Protecting Ally

by Tianna Xander

  Kalen ended the call, stuffed his phone back into his pocket, and turned to Bastien. “You can’t afford to go back now. We’re too close to that nut. Keep going and I’ll head back to find the woman. Between Merrick and myself, we should recover her fast enough. She can’t have gotten far.” He checked his watch and shrugged. “It’s easy to cover fifty miles in my other form, and like I said, her instincts will lead her back here to her hometown.”

  Bastien agreed with a nod. “Fine. Get yourself a pack and get going.”

  “What if she doesn’t believe him?” Carly asked with a wry grin. “It’s not like this is something she’s prepared to take in stride. Remember, to her, this is going to be nothing but some horrible nightmare.” She turned her attention to Kalen. “I remember how frightening and overwhelming this all is. Be gentle with her.”

  Kalen glanced back at the woman who had been human and ignorant of all things paranormal until just a few short weeks ago. “I’ll try.” He got out of the van with his neck pack and frowned when he realized he meant what he said.

  Thornton had just turned the poor woman’s life upside down. The least he could do was try to break it to her gently. She wasn’t a human anymore. The sooner she learned to face that fact, the better.

  The convoy of vans pulled from the motel parking lot while he watched. After they were out of sight, he then made his way across the street and into the woods.

  The woman’s scent was all over him, making his body demand things it shouldn’t. He hadn’t noticed what her delicate fragrance did to him until after he’d put her into the van, and she was gone. It probably had something to do with his wrist. He looked at the area that had throbbed for a good hour before his beast’s metabolism finally kicked in and healed the wound.

  It was only after the puncture wounds healed that Kalen noticed how being near her tantalizing scent made him feel. It seemed to wrap around his insides and squeeze.

  His balls ached more and more every time he drew her heady scent into his lungs. It felt as though someone had put his scrotum in a vise and tightened it down every time he scented or thought about the beautiful, full-figured female, which had been nearly every moment since his wrist had healed.

  “I should have asked one of them to shoot me,” he complained as he undressed in a small clearing. He folded his clothes into as small a bundle as he could, crammed them into the neck pack, then fastened it loosely about his throat.

  If he had had one of them injure him, just a little, perhaps he would find a way to concentrate on locating the woman for the pack instead of finding her because she gave him a raging hard-on.

  “It’s a damned shame when you contemplate having someone shoot you just so you can keep your mind off a woman.” He shook his head and prepared to change into his wolf.

  How in the hell would he ever live it down if his brother found out about this? How many times had he ragged on Galen about sniffing after females? And here he was going in search for one who had bitten his wrist so hard, he’d felt her teeth sinking to the bone.

  Hell, from what he had seen, the woman wasn’t even nice. He paused with a smile. She might not be nice, but she sure as hell was nice looking with her wide hips and full, lush ass, and she smelled like heaven on Earth.

  Stooping low, he concentrated on the change. His bones popped and snapped as some shrank and others elongated. The short stubble on his chin turned to fur with the longer whiskers of his wolf.

  Muscles grew smaller, more compact as he continued to concentrate on his other half until there was nothing left of him, but his beast.

  Kalen stuck his nose in the air and sniffed, scenting nothing yet, but then, he hadn’t expected to.

  Turning East, he headed back toward Mid-Michigan and the woman he couldn’t seem to forget no matter how hard he tried.

  One thing was sure. As soon as he found the woman and returned her to safety, he was showering her heady and distracting scent from his body and taking the first mode of transportation back home. She was dangerous. He could feel it.

  Chapter Five

  Terrified, Ally ran through the woods as hard and fast as she could. She stumbled over her feet at first, but as strange as it seemed, it hadn’t taken her long to get used to running on four legs instead of two. Fighting the urge to look back, she kept her eyes looking forward.

  That was always the first mistake of women in trouble in the few horror movies she’d seen. The dumb bimbos constantly looked behind them and usually ended up tripping over something—like their own clumsy feet—in their hurry to escape whatever monster, or villain was chasing them.

  There was no way she would make that mistake. If someone followed her, it was best to keep looking forward while running as fast as she could away from them.

  Low tree branches and brush slapped her face and eyes as she ran past. Her lungs ached with exertion and her legs felt like jelly. Still, Ally knew she must keep moving. There was no doubt in her mind that the others would follow her.

  Where she was headed was anyone’s guess. Ally hoped it was home. Now that she was an animal, wouldn’t she have an instinct for that sort of thing? Stopping near a stream to catch her breath, she eyed the water wistfully. She might be a dog, but she wasn’t thirsty enough to drink untested water. The thought that a deer could be peeing upstream was enough to keep her tongue away from it.

  Dream or not, reality or not, she had to have her standards. She trotted across the stream and scared a rabbit from its hiding place. The animal couldn’t know she wouldn’t eat it, no matter how hungry she might have been, or how tempted. Just the idea of eating raw meat was enough to make her stomach roll over in protest.

  After dropping her clothes on top of pine needles and leaves, she plopped down to rest. It didn’t matter that she couldn’t stay long, but she’d had to stop. The intermittent, niggling pain she felt while she’d been running, kept growing stronger.

  Her stomach cramped and her paws ached. No matter how badly she needed to run, Ally didn’t think she was going anywhere anytime soon.

  If what she suspected was true, she was about to change back into a human and the only thing she had to wear were her practically non-existent panties and her waist length t-shirt. What a day to decide to stop wearing the big, baggy oversized shirts she loved. This was the last time she listened to advice from anyone concerning her wardrobe.

  When the cramps worsened, Ally curled up into a tight ball and whimpered. The pain of the last change was almost too much to bear and now she had to go through it again. What if she fainted this time and lay here on the ground naked and alone? Gritting her teeth, she groaned as the pain grew more intense. Even her hair follicles hurt.

  It didn’t take much longer before Ally began to shift shape again. Like before, her jaws popped and cracked as they changed size. With an odd sensation, the thick fur that had covered her body seemed to disappear back into her skin. Claws shortened and turned blunt before changing back into fingernails and her paws became hands once again. Lifting them, she wiggled her fingers, making sure everything still worked.

  The animal side of her whined and cried out with the agony of the shift. She fought the pain, trying to push it aside. Yet the more she fought it, the more unbearable it became. It was so intense, that when Ally finally regained her human vocal cords, she was unable to keep the scream of pain from bubbling from her lips.

  Afraid to move for fear of causing herself more distress, Ally stayed on the ground cold and panting, her knees drawn to her chest, for what seemed like hours.

  As soon as it was possible to breathe without pain, she donned her underwear and the t-shirt that barely covered her midriff and sat down on a nearby log. She tried not to think of how many bugs lived in the rotted wood. She only knew she needed to rest after her ordeal.

  Taking a quick look around, Ally realized she had no idea where she was, or even where to go. There was no way she could ever walk the several miles back home, even if she knew which direction to go. D
ogs had thick pads on their paws. She had nothing more than her bare feet.

  Ally looked over her shoulder in the direction the animal that somehow seemed a part of her now had been headed. Perhaps that was the way home. Still, she wasn’t certain of anything. What if she got even more lost once she abandoned this stream? Should she follow the water?

  She bit her lip as she sat thinking. Ally had a feeling that home was just over her right shoulder, but what if she was wrong? Walking through the woods as a dog and striding through them half-naked as a human were two vastly different things.

  “What now?” she asked herself as she rubbed the chill from her upper arms. It was nearing sunset. She had no way to keep warm, and it was only going to keep getting colder.

  Ally shivered as the very real possibility of freezing to death crossed her mind. If only she would have remained a dog for the night. At least then she’d had a fur coat.

  “Dang it all, Ally.” How many times had her neighbor, Milly told her to look before she leaped? If she’d thought of that, she might have just stayed where she was in the van, instead of running like a scared rabbit.

  “You look like a girl who could use some help.”

  The sound of the deep voice startled Ally, and she turned with her hand to her throat.

  Two men stood side by side, fishing poles draped over their shoulders. Blond and bucktoothed, they both wore jeans and thick plaid jackets over their t-shirts. They looked like twins, but one was taller and thin. The shorter one was a bit on the stocky side. Along with his fishing pole, the tall man carried what looked like a bait bucket and a cooler. The short one held a string of fish that looked almost good enough to eat raw. Ally shuddered at the thought.

  She leaned forward on the log, trying to cover up the fact that she was nearly half-naked and eyed their warm-looking coats.

  “Looks like she could use some clothes, too,” the shorter one said with a leer.

  For a moment, Ally wanted to bean him on the head for that smirk. At least she did until he propped his fishing rod against a tree and hung the fish precariously from a broken branch before removing his jacket.

  “Here ya go, ma’am.” He handed her his coat, which fell nearly to Ally’s knees when she stood and slipped it on.

  “Thank you.” Ally tried not to notice the powerful stench of body odor that clung to the jacket. At least she was warmer, even if she didn’t smell better. Her feet were still bare, but she didn’t expect the men to give up their footwear. Even if they had, the boots they wore would have been way too big for her anyway.

  She inhaled again and fought a grimace. For some reason, it seemed as if all odors were stronger today. It must have something to do with her new animal side.

  After everything she’d been through, Ally had given up trying to convince herself that this was some sort of bad dream.

  Nightmare is more like it.

  Either way, no matter how impossible it seemed, what had happened to her seemed real—too real to continue to try to pass it off as some figment of an overactive imagination. Her imagination had never been that vivid.

  “Are ya lost?” The taller one appeared to be missing a few sandwiches from his picnic. But he was kind of cute in a strange, bucktoothed sort of way.

  His brother, on the other hand, knew which way the geese flew and kept looking at her as though she was a piece of meat. She didn’t like his leers, or him, but she was cold and lost. What choice did she have but to follow them at least long enough to warm up again?

  “I’m Billy,” the tall mentally challenged man said, holding out his hand. He nodded toward his companion. “That’s my brother Bobby.”

  Ally refrained from touching him. Something about the two brothers made her skin crawl. She wasn’t sure if it was their horrible odor, or the way they looked at her. All she knew, was that she didn’t want to touch either of them, and she had to get away from them both as fast as she could.

  Some strange intuition also told her if she shapeshifted in front of these two, they would kill her, skin her, then stuff her to hang on their wall as a conversation piece.

  “My name is Alice,” she lied. The last thing she wanted was for them to know her real name. At least with the Al sound at the beginning, she might remember to answer to it. She held the coat out away from her for a minute, hoping some of the smell would waft off it. “And thanks for the use of your coat. It was very kind.”

  Bobby shrugged. “‘Taint nothin’ ma’am. I was hot in it anyways.”

  “Still...” She smiled in an effort to make it look like she didn’t notice the gawd-awful stink that permeated the thing. “It was kind of you.”

  Bobby grabbed his fishing pole and the string of fish before turning to his brother. “Come on, ya nit. We need to get home before dark.”

  Ally looked up toward the ever-darkening sky. If they could get home before it got dark, then it meant that they didn’t live far from here. She had to make some excuse to get away from them. Somehow, some new animal instinct told her that if she stepped one foot inside their home, she would never leave it alive.

  Chapter Six

  Kalen ran through the woods as fast as he could. He didn’t know why, but something told him the woman was in danger. During his search, he figured out why they seemed tied together. She’d bitten him. Hard. Her new canines had sunk down to the bone and that small exchange of saliva to blood had tied them together, forming the bite bond.

  The only other way to form such a tie was with a mate. Kalen refused to even think about that. He wasn’t ready for it and he liked his way of life just the way it was, thank you.

  The last thing he wanted was a woman hanging around mucking things up. Despite what he wanted, they were connected now and there was nothing he could do about it but bitch, and what was the point in that?

  Continuing to run East as fast as he could, Kalen concentrated on the rhythm of his paws hitting the ground. That, and his claws digging into the earth for traction was the only noise in the quiet of the still forest. There were no rabbits or squirrels in the underbrush. He sensed they were all hidden deep in the bushy groundcover.

  Smaller creatures knew when a predator was in their midst and kept low to the ground, their little hearts drumming with terror. The last thing on Kalen’s mind was hunting the small rodents hiding in the brush.

  The uneasy feeling in his gut had set him on much larger prey. Fear spiraled in his stomach as he felt the woman’s discomfort. Two men had approached her. They both scared and repulsed her, yet she felt resigned to following them. He must be close if he could feel her emotions, her repugnance at having to associate with the men she didn’t want to be around.

  Kalen slowed his pace to a trot when the roof of a little cabin came into view. A small spiral of smoke rose from the chimney, giving evidence of a fire, long since ignored. He circled the shack, listening for inhabitants. When he heard none, he went back the way he had come and shifted into his human form.

  If the men didn’t carry guns, there was sure to be one in the cabin. He must intercept them before they could enter the small shack. If they carried guns, he would leave and call the others in. He wasn’t stupid. One shifter against two humans with guns was never good odds.

  Once changed and dressed, he wandered back into the clearing, walked up the steps of the rickety porch and knocked on the door.

  Nothing.

  Good. It meant the men with the woman were still outside in the woods somewhere. With luck, they would also be unarmed and getting the newly changed shifter from them should be a piece of cake.

  Their kind didn’t just shift into wolves, they were bigger than wild wolves and strong, very strong, even when they weren’t in their wolf form. It was another of the perks of his kind and there were many. They also had many enemies, men such as Dr. Thornton.

  Kalen suppressed the urge to growl at the thought of the other man. It wasn’t any wonder Bastien spent nearly every waking moment in pursuit of the crazy scientist. Kale
n would be out for blood too, had the man put his mate in that much pain.

  Still as death, he stood in the middle of the clearing waiting for the group to return. Kalen knew the woman feared these men, yet she didn’t know how to escape them. It wasn’t any wonder. When they finally walked into the clearing after a ten-minute wait, one walked before her, the other behind.

  Kalen did the only thing he could think of to make these men give her up without a fight. Stepping forward, he schooled his expression into one of deep concern and happiness.

  “There you are, cupcake! I wondered where you’d gotten off to.” He looked her over as though surprised to see her half-dressed, then scowled. “What happened to your pants and shoes? Did these men hurt you?” He pulled his cell phone from his pocket. “Should I call the police?” He paused then, hoping she would realize she had nothing to fear from him, and play along. He raised his brows when she paused. Come on. Pretend you’re with me.

  Her eyes widened for a moment before she responded. “I’m sorry, snookums,” she said, after a momentary pause, her voice practically dripping with syrup. “I know you told me not to go for a dip in the stream, but I just had to rinse the bear poop off my pants.” She bowed her head, trying to look contrite. “I didn’t mean to lose them down the stream and when I went chasing after them, I got lost.”

  Bear poop? The best you can come up with is bear poop?

  Bite me.

  That can be arranged. He raised a brow.

  “That’s okay, honey bunny.” He walked over to her, took the stinking plaid jacket off her and wrapped his windbreaker around her shoulders. He tossed the coat to the man who had none. “Thanks for looking out for her, boys. I’ve got her now.” He leaned forward and whispered. “Don’t fight me. I don’t want to have to hurt these two.” Though he would if provoked.