Laura's Wolf (Werewolf Marines)

by Lia Silver

  “My mom was a cop.”

  “Was?”

  “She died four years ago.”

  “I’m sorry. Was it—um…” Laura’s voice trailed off awkwardly.

  “In the line of duty? Not the way you’re thinking. Her partner pulled up at a 7-11 to get coffee. When he came back to the car, he thought she’d fallen asleep. He was all ready to razz her about it. But she was dead. It turned out that she’d been born with a heart defect. She could have died at any time. But no one knew about it. Not even her.”

  “How tragic.” Laura’s gaze was warm with sympathy.

  “It was tragic that she died young,” Roy replied. “But maybe it was just as well that she didn’t know. She got to be a cop, which she loved. She raised me. If she’d spent her whole life knowing that she could drop dead at any second, she might have done everything differently.”

  The rawness of his grief had worn off over the years, but the scar remained as a catch and ache in his heart. Uncomfortably, he realized that he envied Mom a little. She’d gotten to die with her boots on.

  He didn’t want to be pushy, but he couldn’t resist returning to the subject of Laura’s career. “You’d make a good cop.”

  Her smile quivered nervously around the edges. “What, you’re not going to try to recruit me for the Marines?”

  “No,” he said bluntly. “I don’t think you’re suited. I get the feeling that in a bad situation, you’d rather talk your way out than shoot your way out.”

  “That’s true. A guy pulled a gun on me once. I didn’t think he intended to shoot me, but he was sure as hell pissed. I started talking. Fifteen minutes later, he’d put the gun away, promised me that he still intended to pay the ransom for my non-existent kidnapped business partner, and offered to buy me a diamond bracelet as an apology for his crazy suspicions.”

  “Did you take him up on it?” Roy asked, amused.

  Laura grinned. “It’s gorgeous. I wish I’d brought it to show off to you.”

  “Think you’d enjoy using your amazing powers of persuasion for a better cause?”

  Shamefacedly, she nodded, her eyes cast down.

  Roy caught her chin in his hand and tipped it upward, forcing her to look into his eyes. “Then do it. The reason I thought you’d be a good cop is because that’s what good cops do. They walk into dangerous situations, and they talk. My mom spent twenty years arresting all sorts of criminals, but she never once had to fire her gun.”

  Laura’s gaze slid past him, as if she was peering into her own future. “I have to think about this. But I think you’re on to something. The other thing that occurs to me… maybe I’ve read too many novels… but I’ve always daydreamed about being a private investigator.”

  “That could be the best of both worlds. You get to talk to people and there’s risk involved, but there’s no fitness tests and no chance of your past getting you in trouble. Plus, I bet there’s a lot less paperwork.”

  Roy stacked the empty coffee mugs on top of the empty plates and headed for the kitchen sink.

  An explosion shattered the air. White-hot light blinded him, agony splintered through his head, and the shock wave knocked him sprawling.

  I stepped on a mine, Roy thought dazedly. So that’s what it feels like.

  His thoughts felt slow and sticky, like drying blood.

  He couldn’t hear. He couldn’t see. He couldn’t stand. Laura might be hurt, might be bleeding to death in front of him, and he wouldn’t be able to help her.

  The blasting noise stopped, leaving his ears ringing. Light no longer blazed against his eyelids. He opened his eyes with dread, expecting to see the cabin in charred ruins around him.

  He was laid out on the kitchen floor, surrounded by shattered china. The rest of the cabin was intact.

  Laura hurried toward him from across the room, looking worried but otherwise fine. “Roy! Are you all right?”

  “I’m fine,” he said, though he felt like he’d been hit by a truck and thrown across the street. He managed to sit up, but he didn’t trust himself to stand. “What the hell happened?”

  Laura kicked aside some broken plate pieces and knelt beside him. “The power came back on—I’d left the lights and TV on. They’re turned off now.”

  The lights and the TV. That was all it took to flatten him. He wanted to kick his own treacherous body.

  “Is it always that bad for you?” Laura asked. The concern in her voice made him feel even more humiliated.

  Roy shook his head, then immediately wished he hadn’t. A wave of dizziness passed over him, and his vision blurred. “It’s gotten worse. It used to hurt, but not drop me like that.”

  “Maybe it’s the shock,” she suggested. “Haven’t you gone weeks without being exposed to electricity at all?”

  “Exposed to? It’s a light bulb, not a chemical weapon!”

  Laura flinched back, and he realized that he was shouting.

  Roy lowered his voice. “I can’t live like this.”

  He forced himself to his feet, then staggered to the front door. His hands were numb and tingling, but he managed to wrest the door open.

  “Roy!” Laura called after him. “Wait—”

  He slammed the door, cutting off her words. The air was crisp and fresh, the ground slushy underfoot with melting ice and snow. Roy ran, mud spattering up past his ankles. To his relief, he regained steadiness with every step.

  Roy stopped under a huge redwood atop a hill. A dull pain radiated out from the wound in his chest. He touched the bandage, but he wasn’t bleeding. The bruising around the bandage had faded from black to yellow. At the rate he was healing, a couple more days and he’d be good as new.

  He could recover from a gunshot wound to the chest in less than a week. He could walk all day carrying eighty pounds of gear. He could beat any Marine in his platoon at hand-to-hand combat.

  And none of that mattered any more, because he was broken on the inside, where it didn’t show. Like a steel box filled with shattered glass.

  He had nothing to offer Laura or any woman. He couldn’t pull his own weight. He couldn’t hold down a job. He couldn’t even live in a normal house. He had no future. He’d already brought violence and trouble to her door. He was dangerous and he didn’t have a life.

  He bitterly regretted making love to Laura. He’d led her on and raised her hopes, when he’d known all along that he could never stay with her. He knew exactly how much it hurt when people made promises they never fulfilled, and he’d sworn that he’d never do that. How could he have been so thoughtless and selfish?

  His father’s voice echoed in his mind. Good to see you, Roy. You’ve gotten so tall! Your mother tells me you’re the star of the basketball team. When’s your next game? I’ll get tickets and come cheer you on.

  Guilt tore at him like the shrapnel that had ripped into his body a few months—a lifetime—ago. For the first time, he wondered if it would have been better if he’d died in Afghanistan.

  He flinched at the thought. He’d known guys who came home from the war and ate their guns, gone to their funerals and felt anger burn through his grief at the sight of their sobbing families and children.

  Roy had never had the impulse to kill himself, but he’d always sworn that if he ever did, he’d do whatever he had to do to get past it. It might have been better if I’d died was close enough to I wish I was dead to scare him.

  He had a third option, though. He didn’t have to live like this, but death wasn’t the only alternative. He could become a wolf. Forever.

  It wouldn’t be difficult. He’d felt in his bones, when he’d spent a day and night as a wolf on his way here, that if he remained in that form for long enough, he would forget that he was a man. His human self had begun to fade, and his thoughts had become a wolf’s thoughts, wordless and vivid, desiring nothing but the thrill of the hunt, the spray of blood in his mouth, and his companions, his love, his pack.

  He could change right now and vanish into the woods.
Three or four days without ever becoming a human again, and Roy Farrell, USMC, would be gone. Only a huge white wolf would remain, to run and hunt in the forest.

  He reached into himself, searching for his wolf. Just to see…

  “Roy!” Laura yelled.

  He glanced down, startled. Laura was trudging up the hill in a very determined manner.

  Roy had the impulse to take off or tell her to go away, but the first would be cowardly and the second would be cruel. She meant well, he was sure. Resigned to her pity, he sat down on a flat gray rock and let her come to him.

  Laura seated herself beside him. He waited for her to tell him she was sorry and lie that everything would be all right.

  She said nothing. He followed her gaze, not down the hill to the cabin but across, to the rugged mountains.

  The pale sunlight made the snow glitter on the slopes, but that didn’t hurt his eyes. The hospital-lab had given him dark glasses, but they hadn’t helped; it wasn’t only the brightness of electric lights that was the problem, but their nature. It was as if he’d become allergic to modern technology.

  Laura wore the same outfit that she’d had on for breakfast: blue jeans, a peach-colored blouse, and a pair of delicate gold sandals. She had left the cabin without even throwing on a sweater or closed-toe shoes, and her feet were wet up to her ankles.

  “Are you cold?” he asked.

  “A little.”

  “Here…” He put his arms around her, sharing his warmth.

  She leaned into him, all soft curves and chilled skin and lemon-sugar scent, and he wished for the millionth time that things could be different. He shouldn’t even be touching her this much.

  “What we did last night…” he said awkwardly. “I shouldn’t have come on to you. Don’t get me wrong, I meant every word I said. You’re sexy and gorgeous and brave and you ought to be proud of yourself. But about the sex… I don’t want to lead you on when I can’t follow through.”

  Laura gave a shrug, as jerky and stiff as if she was a marionette who’d had her strings yanked. “I get it, Roy. I was upset, you’re under a lot of stress, we were in the same bed, one thing led to another. I didn’t take it as a marriage proposal. So don’t worry. You didn’t lead me on. It was nice, that one time, but we won’t do it again.”

  Roy opened his mouth, then closed it, trying to figure out why everything felt so wrong. Laura was only agreeing with what he’d said himself. He hadn’t raised expectations he couldn’t fulfill, and if he hadn’t been completely up-front initially, neither had she. When he left, she wouldn’t feel abandoned.

  He was the one who felt abandoned, which made no sense. Laura was sitting right there in his arms. So why did he feel so achingly lonely?

  “I’d still like to be your friend, though,” she mumbled, so softly that he might not have been able to understand her before DJ had changed him.

  His arms closed tighter around her. “You are my friend.”

  Roy knew his actions were contradicting his words. If your buddy was cold, you loaned them your jacket. And if Roy and Laura were going to be hands-off from now on, he should get his hands off of her.

  He couldn’t bring himself to let go. Besides, Laura wasn’t moving either. If she didn’t want him to touch her, all she had to do was slide two inches away.

  “What’s DJ’s last name?” she asked.

  “Torres. Why?”

  “The internet’s back up. I could get online and look him up, see if he’s back home. DJ stands for something, right?”

  “No, it’s a nickname—he DJs at clubs. His full name is Dale Alejandro Torres. He’s lucky he didn’t get nicknamed something like ‘Who dat?’”

  Laura took a cell phone from her pocket and extracted herself from Roy’s arms. “I’ll just step away…”

  Roy watched glumly as she walked halfway across the hill and ducked behind a tree. He found it hard to imagine that he’d be affected by her checking the internet on her cell phone, so long as it didn’t ring and he didn’t stare directly at the screen, but he didn’t blame her for being cautious after the disaster this morning.

  “Look me up too, will you?” Roy called. “Roy Farrell, USMC. Foxtrot Alpha Romeo Romeo Echo Lima Lima.”

  There was a pause, then Laura yelled back, “Two Rs, two Ls?”

  “That’s right.”

  Another long pause. Then Laura returned, the cell phone shoved back in her pocket, looking wary.

  “Don’t freak out,” she said.

  “I don’t ‘freak out,’” Roy began, then remembered bolting out of the cabin less than an hour ago. What was wrong with him? He never panicked like that. “Hit me. Am I dead?”

  “No, you’re missing in action.”

  Roy shrugged. He’d expected that. “What did it say happened?”

  “Part of it meshes with what you told me.” Laura was still eyeing him like he was a grenade with the pin out.

  I must have really scared her this morning, he thought guiltily.

  “Your helicopter was shot down, and you and DJ were the only survivors,” she said. “Then it says that you were both critically wounded—”

  “No, DJ wasn’t—”

  “—and you both had to be transported immediately to the nearest shock trauma unit for stabilization before you could be sent stateside. Your transport was ambushed, and you and DJ are both missing.”

  “What?” Roy jumped up and slammed his fist into the nearest tree, dislodging a shower of bark and snow. “Fuck! Those fucking Nazi shitstains must’ve gotten DJ too. And I didn’t even look for him. Those motherfuckers! I have to go back. Right now.”

  Laura brushed snow off her hair. “Hang on. This could be a con—a trap. What if that article was written to lure you back in?”

  “What if it wasn’t?”

  “Yeah, what if it wasn’t?” Laura asked. “Here’s another scenario: what if DJ’s already escaped and is lying low, like you are? He wouldn’t have any idea where you are or any way to contact you.”

  Roy wanted to believe it. But every particle of him was screaming, Don’t abandon DJ in that prison for one second longer and Never leave anyone behind.

  He scanned the forests, trying to get a sense of the land now that it was covered in snow. Roy had tried to keep mental track of the location of the lab, but it had taken him nearly a week of hiking through mountain county to get here. He knew exactly how difficult it was to find anything again under those conditions. But he could smell better now. He could sniff out his own tracks. If he couldn’t do it as a man, he’d do it as a wolf.

  But finding the lab was one thing. Breaking in, and breaking DJ out, would be much harder. He only had the one cheap pistol. He needed weapons. He needed allies. He needed his pack.

  He needed his pack…

  Laura was standing in front of him, her lips moving. He had a vague sense that she’d been trying to get his attention for a while, but he couldn’t hear her. The pulse of his own blood roared in his ears like a fighter jet taking off.

  DJ was in trouble, alone. Marco and Alec were probably still in Afghanistan. For all he knew, they were dead. His pack was gone. His pack didn’t exist. Roy was alone.

  Someone grabbed at his wrist. With a snarl, he knocked the clutching hand away.

  A woman let out a cry of pain.

  Laura.

  He’d hurt Laura.

  The red cloud before his eyes faded away. Laura was backing away, wringing her hand.

  “I’m sorry,” Roy said, knowing how completely inadequate apologies were. “I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean—How bad is it?”

  Laura gingerly flexed her fingers. “I don’t think there’s any damage. I was startled, mostly.”

  “I’m sorry,” he repeated, feeling sick. “I don’t know what got into me. I’ve never hit a woman in my life.”

  “Yeah, I could see you weren’t really with me. I should have known better than to touch you.” Laura edged closer, looking more concerned than hurt. Concerned—
about him! She ought to be concerned about herself. “Were you having a flashback?”

  “I don’t get flashbacks. I don’t know what that was.” Roy stared out at the mountains, trying to recall what had been going on his head. “I know it won’t help DJ to tear off half-cocked, all by myself, with no plan and no info and no decent weapons. I’m not like that. I keep my head even if everyone around me is losing their shit.”

  His heart felt like a lead weight in his chest. He’d hurt Laura. He’d gotten DJ captured. He’d left Alec and Marco to fight alone. He’d seriously considered becoming a wolf forever, which was a sort of suicide.

  He’d hurt Laura…

  “I’m not like that,” he repeated dully. “There’s something really wrong with me. I think I’m losing my mind.”

  A crushing exhaustion bore down on him, overwhelming as a post-combat let-down. He sat on the ground and buried his head in his hands. Mud and snowmelt soaked into his jeans, but he barely felt the cold.

  Laura crouched down in front of him. “Roy…”

  “You shouldn’t get that close to me. It’s dangerous.”

  “I’ll risk it,” she said drily.

  “Seriously, don’t. I—I’m broken and crazy. I could snap and hurt you.”

  “‘Broken and crazy?’” Laura repeated incredulously. “Roy, are you listening to yourself? If you were on patrol and some guy in your platoon sat down on the ground and started talking like that, what would you say to him?”

  “This is me, not ‘some guy.’ I really fucked up. I am fucked up…”

  “What would you say?” Laura demanded.

  “‘Suck it up,’” he said automatically. “‘We’ve all been there. You’ve got a job to do and it’s not boo-hooing on my shoulder like a pussy.’”

  He mentally replayed his words, and added, “Pardon my French.”

  Unexpectedly, Laura giggled. “You’ve been watching your mouth around me, haven’t you?”

  “Yeah,” he admitted. “I guess that lasted all of four days.”

  “I can’t stand ‘pussy,’ but I’ve been known to use the f-word myself. Relax.” Moving slowly, so he could see her intent, she laid her hand on his shoulder.