by Kaia Bennett
He sneered and dropped his cigarette, stomping the orange tip under the toe of his Doc Marten. “I’ll be in the trailer, if that’s alright with you, boss.”
I let him go. He didn’t step out again until we packed in for the night. Then we found a campground and hunted.
He didn’t stop killing until I finally pulled him off his prey.
On the third day, we hit snow in southern Ontario. We pressed on, starting out at eight a.m., but made Pukaskwa National Park our stopping point for the night. The temperature dropped and the snowfall increased. I marveled at Evie’s strong shivers as she got out to stretch her legs at the campground. Just a week ago, she’d stood outside in a blizzard and caught snowflakes in her hand, amazed at the changes in her body.
She was close to her period then. The vampire was high.
“It’s beautiful here.” Sadness tinged her voice as she stared up. Pine trees cradled snow on their limbs. When the weight became too much, clumps crumbled to the ankle-high fluff. “Feels like Christmas.”
Her mind fed me the scent of contained pine instead of a forest full of living pine trees. A living room glittered with twinkling lights, the shine of tinsel. Torn wrapping paper fluttered to the floor. Somehow, the scent of cookies didn’t make me gag, but warmed me. My heart swelled at the memory of the holiday despite the foreignness. Christmas with her family meant something to her. She’d probably miss them this year.
Christmas, to me, had always meant bigger crowds, more choices for the hunt. Blood in the snow. I’d strangled a man once with lights like I saw in her memory. I tried—and failed—to hide this from her. She recoiled, in spite of the hunger I aroused in her repressed inner predator.
“How long till we get there, again?”
“If the weather holds, another three days or so. Even if it snows, the truck’s built for the weather. We’ll still make good time.”
“Will it get us there before he loses his mind?” Evie tipped her head toward the trailer, which had become Vaughn’s unofficial pouting place since yesterday.
I didn’t have the answer, and I didn’t like the way her thoughts twisted in the wind around the subject of Vaughn. Ribbons on a maypole, tied tight and always flapping in the corner of my mind.
She kicked a pile of snow, stirring movement behind her. She followed my gaze to the swish of a fox’s tail, the white, black, and rust-colored length popping in a sea of shimmering ivory and forest green. For a moment, Evie’s face lit up with pleasure.
“I’ve never seen a fox in real life,” she whispered. “How adorable is that?”
The fox turned and looked at her, a wild thing with eyes refracting predatory light in a diminutive face.
Her mind fed me flashes of Vaughn, the first vampire she’d ever seen. The first time she’d ever witnessed silver eyes housed in the face of a man, she’d been prey.
The creature sprinted across the landscape, ears flicking for signs of prey scuttling in the underbrush. Her mind lingered on Vaughn, on the killer who’d never be full because blood couldn’t feed his true hunger for vengeance anymore than snow could feed a fox.
I suppressed a sigh, staring at snowflakes dancing on the wind to avoid her accusatory stare.
“I don’t leave him alone when he hunts. Part of that is because of V-Sep, though I haven’t heard about many cases up here. But, the other part of that, the part you don’t wanna hear, is that he has to get this out of his system. I’m there to bring him back, so we can stay on schedule, more than anything.”
“Get it out of his system. By murdering people. Viciously. So that he can go back to murdering people viciously, but not as much.”
What the fuck am I supposed to say to that?
I raked a hand down the bark of a nearby tree in frustration, my gaze drawn to the wound left by one haphazard touch.
“You’re not the only person I can feel, Jesse. You take up most of my mental and emotional bandwidth—”
“Don’t forget the physical.”
“But, I sense others around me still. Every time I let him go out there and hurt someone else, without saying anything, without stopping him, I feel like a killer, too. I feel like I’m back in that motel all over again with Margot Jane, but this time I’m a coward. At least then, I could put her out of her misery.” She fingered her bare wrist, planting the image in my mind of the token that once resided there. “I feel like I’m back in that creepy mating room with your vampire bride.”
“She wasn’t my vampire bride,” I mumbled with an eye roll.
Evie rolled her eyes in return. “Whatever. Point is, I shouldn’t be the only person escaping death here. It’s not right. There has to be another way. I thought maybe I almost did something in Austin, something that could’ve helped, before I had to kill Vaughn.”
This is why vampires don’t have mates.
Having conversations about feelings and dirty deeds. Baggage. We couldn’t get to that coven soon enough, if doing so meant I wouldn’t have to squirm with guilt at every mention of the past and my nature.
“Maybe I should talk to him?” She hated the idea. She winced even as she said the words. But the set of her shoulders said she hadn’t mentioned using her powers as a superficial gesture. When I didn’t give her guidance, she reached down, cupped a handful of snow, and lobbed a ball at my face. I bared my teeth, the cool sting of snow already melting against my neck and down my jacket collar.
“I just told you, I can feel people dying, that I’m going fucking crazy picking up every nuance of Vaughn’s agony, and you’ve got nothing to say?”
“Nothing you wanna hear. Nothing that will stop what’s set in motion.” I smacked away remnants of snow while she seethed. “You can’t save everyone who’s in pain, Evie. You’re one woman, and you know better than most the beast you’re dealing with. You know what it’s like to want revenge and how sometimes you just need to hurt something.”
She averted her gaze, snuggling deeper into her coat to guard herself against the truth.
Stark hopped out of the truck. The snow and tree cover in our section of the camp hid the oddness of a man getting undressed to any passersby.
“I need to hunt.” He cleared the gravel from his throat. “It’s been a while since I’ve changed.”
Evie’s gaze traveled over his form as the wolf tugged his sweatshirt off. A flush of red etched his neck and chest. The blond fur around his nipples pointed like an arrow down his body. My mate noted the trail disappearing into the denim, the sharp cut of his hips. The wheat-colored curls at the base of his cock trapped the distinctive scent of her ‘good friend’.
If thoughts had punctuation marks, Stark was a ‘friend’ with a question mark.
She averted her stare when she realized she’d watched him peel off his jeans and boxer briefs.
I narrowed my eyes and she gave me a wide-eyed stare in return. We shared flashes of his naked body in New Jersey, and then on the rack in Asylum. My subjugation of her body, how she’d hated me, even Vaughn’s fingers and tongue, dominated her memories of that night. Now, she remembered the rest, all the things that heightened the experience. She’d seen the wolf’s hard cock. She seen him panting on the ground as he changed in Allamuchy, and then panting under Sundara as the true born temptress sucked and fucked him into submission.
Alpha stock. Powerful, but also able to be tamed. Able to be ridden in a world that had taken Evie for such a wild ride.
The twining images of wolf and man took her thoughts to a hospital room. The soothing scent of earth and woodland musk tickled her nose as he held her in her childhood bedroom. He’d come to her when she called him. He’d held her while she cried endless tears. She recalled her bandaged hands smeared with blood, and underneath them, healing flesh she couldn’t explain to her mother.
Ravenous hunger and blankets on her shoulders, as her family huddled together in that same living room full of Christmas memories. They’d learned that a world bigger than them existed, and that Evie had bec
ome a monster. Their little girl wasn’t human, and something else inhuman would be coming for her. But, Stark promised he’d be there to protect her. Her human weakness marked down a debt she didn’t know how to repay.
Stark kicked off his shoes. Everything he took off, he folded neatly and placed in backseat he’d been given leave to sprawl in since Vaughn vacated the cab.
I noted the moment Stark’s stare passed over Evie and clenched my fist sorting through the flames of rage that licked my insides. Just a look. She’d never forgive me if I killed the wolf over a look. But then, she’d never forgive me for many things. What was one more?
Chill. In a few days, none of this will matter. She’ll be free to be her own turned witch. And I’ll be free to—
Free to what? Free to be in exile?
The wolf knelt on all fours in the snow, breathed deep and exhaled. But he stared at Evie like he made sure to remember her, to come back for her when he gave into the beast.
A low hum started in him. The same feral beast from New Jersey rippled through his body like a wave. Creatures scattered in the underbrush, sensing a predatory song as old as the land we stood on. A predator getting ready for the hunt, prey playing their part.
And what part did Evie play? What part did I play?
The change seized Stark, gripping his jaws as they elongated and snapped at the frigid air tickling his whiskers. I smirked as Evie shuddered and sprang to put distance between them, but stared, riveted as his back arched and elongated. There was a strange majesty in the change, to become a beast instead of hiding the monster in plain sight.
Stark’s spine cracked through his skin, and I thought of Vaughn. Of bones growing in hidden places. Like memories and pain. The chain of bones that would become Stark’s tail crawled into the air and fused together like snowflakes.
I had the better deal in the end. Every time Stark knelt on the ground, he had to give into a torture I’d skipped at birth. His skin split like mine had under Cai’s blade, the surgical precision of nature revealing the muscle and sinew of the wolf within. The fat and skin, the prickle of each follicle calling to the others, created first the short coat, then the slate gray overcoat. He grew a hide and fur that would shield him from fleas and ticks. Nothing so insignificant could pierce that rapidly healing skin. The unruly wires itched endlessly, like the whiskers spiking from his face. He used them to inhale a thousand worlds with this new, wet nose….
Since when did I give a fuck about werewolves shifting?
Evie had proven her point about her abilities. I didn’t think she noticed she’d rolled me once again, but she had, and thoroughly. She felt Stark’s change as if her own goosebumps were sprouting fur. I swept my sleeve up my forearm and saw the goosebumps to match.
Fucking. Empaths.
I couldn’t think of a better way to curse a being than to give them the ability to feel another’s pain as their own. Evie’s voice answered me in an absentminded manner, as if she were talking to herself with a lyrical voice from the past, sparked by indignation.
Not just pain. Also pleasure. The curse is pain. But the cure for the pain is the feeling of life in my veins. As many lives as I want. As much pleasure as I can contain. If it didn’t terrify me so much—If I weren’t so scared of who I am, sometimes I think I could devour the whole world. Glut myself on sensation. Bend people to my will like a wolf with a rabbit in his teeth. Like you with a human or a witch coming on your cock as you suck them dry. If I weren’t so terrified….
We both shuddered with desire, with the spike of power at those thoughts and the speed of them as she imagined all the things that made us come, made us moan and catch fire. Her thoughts spiraled with the speed of Stark’s immersion into his beast skin. Fur wet with the afterbirth of transformation and snow bristled all along his sleek and powerful body. His eyes burned like azure flames, when they weren’t hooded with the pains and endless itches under the skin, the rearranging of cells, the growing and shrinking of organs.
My poor wolf. I’m so sorry, Josh.
I sensed the deepest loneliness. Tears prickled behind my eyes to join Evie’s. To be birthed alone, each and every time, since the moment he left his pack had been a hefty price to pay. Pack wolves had each other. The hum eased the ache, the hum of creation in their bones smoothed the passage from human form to wolf. Together, as a pack under the full moon, the pain felt like an exaltation, like a howl shared.
Out here alone, in the wilderness with no wolves to share the ache, he gave birth to himself. He latched onto the sight of Evie in his mind like a mother as he twisted in the womb of his change. She eased the sting somewhat. She made him remember the modulation, that the agony he conformed to with silent surrender, had a purpose beyond fucking or finding a fresh kill.
When he’d finished his change, whatever remained of the human detective sat cradled within the impulses of a viciously male creature, ears pricking up for prey, balls heavy with seed and full of heat. If he couldn’t fuck in wolf form—the memories Evie teased from him suggested he’d fucked plenty in Allamuchy—then he’d come back to human form, dying to bury himself in someone. He knew this deep down and he worried for the next few days, but Detective Stark had already begun to doze in his new shell. No time for human concerns now, for decorum nor to wonder about the witch’s warm body, if he couldn’t find his own kind.
The wolf shook out his wet fur. Growling like a discontented chainsaw, he lowered his chest to the ground. Sliding massive front paws through the snow, ass up, tail high, Stark stretched, leaving marks in the snow that were easily longer than the dually truck at his back.
Turning glowing eyes to his charge he padded to her side and bowed his head. She swept her hand over his head and then under his chin to scratch him like a big dog. He sniffed and licked her palm. I watched a giant wolf close his eyes like a pet, like I did when I savored Evie’s touch.
Salt sweet. His mind growled at the taste of her palm. Fangs inside. Kind. Sweet witch.
Her scent in his nostrils became a bouquet as distinctive as a fingerprint, filled with notes even I couldn’t decipher, notes that revealed the phase of the moon even.
He tilted back his head and howled, the long mournful note piercing an afternoon blanketed in white, from the storm clouds to the forest floor. Wolves returned his spine-tingling howls. The long notes resonated with the need to connect, dropping to a register that indicated Stark was equally ready to kill. Yet, these wolves weren’t his own kind. None called to him with the notes of the beast of burden, the protectors of witches. These were free wolves answering his call now, as innocent as predators can get. They belonged to packs all their own. They would live and die just for each other. Purely beast. Their own masters.
Anguish pierced my guts as he ended his song. He took off at a gallop to outrun that loneliness and disappeared into the thickness of the forest.
“Why don’t you go with him, since you two are so close.”
One long plume of vapor exited Evie’s lips, then she swiveled, with two decisive crunches in the snow, to look at me. She said nothing, just waited for me to dig more dirt out of this hole I’d shoveled with such unwitting skill.
“Poor little white knight seems lonely, is all I’m saying. Maybe if you’re out there on all fours when he’s done munching on possum you can make him feel all better.”
She sniffed, not with tears, but from the cold. Even her nose had gone Indian red from the chill.
Then she smiled, a smile so gorgeous I realized I’d never seen the like before. Not ever, not even on her beautiful face. She’d never smiled at me like this.
“I’d love to say it’s none of your business who I get on all fours for, but you made sure I couldn’t. At least not for a few days. After that though….”
Her smile died a quick death. I followed her train of thought against my will, her viciousness bumping up against that wall of conscience she’d set up like a prison watch tower inside my skull.
It’s none of you
r business where I stick my dick.
I’d taunted her with those words in a dressing room in Tennessee, with a girl outside waiting to fuck us both. At the time, Evie’s body had been subject to the same rules. If I’d decided right then to lift that school girl jumper and fuck her in front of the mirror, she’d have had no say.
Had she been jealous then of that girl, like I’d become now? And of a fucking wolf, at that.
Now who’s on the rag?
I’d heard all the human clichés about women and menstruation. I’d fucked and a killed a few girls on the rag, a kind of delicacy for my kind though the bloodlust means you don’t often keep prey around long enough to have that treat on purpose. Never kept one alive myself long enough to see the hormonal spikes, but the way I felt now made me wonder—
“Maybe. Maybe I am rubbing off on you, and maybe you deserve to feel a little imbalanced. I only wish I could give you the bloating and the cramps to go with it, you smug sonofabitch.”
In a few days, though, her hormonal issues wouldn’t be a problem. Whatever happened then, sucking witch blood straight from the womb, would be a memory. I’d have to get my fix the old-fashioned way—
She trudged to the truck and yanked open the passenger door. Shuffling up on the step she slid inside and slammed the barrier between us on her own unspoken question.
How many girls are going to die in my place when he’s free? How many girls are out there right now on their period, walking into the clutches of a vampire?
Vaughn and I hurt a lot of humans in our respective lifetimes. When we severed the bond, Evie would still be a half-breed, an anomaly with complications waiting around the corner. I’d go back to being me.
She thought of Stark. The knight in shining wolf fur with his great big teeth for biting, and his great big hands for holding, and a sexual appetite to match the one she’d been born with, as well as the extra helping of carnality I’d given her when she turned.
I looked over my shoulder, the earthy smell of wolf still in my nostrils, and heard his howl, like a bell tolling on my uncertainty.
