Laura's Wolf (Werewolf Marines)

by Lia Silver

  She’d slept through the journey back to the cabin, then awakened in bed when Roy had begun to clean her bite wounds with stinging antiseptic, her foot propped on a folded towel.

  His crying had tapered off, but every now and then a tear would run down his cheek. He seemed to have given up on trying to stop it. His eyes were red, his face was puffy and flushed, and his bitten lip had swelled up. She’d seen him looking much more handsome, but she’d never loved him more.

  “You okay to be alone for a few minutes?” he’d asked when he finished bandaging her ankle. “I want to get you something to drink.”

  She nodded, and drifted off before he’d even left the room. He woke her up to give her some hot broth, lifting her head and holding the cup to her lips, then laid her back down and kissed her. The last thing she remembered was a drop of salt water trickling into her mouth.

  Laura had been too dazed and exhausted the day before to take in what had happened, but it came back to her now in a rush of vivid, impossible moments. Opening her wolf’s eyes to an utterly different world. Roy telling her he loved her. Roy sobbing and sobbing, begging her to live.

  In all the times she’d imagined what it would be like if Roy loved her, she’d sometimes thought of how sad and angry and betrayed he’d be if she lied to him or if he grew disillusioned with her. But it had never occurred to her that she could hurt him that badly through no action of her own, simply because she was a human being who could die.

  Roy loved her. She didn’t disbelieve it—she’d seen the prospect of losing her tear him apart—but she couldn’t quite believe it, either. It was easier for her to accept that she was now a werewolf.

  Laura sat up, testing her body. She felt fragile, her skin and nerves over-sensitive, as if she hadn’t eaten in days and then stayed up all night. But when she searched inside herself for the place that had slid out of her grasp so many agonizing times the day before, she easily found her wolf, cool and alert and full of grace.

  Roy came in with a cup of coffee and a plate of toast. His eyes were bloodshot and surrounded by raccoon-like dark circles. If she felt like she hadn’t slept in days, he looked it.

  “How’re you doing?” he asked, setting the coffee and toast on the table. “I wasn’t sure if you’d be up to eating anything.”

  “I’m a little shaky. But I’m hungry, too.” She took a bite of the toast. It was plain and crisp, like you’d give to someone with stomach flu; she had to wash it down with coffee. “Thanks for the toast and coffee. And thanks for saving my life. That’s twice now.”

  “It better be the last time,” Roy said, with feeling. “I never want to do that again. I swear to God, it nearly killed me.”

  “I’m holding you to your promise,” Laura warned him.

  “What? What promise?”

  “There’s a certain word that you’re never going to say again.”

  Roy laughed. “Oh, right! Consider it struck from my vocabulary. Though it did justify its existence yesterday.”

  He sat on the edge of the bed and took her into his arms. Laura leaned back and let him hold her, breathing in his scent and enjoying his warmth. He held her as gently as if she was made of blown glass, but she felt his breath shudder through his chest.

  “Are you all right?” Laura asked.

  “Sure.” Then he admitted, “I feel a little strange. I guess I’m still shook up from yesterday.”

  “Did you sleep at all?”

  “I slept some,” he said evasively.

  “Were you guarding me?”

  “Yeah,” he confessed. “I believe you that Gregor probably won’t come after you, and I know I’ll wake up instantly if anyone breaks in. But I had to watch you breathe for a few hours before I was completely sure that you wouldn’t stop the moment I took my eyes off you.”

  It was the first time she’d heard anyone use “a few” to mean “six or eight,” as she was certain he had. She twisted around to look into his face, which was still creased and worn with grief and fear.

  He did love her. She believed it now. And she knew what he needed to hear.

  “I love you.” Laura willed her words to sink in and take his pain away. “I don’t care how hard it is to be with you. I won’t leave you. And I’m not dying now.”

  Before he could reply, she locked her hands behind his head, his fine hair sliding beneath her fingers, and pulled him down to kiss her.

  As their lips met, she felt a silent but distinct inner click, like a puzzle piece fitting into place. They both jumped.

  “Did you feel that?” Laura asked.

  Roy’s jaw fell open. She watched, fascinated, as his expression shifted from confusion to disbelief to astonished joy.

  “It’s gone,” Roy said at last.

  “What’s gone?” Laura felt different too, but she couldn’t put her finger on how.

  “The loneliness.” His words tumbled out excitedly. “Ever since DJ bit me, there’s been this emptiness inside of me. I thought I missed my buddies, but it was more than that. Like nothing I’d ever felt before. I tried not to think about it, but every now and then it would hit me and knock me flat. And now it’s gone. You’re with me, and I can finally believe it. I’m not alone.”

  The lines in his face had smoothed out, making him seem years younger. Laura had gotten a hint that Roy was capable of looking like this when she’d seen him asleep, and after they’d made love. But even then, a shadow had clung to him. She hadn’t realized how much of his energy had been poured into concealing or fighting his loneliness, until she finally saw him with that burden lifted.

  The sensation Laura had noticed earlier, when she’d known Roy was in the kitchen, was more distinct now. When she focused her attention on it, she could feel it as a bond that connected them, humming with life.

  Laura gave it a mental tug. Roy’s hand flew to his heart, his breath catching.

  “Sorry!” Laura gasped.

  “No, no, it’s all right,” Roy assured her. “It didn’t hurt. It was just startling.”

  “It’s the pack sense!” Laura exclaimed, grabbing Roy’s shoulder in her excitement. “Roy, that has to be what it is. It’s what that poor pack of Gregor’s couldn’t live without—what he thought I’d go back to him to get.”

  So much for Gregor, Laura thought with satisfaction, imagining him waiting and waiting and waiting for her, getting more and more confused and frustrated as the days ticked by and Laura didn’t crawl back.

  “So that’s what I needed,” Roy said in wonderment. “All this time.”

  “How long has it been since you were bitten?”

  “About two months.”

  “You really are one tough wolf,” Laura said. “No one in Gregor’s pack held out anywhere near that long. Nicolette only made it six weeks, and believe me, she is hardcore.”

  “Yeah, but she knew how to make it stop,” said Roy, shrugging. “I didn’t. You can endure anything when you don’t have any alternative.”

  He didn’t move, but Laura felt him reach out through their bond. She perceived him through it, not merely as a presence, as she had before, but as a personality. Laura felt his strength and warmth and humor, his endurance and love and icy battle rage. And beneath it all, she glimpsed a pain as deep and raw as the loneliness he no longer felt.

  “I thought I’d fixed you,” Laura said, disappointed, then felt blood rise hot to her face when she heard her own words.

  Roy cupped her cheek with a rueful smile. “That would’ve been nice, wouldn’t it? I have to tell you, though, that went both ways.”

  Laura stiffened involuntarily at the thought that he had read her mind, knew her secrets, knew—

  “I didn’t get any details, if that’s what you’re thinking,” Roy assured her. “Just a sense of you, like I guess you got a sense of me. There’s a lot of pain in you that I wish you didn’t have, that’s all. I couldn’t tell what it was about. And you saw mine, huh?”

  Laura nodded. “I wish I could do more fo
r you.”

  Roy’s palm was still against her face, gentle and warm. “You fixed me enough. Not losing my mind from loneliness is plenty. And you’ve done way more than that. You saved my life. You saved my life four times! You love me. You…” He choked up. “You lived.”

  “Sorry I made you cry.” Laura traced a fingertip down his cheek where the tears had run.

  “Don’t worry about it,” Roy said quickly. “In fact, let’s not talk about it.”

  “I have to ask one question, and then I’ll never mention it again. When did you stop?”

  A pink flush crept over Roy’s cheekbones. Then he met her eyes, shrugging wryly. “Some time after I fell asleep, I guess. When I woke up, the pillow was soaked.”

  “Wow. That really was fifteen years of tears.”

  The flush faded. “Not quite. It was four years since I last… you know. But probably ten or eleven before that. So, fifteen total, but not fifteen continuous.”

  “Exactly four?” Laura asked, then remembered. “Oh. Your mother.”

  He nodded, his gaze downcast, looking at least as embarrassed as sad.

  “How many times have you seen me cry?”

  “A couple,” Roy said tactfully.

  A lot, Laura thought. “Did you still respect me in the morning?”

  “Of course I did. But it’s different for you.”

  “I have breasts. That doesn’t make me a different species.”

  “We might both be a different species now,” Roy said, catching her light tone. “But that’s not what I meant. Female Marines don’t cry much either. Neither do female cops.”

  “Under the uniform, you’re still flesh and blood.” Laura slipped her fingers under the collar of his shirt to caress the warm flesh beneath. “You know, the human body is sixty percent water.”

  Roy laughed. “Today I’m only fifty-eight percent.”

  “And I still respect you.”

  Roy determinedly changed the subject. “So if you and I have the pack sense between us, you don’t need Gregor, right?”

  “I’m sure I don’t. And I assume you don’t need DJ.”

  He frowned, the worried creases reappearing in his forehead. “He might need me, though. And I can’t leave you alone, and I can’t drive. But now that we know it was Gregor who was after you all along, I’m not so worried about the lab. I’ll call DJ’s family and cross my fingers their phone isn’t tapped.”

  “I hate to tell you this, but my phone’s in my purse, which is in my car. Which is parked in Gregor’s driveway.”

  Roy gave a frustrated sigh. “And there’s no landline here, huh? All right. Here’s the plan. Once you’re up to a hike, we’ll walk to the nearest pay phone or person with a phone and call DJ’s family. Hopefully, they know where he is. If they do, I’ll hit him up to help me take care of the Gregor situation—oh, and get your car back,” he added, as an afterthought.

  “I appreciate it. I’m attached to that car.” Laura pointed out the window, toward the dirt road. “The nearest neighbor is three miles away, a guy named Jim Sullivan. He knows Dad. I’m sure he’d let you use his phone.”

  “Or let you use the phone on my behalf,” Roy said glumly. “I haven’t tried phones yet, but the odds of me having problems with them are probably pretty high.”

  “Maybe not.” As soon as he mentioned the phone, scattered pieces of information assembled themselves in Laura’s mind, like colored dots coming together to make a picture. “Roy, you might not have any problems with anything any more. If you don’t have a pack, you get so lonely you can’t stand it. But the other thing that happens is that your powers go out of control. And now you have a pack.”

  “But I don’t have a power. I mean, other than turning into a wolf.”

  “You do!” Laura said excitedly. “You can smell me, right? I mean—”

  “I know what you mean,” Roy said, smiling. “You smell like lemon meringue pie.”

  “Seriously?” Laura asked, momentarily distracted. “My scent name would be Lemon Meringue Pie?”

  “I’ll call you Lemon Meringue for short.” A playful gleam brightened his gray eyes.

  “Isn’t there some more dignified way to describe it?”

  Roy shook his head. “Nope. You’re Lemon Meringue. Just be glad you smell like something nice. Gregor smelled like a stepped-on ant hill. Imagine if I had to name you Squashed Ant.”

  Laura dragged her mind away from that appalling prospect. “Anyway, Roy, here’s the thing: I can’t smell you now. That is, this close, you smell good. Clean. But when I was a wolf, you had a completely different scent.”

  “Did you like it?”

  “I did,” replied Laura, secretly amused that Roy cared what she thought about his scent, given that she could only detect it as a wolf. “It’s very masculine: charcoal and black leather and bittersweet chocolate.”

  “Black Leather is cooler than Guinness,” Roy said hopefully. “Even Charcoal is cooler. Could you—”

  “Nope,” Laura said with some satisfaction. “First name sticks, Guinness. But Roy, I think your power is enhanced senses. Without a pack, you sense things so intensely that it hurts. Everything you can perceive as a wolf, you can still perceive as a man, can’t you?”

  “But I thought all werewolves…” Roy began, then trailed off. “Can you hear my heartbeat?”

  “Your heartbeat?” Laura asked incredulously. “I couldn’t even do that as a wolf. Can you hear mine now?”

  “If I concentrate. My vision’s sharper, too. And I can see in the dark. And—” Roy’s gaze moved from Laura to the lamp by the bedside table.

  All his muscles tensed against her body, then he drew in a deep breath. Before she could stop him, he reached out and clicked it on.

  Laura felt him involuntarily jerk away. He closed his eyes tight, then covered them with his hand. Her heart sank, though undoubtedly not as much as Roy’s did. Then she realized that he’d flinched and covered his eyes, but no more than that.

  “What’s it like?” she asked.

  His jaw clenched tight, Roy took his hand away and opened his eyes a crack. Then, turning so he wasn’t looking directly at the light, he managed to open them all the way. “It hurts my eyes and it’s giving me a headache. It’s not as bad as before, though.”

  It clearly wasn’t as bad as when he’d collapsed to the kitchen floor. But she could see from his expression that “not as bad” covered a whole lot of painful ground. He’d said, “It’s not that bad” when he’d been shot, too.

  On impulse, she touched the pack sense. This time she could feel something wrong with Roy. It was as if he was free-falling, desperately grasping at something that wasn’t there. She reached out for him through the pack sense, but instinctively knew that she needed something more.

  She took his hand. With the skin-to-skin contact, she felt another, smaller click.

  Roy’s body jerked. “What was that?”

  “I don’t know. Hang on.”

  She could reach him now in the pack sense, steadying him, bracing him with her own strength. If he was metaphorically tumbling through the air, she couldn’t set him on solid ground. But she could catch his hands and turn his fall into a controlled skydive.

  He gave a deep sigh of relief. “That’s better.”

  “It doesn’t hurt?” Laura asked hopefully.

  “It hurts a lot less. It still doesn’t feel good. But I can take it now.” He turned back and gave the lamp a good long stare with his eyes wide open, no doubt to prove to himself that he could, before he turned it off. Then he rubbed his forehead, wincing.

  Laura came near the verge of tears. “I thought all you needed was the pack sense. I was so sure.”

  “Don’t feel bad, Laura.” Roy ruffled her hair. “Honestly, this is better than I expected. I bet I could use the phone if you held my hand.”

  “But it would still hurt.”

  He shrugged. “You can’t take the day off in a war zone just because you haven’t sl
ept in a couple days and you haven’t had a chance to eat and you have a headache from the sun. I’m used to not feeling great when I do stuff. The important thing is that I can do it at all.”

  “Really, you’re fine with ‘so long as I hold your hand, the lights only hurt some?’” If Laura had been in that position, she’d have been miserable.

  “Yes.” Roy sounded completely sincere. “Obviously, I’d rather be cured. But it’s a huge improvement. Though I do realize it’s a burden on you. I don’t want you to feel like you have to stick around to be my—my voltage regulator.”

  “I don’t want you to feel like you have to stick around so I don’t go crazy from loneliness and have to crawl back to Gregor,” Laura said promptly.

  She’d only meant that to imply that helping Roy wasn’t a burden, but he reacted as if he’d been electrified. He grabbed both her hands and stared into her eyes so intensely that Laura instinctively rocked back. “You’ll never have to do that. Never. If it doesn’t work out between us, we’ll find you some other pack. Besides, didn’t you want me to kill Gregor? I swear, I will.”

  “None of my other boyfriends ever promised to kill someone for me,” Laura said, smiling. “You’re the sweetest.”

  As she’d hoped, Roy chuckled and relaxed. “Right. I get you. We both need each other. Which reminds me—if my power is enhanced senses, what’s yours?”

  “The power to help you with your power?” Laura suggested doubtfully. “It would be romantic. I guess.”

  “It would suck and you know it. You should get something badass.”

  Laura laughed. “Okay, yeah, I hope that’s only the pack sense. I would like something else. Maybe invisibility.”

  “That would be cool. Mine’s awfully… low-key. Even apart from that it doesn’t work right.”

  “Think of it this way, Roy,” Laura suggested. “You’ve got the same power as Wolverine.”

  To Laura’s amusement, he looked genuinely consoled by that idea. “Hey, that’s true. I have super-healing, too. And claws. Sometimes.” He glanced down at her toast, untouched except for the one bite. “Want me to make you something better to eat? I only brought the toast because I thought your stomach might be upset.”