TWELVE
So many questions.
Brandon had always been a curious boy, a smart boy, one who understood more than other kids his own age. Garrett liked to take responsibility for that. He’d done everything he could to educate his son, to prepare his son, for what the future might hold. Lessons, training, exercises in swordplay and firing a variety of guns. All to prepare him for a time in his life just like this one, when Garrett couldn’t protect him from his Shifter heritage anymore.
He could be proud of all that. At the same time, he had to accept the blame for placing Brandon’s life in danger. Nearly getting him killed.
Scaring him to death.
It had taken a long time, but Brandon had finally ran out of questions. At least for now. Garrett held his son tight on the edge of the bed now, just being there for him, and somehow he got the impression that was more important than all of the words he had just said. Explanations were one thing. The actual physical comfort of having his father there with him was something else. Something more.
The words had all sounded comforting. Yes, his father could change into an animal. No, it’s not as cool as it sounds. No, you might not have to go through the same thing.
Brandon had almost looked disappointed at that one.
More questions, more answers. Yes, the wolf is also a Shifter. That’s how he can talk. He’s a bad man. I was trying to protect you from the wolf.
Yes, shifting is painful. It’s a part of who I am and I can’t stop it, no matter how hard I try. No, Malinda isn’t a Shifter.
Yes. I love her.
That last one had been one of the easiest questions of all to answer. He loved Malinda. It had come upon both of them quickly, almost savagely, but it didn’t change the fact that it was real. They were in love.
Which was why she was in the mess she was in.
He ruffled Brandon’s hair, and the two of them went back to sitting in silence with their own thoughts. He hadn’t protected his son. He hadn’t protected Malinda. Jorge, and the other people in his employ that Raul the wolf-Shifter had killed, had all died because they were part of his household.
Where would this end?
The answer seemed obvious. It wasn’t going to end until Raul was dead.
That realization stirred something inside of him and it took him a long moment to realize it was the bear’s animal spirit moving, rousing, rising to the challenge to protect him and his own. He frowned and tried to quash the slithering sensation.
The thing inside of him didn’t get a say in his life. Not now, not ever. The bear had been useful to fight off Raul, and that was all. When the time came to finish Raul off, he would call on the bear again. That was all it was to him. A means to an end. A useful tool.
Inside of him, he could feel the bear laugh.
Shut up, he thought loudly, knowing he was really arguing with himself.
“Dad?” Brandon said.
“Yes, son.”
“Can Malinda stay with us? Like, forever?”
That was unexpected. Garrett hadn’t brought any woman around his son since his mother… since then. Now Malinda was here, and Brandon had embraced her as part of his life so quickly. Almost as quickly as he had fallen in love with her, Garrett thought.
“You like her?” he asked Brandon.
“I really do. She took me to the park. Then she stood between me and a wolf. I mean, who does that?”
Just the people who really care about you, that was who. Garrett left the thought unsaid, but it was all around them in this room.
Maybe it was something to do with Malinda herself. Maybe she just made it that easy to love her.
Or maybe, he thought, she just belongs here with them.
He looked down at his son, about to tell him that very thing, when he heard it.
It was a distant sound, elsewhere in the mansion, and he would have missed it left to his own devices. It was the bear deep inside of him that stopped and cocked an ear to listen more closely. The animal spirit stretching out.
“What is it, Dad?” Brandon asked, tensing inside Garrett’s arms. He’d picked up on how oddly still Garrett had become, how he held his breathing.
Something was wrong.
The sound came again. A shout. Not quite a scream, but an angry shout.
Malinda’s voice, so far away he couldn’t do anything more than recognize her soft tenor. She was scared, and angry.
The next voice he heard, at the edge of his extended senses, brought him to his feet.
Inside his soul, the bear leapt to attention.
Raul. The wolf Shifter was in his house again.
“Dad…” Brandon’s voice trailed off.
He was already heading for the door. “Stay here,” he said, anxiety making his voice sharp. “Lock the door behind me. Then hide.”
Brandon’s eyes were as wide as saucer plates. Terror seeped across his little boy face and suddenly he looked very, very young. Garrett knew he couldn’t just leave his son like this. He had to go, had to go right now, to find Malinda and save her from the monster Raul.
But Malinda wasn’t the only one who needed him.
He needed to be a father to Brandon. Wasn’t that what Malinda had told him? To be more than just the man who protected him. More than just a strong force living in the same house.
Be his father.
Quickly, he stepped back across the room to Brandon’s bed, and hugged him close. “It will be all right,” he promised. “I’ll come back for you. Don’t come out of your hiding spot until I come back for you.” One more hug. “Be brave for me. You can do that, right?”
After just the briefest hesitation, Brandon nodded into Garrett’s chest. “I can do it.”
“It will be all right,” he repeated once more, hoping he could make those words come true.
Then he kissed the top of his son’s head, and rushed out to the hallway, waiting only long enough to hear Brandon lock the door behind him.
When he was sure of that, he ran for the stairs, listening with every fiber of his being to the house around him.
As he went, he called upon the animal spirit within him.
He called upon the bear.
*
Her skin ripped.
In the middle of the ruined strips of her clothing, she shivered and gasped as her body tore itself into a new shape. It was the strangest sensation she had ever felt. Not pain, exactly, although there certainly was pain. Her skin tearing and her bones cracking, shifting, reshaping… that was something else.
Ecstasy.
Malinda felt the greatest sense of tingling, thrilling pleasure she had ever known. It was the closest thing she’d ever felt to complete sex. Like her first time, all over again. Chemicals rushed through her body and her mind, an orgasm of emotion, intimate and beyond her control.
And it all happened in a handful of heartbeats.
She stood, staring at Raul the wolf Shifter with vision colored red with her desire to see him dead. She wanted to tear his throat out with her own teeth. She wanted to dig her claws into his soft underbelly from stomach to groin and dig out his entrails to watch him die in a pool of his own blood.
That was when it dawned on her that she was eye-to-eye with him. They were standing at the same height. He smiled at her, already knowing what she had just realized.
She was the wolf.
Of course you are. You called upon me.
The voice was in her head. It was a husky feminine growl. The wolf, the animal spirit she had been infected with, was talking to her.
I don’t want you here, she said.
We both know that ain’t true. You let me out. You joined with me and accepted me.
I did?
Yes.
When I changed. Shifted, I mean. It didn’t hurt. It felt… good.
The bonding shouldn’t hurt. The shift gives pleasure to the host and the spirit alike.
But that’s not what Garrett said. He said it hurts. That he loses himself when the spirit of the bear takes over. He loses himself and it hurts.
Garrett, the wolf growled, in equal parts desire and disgust. He tries to refuse us. To deny what it is. It is like fighting the tides of the ocean and then wondering why you drown. He is of us, but does not understand us.
In the recesses of her mind, in the freedom of eternity in which all this took place, Malinda listened to the wolf. To her wolf. This is how it was supposed to be. The intensity of her reaction, the way the wolf took her body but didn’t steal it from her. This was what it felt like to join with the animal spirit, to bond.
All this time, Garrett had been mistaken.
He always fought against his bond. Struggled with it, denied it, made the connection with his animal spirit into a battleground.
That was it! That was the thing that had nagged at her all this time. Ever since finding out what Garrett was. When she found out what the secret hidden in the halls of this mansion was, when Garrett told her what shifting was, she knew there was something wrong. Something missing. He thought the spirit was hurting him.
But there was something wrong with what Garrett told her. Something missing. The way he understood shifting wasn’t right. The animal spirit wasn’t an evil, horrid thing. It was beautiful, full of strength and exhilaration. That’s how it felt to her. It felt right. What had happened between her and the spirit of the wolf felt right.
You know it’s true.
The wolf’s words faded out, and out, until she was left alone. She was the wolf.
And the wolf was her.
“There she is,” Raul said triumphantly. He lowered his muzzle to look closer into her eyes. “I see her. I see the wolf spirit within you. The same look my wife had in her. You are mine again!”
Like hell, Malinda and her wolf thought together.
She lunged, aiming her teeth to snap at the bridge of Raul’s long snout, up near his damned eyes. He sidestepped her easily, a blur of gray hair and laughter.
Changing direction just by twisting her weight on her paw, Malinda nipped at Raul’s hind feet. Her teeth caught and bit into corded flesh. She tasted blood. It felt good, and she reveled in her new body. She’d scored, cut him, made him bleed.
“That’s the way,” Raul thrummed. “That’s the way I like it.” He twisted his head back, his flank towards her, and licked his wound in an obscene way, his long pink tongue stroking his wound where her teeth had cut him.
He made sure she was watching.
He looked up at her again, moving closer. “Hurt me again, she-wolf. Make it feel good.”
“Stay the hell away from me,” she barked, a dog’s voice. A wolf’s.
“You don’t want me to stay away. You want me to cut you. Make you hurt. Bleed.” He lunged at her, faking a snap at her front leg. “I’ll lick you clean.”
Her stomach turned, but inside, the wolf preened.
Now that the wolf was one with her own mind and soul and body, her senses were heightened to a new sharpness. Sight, sound, smell.
She could smell Raul. His musk. His sex, putting a tang in the air.
They circled each other, here in the kitchen, her retreating as he came closer and closer. In spite of herself, she sniffed the air in his wake. He filled her and tantalized the wolf. It pushed her to keep away from him. She would not let him do this to her. “How did your wife stand to be anywhere near you with that stench?”
He growled, but then the growl became a chuckle. “Malinda, Malinda. Dear Malinda. Haven’t you realized yet? That spirit within you? Where do you think that spirit came from? When my wife died I took her spirit upon myself. I’ve held it in my heart all these years, nourishing and feeding my anger. She has always been with me.”
“How… creepy.” She jumped sideways to avoid a playful little nip. He was toying with her. She needed to attack, to crush him, to kill him. He was turning this into foreplay and her wolf was telling her to play with him first.
Take your pleasure now. Then kill him.
He licked his thin lips, baring his teeth slowly. A hungry wolf looking at a meal. “When I bit you,” he said, “the spirit finally left me. It left me, and entered you.”
Cold dread weighted her steps.
No.
“Yes,” he argued, as if he could hear her thoughts. “You are my wife now.”
It couldn’t be true. She was frozen in place by the very thought. His wife. Joined to her by the spirit passed through him when his teeth sank into her body.
His wife.
It couldn’t be.
She searched within for her wolf, asking, pleading for answers. The wolf spirit was there but she couldn’t reach it and she realized it was because the wolf was her now.
She was the wolf.
Raul’s wife.
“No!”
He was on her in her moment of distraction, throwing her down, landing on top of her, his mouth moving all over her, his paws blocking her claws, her teeth, her every defense.
His tongue tasted her, and she couldn’t stop him. He breathed in her scent and touched every intimate part of her and she howled at the way he moved past every defense she could put up.
When he nipped her tail, squeezed it between his teeth, her body went rigid. She couldn’t help it. It was involuntary. Her body belonged to him, held there between his teeth.
His tongue stroked her. She was so sensitive there. She never could have imagined. It was like being touched by a lover’s hands, gently, between her legs…
In the instant he let go, she could move again. She crawled away, head low, body still alive with his rough touch.
She shivered, and tried to find herself in the swirling mess of her emotions.
“Mine,” Raul repeated. “You are mine.”
“Like hell she is.”
Malinda focused on Garrett as he came into the kitchen, amid the chaos of pots and pans and photos knocked off shelves, of spoons and knives and forks thrown around the room.
When had they done all that? Malinda had a faint memory of her and Raul bashing into cabinets and walls and every surface as he played with her and she had to get away, only to succumb to the desires of her new body.
She cringed and whimpered, and Raul laughed.
Garrett, fully in his bear form, reared and stretched up on his hind legs, arms wide, huge and terrifying. He was there to save her.
From Raul, and from herself.