by H. A. Wills
He nods, his lips pressed tight, and I help him slowly lie back onto the grass. The right thing to do would be to lie him down on a table or bed or something, but that’ll take time, and I need to fix something for him now. I can’t fix that he was nearly tortured and killed by his estranged sister, but I can at least pop his fucking arm back in. It’s more awkward for me to get his arm at a perfect 90 degree angle, but with a few slow steady pulls on his arm, I’m able to pop it back into place and he groans with relief.
I flop down beside him, choosing to look up at the sky verses the very human looking decapitated corpse-- and the fucked up burnt mess beside it. Unlike in the movies or TV, there’s no scorched out eyes or bodies that turn to dust. Just a body I have to bury or burn. I knew this would be my life, but… I always thought of the demons that lay inside that I had to destroy, not their hosts. The demons’ images are what’s illustrated in the texts. Nothing in there about it looking and feeling like I’m killing a person-- or how the host souls might still be trapped inside.
“You’re shivering,” Nolan observes, shifting closer to me.
“It’s shock,” I reply, my voice detached. “I think my stomach is cut up worse than I thought. Won’t stop bleeding.”
“I could lick it,” he half chuckles.
“You’re not licking my wounds,” I insist, shaking my head side to side, fighting my body to keep still while the world spins too fast.
“It’d seal them closed, and you’d stop bleeding out in Callie’s backyard,” he counters, turning his head to look at me.
I sigh, then wince because both my back and my stomach hurts. “I’m not bleeding out.”
Nolan sits up, his left arm cradled against his chest, and he glares at me. “Why do you have to make shit difficult?”
“Because I’m an asshole,” I remind him with a tired smirk.
“Yeah well, this is literally the only time you’ll hear me say this, but just lie there and don’t fucking do anything,” he orders, his features pulled tight as he moves into a position near my stomach.
I haven’t looked, but the cuts must be obvious even under all the blood, because he doesn’t have to wipe anything away before his tongue runs along the injury, a welcoming numbing sensation following in his wake.
“Didn’t think it was possible,” he mutters, working his mouth for another pass, “but somehow you’ve found a way to make licking your abs not sexy.”
“Not even a little,” I chuckle then groan, because yeah, still fucking hurts.
“Don’t laugh, you idiot. I’m not done,” Nolan scolds, dropping his mouth back to my skin.
He’s not wrong. We’re covered in blood, dirt and grass. There are literally two corpses about ten feet away that I’m working real hard to forget are there. And I fucking decapitated someone like ten minutes ago. But I also know a challenge when I hear one.
My eyes drift closed and I concentrate on the sensation of his hot breath against my skin, the brush of his tongue slipping along the firm lines of my stomach, and his proximity to my belt. Relaxing into the cold grass, I imagine us somewhere… anywhere but fucking here, and making sure I have the right amount of pressure, I let my hand run up his spine, careful of his shoulder, into his hair, then fist tightly like I can’t get enough of whatever he’s doing.
“You’re a fucking asshole,” he groans, leaning into my hand.
“And?” I purr.
“Fine, it’s still a little sexy,” Nolan concedes, and I release him. Under his breath, he grumbles, “Should have just let you bleed to death.”
Chapter 19
Connor
The winds might have settled, but lightning and thunder still crack across the sky. Curled up against the passenger side door, Callie grips the stone of her necklace, whispering to herself, “Please don’t come true,” over and over again. I managed to pry her cell phone away in case she felt like throwing it again, and it now sits in one of the cup-holders in the central console. The black screen an ominous reminder that there’s no news about the demons, the guys, or Mildred.
They might not even be there yet, I reason, releasing a slow breath. I have to trust my friends can handle themselves.
When Callie told me to take her away, I didn’t think, just drove, and now we’re at the face of a secluded trail marked by a solitary boulder. In the dark, the trail is nearly invisible, the underbrush as dense as the trees, but a mile in, it opens to a small meadow with a ravine. Further down, there’s a pool so deep I can’t touch the bottom. It’s where I come when I need to shift and be alone. It’s my safe place, and subconsciously, I’m hoping that the forest can calm her like it calms me.
“Reina,” I whisper, running a hand along her arm. “We’re here.”
Her troubled eyes look out the window then to me. “So many trees. What if I make it worse?”
“You won’t,” I reply, assuming she means the fire.
She tilts her head to the side and the expression is so wolf-like that a small smile pulls at my lips. “How are you so sure?”
“Faith,” I murmur, and her eyes widen, both of us appreciating what a fragile thing faith is for people like us.
Her gaze drops to her lap and she murmurs, “As much as I appreciate it, past experiences imply that your faith may be misplaced.” She sniffs and rubs at one of her eyes. “Honestly, it feels like everything inside me is breaking, and no matter how tight I try to hold on, it keeps slipping through my fingers.”
Though she’s sitting right next to me, she feels untouchable, caged by the internal battle she’s fighting.
Opening the driver’s side door, I drop one leg to the ground. Hoping to set her free, I encourage, “Then let go.”
More of my reina comes to the surface, her features frowning in exasperation at my simple solutions. “Letting go tends to lead to things exploding.”
“Not true.” I shake my head and get out of the car.
Once I’m on the other side and helping her down, she snarkily comments, “I have some trees, a few windows, and an expensive table that beg to differ.”
I sigh, trying to find the right words so she’ll understand, but Kaleb is the one that’s good at this stuff. Not me. Thunder rumbles in the distance, and she winces with the sound, her gaze turning to the night sky.
Placing a hand on her cheek, I bring her focus back to me. There’s so much pain and fear swirling in the dark depths of her eyes that my chest feels tight, and my wolf whines. I want to take it all away, even if the only way is into myself. At least one of us would be free. But I can’t.
“Fighting my wolf hurts. Fighting the shift hurts,” I explain, extracting her hand from her necklace and opening it palm up between us. In the center of her small hand is a half dollar sized burn with more burns running up her fingers. As we both watch her heal within seconds, I murmur, “I stop fighting, it doesn’t hurt.”
Just thinking of shifting has an itch running down my skin. There’s a feeling in my gut that
something isn’t right, and it’s not the fire or the demons. Whatever it is will need teeth and claws. It will need everything I have to protect her. But first, I have to help her find peace in herself before whatever she fears comes to pass.
“Stop fighting what you are, mi reina,” I whisper, softly running my thumb along the life line of her now fully healed palm. “Welcome it.”
“It’s not the same thing,” she insists, closing her hand tight around my finger. “Whether you fight or succumb to your wolf, it affects only you. The whole reason I’m here and not helping to save my aunt is because my magic can kill everyone. I can’t risk destroying everything.”
I use my captured hand to snake her arm around my waist and my other hand to encourage her to lean her head on my chest. She sighs, drooping against me, and releases my hand so she can twist the fabric of my borrowed t-shirt, which smells strongly of musk, leather, and feathers, within her fists. This shirt might be clean, but whatever it was with, wasn’t.
&nbs
p; My hands idly slide up her back over the ties holding her costume together. Trying to articulate what I mean is so difficult that for a fleeting second I wish she could read my mind, but in reality, that would be a nightmare. Some things in there she may never be able to forgive.
“Without me, my wolf runs on instinct to stay alive. A lot of… damage is done in the name of survival,” I explain, my voice slightly hoarse from my dry throat. Painful memories of the things I’ve done clench around my neck, making it difficult to breathe.
Callie thumps her forehead against my chest and mutters, “So what you’re saying is if I embrace my magic, then I’ll be able to stop it from destroying the town? But the binding spell is specifically designed to keep me from accessing and controlling my magic.”
With her pressed against me, I can feel the heat of her necklace, hinting that despite her calmer tone, just as the lightning and thunder crack in the sky, the storm still brews inside her.
I press my lips to the top of her head and breathe her in. “Even if I couldn’t shift, I’d still be a wolf shifter. My wolf is always a part of me. I guide him. He guides me. Your magic is a part of you. Don’t fight it. Guide it.”
She shakes her head, as if she’s unsure what to do with my words, then shivers, sliding her hands underneath the back of my shirt. They feel like five fingered icicles against my heated skin. Realizing she must be freezing in her tiny costume, I pick her up, her hands sliding further up my back, and carry her to the back of the Tahoe.
“You know I can walk, right?” she teases when I set her down to open the hatchback door.
I shrug and dig through one of my bags of spare clothes for something she can wear, settling for one of my flannels. Holding it open for her, she slips her arms through the sleeves, and then I button the front for her. It hangs to her knees, and her hands are lost within the sleeves.
She climbs up into the hatchback, sits against one side, then tucks her knees to her chest underneath the shirt. With a small smile, she wraps her arms around her legs, cuddling the soft fabric to herself, and whispers, “Thank you.”
I nod and try not to think too hard about how much I like seeing her in my clothes. Knowing that even though I smell like Donovan at the moment, she smells like me. Grabbing an old towel from the same clothes bag, I start to wipe the dirt from her feet and chafe them warm.
Trying to traipse down a trail into the forest in the middle of the night while she’s dressed in a tiny costume and no shoes might not have been the best idea.
Her gaze follows my movements, and she wiggles her toes. Another streak of lightning flashes across the sky, momentarily lighting the interior of the car, and she squeezes her knees tighter to keep from searching out the stone hanging around her neck.
“I don’t think I even know how to let go and embrace my magic,” she confesses, nearly drowned out by the boom of thunder. “For years what I am has been the enemy. It’s the thing that let the Bastard keep hurting me. Hell, it’s why the Bastard kept hurting me. It kept me alive when I…” Her words trail off as she realizes what she was about to admit.
My wolf bristles at the idea of her wanting death, but I understand, maybe better than anyone else. Sometimes the pain is unbearable, and for her, it must have felt like there was no end. But there was one. I hate what she’s been through, but I can’t hate her magic. I can’t hate the thing that eventually brought her to us. To me.
“But it’s not,” I counter, looking into her eyes while my hands slide up and down her lower legs. “My wolf. Your magic. Not the enemy.”
“How do I stop fighting?” she whispers, the battle worn warrior clear in her gaze.
All she’s known is pain and survival.
I get to my knees and hug her to me, curling my body around her, while her pain aches inside me. It’s in this moment that the last dredges of my resistance crumbles, and I embrace what my wolf has accepted so easily.
“Let go,” I murmur, feeling the last threads that held me to my life before her break. The future I had planned. A destiny in my control. Gone, as I surrender myself completely to her. “Trust no matter how far you fall, I will always catch you, mi reina.”
She shudders, tentatively sliding her fingers up my chest and over my heart. Her face is pressed to my neck, and her words are hot against my skin as she asks, “What does that mean? What you keep calling me?”
My stomach tightens, fear that she may not want me shredding through my insides. Clearing my throat, I answer, “My queen.”
“Oh,” she murmurs, leaning back so now our faces are so close I can feel her uneven breaths against my lips. “And what’s wolf in Spanish?”
“Lobo,” I reply, my voice low and soft.
I’ve never been a religious person, difficult to be in my world, but sitting here with Callie in the back of my Tahoe surrounded by the forested night feels almost holy.
She keeps one hand to my chest and the other reaches to hold the side of my face. Her hauntingly beautiful grey eyes that can see into a person’s very soul slowly caress my features, following the planes of my brow, the slope of my nose, the jut of my cheekbones and chin, finally resting on my mouth.
Her thumb brushes my bottom lip, and in her rich, husky voice, she whispers, “Mi lobo.”
“Always,” I vow, turning my head and placing a kiss on the inside of her wrist.
From within me doubt and fear are washed away, and I feel clean and whole. No longer am I fighting against something-- simply trying to survive. Now my purpose is to protect, to nurture, and to thrive by her side. Even though I’ve bound my life to her, for the first time, I feel free.
As if he has a sixth sense for crushing new found hope, a familiar voice sneers from the darkness, “Disgusting. My strongest son willfully a witch’s lapdog.”
Adrenaline shoots through my veins, and my wolf presses hard beneath my skin. I shove Callie further inside, jump out of the Tahoe and close the hatchback door behind me, muffling her squawk of surprise.
Quickly, I kick off my boots, rip the t-shirt over my head, and I’m about to unzip my pants, when the Alpha walks out into the open. Lightning cracks across the sky, highlighting him in sharp relief… as well as the gun in his hand.
“What do you want?” I growl, hunched over and blood starting to drip between my fingers as my claws dig into my fisted hands.
“The girl,” he snarls, the hand with the gun in it shaking.
The Alpha looks half-deranged. His clothes are ripped and covered in dirt, dried blood caked around open cuts along his body, and his eyes are nothing but circles of amber surrounded by black.
“You can’t have her,” I declare, the words warped by my teeth shifting to my wolf’s that are better at tearing through flesh.
“Give her to me,” he commands with all the might of an Alpha, but I feel nothing now that even those tenuous threads have been cut.
“No,” I growl, pushing my jeans off and fully shifting to my wolf.
I never wanted this, and unlike all the times in the ring, there’s a strong chance I won’t make it out of this alive. As I start to pack away my heart, readying for battle, sorrow slips through my body. The Alpha may make a liar out of me tonight. But if I die, I’m taking him with me.
Surprise sparks across his face as he realizes I’m no longer his to control, followed by an ugly glare. He spits at the ground in front of me. “You chose a witch over your entire pack?”
I expect him to shift and fight me, wolf to wolf, but instead he shakes his head, like he’s trying to clear a nightmare that won’t let go. “Not me,” he mutters, pointing the gun at me. “She won’t get her claws into me, and if I have to go through you to stop her, I will.”
“Don’t you fucking dare!” Callie shouts, hopping to the ground from the back passenger side and stalking over next to me. She must have climbed over the back seat to get out.
Now as my wolf, I can smell the increasing volume of magic she’s calling into herself, like the burnt scent of t
orched sky mixed with the tingling chills of electricity. Dark laughter rides the growing winds followed by a powerful boom of thunder.
In a voice so cold I expect frost to start crawling from beneath my feet, she taunts, “You want to kill me? Go ahead and try. Stronger men than you have tried and failed, but leave Connor out of this.”
Shit. She’s a warrior used to fighting her own battles. I don’t know why I thought she’d stay cowered in the damn car. If I live, I need to remind her that I’m supposed to be the guardian.
The Alpha’s attention zeros in on Callie and the shaking spreads from his arm to his whole body. Pricks of his claws break through the tips of his boots and grow from his fingers, but for reasons I can’t understand, he fights the shift.
“You won’t control me,” he shouts, hunched over and his breathing labored. “The pack is mine!”
“I don’t want you or your pack,” she answers, standing as regal as the queen I know her to be.
Expressions I’ve never seen before wash across the Alpha’s face. Loss. Vulnerability. Soul crushing pain over her rejection that nearly drops him to his knees, and that’s when I understand. The Call. He’s trying to fight it.
“You bitch,” he grinds out, taking the gun with both hands.
When he lifts the gun toward Callie, I leap and tackle him to the ground, one shot going off with his fall. The pop is so loud that for a second I’m disoriented, all sound gone except for a high pitched ring.
He bashes the butt of the gun into my eye, causing me to recoil and yip with pain. Fueled by the power of the whole pack, he plants one foot into my stomach and shoves me off him.
The Alpha raises the gun again, pointing it at Callie who looks at him with unabashed rage, and the wind howls louder. Branches rip away from the surrounding trees, thrashing in the air and into anything in its way. Lightning and thunder shake the heavens, as she plays chicken with a bullet.
I scramble back to my feet, and with a powerful snap of my jaw, bite through his forearm, the copper taste of blood flooding my mouth and dripping down my jowls. Snarling and growling, I jerk my head side to side, his flesh tearing along my teeth.
