Code of the Wolf

by Susan Krinard

  The men Serenity wanted were the men who had killed Ruth. And now that Serenity had set him on their trail, he couldn’t turn back. He couldn’t pretend it was better to leave them alone than add to the bloodshed that had kept the feud alive so long. Bonnie had brought that home to him. So had Serenity.

  He would go after them, sure enough. But the Code, as much as it had been stretched these past few days, wasn’t yet broken. He would do one thing he’d promised Serenity. He would bring them in and stick with them until they hanged or he was forced to finish the job himself.

  But that would be the last resort. And it would be the end of the Code. Of himself.

  A brief touch on his knee snapped him out of his thoughts.

  Zora was standing at his stirrup, looking up at him with eyes as flat as the top of a mesa.

  “Serenity has offered you money,” she said. “I will give you more if you finish this hunt alone.”

  Werewolves couldn’t read each other’s minds, but Zora might as well have seen right into his.

  “I don’t need money from you,” he said quietly. “But I’ve got the same plan in mind.”

  The Indian woman nodded. “You know these men she seeks,” she said. “I know of them.”

  “I think it is more than that. It is not only because of Serenity or the money she will give you that you hunt these men.”

  “My reasons don’t matter. I’m doing what you asked me to do.”

  She rested her brown hand on his horse’s croup. “Hatred is a powerful thing. It blinds Serenity. She has no sense where these men are concerned.”

  “That’s why I plan to leave her somewhere safe before we get anywhere near them. I’ll see her to some town where she can find her way back here with no trouble.”

  “How will you do this?”

  He met her gaze. “I know what she hates and fears most,” he said.

  “You will not hurt her?”

  “I’ll do what I have to do, no more.”

  “You will do this soon?”

  “Soon as I can.”

  “Then we will be watching for her.” She paused. “She will hate you for this.”

  “She’s halfway there already.”

  “Maybe not as much as you think.”

  Jacob kept all expression from his face, though his heart had contracted into a tight little ball. “Once this is finished, we likely won’t lay eyes on each other again.” He looked out across the desert grassland sloping away from the mountains behind them. “You take good care of her.”

  “We will.”

  She walked away just as Serenity rode up. Her eyes were sad, but her jaw was firm and her shoulders set.

  “How do werewolves say goodbye?” she asked.

  “Not so differently from anyone else.”

  Serenity cast one last look around the yard and the women gathered to see her off. Caridad raised her hand, and she waved back.

  “Let’s ride,” she said.

  They set off at a trot, their spare mounts keeping pace at the ends of their leads. Serenity didn’t look back again, but Jacob suspected he saw a wetness in her eyes.

  She believed she might not come back from the hunt. She wasn’t discounting the danger, at least the danger she imagined. It was just that she was willing to die if she could see her enemies destroyed. Any regret she felt about Leroy—and he’d become sure she did feel regret—wouldn’t be enough to stop her from killing again.

  Only he could do that. But not yet. He had to wait until he’d set things up just right. When he was done, she would be glad to get away from him, even at the cost of her revenge.

  In the meantime, he would have to be close to Serenity every waking hour and every night, breathing in her scent, listening to her husky voice, struggling to remember that she was untouchable and always would be.

  They rode south along the Rio Grande through the morning, stopped in the shade of the vast cottonwoods by the river during the hottest part of the day to rest and change horses, and continued on into evening. They made camp ten miles northwest of El Paso, taking advantage of the river’s proximity to provide not only water but fuel for their fire. Jacob knew they wouldn’t always have it so easy.

  Not that it would be easy for Serenity much longer after tonight. He had decided to wait until the next evening to begin putting his plan into effect. He gathered up an armful of fallen cottonwood branches, built a small fire and watched her boil the beans and coffee. They ate as they usually did, in silence, and then spread their bedrolls on either side of the fire. It didn’t make much of a barrier, even a symbolic one, but then, that didn’t really matter.

  In the morning, they broke camp and continued on to El Paso under a brilliant blue sky. They reached the busy town in the early afternoon and stocked up on supplies, then kept riding south toward Fort Hancock. Though they still traveled along the river and parallel to the tracks of the Southern Pacific, the landscape away from the bosque had grown increasingly harsh, dominated by hardy desert plants and patches of grassland.

  On the second night, when they camped at the edge of the bosque, Jacob slipped out of sight behind the trees, stripped out of his clothes and Changed.

  Maybe Serenity sensed what was happening, for she was staring in his direction when he reemerged. She flinched a little when she saw him, struggling to get herself under control again.

  “Are you going out to catch our dinner?” she asked casually.

  He turned and burst into a standing run. He could feel her gaze locked on him as he loped away from camp. She would seem indifferent when he returned, but she wouldn’t be. She would be thinking of the Reniers and everything he had in common with them. And he couldn’t let her forget.

  Jacob turned up a jackrabbit in less than five minutes, scented another one soon after and caught it, as well. The meat would be scanty and tough, but along with the beans it would be enough.

  Just as he’d anticipated, when he returned, Serenity seemed relaxed as she boiled the beans over the fire. She hardly glanced up as he trotted into the firelight with the two rabbits dangling from his jaws.

  “Good,” she said. She patted a cloth she had spread on the ground beside her. “Please put them here.”

  Feeling like a cad, Jacob did as she asked and returned to his clothes. He Changed, dressed quickly and rejoined her. She had drawn the knife she wore at her waist and was reaching for one of the rabbits.

  Jacob crouched on his haunches a few feet away. “Let me do that,” he said, unsheathing his own knife. “I can skin a rabbit in my sleep.”

  She wouldn’t look at him. “You did the hunting. I’ll do the cooking.”

  Arguing would only make the situation seem normal again, so he lay back against his saddle, pulled his hat over his eyes and pretended to sleep. Two hours later Serenity “woke” him, and they ate beans and rabbit without so much as a word passing between them. Jacob moved a little more quickly than she did to clean up and dispose of the rabbits’ remains. She left him to it and sat brooding over the dying fire, poking at the embers with a stick and studiously avoiding his gaze.

  The next evening, when he Changed, Jacob upped the stakes. He turned his back and stripped in front of her, letting her witness the transformation as he had done the first time at Avalon. Before he left to hunt, he stalked around the camp, bristling up his fur and showing his teeth without ever turning his attention directly on Serenity.

  Once again, they cooked and ate the brace of cottontails he brought in a silence fraught with tension and unspoken fears. Jacob reminded himself again and again that this ugly game was necessary, but he hated it all the same. For the first time in years, he despised what he was.

  On the following day, they stopped in Fort Hancock, then turned west toward Sierra Blanca, riding into a country of vast, flat plains broken by high mountain ranges that seemed to spring straight out of the parched earth. That night, when they made camp in the open desert, Jacob behaved in as bestial a manner as he could, growling and
snapping in the darkness just out of Serenity’s sight, nearly tearing the night’s prey apart before he brought it back to her, eating his bloody portion as wolf instead of man, and howling at the moon long after she had taken to her bedroll.

  He didn’t come back until dawn, when the fire had burned to ashes and Serenity’s attention was focused on saddling her horse. Her shoulders twitched when she heard him trot into camp. Self-disgust curdled in Jacob’s gut as he Changed, dressed and retrieved his own saddle and bedroll.

  Acutely aware of Serenity’s inner turmoil, he saddled his own mount and checked on his spare. The weak part of him wanted to apologize to Serenity for his behavior, but he knew one slip would undo any progress he had made. By tomorrow, or the next day, or the day after that, she would have seen enough of the beast that she would rejoice to be rid of him.

  “Are you trying to frighten me?” she asked suddenly.

  An unseen rock rolled under Jacob’s boot, and he almost stumbled. “No,” he said, half choking on the word. “What makes you think—?”

  “Are you hoping I’ll give up rather than travel with a werewolf?”

  Hell. She’d seen through his ruse so easily. “Serenity…”

  She stood very still with her palms flat on her horse’s barrel. “You don’t understand me at all, do you? If you think staring at me with those yellow eyes and howling all night will make me turn back…” She turned to glare at him just the way she’d done when he’d been lying in the barn after the rescue, completely at her mercy. “I saw Zora speaking to you before we left. I know she never wanted me to come with you. Was this your idea, or did the others put you up to it?”

  “It was my idea,” he said. He removed his hat and held it in both hands, forcing himself to meet her gaze. “I thought if you saw what you’d be up against—”

  “You think I don’t know?” She shook her head sharply. “When you changed the first time, in the barn, I thought I had passed your test. I thought we had an agreement. But you were lying all along. You never intended—” She caught her breath. “There is nothing— nothing—you can do to make me change my mind. If you try to leave me behind, I’ll come after you. Even if you take the horses and all the supplies and leave me in the desert, I’ll find a way.”

  Her blazing eyes did more than send his emotions spiraling into a black pit of confusion. Her stubborn courage didn’t only arouse his admiration, but his body, as well. Her fresh and passionate face with its straight, sandy brows, high cheekbones and full lips had never been more beautiful. Her chest rose and fell rapidly, pulling her shirt taut across her breasts.

  Jacob knew then that he hadn’t wanted to get rid of her only for the sake of her own safety, or because putting her in danger would go against the Code. He hadn’t wanted to feel again what he was feeling now, that powerful, pounding lust that was such a deadly trap for both of them.

  If it hadn’t been for the wild contradictions in the way she looked at him—angry and pleading, defiant and vulnerable, all at the same time—he might have done better at resisting her. He would have remembered the time she’d tried to buy him with her body. He would have remembered Ruth.

  But he wasn’t remembering when he dropped his hat, crossed the space between them and took her in his arms. He wasn’t thinking as another part of the Code he’d lived by crumbled under his feet like the parched earth at the edge of a cliff. After his three nights of hunting and running as a wolf, his instincts were very close to the surface. He didn’t have the will to fight them. And when she put her arms around his shoulders and raised her face to his, he knew nothing in the world could stop him from kissing her.

  Serenity was as hungry as he was, as eager to feel his mouth on hers. Her lips were pliant and warm and demanding. He could feel all the wiry strength in her body as she laced her fingers in his hair and opened her mouth to accept the thrust of his tongue. Her heart was thumping so hard that he couldn’t feel his own.

  He kissed Serenity’s cheeks, her chin, her forehead, as he moved his hands down her straight back and rested them on the gentle flare of her hips. No men’s clothes could conceal her very feminine body from his eager fingers.

  She leaned into him, her breasts flattening against his chest. A little prick of Jacob’s conscience reminded him that they were moving much too fast. He had to stop before they went too far. He had to remember.

  But the wolf and its primitive power would not be denied. He pulled her hips against his and slid his hands between them, cupping them over her breasts. She wasn’t nearly as small as she appeared in a shirt meant to blur her shape. He’d known she didn’t wear a corset, and there was only one other layer between the shirt and her skin, too thin to blunt the firm peaks of her nipples.

  He kissed her again, swallowing her soft moans as he rubbed his thumbs across the heavy cotton covering her breasts. He tugged up on the shirt, freeing the tail from the waistband of her trousers. His fingers brushed heated silk, a woman’s undergarment that served as a shallow nod toward propriety, a feminine indulgence he hadn’t expected. He lifted that as well, exposing the soft skin of her waist, feeling the tremulous flutter of her breath. The undergarment lay too close to her body for Jacob to reach underneath it, but he slid his fingers up over the silk and found her nipples again.

  She gasped, her body torn between resistance and surrender. Jacob didn’t recognize her struggles for what they were until she pulled away, tearing the undergarment before he could get his hand free. She backed up, her shirttail flapping around her hips.

  “I’m…I’m sorry,” she whispered. “I can’t.”

  It was the second time she’d encouraged him and then broken off, and Jacob reeled as if a bullet had just passed through his heart. His legs had gone weak as a newborn calf’s, and his breath burned like a searing wind off the Jornada del Muerto. The wolf inside him snarled in frustration, slavering to finish what he’d started.

  This time the man was stronger.

  “Serenity,” he said, holding his arms loose at his sides. “You’ve…got no call to apologize. I was the one—”

  She pushed at the air between them, warding off his awkward attempt at an explanation. “I wish I could explain,” she said, her voice catching.

  She didn’t have to. He’d been doing nothing but reminding her what he was almost since they’d left Avalon.

  Better to leave her alone and give her a chance to recover her composure while he figured out how he was ever going to be able to look her in the face again. He turned to leave.

  “No,” she said. “No. Don’t go.”

  “I reckoned you’d want to be alone.”

  “No. I…wasn’t honest with you, either. I said I was willing to give you…whatever you wanted in exchange for helping me. Even though you refused, I never would have been able to go through with it.”

  “You don’t have to say any more,” he said roughly.

  “I want to. Please. Look at me, Jacob.”

  He looked. She wasn’t trembling now, though he could still smell the fear on her.

  “We should be riding out,” he said. “If you want to talk later…”

  “With this standing between us?”

  “You know I’d never hurt you.”

  “I know,” she said, staring at the ground. “If it were only what you are…” She trailed off and sat on one of the nearby rocks. “I was engaged once,” she said, “to a very good man. A gentle man who loved me.”

  Another bullet plowed through Jacob’s body, piercing something more vulnerable than any flesh. When he had first met her, he had speculated that her skittishness around him, her disgust for the male sex, had to do with bad treatment by someone she’d known. He had put that speculation aside when he’d learned of her parents’ deaths at the hands of his kind.

  But he’d never thought she might have had a good man in her life. It didn’t seem to fit. And it meant that someone else had…

  “He died,” Serenity said. “He died in the fire with my pa
rents. He was visiting that day. We were planning our—”

  She broke off, her throat working. “I loved him,” she said, finding her voice again. “He was the only man I had ever cared for. When he died, I knew I could never feel the same way again.”

  Or give herself to any man, because it reminded her too much of him? Had her fiance touched her as Jacob had, or had their relationship remained pure, preserved in innocence until their wedding night?

  Ruth had been innocent in every way but one until the day she died. And he had loved her.

  “I’m sorry,” he said.

  She rubbed at her eyes. “Thank you. I hope you understand why—”

  “I understand,” he said. But he knew there must be a hell of a lot more he didn’t know about her. That made everything harder, because his plan to leave her behind wasn’t going to work, and he needed every advantage he could get. He would have to figure out another way to leave her. And of keeping his hands off her for the rest of the time they were together.

  “We should go now,” he said. “If you feel well enough.”

  Serenity got up, opened one of her saddlebags and took out a small fabric pouch. Inside were the pins she used to hold her hair close to her head. She began to gather up the long strands that had come loose during their embrace, the lines of her back subtly changing with every graceful motion.

  “What is it like?” she asked suddenly.

  Jacob didn’t have to ask what she meant, though it astonished him that she would ask at all.

  “Sometimes it feels like a miracle,” he said, looking toward the sun rising over the mountains. “Having two ways to look at life. There’s so much beauty out there most folks don’t see because they don’t take the time to look. But when you’re a wolf…” He hesitated, as if searching for the right way to put his feelings into words a person like Serenity could understand. “You can’t help but take the time, because right now is all there is. The future doesn’t matter, and neither does the past.”

  “No future,” she murmured. “No past.”

  “You’re just alive, part of the night, with the blood of everything that lives pumping in your veins.”