Change For Me (Werewolf Romance) (The Alpha's Kiss) (22 page)

Leaning forward, he pushed the bike as hard as it would go, and heard something off in the distance. Something desperate, like a scream, caught his attention from somewhere straight ahead, in the same direction as he caught Devin’s scent. A grin flashed across Damon’s face, even though he knew what was coming.

In a way, he looked forward to finding his brother, and to whatever was about to happen.

He was going to get Lily. He didn’t care what it took, or how hard he had to fight.

Nothing else mattered. Not Poko, not the clan, not the ancient mysteries of his people. All that, he thought, would work out. All of that would come.

But none of it would be worth anything unless he had his Lily.

Behind him as he roared across the open desert, the moon rose. Ahead of him the sun sank into the horizon.

Damon’s vision didn’t change. Every detail, every crack in the ground, it was all there for him to see. His eyes had either adjusted immediately to the darkness, or didn’t need to at all.

Power coursed through his veins. His nerves all seemed to come to life at once, every synapse of his brain firing in tandem with the others. He turned briefly and stared at the fat, pale disc that had just separated itself from the horizon. As the silver light filled his eyes, he felt a palpable sense of excitement.

In a way, it was similar to how he felt the first time Lily kissed him. Trepidation, anxiousness and warmth spread from his head to his fingertips, all at once.

He grunted with a smile. Was this it? Was this what it felt like when his entire world changed? Off in the distance, he heard another sound of scratching... on concrete? Was he hearing fingernails on a cement wall?

Damon cocked his head and squinted into the horizon. Silver light, impossible to have come from the moon, at least for human eyes, lit the world for him, but when he closed his eyes, he could see and sense and feel and taste everything, like his senses had become something else.

Like he had transformed.

Quickly, he glanced at his hands, which he found to be perfectly normal. No claws, no black hair, just normal Damon hands. It was still coming. This was just the beginning.

A sniff caught Devin’s scent again, confirming that all the things he sensed were in the same direction, although he didn’t much need to confirm that. He just
knew
.

It wasn’t just Devin he sensed.

Smelling the air again he noticed a softer scent, a fainter one. It was vaguely sweet, just a little hint of patchouli. “Lily,” he said under his breath. “He’s got you. I knew it.”

Those screams, the fingernails, the muffled, deadened scent, Damon’s realization grew as he ground his jaws together.

“You’re not getting away with this, brother, not now and not ever. I just hope you’re ready.”

Far in the distance, probably twenty miles from where he was, Damon’s wild vision saw a little clumping of houses, desert shacks, which everyone from town called the roach motels. They were supposedly little huts set up by vagrants or drug addicts or whoever else the scape-goat of the moment was. All kinds of ridiculous stories about what sorts of horrible things they got up to in them flooded his mind.

But Damon knew what they really were.

The Carak, when Poko banished them, were forced out of the forest, out of the mountains where wolves belonged. Forced away from Carey’s Bluff, that sacred place, and out into the desert.

There was a reason that people who wandered this far out in the Sonora never came back, but it didn’t have a single damn thing to do with rogue homeless people or illegal immigrants.

It was getting hard to tell the difference between what he was seeing with his physical eyes and what he was sensing with his soul, but it hardly mattered.

Lightning flashed behind him, almost blinding Damon with the pulse of white light before it immediately faded.

The wheels turned, rasping over scrub brush, over cracks in the sand.

Wheels screamed over the desert, crunching the dirt underneath them.

He sensed there were three people, and six houses, in front of him.

“Are you alone out there, brother? Are you doing this all by yourself? You won’t get away with this.”

Damon’s sense of life signs was a thump in the back of his head. A warm, pulsing thud-thud-thud, like vitals on a heart monitor, they echoed in his consciousness. Two of them he knew, but the third was a mystery.

It was weak though. Very, very weak, almost snuffed out.

Only five or six minutes separated the hunter from his prey.

A phantom pain stung Damon’s shoulder, then his ribs burned with the memory of the damage done last time the two met.

It didn’t matter.

Nothing mattered. He’d die if he had to. He’d kill if he had to, though he vaguely hoped it didn’t come to that.

Nothing mattered except Lily, and as the little clutch of roach motels came into physical view, another smile crept across Damon’s face.

He wasn’t leaving without her.

Of that, he was certain. The alpha wasn’t leaving without his mate, without his love, without his Lily.

No matter what.

“Brother,” he snarled, seeing a lurching, jerking form out front of one of the houses. “I wonder if you know about me.”

Damon narrowed his vision, revved his engine one last time, and skidded to a stop.

A moment later, he was bounding through the air with strength, with speed that he’d never had. One step carried him four feet. One bounding leap went ten.

Damon felt his brother just inside the house, and dove forward, driving his hands through a shutter, spraying wood shards all around. An instant later, he closed both his fists around his brother’s throat, and yanked with all his might, pulling him through the window and throwing Devin to the ground.

With teeth flashing in Damon’s new, silver-tinged vision, his brother sprang to his feet, snarling.

Damon unleashed a throaty, husky roar.

Devin’s dagger-like teeth glimmered in the moonlight, and he took a wild slash. His claws caught Damon across the chest, cutting deep.

“What hope... do you have... like
that
?” Devin said, his voice halting, mocking, and painfully tight in his throat.

Damon’s feet left the ground. Hands were now crushing
his
throat. No, not hands. Claws.

With little more than a flick of the wrist, Devin hurled his brother backwards, battering him against sunbaked bricks. He knelt down and stared deep into Damon’s eyes, yellow irises burning as Devin’s claws scratched the sides of Damon’s neck.

Damon sucked air, as best he could, but he was fading.

His vision went gray, then it went black.

“No,” he whispered, rasping over the clawed hand that crushed his life. “Not like... this...”

––––––––

I
t wasn’t until the moon was high in the sky and the little pool of light on the floor spread along the entire bottom step of the cellar that I summoned the courage to move.

Okay, to be honest, saying that I did it on my own is a little dishonest. I was sitting on the floor, crouched low and trying to listen for anything that I could when there were a few banging sounds outside, and the walls kinda shuddered.

The stairs were, I figured, about ten steps from the floor to the ceiling. That far underground, it was hard to hear any voices, or really figure out what was going from the banging and the booming, but there was definitely something violent happening.

When it all started, my first instinct was to grab the tooth that hung around my neck and squeeze it with all my strength. I clenched my eyes shut and stared deep inside myself, visualizing Damon. I saw him come through that cellar door, the moonlight framing his beautiful body.

I imagined him descending the stairs, looking down at me with those soft, smoldering green eyes, and then picking me up and taking me away from all this... this pain, and this darkness.

And then I heard the
other
noise.

“Are... hello?” The tiniest voice I’d ever hear called out. “Is someone there?”

“Who’s that?” I called back. “Cat?”

I knew her voice when I heard it, but she sounded so vulnerable, so defeated, that it hardly seemed possible. Knowing her other option was to have been killed by Devin, this one was better, but not much.

“Is that you, Cat?” I asked again when she didn’t answer the first time.

With my hands on the concrete floor, scooting forward to make sure I didn’t step on any nails, or bump into a saw blade or something, I moved in the direction of her voice. “Talk to me, Cat, I can’t get to you unless you make noises.”

“How’s that?”
A voice boomed upstairs. It sounded like Devin, but he was so crazed, so ferocious, that he wasn’t himself.

Who could he be... oh no, no I can’t think about that. Probably just some other desert dweller. Caraks fight all the time right? Maybe just another one of them?

Momentarily I clutched the fang again, hoping against hope that the strained, ragged gasping that I suddenly heard through the floor above my head wasn’t Damon. No time to think about that, anyway.

“Talk to me, Cat,” I said again.

A few feet away, ahead and off to my left, I heard trembling breaths. The sort of frightened, shaking breath that you take when you’re trying your best not to be heard, but you still have to breathe.

I stopped bothering with talking. Cat was too messed up with fear to respond. I kept talking
at
her, to try and calm her down, but didn’t expect a response. But I never lost ear-shot of her breaths.

“Everything’s fine, Cat,” I said with a low, smooth, soothing voice. “Nothing’s wrong. You and I are down here, and Damon is coming. Damon’s going to make sure we’re safe.”

Her hitching, clenched breaths started coming more evenly.

“That’s it, calm down. Everything is okay. You don’t have anything to worry about.”

“You think that’s going to work?”
After his latest shriek, Devin laughed, and a sickening crunch of boot on face met my ears. I shook my head, simply refusing to listen. Damon was coming. Damon was safe and he wouldn’t let me suffer. He promised.

Yeah, he promised a lot of things
. My damn doubt wouldn’t leave me alone.

I pushed past it, gritting my teeth and refusing to give in to that negative, awful bullshit. Someone else needed me, and I wasn’t going to let her down on account of my pointless worrying.

“I’m coming, Cat,” I said. I heard a little whistle join the end of her rattling breaths. Broken rib? Punctured lung? Didn’t matter. I had to get to her and that’s all there was to it. “Are you on your side? If you’re not, try to roll to your side. And reach out in the direction of my voice. I promise I’m not going to hurt you. I’m down here just the same as you.”

Something scuffed on the floor, and I immediately reached for it, glad it was fingertips and not a rat.

“Is that... Devin? No!” Cat shrieked and pulled her hand back, then started crying.

Whatever that monster did to her, I hope Damon gives him back twice as much. No time for this, no time.

“No, no, honey, no, it’s me, it’s Lily.” Swallowing my own fear, my own worry, I used my calmest voice. “Everything is fine. Give me your hand.”

Slowly, tremulously, the fingertips extended again. How I wished that damn moon was somewhere else. I needed to see her. I wished I could do that wolf-smelling-the-air thing, but I had to make do with what I had.

“Come on, Cat, I know you’re scared, but everything’s okay. Give me your hand.”

I was firm, but soft, just like I remembered seeing whenever television detectives had to question a terrified witness. “Good, Cat, just like that. Be strong for me, I’m scared too and I need you.”

Cat sniffed, and swallowed. I heard her suck on her teeth. “L... Lily?”

“Uh-huh,” I said. “It’s me. It’s your friend Lily. Give me your hand so I can feel you and know you’re okay.”

When I felt her fingertips touch mine, I ignored another explosion from outside and stretched my hand out further, wrapping it around hers and just holding her still.

A moment later, Cat’s terror burst out in wracking, almost painful-sounding sobs. I felt her anguish coursing through me, but there was nothing I could do except push myself to my feet and wrap my arm around her.

“Y... you don’t even like me, Lily,” she sniffed, then whimpered. “You never did, I’m a h – horrible monster and I was always mean to you and...”

I smoothed Cat’s hair and pulled her close. Almost instantly, I felt her against my shoulder, and I wrapped my arms around her shaking body.

“Everything’s fine,” I said to her slowly, patiently. “We’re both okay, I promise.”

For a second, she just shook and I just held her, stroking Cat’s back and letting her let go of her fear. It took about the time of two massive thudding sounds outside before she took a deep breath, held it, and stopped quivering.

“I’m okay,” she said. “I just... he threw me down here and I didn’t know what was happening. Devin, he said he was going after you because of some...”

She started breathing heavily again.

Standing, I pulled her up too. “Are you hurt?” I said softly.

“No, no, he didn’t hurt me except the throwing me down the stairs thing,” she half-laughed and half-sniffed. “I’m sorry I didn’t call, I couldn’t find my phone.”

I smiled, glad that the darkness hid my nervous laughter. “It’s fine, Cat, really. There’s nothing you could have done. It’s...” I sighed. “A long story. But yeah, don’t worry about that. You’re not hurt?”

“No, I don’t think so. He pulled off the gag and pushed me. Just my wrist kind of hurts, and,” she paused as something hit the wall right above us
hard
. “Uh, what was that?”

“Come on over this way,” I said, urging her nearer the stairs. I didn’t want to be anywhere underneath those noises if that floor collapsed. “Let’s...”

A shotgun blast, or near enough, hit the cellar door. The whole room around us seemed to shake with the impact. My ears rang, and rang. I fell to my knees, clutching the sides of my head to try and muffle the horrible sound.