the FBI investigate the DHS agent.”

  Zane winced.

  “Yeah, not the brightest thing I’ve ever done,” she agreed. “As you can imagine, I got a visit from some extremely senior agents who bluntly told me if I didn’t change my report, I’d be destroying my career. When I stood firm, they put my entire report through a shredder right in front of me, then politely escorted me to the airport and put me on a plane for DC. Several other very polite agents met me at the gate, then took me to meet my new team leader—Nathan McKay. That was the night I learned there are all kinds of things that go bump in the night and that I’d been assigned to a joint FBI and CIA team called the Special Threat Assessment Team. Though to be honest, most of the people I work with have unofficially replaced the word Special with Supernatural because of all the strange things we end up dealing with.”

  “You mean, like the X-Files?” Zane arched a brow. “You’re not making this up, are you?”

  She shook her head. “Nope, I’m not making it up. It’s what I’ve been doing for the past year or so. Investigating cases involving things the regular cops can’t—or won’t—handle.”

  “Like vampires and werewolves?”

  Alyssa nodded. “I can’t honestly say I’ve ever had to deal with something quite this extreme, but yes, you get the basic idea.”

  “Whatever happened to the guy in DHS?” Zane asked.

  “Nathan told me there were lots of bigger problems in the world to deal with than a supernatural working for Homeland and that the guy was on our side,” she said. “He told me to drop it. Unless I wanted the people in black SUVs to show up at my apartment one day and make me disappear.”

  Zane was silent for a while after that, obviously lost in thought. Alyssa was working up the courage to ask him why he didn’t want her help to find Zoe and Chloe when he spoke.

  “Do you regret sleeping with me?”

  The question was so completely out of left field that Alyssa gasped. “Why the hell would you ask something like that?”

  He shrugged. “I saw the way you looked at me after the fight downstairs. After you saw the fangs and the claws, after you saw what I really am. I’ve been on the receiving end of that same look before. I’ll never be able to forget the disgust and revulsion. After seeing me like that, can you truthfully tell me you don’t regret sleeping with me?”

  Alyssa was out of the chair and standing in front of him before she even realized she’d moved. Her heart was thumping a hundred miles an hour and she was half a second away from ripping into him like a complete psycho when the rational part of her reasserted itself and pointed out that screaming wouldn’t help anything.

  “I’m not Sienna,” she said as calmly as she possibly could.

  Those three words seemed to crack through the shell he’d put up around himself and he snapped his gaze up to look at her.

  “I’m not the woman who walked away because you weren’t the man she thought,” she continued softly. “If you saw anything in my eyes, it was the confusion of a woman who’d just found herself in a world along with vampires and werewolves, coming to terms with the realization that she’d slept with one of those creatures. It didn’t mean I was disgusted or revolted. It meant I needed a moment to process that.”

  He started to say something, but she cut him off.

  “Yeah, I’m pissed you didn’t mention you were a werewolf earlier. Right from the very beginning would have been best, especially since you told me you wouldn’t lie to me. But I recognize it would have been a somewhat difficult subject to work into most of our recent conversations, so I’m willing to deal with it. At the same time, I realize I don’t have room to talk since I never bothered to tell you I investigate crimes involving supernatural creatures.”

  He opened his mouth again. This time, she silenced him with a glare.

  “Look, I’ll admit I don’t have a clue what the hell is going on between us, but there’s something real and powerful pulling us together. I can’t explain it, but I feel ill simply at the thought of you being shot over in Afghanistan or injured by those hunters. And the idea of you going up against another one of those vampires by yourself is enough to make me go insane with fear.” She sighed. “I don’t understand what I’m feeling,
and it scares me a little, but I’m not going anywhere, no matter how hard you try and push me away.”

  Alyssa expected him to scoff at every point she’d made, but after gazing at her for a long moment, he nodded and slipped around her to admire the same mural again. Maybe she’d stunned him speechless. She couldn’t blame him. She’d stunned herself. Until the words had come out of her mouth, she hadn’t known what the hell she was going to say.

  “It’s called The One,” he said, eyes locked still on that damn mural.

  “The one what?” she asked, confused. “What are you talking about, Zane?”

  “This sensation you’re experiencing,” he explained. “Being worried about me, feeling a connection that couldn’t possibly exist this soon. It’s caused by a soul mate bond called The One. At least, that’s what werewolves call it.”

  Zane turned to look at her, and for the life of her, Alyssa couldn’t say whether his expression was one of hope or contrition.

  “Soul mate?” she repeated.

  They’d met a few days ago and now they were soul mates?

  * * *

  “Yes, Nathan. You heard me right,” Alyssa said as she stepped into the alley outside the club, turning a little away so she’d avoid the worst of the cold wind whipping down Third Street. “LA is home to a coven of vampires, and they kidnapped two teenage werewolves. As soon as I get a location on their nest, I’m going to raid it with four alpha werewolves. And I could seriously use all the help you can send me because these things are hard as hell to kill.”

  There was silence on the other end of the line, then she heard a heavy sigh. “And you’re okay working with this group of werewolves?”

  Alyssa thought about Zane still waiting up in Davina’s office, tense but okay with her stepping out for a few minutes to get some air—and a little perspective.

  “Yeah, I’m okay working with them,” she said. “I trust them.”

  Her boss asked a few more questions, which she answered, then hung up, promising to get her as much help as he could. After that, she stood there for a few seconds, wondering what the hell she was going to do now.