Chapter 21 #2
This wasn’t the black wolf I’d seen fighting Erik.
That had been an animal, terrifying but recognizable, a creature that moved on four legs and had a shape my mind could process.
This was different entirely. A form my mind recoiled from, a wrongness that triggered every survival instinct I possessed and set them all screaming at once.
It stood upright. Seven feet tall at least, maybe more, its shoulders so broad they blocked the moonlight between the trees.
Its body was covered in black fur, dense and coarse, rippling over muscles that bunched and shifted beneath the pelt with every breath.
Its arms hung at its sides, long and thick, ending in hands that were wrong, too large, the fingers tipped with claws that curved like skinning knives and gleamed wet in the moonlight.
Its legs were bent wrong. Jointed like a wolf’s hind legs, digitigrade, the knees reversed, the massive feet ending in clawed toes that gripped the frozen ground.
It stood the way a man stands but nothing about it was human.
It was a wolf forced into a man’s posture, or a man twisted into a wolf’s shape, and the result belonged in neither world and was terrifying in both.
I’d seen this shape before. In the clearing, the night I ran. The gray wolf had stood like this. The same impossible height, the same backward legs, the same clawed hands that weren’t hands at all.
Its head was a wolf’s head on a man’s neck.
Elongated muzzle, ears pricked forward, lips pulled back from teeth that were longer than my fingers and gleaming with saliva.
The fur around its muzzle was dark and sleek and its nostrils flared wide, scenting the air with slow, deliberate breaths that steamed in the cold.
And its eyes. Golden. Burning. Fixed on me with an intensity that went beyond hunger, beyond desire, beyond anything I had a name for.
The bond confirmed what I already knew. Dietrich was in there, behind those eyes, thinking and feeling and aware.
But the wolf was driving now. The wolf was in control.
And the wolf was looking at me the way Erik had looked at me in that clearing.
Except this wasn’t horror. This was older and darker and infinitely more dangerous.
I was trembling. Not from the cold.
Every blood-keeper instinct I possessed was shrieking at me to run.
My legs wanted to run. My hands wanted to throw Forceweaving.
My body was flooded with adrenaline so potent I could taste the copper of it on my tongue.
This was the thing my bloodline had been fleeing from for centuries.
This was the predator that had been built to hunt us down and drag us back and take what it wanted.
And it was standing between me and the only way out of the forest.
In my mind I reached for him. Found the Dietrich beneath the wolf, a steady presence burning like a candle flame inside a furnace. He was there. He was aware. And he was holding the wolf back with everything he had, giving me time to choose.
Run or stay. I’m here either way. I love you either way.
The thought came — not words exactly, more like a feeling shaped into meaning. His love, vast and unwavering, wrapped around the wolf’s hunger like hands around a throat.
The werewolf didn’t move. Just stood there, breathing, watching, its massive chest rising and falling. Waiting. Patient in the way only a predator can be patient, the patience of a being that knows its prey can’t outrun it and is content to let the chase begin on the prey’s terms.
I looked at it. At the claws and the teeth and the impossible body and the golden eyes that held the man I loved inside a monster’s skull.
My hands were shaking. My knees were shaking. Every nerve I had was on fire with fear so primal it predated language.
And beneath the fear, beneath the adrenaline and the survival instinct and the blood-keeper’s ancestral terror, my body was responding in ways that had nothing to do with danger and everything to do with the dream I’d been having since the first night in the cottage.
The heat gathering low in my belly. The pulse between my thighs.
The cloak suddenly too rough against my nipples.
I unfastened the clasp at my throat.
The cloak fell.
Red wool pooled around my bare feet on the white snow.
I stood naked in the moonlight, pale skin and dark hair and the bite mark on my right shoulder that throbbed with his heartbeat.
The cold cut into me like glass but I barely felt it because the werewolf’s eyes had dropped from my face to my body and the sound it made, a low, shuddering rumble that vibrated through the ground and up through my bare feet and into my bones, set every hair on my body upright and sent a flood of wet heat between my thighs that I couldn’t have stopped if I’d wanted to.
It scented the air. Its nostrils flared wide and I knew, knew with absolute certainty, that it could smell my arousal. Could taste it on the wind the way Erik had tasted my Forceweaving. Could track the exact chemical signature of a woman’s want across miles of frozen forest.
The werewolf took a step forward. The ground shook beneath its weight. Its claws left deep furrows in the frozen earth.
I ran.
I didn’t decide to. My body made the choice — the blood-keeper instinct and the prey instinct and the woman’s instinct all firing at once, sending me spinning on my heel and sprinting into the dark forest as fast as my bare feet could carry me.
Branches whipped my face and roots grabbed at my ankles and the snow burned my soles and the moonlight turned the trees to silver bars of a cage that was closing around me.
Behind me, the sound of pursuit. Not footsteps.
Heavier, faster, the drumming of massive clawed feet on frozen ground that ate the distance between us with every stride.
The crashing of branches as a body too large for the gaps between trees forced its way through.
The sound of it. Deep and rhythmic and hungry, getting closer with every heartbeat.
The dream. This was the dream. Except the dream had been warm and painless and tinged with the haze of sleep and this was real.
The cold searing my bare skin, the branches drawing blood across my arms and face, the terror so sharp I could taste it, and underneath the terror the arousal burning so hot it was making me dizzy.
I could feel him. Not just behind me but around me, his awareness encompassing mine, the wolf’s senses mapping the forest in ways I couldn’t fathom.
He knew where I was going before I did. Knew every turn I’d take before I took it.
Was letting me run because the chase was part of it.
The blood rising, the scent intensifying, the prey’s fear and the predator’s hunger building together toward an end neither of us could stop.
I burst into a clearing and the moonlight hit me full and bright and I was naked and silver-skinned and gasping and the werewolf broke through the tree line behind me.
It was faster than I’d imagined. It crossed the clearing in three strides and its arm caught me around the waist and lifted me off the ground like I weighed nothing, nothing at all, a doll, a leaf, and pulled me back against its chest.
The fur was coarse and hot against my bare skin.
The arm around my waist was thick as a tree limb, corded with muscle, the claws curving carefully away from my flesh.
Its other hand came up and gathered my hair, all of it, one fistful, and pulled my head back against its shoulder, baring my throat to the moonlight.
It pressed its muzzle against my neck and inhaled.
The sound it made, a rumble so deep it bypassed my ears and went straight into my chest cavity, made my legs give out entirely.
I sagged against it and felt the hard length of it against my lower back, hot even through the fur, and my body clenched around nothing and the whimper that came out of me was the most honest sound I’d ever made.
Dietrich. Still there. Still aware. His love wrapping around the wolf’s hunger, not fighting it anymore but braiding with it, the two of them looking out through the same golden eyes at the woman trembling against their chest.
I’m here. I’m here. I love you. I’m here.
“I know,” I whispered into the cold air.
The werewolf lowered me to the ground. Face down on the cloak — the red wool spread across the snow where I’d dropped it, and he’d carried me back to it, had circled back to the place where I’d stood and laid me down on the only soft surface in the frozen forest.
Even now. Even with the wolf driving. He’d brought me back to the cloak so I wouldn’t be bare against the snow.
The tears came and I let them because they weren’t fear. They were the realization that the man inside the monster was still choosing me, still protecting me, still thinking about my comfort while his body was something out of a nightmare and his instincts were screaming at him to take.
His weight settled over my back. Fur against bare skin — rough and hot, impossibly hot, the heat of him pouring through the pelt like a furnace.
I could feel the musculature of his chest against my shoulder blades, the power in it, the coiled, barely restrained violence of a body built for one purpose.
His muzzle pushed between my thighs from behind.
I gasped and my hands fisted in the red wool.
His tongue, broader and rougher than the human version, textured in ways that made my nerve endings detonate, lapped against me in a long, slow stroke that dragged a moan from somewhere I didn’t know existed.
He tasted me the way he’d tasted me in human form, with that same focused, devoted attention, except the wolf’s tongue was longer and his mouth was wider and the sounds he made against my flesh were animal.