Demons Undone: The Sons of Gulielmus Series (96 page)

He’d existed for countless millennium, but hadn’t known yearning until he met Sweetie.

Mark held his hand out to the wolf.

She sniffed it, and retreated farther into her hole.

“Dammit. Come on, wolf, you know me. I saved you once, don’t you remember?”

No response from the wolf.

Sighing, he crouched down, nudged his glasses up his nose, and rested his forearms on his thighs. Her mother had suggested he set a trap for her, but that had seemed inhumane. Contrary to the way Sweetie was behaving at the moment, there was still a woman in there.

The local wolf pack called it “the mania.” It was some awful evolutionary disadvantage that kept the pack’s birth rate up high, but often left single wolves with few options for partners. The long and short of it was Sweetie’s hormones were wrecked. The cure was taking a mate. She didn’t want one. She’d known that meant that over time, she’d lose her woman to her wolf, but she’d claimed it was better than the alternative. She’d rather forget who she was and what she knew than to be forced into a mating.

Well. He was going make her understand that she had one more option.

Him.

After all this, he
hoped
she wanted him. If she didn’t … well, he’d keep her hanging on until she found someone else. This was no way for a woman like her to live. The world needed more women like Sweetie.

He reached into his coat pocket and wrapped his fingers around the jerky he’d brought along. This seemed barbaric to him, teasing her out with scraps of meat like she was a stray dog. But maybe she wouldn’t remember. Once he got her out, he could fix her. Apologize for not doing this sooner. For as much as he’d criticized her for not doing what needed to be done, neither had he. He’d waited for some other man to step up, but maybe it had needed to be him all along.

Mark tossed the meat to the front of the hole. After a moment, she poked her nose out and sniffed it. With a fast snap of her powerful jaw, she snatched it up and scooted back into the shadows before he could grab her.

“For fuck’s sake.” He shook his head. He still had angel reflexes and should have been better than this. He was
smarter
than this, and yet he was letting an animal get the better of him. She was winning because he refused to treat her like what she’d become.

“All right, pup,” he muttered. “You want to act like a wild dog, I’ll play along.”

The yellow-green of Sweetie’s eyes shone like beacons inside her shadowy niche. She’d stopped growling. Whether it was the meat or the sound of his voice, he didn’t know, but she seemed less agitated. He wasn’t, though. Each blink of hers marked off a few seconds of tense silence that eroded his shrinking reserve of patience.

He wanted to take her home
now
, and the kind gentleness of his angel days wasn’t going to serve him well. She’d always told him he was too sweet for his own good. Well, he’d lost some of that sweetness right around the time his best friend decided to disappear into the fucking woods. He felt it was half his fault for not telling her sooner that he wanted her.

He clicked his tongue at her and snapped his fingers. “Come here, girl.”

She blinked again, unmoving.

“You want me to throw kibble at you? Maybe a dead rabbit?”

She lifted her head and made a little
woof
sound.

“Are you kidding me?” If Sweetie-the-woman really was front and center in the brain she shared with the animal, she would have been gagging about now. She didn’t even like gamey meat. Mark needed to find a way to put her back into the driver’s seat in her head.

He clicked his tongue and kept his stare on the wolf. If the wolf was hungry, maybe the woman was, too.

There was one last piece of jerky in his pocket. He extended it to her, and this time didn’t let go. “Aren’t you hungry? You’re so skinny. Are you’re confused. You can’t remember what’s okay to hunt. You don’t want to hurt anything you’re not supposed to, right?”

She blinked.

“Come with me. I’ll get you something good to eat. No rabbit, but maybe a steak.”

That pulled an emphatic bark from the wolf’s throat. She eased forward and grabbed the end of the jerky between her side teeth. She tried to tug it away from him, but he held on.

“Okay, then. Steak. Maybe you’ll let me cook it a little. I’m getting better at it.” He chuckled and slowly extended his hand to touch her paw.

When she didn’t flinch, he stroked her foreleg softly and whispered encouraging words.

She inched out, nose-first, and he grabbed her around the flanks before she could pull away.

She nipped at him, letting the jerky fall, and setting her razor-sharp teeth into the fabric of his coat. Her legs flailed wildly, but he held her tight and pressed his face against the fur of her neck. “It’s all right to fall apart,” he said to the woman in the wolf. “You did it, and now I’m going to put you back together. Take what you need from me.”

The wolf wouldn’t know what that meant, but the woman inside would. That woman had been depriving herself of the soothing energy she’d needed for too long, and he wasn’t even sure she’d take it from him. “Fixing” a wolf wasn’t a temporary thing. Wolves mated for life. If she accepted him, they’d be psychically and intimately tethered for the rest of their lives, and given Mark’s still-intact immortality, that’d be a very long time. He was fine with that—their needs and wants being all wrapped up in each other’s. Knowing everything about each other. Propping each other up. He’d
fallen
for the hope of that—of having her for a wife. It’d be a different kind of heaven than what he’d known.

He rubbed what he could reach of her matted fur and whispered, “You don’t have to understand me. Just let Sweetie out. Let me feed her and get her warm.”

She squirmed ineffectually, but the wolf’s sense of self-preservation won out. The fur-covered, shivering pile of bones in his arms shifted.

Brown pelt gave way to dirty, tan skin. The yellow in her green eyes withdrew rendering them more human and more familiar. Her dark hair fell over her face in tangled clumps that she blew away in a surprised huff as he set her bare feet onto the snowy ground.

“There you are.” He yanked off his coat and wrapped it around her shivering shoulders before picking her up. He cradled her and followed his tracks out of the woods, though he didn’t really need them. He’d followed her so much during the past six months he had nearly every inch of the forest memorized. Mark could still teleport, but holding her felt so good and he wouldn’t give up the hike for anything.

“A-angel?” came her hoarse voice against his chest.

He leapt over a fallen tree, being careful to land softly so as not to jostle the already-nervous Sweetie.

“Yeah, it’s me.”

“What are you doing?”

“I should ask you the same thing. You didn’t have to do this.”

“I didn’t have a choice.”

“We always have choices.” He held her tighter and trudged through the knee-deep snow of the clearing.

“Where are you taking me?”

“Claude’s place. He loaned me his cabin. I’ve been living here since June.” Claude was one of the supernatural delinquents Mark called a friend. Claude and his half-siblings had a fallen angel for a father. They’d been part of his invaluable support group during his transition from angel to … well, whatever he was now. They’d said they’d owed it to him for being epic pains in his angel ass. They’d gotten him into some fantastic brawls in the past three years. It’d been a wonder the big guy upstairs hadn’t kicked him out of the angelic ranks just because of the company Mark kept. Well, that the angel who went by the name of Mark kept. He was known as something else by his maker. Few others knew that name.

“Claude? He’s…”

“He’s fine. Everyone’s fine. Well. Almost.” He cringed, and was thankful she couldn’t see it. “Suffice it to say, you missed a lot since summer.”

“Did y’all get Ross?” Ross was a troublemaker they’d been helping the pack root out before Sweetie left.

“Yeah, we got him. I helped the boys dispose of what was left of him.”

“Oh, good.”

She’d missed the big fight, but then, so had he. He’d been watching
her
. It’d been the only time in his long life he’d refused to come to the aid of people he’d considered to be friends. They didn’t malign him for it, but he felt the guilt all the same. Guilt was an odd thing. He’d never been familiar with it until now.

“You should have just let me stay out there,” she said. “Adjusting … the back and forth, it’s too hard. If my wolf takes over again—”

“I won’t let her.” He bumped the unlatched cabin door with his hip and carried her over the threshold. Shifting her to one arm, he closed the door, locked it, and kicked the rolled rug against the bottom to halt the draft.

He’d left the fire burning in the hearth so the one-room cabin was warm and inviting for Sweetie. Mark set her on the bed pushed into the back corner of the room and pulled the pile of fleece covers up over her. The bed was also for her. As an angel, he hadn’t needed sleep. Now, as whatever he was, he needed a bit, but not on a human schedule. He seemed to require sleep after overly exerting himself. Teleporting too frequently, for instance.

“Angel, I’m f-f-filthy,” she said through clattering teeth.

He sighed, and nudged his glasses up his nose. “You’re really worried about that? Of all things?”

“I-I-I don’t want to get them d-d-dirty,” she said, stroking the soft blankets.

“There are plenty more. I … went shopping.” He’d never admit how much he enjoyed such a thing. He’d kitted out the cabin for her recovery. Everything he’d purchased had been with her comfort in mind. “Get warm. I’ll get you something to eat, and then we can see about getting you a hot bath.”

“Kn-know what happens when you sp-spoil a wild animal?”

“What?”

“They still bi-bi-bite you in the ass.” She stared at him, her green eyes narrowed just over the top of the covers, daring him to disagree.

He didn’t. If he had any intention of letting her back out into the wild, he might have tried to assuage her, just as a matter of course, but she didn’t seem to understand yet that his presence wasn’t because of pity.

“I always suspected you were into kink,” he said drily.

Her eyes widened and what he could see of her olive skin flushed red before her head disappeared beneath the covers.

“Is there running water here?” she asked in a small voice.

“Yes. Hot water, at that. Behind the curtain in the other corner is a tub and sink.” He pointed to the corner of the one-room cabin where the tub was installed. The curtain was new. Claude, being a bachelor at the time of his occupation of the cabin, hadn’t needed privacy and hadn’t bothered closing the space in. Would have been easier for him to tear down the cabin and rebuild a modern one from scratch, probably. “Toilet is in that closet.”

“Okay.”

Mark rubbed what looked like her shoulder and stood. “It’s Christmas,” he said, and tried to weave some sunshine into his voice. That used to be easier for him. “I think a roast chicken would be appropriate, but that may take too long to cook. I’m sure you’re famished.”

She didn’t say anything for a long while, but finally nudged the covers off her face and cast a disbelieving stare on him.

He chuckled. Now that she was warming up a bit, that spunk he loved so much was coming back.

“What?” he asked.

“Even my mama wouldn’t haul my feral ass out of the woods and make me show up for dinner, Christmas or otherwise. What are you up to?” She bolted upright, knocking the covers off her.

The coat he wrapped around her out in the woods lay open at the chest to reveal just enough of her breasts that he had to turn his back to her. Vision foggy, he yanked open the refrigerator door and fumbled for the fruit bin. He’d never been susceptible to temptations of the flesh until he met her. Wolves weren’t hung up on nudity, and he’d had plenty of opportunities in the past couple of years to see every bit of her from the top of her black hair to the soles of her feet, but he’d never looked.

He wouldn’t know what to do with himself if he looked. Angels generally took an antiseptic view of the human form, but Sweetie had been hard to ignore. More so now that he had hormones to go along with his functioning junk.

“Is this a trap?” she asked. “Did Mama put you up to this?”

He heard the pads of her feet hit the floor. “Wait, are you gonna lock me up here and try to force-mate me to some wolf?”

Her blow to his back was weak, but drove her point perfectly well. He closed the refrigerator door and turned to her. “You know me better than that.”

She startled, but held her ground, though her shoulders hunched. She looked up at him with tired eyes, but her fists were balled at her sides.

He pushed his glasses up again. “Sweetie, I would never force you to do anything you didn’t want to do. That’s why I didn’t try to drag you in from the fucking woods six months ago when you ran. Enduring the mania was your choice, and I respected it, even if I didn’t agree with it.” He’d been pretty vociferous about it, in fact. He’d insisted she take a mate—
any
mate—because he didn’t want this to happen to her. There was a point of no return. As much as it would have broken his spirit to know she was with another man, at least she’d be herself. At least he’d still have his friend.

He’d let her go, and she’d taken his joy into the woods right along with her.

“So why would you bring me in now? I’m just going to go right back to the way I was. Your energy’s only gonna keep me at bay for so long, and then you’ll have to put me out.”

That would be true if he’d only intended to give her a sip of what she needed instead of filling her up. If she didn’t refuse him, he’d give her everything she needed. He couldn’t just spring this on her, though. She’d tell him no just to be contrary. She’d berate him for doing what needed to be done.

“I’ll never put you out.” He picked up her shaking right fist and opened it. He put an orange in her palm and closed her fingers around it. “That’s to hold you over, and I’ll make you a sandwich, too. Do you need help peeling it?”