The Vampire's Wolf

by Jenna Kernan

  Mac had guessed correctly. Friday night had been her first time with Jeffery. She’d been uncertain, and the sex had been disappointing. Her fault, she knew, because she’d held back. She told herself that it was because she still missed Matthew, but deep down she knew something was wrong and she was afraid.

  MacConnelly rested a hand over hers. She glanced down at the connection, their hands sitting one upon the other on his carefully made bed, and then she looked into his eyes. She had his complete attention.

  “Princess, tell me what happened.”

  She slipped her hand away and pressed both hands to her chest. She didn’t know why he needed to know this, but she would tell him.

  “We woke up together. Jeffery felt off, he said. His stomach was upset. He threw up and then the dizziness started. He wouldn’t let me call an ambulance, but then he threw up his coffee, too. So I got him to my car and drove him to the emergency room. They ran tests, gave him fluids. That helped. But then he blacked out. They said he might have internal bleeding and took him to surgery, but there was nothing. Now they think there might be something wrong with his immune system. No white blood cells. That’s impossible, isn’t it, to be healthy one minute and so sick the next?”

  He gave her a long unblinking stare. He didn’t seem surprised. Her body chilled.

  What if the doctors were wrong? What if everything Nana said was true? No. It’s impossible. She dismissed the thought, but a tiny shard of dread remained lodged in her heart like a sliver of glass.

  “Nana said I had to leave Jeffery or he’d get sick. She said Matthew had been sick because of me. But that’s crazy, right?”

  He didn’t speak, just continued that assessing stare. Bri looked away.

  She could pretend that she was normal, that everything was normal, but it wasn’t. She wasn’t.

  Chapter 5

  “Was it me?” Bri whispered. “Did I do something to him.” She glanced at Mac.

  His mouth was grim. A frost crept through her body. Tears leaked from the corners of her eyes.

  “Been any other men in your life, Princess?”

  “Yes. One. Before...” Before that woman at the high school showed up and called her sister.

  “Tell me about him.”

  “Matt was my high school steady. We never, you know.” She shrugged her shoulders and looked at her hands, now folded into one tight knot of interlaced fingers. “But senior year he proposed and I said yes. My nana was so angry. She forbade me to see him. I thought she was just being old-fashioned. During his freshman year he came home on Thanksgiving break and...” She stared at him as the panic began to rip at her with tiny, sharp claws. Oh, God, it was her! “Do you know why this happened?”

  “Tell me the rest, Princess.”

  “He got sick, too. But he went back to school and he got better and then...” The unease was rising to panic. Her heart knocked against her ribs and the sound of her breathing reminded her of an asthma patient in the midst of an attack. “He came home for Christmas.”

  “He got sick again?”

  She pounded her fists on her thighs. “No! He died. Undetected aneurysm in his brain. That’s what they said.” She met his steady stare. “But that wasn’t it. Was it, MacConnelly?”

  He cocked his head as those crystal eyes judged her. “You really didn’t know, did you, Princess?”

  “Know what?”

  “How long between Matthew and Jeffery?”

  Why? Why did he ask her this?

  “I don’t know...four years, I think.”

  MacConnelly gritted his teeth and winced. “Four? He should be dead.” His gaze swept her as if searching for answers.

  “What?”

  “Nothing. Jeffery was lucky because you got more potent with time. Didn’t you know that?”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Anyone in between?”

  She shook her head.

  “But you lived with your grandmother. How could that be? Was she like you?”

  “No, she wasn’t at all like me.”

  “Then I don’t understand. How did she live so long? I read her obit on the Internet. Eighty-eight. Died one month ago.”

  Brianna covered her mouth, trying to force back the grief at her grandmother’s passing and the fear that threatened her sanity. “Please tell me what’s happening.”

  She tried to remember all her nana had said. All the nonsense, the doctors called it, just the drug-induced ranting of a dying brain. But now Brianna knew better. Now she could no longer ignore her grandmother’s final words.

  “Did she know, Princess? She must have known to have lived with you so long. Unless you were just turned. When were you bitten?”

  “Bitten? I don’t understand.” She stared at him in confusion. “I was never bitten. My nana said that I’m a Feyling. She said I was born of the Fey. Born, not turned.”

  “Feylings? I never heard that.” He sat with one leg folded at the hip, half turned toward her now, the stiffness still starching his spine, as if being a Marine somehow came from the inside. “What did your grandmother tell you exactly?”

  Her skin crawled at the memory and she rubbed her hands over her arms. “She said my mother was a fairy.”

  “A fairy?”

  Brianna nodded, knowing how crazy that sounded. “That’s what she said. She was a particular kind of fairy called a Leanan Sidhe. And that all fairies are real and that my mother didn’t really die. She just abandoned me to return to her world with the Fey.”

  “Is that true?” he asked.

  “I don’t know. But it is what she said.”

  “That would make you half fairy.”

  That thought had occurred to her. It explained many odd things about her, things she’d tried to hide during her childhood and continued to hide now that she was an adult.

  “I know,” she whispered. “She said a Feyling is one born of a union of the Fey with a mortal, my father. He was a writer. A great writer.”

  “We’ve never known the origin of your kind. Fairy makes as much sense as any other crazy theory I’ve heard.” He scrubbed his eyes with his hands and released a long breath. Then he turned his troubled gaze on her again. “But we have another name for your kind, Princess.” She heard a definite note of regret in his voice.

  She sat on the edge of the bed, waiting, knowing that whatever he was about to tell her, she was not going to like it.

  His gaze had gone cold again. “Vampire.”

  Bri gasped and drew back as if he’d slapped her. “No, that’s what’s chasing me.”

  “Because you are one of them.”

  “But that’s not possible. I don’t drink blood. I’m a vegetarian, for goodness’ sake. I helped build low-income housing and marched to stop the war. I’m working part-time as a social worker. I’m a good person, not a monster.”

  “You’re one of them.”

  “But I don’t look like them. I’m not...I’m—”

  “—beautiful, like all the females. Bewitching, they say.” He made it sound like a condemnation, bitten between clamped teeth. “Irresistible to mortal men.”

  “No,” she said, gasping now, her mind screaming denial as her stomach ached like a raw, oozing wound.

  He laid out the evidence. “You can fly.”

  “I can’t.”

  “Well, something damn close. How’d you get up on that roof?”

  “I sort of bounced.” Why didn’t he seem shocked? It was almost as if he expected her to say this. Bri became more certain that he knew things that she needed to know.

  His brow knit together. The gesture only added to his good looks. She edged away as another truth hit her, werewolves killed vampires, and she was a vampire.

  “I’m going to be
sick.”

  She barely made it to the toilet. Mac waited in the door frame as she finished retching, then offered her a wet towel. She washed her face with the cool terry cloth. Afterward, he gave her his mouthwash and a glass. When she finished she looked at herself in the mirror and saw that her skin still looked flawless and her hair still danced merrily about her heart-shaped face. But her green eyes now looked dead.

  She lowered the glass to the sink and faced the Marine sergeant who knew what she was.

  “You mean that if I’d been born a boy, I’d be—”

  “—like them.”

  She shivered, rubbing her upper arms with her hands, as if she were standing naked under a shower of ice water.

  “You can self-heal, too. I’m sure you know that.”

  She nodded. It was one of the differences her nana had told her to keep to herself. She was never sick and never injured for long.

  “And you suck the life force from any human male you sleep with.There are soul-sucking vampires, too. All female vampires are soul-suckers” He pressed an index finger to the center of her forehead as if sighting the placement of a bullet. “Like you.”

  She started to deny this and then hesitated. A chill broke over her and she huddled, shrugging her shoulders as the chill ate deep into her bones.

  “I killed Matthew. I almost killed Jeffery.”

  His eyes met hers and he gave a slow nod. She saw it then, the truth. He understood her self-loathing, the disgust at what she had done. What had he done that made him understand? Something bad, it was clear in those sky-blue eyes.

  “At least yours were accidents,” he said.

  Was that some sort of consolation prize?

  “So I killed a man I loved and sent another to the hospital, but I didn’t mean to hurt them, so that’s supposed to make everything okay?” Her voice was nearly unrecognizable, a screeching thing, totally unfamiliar now.

  “No. Not okay. It will never be okay. Just, well, we all have regrets.”

  “Regrets!” Her hands flew up and then dropped down limp to her sides, as she muttered, “Regrets.”

  “We thought vampires were made, like werewolves, from a bite. But this explains why the males have to chase the females, to hunt them, bring them in, especially if they can’t make new vampires through a bite. They’d have to sleep with you.”

  “What!”

  “I’ve seen the males. So have you. Would you have sex with one?”

  She hugged herself. “Never.”

  “Then they need to catch females in order to mate. Catch them and keep them captive, at least until they deliver. And you escaped because you were warned?”

  She nodded, “Twice.”

  He took hold of her forearm and led her back to the bed, seating her. He sat down beside her again and the bed sagged.

  The lump in her throat was the size of a golf ball.

  “Now about the woman. Who was she?”

  “Which one? There were two.”

  “The one at the hospital.”

  Brianna thought back to the lovely woman wearing a long gray cardigan that swept the tops of her stylish boots. The black beret covered most of her strawberry blond hair, but she knew the woman was a beauty with a clear complexion, a generous mouth and startling gray eyes. She had been perfectly lovely. Too perfect, she now knew. When they’d been on the ground floor, the woman had grabbed Brianna’s arm and held on until the elevator left without them.

  “I’d never seen her before. She stopped me, pulled me into the alcove before the outpatient surgery doors and told me that there were male vampires hunting me. That they couldn’t track me until I was grown, but now they had and they were waiting on the fourth floor for me to show up. She told me to run.”

  “Why did she warn you?”

  “I asked her that. She said, ‘Eight years. That’s how long they had me. No one warned me. No one helped me. Maybe you’ll make it, because you’re first generation.’ But she said that will make them want me more. They won’t give up. They never give up.”

  “What’s ‘first generation’?”

  “I don’t know, except that my mom was a fairy. That’s what Nana said.”

  His brow wrinkled and his words seemed more for himself than her. “First generation. What difference does that make?” His gaze snapped back to her. “Then what?”

  “She told me what the males had done to her. It was years of abuse. Rape. She was quick, and when she finished she vanished. I was looking at her one minute and the next she was gone. She just glanced over her shoulder and said, ‘Run.’ Then poof.”

  “So you left the hospital?”

  “No. I ran out of the hospital. Then I went to the apartment I share, shared, with Nana. I have it until the end of the month. But they broke in while I was there, so I ran again. But it was different this time.”

  “Everyone slowed down?”

  She fidgeted with her thumbnail. “Yes.”

  “Tell me about that.”

  She did and when she finished describing her journey he was silent for a moment as he absently rubbed his jaw. He was clean-shaven again, she realized, unlike when she’d arrived. His smooth cheeks made his jaw even more defined. She watched the rhythmic stroke of his index finger over his face and noticed how the muscles of his forearm corded with the muscles of her stomach. Just looking at him made her twitch.

  “Maybe they didn’t slow down. Maybe you sped up.”

  She paused to consider that. “How?”

  “Same way you got on my roof.”

  It all was too much. She covered her face, hunching forward as she wept in long, wracking cries. His big, strong arm came around her, dragging her to his side as she fell against that wide chest. After a time the tears slowed. She sniffed and wiped her eyes, listening to the comforting rhythm of his heartbeat as he held her, giving comfort and asking for nothing in return.

  “Nana told me some things before she died, but I didn’t believe her. I didn’t want to believe her. In my heart I knew it was true. But I thought if I just pretended hard enough, if I kept believing that I was like everyone else, I could go on as I was. But it can’t ever be that way again.”

  She sagged against him, letting him hold her, letting him comfort her as she released some of the fear and sorrow in her heart. Then she remembered what she was.

  “No!” She extended her hands, pushing with all her might.

  * * *

  Brianna was stronger than Mac expected. Stronger than she looked but not strong enough to escape him.

  “You can’t hurt me,” he assured.

  “Yes. I can. I will. Please, let me go.” Tears streamed from her eyes as she stared up at him begging for release. “I can’t. I won’t do this again.”

  He eased his grip, letting her draw back, but not away. He wanted to tell her, if only to reassure her that whatever happened with human males, it would not happen with him. But first he’d have to tell her the truth.

  “You can’t hurt me, Princess. I’m like Johnny. I’m a werewolf, too.”

  She stilled as his confession registered. Her fingers gripped his shirt and her lovely eyes went wide. The sea-green depths, stormy as some internal turbulence made her body shudder. The flush began at her neck and then spread to make her cheeks a rosy pink.

  “You’re like him?”

  Was that fear in her eyes or hope?

  He nodded.

  “I smelled it. I just thought...but if you’re a wolf, then why did you keep Johnny from killing me?”

  “You asked for my protection.”

  “But I’m your natural enemy. I thought I was influencing you, but if it’s true...then what I am didn’t cause your actions. Werewolves aren’t drawn to vampires, except to kill them. That’s what I was told
.”

  “But I am drawn to you. What man wouldn’t be?”

  “Why don’t you turn me in?”

  He glared at her, angry it seemed, over her insistence to keep poking at him for answers. His jaw worked hard as if crushing something between his molars.

  “Because I don’t know what they would do to you.”

  “They wouldn’t help me?”

  “I doubt that very much.” He filled his lungs with a great breath of air and then blew it away.

  “I don’t understand why you are helping me. If you are a werewolf—”

  He interrupted her. “I am.”

  “Well, then. The woman said...she said that a werewolf could kill vampires, but I didn’t know I was a vampire then. I knew it was dangerous, but I didn’t understand how dangerous.”

  “If you knew all that, then why’d you come?”

  She dropped her chin and her hands fell to her lap. She looked small and defenseless. He kept one arm about her waist and waited. When she finally spoke, her voice was just a whisper.

  “Because I’d rather die than go with them.” That admission took the roses from her cheeks. She looked pale now to the point of fainting. What did they do to their women that made them ready to run into the open jaws of a werewolf? The hairs on his neck lifted at her words. Rape, she’d said. Years of it.

  His CO said the males held the females for indoctrination. But that was all. Did they know what really went on?

  She rested a hand on his chest. “Thank you for fighting for me, for lying for me and for sheltering me. You’ve done so much, but I have another favor to ask.”

  He lifted his brows, waiting.

  “Can you call and check on Jeffery? I’m so worried about him.”

  His mouth when grim. “Because you love him?”

  “No.” She said that too quickly and realized with some guilt that it was true. She didn’t love him, hadn’t, even though she had tried so hard. “I don’t. It’s because I hurt him.”