Shadow of a Wolf

by Jez Morrow

  His long limbs lay relaxed, his strong, hard-edged muscles at rest. He looked beautiful and thoroughly ravished. He was too lean. The spareness of flesh did amazing things to his looks, giving him an ethereal beauty. Jack ached for him.

  Last night had been nothing but pleasure and pure joy for Jack. For Martin, it had been a kind of shattering. Jack let him sleep.

  Feeling light, Jack pulled on a pair of jeans and padded downstairs, put the coffee on and started breakfast. Happy, he knew he was smiling like an idiot. Couldn’t help it.

  Soon, he heard a stirring upstairs, very light. Martin could move like a shadow.

  Jack had come to a stopping point in the breakfast preparations. He set the frying pan aside, off the burner, so he wouldn’t scorch anything if he didn’t come back to the kitchen for a while.

  He took the stairs by twos, his cock straining at his jeans. He knew Martin was going to say something sarcastic about his big grin. Jack was just too happy and could not hold it in.

  He bounded to his bedroom.

  The room was empty. The bed a delighted rumple of sheets.

  The master bathroom door was open, no sounds coming from within.

  Jack backtracked down the hall to what was supposed to have been Martin’s room for last night.

  The window was open. Cold air billowed the curtains.

  Martin was gone.

  For a moment, Jack was seized with terror. Maybe Martin’s fears had not been paranoia after all and Jack just hadn’t listened. Was someone hunting Martin? Had they tracked him here?

  Jack ran to the open window, and leaned out.

  Wolf tracks in the soft earth below led away into the forest.

  No one had come to capture or kill Martin. Martin had run away.

  His clothes were gone. His gym bag was gone.

  He was not coming back.

  An overwhelming hollowness froze Jack’s chest, making it hard to breathe. He left the room in a nightmare trance.

  He could not go back down to the happy kitchen, where coffee for two waited. Pain hit so hard it dizzied him. He sat down at the top of the staircase.

  How could something so overwhelming, so soul-shaking, not be shared?

  He had been flying so very high. Coming down from that height, that fast, that hard, did not feel like he should survive. A buzzing filled his head.

  He had to remember to breathe. It hurt.

  He was alone again.

  Chapter Three

  Jack lost his parents when he was still quite young, before his adolescence when he discovered that he could transform into a wolf—not with the changes of the moon but at will.

  The first time had not been his conscious will at all. It had been an accident. In a fit of grief over his parents’ deaths, screaming at the merciless heavens, young Jack Reed had morphed into a howling animal.

  It was luck that he had been alone at the time.

  And it was a huge relief to find out that he could change back again just by wanting to.

  He would remember for the rest of his life frantically pulling his clothes back on, yanking on his socks inside-out in panic, before someone could come upon him and ask him what the hell he was doing outside naked as a pervert in the middle of the afternoon.

  The second time was on purpose, carefully planned, alone in the forest land he had inherited from his father. He didn’t even know what sort of creature he had become until he found a woodland pool, looked down into the still water and saw a black wolf with eyes like his looking back at him.

  There was no one he could ask about it. He searched his parents’ papers for some clue, some record of how this could be happening to him. The only faint hint that his mom and dad could have known anything about it was a piece of jewelry of his mother’s. A wolf head ring among her old high school vintage stuff. Could be nothing. Or had she known? Had she been a wolf too?

  His guardians—his father’s brother and his wife—seemed entirely oblivious that there could be anything odd about their nephew Jack.

  For a long time, Jack wondered if there was anyone else in the world like him.

  He grew up to become a Naval Intelligence officer.

  Navy because his Dad had been.

  Intelligence because he had a drive to know things.

  He was very good at uncovering secrets. Except for the secret of what he was and were there any others.

  He served two tours on the battleship USS New Jersey, then came Stateside and was working now at the Pentagon with the Department of Defense.

  His Georgetown townhouse was his official residence these days. The log cabin was a retreat he built on the wooded land where he had first discovered his true nature.

  He had all but given up any hope of ever finding how he had become what he was, or of finding anyone else like himself.

  Then came the sunny day when he took a romp in the woods behind his log cabin to cool off. He needed to cool off, not because the day was hot. He needed it because he was hot and horny and frustrated.

  He never felt desire as a wolf. So whenever he was feeling unbearably randy and had no one to share his bed, he turned into a wolf to clear his senses.

  The day was fine and crisp. He ran all out, just to feel his muscles move.

  Forest air filled his lungs. He scared all the birds and the rabbits.

  He bounded through the underbrush, collecting burrs on his thick black coat. He leapt over logs, splashed into cold streams. He saw something up on the embankment.

  And stopped dead.

  Another wolf.

  The District of Columbia was not known for wolves.

  Could it be? Dare he even think it could be? Had to be.

  Someone like himself.

  Jack’s hopes leapt.

  The skinny little wolf’s lip curled into a snarl and it growled low, threatening, its hackles raised.

  The wolf looked so raw and wild that Jack’s spirits sank again, realizing it was probably just a real wolf after all. Maybe someone’s cast-off pet that had become too much for its owner. This animal did not look as if it had ever been tamed.

  It had a silver coat over a loose rangy build. Its light topaz eyes flared, teeth bared. Jack thought it was a little she-wolf.

  But those topaz eyes were too knowing. There was someone home behind those eyes. And she was bluffing.

  Jack’s spirits soared again. The eyes told Jack that this creature absolutely had to be one of his own kind.

  Overjoyed, Jack bounded up the bank. The other wolf crouched, head down, snarling, ears pinned flat back, tail clamped between legs.

  Jack trotted right up, bowed down dog-style in invitation to play. Then he sprang up and ran circles around the stranger. He batted the silver wolf in the side with his own big paw. Tag! His tongue lolling in a big wolfly smile the whole while.

  The other wolf was not amused. He. Jack saw now that it was a he.

  The little wolf growled. But the ears were lifting, the tail relaxing and the growling subsided into a mutter.

  Jack raced back and forth with an exuberant come-with-me barking.

  The silver wolf grudgingly stirred himself, followed Jack where he led—pausing now and then to sniff the air, circle ‘round to look back suspiciously, topaz eyes furtive. Then he would lower his head and continue following Jack.

  They came to the log cabin.

  The silver wolf held back, as if smelling a trap. At he last followed Jack through the open door.

  Inside the cabin, Jack galloped up the stairs, grabbed sweatpants and a shirt in his mouth and thundered down the stairs to drop the clothes at the silver wolf’s feet.

  Then he turned tail and ran back up to his bedroom. He transformed into a man, threw some clothes on, and thudded back down the stairs like Christmas morning.

  And yes, there was a young man, dressed in Jack’s too-big sweats, looking very surly. And very sultry.

  The young man was too spare for his big bones, all hard muscle and bone and satin skin. He
had an otherworldly beauty, entirely male but beautiful. He looked hunted, haunted, brooding. His topaz eyes were very large, set in their wide orbits, finely shaped and wary.

  Jack’s clothes hung loose on the slender young man. “Not a great fit,” Jack allowed.

  “You’re bigger than I am,” said the stranger.

  “No, I could never say that.”

  The stranger glared at him sourly.

  But there was no hiding the size of that. Within the sweatpants, the stranger was well hung. His body was hard and taut, his big bones finely sculpted. His shoulders were wide, his waist hard and narrow.

  Jack was the taller, broader, like a stallion next to a gazelle. Jack’s dark eyes sparkled, his smile was bright white. Jack Reed was a very handsome man, with dark hair, a strong chin and a strapping, well-proportioned build.

  “Dog,” the stranger snapped dryly.

  Jack only smiled more brightly still, nearly laughing. His brows lifted quizzically. “Dog?”

  Martin spoke, wryly, “So this big mutt runs circles ‘round me, comes up and smacks me in the side with his big paw and does the ‘Do you want to play?’ pose, smiles and wags his tail, while all the time I’m telling you I am going to kill you. And then the dumb shit does the ‘Come this way, Timmy!’ doggie maneuver. Did you think you were Lassie?”

  “Oh yeah, smartass?” Jack shot back merrily. “I thought you were a girl.”

  “And now I’m standing in a stranger’s house, in baggy clothes, talking at this big, overly cheerful dick who thinks he’s found a new best friend.”

  “All true, except that you found me,” said Jack, completely unfazed by the abuse. The insults just didn’t sound convincing. “How did you find me?”

  “Reports of wolf sightings. There is not just a whole lot in the way of wolfage inside the Beltway, so I had to wonder. The sightings were of a black wolf, so I knew the reports were not about me. I haven’t let myself be sighted.”

  “I didn’t know I had been seen,” said Jack. “I never saw any report in the news.”

  “Not in the news,” said the stranger. “At the Bureau.”

  “The Bureau.” That could only be the FBI. Jack barked a laugh, “You’re an X-File!”

  “There are no X-Files, you idiot.” Then the young man’s artistically shaped head snapped aside like a hawk’s. “Jack. Jack Reed. Lieutenant Commander. U.S. Navy.”

  “I told you who I was,” said Jack.

  “I know you,” said the stranger, recognition setting in. Then, suspicious, accusing, “You were in the database—searching in the same files I was! You’re the Jack Reed who ran a data search on werewolves. You were looking for me.”

  Jack shook his head, no. “I was looking for me. I was afraid I was a weapon.”

  “So your search word was ‘werewolf’? Are you a werewolf?”

  “Same as you,” said Jack.

  “Werewolf?” The stranger drew his chin in, taking insult. “Maybe girl wolves obey the phases of the moon but I don’t.”

  “Girl wolves? Are there girl wolves?” Jack asked. Then, not waiting for an answer, he said, “Are you hungry? I don’t have much here but I can do breakfast. Who are you?”

  His name was Martin Winter. He worked across the Potomac from Jack, in the J. Edgar Hoover Building. He was a Special Agent in the FBI’s Criminal Investigation Branch, in the Office of Law Enforcement Coordination.

  “There are no X-Files in the FBI,” Martin repeated. Then, in the first of Martin’s dry jabs that Jack came to know well, he added, “That’s the Air Force’s job.”

  Breakfast was bacon and eggs. And coffee.

  Martin had already done a background check on this Jack Reed in the Bureau’s database. Reports painted Jack Reed as just the nicest guy. Lacking a certain gravitas and political ambition but Lieutenant Commander Jack Reed was a steady officer with a snow-white reputation.

  But the Jack Reed that Martin had read about kept a residence in town—not out here in the middle of the woods.

  “What is this place?” Martin looked ‘round at the rough unfinished beams, the sawhorses, the tools in what was to be the great room.

  “This is my weekend project,” said Jack.

  Of all the rooms, only the kitchen was nearly finished. The appliances, the tall hickory cabinets, the fixtures were all high-end. The rest of it was a half formed vision.

  This mesmerizing creature brought life and light to the space. The floorboards were well sanded and smooth under Martin’s bare feet. Transom lights were set over all the large windows. Sawdust floated in the beams of sunlight that streamed through them, dreamlike and luminous. Martin looked like a magical creature in the midst of it.

  The land had been in the Reed family since 1803. It bordered on wetlands, so there would be no other houses around him. Jack’s neighbors had antlers.

  “What were you doing out there?” Martin demanded.

  “Running,” said Jack. “What brings you to my woods?”

  “You, it would seem,” said Martin. “I was looking for my own kind. I found one.” He raked Jack up and down with his eyes, then revised his statement, “More or less.”

  The two were alike, yet so not. The suspicious and the trusting. The cheerful and the scowling. The friendly and the prickly. Jack and Martin had only one thing in common. A huge thing.

  They asked each other at the same time, “How many of us are there?”

  Each blinked at the echo of his own question from the other.

  Jack was first to answer, “I thought I was the only one.”

  Martin tilted his head to one side, and said, “Then we have a known total of two.”

  Each of them thought it odd that both of them ended up in the intelligence community—Jack in Naval Intelligence with the Department of Defense, Martin in the FBI. Both would do anything for their country but neither of them had ever entrusted anyone else with the secret of the wolf. It was too outrageous. No one would ever even believe it, if told. And both of them harbored the real fear that if they were ever to show their ability to transform, they would be locked away and analyzed to death.

  “So tell me, DOD,” Martin called Jack by his place of work—Department of Defense. “Did your guys over at the Pentagon create us? Are we secret weapons?”

  “No,” Jack shook his head. “No country is even working on anything remotely like this. Can you imagine asking for funding?”

  “No,” Martin admitted. “But just being like this doesn’t make any sense either.”

  They asked each other about their parents, but found no possible kinship between them.

  Jack was Maryland-born. His mother was a Daughter of the American Revolution through and through. Father’s family was just as old. There had been a Reed in the Navy ever since there had been a Navy on these shores.

  Martin was born in Virginia but was not a true Southerner because his family roots went back only as far as Ellis Island. His grandparents had not come over until after the Civil War.

  “From Romania? Transylvania?” Jack asked.

  “Germany and Moravia,” Martin answered, not amused.

  Jack’s family was close and loving.

  Martin’s parents divorced when he was young. Martin had been reared more or less, by his father, which really amounted to Martin fending for himself.

  Martin’s mother had remarried. She lived in a cute gingerbread Victorian house with her second husband, their three children, a minivan, a town car, a rose garden and a toy poodle.

  “I confess to murdering the poodle,” said Martin. “Can’t say I’m not a son of a bitch.”

  Martin ended up staying the day at Jack’s cabin, helping him run electrical cable and hang lights.

  They were two creatures of twilight, as different as dawn and dusk—misty morning and gathering darkness—they seemed two halves of a whole.

  Martin had spent that night there at Jack’s cabin, curled up in wolf form by the big stone hearth. He filled a place in Jack’s h
eart and home he never knew was vacant.

  Losing him a second time, Jack felt the pain of his absence more than ever.

  And wondered where Martin was now.

  * * * * *

  A silver gray wolf curled up, shivering, in the forest.

  Hiding from himself.

  Martin the wolf huddled down in a hollow by a rotting log, making himself very small amid the moss and acorns and forest litter. The place exhaled earthy scents of black dirt and the sharp sweetness of last year’s oak leaves.

  Wind soughing through the treetops brought down a rain of bright yellow maple leaves. They pattered down softly around him. Pine boughs nodded over his hiding place.

  He was not cold. He could not stop shaking…

  He shied from a memory too hot, too searing—the amazing sensation of Jack’s hot, wet tongue on his body, of Jack’s mouth on his straining cock, of Jack coming inside him. Martin kicked at the memory. He could not believe his own wild abandon, his shattering climax, the sounds that tore from his throat.

  He pushed against the images, the sensations.

  And visited the memory again.

  He quivered, wincing at the piercing keen snapshots of memory. He curled back up, tail over his face, a frightened animal, fearing what he felt.

  An animal groan rose in his throat at the memory of Jack’s hands—big hands, calloused hands, of a man who worked with wood. He remembered the warm and tender touch of those hands. He relived Jack’s hot kisses on his throat, tracing fire on his skin, Jack’s tongue in his mouth, filling his soul…

  Sensations and emotions flooded back, out of control, terrifying.

  He cringed to remember writhing like a cat in heat under the caress of Jack’s tongue on his body. The roughness of Jack’s cheek on the inside of Martin’s thighs, the utter masculinity of it hit hard and enflamed him. This great beast, this animal power, was undeniably, altogether male and Martin had yielded, submitting to another man. And loved it.