In the Werewolf's Den

by Rob Preece

  "Are Mike and Arenesol children?” she demanded.

  He looked at her, confusion written on his face. “Of course not. Arenesol could have been any age since he's an elf, but he was definitely adult. Mike is probably ninety. For him, the return of magic was a literal lifesaver."

  "Right. They are grown up. Which means you aren't responsible for their decisions. Arenesol decided to blow up the tower to save your life and because he didn't want to go on living. You didn't make him do it. Mike agreed to create your diversion. You both calculated that the risks were low. And he would have been fine if that helicopter hadn't happened along. So, I don't think you can wallow in your poor-pitiful-me act any more. Not about Mike and Arenesol, anyway."

  Carl didn't want to be let off the hook so easily. “But I killed that warder."

  "I saw that. But I'm not going to judge you for it, Carl. You saw what he'd done. No one else was going to punish him for it."

  Impulsively, she bent and kissed him on his forehead.

  Carl raised his face and, without thinking, without meaning, without anything but the most basic attraction between male and female, man and woman, their lips closed on one another, kissing frantically as if this were the last day of both of their lives.

  Quite possibly, Danielle realized, it might be.

  Chapter 11

  Danielle hadn't meant to kiss him. She was confused about everything and adding emotional fuel to the fire didn't make a lot of sense. Once their lips met, though, raw need pushed rational thought aside.

  Under the tattered blanket he'd wrapped around himself, Carl was already naked.

  Danielle still wore the canvas pants to her Karate gi, and a sports bra that had been through far more than the manufacturer would have guessed possible. They didn't provide much coverage—certainly didn't stop the contact of body to body or the raging heat that Carl's touch generated.

  Carl's hands brushed against the fabric of that bra and her breasts, sending surges of warmth and desire pulsing through her body.

  She yanked the blanket away from Carl and gloried in the lean muscles of his torso. His erection stood proud and fierce, jutting from his body like a missile posed for flight.

  She cupped it in both of her hands, stroking its smooth length until he shuddered with pleasure and desire.

  Carl pushed himself up on one elbow and pulled her toward him, his lips greedy to kiss her again.

  But Danielle couldn't miss the wince of pain that Carl had tried, and failed, to suppress.

  "Let me do this, honey.” She gently lowered him back to the bed, kissed him lightly on the lips, then ran her lips down his hard muscled body.

  Touching him, brushing her skin against his, filled her with a drugged giddiness that let her hope that all of their problems could be overcome. She wasn't operating on logic now, but on a primitive level of intuition and emotion. Carl wasn't her herd any more, he was her pack. The alpha male to her alpha female. Sex reaffirmed their bonding. She had no idea where their lives would take them next. Whatever happened in the future, she would hold the memories of this perfect moment, this much-needed lovemaking, forever.

  Carl groaned when she kissed his hardness and licked its length. She tasted his maleness, inhaled the scents of a man.

  He moaned again when she slid his arousal deep into her mouth.

  He hadn't resisted when she had pushed him back in his bed, but that didn't mean he was willing to simply accept her explorations passively.

  A growl sounded deep in his throat as he jerked at the ties that secured her pants to her body, then yanked the pants off of her and pulled her onto the bed beside him.

  Beside him, but with her head at the opposite end of the bed. Which, it turned out, was exactly what he had in mind.

  His strong hands made short work of her panties, tearing them away rather than going to the trouble of sliding them off her legs.

  In a moment of giddy delight, she decided that if she was going to stay with Carl, she'd look into Velcro panties. Her delight faded when she realized that staying with Carl was the least likely of futures.

  For them, the future was a mystery, but a dark mystery. Its one certainty was that there was no hope for a world divided between the normal and the impaired—the magical, she reminded herself. Still, if they lacked a future, they had a present. She needed to stay grounded in the now and not get carried away in teenaged fantasies about ever-after.

  With one hand, Carl traced a slow circle that led from Danielle's right knee up her inner thigh, brushed gently against the sensitive folds of her womanhood, then continued down the other thigh. With the other hand, he tugged her closer to him until she could feel his warm breath against her upper thighs.

  Wherever he touched, Danielle's body tingled. Her blood pulsed behind his caress, her internal thermostat cranked up to full burn.

  This wasn't fair. He was injured, barely able to sit up, yet he was taking control over their lovemaking. She opened her mouth to protest, and then shut it abruptly when his mouth pressed against her most sensitive area.

  He kissed, nibbled, then found an indescribable pattern of tongue, lips, and fingers around, and inside of her.

  Any idea of protest fled as indescribable pleasures pulsed from her core to the extremes of her body, then rebounded to double and triple her bliss.

  Rather than resist, she wallowed in his touch. She threw back her head and shoulders, straddled him, clamped her thighs around his head and pressed herself more closely to him, urging him to bring his kisses more deeply into her welcoming body.

  He responded willingly, enthusiastically. Like her, she realized, Carl was enjoying the now.

  She thought about bending forward and taking his erection into her mouth again while he gave her pleasure, but Carl's caress commanded her entire attention, demanded every inch of her body.

  Pressure built up inside of her like a wall of water rushing at a dam. She clamped down, letting the intensity build, but her effort at control was doomed. Orgasm washed through her entire body—a sudden explosion of sensation and pure glorious delight. Then, like an overflowing river, joying in being free when the dikes finally break, surges of orgasm continued, for seconds, minutes, forever it seemed, as wave after wave of pleasure swept over her, each more intense than the last.

  All of her strength deserted her. Danielle fell forward over Carl's body, as boneless as a cat, her short hair brushing against his glorious erection.

  For an eternity that lasted all of thirty seconds, Danielle wondered if she would ever move again. Her brain worked at a fever pitch but seemed disconnected from the real world. Random thoughts of love, sex, and running away with Carl to somewhere where no warder could ever find them, competed for attention.

  Carl's breathing brought her back to full consciousness.

  She was lying on top of him, a hundred and twenty pounds of woman crushingly on top of her man's battered body.

  She jerked away, only to find that he held her in place with his strong arms.

  "I'm hurting you,” she protested.

  "I'm not complaining."

  Well, Carl wouldn't complain, would he? He was too busy being a man.

  Which was how she thought about him, she realized. A man. Not a canine. Not a Were. Not her herd at all. Not any more. Now he was a man. Her man.

  Damn. Joe Smealy had been right about this, at least. If you let yourself get entangled with an impaired, things could get complicated.

  And she was thoroughly entangled with Carl now.

  But that was something she would think about later. Right now, she needed to get off of Carl before she punctured one of his broken ribs through his heart.

  She reached back, stripped his hand off her naked bottom, and turned herself around.

  She hadn't consciously intended for it to happen, but she ended up facing him, her hips straddled over his.

  His swollen excitement pressed against her moistened and waiting lips.

  If that wasn't a sign,
Danielle didn't know anything about fate.

  She captured him in her hands, adjusted the aim, and lowered herself onto his engorged member.

  Carl stroked a hand across her face. “Oh, yeah."

  They weren't the most romantic words in the universe, but they filled Danielle with a sense of accomplishment.

  She raised herself, then lowered again, pressing her hips to his, feeling her body adjust to take all of his length deep within herself.

  She stared at his eyes looking for any sign of the shift. She wasn't sure what she would do if she saw it. Maybe run screaming from the house. Instead, the human Carl looked back at her, his eyes filled with the same confusion and pain that she felt after the events of the past twenty-four hours.

  For now, that was enough.

  She leaned forward, putting her hands on either side of his shoulders, kissed him on the mouth, and then let her hips find the rhythm that brought the two of them together.

  She hadn't thought she could climax again, so soon after Carl's tongue had brought her over the edge. But as the friction built, she realized that she'd been mistaken. About this, and so many other things.

  Carl groaned; his face tightened as he fought for control. Fought, and won. Then his hips joined hers in the dance of life, extending their mutual pleasure, allowing her body and his to discover new ways of pleasuring one another.

  As she neared the edge, each nerve in her body became hypersensitive. Carl's faint beard, noticeable after a day without shaving, felt harsh against her skin. His hand, clasped to her shoulder to press her to him, burned with heat. Beads of perspiration collected under her breasts, each drop leaving a distinct sensation of moist warmth and evaporating coolness.

  The sensual overload should have been unpleasant, or even painful. Instead, pain and pleasure mingled into a simple rush of awareness. The rush swept over her entire body, and then suddenly collected in her womb.

  Her previous lovemaking with Carl should have prepared her for this to happen, but somehow it didn't. Despite everything she'd experienced before, the power of her orgasm surprised her. Caught her up in a torrent of sensual delight.

  For an intoxicating moment, she felt that she and Carl were united in more than simply the physical bond that connected them. She imagined she could hear the echoes of Carl's thoughts and senses within her own mind. That heady feeling of joy, accomplishment, and pleasure washing away the memory of injury, those feelings of affection, the regret for what they'd done to one another and the destruction they had caused.

  That emotional and mental bonding felt strange, uncomfortable, but wonderful at the same time. Danielle slid forward, bringing her breasts to his muscled chest, and pressed her lips against his neck in an attempt to preserve that closeness and sharing.

  For the first time since she'd discovered her mother's broken body, Danielle felt whole, and safe, and wanted.

  Damn, she was in trouble.

  * * * *

  Carl disentangled himself from Danielle's sleeping body. A part of him wanted to simply stay there indefinitely. But Carl was a scientist and a scientist deals with facts rather than fantasy.

  And the facts were ugly. He was a marked man. Whether the warders had ordered his termination before the games and riot, word would be out now. They would have analyzed video records from the guard tower. They would recognize the wolf and identify it as Carl in his Were form.

  It was time for some hard decisions.

  He covered Danielle's sleeping form, wrapped a sheet around his body and headed out of the bedroom. He needed to find some data, develop some hypotheses, and test the reality that had fallen over the world.

  In many ways, he was different from Danielle. But in one key respect, they were similar. Both were fighters. And Carl intended to keep on fighting as long as he was alive.

  Mike the Vampire lay nestled in a pallet in a tumbledown room just outside the bedroom where Danielle and Carl had slept. He'd stacked abandoned furniture around his makeshift bed to give it just the hint of coffin.

  Carl wasn't an expert on vampirism. Hell, like most normals, he'd simply taken for granted the official line. Now, he wondered if the coffin thing was instinctual vampire behavior, or Mike's idea of a funny statement.

  Mike's chest remained perfectly still. He wasn't breathing, but he wasn't dead either. Or rather, he wasn't any more dead than the average vampire. He also wasn't, Carl felt certain, inhabited by a demon. Like so much of the supposed knowledge about the magical, that was simply a convenient myth. A lie. A justification for cold-blooded killing.

  The terrible reality was that no one else had done serious scientific work on the magical. The magical virus had infected a tenth of mankind, but no credible research had been done on the results of the infection.

  Fear and panic, rather than science and reason, had formed the basis for virtually every decision made about relationships between the normal and the magical.

  Snori peeked his huge head around the doorway. “Thought I heard someone moving in here.” He held up a radio scanner. “I think we'd better get a move on soon."

  The troll jerked Carl's mind back to the here and now. “What have you heard?"

  "Warder bands are all encrypted, of course. But there is a lot of chatter. More than I've ever heard before. And there's nothing but white noise on the short wave. Like there was a major sunspot outbreak. Only there wasn't."

  "Sounds like the warders are jamming. I wonder what that means?"

  Snori ran a hand over his bald head. “Well, it could mean that they're going to attack and they don't want any hams to blow the secrecy. I've heard about zones that suddenly just weren't there any more."

  Snori wasn't being paranoid; it was a real possibility.

  "They have to do something,” Carl admitted. “They'll want to come after me. But I'm not sure they'd want to take out the entire zone. In the first place, killing and disposing of a million or so magics wouldn't be cheap or easy. In the second place, I have to think that even some of the warders would balk. It's not like just encouraging an occasional riot."

  Snori shrugged. They didn't have enough information to do more than speculate. And here Carl had thought he was the one who could offer scientific method.

  "All right,” Carl decided. “We've got to get away from the zone border and go deep underground."

  "What about Danielle?"

  There was no way to avoid that question. What about Danielle? He didn't want to leave her. But could he trust her after she'd betrayed him to the warders?

  "What do you think?” Not that he could evade ultimate responsibility for choosing. Still, Snori had shown amazing insight already. Carl knew he couldn't be unbiased when it came to Danielle.

  Snori grinned. “I think she's a keeper, boss. Just get this warder nonsense out of her head. It isn't as if she's a real normal."

  "Huh?” Maybe he'd been wrong about Snori's insights.

  "Come on, boss. Wake up and smell the coffee.” Snori put his hands together and cracked his knuckles. The sound sent echoes through the room. “You fought her, didn't you? You saw how quick she moved. Can any normal fight like that?"

  "It's the warder training,” Carl explained. “We saw another warder that had the same trick."

  Snori slammed a massive fist into his palm. “Warder training.” His voice practically dripped with contempt. “That's such a bull line I need boots just to listen to it. Here I thought you were the scientific type. You know, look at the facts rather than people's made-up explanations."

  Carl didn't feel comfortable with where this conversation was heading, but he had no choice but to follow it.

  "Martial arts training can bring out exceptional talents,” he reminded the troll.

  "Right. That's why you can go into that blur mode, right?” Snori looked around for a place to spit, then thought better of it and swallowed. He leaned forward and lowered his voice to a modest roar. “They're using our own kind against us. The warders are like old-time Ja
nissaries."

  Carl had revised his estimation of Snori once already. Now he did so again. “Janissaries like in the medieval Ottoman army?"

  "Like the Turks gathered up children from their captive people, raised them, and then used them to keep their own cultures under control. Yeah, just like that."

  He looked more closely at the troll. “Who were you before you became a troll, anyway?"

  Snori laughed. “I was nobody before I became a troll. Since then, I've been reading. Nobody ever said that a troll can't read, you know. No laws in the zone."

  Carl rubbed his eyes. He didn't know if Snori was right, but he couldn't say the troll was wrong either. And if Danielle was magical, that would solve no end of problems. Assuming she didn't kill him when he told her.

  One thing was certain, he wouldn't abandon her. If she was magical, the warder leadership would see her as a disposable tool. And, thanks to Carl, the warders might just decide that it was time for them to dispose of her. Of course, if she was magical, that solved another problem. He'd wondered how a magical could have a relationship with a normal. And he wanted a relationship with Danielle. Needed it down to the bone. And last night he'd decided Arenesol was right. Even if he found the cure, he wouldn't take it. His magic enhanced, it didn't impair.

  He made his decision. “Wake up Mike and I'll get Danielle. We've got to get out of here."

  Snori smiled. “You going to tell her what I said?"

  Carl shrugged. Danielle held her secrets tight. She'd never told him why she'd become a warder, but he didn't believe it was out of greed or a lust for power. If he just told her that she was one of the group she hated, she wouldn't believe him and might get violent.

  Besides, if Snori was right about the warders, that meant that there might be plenty more magical living amongst the normal. “Not right away. I've got to think about this."

  "Don't wait too long, boss. She's not the kind of woman who like it if you know secrets about her and don't tell."

  Carl didn't think that kind of woman existed. “Let me worry about that. You worry about getting Mike out of his coffin."