by Harper Allen
“Run.” His voice was a growl, but I heard it normally, not as if it were coming from inside my head. “Run like you’ve never run before. Don’t wonder about anything, don’t think, just run!”
Running had been a good idea sixty seconds ago, I thought as I began to race for the trees. I shot a glare at Mikhail, loping shoulder to shoulder with me, but he was looking back so I risked a glance back, too. The dark cloud of bats wheeled in a wide circle over the entrance to the well where we’d been standing a moment ago, then turned as a group and begin heading toward us, one massive bat slightly ahead of the rest. As the lead bat begin to close the gap between us I saw green fire flash from its eyes, and I nearly stumbled.
“Keep going!” Mikhail snarled. “We’re nearly at the treeline, and the brethren are coming to meet us!”
I couldn’t take in what he was saying. “The lead bat’s got emerald eyes,” I said, terror giving a rough edge to my voice. “Mikhail, it’s Zena! And she’s got a damn army backing her up!”
“We’ve got an army, too,” he growled, jerking his muzzle at the trees. “Once we lose ourselves in the brethren, we’re safe.”
“Who the hell are the brethren?” I pictured an earnest group of door-to-door Bible-thumpers who had somehow gotten themselves stranded out here in the middle of nowhere. Then, through the tall grass that partially obscured my vision, I saw pinpricks of brilliant gold ahead of us by the trees. “A wolf pack?” I swallowed. “They understand I’m under your protection, right?”
Mikhail snapped his jaws close to my neck. I felt a sharp slicing sensation as his nip pierced my flesh. “If you don’t pour on the speed, I’ll rip your throat out myself rather than let that bitch take you down, so move!”
Maybe it was the shock of knowing he’d bitten me, or maybe it was just the fact that Zena was gaining on us. Whatever it was, I put on a burst of speed I didn’t know I had in reserve, aware of a fetid rush of air bearing down on me and the creak of leather wings just feet above my head. Then I reached the protective stand of trees and was surrounded by a dozen or so wolves. I kept running, but now I was pressed in on all sides by the pack. I glimpsed Mikhail’s lean, muscular shape pivot beside me and leap into the air, white fangs snapping closed inches away from the lead bat. Several wolves directed their attentions at the handful of other bats that had followed their mistress into the small forest and were dodging the low-hanging branches, their outsized wingspans liabilities now, rather than assets.
At some point I sensed we were no longer being pursued. The wolves flanking me reduced their speed to match mine, loping instead of racing through the trees, but although it seemed I’d been running forever, I felt no need to stop. In fact, I didn’t want to stop, I realized as I nimbly scrambled up a small scree of fallen rocks onto the ridge of a hill and then down again into a shadowy valley. Through the branches overhead I could see a huge moon hanging in the velvety night sky, its reflection mirrored in the waters of a nearby stream. The sight of it seemed to add an edge of exhilaration to my relief at having escaped Zena and her hordes, and a wild, uninhibited joy ran through me. The grass underfoot was fragrant and soft. The night was warm. I felt bursting with energy, my pack had proved themselves to be loyal and brave companions and my mate was virile and ready to take me whenever I signalled my readiness.
Boy, was I one happy she-wolf.
I came to a skidding stop inches from the stream. The other wolves kept going, except for the black wolf with the silver-tipped ruff holding back at the edge of the water.
“Mikhail.” I said his name without looking at him. I tried to tell myself that my voice hadn’t come out in a low, canine whine. “What did you do to me?”
“What I had to, to save your life.” His voice was a growl—no, not a growl the way it was when he was in human form, but a growl. I could understand it as well as if he’d been speaking English. “You’re under the radar now, as far as any vampires are concerned. You give off the scent of a wolf, not a human, and wolves aren’t vamp prey.”
I dipped my head toward the water. The moon’s image floated like a golden lily pad on the surface of the stream but I wasn’t in the mood for Zenlike beauty at the moment. I stared at the wavering reflection of a female wolf, her fur pale in the moonlight, and opened my mouth to speak. The wolf in the water opened her muzzle, showing the gleam of white teeth.
“Am I stuck like this?” I said/growled, still looking at my reflection and not at Mikhail.
“Would that be so bad?” I was sure I detected a note of wolfish amusement in his reply. “The night is warm, the grass is soft and your mate is virile and ready to—”
If I’d been in human form I would have punched his arm. As a wolf, I apparently had less of a sense of humor and more of a hair-trigger temper. I whirled around, my sudden move shattering my reflection into a mosaic, realizing from the strange sensation on the nape of my neck that my ruff had risen. I sprang toward Mikhail, my canines slashing at his shoulder.
“You should have warned me, you carrion-eater!” I didn’t know where the insult had come from, but I sensed it was one of the worst things I could call him. “Maybe you’re used to popping back and forth between human and animal, but I like having a heads-up as to which species I might be at any given moment! Now tell me—am I stuck like this?” I punctuated my question by ripping at his left flank. In the moonlight I saw him bare his teeth as he turned on me, his jaws closing on the fur at my throat. I rose up on my back legs, intending to twist out of his hold, but he knocked me to the ground with his muscled forelegs.
A second later I was lying on my belly, his jaws still clamped on my neck. “No,” he said through a mouthful of my fur. “You change back the same way you became a wolf.”
“By kissing you?” I let my anger trickle into my tone as I slanted my gaze backwards over my shoulder at him. “How do we manage that trick in our present forms?”
“We don’t. You undergo the shift with me if we’re physically intimate at the moment I begin to change.” The amusement returned to his tone. “I thought you’d prefer to stay like this until we get back to the motel, in case Zena’s left a couple of undead watching the Mini. As you’ve discovered, a wolf’s stamina and speed and night vision are better than a human’s. But if you want, we can shape-shift now.”
“Get off me.” When he didn’t immediately move, I let a growl rise in my throat, and felt his jaws release their hold on my ruff and his body heat recede from my flanks. I leapt to my feet, intending to slash at him again, but when I spun around to confront him I wrinkled my nose in confusion. “What are you doing?” I asked with fresh suspicion.
His front feet were splayed out on the ground in front of him, the black and silver fur of his chest almost brushing the grass, while his hind quarters were in normal standing position. At my question he hesitated a moment and then suddenly tore sideways a few feet and took up the same stance, still staring at me. His teeth showed between his open jaws, but his lips weren’t curled back in warning, and as I stiff-leggedly advanced on him he dashed out of reach again. His tail moved fractionally from one side to the other.
I ignored his maneuvers. “Not to be crude, but if I want to turn back into someone who can wear heels again you and I have to do it doggy-style, is that what you’re telling me?”
“That’s one way wolves are intimate with each other, sure.” His tongue lolled out the side of his mouth as if he were grinning. Before I could anticipate his move, he dashed behind me, nipped lightly at my tail, and sped away again.
“What are the other ways?” I tucked my tail between my legs to keep it safe from this new, unpredictable Mikhail.
“You could let me groom you, we could fall asleep curled up together, we could open our souls in a group howl.” Punctuating each possibility with a mock leap at me, he ended up with his nose touching mine, his lambent eyes only inches away from my glare. “But we’ve been wondering what it would be like to mate with each other since we first met, so let’s
go with that.”
“We have?” My ears pricked forward alertly. “I mean, you have? You saw me as the enemy!”
“That didn’t stop me from wondering.” Suddenly he broke off contact with me and sped halfway up the hill. He stopped and looked back at me. “You don’t have to make up your mind right away. Come on, let’s play!”
Let’s play? Was this the same Mikhail who’d spent the better part of a week glowering at me and acting like Darkheart’s binding incantation had been a fate worse than death? And what about his admission just now that all along, his engine had raced a little hotter when he and I had been together?
“Maybe he shifts personalities as well as shapes,” I growled under my breath as I saw him lope to the top of the hill and then whirl around again. I rolled my eyes heavenward in exasperation. “I’ve got enough problems trying to keep the vamp side of me from taking over. I’m in no mood to indulge in puppy-playtime with my oboroten, especially when Kat and Tash are out hunting—”
I stopped, my gaze fixing on the full moon. It was so huge, I thought, awestruck. And so…golden. It seemed to be shining directly on me, its magical beams drenching me in gilt spangles, the pull of its ancient power reaching straight into my body and running like quicksilver through my veins and sinews and muscles. I tried to look away, but I couldn’t. It seemed to swell until it filled the indigo sky. A nameless desire shafted through me, and without knowing what I was doing or why I felt compelled to do it, I lifted my muzzle to the sky and let out a sobbing howl.
Weeks after this all happened, I made the mistake of telling Tash about my howling-at-the-moon performance. She gave a shudder and said, “Two words, sis—Un! Comfortable! I totally didn’t need a permanent picture in my memory bank of my sister doing the wolf-girl thing at the moon.”
I can see her point, but at the time my actions seemed perfectly natural to me. I don’t know how long I howled, but when I finally dropped my muzzle and ran to join Mikhail, all my inhibitions had fled. Following the silvered track of the moonlight, we raced across fields, through the trailer court and down dirt roads, taking the back way into Maplesburg. It was a run of about ten miles, but we stretched it into twice that. First Mikhail would circle behind me and try to nip my flank or my tail, then I would throw myself at him and we’d tumble in a pretend-fight. We treed a raccoon, drove a chained-up farm dog crazy with our scent until his barking woke the farmer, and when we got closer to the motel, tipped over some garbage cans outside a strip mall restaurant. When we finally made it to my palatial digs at the Park Vista, we were snuffling with laughter as we lurked in the shadows at the back of unit seven, and when I looked up at the small bathroom window I began to snuffle harder.
“You got any bright ideas about how we get in?” I asked Mikhail, my tail wagging in amusement. “That’s latched from the inside. The front door’s locked. And neither of us have opposable thumbs at the moment.”
He touched the tip of his nose to mine, as he’d done in the forest. “Leaving aside the lack of opposable thumbs, how do you like my world, Crosse?” I heard his query only as a rumble coming from deep in his chest, but it was as understandable as if it had been put into words. His eyes seemed lit with gold fire. “Did it make you forget your human problems for a while?”
I dipped my head and lightly licked the side of his muzzle, my tail no longer wagging. “It made them recede, Mikey-baby. And becoming a wolf tonight saved me from going one-against-fifty with Zena and her creatures. That would have been a fight I couldn’t win.” I nuzzled his ear. “I like your world. But my mother tried to run from her destiny, and it caught up with her in the end. I can’t stay a wolf forev—”
Dizziness caught me unawares. For the second time that night I closed my eyes as jarring sensations flicked through me. I felt strands of hair like rough silk under my fingertips, warm skin against my lips, and the solidity of Mikhail’s biceps tightening around me as I adjusted to the unsettling feeling of standing upright on two legs and having clothes on again.
“I wish you’d warn me,” I said shakily. “A girl likes to know when her world’s about to be rocked.”
“Too bad,” Mikhail said, bending his head to mine.
I think I’ve already testified that the man can kiss, no? But that’s like saying Rob Thomas can sing. Mikhail’s tongue stroked the inner recesses of my lips and flicked against the roof of my mouth before retreating slightly. I felt his teeth close on my lip, then release it and lick the tiny sting away. His hands moved down my back to my rump. Spreading his fingers wide, he snugged me higher against him and made a frustrated sound deep in his throat. I let my palms slide along his shirt to his belt, and then to the straining hardness I could feel beneath his jeans.
“We should get a room,” I whispered hoarsely.
“We have one,” he breathed against my mouth. “All we have to do is get to it.”
Making our way to the front door of the unit took a lot longer than it should have, what with me trying to unzip his jeans while we were edging around the corner of the unit still locked in an embrace, and Mikhail trying to reach under my top, unsnap my bra and peel my pants past my hips all at the same time. Luckily there was no one in the parking lot to see us, because when we finally fumbled my key in the door of number seven and got inside, we were both half-naked and there was a trail of hastily discarded clothing leading up to the unit.
“The first time I saw you in human form I thought, God, he’s so hot,” I said as he succeeded in getting my jeans off. “Well, actually, more like hott, with two Ts. Maybe even three. Hottt. But then you turned out to be an asshole.”
“I just thought, fuck, she’s holding a gun on me and I’ve got a hard-on, what does that say about me? Was I really an asshole?” Mikhail ran his thumbs up the inside of my thighs.
“You dumped me in a graveyard at night,” I reminded him, arching my neck and closing my eyes. I sank my fingers into his hair. “You’ve got a lot to make up for, Mikey-baby.”
“I’m working on it,” he said as he hooked a finger through the hip-band of my thong and dragged it down. “Hot with four Ts,” he rasped as he surveyed the little landing strip of neatly trimmed hair that was all Joyla, the brutally efficient Brazilian waxer I visited at the Beautiful You Salon, left on her willing victims, I mean clients. “You feel like satin all over,” he muttered as he brought his mouth to Joyla’s handiwork.
You know how in books they used to put three dots at the point where everything started to get hot and heavy? And then they’d pick up the story again with the lovers lying panting and exhausted in each other’s arms? I used to think that was just the author drawing a discreet curtain over the wild monkey sex I was sure happened after the dot dot dot part, but now I think it’s because, really, how do you describe going out of your mind?
Total rip-off if I don’t try, though, so here goes.
The man brought the exact same talent that made him such a dreamy kisser to the lower area of my anatomy. His tongue teased me and invaded me by turns, and every time I thought he was going to let me go into full-blown Megan-goes-over-the-edge mode, he pulled back just enough to have me biting my bottom lip and practically begging him to play fair. At some point I found myself on the side of the bed, and in pre-orgasmic impatience I sneakily tried to get my own hand in on the action. Not missing a beat—okay, not missing a tantalizing lick—he trapped both my wrists with one hand and kept on driving me crazy.
Which meant that when he finally relented, I was extremely ready.
My hair felt damp. Oh, hell, to be honest it felt soaked. I’d lost my top somewhere on our striptease journey from the back of unit seven to the door, but my bra was still hanging off one shoulder, and my nipples looked like round pink pebbles. My fingers were raked through Mikhail’s too-cool-for-school silver-chunked strands of hair and I felt like my grip on him was the only thing keeping me from spinning off the edge of the world as I let loose with an upwardly escalating series of gasping, whooping screams.
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I know. Tough on the older couple in unit eight and a slam-bang audio performance for the single guy in unit six, but I was way past the point of worrying about motel decorum by then. And when I eventually drifted back to something resembling sanity, I had something bigger to focus my attention on.
“Oh my,” I croaked, my throat raspy from hitting high C so many times in the past few minutes. “I mean, your jeans fit tight in all the right places and a girl’s gaze just naturally drifts to the zipper area to check out a male’s merchandise, so I kind of had a clue, but…” I lay back on the bed with an anticipatory purr. “Something tells me I’m going to be howling at the moon for a third time tonight.”
“Something tells me I’ll be joining you,” Mikhail said, his grin flashing in the light slatting through the chinks in the blinds at the room’s single window.
He moved to the bed and straddled me, the muscles of his thighs taut against my hips. I wrapped my hands around his shaft, feeling the velvet-over-steel tension centered there, and slowly let my palms slide down along its length. Equally slowly, I let them move back up and then down again, this time cupping him and letting my fingertips stroke him further. In the half light I saw him close his eyes and tip his head back, the tendons in his neck tight, and heat began building again in me as I watched his reaction. The next time my palms moved upward, I pulled him closer and raised myself from the pillow. This time when my hands slid down his length, my mouth followed and I heard Mikhail’s sharply indrawn breath as he felt me take him in.
Okay, I confess: I was as mean to him as he’d been to me. And he loved it. I could tell, because in between growling hoarsely that he’d known from the first I was heartless and now I was proving it at his expense, his voice would trail off into a strangled moan and his hands would tighten convulsively on my shoulders. Once in a while, just to be a total tease, I’d swirl my tongue around the tip of him verrry slowly, looking up at him through my lashes as innocently as if I was licking an ice-cream cone. I would see the gold glint of his half-closed eyes, the thick shadow of his lashes on his cheekbones, the erotic way he sank his teeth into his bottom lip, and my own control would threaten to break.
