Chapter Thirteen
Sonya
Head still spinning from a two-hour lesson on a literally tongue-tying language, I leaned over my outstretched leg to grab the deck railing. The pull of my hamstring muscle helped me clear my head almost as much as the view of the spruce and pine forest beyond the deck. Clouds covered most of the blue sky above the towering treetops, keeping the day pleasantly cool. Even now rolling some of the words around in my head, I couldn’t get Ty’s accent quite right. Breathing the wet earth and fresh rain-scented air deep into my lungs, I whispered a few of the toughest words, going over their meaning in my mind.
“See, you are a natural at it.” Ty’s voice came from the French doors a moment before his soft footsteps sounded on the deck.
Laying the side of my face against my leg, I peeked at him through the curtain of my hair. Clothed only in a pair of loose gray sweats, he looked as divine as a Norse god. With that smirk on his fine lips, the expanse of chiseled chest, abs, and those bulging arms, I couldn’t imagine a finer looking deity.
“Hardly,” I said a bit breathlessly, hoping he would think it was from the stretch.
One of his legs came to rest on the railing beside mine, and he leaned down to stretch. Seeing how my leg was at a ninety-degree angle and his was barely at forty-five, it hardly seemed as effective for him. I was suddenly very interested in how flexible he might be. Shaking the thought from my mind, I pulled my leg off the rail, took a step away, and began stretching my arms. Sanity, I had to keep my sanity. Which made me wonder…
“You mentioned varúlfur who didn’t make it through the verða being put to the reaper. Is that like a metaphor for a person, or just the killing itself?”
Eyes going so wide they practically bulged from their sockets, you would have thought I’d wrapped my hands around his neck and squeezed. “I should have known you would catch that. I did not mean to say it. Such dark talk is not exactly encouraging to a newly bitten.”
I touched his arm, partially because it was growing harder and harder not to touch him, but mostly to make him look at me. Right, that was why, because that was so important. Dammit. “I realize it’s been less than a week, but you still know me better than that already. My doctor brain wants all the facts. Tell me.”
He met my gaze. “Hundreds of years ago, it was a person, chosen by the gods, legends say. But with fewer and fewer being bitten in, there has been no need for the gods to choose a reaper. So now, when necessary, it is carried out by the lögreglu.”
“The police?”
He grinned. “Very good. Yes, the police, or the chief of police, rather.”
“Tell me more about this reaper legend.”
“My apologies, I do not know much more about it. It is one of our most obscure legends that is not talked about much. It is a dark part of our history, my father says.”
Cocking my head at him, I put a hand on my hip. “Seriously? A history teacher who does not know the legends of his own people?” I teased.
Pink flushed across his cheeks. “I know of it, just not the details. Like I said, our kind do not like to talk about it. Besides, I have spent much of my time learning the history of the world, and there is a lot to learn.”
I tagged him gently on one rock-hard bicep. “Forget it, teach. I’m just messing with you.” Another thought occurred to me, this one almost as disturbing as thoughts of the reaper. “Do you think Raul had one of his people bite Candice as some twisted backup plan?” With two long phone calls between us in the last twenty-four hours, she and I were on a first name basis already, and then some. The girl liked to chat and had a million questions. Not that I could answer any of them.
Stretching over his leg to loop his interlaced fingers over his toes, he shook his head. “No, even Raul is not that sick. She is just a kid.”
“I thought you said they—we—don’t do this kind of thing without approval.”
“We do not. I do not know who could have done it, or why. Unless… No that is not possible.”
His eyes had drifted off into the distance, peering deep into the trees but seeing something else entirely.
“Unless what?” I prompted.
“There are old legends my mother used to tell me, about a time when our kind would bite those who had wronged them. The bitten ones became indentured to those they had wronged, often serving decades or centuries trying to redeem themselves.”
Despite the constant flush that clung to me lately, chills crawled up my arms. “What could a teenage girl have done to deserve that?”
Gaze pulling back to me, he shook his head. “Nothing. That is not done anymore. It risks exposing us too much. It was outlawed around 1900.”
Hip thrusting out a bit, I rested my right hand on it. “Yeah, well turning someone without raðið approval is outlawed too, yet here I stand.” I almost nailed the accent, which made me proud despite the darkness of the conversation.
Ty fixed me with a stare so serious it drained the snark right out of me. “You do not understand. Since it was outlawed, the sentence for turning someone to punish them is death.”
“Oh.”
My chills multiplied until the cool morning air seeped right through my varúlfur temperature. “Who would risk that? And why?”
Ty shook his head as he stretched an arm behind his back in a maneuver that looked almost painful. The movement made the muscles of his chest flex which made me forget what we’d been talking about for a second. “No one in their right mind, which sort of answers the why too, I guess. But I do not believe that is why whoever turned Candice did it.”
“Why do you think they did it?”
“I am not sure yet.”
“What do we do about it?”
“Us?” A sort of helpless frustration clouded his eyes. “There is nothing we can do. It is council business now. They will handle it.”
The finality of his tone grated on my nerves. I got that he felt helpless, removed from the situation because he didn’t belong to one of the packs, but how he could let something like this be, I couldn’t get.
“And what will they do about it?”
He bent at the waist, reaching for his toes and hiding his face from me at the same time. But that toned backside was oh so visible.
“They will put a lögreglu on the case, sniff out whoever did it, and take care of them.” The flat tone of his voice revealed that he was trying to hide something.
“A varúlfur policeman? And you trust them to do this?”
Expression guarded as it so often was, he stood to his full height and looked down at me. That careful guard slipped a bit as his eyes flicked across my low-cut tank top. Apparently I wasn’t the only one distracted. “Yes. Now let us get to this, shall we?” he asked.
I was too emotionally drained to have the energy to pull any more information out of him, so I nodded. “Teach away.”
Without a word, he leaped over the railing and dropped the twenty feet or so to the grass below, making it look graceful and sexy as hell. No. I wasn’t allowed to think of him that way, especially when he was acting like the unsanctioned creation of new varúlfur wasn’t his problem. It seemed to me that should be every varúlfur’s problem. He started down the flagstone pathway that wound through a backyard carpeted in as much clover as grass. After a moment he stopped and turned to look at me. A grin pulled his luscious lips upward. How could he frustrate me and entice me practically at the same time?
“Are you not coming?”
“You dropped like twenty feet.”
He shrugged. “You can too.”
My brows rose. “A varúlfur thing?”
Sparkling blue eyes beckoning, he nodded.
If I broke an ankle or something I was totally going to make him wait on me hand and foot. Preferably in only those sweats. Or less. I took a deep breath and jumped. My legs bent and absorbed the impact with an ease that left me breathless with shock. I didn’t even stumble. Looking back up at the deck, I wondered if I could just as easily jump back up. When we came back, I was definitely going to try that.
“Told you,” Ty said, drawing my attention back to him and the yard.
Hints of a dark blue lake peeked through the pine trees that bordered the edge of the large yard. Most people would have cut those trees down to have a full view of the lake, but this way it was somehow more beautiful, mysterious almost. A smile on his face, Ty followed my gaze.
“There is a path that leads down to the lake. Maybe I will show it to you sometime.” The hint of joy in his voice made me want to ask him to take me to see it now.
Then I realized he was likely trying to distract me from our earlier conversation. There was something he didn’t want me to ask, didn’t want me to know. I must have been close to touching on whatever it was. And here I had let him sidetrack me again.
Arms crossing beneath my breasts, I stopped when he did and faced him. I won’t lie and say I didn’t enjoy his gaze wandering down to the cleavage the V of my low-cut T-shirt revealed. “Maybe I’ll let you.”
A pointed pink tongue darted out to lick his lips. The sight made muscles between my legs clench and it was all I could do to will myself not to get wet. Would he smell it if I did? For some reason the idea sent a rolling tremor through my inner labia. He looked quickly away.
“You said you have taken martial arts,” he said with a forced casual air.
“Yes.” My attempt not to sound breathless wasn’t much better.
Those glacier-blue eyes crawled back to me as if they couldn’t stay away. “Full contact, light, or no contact?”
Seeing how my mind went somewhere completely different—somewhere his own resided by the hungry way he chewed on his bottom lip—it took me a moment to answer. “Light.”
One after the other, he rolled his shoulders, the motion having a sort of cleansing effect that left his face blank. “Good. We will do a bit of sparring and work on your anger control that way.”
I didn’t want to tell him, but that would certainly test me. When sparring, my mind went to a place where the fight was real. My dad had always said that we must train like we want to fight because when it comes down to it, we will fight like we trained. And the idea of anyone raising a hand to me really pissed me off.
“So we’re not going to work on controlling desire?” I asked, making my voice sound teasing to cover the disappointment.
He chewed on his bottom lip as his eyes traveled the length of my body. “Unfortunately, that is not your strongest emotion.”
The measure to which his disappointment pleased me was so wrong. If only he knew. Ty led me to where the flagstones circled an area of sand. I had a feeling it was no coincidence that the circle was the size of a standard fighting ring. With a wave of his hand, he invited me to step in first. Not knowing what to expect, I kept him in my peripheral as I moved past him. Despite being wet from last night’s rain, the sand was pleasantly warm beneath my bare feet.
“Varúlfur fight for their place in the pack. Fighting comes as naturally to us as breathing and hunting.” As he spoke he paced around me, legs bent in a fighting stance, hands up at the ready.
I shifted into a stance of my own and moved methodically with him to keep him in my line of sight. “Great. I suck at fighting. No room for pacifists, huh?”
He took a slow jab at me, one easily blocked with a sweep of my right forearm. “Sure, at the bottom of the pack. But you do not strike me as one who enjoys being on the bottom.” The gleam in his blue eyes as they flashed across my body revealed his double meaning.
The look alone heated me up more than the rise of my wolf ever could. I returned the smile, and the jab. He blocked mine just as easily, the skin of his arm sliding across mine in something close to a caress. “As long as the person on top is good at what they’re doing, I don’t mind.”
The husky tone of his voice took my mind to places I couldn’t afford it to go. Drawn by those thoughts, my eyes traveled the impressive V of his lower abs and external oblique muscles to where they disappeared into his low-slung sweatpants. The verða had to be setting my lady parts on fire because there was no way I wanted anything to do with sex after what had happened with Raul. Yes, that had to be it. Was this what madness felt like? The thought sent a shiver of fear through me.
Ty made a contented sound somewhere between a groan and a growl that made my vaginal muscles clench again. “Sanngjarn nógur,” he said as he prowled around me.
Impossibly, his voice sounded even sexier when he spoke Icelandic. Fingers curling into fists, I kept my stance low and stepped as he stepped, keeping him in sight.
“And that means?”
The right corner of his mouth quirked up. “You tell me.”
“Seriously? A language lesson now, when we’re about to fight?”
“Always.”
Pulling in the scents of damp sand and grass, I thought hard. “Nógur, that must be similar to nóg, which means enough. The other word I don’t know.”
Fast as a snake, he shot in, tapped my midsection with a punch that barely brushed my tank top, and threw a backhand toward my head. Our arms collided with a smack reminiscent of bodies slapping in a far more intimate setting as I blocked the backhand. Dammit, I had to get my mind out of the gutter. I barely knew this guy. Falling into bed with him just because he was hot could be an epic mistake, and I had had my fill of those. This one, though, this could kill me.
“The first is actually one word, it means fair. But you got half of it, that is good,” he said.
But was it? I couldn’t help but wonder. No doubt the phrase was one he had taught me this morning, one I’d already forgotten. To get any of the language down before we went to Hemlock Hollow in a little over two weeks I was going to have to seriously step it up. My distraction must have shown because Ty grinned and kicked out at me. As I sidestepped it, he whipped his leg in the opposite direction, catching me behind the knees and sweeping my legs out from beneath me. Had the impact not knocked the air from my lungs, I would have cursed something colorful enough at him to make him blush. Or at least tried.
“Ah come on, you made that too easy,” he said.
I glared at the hand he offered and stood on my own, my guard coming back up the moment I was back on my feet.
“Yeah, well, I didn’t realize you were going to play dirty.”
He licked his lips, making me wonder what they tasted like. “It is no fun if we do not get a bit dirty,” he said.
“Sanngjarn nógur,” I threw back at him.
I threw a few punches and other strikes, testing his defenses and reaction times. He blocked swift and smooth in an almost effortless fashion, his eyes locked on mine all the while. The grace with which his movements flowed was something I hadn’t possessed even in the height of my training years ago. But I found that as we danced, my reactions smoothed out, beginning to flow from that place within where no thought dwelled, only instinct. Our bodies collided, arms with arms, arms with legs, sometimes legs with legs in the dance of blocks and strikes. Some of them stung, especially on my shins and forearms where I lacked muscle, but none hurt. He was going easy on me. Oddly, that made me angrier than the occasional strikes that broke through my defenses.
I sped up and he followed suit. Still, he pulled his strikes, never landing them hard enough to hurt, or even knock the air from me. It made me feel inadequate, which fueled the very thing I was working to control. The combination of his speed and perfect form made it impossible to land even a single strike on him. It had been a very long time since anyone had made me feel like a helpless girl. My skin began to burn and my teeth began to ache. Growing desperate to land even just one strike, I sped up more. Again and again he tapped my side, stomach, back, with gentle strikes, proving my defenses were not keeping up with my speed.
“Dammit!” I yelled as his fist brushed my T-shirt below my breasts.
Laughter bubbled from him as he spun around me and landed another strike on my back, this one so feather soft it was obviously meant to tease. I’d had it. Fast as I could, I stepped back, one leg going between his. I slammed into his chest—which wasn’t even slick with sweat, dammit—dropping down the moment I felt the impact and grabbed his leg. Wrapping my arms around it, I stood and threw my body back against his. Air left him in a whoosh and suddenly we were both on the ground. Releasing his leg, I spun around in a half crouch. Before he could get up, I straddled his waist and raised my fist high. Breath coming in gasps, lips curled back from my fangs, I stared into his eyes and realized I was about to lose it.
The burning beneath my skin intensified until I broke out into a sweat. Breath coming in gasps, tongue moving with each of them brushing against the backs of my fangs, I teetered on the edge of panic. My nostrils flared, not to draw in scents, but from the onslaught of them: Ty’s delicious sweat and musk, the sweet clover and tang of evergreens. Colors grew brighter. The grass beneath Ty seemed greener. The blue of his eyes became downright glacial as they stared up at me, filled with concern. A soft, steady thudding drew my attention. It took me a moment to realize it was Ty’s heart. The world began to slip away, or rather, I did.
“Easy, Sonya, easy. Breathe, relax. Just relax.” Ty’s methodical voice had an instant soothing effect. He kept talking, encouraging me in soft tones much like a hypnotist might use.
The sound slowly brought me back, working like the North Star to guide me to safe shores. Soon I could feel him beneath me again, his hips holding my legs apart, his groin scorching against mine. Damn, he was hot. Literally. Considering the pressure I felt against my opening, it wasn’t hard to guess why. Well, it was hard, quite hard, and the length of that pressure was impressive. Heat spread from between my legs, rising upward through me like a tide. The desire to tear Ty’s sweats off and uncover what lay beneath made my hands roll into fists at my sides. Skin crawling and teeth aching, I leaned my head back and tried to catch my breath.
“Whoa, easy, no jumping lessons here. Breathe and find your center, your place of control,” Ty said.
Melodic and soothing though his voice was, it also sounded deep and husky with a desire he seemed to be struggling with too. That knowledge made me wet. So much for keeping him from smelling my desire. At the moment I had bigger problems, like how my vision sharpened and how I could suddenly hear not only my own heart beating, but his as well. Colors changed slightly. They didn’t bleed out like I half expected them to, but shifted, as if I was seeing on a different spectrum now. Light became far more intense.
“Sonya.” Ty grabbed my arms. “Sonya!”
Slowly, I forced my gaze from the sky and trees. Ty had sat up and now shook me slightly. His blond brows scrunched together over his worry-filled eyes. My gaze tried to stray down to his bare, broad, rock-hard chest…
“Sonya!”
Like a switch being flicked, my attention shot back up to his face.
“Good. Now tell me why it bothers you that you could not land a hit on me,” he said.
My face scrunched up into a look that had to be unattractive. “What?”
“Why did it make you mad that you could not hit me?” he pressed.
I shrugged his arms off me. He gave in a bit too easily, letting go as if I were on fire. “What are you talking about?”
He shook his head slowly from side to side. “Do not get angry. You need to focus on the reason for the emotion, rather than the emotion itself. Understanding reason is what keeps us from getting caught up in our emotions. It will help you keep control, and your sanity.”
Uncomfortable as the idea made me, it also made sense. Figured. Everything about this made me uncomfortable, except for the strong, wonderful-smelling man beneath me. In one awkward motion, I pushed up off my knees and flipped to my feet. He rose slowly, like a predator flowing to its feet, eyes never leaving mine. Damn it was sexy. From beneath my skin a slight hum started. I slammed my eyes shut and tried to focus on what he had said. Reason, it had been about reason…
The hum slowed and finally stopped. Thoughts became clearer. “I don’t like to feel as though I can’t protect myself,” I finally said.
Careful to keep his distance, Ty slowly rose to his full height several feet away. “There is no shame in that. It is a bad feeling. See how thinking of that stopped the change?”
I nodded.
“Good. Keep that reason forefront in your mind when you feel yourself losing control. Knowing what triggers an instinct is the key to controlling it,” Ty said, this time in his teaching voice rather than that soothing, sexy voice that was meant to calm me and did the opposite.
The way his eyes locked on my chest made me tug at my shirt, wishing I had worn a bra that concealed how much I was attracted to him. Was it really attraction, though? Or a response of the verða? I preferred to think the latter. The wonderful ache in my hard nipples didn’t really care what the reason was, but I tried to focus on it anyway. Once I got through this process and shifted, I’d be in control again. And then, who knew, I might not be attracted to him at all. That both soothed and upset me. The resemblance to puberty wasn’t lost on me. And much like puberty, I just had to get through it. To achieve that, I could fight my false attraction to him. I knew I could.
And I did. For a while.