by Joey W. Hill
“Faster. And our bodies can bounce back from a lot more punishment.”
That intrigued look swept him again, and Rand felt more than fever warm him. “I’ll keep that in mind,” the male said.
At times, his voice was like the wind when it was strong enough to reach the forest floor, moving and twisting through the trees and foliage. At that deeper level, it passed over the fur and through the body, bringing all sorts of messages in its scent.
“You’re not my prisoner,” he continued. “You can drag yourself off into the woods, make things worse. I’ll give you time to do it, prove to yourself how stupid you’re being, before I catch up, re-treat your injuries and make you eat something.”
“You could just let me die.”
“We covered that,” the male said shortly. “No one but yourself to blame.” His gaze slid up to Rand’s face, lingered. “You and that made-for-sin mouth. It lost you your window. I expect you wanted to die in a fight. Now your choice is to die of your wounds. Far less satisfying, right? So get better, and you can live to fight and die another day.”
“Don’t you have better things to do than nurse an injured wolf?”
“Tons. But not right now. If that changes, you’ll be the first to know.” The vampire removed the spit and brought the rabbit to him, dropping to his heels again to offer a piece he tore off. “Here. Eat. Your growling stomach is scaring me.”
Rand’s lips twisted, but the proximity of the cooked meat made it impossible for him to refuse. He reached up to take the morsel, and found his hands were shaking. Bloody hell, he felt like shit. The fever had coated his muscles in a light sweat, and suddenly the meat made him queasy, even as his stomach rumbled in a demanding way. The instinct of the wolf told him to gulp down whatever food was available, while his human anatomy warned him against eating anything.
“Here.” The small portion was brought to Rand’s mouth. “You won’t be able to eat as much as usual and keep it down, but you can take the edge off and give your body some fuel to help heal itself. If that doesn’t stay down, I’ll boil some broth out of this rabbit.”
“If I shift, it will help.” It was a lie, but he didn’t like this form. He felt too exposed, too vulnerable.
“If you shift, you may become a lot less cooperative. Not that you’re winning any awards on that now. And I won’t do this.”
Rand’s shaking hands were too slow to prevent the vampire from curling his fingers around his dick. He sucked in a breath as the vampire showed he knew his way around another male’s body. As he stroked him, Rand’s traitorous hips pushed his cock into the vampire’s grip. He clamped his hand on the male’s thigh for an anchor point.
The vampire’s gaze shifted to the contact, but he didn’t remove it. He merely watched Rand as he pumped his shaft, rubbing his thumb along the bottom, over the slit. Fuck, it hurt like fire to move, and he still felt queasy, but he couldn’t resist the urge. It was as if his libido was operating in a whole different area of his brain than his broken body.
The vampire released him, squeezing Rand’s hip. “Yeah, sex drive increases with every mark. Rumor is, third marks want to fuck even on death’s door. Take the food.”
He wasn’t sure what the vampire meant, but Rand had bigger concerns. He wouldn’t allow himself to be fed. He had that much pride.
The other male gave him a long look, then nudged the food against Rand’s curled fingers, lying loosely against his chest. Rand managed the transfer from that more stable position and brought the food to his lips. Despite the surge of nausea, he got it into his mouth and swallowed.
“Good. So you said your name is Rand. Is that short for something? Randall, Randy?”
Rand’s brow furrowed, parsing the meaning of the question. He noticed the vampire was scrutinizing him, and before he could answer, the fanged annoyance had another question.
“How long has it been since you shifted back to human?”
Long enough. He’d lost track of days, seasons…no, he remembered the seasons. They’d died in the late spring, when it was just giving way to summer. He’d remembered the nearly one-year mark when the summer flowers started cropping up among the sunlit rocks in open spaces. He’d grieved anew and been glad when summer passed into another fall. But by wintertime, it had all proved too much. The last time he’d been human, the despair had overcome him and…
He pushed that away. Over two years. Except for surfacing that one futile time in the second winter, he’d stayed a wolf over two years. He’d felt it taking more and more of his human side away, and he’d let it go with no desire to ever take it back. But imminent death at the hunter’s hand had forced a shift back to human. When a shifter lost control of his faculties, deepest instinct took over and ensured he was in the form most likely to ensure his survival.
Instinct wasn’t always a friend.
No brainer on why he’d shifted to human this time. The vampire wouldn’t have tried to save him if he’d thought Rand was merely a wolf.
He hadn’t answered the male’s question. None of his damn business. Rand kept taking bits of food from his fingers, though. The grease made the contact a slick passage that in turn made him think of other slick things. The vampire’s nakedness showed he’d responded to Rand’s arousal in kind. His cock was as frustratingly perfect as the rest of him, big and thick enough to make a male lose his train of thought, flesh stretching out into heated smoothness as the shaft lengthened and curved toward his flat abdomen.
Rand wanted to clasp his greased fingers over it and see how the vampire responded to being worked as he’d worked Rand.
Or work that grease over his own cock and then fuck the high, muscular ass, show him exactly why he shouldn’t have messed with a wolf. But the strength in the vampire’s hand said that it wouldn’t be as easy as Rand fantasized it would be. Whereas the vampire taking his ass? Right this second, it would be as easy as it had been for the vampire to skewer the dead rabbit.
The vampire kept watching him with those eyes, that contradiction of water-clear blue irises with an abyss of darkness behind them. It was as if he could read his mind. But if he could, he didn’t speak to Rand’s thoughts. Not directly.
“So Rand isn’t a nickname?”
“No,” he managed at the additional prompt. “Just Rand.”
“Hmm.” A grunt in reply. “I’m Cai. You may not remember me telling you that. Mordecai Wallace originally, some two hundred years ago. Made vampire. If you know anything about my kind, you know that makes me blue-collar class among the fanged bipeds.”
Rand had to recall what blue collar meant. When he figured it out, he wasn’t sure how that applied to vampires, but he repeated the name. “Cai.”
The vampire wiped Rand’s mouth with a caressing thumb, startling him. “Terrible table manners. Don’t talk with your mouth full. Someone would think you’d been raised by wolves.”
Wolf jokes. Great. A few days of this and dying of his wounds instead of in battle wouldn’t look so bad. Maybe a few hours.
Cai’s lips curved again and this time there was no mistaking the timing. Or the food was helping to clear Rand’s mind. Suddenly, the incomprehensible comments about marks sank in. He also remembered Cai’s voice in his head when he woke. A startled panic rippled through him, agitating the wounds anew as he started back, an involuntarily reaction.
You can read my thoughts?
“Yeah. That’s part of what second mark means.” Cai gave him an odd look. “My blood can also spur your healing, somewhat. Thanks to the first mark that’s part of the second, I can locate you wherever you are, within a few thousand miles. As I said already, the marks also give you some additional healing properties, and not just from drinking my blood. Though I gave you some when you were out, just to be sure and help you along.”
“I didn’t consent to that.”
Cai’s brow rose, a silken dark curve. “I didn’t ask your permission, wolf. For one thing, you were dying and out of it. For the other, what
makes you think I had to ask?”
“Decency. Moral code. Respect for another will.”
“Yeah. Vampires don’t really go for that kind of stuff. Where’s your pack, alpha wolf?”
As he spoke, Cai removed the rabbit from the spit and laid it on a flat rock beside where Rand was lying. When the vampire used his sharp knife to cut more uniform pieces off the rabbit, Rand noted it was a knife more than capable of gutting prey. Or using lethal force to repel an attack.
Rand closed his hand on the discarded, conveniently sharpened stick.
Summoning a reserve that came purely from will, not from physical strength, he propelled himself up, seized the vampire by the back of the neck for leverage and thrust the stick toward his chest. He shoved himself against the vampire to turn him in the necessary direction.
Because he was injured, he didn’t expect to match the vampire’s speed and strength, even with the element of surprise.
But if they managed to take one another out, Rand wouldn’t have any problems with killing the vampire, rather than simply pissing him off to initiate the mortal combat he craved. Cai had goaded Rand twice, the intelligence in his gaze saying he knew the likely reason an alpha would be a loner. He was right. Decency wasn’t part of him, and that supported what little Rand knew of vampires, leaving him no regrets for his ungrateful act. But he hadn’t asked to be saved.
Cai deflected the blow, but it made good contact, jamming up under his ribs hard enough to produce a grunt and result in a puncture that broke skin, but that was as far as it got. He knocked the weapon out of Rand’s hand and seized his arm, wrenching it back. The pain drove Rand in a different direction and he took it at a full mental run. He contorted, the cry that broke from his lips becoming a howl. The shift was agonizing with his wounds, should have killed him, but maybe that would happen in the aftermath.
The important thing was he’d escaped to his sanctuary. If he was going to die, he was dying as a wolf.
The vampire jumped back, his eyes hard and glittering as Rand finished the transformation and made it to his feet, panting hard, swaying but standing. His ears went flat on either side of his head as he bared his teeth and crouched, prepared to spring. The effort to think like a human was discarded, intent narrowed back to the simplest terms.
Run. Leave. Fight if he tries to stop me.
He charged.
The vampire stepped aside and let him go. Deep inside, what was already desolate became even more barren. The wolf had a disturbing, confusing image in his mind. A hand reaching out, the sensation of touch, the first he’d felt in a long while that meant more than nothing.
But it wasn’t enough. He wouldn’t let it be.
Cai let him run. Restraining a wild animal when he was already injured would only stress him out further, particularly when he was in a fighting mood. He suspected Rand had been in a fighting mood for a while now.
But holy fuck. Even injured, the guy had damn near made the killing blow. Only the speed of Cai’s reaction had saved him, and he wasn’t sure it would have, if the shifter was at full strength. Go figure. He supposed most vampires went through life assuming they were the biggest, baddest things ever. Which just showed they hadn’t had the shit kicked out of them enough. Didn’t take long to lose that sense of superiority.
Unfortunately, it meant the wolf had done it again. Despite the male’s intriguing physical attributes, Cai doubted he would have broken camp to chase after the surly canis lupus if Rand had no more to offer than the novelty of watching him shift—check that off the list—and being a hot alpha male human—double check. Cai had already invested more time in him than he’d expected, hauling Rand’s two hundred plus pound body far enough away from the hunter kill site.
But thinking the shifter might be a match for him physically? Well that made the challenge of having his ass all the more irresistible. Definitely a departure from the usual same-day, different-shit mantra Cai carried inside him.
Even so, for form’s sake, Cai grumbled at the need to pack up camp, including the cooked rabbits, but he completed the necessary tasks, pulled his damp clothes back on, and went back on the hunt.
Based on Rand’s fever, how he’d been shaking and the severity of his injuries, Cai estimated the wolf might make it a mile before his wounds dropped him. He made it three, winning a grudging smile from Cai, and something else.
When Rand had gone after him with the spit, trying his best to get Cai to kill him, the up-close-and-personal depth of his agony had penetrated Cai’s cynicism, something he admittedly maintained to a hard-as-rock exterior.
Part of it was how the wolf hadn’t been entirely self-sacrificing about the matter. He would have been happy to take Cai down with him, a convenient perk to his suicide wish. The shifter was hurting, grieving, and yet pissed as hell. A worthy opponent. He wanted to die, supposedly, yeah, but he wanted to go down in a struggle to the death with an adversary, someone he could fight to deal with that grief.
The loss of his pack. His family.
Yeah, that part wasn’t hard to decipher. Everyone had pain and loss. Big fucking deal. The shifter had lost his family. Boo-hoo. Yet the look in his eyes when he’d spat out those words, decency, morality, had made Cai feel…less. That intrigued him.
Anyone who could get him to feel anything intrigued him.
As he dropped to his heels next to the wolf, Cai probed with all his senses to be sure he was unconscious, not wanting a replay of the hunter’s mistake. This time he hadn’t shifted back to human. Since the guy obviously preferred his quadruped body, Cai guessed there were states in which the shift was involuntary, like when he’d become human in front of Cai, despite an obvious desire not to do so.
His gaze coursed over the wolf. When Rand was standing on all four feet, his lifted head would damn near reach Cai’s shoulder. Cai revised his opinion on the weight issue. Given the bone structure of both man and wolf, he expected Rand was probably two hundred and fifty pounds or more in full health, and the wolf wasn’t far from the same. The guy had looked a little on the lean side, like he hadn’t been eating as much as he should to feed all those muscles.
At least Rand had fallen out near a fresh water source, a gurgling creek. Spreading out his bedroll, Cai considered moving Rand’s bulk onto it, but decided on something else first. Dropping back to one knee, he laid his palm on Rand’s rising and falling chest. His breath was shallower than it had been before. The dumbass had pushed himself.
“You’re not dying.” He wasn’t taking any more shit on this from the Grim Reaper. This wolf was going to live, at least long enough for Cai to enjoy a good, thorough fuck with him.
Creation was a multi-faceted tool, even when staying clear of the darker side of its coin. It could reach out and feel so much, translate different kinds of languages, all unspoken.
Cai closed his eyes, connecting to it, and to what was beneath his palm. Rand’s energy…it was earth and blood, wind against his face. And pain. The wolf and the man had experienced the grief and loss together, but the wolf was less self-destructive than the human side…and more protective.
Could he have done it if Rand was awake, in control of his faculties? Probably not without a hell of an ugly fight, but it was a path Cai was able to follow right now, probably because it served both his interests and that of the wolf’s.
He let the energy unwind and then broke the contact as whatever was inside Rand took over, triggered by Cai’s push and the shifter’s unconscious will to survive. Literally.
The shift was smoother this time, more like watching sculpting clay shape itself on a spinning wheel. A few breaths later, the man lay there, not even a tuft of wolf hair remaining.
“Nifty.” Cai grunted. He cleaned the wounds again, ripping up one of the shirts in his pack to bind them. Because vampires healed instantly from anything but death blows, he didn’t carry a first aid kit. A quick trip to town might eventually be needed. He really was investing an unreasonable level of effort in this g
uy.
But the hunter’s vehicle was a few miles off. He could use the SUV to save him some running time. Leaving it even farther away from the kill site wouldn’t be a bad thing.
With some antibiotics and other supplies to keep the wounds clean and dressed, Cai suspected the shifter’s own healing ability, and his second mark upon Rand, would do the trick.
Teasing the male’s lips open with the neck of his water bottle, Cai massaged his throat to get him to swallow. Small amounts at a consistent pace to keep him hydrated. Cai also dampened a piece of the ripped shirt and ran it along Rand’s face, neck and groin area to help cool him down. It was a pleasure to touch his body, to handle his inert cock and heavy testicles, the tender crevices, pale lengths of inner thighs. He had a nice crisp layering of hair on his legs that Cai stroked with his fingertips as he rubbed the soaked cloth over his feet, bemused by the long arches and surprisingly smooth soles.
“Why not…let me die?” A strained whisper.
“Because I’m pissed at the world, too,” Cai said shortly. “It isn’t a good enough reason to check out. You’re right, there’s nothing after, so how the hell can you make everyone else miserable if you’re not around?”
At the resulting silence, he looked up. Rand’s eyes had closed tighter, as did his mouth, reflecting a pain that had nothing to do with his wounds. “Can’t fight what you can’t change,” the male said. “Hurts. Just want to stop…hurting.”
Abandoning the cloth, Cai poured some of the water over his hand and used the flesh-on-flesh contact to cool the flaming skin. “You’re less vindictive than me, wolf. If I’m hurting, I want everyone else to suffer with me.”
