Authors: Marcy Jacks
Tags: #none
Could that be what would cause an alpha wolf to fear the presence of other alphas? Rhyan had been killed by werewolves in his former life, quite savagely, in fact.
Of the few memories Blasius had taken with him of his former
life, that day had been one of them, and he would never forget it.
Finally, Rhyan looked up at him, gray head cocking to the side.
Blasius was most pleased when Rhyan came to him of his own free will and then began sniffing at him. Blasius allowed him to, knowing his scent would calm the other wolf.
Finally, he yipped at his mate and ran toward the tree line that surrounded the houses of James’s pack. Rhyan waited a beat and then took the hint and followed him into the trees to run and play.
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Chapter Four
Corey stirred the sugar in his coffee, but mostly he just stared down at his reflection in the dark liquid. “Would you really have killed him?”
James sighed quietly and pulled out the chair next to him, taking a seat. Corey looked at him, and the scarred face of his lover, his mate, was saddened.
“Yes,” he replied.
Corey looked away from him and back down into his coffee.
“I wouldn’t’ve wanted to do it,” James said quickly, seeming to take the movement as a sort of dismissal. “If he’d gone wild, there wouldn’t have been any choice. You’ve seen what wild werewolves do when they have some control over themselves. That guy wouldn’t have had any.”
“I nearly went wild,” Corey reminded him.
“That’s … ” James ran his hand through his hair. “That’s
different.”
“Because I’m mated to you?”
“Yes, and no.”
Corey looked at him, not understanding at all. He knew things like this happened within a pack of wolves, but in the months that he’d lived here and been a werewolf himself, he’d been fortunate in that he’d never had to see or experience any of the harder decisions that had to be made for the survival of the pack.
“I would’ve protected you even if you had gone on a rampage. Even if you’d run into Brampton and started eating people alive, I wouldn’t have let anyone hurt you.
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“It wouldn’t have come to that anyway,” James continued. “You only fought your transformation for a couple of days, and that was bad enough. That guy downstairs, Detective Miller, he was struggling against his new instincts for weeks. If you had gone wild, I would have been able to restrain you until you calmed down. If he had lost it, there was no telling what he could’ve done.”
Which meant that the man downstairs had been extremely lucky that he’d finally allowed himself to properly mate with Blasius.
Corey could still recall the feelings of being sick, of struggling with the thing inside of him because it wanted out so badly, but he had neither the knowledge nor the courage to let it out.
For him, mating with James had helped. There was something about fully bonding with a mate that allowed the inner wolf to calm down enough to prevent it from tearing its way out of the host. The same seemed to be true for Blasius and his mate.
James reached out and then seemed to hesitate before he put his hand on Corey’s shoulder. “I wish I could keep these things from happening, but for werewolves, there are no laws that we can follow except for the ones we made. There’s no system of justice for us unless we make it ourselves.”
Corey knew that, and he knew what he’d basically married into, if mating counted as being married, and Corey kind of believed that it did.
He reached up and put his hand on top of James’s. The facial features of his mate visibly relaxed with that small act.
Corey smiled at him, a weak little thing, but it was there . “Thank God Blasius got through to the guy, right?”
“Yeah,” James said.
There was a twitch in James’s cheek when he said it, but Corey didn’t comment on it. It told him enough. It said to Corey that Blasius and the detective might have a few more things to work out before they could have their happy ending.
“Could you just do one thing for me?” Corey asked, unable to let
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it go.
James’s eyes widened a bit. “Anything.”
Corey didn’t know if he would regret this later or not, but he had to ask. “If another werewolf goes wild, can you at least give him a chance before killing him? Not all wild werewolves hurt people,” he said, thinking of himself in his nearly wild state, as well as the newest member of their pack.
James clenched his jaw, and then he nodded. “I’ll try.”
* * * *
When Ryan woke up, everything on his body hurt. He was pretty sure that even the strands of hair on his head were aching, and he groaned as he got up, little pine needles and tiny pebbles falling away from where they’d been pressed into his skin from when he slept.
He brushed them away. He was naked and had no clue where the hell he was.
One thing was certain, though. He did feel better. He was out in the fresh air, looking up at the bright morning light coming down through the canopy of pines, oaks, and cedars. He could say that he felt great, like he’d just come out of a spa or something.
Not that he’d ever been in a spa, but he assumed the feeling in his body would be roughly the same.
A couple of birds twittered somewhere. Ryan’s head twisted around, trying to see where it was. He could hear the fast and feathery flapping of wings, so he assumed the little creatures were fighting somewhere near his head, and he even swatted his hands just to scare them away from him.
Then he saw them, in a tree at least twenty yards away.
His jaw dropped, and Ryan rubbed his ears, expecting something to pop inside so that his hearing could go back to normal.
If anything, it got worse.
He could hear insects buzzing around under the bark of the trees,
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smell those flowers blooming out of a patch of weeds just beyond that shrub beneath the birds, and when he squinted, he could make out details and colors he’d never seen before in, well, anything.
“It’s somethin’, isn’t it?”
Ryan spun around and then shot to his feet. That man, Blasius, stood not five feet away from him, a couple of dead rabbits in one hand and a small cluster of twigs in the other.
“How come I didn’t hear you coming?” Ryan asked.
Blasius grinned at him, approaching as though they were friends or something. “I’ve been a werewolf longer than you have.”
His accent was soft again and almost playful.
Sudden memories from the night before came back to him. Him pounding inside of Blasius with an ungraceful lust, of him running outside, his body cracking, changing…
Then there were the other memories, things that blurred in his mind to the point where it could have been just a dream.
No, it was not a dream. He’d been running on all fours. His hands and legs becoming hairy paws, and he and another wolf chasing each other through the trees, hunting anything that moved and chasing those down, too.
He knew that the other wolf had been Blasius, and he felt his
stomach twist as the ground beneath him swirled.
“Easy, man, easy,” Blasius grabbed him by the arm, easing him
back down to his ass for him to sit.
“Breathe deep. That’s it.”
“Jesus Christ,” Ryan said on a gasp. It hadn’t been a lie, none of it, and he hadn’t been hallucinating that night of the attack either. Werewolves. Fucking werewolves, of all things, they were real, and he could now consider himself a member of their race.
He was going to be sick.
“Can’t say that I well recollect the transformations of any human into a wolf or what they felt,” Blasius said. “But I imagine what you’re feelin’ is normal.”
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“There’s nothing normal about this,” Ryan said then stared up at Blasius. He grabbed the other man by the arms, panic seizing everything inside him in a tight grip. “Am I dangerous? Will I hurt anyone?”
Blasius touched his face with comfort and ease, as though he were touching a lover. “You need not worry about that. You’re no longer a danger to anything unless you want to be.”
No longer? “Was I ever a danger?”
Blasius looked at him pointedly. “Aye. That’s what the cage had been for. Luckily you finally managed to let out your new beast before he could really get angry. Otherwise you would have been somethin’ of a nightmare to the first poor soul you came across.”
Ryan thought about that, and what had happened between them last night. He couldn’t recall thinking too much about it as he’d flipped the other man onto his back and forcefully fucked him. He couldn’t remember anything other than the fact that he felt if he didn’t do it he would have gone out of his mind.
Ryan buried his face in his hands. “Oh, Christ.”
Blasius slapped him good-naturedly on the back. “Ah, don’t you be worrying none. You’re as fine and healthy as any good horse now. A couple more transformations and you and the wolf will be fully merged.”
“Jesus, how can you talk like that? I raped you.”
That statement clearly threw the other man for a loop, and he threw his head back and laughed. “Don’t be a fool. Ye did nothing of the sort. Now come, we will eat.”
Blasius held up the rabbits for him to see, as if he could have missed them, and though they were raw and just recently dead, the sight of them strangely made his mouth water.
He got up and watched as Blasius cleared away a small space with his hands, shoving away clumps of dead leaves and such before placing down some stones. Ryan watched, fascinated, as the other man actually managed to start a fire with just the sticks and twigs he
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had with him. This guy was clearly a Boy Scout as a kid.
“I see the way you’re eyeing them rabbits, but you need to be patient,” Blasius said. “Your wolf might want to eat them as is, but in this form, your stomach might not approve.”
Ryan’s face heated, and he turned away. It seemed an eternity before the rabbits were skinned, put over the fire, and cooked properly enough to eat. Ryan hadn’t expected them to taste so good considering the lack of any sort of seasoning, but he sucked the meat off the bones, and Blasius even gave him a leg out of his share to finish off as well.
“Good appetite,” he said. “That’s a good sign.”
“I need to go back,” Ryan said after swallowing the last of his meal, and then he wiped his hand across his mouth. “I need to make a report. Decker is dead, and his family’s going to want to know where he is.”
Ryan didn’t like the way the other man wouldn’t look at him when he spoke. “Keep speaking like that, and you’ll never be allowed to leave.”
“Why? I thought you said I wasn’t a danger to anyone.”
“As the wolf, no, but you still pose a threat to the lives of every man, woman, and child in this pack should ye decide to run off and tell the world that there are werewolves here.”
“I wouldn’t―” Ryan had to stop himself, his mind working to fill in the things Blasius was not telling him.
Ryan wouldn’t tell anyone. Who the hell could he trust with something like this? And if he did reveal his secret and proved it by somehow managing to transform on his own―and he was still having a hard time figuring out how he was going to do that―he would be the one getting locked away, to be studied like an animal. Then the authorities would come for the people here.
Even if he didn’t let the world know about this strange secret that it had yet to discover, he would be reporting the murder of an officer, an officer that Blasius had admitted they had already buried
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somewhere on the land. There would be police, detectives, forensics, reporters, and everything in between snooping around here for months. Someone would find something that would place the blame on the people here. Or worse, someone would become a wolf, right when a news camera or something was pointed at them.
Ryan couldn’t tell anyone anything. So what the hell was he expected to say when he got back home? Decker was dead, and he’d been missing for weeks. If he showed up with no explanation…
Suddenly, Ryan realized the thing that Blasius had been trying to gently tell him.
He was stuck here. There was no going back. Ryan was officially a supernatural outlaw.
Ryan shot to his feet. “I can’t stay here.”
Blasius stared into the fire, his fingers laced together. “There are other packs that will have ye, if that is yer wish, but there’ll be no going back to the human world for ye.”
He’d just gotten out of that cage. Being told what to do now was not something that Ryan wanted to deal with. “Fuck you. I’m going.”