by T. A. White
"I said no!" Caroline shouted, her voice deepening by several decibels and carrying distinct notes of a growl. Her eyes flashed amber and for just a minute I saw a weird overlay of a wolf's head through one of my eyes.
I went very still, my instincts telling me this was no longer my friend but a predator seconds from ripping out my throat.
"Okay, Caroline. If that's what you want," I soothed.
Jeweled wings fluttered in my periphery and one of my pixie roommates landed on the far end of the counter, watching Caroline with thoughtful eyes. Inara had wings of iridescent green and yellow that had a spidery network of veins made of every color green imaginable. When she fluttered her wings, it looked like a tree rustling in the wind.
Caroline's growls continued as she remained focused on me, not noticing the pixie.
"I need you to calm down, Caroline. This isn't helping matters." I took a step back and made myself look away from her eyes. Meeting a wolf's eyes in the wild meant you were challenging their dominance. Werewolves should have some of the same instincts. Right?
The growl grew in volume, and she took a small step forward. A burnt umber light, tangled with inky blackness, coalesced around her. It was only visible with my left eye, the one the sorcerer had taken from me so he could use it as an ingredient in a spell. Ever since it grew back, I could see weird things. At first, I thought I was crazy, before I realized what I was seeing was magic. Or something close to it.
She took another step forward. A blur of green and yellow darted toward her eyes.
"Bad dog." Inara fluttered around Caroline's head, evading the swats aimed her way.
The growling stopped, and the light faded bit by bit. The pixie's distraction worked.
Caroline looked shaken and upset. "Aileen."
"It's fine. I had more than one episode myself when I was first turned. I even almost chowed down on Jenna once."
"I'm so sorry. You've got to know I would never hurt you."
My smile was sad. "That's just it. You don't know what you're capable of anymore. It's like being a teenager—only about a thousand times worse. You've got all these hormones and new urges running roughshod through your body, only it won't just be shouting matches when you lose it. People will get hurt. Best case, you change them into what you are. Worst case, they die."
"How did you do this? Alone? Without help?"
I lifted one shoulder. "Very carefully. I had some help in the beginning, but every day is an exercise in self-restraint. You'll get there; it'll just take time."
She nodded even though she didn't look convinced. The loss of control seemed to have taken the wind out of her sails. "I know you're probably right, but please don't call him just yet."
I hesitated, knowing the best thing would be to take care of this while we had the chance. It would have taken her hours to drive from Kentucky; longer if she had to walk out of the farm. If they hadn't already, they would learn of her disappearing act very shortly, and it wouldn't take much of a leap to guess she'd head here.
She didn't say anything else, just looked at me as if her entire world was falling down around her. She was begging me for a respite, even if it was for just a few hours. I knew that feeling. I knew it intimately.
I sighed, the sound heavy and resigned. "How 'bout you go get a shower. You can have my bed for the night; I'll sleep out here on the couch."
She started to turn and then looked me over. “Shouldn’t you get a shower first? I can’t imagine it’s comfortable covered in whatever that is.”
I looked down at myself and grimaced. No, it wasn’t. I was afraid to move for fear of getting more of it all over my kitchen.
“I’ll be fine,” I said. “Just maybe don’t take all night.”
She looked unsure but accepted the offer. "Thank you, Aileen."
I nodded. I doubt she'd be thanking me when Brax broke down my door in the middle of the day to drag her away with me lying dead to the world on the couch.
Inara landed next to my hand on the counter as we watched Caroline head for my room to get a change of clothes for the night. “You look and smell disgusting.”
I drained my glass of wine. “I do try.”
Inara waited until the water had turned on before she said, "It was a mistake to let her stay here."
"I know."
"They sequester their pups for a reason. A newly turned wolf is stronger than normal and has little control of the change." She flicked a look my way. "She could probably tear apart a baby vamp very easily."
"Great."
Inara wasn't telling me anything I didn't know or suspect.
"I'll call him when I wake. That should give her time to calm down." And for me to think of an excuse for why I hadn't called him sooner.
"And if she flips out again?"
"We'll cross that bridge when we come to it."
I collected Caroline's glass and deposited it in the sink. While Inara kept an eye on the hallway, I opened the fridge and pulled out another bottle of wine, this time one created for me and my needs. Anybody taking a sip out of it would find themselves in for an unpleasant surprise.
I tilted it over my glass, watching the dark red liquid collect in the bottom. The smell of death and rot reached me, and I curled a lip. Ever since I'd tapped Liam's vein earlier in the year, my stored blood hadn't tasted quite the same—the flavors lackluster and nasty, like a powdered protein shake and not the good kind. Whereas before I couldn't get enough of it, now I could barely stomach gulping it down. Worse, I could feel the difference between it and live blood. Now that I'd had the premium, grade A stuff from tall, dark and handsome, I could tell how inadequate it was in meeting my needs, barely abating the hunger these days.
I turned to find Inara regarding me with a dour look. "What?"
"I forgot. Your friend isn't the only one with troubles."
"I don't know what you're talking about." My voice was defensive despite my best efforts.
For such a small being, Inara could throw skepticism better than anyone I knew. Including my mother. She shook her head and leapt off the encounter. "This should end well. It's like the blind leading the blind."
"You don't know what you're talking about," I called after her retreating figure. I grumbled into my glass, "I'm perfectly fine with bagged blood."
Finishing a sip, I held the glass away from me and grimaced. It was like drinking that fermented stuff that was the newest fad. The kombucha or whatever. I'd tried it once as a human and had sworn never to step near the nasty drink ever again.
"Inara is just looking out for you," a tiny voice said near my ear.
I started and then turned my head, careful not to disrupt the pixie's perch. I'd done that once; it had not ended well. Lowen sat on my shoulder, having found one small spot unmarred by the gunk covering me. His tiny little feet kicked back and forth as he looked up at me. His purple and blue wings glittered as the light caught them. Unlike Inara, who was pale with a slight green tinge, his skin was a burnished copper. He wore tiny trousers that ended at his knees and a sleeveless white tunic.
"I'm pretty sure Inara only tolerates me," I told him.
He leaned back on his hands and peered up at me. "True, but she doesn't want you to die. We'd have to find a new home then."
"You could always just remain to torment the next inhabitants."
His face was thoughtful before he gave a noncommittal shrug. "There's something odd about your friend."
I snorted. "Yeah, she was just turned into a werewolf after learning there's a whole supernatural world out there. Anybody is bound to be a little off after that."
He shook his head, his large eyes looking reserved. "No, it's more than that. Something’s wrong with her. You should be careful not to get torn apart."
With that he took off, leaving me to stare after him in frustration.
CHAPTER TWO
A KNOCK AT the door summoned me from my deathlike slumber. Really, it was more of a pounding that caused my door to
shimmy and quake. I lifted my head without opening my eyes and then let it drop. It was too much effort to get up. Whoever it was would go away eventually.
The knocking paused. Moments later it resumed, louder than before. I pried my eyes open and blinked at the purple and blue wings filling my vision. Lowen leaned forward. "You have company."
I turned on my side and buried my head in the couch I'd ended up on last night. "I can hear that. Tell them to go away."
Between one breath and the next, I drifted off. A sharp pain on the rim of my ear brought me back to the land of the living.
"Take care of it before they break the door," Inara ordered. She released the abused appendage and flitted out of range before I could swat her.
"I'll be fast enough one day, pixie," I said, giving her a dead stare even as I lumbered to an upright position. When had sitting gotten so hard?
"Not even in your prolonged life," she returned in a scathing voice.
"Yeah, yeah." I yawned, my eyes falling shut. Couldn't this wait? I thought it could. I started to lean back against the couch. I was just so frickin’ tired.
One of the pixies dive bombed my face. "Get up and answer the door, you worthless blood sucker."
With a long groan, I made it to standing and with the help of the pixies swooping at me whenever I veered off course, I made it to the front door. I leaned against the wall for stability and unlocked the first lock, then the second. I'd barely finished with the last lock when the door thrust itself open and a very angry pair of werewolves stalked inside.
"Please. Come right in," I said in a dry voice as I squinted against the bright light. Well, that answered the question of why I was so exhausted when I normally woke up bright eyed and bushy tailed. As a new vampire, I still struggled to stay awake when the sun was in the sky. Most of the time I could only manage a few minutes at sunrise and sunset. At the moment, the sun was shining bright and cheerily in the sky. This had to be a new record for me.
"Where is she?" Brax rounded on me as Sondra moved through my small apartment, her head up and face alert. A pair of ice blue eyes glared at me with a fierceness that would have taken my breath away if I’d been able to summon enough energy to feel fear. His power, that thing that only he as alpha had, filled the room with heat. It felt like standing next to a raging wildfire. You just knew if the wind shifted in the wrong direction, your ticket was up, and it would be an unpleasant way to go.
I shut the door and shuffled back to my couch. I collapsed onto it. "Who are you talking about?"
"Don't try to lie to me. I smelled her on your landing. I know she came here."
I made a whimpering sound. Why couldn't the big, bad werewolf just shut up and leave me in peace? Couldn't he see that I was in no shape to deal with his shenanigans?
"She's not here," Sondra said, appearing from the hall that led to my bedroom. She moved with an almost feline grace through my apartment, which was funny since she was a wolf. Her hair was a curly mess around the feral beauty of her face.
Brax leaned down, trying to use his standing position and general badassery to intimidate me. Most days that would work. Today, I was just too tired to feel anything beyond the smallest spurt of concern. Then that too was gone. Even now, I could feel the allure of sleep sucking me back down.
"Where's Caroline?" he growled.
"You're her alpha. You tell me." I gave him a sleepy smile. "Guess you wish you'd been a little more forthcoming when I needed you to. Tit for tat."
He stared at me for a long moment. He wasn't handsome, not in the traditional way. He'd never be on a billboard or featured in a magazine. He was rough around the edges, like a really sexy mountain man—one capable of changing into a wolf and ripping your throat out at a moment's notice. He had a presence to him, a way of demanding attention anytime he was in a room. Right now, he was trying to use that same sense of charisma to get answers from me.
The pixies landed on either side of my shoulders, Inara haughty and amused, while Lowen had an implacable expression on his face. Brax eyed the two of them with a look of distaste before whirling and sending my coffee table sliding across the room with a well-placed kick.
"Rude animal," Inara said with a moue of disgust.
I patted next to her, mainly because she managed to evade the pat. "Shh, don't upset the alpha. You wouldn't like him when he's upset."
I realized what I just said and snickered.
"What's wrong with her?" Sondra asked, watching me with fascination.
"Nothing’s wrong with her," Inara snapped. "She's just tired."
"This isn't a game, Aileen. You need to tell me where she is right now before someone gets hurt." Brax paced the small space, running a hand through his hair and making it stand upright for a moment.
"Did I hear you right? Were you just threatening one of my vampires?" a silky voice asked from my open door.
I cracked one eye open from where it had drifted shut and glared at the newcomer. "Does nobody respect a person's private space anymore?"
Both men ignored me. Liam stepped into the room, his enforcers at his back. A vampire several centuries my senior, Liam was a dragon given human form. He moved with the grace and confidence of a predator at the top of the food chain. Every movement he made held the potential for violence even as it looked like it belonged in a dance.
He had a maturity about him that said he'd been turned somewhere in his early thirties—something I envied him for. Who wanted to be stuck in their mid-twenties forever? He had dark hair and electric blue eyes that had a habit of seeing right down to the very core of a person, stripping away their paltry defenses. His cheekbones were sharp and his jaw stubborn, but his lips were utterly soft and kissable as I'd discovered during the one and only time I'd ended up kissing him. I claimed the distraction of my first blooding as the reason. He was the thorn in my side that just kept digging deeper.
"Hey there, baby ass-kicker, you're looking kind of rough," Nathan, his enforcer, said with a playful smile on his face. He was light where Liam was dark and acted like a flirtatious frat boy. I'd seen him kill, though, and knew he was every bit as deadly as everyone else in this room.
"I'm gonna kick all your asses as soon as I have my energy back." I gave up and let myself collapse on the couch, falling sideways.
"Aw, it's cute that you think that."
I made a grunt of argument. It was all I could manage with my current level of exhaustion.
"What are you doing here, Brax?" Liam asked. He moved with the grace of a tiger, beautiful and deadly, and oh so distracting.
"Your vampire is hiding one of our pups," Brax said.
Liam flicked a quelling glance my way. That would have normally made my night—I lived for pissing him off—but right now the effort was too much. I really just wanted him to go away and take all these other trespassers with him. He jerked his head and Eric, his other enforcer, strode for the hallway leading to the rest of the apartment.
"You won't find her," Sondra called after him, posting herself at the mouth of the hallway. "She's long gone."
Eric returned in moments and shook his head, confirming Sondra was right. She folded her arms and leaned back. All eyes turned to me.
"You're sure she was here?" Liam asked, fixing me with a stare.
"Her scent stops right outside the door," Brax responded.
I met their stares with as much energy as I could muster.
"I don't think you understand the severity of what is happening here," Brax began.
My eyes drifted closed as the conversation continued around me. I woke with a start, the taste of life and decadence on my lips. A weight pressed hard on my chest—Liam holding me down. One of my legs had curled around his. His eyes flared briefly as he finished licking the wound on his wrist.
"What the fuck?" I scrambled to seated as he stood and stepped away. "Did you just give me your blood again?"
He lifted one eyebrow, the superior expression on his face letting me know how stupid he
thought that question.
I would have kicked the coffee table if Brax hadn't already knocked it out of the way earlier. Damn it. I just got used to bagged blood again. It had taken me weeks to be able to keep the stuff down after the last time I'd had a taste of Liam's blood.
"Don't do that again," I ordered.
"I will do what I must since you have already shown you can't take care of yourself. We needed you awake and alert for this conversation." He gave me a smirk. He knew exactly how difficult his blood would make my coming weeks. Yeah, I'd be supercharged for a few days. Stronger, faster, able to leap tall buildings with a single bound, but it came with a cost. That cost being the difficulty of keeping the bagged stuff down.
"When you two are done flirting, can we get back to business?" Brax asked. He'd taken a seat on the coffee table he'd knocked across the room and was leaning forward, his eerie blue eyes focused intently on me.
I glared at him, properly outraged at his presence in my territory now that I had the energy to stay awake and alert.
"From what I understand, Caroline needed a little away time from the farm you secluded her on. I understand the feeling." My smile was humorless. "All of this can be a little hard to take at times."
"No, you don't." Sondra stepped forward. "You can't. You're not a wolf. She's dangerous right now, both to herself and others. If we can't find her and she hurts someone, she could be put down."
I scoffed. "Like you were?"
Shame crossed Sondra's face before her expression firmed.
"Those were mitigating circumstances," Brax said, his voice a rumble in the quiet.
"It doesn't matter. Caroline won't let herself hurt anyone." Not physically at least.
"She's not the same person you knew," Sondra said.
"I was turned, and I managed not to hurt anyone," I said as a defense.
"You're not normal," Liam spoke.
"That's for sure," Nathan agreed.
