by Rhys Ford
The storm’s noise—its cacophony—drove what little reason Ellis had left to the shadows. The cunning intelligence Gibson saw in Ellis’s amber gaze slowly seeped away, scattered by nightmares and memories. He’d been nipped before, a tooth snagged on the inside of his right arm during one of Ellis’s episodes, but this time—this storm—called a Wild Hunt of terrors from the dark recesses of Ellis’s mind.
“Come here.” He was torn between holding his brother close or turning Ellis’s muzzle away from him, but that act—no matter how sensible—was the basest form of rejection. They needed to share breath, exchange scent, and most of all Ellis needed to feel him, draw from Gibson’s strength in order to fight off the storm’s reverberations.
It was a battle of wills and denial. Ellis’s mass made it difficult for Gibson to maneuver, but he anchored himself against the couch and wrapped his arms around the wolf’s chest, drawing him in. Ellis strained against the embrace, a tightly wound snappish creature driven insane by the frenzy above them. His jaw gaped open, exposing nearly all of his teeth, and Gibson shifted his arm, hooking it under Ellis’s throat.
“I’ve got you, brother,” Gibson crooned into the wolf’s ear. Ellis rumbled, and then his voice pitched up, turning his whine into a reedy thin screech. The wolf twisted, trying to break free of Gibson’s arms, but he held tight, refusing to let Ellis go. Digging his fingers into the thick fur on Ellis’s chest, Gibson rubbed at a spot he knew would drive calm through Ellis’s thoughts. “Listen to me, El, and not the storm. You’re not there. You’re here with me in California. Whatever you do, you need to hold on to that. You can do this. You can make it past this. We can ride this out.”
The wolf’s gyrations grew frenzied, surging with the growing storm. With each shatter of lightning against the dark sky, Ellis’s mewling intensified until he worked himself into a long keen, spittle and froth speckling his muzzle. Gibson felt Ellis’s bones shifting, vibrating against the flat of his palm. The wolf’s fur rippled, shedding in chunks from his haunches and shoulders, his back arching high and his vertebrae popping, parting the hair along his spine and thinning Ellis’s skin.
Gibson’s stomach roiled, clenching around a sour he’d held in his guts since the moment he’d gotten that ill-fated phone call from Old Walter telling him Ellis had come home… only to go wolf. He couldn’t ease the pain wrapping around Ellis’s mind, nor could he lessen the anguish twisting at his bones and flesh. Worry filled his thoughts, intense and fierce, so strong he didn’t notice Ellis’s teeth sinking into his forearm until his dripping blood hit the floor. The bite didn’t matter. Neither did the blood. He’d heal over the wound in a matter of seconds, one of the few blessings of their family line, but he was worried about the insanity riding his brother’s mind. Gibson didn’t know what was forcing the change, the storm riding the wolf’s instincts or the memories of war holding Ellis hostage.
Once started, the change was nearly impossible to stop.
Chunks of Ellis’s fur peeled off from his skin, falling to the cabin’s floor. Other patches folded into the wolf’s now rippling flesh, churning under the stretches of human emerging from within. His bones cracked, elongating, and his body mass shifted, changing beneath Gibson’s hands. It was painful to watch. Gibson’s body ached with the memory of going through the transformation himself, but Ellis—tortured, haunted Ellis—carried more agony than Gibson could ever imagine. He didn’t know if Ellis even understood what was happening to him anymore, if there was any awareness left in the overgrown maze of Ellis’s mind.
The wolf’s amber eyes bled gray around the edges, Ellis’s humanity taking hold. Transformations, the shifting of one body to the next, were usually rapid, a push of will against flesh and form and the genetic flow of one half to the next that took mere seconds. It was never instantaneous, and the shed of fur or skin left behind was easily disposed of, but the shift itself, while painful, evolved over generations to be a quick process, either for survival or to minimize psychological damage.
Ellis wasn’t so lucky. Not now. Not when his shattered mind longed for his wolf form but his flight instinct, more human than lupine, forced his change. Gibson could only watch helplessly, arms wrapped tight around Ellis’s shifting chest, mostly skin now with patches of wolf fur, and pray Ellis could survive the pain of an agonizingly slow transformation.
The sound of the skull cracking, bones changing, tore at Gibson’s heart. Then Ellis’s face emerged from his wolf form.
It broke Gibson. Ellis’s expression, the horror in his eyes, the grimace on his face. And just when Gibson thought Ellis finally broke through—the Ellis he’d come to protect, nourish, and hope to heal—the moment was gone. Ellis was gone. More shifting, but this time against the skin, the wolf’s thick black pelt swiftly covering his lengthening body. Ellis’s broad chest barreled out, his hips tucking up and his legs morphing back to the form he felt so very safe in.
Gibson wanted to think the shimmer of gray he saw slowly fading into the amber of the wolf’s gaze expressed regret, perhaps even remorse, but there was no guilt there. Only the release of pain, the shedding of humanity, and the echo of relief as the wolf took over once again.
“No, no. Please. Ellis, stay with me,” Gibson begged. “Let me help you. Please give me a chance to help.”
The wolf pulled away from him, skulking off on shaky legs. And Gibson was left surrounded by handfuls of shed fur and an immense loss gutting him. He was crying, he could taste the salt on his face when his tears touched his lips, but his thoughts were solely on the man lost inside of the wolf.
Until he heard a gasp behind him and the sweet rasp of the honeyed baritone exclaiming, “Oh my God, what are you people?”
Two
FEAR TURNED Zach’s mouth into a desert. He was alive, cold along the spine but alive, yet staring into the rough features of the man sitting on the other end of the L-shaped couch, he wasn’t sure how much longer he would survive. There was an iciness in his storm-cloud-colored gaze, his gray eyes folded with a marble of blue and dove and a chilly detachment more keen than any knife Zach ever handled. It sliced through him, sharper and colder than the lake waters he’d fallen into, and he quickly discovered he feared the man more than he did the wolf lying near the fireplace.
The man was large, the kind of bulk gained by hard work and determination. His shoulders strained at the seams of his shirt, its long sleeves ruched up past corded forearms, and his thick thighs, encased in faded denim jeans, surged with power as he stood. A few short strides and the man stood over him, his bulk as terrifying as the wolf’s growl when he chased Zach through the trees. A scruff of beard dappled his square jaw, a mink brown slightly darker than the sienna mane pushed back from his face. He was handsome in the way a man was when he carried himself with confidence, a stalking swagger demanding the world part in front of him, leaving him with an open field to run.
He was terrifying and arousing. And Zach hated himself for the tickle of attraction forming in his belly even as his fright stole the spit from the back of his throat.
It probably also didn’t help he was naked and trapped beneath the wealth of quilts. The rub of fabric against his dick and nipples was an odd distraction to have when facing down death, but there he lay, stroked with soft cotton and terrified by what he’d seen just a few moments ago.
“Please, don’t kill me,” Zach whispered. “I won’t tell anyone. I won’t—”
He wasn’t sure what happened. He wasn’t even sure what he’d seen was real. There were things his mind couldn’t make sense out of. The wolf that terrified him almost becoming a man, the crackle of his bones a sickening refrain in Zach’s ears and a sound he was never going to be able to shake. It was a horrifying secret, a thing out of nightmares and trauma he struggled to accept as reality. Even if he’d doubted for one second the menacing creature changing in front of him, the man’s ominous reaction only added to the truth weighing Zach down.
“I’m not going to kill you. I ju
st dragged you up the damned mountain. If I was going to kill you, it would’ve been done back down there by the lake.” His voice was deep, echoing the thunder coming across the mountains, and his face broke into a handsome smile, rueful with a touch of goof. It softened his features, taking the edge off of his granite hardness. “Besides, with as hard as it’s snowing right now, it would be a bitch to dig a hole to hide your body. How are you feeling?”
It was easy to be terrified. Terror was a default setting easily clicked on in most human brains, and it was an emotional state Zach had learned a lot about over the past couple of years. He’d been through various states of terror, from a realization that his life would never be the same to the frustration and fear he didn’t know if he was strong enough to survive what happened to him. Looking back now, those frightening moments seemed so silly, much like fleeing a wolf straight off a mountainside only to discover the wolf was more man than creature. It was the kind of secret people would kill to keep, but the man who’d come to save his life—not from a large black-furred menace but rather a deadly lake—didn’t appear to be very worried.
The wolf was settling down, but the man kept glancing back at it, worry deepening the grooves on his tanned face. There was an intimacy to those looks, a relationship of some sort, and Zach would’ve dismissed what he’d seen as hysteria or delusion, especially since he was weak and trembling beneath the heavy layer of blankets… except for the persistent cloud of concern hanging over the large man’s demeanor and the handfuls of black fur scattered around the man’s bare feet. His fear eased back, lessening, but Zach was aware of the presence, prickling under his skin.
“Seriously, I’m not going to kill you,” he reassured Zach. “I need to know how you’re doing. We have to decide if we are going to risk going out into that hell storm. They’re warning everybody to stay inside, but if you need more than what I can give you, we need to get going now, and I still can’t guarantee that we’ll make it.”
“I think I’m okay. Maybe a little sore. Definitely cold. And I feel like I’ve bruised every bit of skin I’ve got, then froze it. Which is pretty much what happened. I lost my footing on a hill and went into the lake. He didn’t touch me, just scared the hell out of me.” His body ached in places he’d injured before, and the scars along his limbs were puffy when he skimmed his fingers over them, but Zach did a quick inventory of his pains, figuring he’d survive them. After all, he had survived worse. “He chased me. Through the woods by the Wilson Inn… well, my inn now. I thought he was going to kill me back there.”
“So you ran?” The man shook his head. “That would’ve touched off Ellis’s hunting instinct. If you had just stood still, he would’ve lost interest and wandered off.”
“I’ll try to remember that for the next time,” Zach replied. “I got scared. Hell, I’m scared to death now.”
“There is not going to be a next time.” The glower was back, an intense storm as frightening as the one howling outside of the cabin’s thick walls. “If you bought the old Wilson place to reopen it, then there will be people, and since I can’t even trust one person to stay on their side of the property lines, you’ve made my life… our lives… a hell of a lot more complicated. Because of you, I’ll have to try to figure out someplace else for Ellis. All I need is one person… one idiot with a gun…. I can’t risk that.”
Zach noticed the man did nothing to reassure him he didn’t have to be frightened.
“I meant what I said. I’m not going to tell anyone,” Zach replied softly. The wolf slept, uneasily restless in his slumber. His massive shoulders convulsed and his paws twitched, his back leg kicking a wooden chair set under a round dining room table. “What is he? What happened to him?”
“Nothing happened to him. Well it did… that was before… and it was something horrific enough to make him want to stay like… that.” A sadness lingered in the man’s expression, and his smile revealed a chip on one of his front teeth, an odd imperfection turning monster into human. “You’re not the first one to find out what Ellis is, and you probably won’t be the last. Mistakes get made, and he’s not thinking straight. Hasn’t for a long time. But just so you know, even if you do tell someone, they’re never going to believe you. We pass as whatever we need to be. Blood tests, anything you can throw at us, what we are is undetectable. I’m not afraid of you saying anything. I’m more worried that you won’t be the only one he chases. So that next time you talk about, could be his last.”
The wolf—Ellis—whined, but his eyes remained closed. The sorrow in the man’s face was back in full strength, and the raging storm outside seemed to howl in sympathy at the wolf’s distress. The rest of Zach’s fear whispered away, carried off by either the wind or the wolf’s thin keen. There was pain in that sound, an anguish ripped up from Ellis’s marrow.
“He’s scared,” Zach whispered without thinking. His eyes found the man’s face, startled to discover flecks of amber emerging in his pale gray gaze.
“Ellis has his own monsters that chase him through the forest.” He grimaced, then looked away. “He can’t outrun them, not even in his dreams. This is the safest place for him, and now, you finding us—seeing him—endangers everything.”
“That doesn’t have to change. Look, do you have anything I can put on?” He tried to sit up more, but the pillows beneath him kept sliding and the room seemed to tilt. “Shit, the room is spinning.”
“Lie back down. I think you took a hit to the head, judging by the lump you’ve got growing back there.” The man came closer, consuming the air and space around him. He smelled good, like fresh linens and crisp air. “Let me get you something to drink. I want to make sure you’re warm inside. We’re trapped in here, and I don’t know how long the storm is going to last.”
His thoughts scattered like sparrows before a cat, and a lethargy stole into his bones. His eyelids dragged, too heavy to lift back up when he blinked, and Zach struggled to keep the man in focus. Without the threat of death looming over him, small things began to edge into his consciousness.
“I’m not feeling too good. My stomach….” Zach’s head ached, a sharp throb increasing every time he spoke or swallowed. “Did you do something to me? Did you drug me? I can’t… stay awake.”
“I didn’t drug you. You were unconscious the entire time I carried you up here. My guess is that hit rattled your brain,” the man rumbled. “You were out for a long time. You had me worried. And as much as I regret what you saw, I’m just happy you woke up. Landline is out, and we don’t get much cell service up here. As soon as it lets up, I’ll see about getting you back to where you came from, and if you’re smart, you’ll stay there. It would be a lot easier on you if you forget everything about this place, me, and my brother. Or at least until we’re gone, after that I don’t care what you do.”
“You don’t have to leave,” Zach burbled around his tongue, his words thick with confusion. “Told you, I’m not going to say anything. There’s always going to be people. At least here, you can protect him, especially if I help you. Not like I don’t know what it feels like to be chased away from the only place I felt safe.”
“I WISH you would speak to me,” Gibson murmured, scratching at Ellis’s ear. He was hunched over his brother’s shaggy body, his wolf form curled up tight. Ellis’s breathing went jagged when Gibson touched him, then steadied out when he spoke. “I would give anything—anything—to have you break free of the wolf. I miss you, brother. I’m not used to being the adult. That was always your role. It’s been a rude awakening, let me tell you.
“And what were you thinking? Chasing after him?” He sighed, glancing over at the man sleeping off his bruises on the couch. “Are you losing yourself in there? I don’t have anyone I can ask, no one who doesn’t tell me to put a bullet in you because you’ve gone wolf. I know I need to be patient, but if you just give me some kind of sign, something to tell me that you’re still you inside there.”
Nothing.
He’d grown us
ed to Ellis’s unresponsiveness, maybe too used to it. By the time he’d made it up to the cabin by Big Bear Lake, Ellis had already held himself to his wolf form for nearly a month. The call Gibson had gotten from Old Walter alarmed him, then scared him deep down, touching on nightmares he hadn’t known he’d held inside of himself. They’d heard stories about their own going wolf, a death sentence for the most part, the loss of every bit of human to the animal living inside of them. He’d turned away their father, who’d come to deliver Ellis from his misery, and Gibson didn’t know what hurt more, his extended family willing to slaughter one of their own who’d been trapped in a net of horrors or them turning their backs on him because he refused to give up his older brother.
“It’ll be okay,” Gibson said, stroking down his brother’s ruffled black fur. “Just do me a favor, even if the guy hits everything on my must-have list, don’t try to bring him home. I’m telling you, there’s no room in my life right now for dating. Even if he is as hot as this Zach guy.”
The power flickered again, giving Gibson a brief flare of hope, then gave in to the storm, plunging the cabin into darkness. He’d debated firing up the generator, mostly for light, but he had a battery backup to rely on, and if he turned off the now useless Wi-Fi on his laptop, it would last a hell of a lot longer and probably make it easier for him to work without the distraction.
“Might as well work. He’s out, and you’re probably going to pass out in a bit. It’ll keep my mind off of things. So long as I don’t have to do any research,” Gibson muttered, wondering if he was talking to Ellis or just to himself. “With my luck, I’m going to make a wrong turn and suddenly have to know everything there is to know about blue-spotted octopus breeding.”
The fireplace let off enough glow for him to see, a dim, buttery spill of light bright enough to snag the wee bit of wolf in his vision. There were times when he wondered what it would be like to be pure human, to not be able to smell the sweetness of Zach’s skin from across the room or wonder how delicious he would taste when—if—Gibson kissed him. He heard every noise, every slight moan the man made when Zach shifted on the couch.
