Desert Wolf

by Linda Thomas-Sundstrom

  “This is just the beginning,” Grant said slowly, as if trying to soften bad news. “There’s just a little more. The next flash of pain will be worse. You might want to die. But you will withstand that pain, Paxton. You must not leave me. Handle what she will throw your way, my beautiful lover.”

  “She?”

  When she asked that question, Paxton heard Grant’s reactive sigh of relief.

  “The moon,” he said. “To me, the moon is female. For you, it might be different.”

  She felt Grant lifting her. He was rescuing her after putting her here in the first place. Before her next breath, she was in his arms and they were moving toward the doorway, toward the light shining there.

  That light wasn’t the final white glare that sick and dying people mentioned in hushed voices, because she had not died in the cell. Already, she could breathe easier and move her arms. Fresh air filled her oxygen-starved lungs.

  More of the terrible tunneling darkness receded as Grant carried her onto the covered porch outside the building. Moonlight lit the street, slanting in from a position low over the top of the nearby mountain range. Though the light was weaker now, it was in a perfect position to have reached her inside the room behind them through the open doorway.

  Grant carried her into the empty street, holding her tightly, probably realizing she couldn’t have stood on her own. Whereas she had always been fiercely independent, Paxton now felt like a child.

  “If this has already started, moonlight might aid the transition, might make things easier. Are you ready to see?” he whispered with his face close to hers.

  Grant’s face. No mistake. Big eyes. Chiseled cheekbones. Expression of concern.

  “And may fortune be in our favor, Paxton, so that the damn beast sniffing around won’t get wind of this before it’s done.”

  Paxton had no idea what he was going on about. Concentration hadn’t caught up after sliding into a caged abyss. Her face and lips tingled, coming alive after being numb. Her body felt brittle and way too rigid.

  The way Grant held her suggested that he thought she might break if he set her down. Maybe he thought she’d pass out. His energy buzzed through her as if he could, by some kind of fancy transference, shore up her energy with some of his own.

  It was, of course, too late for anyone to help her. When Grant leaned back and moonlight touched her again, the thing nestled inside her soared to the surface.

  Chapter 23

  In his arms, Paxton shuddered once more.

  Grant shored up his grip on her.

  Her head was thrown back, exposing a smooth expanse of pale ivory neck he wanted to nuzzle. Her legs, clad in dirt-speckled jeans, dangled over his arms. Paxton felt so very light; he feared there would be no room for her small-boned frame to graduate to the next phase of her first shape-shift.

  But her body was trying to do just that.

  He wasn’t going to let her go or let her die. Silently, he sent her one message of encouragement after another, backing up those messages with a push of his own personal power. She didn’t scratch at him or fight. Her hands covered her face because the light was hurting her eyes. On her upper arm, below her short T-shirt sleeve, sat the ring of silvery tissue that looked like his.

  Who the hell knows where your moon mark comes from or how Andrew kept it a secret? he mused, not wanting to mention Paxton’s father’s name. Andrew Hall had never set foot in Desperado since Grant took over as caretaker and alpha of the desert pack. Though Grant had bunked in the guesthouse, Andrew had seldom been in residence, preferring another, undisclosed location for his long-term illness.

  They had never crossed paths or spoken face-to-face. After word of his death arrived, Andrew’s will had been the only remaining link to a legacy directed at werewolves…from a man with knowledge of the species who, for some reason, cared enough to help.

  Paxton had to be that reason, Grant surmised. Her father had brought her here and had sent her straight into Grant’s arms. He hadn’t been wrong about Paxton’s wolf blood—it had to have come from family. There was no way to copy a mark like hers. Although he didn’t have proof of her father’s heritage, and Andrew Hall had certainly never admitted to being part of the species he protected, the man had to have been a pure-blooded werewolf.

  If Andrew had been a Were, it explained her. This. Now. What it failed to address was how Paxton had held off her wolf for so long and how she could be going through the change without a full moon present. Those things would suggest she was Lycan, and also that he had been an insensitive idiot for not picking up on it when sensing Weres was his business.

  Damn it, he was anxious for Paxton, who was in the dark in so many ways. If offered the choice, he would gladly have changed places in order to take on her pain. At the moment, with her shirt torn open and what remained of her flimsy lingerie exposed, the belief that she could be a Were seemed ludicrous.

  He wished they’d had more time in that damn bunkhouse and that he could have explained to her what to expect. She wouldn’t have believed him, of course. Not many people could have, in her place.

  Grant’s heart skidded in anticipation of what would happen next. Paxton would be enough like him to be able to stay with him if she chose to. She would be free to love him if that’s the way her heart ran after just one day together.

  One frigging day that felt like years.

  Imprinting was a hell of a thing to have taken hold of him so quickly. Taken hold of both of them, it now seemed to him.

  New shudders rocked Paxton, punctuated by her muffled groans of surprise and pain, before her body went limp in his arms. Grant anxiously waited for movement that didn’t come. For her big break from human status to manifest. Paxton didn’t open her eyes or acknowledge where she was. Her breathing again was shallow. So far, other than a few good quakes, there had been no real hints of a big reveal.

  But he wasn’t wrong about what she was going through. Any werewolf could have recognized the signs.

  As if his last thought had nudged a reaction, Paxton suddenly kicked out with both legs. She squirmed and began to fight his tight hold. Her head came up with a snap. She opened her eyes.

  Their gazes met and held long enough for Grant to see a reflection of the moonlight in those amber irises seconds before the golden color began to darken.

  Next clue. The flash of gold all Lycans possessed.

  The time for ignorance and denial was over.

  Paxton’s face began to alter like soft sand sifting into a new shape. Slowly, and with the moon granting his plea for leniency on Paxton’s behalf, her pale cheeks sharpened without making her scream. Deep hollows formed, and the angles made her thin face seem twice as delicate.

  Moonlight melted on her skin. Her face and bare neck shone with a silvery luminescence, as if she had swallowed moonlight and it shone through her pores. Because breathing was difficult for her, she panted, taking in air through her mouth. As her chin began to elongate, her moan of discomfort was a barely perceptible sound.

  “Yes,” he said to her. “Let it out.”

  She had larger eyes now, and a longer neck. She had taken on an otherworldly look that was ethereal, yet backed by steel. Her arms were defined. Long blond hair flowed down her back.

  Paxton was shifting in his arms and hadn’t cried out or doubled over to retch her guts out. Her overall size hadn’t changed. Some of her features hadn’t yet rearranged because she had paused part of the way through her transition. And though Paxton no longer looked quite like any human on Earth, and didn’t resemble Shirleen or any other she-wolf he had ever known or seen, she was a Were in her very soul. Different. Beautiful. Unique.

  Lycan.

  Grant stared at the result of the moon’s purposeful early caress with his heart thundering. The wolf in him begged to respond to Paxton’s wolfishness. She was the wolf of his dreams. His wishes for a mate had been answered.

  “You are beautiful,” he said to her, slightly in awe, meaning every word.<
br />
  But the face-altering business was only a moment of calm before the storm. After another racking shudder, Paxton again went rigid. The familiar crack of bone on bone came as her spine snapped to a new alignment. Soon after that, her struggle to get free intensified.

  Though Grant wasn’t so sure about obliging that request for freedom, or what she would do if left on her own after the shock of this new identity, he loosened his hold.

  “What if you get away? What if you run?” he said. “Danger lies beyond these walls, Paxton. Tonight, if the beast out there has his way, everything might come tumbling down around us.”

  She couldn’t speak. Her body had changed in this second wave of shifting, but not tremendously, and she was still breathing.

  Paxton Hall, she-wolf, was breathtaking. This close to her, Grant’s wolf was not to be caged. His claws, face, chest and spine, morphed in seconds as he continued to hold Paxton close. The look on her new face when she witnessed this was priceless, but she couldn’t protest, argue or feign disbelief. There were two werewolves here. Paxton’s inner self, long in captivity, had finally been set free.

  “Damn!” Shirleen’s tone was one of surprise. “What the hell?”

  Fully shifted, Grant’s senses strengthened. While he wanted to deal with Paxton, something else dared to vie for his attention. He looked west with sudden interest. Silently, swiftly, Grant set Paxton down, ruing the need for a few inches of distance when he wanted to go at her in animal-to-animal fashion and solidify their bond. His need to possess her was so strong, he backed up a few more steps to keep from touching Paxton again, afraid he’d never let go if he did.

  Paxton didn’t run away. She sank to a crouch, attempting to deal with new parameters for balance. Her eyes were damp when they again met his, and reddened by the pain she had not yet put behind her.

  “Welcome to my world,” he sent to her. “To our world.”

  Soft growls of protest escaped from her throat.

  “The beast comes,” he sent to her. “Can you hear me? Can you feel his presence out there, somewhere close?”

  In spite of her quakes, Paxton stared back.

  Bless her, she was on board. Paxton was Lycan, another term for strong and fierce. However, there was much more to come, just as he had promised her.

  His first instinct was a primal one—an urge to throw her on the ground and possess her. They could imprint their brains out if he showed Paxton everything a Were could do with a mate, twice over.

  The ache he carried inside for finding a real partner had intensified a thousand times, and at the moment there was nothing he could do about it. Whatever he and Paxton had to work out had to be postponed. His terrible, gnawing need for her had to be ignored.

  “It will be okay,” he promised.

  But could he keep that promise? She might be stronger as a werewolf, yet she remained a fledgling, without the knowledge of how to access and wield the new power she possessed. Christ, she couldn’t even stand up.

  Paxton was vulnerable, sick, and he had to leave her. Had to. He was alpha. Helping Weres come into their own was his gig and what he had signed on for, but they were all stuck in the middle of a mystery only partially solved by Paxton’s arrival and late transformation.

  What happened to you all these years, to keep you from this? How have you postponed what your heritage demanded?

  *

  Big freaking surprise.

  By fornicating with Grant the werewolf, she had caught his disease, and she could have killed him for that—if she didn’t want to ravage his body first.

  The only sound Paxton could dig up was a growl—the kind of sound wild animals made when angry, threatened and in distress. That was appropriate as hell, she supposed, since it seemed like she was an animal.

  The world had tilted off its axis, and she was hanging on by her claws. She had somehow been treated to an unwelcome physical software upgrade that had tripped her system into uncharted territory, and she didn’t know what to do or how to react.

  The shock was not only staggering, it was slowing her defenses and leaving her afraid to even try to comprehend what she had become. Her skin was on fire. Nerves were frying with each upward degree of core body temperature. Her legs felt like someone else’s legs. She didn’t recognize her trembling hands.

  But Grant was on the move, and she could not lose him. He had the answers to this riddle. If he had given her this disease, perhaps he knew how to reverse it.

  Without knowing how, she found herself shadowing him, somehow able to walk, quickly finding her balance, if not her sanity. He didn’t like having a shadow and growled a warning for her to stay back. Without him, though, she was in limbo. Fear clenched her insides. Desperado’s buildings seemed darker, more sinister, when she had long ago loved this place.

  Was she going mad?

  Grant strode toward the end of town, halting twice more to issue sounds of displeasure when she ignored his warnings about being left behind. Paxton prayed he soon would wake her up.

  “Help me.”

  His shoulders tensed as if he heard her thought, yet he kept moving toward the darker places beyond the old wood walls.

  Paxton’s shock was making way for a litany of strange new sensations. The warm breeze ruffling her hair was unusually sensual. Desert heat slid down her body to slip inside her jeans, leaving her thighs tingling. She wanted to tear off her clothes and run naked through the dark, cool off and mate with Grant on blistering desert soil, rutting like animals.

  Off came her shirt, tossed aside. The mark on her upper arm felt like it had been made by the kind of hot iron brand ranchers used to mark their animals, and it seemed larger, deeper, more visible. Scarier still, it did look like leftover damage from a large animal bite.

  Moon mark was what Grant had called it. Bearing the mark was proof she was like him, he had said. If that were true, it had taken having a sexual liaison with Grant to find out she was something unimaginable. Something inhuman.

  Stumbling twice before getting her stride down smoothly, Paxton refused to slow until she reached the edge of town, near the old mining office. Grant had stopped there and was looking at her over his shoulder. His expression was one of regret. It took her a few seconds to register that he had shifted again, so fast she hadn’t had time to notice. The human face he presented to her was a camouflage, as was his hunky cowboy body.

  “Not a lie,” he said soberly, in response to her thought. “This is the face I was born with. It’s the one I present to the world most of the time so that we can all get along.”

  Paxton shook her head, but was sorry she did. The piercing pain behind her eyes was excruciating. The inability to speak brought more panic. “Not the real you, Grant.”

  “Both faces are me,” he corrected. “I’m the same guy who picked you up at the airport and…”

  He was hearing her thoughts, however absurd that idea was, and he wanted her to understand what was going on without having the time to tell her exactly what that was.

  “Show me the other one,” she said to him in her mind. “Change again for me.”

  “I have to stop a beast from getting here, Paxton. He is too damn close, and though you’re a Lycan, you are new at it and much too vulnerable to help in this fight. You’ll have to stay here and keep back. A stint in that damn cage truly was meant for your protection.”

  Paxton’s hands stung so badly, she growled in terror. Hearing the sound made her want to cry. As she stared at the sharp little claws working their way through the tips of her fingers, she vowed not to faint.

  Never been weak…

  This is only a dream.

  She ventured another silent question. “Does that beast have something to do with this place? Does it have anything to do with me, since I’ve encountered it twice?”

  “Damned if I know what it wants here,” Grant replied. “Nor do I really want to find out after everything I’ve learned about this creature. But I have to find him. You do underst
and that, after what I’ve told you? You do see how necessary it is to keep Desperado off human radar?”

  He wasn’t telling her the truth. Paxton leaned forward. The inferno inside her was taking its toll, driving her crazy, making her twitch. The wolf in her was outrageously issuing X-rated demands in spite of the appalling situation she found herself in—this unshakable dream that seemed so real.

  And Grant was withholding secrets that pertained to her.

  She saw the same level of lust she was feeling reflected in Grant’s blue eyes, but it seemed that his ability to control it was a hell of a lot better than hers. Fear, lust and greed were like a sudden heat wave coloring the space between them.

  Grant was upset, nervous and preoccupied. When he turned to sniff the air, the scent he was after hit her like a flying brick. In that breeze was a smell she recognized.

  Paxton dropped to a predatory crouch. With one hand in the dirt and the other on the mark on her arm that burned like a sharp-tipped arrow had been embedded in her flesh, she glanced up in time to see Grant shape-shift again in a fast ruffling of time and rippling flesh.

  Screaming was not an option. Arguing took a back seat to the sheer amazement of what she was seeing for the third time. In this form, the intimacy of their connection blossomed. She had a new appreciation for the large, formidable werewolf whose face exposed the anger he was feeling and whose skin undulated continuously as though unsure of which form to take.

  “I know that scent,” she sent to him, and he nodded without asking more details.

  The creature Grant was expecting was none other than her bear…the bear that wasn’t a bear at all, but something everyone here expected to be far worse. Hell, her instincts shouted, what could be worse than a goddamn werewolf?

  Still, now, as she inhaled the scent of the stranger out there beyond Desperado’s walls, bits of memory, sharp as broken glass shards, came crashing back. Memories tied up with that same scent in a not-so-pretty red bow, suggesting that Desperado had always been strange, and she had just been too young to notice.