Marked Clan #2 - Red (6 page)

She kept both hands up. I couldn’t be sure in the waning light, but I thought I saw a tear running down her cheek. “Lupin brought us back. He didn’t explain it to me, just said an old friend needed a talking to.”

She froze, and then whipped around to face the woods. A man stepped out, silent as a ghost. I brought my gun up and took aim. He had covered his face with a ski mask. “This a friend of yours, Dree? Come to finish me off after you softened me up?”

“I’ve never seen him before in my life. Goddamnit, PJ, why don’t you trust me?”

A cold blade bit into my neck and I lowered the gun. I’d been so preoccupied with Dree and the mystery man, his partner had snuck up on me.
Why did you have to come back?

“How about we have a quick little chat,” the man behind me said. “
Sans
weaponry, eh?”

I dropped the gun, and he pulled my bag off my shoulder. Dree divided her gaze between the two men, but didn’t move.

“We underestimated your spirit the first time. Won’t happen again. I have a message for you. Stop your little hunting trips, or we start hunting you. Got it?”

I was pretty sure I could land a crotch shot from the way he was standing. Of course, he might just slit my throat on the way down. There was that to consider.

“Loud and clear,” I said. “Now any chance you could ease up on that metal against my neck? Stainless steel doesn’t do much for my complexion.”

He didn’t ease up. Instead, he jerked me to one side and spoke to Dree. “Got one for you too. You tell your Alpha he ain’t got no friends left here. He’d best just move along. Let us handle ours.”

Dree took a step back toward the woods and lowered her hands. “Why not tell him yourself?”

A massive black wolf bolted out of the woods. It moved like a demon, shadow made flesh with teeth that flashed and went for my throat.
This is it,
I thought,
one good snap and I’m dead, blood or no.
Before I had time to finish the thought, I was on the ground. So was the man who had held the knife. I checked my throat, but somehow the wolf had batted the knife and me out of the way in the space of a second. I’d never seen one that moved so fast.

It sat on top of him now, its teeth clamped down on the man’s throat hard enough to draw blood. It could have killed him easily. Why did it hold back? I heard shuffling feet as the other man turned to run, but another wolf came up behind him. This one was slate gray and slightly smaller, but only just.

“How did you find us?” Dree asked.

The one with the wolf at his throat answered first. I can’t say I blamed him. “Her scent. It’s strong once you find it. We tracked her here.”

“He’ll gut you for that!” the other one screamed. “You’ll be the next meal. Best shut your mouth!”

The one who had the knife laughed, and fur sprouted from his skin. His face pushed out under the mask. He shook it off his expanding muzzle. His pants ripped and he kicked them off. The larger wolf held him down. I heard a sound and looked back. His friend had changed as well. He launched himself toward me.

I dove for my bag, but he was faster. His body slammed into mine, and my lungs collapsed in on themselves. I gasped for air and felt for my gun. The slate gray wolf knocked him off me, but not before he sank teeth into my left arm. The motion of him being pulled off me yanked the wounds open further.

My other hand touched cold metal, and I brought my gun up quickly. I didn’t know what to shoot. I saw four wolves wrestling each other, writhing masses of muscle, fur, and teeth. With a snap, the one who’d held the knife to my throat yelped and was silent. Not long after, the second one wriggled free and ran away.

I scrambled to my bag and reached inside for a pen. Maybe while they were distracted I could get the big one. They’d called him Dree’s Alpha, which meant he was the one I needed to kill.

I made it a couple of feet before my vision swam. I wasn’t bleeding
that
bad, was I? I looked down at the bite wound. My arm was slick with blood. Okay, maybe I was. The sky picked that exact moment to open up and drench us all. The last thing I remembered before I blacked out was a mouth full of damp grass.

Chapter Ten

I dreamed of panicked voices and thunderstorms. I couldn’t decide if I was walking or flying. I moved, but my legs didn’t. I felt soft, warm flesh against my face. It was a nice change against the chill of the rain.

“She needs a hospital!” Dree said.

“I will take her,” said another woman. She was very close.

“The nearest one is about two miles, that way,” Dree said. “Should I get the car?”

“I will run,” the woman said. I dreamed we were flying fast. Wet leaves and wind whipped around us. I saw a face above me.

“Mom? I don’t feel good. I don’t want to go to school today.”

When I woke up, I was back in my apartment. Connor sat beside me on the bed. He’d fallen asleep in his reading glasses. They looked so tiny on his face. He never wore them in public; he was afraid it would hurt his image of the rough-and-tumble Scotsman. I tried to sit up and screamed in pain. My arm felt like it was tearing itself apart.

Connor jumped awake and put his glasses on my nightstand. “Damn, Bon. You sure know how to wake a guy up. Don’t move too much—you’ll pull your stitches.”

“What happened?” I asked.

He got up and stretched. I saw a piece of cotton stuck to his arm with medical tape. “I was hoping you’d tell me, Margaret Jane. You look like you’ve been wrestling timber wolves.”

Pretty close, actually.
“Did I lose a lot of blood?”

He looked down at his arm. “Aye. You’re goddamned lucky the traffic was light. They didn’t have a lot of plasma handy. You’re the second trauma victim they had in the span of a couple of hours.”

“Thank you, Connor.”

He sat back down and reached his arm over my shoulders. I leaned into him like I used to when I was little, and he stroked my hair. “Sweet Jesus, Bon. What will I do with you? If Glenna had told me the trouble you’d be later on, I’d have sent you off to a boarding school in the Old Country.”

I laughed. “Poppa would have liked that.”

“Aye, he would have. See his bonny wee lass off running along the moors. It’s a shame his mind had to go in the end. Hell of a way to die.”

I wanted to correct Connor—Poppa had died every bit as lucid as the day he was born—but this was his dad he was talking about. I certainly got touchy when I thought about Mom. He had just saved my life, too. I let him think what he would.

“Are you going to tell me what happened?” he asked.

“You wouldn’t believe me if I did,” I said.

“You’re probably right. Can you at least promise me one thing?”

I sat up and nodded. He pinched the bridge of his nose and rubbed. “Can you please, for the love of Jesus and Mary, stay in bed for the next few days and let that arm heal up? No adventures, no detective work?”

Okay, this sweet little niece thing had gone far enough. “I may be short, but I’m not six anymore Connor. You can’t just fold me over your lap whenever you don’t like what I’m doing.”

His jaw tensed, but he kept calm. He grabbed his glasses and slowly, deliberately folded them so he could tuck them in his shirt pocket. “Fair enough, Bon. Next time you need blood, you just call ahead first and make sure the hospital has enough.”

“That’s not fair,” I said.

He walked slowly out my bedroom door, through my kitchen, and calmly slammed my door hard enough to rattle the frame. Those anger management classes he’d been taking were doing wonders.

My left arm was bandaged up thick enough that I probably could have taken a baseball bat to the wrist and felt nothing. Speaking of, there was a lovely little bottle of prescription painkillers waiting for me on the nightstand. With a couple of those and some caffeine I’d be good to go.

I found that with enough small movements, I could get out of my bed and make some coffee without tearing anything. Thank God he’d ripped into my
left
arm, the son of a bitch. I snickered at my own inadvertent joke.

“Yeah, I guess he really was.”

In all fairness, with a mouthful of my blood he probably hadn’t got far. I took some solace in that. That image made me think of the pens and my gun. I had a moment of sheer panic that they were still laying in a pile behind that piece-of-shit apartment. I scanned my bedroom and saw a clear plastic hospital bag sitting on the floor. It had bloody clothes in it. I bent down too fast and felt a jolt of pain, but I had to know. I dumped its contents onto the floor and breathed a sigh of relief when my bag fell with a heavy
THUNK.
It must have been pretty crazy in there for them to not notice my gun. Then again, Connor could have spirited it away before anyone had the chance.

How had I made it to the hospital in the first place? I remembered fragments—a woman who looked weirdly familiar, rain, and cold pavement. My arm screamed for my attention and got it. My phone rang just as I downed a couple of pills.

“Hello?”

“Oh thank God,” Dree said. “How are you PJ?”

“I’m okay, no thanks to your puppy pals. You lied to me, Dree.”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“Don’t play innocent. You said you were alone, and then out of the blue your pack jumps in to save the day. Next, you’re going to tell me the guy with the knife and his buddy with the hungry jaws weren’t part of your team.”

She was quiet for a long time. “When did you start to hate me, PJ?”

It was my turn to be quiet. I hadn’t really thought about that. I did resent Dree for leaving me so suddenly, with not so much as a phone call for five years. I’d have assumed she was dead long before if Poppa hadn’t explained things to me—the meaning of her tattoo, the curse.

I answered her honestly, “I don’t know, Dree.”

She sighed. “Lupin finally told me why we came back. PJ, I know what you’ve been doing. Your…hunting. It’s got the attention of some of the other packs.”

“How many are there?” I asked.

“I didn’t even know there were more like us until recently. Lupin doesn’t like to talk about it much.”

“A real stand-up guy, this Lupin. You should let me take care of him for you. His bitch too. I assume she is a woman. The gray one?”

“Slate,” she said.

“Whatever. You haven’t answered my question. How many packs are there? How big are they?”

“I-I don’t know,” she said. She sounded tired. “We’re only three, but the one Lupin is trying to find…he acts like it’s pretty big. He’s being very careful.”

A polite knock on the door interrupted us. I put the phone down and walked over to it ready to rip Connor a few new orifices. Instead I saw Justin. He wore scrubs and carried a backpack in one hand…and roses in the other.

“Oh fuck,” I said.
Last person I expected right this second.

“Maybe we should get that arm of yours looked at first?” he said, and then gave me a naughty smile. “But technically you could call this our second date, so whatever happens after is fair game.”

Chapter Eleven

“Hell, Justin, I must look like warmed over shit. You couldn’t have called first?”

I let him in, and put the roses in some water while he set up on my bed. I had to dig through my cabinets to find a proper vase. I don’t get flowers much. The kind of guys I’d dated in the past would just as soon show up with a bottle of vodka, a live chicken, and peach preserves.

“They’re beautiful,” I said. I walked in and sat on the bed, watching him unpack the contents of his bag. He was still wearing his ID badge from the hospital:
Justin Frasier, M.D. - Internal Medicine.

“You’re a good liar,” he said. “I’m not sure if that’s a good thing or not. I had to grab them from the gift shop downstairs on my way over. I hope the sentiment is worth something.”

“Of course,” I said. I was suddenly very aware of how un-made-up I was. “Can you excuse me a minute?”

I went into the bathroom and shut the door. After a few seconds of thought, I locked it too. I looked at myself in the mirror and frowned.
Well, PJ, you’ve honestly looked worse.
My hair was a mess and still had a bit of caked mud in it in spots. My eyes were puffy, and I was wearing faded green pajama pants and an old T-shirt with a hole right around my nipple. Of course, I wasn’t wearing any underwear.

My closet was out there, locked away from me, and I didn’t have time for a proper hair washing. Fuck. I did the best I could and crossed my arms over my chest. That just made me look angry, and he couldn’t get to my bandages. I sighed and gave up. Hell, I’d practically thrown myself at him on our first date, so what if he saw some nipple?

He waited patiently at the foot of my bed as I came out, looking all doctorly with his rubber gloves on. I leaned against my headboard and crossed my legs in as ladylike a fashion as I could muster. “Okay, Doc. Do your worst.”

He laughed and scooted up closer to me. I gave him my arm, and he carefully pulled the bandage off. I had one large tear that was crisscrossed with stitches and had a few punctures. The skin around the wounds was bruised, but didn’t look infected. One of the nice things about wolf attacks was they didn’t carry any diseases.

He swabbed each of the wounds with a slightly yellow solution. I’d seen plenty of that downstairs. “Betadine?” I asked.

Justin nodded. “You can also use distilled water and a small amount of soap, but make sure you clean these twice a day. You probably want to keep your arm propped up for a few days to keep the swelling down, too.”

“Do I need to wrap it when I shower?” I asked.

He shook his head. “These aren’t dissolving stitches—you should be fine. Just give it a gentle wash afterward. You’re only a day out though, so I’d recommend you wait another day before you try and shower.”

He covered me back up with a fresh bandage and started putting away his supplies. I put my hand on his and he paused. “Thank you, Justin,” I said.

He smiled. “It’s no problem. I wanted to do it.”

I leaned in and kissed him, and this time he didn’t pull away. I ran my fingers through his hair and pulled him toward me. His lips opened wide and I felt his tongue seeking mine. He pushed me down on the bed and lay across my chest.