Shut out the stars overhead. Pretended nobody but Violet is with me. Not a muscle. Nor a stray observant eye. They're gone. All gone. And everything will be fine.
My mind didn't cooperate.
Probably because I started to sweat. As always from wearing too many clothes. I sat up and yanked off my shirt jacket, undressing down to my tank top, but laid back and attempted to go right back to sleep.
Where is that man who made me feel some level of safe? Just to talk to him. To learn why I'm not as good as Sherry. Good enough to keep close. Or more. Why am I average? Aside from Sherry's glistening fiery hair. The fiery personality. Of course, I just lived like a weak little quiet thing. Father's dark-haired nondescript daughter who followed instructions. There isn't anything special about me to lure a man into following me closely. Or Lucius would be here next to me, protecting me the way Tacitus did Sherry. I'd been wrong about his attention all day. So mistaken. He hadn't been attracted to me. No. He's suspicious about us. About what Violet revealed about aliens and our healing powers. Life is truly insane. And Langston fed us to the wolves! We're in so much trouble if Lucius doesn't take us to his sire.
My heart rattled until falling into a pit of cold numb fear.
I just need to sleep. To forget about something that couldn't possibly matter. Tomorrow, yes, tomorrow, I could forget about my childish infatuation with Lucius while I slept and deal with pretending we didn't harbor an ungodly amount of alien DNA.
****
The hum lured Elise out of her dream. The strangest sound, she noted. Almost familiar.
My eyes popped open.
Something oddly familiar. I stared into the diamond-like stars in the night sky. The almost-full moon hung low in dark velvet overhead. Violet's hand warmed my skin where curled around my upper arm.
The sound. What made that hum? I know I heard it. And now only a cricket chirped.
Sherry mumbled something in her sleep.
I slid my gaze to where she stretched out a dark lump etched in moonlight.
Tacitus' bedroll lay flat.
Where had he gone? Have all the other Shifters left? I scanned their unrolled bedrolls.
Equally flat. They'd gone somewhere. Why?
The faint coo of the hum, maybe a motor, barely took hold of the night.
Far away. But growing in intensity. Approaching. What makes the noise? And where are our Guardians? Does it matter whether or not we're on an island now because our Guardians abandoned us?
A dot of light near the moon's disc popped into the night sky.
My gut soured.
Nobody on Earth flew aircraft AEI. Fuck. And things are beyond bad when a lady thinks that expletive.
****
"Holy shit, Lucius. Elise is up. Running," Marcus twisted and gasped at me, his eyes glowing with his Wolf in the darkness. "I'll go and keep her quiet so she doesn't wake the others and panic them."
Mine, Wolf growled.
"No." What in the Gods-be-damned hell is she doing? It isn't bad enough a spaceship is flying over The Wild. No, Wolf's woman is jacking around in the middle of the night. I shoved off the grassy forest floor. "Stay here. I'll take care of her." I wove through the dark linear lines of the tree trunks.
As long as the others slept, discussing the latest alien activity would be easier. I'd be lucky to get Elise back to sleep though.
She fumbled around the heaps of saddles on her knees.
Feeling for something. I silently eased up behind her form.
She'd taken the tie out of her hair. Hanging like a dark drape, her hair covered all but a line of pale cloth down her back.
Whatever she wore under that plaid over shirt.
Her bare elbows jerked something long into the air.
"Elise?"
She leapt, twisting to face me, pointing the long barrel of a rifle at me.
"Whoa." I threw out my palms. "It's Lucius."
Her wide eyes glistened with moonlight. "Fool." She lowered the weapon, revealing the seductive curves of a woman in a tank top, the curves she hid for days. "Don't you know not to sneak up on people in the middle of the night?" she snarled.
Damn. She'd wake the youngster and the mouth. "Sh."
Play, Wolf whined.
She blinked wildly as if detecting Wolf's message.
Impossible. But I'd pretend Wolf and I didn't notice the curves of her breast. Or the narrow waist above the gentle swell of her hips. Oh to curl my hands around that waist and pull her against me. She'd be warm. Soft. And without that shirt…
Mine. Mine. Mine, Wolf growled.
She snatched the gun up as if fearing a real wolf unleashed a warning.
"Don't worry, Elise. We'll take care of the aliens."
She sighed. "Did you see the spacecraft?" she hissed her whisper.
"It's gone now. We never see them out here. It must have just been flying across country. Nothing to worry about." I waved a hand at her sleeping bag. "Get some sleep."
"But we're out in the open," she groaned.
At least she didn't argue irrationally like Mouthy Red. "It won't matter. The ship is gone. Please, Elise, try to sleep." So I can forget about that perfect body beneath your perfect face.
"Fine. Tell the woman to go to sleep." She stepped off with the rifle.
An anxious woman might shoot someone in the dark. I grabbed the barrel, my little finger overlapping a part of her warm hand.
She flinched and snapped a bitter gaze to mine.
Like my touch pained her. Or frightened her.
She jerked the weapon from my grasp.
For merely a second. I caught the hard cool cylindrical barrel.
"Give me the rifle," she growled, her grip on the cold hard steel as solid as the weapon's metal.
And maybe I caught something more by her reaction to me. Maybe prejudice against Shifters? Just like Red. Is my touch repugnant? Does she see me as an abomination like most Normals? Maybe that's the truth she concealed. And I'm not insane for my suspicions about her sisters being planted among us to infiltrate our outpost.
Fine. I'm waiting. Watching. Ready to end their little charade. Because my sire will be upset if I don't have proof of their guilt before getting rid of them. But she isn't going to have a gun on hand to shoot any of the Shifters. I drew Wolf into my eyes and ears to use my Wolf eyes as a warning. "Release the weapon."
Chapter Four
Wolf's hearing caught the woman's heart freezing up in another death choke where she stood in the night's revelatory moonlight. Yes. Fear grabbed her heart cold. Revealed something drove her to arm herself against me with a firearm. Oddly enough, moments after an alien spacecraft flew overhead. How ironic. She will drop the weapon. I stared her down.
Her grip loosened and slid away.
All the better for my brothers and Tacitus. A gunshot wound in the right place could kill a Shifter. "Back to sleep." I tossed my chin toward her bed.
She stormed past me, her hair flapping out behind her like one large dark ghostly wing.
All seductive and mesmerizing. Long. Around the sleek curves of her feminine form.
Mine, Wolf growled a desperate partial whimper but part demand.
No. But what a pity she disliked Shifters. Nothing incredible like her ever trotted past my tail. I tucked the rifle into the tack.
"You don't have to growl at me," she snarled.
True. But it's more of a subconscious thing when a Wolf trapped inside a man speaks its mind. Involuntary. And good to know she doesn't misinterpret the sound as territorial. She could use that against me with sex. I pivoted and headed to join the other Shifters hidden among the trees.
"Gods-damn, she's perfect," Marcus hissed where he squatted in a pool of darkness.
He obviously hadn't been eavesdropping on my little confrontation with the woman. "Don't waste a thought on her. That one hates Shifters." I knelt to where we looked one another golden-Wolf-eye-to-golden-Wolf-eye.
"You're wrong," Marcus scolded. "Sh
e never once led me to believe that."
Why is he arguing with me? "You couldn't see what just happened."
"No, Lucius," Tacitus growled, his eyes embers, "Sherry declared to me that she's the only one of her family who had a gripe about Shifters. The others, Violet and Elise, Lucius, have no qualms with us."
Throw tail at a pack and chaos ensues. Unmated Shifters can be such fools. "Why are you arguing with what I just experienced?" I waved a dismissive palm to end the subject. "Tomorrow, we stop at the wire and message the outposts. The Elders need to know about the spacecraft. And anything else we come up with about these females."
"Women," Marcus snapped condescendingly as if my Wolf disliked tail. "And if you're finished with Elise, she's mine."
Mine, Wolf insisted.
The fool has no business discussing my relationship with Elise. "Don't give me a fucking ultimatum."
"Calm down, Lucius," Tacitus warned low and methodically. "He's in the right to voice a claim."
Gods. Do I have to listen to this crap all night?
"She's yours then," Marcus said, no resentment in his tone. "She's scared, Lucius. I don't know why. But you better do something about it before one of us has to befriend her and piss your Wolf off in the process."
Wolf leapt at him.
Tacitus's iron ass jumped between our jerking bodies like a fucking side of a mountain.
Marcus would hear what they all needed to hear. "Mind your own Gods-be-damned business." I shoved at Tacitus' iron chest. "Get the fuck away from me."
Immobile, Tacitus heaved me backward two steps and loomed, a force to contend with. "Go cool off, Lucius. Clear your head. You're not thinking rationally now. Because of her. Because of the aliens."
What the fuck. So much for friends and family. This place began to reek of betrayal. There's nothing worse than Shifter stink.
"Go on. Tear out of here. Run it off," Tacitus growled.
****
When Lucius strode into camp in the morning, he couldn't have even noticed I breathed the way he coldly walked right past me to his saddle and prepared for departure. Just what was so wrong with me sleeping with a rifle? After all, the Guardians had vanished. Didn't anyone realize a woman needs the little comforting reassurance a weapon offers? Especially if she wasn't good enough to have a man do the honors? Oh well. Time to forget about him. My sanity is best kept for keeping my secret instead of obsessing over a Shifter who doesn't consider me mate-worthy. Forgetting him would be difficult. When he'd touched me, when he'd set off a thousand fires in my body by touching only my finger, I can't fathom ever driving the thought of him from my mind. Him. The only man who'd ever made me want to be a woman in a man's world. But I will.
We left the island and rode until shortly past midday where we stopped at an old clapboard house. Bits of white paint curled here and there where they still managed to cling to the home they once perfectly coated. But nobody could call this building a home. The windows had been covered with weathered two-by-fours--who knows when. And the roof had collapsed inward on one end.
Lucius left us eating whatever we could forage from the saddlebags.
But he did something odd. I couldn't help but watch him climb up a thick pole, one like a log stripped of its bark then painted black. At the top, he used a tool to sever the end of one of three metal lines. The end fell to the ground but remained elevated to something it was attached to east of the dilapidated building. Then Lucius carried on with the other attached metal lines. Doing something mysterious, only to finally slide back down the pole and join us to eat.
"Lucius?" Violet called, chewing on some hulled walnuts.
He rolled his blue gaze up from the saddlebag he dug through where he sat not far from my little sister. "Yes?"
"Why did you cut that thing?"
His brow pinched curiously. "To send a message to the place I want it to go."
"A message? Like on paper?" she asked.
Violet wasn't one to not ask a question. And her heightened intelligence drove a fascination she had with languages and communication. A fascination that would reveal her heightened intelligence and get us even deeper into trouble. "Violet, don't bother Lucius."
"It's alright." He rose, waving Violet to follow him and led her to the pole.
So damned far away that I can't intervene to tie her tongue or dodge the bullets certain to fly with his questions and her answers. There's no other reason he'd want to spend time with my little sister. And now he blatantly ignores me. Why? Because I'd wanted to defend myself with a rifle? What harm could that do? He's too suspicious. Too dangerous. I need to calm his fears. How?
Violet walked back alone with a grin on her face. "You won't believe it, Elise!" Her voice piped higher than the tin whistles played by traveling musicians. "Lucius says those wires carry sounds to distant places." She plopped down on her knees, overjoyed in the new bit of science she learned. "Instead of letters on paper, the sounds tell someone on the other end which letters to write on paper. With a sound pattern."
God. Not that word. Pattern. I'll never be able to keep Violet's mouth shut now that we're discussing her favorite subject. And people can pass the word that we're alive. And that spark twinkling in Violet's eye means she's contemplating coding something. Using the game of hidden messages to challenge me to a duo of mind games. This isn't the time to toy with me when her ability to create indecipherable codes could be discovered. Then, everyone will know we're alien hybrids.
My heart rammed into my throat.
"What's wrong, Elise?" Violet pealed.
I need air. Time to choke down the lump of bad news. A place to think out our situation. To plan. I tried to rise but fell on my palms in the grass.
Scuffed combat boots stepped into my path.
Lucius.
"Get up. We need to talk," he growled slightly while speaking.
He must despise me. So, talking is bad. Especially after he ignored me all morning.
"Leave her alone, Lucius," Marcus warned. "You're scaring her."
"It's my call. Mind your own business."
And now they're arguing about me. That's a good diversion. Maybe Lucius will go away. I got my palms beneath my shoulders and tried to push up from the dry dust.
Lucius knelt, with his glowing Wolf gaze locked upon me.
A stare that weighed me down more than gravity.
"What are you hiding, Elise?"
Something completely disconcerting twisted in my gut under his heightened censure. What can I say? If I told him what I am, would it matter? The knowledge does nothing but plague me. It brought three enormous aliens to Sherry's bedside too. Nothing good came from that. Only fear. I have loads of fear already. Confessing to a person who hates me will only cause more problems. "Nothing I know can change anything," I softly replied, staring down at the hem of his bloused camouflage pants.
Well, except my chance at a normal life. And that's what I want. Just as normal a life a person could grasp AEI. One with touching. Yes. And a comforting hand to hold. To touch. What's wrong with me having those things?
He grated his teeth for a second.
I could hear the sound of teeth grinding against teeth.
"Then tell me about this nothing you know because something made your heart thrash out a warning before you fell flat on your face."
"Gods-damn-it, Tacitus," Marcus hissed, "make him leave her alone."
"Let it go, Marcus," Sherry's big Shifter calmly warned. "She's acting strangely. He has every right to question her."
But why question me? What good will it do? I can't tell them the truth--a truth that only implicates my young sister in the process. Even upon threat of death. Violet will suffer. I can't be the cause of her pain. I focused on the splotched greens of the fabric stretched over his bent knee and got my own knees beneath me.
His glare bore through me as I rose to my feet, him rising simultaneously.
I tried to turn away. Stepping sideways to find someplace to hide
from the heat of his stare. But his wide camouflaged impenetrable mass kept cutting me off. Why? What had I done other than breathe?
"Start talking, Elise," he warned, his jaw squared with determination.
Loving Lucius (Werescape) Page 6
