CHAPTER 3
Walker wanted to grab the woman and shake her for being so stupid as to rush up to the demon like that. Then he wanted to thank her for distracting the demon with that spell of hers. And finally, he wanted to get a better look at what he remembered as being a truly fine backside, this time without the distraction of a rampaging demon to dull his pleasure. But at the moment, he had other things to do. Like getting them both the hell out of Dodge before the demon learned how to run with severed Achilles tendons.
Walker scooped her unconscious figure up in his arms and sprinted for home. The demon reacted about as positively to that as Walker had expected, but thankfully, the injuries slowed it to a point where the combination of werewolf speed and the thick tree cover foiled its pursuit. That didn’t mean Walker slowed down any.
He ran a good two miles before he felt safe in slowing to a brisk, ground-eating trot.
Through it all, the woman in his arms remained limp and still. He wasn’t sure if she was asleep or unconscious, but either way, she was so out of it that he contemplated setting her down for a minute so he could shift back to human form before they left the park. The general rule for Lupines stated they shouldn’t walk in were form anywhere they might be seen by humans. Wolf form could be written off easily enough as the appearance of an especially large and long-legged dog, but there was nothing in the human world that could account for a seven-or eight-foot creature covered in fur with the posture of a man and the facial features of White Fang. The human mind was only so elastic.
In this case, Walker weighed his options and decided that if he stuck to the alleys on the trip back to his apartment and didn’t get too close to any streetlights, he’d be better off going as he was. If he shifted back to human, he might not risk psychically scarring a wandering human observer, but he did risk spending the night in a cell with a public-indecency citation hanging over his head. Given the way his night had been going so far, he didn’t have time to go to jail.
He reached the borders of the park and scanned the street from the cover of the last few trees. He didn’t see much movement, which did occasionally happen even in New York, and at three-something in the morning the streets of the metropolis were about as deserted as he could ever hope to see them. It was now or never.
Taking a deep breath and immediately regretting it because of the crack the demon had left in his ribs, Walker bowed his head, clutched the woman tighter against his chest, and dived into the shadows. His long strides ate up the ground between the park and his neighborhood. At a dead run, a werewolf could move faster than a sprinting racehorse and might even give a cheetah a thing or two to think about. Luckily, Walker could maintain his speed for distances closer to those of the equine than the feline, because it was a good couple of miles to his apartment.
He made it without incident, ducking into the alley behind his street and breaking his speed, slowing to a walk for the last hundred yards to his building. It took him a second to catch his breath, but both he and the woman had made it in one piece. And, he hoped, without being seen.
Hitching the unconscious woman higher against his chest, Walker scanned the area before he rounded the corner, balancing her carefully in one arm while he paused outside his apartment door to retrieve his spare key. He kept it hidden for just this sort of emergency. In his line of work he never did know when he’d be coming home without pockets. The fact that his door was set down half a flight of stairs as a basement entrance made those times easier, too, by offering a bit of concealment from the odd passerby.
He let them inside and kicked the door shut behind them. Though the entrance to his apartment looked like it led to a basement, he actually occupied two floors of the narrow old building, and he used the bottom floor as a workroom and Spartan home gym. His living space was upstairs. He carried his guest up and directly to the sofa, depositing her on the soft cushions before he straightened and shifted back to his human form.
He felt the sting and then the easing as his genes reformed his body, knitting together the crack in his ribs, sealing the scratches he’d gotten wrestling around the forest. When the change was complete, his shoulders rolled in instinctive adjustment.
The woman never moved, and he frowned down at her, crouching beside the sofa to examine her limp form. He’d felt the steady beat of her heart and the rhythmic rise and fall of her breathing as he’d carried her home, so he knew perfectly well she wasn’t dead. And that was what had him frowning. No human woman or witch should have survived the demon attack, which meant she must not be human. He knew from her scent that she wasn’t Lupine or any other sort of shifter, for that matter. There was nothing earthy about her, nothing animal. She smelled too pure for that, and the fact that he could smell her at all meant she wasn’t a vampire. Her skin felt too warm and smooth and elastic to belong to any other nonliving life-form, and she looked too much like a human for him to identify her origins by sight.
He didn’t like that his sense of smell had failed him here. One good sniff ought to give him all the information he needed to place her species, but instead it only gave him a raging erection. He didn’t know what the hell was the matter with him. Sure, just like any other male in existence, a good brush with death tended to bring out the horny in him, but this felt like more than that. He didn’t just want sex; he wanted sex with her, with this woman—or whatever she was—and he wanted it now. In fact, he seemed to want it more with every breath full of her scent that he inadvertently inhaled. He struggled to block the tantalizing aroma from his mind and pushed to his feet. If he didn’t get control of himself, she would end up getting a hell of an awakening. Maybe from the inside out.
Gritting his teeth and taking slow, shallow breaths through his mouth, Walker braced himself against his uncontrollable arousal and forced himself to take stock of her wounds. Starting at her feet seemed safest, and the ragged puncture marks in the leather of her high boots looked pretty nasty. He dealt efficiently with her laces and tugged the boots off, setting them aside under the coffee table. Without the heavy covering, her feet looked tiny and fragile beneath their veil of sheer black stockings, which were dotted with blood around her left ankle. The demon’s claws hadn’t bitten deeply, thanks to the leather, but the punctures would need a thorough cleaning.
His gaze moved up the length of her slim, graceful legs, which did totally inappropriate things to his libido, but they appeared to be free of further injury. The only other wound he could see was a slash across her stomach, and that was the injury that worried him. Carefully, he reached out to lift aside the hems of her skimpy tank tops, one eye on her face to be sure she hadn’t woken up. Her eyelashes didn’t even flutter, and her expression remained tranquil. Walker wished he could say the same for himself, but one good look at the ragged gash in her pale, freckled skin had him cursing a blue streak and gritting his teeth against the urge to howl in anger.
The cut bled sluggishly, much less than he would have expected, but it looked nasty all the same, with jagged edges darkened to black by the poison on the demon’s claws. Jaw clenching, he dropped her hem and headed straight for the first-aid supplies in his bathroom. On the way back, he paused in the bedroom to grab a pair of jeans and ease himself into them. No reason to scare her to death by having her wake up eye to eye with the part of him most anxious to make her acquaintance.
He stepped back into the living room with his hands full of disinfectant and bandages, and he froze. The blue-haired punk he’d left on his sofa had been replaced by a dark-haired goddess with skin like whipped cream and a torn and tattered gown of a fabric so light, if it hadn’t been for the pale lilac color, he couldn’t have sworn it even existed. The clothes she had been wearing had disappeared, and she slept on as if nothing had happened. Now he had proof she wasn’t quite human. A witch, maybe? That would explain her human appearance, since technically witches were humans who just happened to have evolved the ability to use magic, and a spell fading would explain the change in her appearance. At least, he thought it would. He wasn’t all that up on the rules of magic.
And none of the rules he had heard before explained why the very scent of her made him want to strip her naked and introduce himself to her womb, up close and personal.
Forcing his mind off his crotch, he returned to the sofa and knelt on the floor at her side. Her wounds took precedence over his curiosity at the moment. Until he did find out who and what she was, he’d be better off treating her injuries than speculating about the effect she had on him. When she woke up, he’d get his answers.
Still, he was frowning as he poured disinfectant liberally onto a sterile pad. He parted the cut in her dress, ripping it slightly wider to get at the injury. When he pressed the cotton to her skin, the muscles in her stomach clenched reflexively, and he heard a soft gasp whisper between her lips. His gaze shot immediately to her face, but her expression remained relaxed and tempting in sleep. Reluctantly, he looked back at his task, only to see that the wound in her abdomen appeared to be a lot less serious than he’d thought, now that he’d cleared the dried blood and dirt away. In fact, it almost looked as if it had begun healing even before he’d washed it.
Oh, this wasn’t good.
Swallowing a curse, Walker leaned back from his unconscious guest and took a really good look at her. One that had his stomach sinking into his toenails. He took in the moonlight-pale, velvet-smooth skin, the miraculously healing wounds, the magically transformed appearance, and saw that his bad day had just gotten a hell of a lot worse.
“Aw, shit.”
Muttering to himself and whatever god currently watched and laughed at his predicament, Walker took a deep, bracing breath, eased his hands into the tumbled mass of the unconscious woman’s raven black hair, and lifted it gently away from the delicate shell of her ear. An ear that swept gracefully up from small, unadorned lobes to a distinct and elegant point.
Fae.
The woman currently passed out on his sofa, bleeding from an unexpected and determined demon attack, was Fae. As in full-blooded, non-Changeling, born-and-bred-beyond-the-gates-in-Faerie Fae. And high sidhe from the look of her. This wasn’t a sprite but one of the aristocratic race. So what the hell was she doing in his living room?
Okay, he had carried her there, but that wasn’t the point. The Fae weren’t even supposed to be in this world. Their ruler, Queen Mab, had made that longstanding custom a law after some kind of incident a few years ago, but the end result was that Walker could count on one hand the number of Fae he’d met in all of his thirty-five years. This one made number three. Not his lucky number.
Pushing to his feet, Walker shoved a hand through his already-rumpled hair and began to pace across the quiet room. He didn’t need a Lupine sense of smell to know this whole thing reeked of trouble, and he wasn’t just talking about the demon stench. He already had enough on his plate trying to keep the Others in the area from inadvertently starting a war with the humans. The last thing he needed was the Fae and demons putting in an appearance and throwing everything into chaos.
Walker bit back a curse and looked over at the sofa, directly into a pair of sleepy, darkly lashed eyes the color of African violets. It felt like taking a stone giant’s fist straight to his gut. Even the demon hadn’t packed this kind of punch. Asleep, the Fae woman had been beautiful. Awake, she stole the breath from his lungs and the brains from his head. All he had left was the blood in his veins, and that was sure as hell easy enough to prove, considering it had all rushed right to his groin the minute she opened her eyes.
While he stood there, blinking like an idiot and probably drooling like one, his guest raised her arms over her head and arched her body in a lazy, feline stretch that left him cross-eyed and half-delirious. Then she collapsed back into the cushions and her full lips curved in a sensual smile.
“Hi.” Her sleep-husky voice had the same effect on his dick as the average Lupine female in heat waving her tail in his face, only magnified exponentially. He probably had zipper marks running up and down his shaft. “My name is Fiona. Who are you?”
Walker groaned and rubbed his hand over his eyes, quickly discovering that the image of Fiona stretching had been burned indelibly into his retinas.
“Shit. I’m screwed.”