by Davis, L. C.
He bent his head, pressing a kiss to my palm, his lips cool and warm at once. When he looked up at me under those golden lashes, his eyes were smoldering. "It's a bit silly not to believe in something I've touched with my own hands. Especially when you're the realest thing I've felt in a long time."
"Dennis..."
"It doesn't have to be public, or exclusive, for that matter," he said, leaning back without releasing my hand. "We can take this as slowly and as far as you want to. I know you're going to be focused on the hearing, and my life is going to hold its fair share of chaos for the next few months, but I enjoy your company, Holden. I don't think I'm being too forward to say you enjoy mine, too."
"I do," I admitted. "Of course I do, but I'm just not sure I can offer you what you want."
"All I want is the chance to get to know you a little better. It's fairly obvious we have a physical connection, and I'd be lying if I said I didn't hope it would become more than that eventually, but let's start with dinner. Every week, or every other, if you'd like. Let me take you out and we'll talk, just like this. I'm a good person to vent to since no one else wants to talk to me," he said with the self-deprecating humor I was starting to find as saddening as it was charming. "And you can listen to me whine about the first-world struggles of the bureaucracy."
"Are you sure that's enough?" I asked softly. "I'd like to give you more eventually, too, but I can't promise that. Not right now."
"I never make an offer I can't live with," he said, sweeping his hand along my jaw to tilt my chin towards him. "No strings attached."
All the breath left my lungs, and I found myself lost in the spell of his touch. For a moment, I was concerned that Nick wasn't the only one capable of compulsion, but my head was clear, even if it was lodged firmly in the clouds, and my will remained my own. I nodded jerkily. "Okay. No strings attached."
I waited, sure he was going to kiss me. When he pulled away and picked up his menu instead, I realized there were some strings I could have happily learned to live with. "Wonderful. Now, how about dessert?"
Fifteen
DANIEL
My track record with women wasn't much better than my track record with men, but if there was one mistress I could always count on, it was sleep. She had been playing hard to get as of late, but after a week of nonstop chaos, it looked like I was finally going to get a full eight hours. There was only one superstition I believed in, and that was the inexplicable uptick in human and animal stupidity that led up to the full moon. That morning alone, I had dislodged a variety of inedible objects ranging from half-chewed action figures to string from more orifices than I cared to think about. My ex-girlfriend-turned-occasional-drinking-partner up at the County hospital had me beat with her war story of a sixty-year-old man who had decided to drop acid for the first time on a whim and wound up diving out of a tree, convinced he was an ostrich.
I would hate to be the poor schmuck who got break the news to him that ostriches can't fly.
At least the chaos was all but guaranteed to come to an end in the morning when the sun rose. In the meantime, I was ready to take my relationship with my memory foam to the next level. Maybe I'd even open the clinic late and sleep in a bit. A man could dream.
Well, any other man could. Apparently, I wasn't allowed to sleep.
I heard the window slide open but I was asleep deeply enough to dismiss it. Sometimes I forgot and left it unlocked, and the building was old. The window had a habit of sliding free of the latch and rolling down. The unmistakable feeling of being watched was what dragged me from the warm embrace of sleep.
"Nick?"
He was watching me from the other side of the room with a vaguely nostalgic look in his eyes. Under any other circumstances, my feelings about Nick in my bedroom would have been conflicted at best, but sleep deprivation had left me decidedly short on tolerance for bullshit.
"Sorry, I didn't mean to wake you up."
"Do you have any fucking idea what time it is?" A quick glance at my alarm clock told me it was later than I thought.
"The zenith of the full moon," he muttered.
"What?"
"Nothing. There's something I need to show you."
"Now?"
"Yep." With that, he climbed out of my window and dropped down out of sight. I rushed to the window and searched the empty fire escape only to find him waiting on the sidewalk below. "What the fuck? How did you --?"
He motioned impatiently for me to follow him and started walking towards the woods.
"Fucking lunatic," I muttered, tripping my way into a discarded pair of sweatpants on the floor. I slipped on my shoes and went down the normal way, still half-convinced I was in the middle of a dream. I made it to the edge of the woods before I noticed something rustling through the trees up ahead.
"Nick!" I hissed, stalking forward. I stopped short when I caught sight of the huge black mass of fur, set with golden eyes that were too high off the ground. At first, I thought it was a bear, but as it moved forward, I realized the slope of its head and pointed ears were far too canine. Fangs as white as the moon peeled out from behind its wrinkled muzzle and if I hadn't been fucking petrified, I might have noticed the sentience in those golden eyes. Or the familiarity.
Before I could scream or run or do much of anything, the beast reached out with a decidedly humanlike hand and pressed a clawed finger against my lips. The silencing gesture was clear, and it served its purpose, if only because my throat was too tightly constricted with terror to scream.
The creature's eyes softened and it blew a puff of air through its nostrils. The gesture was just familiar enough to trigger some recognition that went beyond sight or sound or what was even remotely possible. "Nick?"
The beast gave a curt nod and turned, stooping to all fours to lope further into the forest. I followed him because at that point, it had to be a dream and I was too curious not to see it through to the end.
He came to a stop and so did I. With the mostly bipedal build of a gorilla on steroids and the canine head, there was little room to doubt that the monster standing in front of me was a werewolf. An eight-foot-tall, half-ton, fur-having, fang-flashing thing that went bump in the night and crawled out of the last campy monster movie I had fallen asleep with on the TV and straight into my dreams.
Or maybe my reality. The wolf crept close enough that I could feel its hot breath on my face and see the red flecks on its muzzle. There was a constant rumbling coming from its chest, but it was too soft to be a growl and too unbelievable for it to be a purr. Those golden eyes were watching me with something like concern and when a cold nose pressed into my neck, stirring the hair at my neck with a sudden rush of air, I felt the ground shift beneath me. I pitched forward and the beast caught me just as my vision went black.
That was strange. I'd never passed out in a dream before. By the time I opened my eyes, those same warm golden depths were watching me with unaltered concern, but they were set in a face I knew well. Nick was Nick again, and he had me by the shoulders, keeping me upright.
"Daniel?" His voice sounded far off, but the sensation of dew soaking into the knees of my sweats kept me grounded. That was the kind of detail that just wasn't there in a dream, but if I wasn't dreaming, how the hell had I gotten out in the middle of the woods and why the fuck was Nick naked?
I stared in confusion at the faint white scars carved into his chest. If I'd been slightly more convinced any of it was real, I would have resisted the urge to reach out and brush my fingertips over the jagged flesh, but the brush of his skin against mine, the warmth of him, was enough to bring reality crashing down on my head and I quickly pulled away. "You never told me you got surgery..."
He frowned at me in confusion, like I was the one who'd just turned into a goddamned gorilla with fangs. "That's the first question you ask after all that?"
"You're...a wolf." My voice was stilted and it didn't sound like it was coming from me at all. It kind of had an echo, like I was hearing it from
underwater.
"See, this is why I never told you. No telling how you're gonna react to shit," he muttered, grabbing a pair of jeans that had been rolled up and tucked into the roots of a nearby tree. I looked away as he got dressed, but not before I'd caught myself staring at his dick. Fuck, had he noticed? At the very least, finding out he was a horror movie monster had to get me off the hook for gawking.
"I'm fucking losing it," I muttered, getting to my feet somehow without really meaning to. He reached out and grabbed my arm, his shirt half-on.
"Easy! Christ, I didn't think you'd faint on me."
"You couldn't have warned me first?"
"You're a skeptic, remember? Seeing is believing."
Couldn't argue there. "You're such a prick."
He rolled his eyes. "Come on, let's get you back inside before the sun comes up."
I tried to plant my feet, because the world was moving too fast around me and I didn't want to go anywhere until my mind had time to catch up to everything, but he pulled me easily. A few minutes later, I was sitting at my kitchen table while he fiddled with my coffee maker.
"Put the filter in first," I muttered. When he froze, I added, "The black thing by the coffee."
"This thing is fucking retro, man," he said, finally managing to get it working.
"It works fine," I said gruffly, looking for any excuse to take offense since I was just generally pissed off.
He leaned against the counter while the coffee brewed and watched me with folded arms. "You're taking this better than I expected."
"That's great, since there's not exactly social protocol for finding out your best friend's a fucking werewolf."
"Just hope Holden doesn't faint when I tell him."
"I didn't faint, I blacked out."
"Whatever."
"How long, Nick?"
"A few seconds."
"I mean how long have you been a werewolf," I snapped.
"My whole life."
"What?"
He sighed, taking out the carafe before the pot was full. Coffee sloshed onto my counter as he poured a cup and set it in front of me before flopping down in the chair across from mine. "It's not just me. It runs in the family."
"Son of a bitch, Nick."
The corner of his mouth tilted up. "Nah, I got it from my dad. Mom's human."
"So your dad... Wait, what about Brent?" I cried. How many nights had I gone out drinking with a werewolf? No wonder I lost every damn contest.
"Yep. Uncle Luke, too. Every direct descendant of the Whitaker line."
I shook my head to clear it since the coffee hadn't kicked in yet. To do any real good, I'd have to spike it. "When you turned into that--"
"We call it shifting."
"Okay, when you shifted, you were male. Did it change when you got surgery? Not that I was looking, it's just...kind of hard to miss."
He snorted, popping the top off a beer with his teeth. Just watching that made my gums ache. "Nah, it's always been that way. Our beastforms reflect our souls or some shit like that."
I could tell he was less than eager to be talking about it, but the medical nerd in me had to ask. "How'd you do that, anyway? Aren't werewolves supposed to heal fast?"
"Silver scalpel, werewolf doctor," he said with a shrug. "If it's all the same, I'd rather not get into it any more than that."
"Sorry," I mumbled. "Wait, your mom knew your beast mode was male and she was still that much of an ass about your transition?"
"Beastform, and she doesn't know I'm a werewolf. None of our mates know. My dad had to compel my mom to forget the first time she saw me shift."
"Compel," I frowned. "Is that what you did to Holden?"
"Keeps the peace."
"I'll bet. So what, you guys forget your anniversary, bat your eyes at the missus and she forgets she was ever pissed?"
"There it is. The sanctimony is coming out," he muttered, taking a swig of my beer.
"You're damn right it is. I don't care what you are, that's fucked up."
"There are wolves who abuse compulsion, but it's an inborn trait. It's not like we choose to be able to do that, we just choose how we use it," he said with the air of a well-rehearsed speech. "And there are rules, just like there are in human society. If a wolf was using compulsion to control his mate for any reason other than keeping the family secret and keeping her safe, the rest of the pack would kick his ass."
"Honor among wolves. How novel," I snorted. "What do they think about what you did to Holden?"
"What I did was a mistake, but I was trying to protect him," he said, his voice taking on an edge that made it clear I'd crossed some invisible line between us. "Anyway, my family doesn't know I imprinted on Holden in the first place."
"Imprinted?" I groaned. More werewolf terminology was the last thing my overcrowded head needed.
"Relax, it's just another word for what happens when we meet our soulmates. That you already know about."
It admittedly made more sense than it ever had. I just wasn't sure that was a good thing. "But Holdens' a guy."
His face fell. "No shit."
"You're straight." He could glare at me all he wanted, but I had spent long enough hammering that fact into my own thick skull that I wasn't about to let it go. "How does that even happen?"
"I don't fucking know, okay? Sometimes it just does. I'm not happy about it, but I can't un-imprint, and I wouldn't want to if I could. It's hard to explain."
"Why, because I'm bi?" I asked dryly.
He rolled his eyes. "No, because you're human. Imprinting is about more than sexual attraction, even though that's usually part of it."
"Usually?"
He shrugged. "Sometimes it's platonic. It's rare, but it happens."
"Is it platonic with Holden?" I didn't mean to sound half as hopeful as I did.
"No. I don't know." He cringed. "This is still weird for me and I'm trying to sort it all out, so I'd rather not get into the details, alright?"
"Fine, fine. I still don't get why you're keeping this from your family, though. Unless you just don't want your mom to know you're uh, dating a guy?"
"We're not dating, but that's part of it. If Holden ever does decide he wants me as anything more than a guard dog, I'm gonna be hearing how my mom 'just knew I'd find the right man one day,'" for the rest of my life," he muttered, mocking her tone. "But I'm mostly keeping it from them because it's not safe if they know. Not for Holden."
"Why not?" The Whitaker family closeness was making more sense than it ever had, even if I didn't want it to, but that left other questions unanswered.
"Remember how I told you Holden was a witch?"
I had been trying not to think too much of it, given that other things I had previously assumed impossible weren't, but I nodded.
"Witches and wolves don't get along so well. Especially Whitaker wolves."
"If you start talking about family curses, I'm walking out."
"It's your place," he reminded me. "And no, that's not it. It's more who witches associate with than the witches themselves."
"Excuse me?"
"Witches are human, more or less. They smell like any other human and they're not much of a threat to us on their own, but they're power sources for other things."
"Such as?"
"Mostly demons. Sometimes angels. I've never met either one in person, but as far as I can tell, the distinction's more political than biological," he said, taking another sip of his beer. I grabbed the bottle from him and polished it off. I needed it a hell of a lot more than he did.
"Why are you telling me this? I don't want to know about any of this."
"I know, but stuff is getting weird around here and I had to tell someone. You're the only one I trust. Besides, I figured it'd be good to do a dry run before I tell Holden."
"Good to know I'm so high on your priority list."
He gave me a look. "Don't be like that. You think I liked keeping this from you all these years?"
"Pe
ople don't usually get that good at something if they don't enjoy it."
"Don't start pretending like you tell me everything, Daniel."
"I do."
"Bullshit."
"Name one thing I've kept from you that matters."
"How about last month when you showed up stinking of Dennis Mills' scent?"
I froze. "What?"
"Yeah, strong nose. Kinda comes with the territory," he said, watching me in smug satisfaction. "You wanna tell me what that was about?"
"I went to his office to find out why he was running for the Council," I said, cringing internally. If I had to pick the last person on earth I wanted to know about my ill-fated reunion with Dennis, it was Nick.
"Uh-huh. Well, that explains why you were stewing in each other's pheromones for days. Nothing gets people hot and bothered like local politics."
My face was getting flushed, so I got up to grab another beer and grudgingly tossed one in his direction. He caught it, of course. At least now I knew why he always kicked my ass during our sparring sessions despite the fact that he was a good forty pounds lighter. "What's it gonna take to pretend like this never happened?"
"Sorry, now that I've outed myself, I'm not gonna let this go. It's hard enough to keep Holden away from that freak, but now I've gotta worry about you, too?"
"You don't have to worry about shit where I'm concerned. I can take care of myself."
"Maybe, but that doesn't mean I'm not gonna worry. Just because I didn't imprint on you doesn't mean I don't see you as family, Daniel. What the hell were you thinking?"
"We're done with this conversation."
"No, we're not," he said, jumping to his feet in challenge. "Dennis isn't who you think he is."
"You think I don't know that?"
"No, I mean he's literally not who you think he is."
I frowned. "What are you talking about?"
"You know how you always said he changed? That he wasn't the same person he was before Jessica disappeared?"
"I don't have the energy for this, Nick."
"You were right," he said flatly. "He's not the same, and it's not just because he went from being a psycho prick with a snuff fetish to a chipper mannequin with an Oedipus complex. I'm talking about a physical, biochemical change. His scent is completely different. It changed overnight, and the whole pack knows it."
