Madison's Song

by Christine Amsden

  “No, that’s not it. I need real magic.”

  “You know I don’t have enough to count.” But Madison had a feeling she knew where this was going.

  “You can ask your other brother for help.” Clinton said, confirming her suspicion. He always sounded jealous when he talked about her other brother, as if her recent discovery of the existence of a half brother meant she felt differently about him.

  “Why don’t you tell me what’s going on first?”

  “I don’t want you to freak out.”

  “How can I not freak out when you call me at two in the morning?” Madison’s voice rose as all her worst fears came tumbling back through her mind.

  “More, then. I don’t want you to freak out more. But I need some magical help, and I need you to get it for me.”

  “Wait a second, are you honestly suggesting that I act as a go-between when I don’t even know what it is I’m going between?”

  “Yeah. Pretty much.”

  “No!”

  “Madison.” Clinton had switched to his wheedling tone. If he were there in person, looking at her with the big brown puppy dog eyes they had both inherited from their mother, it might have worked.

  “Clinton,” Madison said, trying and failing to match his tone.

  “The thing is. Look. I can’t handle losing you right now.”

  “Why would you lose me?” Madison could feel her heart pounding a little faster in response to the fear in her brother’s voice. She had never heard anything quite like it there before. Her palms felt slick, and it was hard to hold onto the phone.

  “If I told you what was wrong, I might. It’s-look, I called because I met someone tonight who swears he can help me, but I don’t trust him.”

  “You should go with your instincts.”

  “My instincts have been telling me to run away, but I can’t run from this.”

  “From what?” Madison didn’t yell, but it was a near thing. She felt like a string about to snap in two.

  “This guy I met says tomorrow will be too late.”

  “The guy you don’t trust? What happens tomorrow night?”

  Clinton didn’t respond. Madison’s mind whirled. What would happen tomorrow night? Well, that was obvious. The full moon. She always knew when the full moon was coming because …

  No. It couldn’t be.

  “Please tell me this doesn’t have something to do with the full moon tomorrow night,” Madison pleaded. Her hand shook and her voice trembled.

  “Don’t freak out.”

  “Too late!”

  “Okay. Okay!” Clinton was talking faster now. Breathing faster. “You know that girl I told you about last time I called? Clara, the new waitress at Chili’s?”

  “Yes.”

  “Four weeks ago she came up to me and said she wanted to be my mate. I thought that meant she wanted to … well, you know. So I said sure, great. She wanted to drive out to this secluded spot to do it, so I took her, but when we got there she took off. Then the moon rose, and out came this giant thing … hard to describe … it didn’t really look like a wolf. I ran for my car, but it bit me on the back of the knee just before I got inside.”

  It was a good thing Madison was sitting on the floor, because if she hadn’t been, she would have fallen. She knew the rest of the story, even before Clinton told her the details. The next day he got sick. Really, really sick. He almost died. He was sick for three weeks and missed his finals. When he woke up, it was to find Clara tending him. She seemed happy that he’d survived, and that he would now be a werewolf just like her.

  “I didn’t want to believe her,” Clinton whispered. His voice was so low she barely heard him. “All week, I’ve been trying to figure a way out of it. It’s not like I didn’t grow up believing in things like werewolves, but you don’t want to think it can happen to you, you know? And I’ve been in Springfield for three years, where most people don’t believe in magic.”

  Madison could feel the delicate threads of her life slipping through her fingers once again. She should be used to it by now, perhaps, but this … In her worst nightmares she never could have imagined this.

  “Madison, are you still there?” Clinton’s voice sounded far away, and agitated, as if he had been trying to get her attention for a while.

  “I’m here.”

  “You’re freaking out.”

  “I’m fine.” She wasn’t. Her whole body was shaking. From somewhere in the bowels of the house the air conditioning kicked on; it felt like a draft of arctic wind.

  “I need help, Madison. I don’t know who else to ask. Clara’s so strong and has such good hearing. I had trouble getting away from her. Tonight I did, and then I met this guy at a bar … he says if I go with him he can fix me, but it has to be before the full moon. Before the first, um, transformation.”

  Madison didn’t believe there was a way to fix it, but she couldn’t tell him that, not when he had called her for hope. He wasn’t the only one who needed hope.

  “I’m scared,” Clinton said.

  “Me too.”

  “Can you help me?”

  “Don’t go with him,” Madison ordered. “Promise me you won’t. I’ll get you some help, one way or another.”

  “Really?”

  Madison closed her eyes and swallowed, hard, knowing what this promise would mean. Clinton thought it was simple. He thought there would be a cure. She knew better, and she knew that however powerful her other brother was, Evan Blackwood wasn’t the man who could help Clinton. The man who could help Clinton was the reason she couldn’t sleep at the full moon, and the reason she had so many nightmares at other times of the month. He was the reason her hair clung damply to her forehead at that very moment, and the reason she needed to change her sheets.

  “Really,” Madison promised.

  Chapter 2

  JESSICA WAS A BITCH IN MORE than one sense of the word. Scott knew that, and yet he’d spent the past six months of his life fucking her. He couldn’t even pretend he was using her in place of the real thing, because to even picture the woman he really wanted while in bed with Jessica felt like sacrilege. He didn’t exactly use her for sex, either. Sex with Jessica lacked any depth, and most nights he thought he would get just as much satisfaction from his hand. The other nights, nights like tonight, he thought he’d get more satisfaction from his hand. At least then he wouldn’t feel bad about picturing her.

  “Is that all you’ve got?” Jessica taunted him when he rolled over and told her to leave. “You wouldn’t want the pack to know you’re losing stamina.”

  Therein lay the real reason for the time he spent with Jessica. It was a show. A power play. He was 27 years old, nearly 28, and he led a pack of men and women who became wild animals at the full moon, and who didn’t necessarily rise much above that state the rest of the time. They expected him to be powerful. They expected him to be virile. They almost universally confused one with the other.

  Scott did have an edge that, to the best of his knowledge, no other werewolf had – he was also a powerful sorcerer. Magic had run through his veins long before he’d foolishly let himself get bitten, and magic, or at least fear of magic, was how he kept control now.

  “Get out,” Scott growled, refusing to dignify her comments with anything more than a not-so-playful nip on the back of her neck.

  Jessica yelped, got the message, and quickly donned her clothes. She wanted him to take her as his mate; he knew that, and he expected her to make another play for the position soon. She’d tried last month, when she stopped taking the pill and didn’t tell him. Some combination of his sense of smell and his gift of intuition had saved him from falling into that trap, but he remained on guard.

  No, he needed to dump her. He would, too, as soon as he found someone to replace her. Preferably someone from a nearby pack, since none of the available females in his own pack would be able to stand up to Jessica. It would be nice if she’d leave after he pushed her away, but he couldn’t be so l
ucky, and he could only force her out if she disobeyed him. She’d walk a fine line, but she wouldn’t do that.

  “It’s really not gentlemanly to force a girl into the cold, lonely night,” Jessica whined. “What if someone attacked me?”

  “I’d feel sorry for him,” Scott replied.

  She laughed, mistaking his comment for a compliment. She flung a long mass of fake red hair over her shoulder and made a show of wriggling into too-tight jeans. It should have stirred something in him, but it left him cold. Skinny legs had never appealed to him, though they did not repulse him nearly as much as her attitude. An attitude that was, apparently, just what his pack expected from his mate.

  “You aren’t even going to show me to the door?” Jessica asked after she had dressed.

  “Do I ever?”

  She laughed. She liked it when he acted like a jerk to her, which made him dislike her almost as much as he disliked himself.

  “See you tomorrow night,” Jessica said as she headed out the bedroom door.

  A minute later he heard the front door open, but it didn’t close right away. There was a startled yelp, one so soft he wouldn’t have heard it without the heightened senses of his wolf. It almost sounded like ... but that was impossible.

  “Well hi there, honey,” Jessica said in her sugary sweet bitch voice. “No wonder Scott was in such a hurry to kick me out if he had you coming over. Why don’t you just head on in? He’s waiting in his bedroom.”

  Scott let out a string of soft curses that Jessica would have heard perfectly, though a normal woman standing on the other side of the door would not. Flinging aside the covers, he reached for a pair of jeans, managing to pull them on just before Jessica returned, ushering in the woman who had been haunting his dreams for years.

  Madison looked beautiful to him, even in jeans and an oversized t-shirt that hid the curves he had spent hours studying from afar. Her thick brown hair lay in graceful waves around her shoulders, glowing with health and making him itch to touch it to find out if it was as soft as it looked. Her scent filled his nostrils as longing filled his heart, as well as other less honorable parts of his body.

  His pack wouldn’t approve. Scott’s best friend, Evan, who had discovered that Madison was his half sister a year ago, would rip Scott’s head off if he touched her. But those weren’t the reasons he kept his distance.

  The reason Scott kept his distance was shining from Madison’s eyes: Terror. Worse than that, though, was the knowledge that he had put it there in the first place. She had reason to fear him, both for what he was and what he had done to her personally.

  “Here’s your late-night snack,” Jessica said, bringing Scott back to the present. The look in Jessica’s eyes told Scott he had better have an explanation for Madison’s presence. The words told him she wasn’t waiting for that explanation to begin her assault on a perceived threat.

  “Jessica. Out.” Scott gave her a look that broached no argument, though she opened her mouth a fraction before shutting it again.

  “I’m leaving.” Jessica gave Madison one last push in Scott’s direction, which would have caused the other woman to topple onto the floor if Scott hadn’t grabbed her first. “Maybe tomorrow night we can share.”

  Madison stiffened in Scott’s arms, but Jessica was gone before he had a chance to scold her.

  Now what? Scott was entirely too aware of the woman he held in his arms, of her softness, of her warmth, and of her scent, reminiscent of sweet vanilla. She often smelled of fear too, at least around him, but tonight the scent was sharper. It spoke of something she feared even more than him. Something that had her half-clinging to him.

  He knew he needed to let her go, but something primitive within him rose to the surface, demanding action. Demanding he make her his. He could feel her body trembling, he knew she was afraid, but she didn’t push him away. Hope swelled within him, a feeling he had believed long-since buried.

  Almost of its own volition, one of his hands went to her hair, the fingers sinking into the thick, silken strands of chestnut. It was exactly as soft as he’d imagined. She had cut her hair a few months ago so that it only fell to her shoulders. After he had set aside his indignation, he had to admit that the new style complimented her round face, drawing attention to her full lips and brown eyes.

  Her trembling grew in intensity, making him wonder if she was simply too afraid to push him away. In a sudden burst of clarity, he remembered who he was, what he was, and why he had no business holding this woman. He lingered a moment or two more, cursing himself for what that hesitation said about him as a man, then he set her aside.

  “What are you doing here?” he asked, when he once again possessed some semblance of control.

  His intuitive gift began to weigh in now that he had put some distance between them. Something was very wrong. Not only had Madison come to him of her own free will, but she had done so at … he glanced at his digital alarm clock … 2:36 in the morning. His first thought was that something had happened to Evan, because why else would she come to Scott herself, instead of going to her own brother?

  “What’s going on?” Scott asked before she had responded to his first harsh question. “Is something wrong with Evan?”

  “Evan? What? No. Why would you think that?”

  “Because you’re here. What are you doing here?” He’d asked that already.

  “I-need your help. It-it’s about Clinton. My brother.”

  He vaguely remembered that she had another half brother, one who shared the same mother, away at college or something. “What about him?”

  “Well, you see, he called me. Woke me up. Says he was b-bitten.”

  Scott’s eyes narrowed, focusing on her pale face, full of terror he knew wasn’t entirely for him. “By a werewolf?”

  She nodded.

  “Where?” Scott asked.

  “He’s in Springfield.”

  Scott wasn’t even aware of growling until he saw Madison flinch away. “Springfield? Missouri?”

  “Yes.”

  That was his territory. When he found the wolf suicidal enough to perform an unauthorized bite in his territory, he would grant their death wish. “Does he know who did it?”

  “Said her name was Clara.”

  “I don’t know a Clara. What’s her last name?”

  “I-I don’t know. I didn’t think to ask.”

  Scott rubbed his hands over his face, working to compose himself. An unauthorized wolf in his territory was serious business under any circumstances, but to have bitten someone, she had to be insane. Which meant he had a lunatic werewolf to deal with, in addition to a new wolf, assuming he survived the transition. For Madison’s sake, Scott hoped he did, although she wouldn’t like what he became.

  “He called a half hour ago,” Madison was saying, though Scott only half heard. “He told me his girlfriend bit him, that he’s been really sick for weeks. I knew about that. I guess it’s lucky he didn’t die.”

  “Yeah,” Scott said absently. Her brother wasn’t out of the woods yet, but she didn’t have to know that.

  “He said he was at a bar, and someone was saying he could cure him, if he went off with him.”

  “What?” Scott was nothing but attention now. This kept getting better and better. What the hell was going on in his territory, under his nose? And how did they think they could get away with it?

  Madison tried to back away a step, but she already stood against the wall and had nowhere to go. Scott knew how angry he must look and he fought to contain the feelings, for her sake. It was late, he was tired, and he was in the presence of a woman who drove him crazy, but he needed her to answer at least a few questions before she left.

  “Come on, let’s go talk in the living room.” Much safer to have her there than in his bedroom, which still smelled strongly of sex. The living room wasn’t much cleaner, but it was far less intimate.

  Madison set a basket of unfolded laundry on the floor so she could sit in one of the re
cliners. Scott mirrored her action, dumping a stack of books unceremoniously to the floor so he could sit on the couch.

  “What did you tell him?” Scott asked when they were seated.

  “Just that I-I didn’t think there was a cure. That the guy was probably lying.”

  “You’re right, there’s no cure.” He wouldn’t sugar coat it for her. If her brother lived, he would become a monster once a month.

  “That’s what I thought.” But her face had fallen somewhat. “I told him to go home and wait for me. I said I’d get him help.”

  “And you came to me?” Scott still couldn’t believe it. “Why not go to Evan?”

  “He’s not a werewolf. He’d have just gone to you.”

  Yes, but then she wouldn’t have had to come to him. He didn’t know what to make of that. Probably nothing. With the full moon tomorrow night, time was of the essence.

  “You did the right thing,” Scott said grudgingly. Probably including coming to him, although he wouldn’t have expected it of her. Maybe he should have, because one of the things he admired about her was her sense of loyalty. She didn’t trust easily or often, but when she did, she gave her all. She would even, for example, face her greatest fear if it meant helping her brother.

  “Can you help him?” Madison asked.

  “I’ll do everything I can. He is my responsibility.”

  “He is?”

  “He was bitten in my territory.”

  “Oh. I hadn’t realized your territory was so big.”

  “It covers Missouri south of Jefferson City, and Northern Arkansas. I know every wolf who roams my land. Every one. They’re all my responsibility.”

  “But you didn’t know Clara.”

  Scott growled. “I’m sorry she attacked your brother. She had no business being here at all, and her life is forfeit.”

  “Oh.” Madison’s eyes had turned into twin saucers.