Nevertheless, she held herself closer and braced herself against the wind sweeping over them. The energy inside her became subdued in the werewolf’s presence, because beneath her was another kind of energy that made her head ache and her fingers prickle to be near it. She welcomed that headache the same way she welcomed a hangover after the oblivion a drink gave her the night before.
The werewolf stopped in a clearing near the edge of the forest.
When David changed back into a man, he assumed the naked form she had seen in her vision, this time coloured not by the moon but by the setting sun. It rendered him a golden satyr in the dimming light.
“You don’t even know what you are, do you?” David said. He cradled her cheek in his hand. “If you did, you wouldn’t keep trying to be something you’re not. You shouldn’t be in their world. You should be here, in mine.”
She should have been afraid. He stared at her mouth as though he wanted to devour her, his palm feverish on her skin. In her red suit jacket, she felt like Little Red Riding Hood getting snowed by the wolf.
But it had been so long since a man had touched her like this, since anyone had touched her without things going crazy around her. Well, the leaves around her rustled, and sudden gusts buffeted the branches and kicked up forest debris in a circle around them, but none of that was dangerous. The forest was familiar with wind and its destruction, and the leaves were well-worn from the number of times they had been swept up just like this.
She leaned into his touch, shivering as if cold. Kelly had spent most of her life feeling out of step, closer and closer to exploding from whatever raged inside her. And this man knew what it was.
“What am I?” she whispered.
He stroked his thumb over her lower lip and met her gaze. “What big eyes you have,” he said
His head snapped back. A giant red welt formed along the line of his cheekbone. Kelly gasped. Apologising was as automatic as breathing for her—she had been doing it for so long. David had basically kidnapped her from an alley after stalking her for over a month, but she was the one who was horrified.
“Oh my God, I’m so sorry,” Kelly said. After apologising, her next instinct was to flee, but David caught her wrist before she could. Not that she could have outrun him anyway.
“Did I say we were done?” David grinned. The whip mark was livid, but it didn’t faze him. “We’re not finished yet, witch.”
He had named her curse.
It should have made her scoff, like the idea of ‘werewolf’. Yet what other word—fantastic though it may be—could describe the things she did? Pseudoscience had its terms—telepathy, psychokinesis, precognition. However, in the old days it was called something else—magic. And the ones who used magic were called witches.
“Is that what I am?” Kelly asked in wonder.
David tugged her closer, wrapped an arm around her waist and brought her hips against his. She gasped again, but this time it had nothing to do with magic, although branches snapped around her.
“What did you think you were?” David asked, chuckling. He lifted her arm up and breathed deeply from the place she’d scraped herself from her fall. He licked his lips then pulled her arm around his shoulder.
“Cursed,” Kelly replied.
“Some say our kind are cursed, too,” David said. He danced to music only he could hear, danced them around in slow circles as the isolated wind storm around them picked up, yanking at her skirt and hair and tousling David’s hair further. “I don’t listen to them. Weak, jealous meat, all of them. Nothing this alive and powerful could be cursed.”
“But…” she tried to protest.
David pressed his lips against hers with soft and delicious tenderness. The storm continued to whirl around her, but she went still, her world narrowing to David’s kiss, his hot tongue slowly but thoroughly claiming her mouth until she clung to him to keep herself standing.
When he pulled back, she tried to follow him to make the kiss never end.
“You are a child of the earth and I am a child of the moon,” David murmured. He was so close to her that he didn’t have to raise his voice to be heard over the howling wind. “You can’t control your magic because it’s too big for the human you are. I can make you more powerful. I can give you the earth and skies and everything in between, as well as the strength to harness your magic. If you keep trying to fit yourself into their world, it’s going to tear you apart. I can let you loose. I can make you wild.”
“That doesn’t sound like control to me.”
He was undoing her jacket, pulling it down her arms. It dropped to the forest floor.
“This doesn’t feel like control,” Kelly said, a little breathless.
“You got to lose it to find it again,” David said with a feral grin.
He slipped a hand under her skirt and squeezed her ass. Among the cacophony of leaves and breaking branches came the sound of tearing fabric. Her blouse ripped apart of its own accord—or perhaps from her own force of will. Because I wanted it, Kelly thought with amazement. I wanted it and it happened.
Her skirt quickly followed the torn shreds of her blouse on the ground. David yanked off the rest. He fell to his knees to take one nipple in his mouth, teasing it with his teeth then making her moan with the wet, velvet heat of his tongue. He traced fingernails that became claws over her tattooed thigh, where a darkly colourful fairy with delicately torn wings knelt in a magical forest.
“I win,” he said, baring teeth that had gone sharp.
Fairy tattoos were about as common and clichéd as roses, skulls and dragons, but she had drawn the concept herself during one of her blackouts. The image, quite unlike anything she had ever drawn before, had stuck with her for several weeks until it had finally compelled her to step into a tattoo parlour.
At first, she had been afraid that the pain was going to make things go crazy around her. A tattoo parlour was one of the last places a person wanted something to go wrong. But after the initial flickering lights as the artist had begun, there hadn’t been a single other incident during that session or the next two.
Instead, Kelly’s eyes had glazed over, and during the second session when the artist had started the colours and shading, she had actually fallen asleep. In spite of the way her thigh had felt as though it had been attacked by a horde of bees, she had practically been high, every muscle in her body relaxed, her mind wonderfully fuzzy and the storm inside her calm. It had lasted for about three blissful days after each session.
Her energy—no, magic—wasn’t calm now. It raged within and around her, but she didn’t have to futilely hold it in the way she did in her apartment, at her myriad jobs, when walking down the street or shopping for clothes or groceries.
“I’m going to give you the whole world,” David promised. He kissed the fairy’s body then stroked it with his palm, moaning as he lapped at the juices dripping from her. His wolfish teeth scraped against her mound before he looked up at her and sucked her small, throbbing clit into his mouth.
She cried out at the sky when one of his teeth caught against it.
He wasn’t finished with her yet. David pulled her down until he lay on the ground with her over him. The head of his cock pressed bluntly against her entrance. He was hot everywhere she touched, his muscles alarmingly firm, and she ran her hands over as much of him as she could reach. David laughed as she bit his shoulder, his neck, his jaw. She wanted more. She wanted closer. She wanted wilder.
The cold wind buffeted them from side to side, forcing them to tighten their grip on each other. Icy fingers pulled at her professional bun and tugged until pins flew in every direction and her long, amber-rich hair tumbled loose. It whipped around them like the tails of a soft flogger, twining around his fingers and her arms and curling around the curves of her breasts and hips.
“Kiss me, wild child,” David said. There was a trace of mockery in his tone, but it was mostly subsumed by the intensity of his arousal and the undeniable glimmer of admira
tion in his eyes. “I like the taste of your magic. It tastes like cinnamon and honey.”
He buried his fingers in her hair and groaned as she sank her tongue into his mouth, giving him the taste of her that he wanted.
Leaves flew over them, and she was occasionally pelted by fallen nuts, but she barely noticed what was going on around her anymore, not when it had been so long since she’d felt someone against her, someone almost inside her. She practically purred into his mouth, wriggled over him as much to tease herself as him.
David growled and rolled them over. Twigs dug into her shoulder blades, and the rough autumn grass crackled under her. Then he had his erection in hand. He sank slow and sweet into her. Her mouth dropped open as he began to move, no longer slow, no longer sweet. She was tight, and it hurt where he stretched her, but Kelly locked her legs around him, arching her back and pushing him in harder to make it hurt more. She dug crescent moon marks into his ass with her nails to spur him faster.
“Oh fuck, yes, harder,” Kelly gasped. “Think you’re stronger than me, wolf?”
The now frigid wind wrapped around him, picking him up slightly and rocking him forward into her. He shouted then laughed.
“I’ll show you power, witch.”
She released him and brought her hands over her head. The nails were stained red. She pressed her palms against the earth and dug her fingers in, bracing herself. She sensed the power under her hands, the soil that got under her fingernails, rich with the nutrients of death. Death and life, disease and birth, it coursed through her fingers and through the cock slamming into her, igniting her from one end to the other until lightning splintered across the sky and thunder rolled through the ground. Kelly thought she was going to fly apart. David swallowed her cries, kissing her through her magic-drenched orgasm until his rhythm faltered, and he groaned out his own climax, hips snapping into hers hard enough to bruise her thighs where they pressed against the wings of his pelvis.
Kelly’s whole body shook. The wind around them had died down with her climax, but now she was weak, trembling. She stared up at David in confusion and a touch of fear—although she did not yet know why—as he stood. She clutched at the earth as though it would protect her. He looked over her greedily. His smile was cruel.
“Just imagine, it will be like that every time,” David said. “But better, because you’ll be able to handle it. Just you wait, Kelly.”
As David changed into the dark wolf and sank his teeth into her calf, Kelly couldn’t do anything but scream.
Chapter One
Kelly opened her eyes to the ceiling of her trailer. It used to be hers and David’s. Now it was just hers. It was cosy and a little worse for wear, but serviceable. Werewolves liked a lot of space, but outside the trailer, she had all the space she could ask for.
The curtains fluttering above her spread to let the morning sun in through the partially opened window. Kelly relished the morning sun on her face as much as the moon at her back. She liked the camper because of the skylight in the bedroom, so that she could see the stars when she went to sleep. It was part of the reason she hadn’t left it behind when she’d fled from the pack after killing David.
David had promised her the world, promised her thunder at her feet and her magic tightly reined by the strength of the wolf.
Well, the wolf was strong, and she’d had more control over her magic after she’d changed. However, following the change the wolf had taken completely over, and Kelly had lost herself within it.
It had taken months before David had been able to challenge the wolf long enough to make her submit to him. Once he’d become her alpha, she had finally emerged from her wolf skin, hair a wild tangle around her, body filthy and scratched but otherwise intact. David had taken her against a tree, and she had submitted again, because he had been alpha and she had been his bitch, which was what he’d wanted all along—a witch as powerful as she was under his command, snagged before she’d had a chance to figure out what she was and how to control it on her own.
Kelly had quickly become a trophy for David to flaunt before his pack and all the others over which he’d lorded. She had tolerated it, because when she’d been alone with him, he hadn’t been so cocky. His body had been hers, and when they’d run through the woods, she had kept apace neck and neck instead of running behind. She’d stayed because the wolf really had helped her control her magic. She was indebted to David for that.
She’d also stayed because covens didn’t like werewolves, and there hadn’t been anywhere else to go.
She stretched her limbs now, feeling the ache of last night’s run. These days, she ran alone, but that didn’t make the running less sweet. She missed pack, but she was also relieved to be released from her fealty to them, from their stares and snickers and scepticism of her magic in spite of her efforts to show them.
When Kelly sat up, she saw that the snow had piled up against the lower part of the window screen. The sun was already bright, glaring against the glittering snow drifts—it would be the last snow. Kelly enjoyed the last snow much as she enjoyed the last hot night of summer.
She smiled and got out of bed to make some hot chocolate.
The aisle between the bathroom and the kitchen was barely wide enough for her to walk through. On the way, Butch Cassidy tangled between her feet.
Normally, animals couldn’t stand werewolves, but her witch nature still called to felines, and the ‘unadoptable’ tomcat Butch Cassidy had firmly adopted her. Aside from Renee, Kelly hadn’t thought anyone at the sanctuary would really take to her, but on her first night, Butch Cassidy had braved the snow to scurry to her trailer and yowl at her door until she’d let him in. He had then cuddled himself—cold, wet, scraggly fur and all—against her stomach as though she were his personal heater. Kelly hadn’t complained. Far from it. She used to think her ’appetites’ had barred her from such attachments. Although she was still a fierce predator, well, she knew how to better handle that hunger these days.
Kelly could adapt to a lot. When she had been human, she had adapted to keeping herself on a tight leash, to being constantly ashamed of herself. Then, when David had turned her, she had adapted to the new demands that lycanthropy had placed upon her, and she’d adapted to David’s demands as well. He had been a bit of an arrogant ass at times, but unlike some of the other men who vied for alpha status, he had actually been a decent leader. However, just as her best times with David had been when they were alone, so were her worst times.
The real problem had arisen when David had wanted Kelly to change Renee Chambers, the young woman on whom Grant Heath had set his sights—the young woman who David had been afraid would be the start of a new pack for Grant.
Even for a werewolf, Grant had been a problem child, a vicious man with what David had called ‘a screw loose’ and what Kelly had called ‘depravity’. It hadn’t defined all of Grant—Kelly had liked him well enough, partly because David had hated him so much. Technically, he could have been alpha. He could have easily beaten David in a fight. But the sub-alphas and the rest of the main pack would never have let him lead. They had all known that something wasn’t quite right with him.
But instead of rewarding Renee—small, scared, strong Renee—for killing Grant and ridding David of his greatest rival as well as a rogue werewolf well worth the name, David had wanted Kelly to change Renee, exactly what Renee had denied Grant. He’d intended to assert his dominance over Grant, dead or not, by taking her. Another bitch to display, another trophy for his case.
Kelly had refused.
David had struck her and told her that she would obey him. Wolf pelt had rippled over his skin. He had said he would drag her there by the scruff of her neck if he had to. He had been used to getting his way.
Kelly supposed it had been easy for him to forget how much she was capable of. All the wolf pack had ever experienced from her was the occasional cold breeze, her uncanny ability to reply to something they were thinking, as well as her little charmed
trinkets, potions and spells that she sold from her truck and online. She had become the circus sideshow, the freak among werewolves, the witch girl who slept with the alpha but wouldn’t eat humans anymore.
At the time of David’s command, Kelly had understood two things—the first was that she needed to protect Renee, who didn’t have the benefit of magic to protect herself. Yes, Renee had managed to kill Grant, but if Kelly went after Renee or if David decided to take matters into his own hands, Renee would not be lucky enough to avoid the transformation again.
The second was that Kelly should have known from the start that she was meant to kill David. There had been no writing on the wall, no drawings of him in the notebook she had begun to keep for such purposes. Yet in that moment, Kelly had known that David had to die. And Kelly thought some part of her had known all along.
Kelly had done it for Renee, but she had also done it for herself.
She’d made the death quick and left him on the forest floor for the other werewolves to find and bury. Because she was a bitch, killing the alpha didn’t make her the new leader. And because she was a witch, the pack had banished her instead of setting upon her with tooth and claw, the justice of the forest. They’d feared for their own lives if they tried.
They’d let her leave with her truck and the trailer before the sun set. Once she’d reached the highway, she’d realised that she finally did have somewhere else to go—Renee’s dog sanctuary, where Renee had already harboured one werewolf, however poor judgement that might have been at the time.
The shapeshifters had reserved a little suspicion of her, and no wonder, after Grant had turned one of them. That man, a tall, dark and handsome stranger to her, had showed every sign of an involuntary turn. He wasn’t as wild as she had been in her first months—his body was already accustomed to shifting. But almost immediately, Kelly had seen his struggle with every twitch, every avoidance of eye contact and in the fever that burned far deeper than his skin.
Cry Wolf Page 2
