Reluctant Mates - 21 Paranormal Romance Stories (Werewolf, Vampire, Minotaur and Monster collection) (43 page)

A hand slides up underneath me and pushes me off my stomach onto my back. Clamping my eyes shut, I desperately try to calm myself down and maintain a regular, slow, boring heart beat like I’m just knocked out.

“Well, well, in’t this just a funny little thing? Go on, get outta here boy. Go now, don’t wait. We need’a get her back before someone else wanders along. Go on!”

“But Pa, what’s the big deal? Why’s she so important? Ain’t she just...”

“Enough boy, go on. World’s bigger than you know. You got a lot to learn.”

“Awright, awright, I’ll be back.”

Taking a nose full of the man who hovers a few inches from my face, I smell peat and leather and smoke.

“Well I’ll be Goddamned. Here I thought you was just a story made up by that crazy queen. I know you’re awake, by the way. I understand you not wanting to be found out though.”

I crinkle my forehead involuntarily.

I gulp when I realize what I’ve done and then figure I may as well open my eyes and see who – or what – is having a sniff of me. Just to be sure I’m not about to fall through another portal to whatever, I make sure to grab a big handful of dirt before I do it and am happy to find a nice, thick root among the earth. As silly as it might be, it feels like a mental anchor.

“Who are you?” My eyes open slowly, afraid of the sun being too bright and giving me another headache, especially after a dream as vivid as the one I’ve just had.
That was no dream, Jaz, no dream.

Thankfully it is dark. I’ve been gone awhile.

“Milton Burl, just like the actor but spelled different,” he says. He’s leather-faced, with hard lines and a shaggy, curly beard. His shirtless chest looks like it’s made of brown, lined, solid wood. “My Ma had a bit of a fix on him before she fell inta here. I’m a halfer, like you. Well not exactly, but...Never understood it myself, if I’m honest.”

He studies my face with the same closeness I do when I look at tree samples back in lab at school. I know the look he has. It’s a bemused sort of curiosity. Milton stoops his neck to me again and takes another sniff.

“I’d know that smell anywhere. You met Sebastien, then?”

“Uh...I-” I have no idea how to respond. I’m so lost, so confused, and I just know I’m about to have a real monster-whopper of a headache. Squeezing my eyes closed for a second, I tell myself that when I open them back, I’ll be in Baton Rouge, waking up in my bed. I don’t really believe it, but it’s a nice idea.

“Wait, you met
her
too? You’ve got the dust.” One of his hands runs tantalizingly along my collar bone, underneath the torn-up neck of the sweat shirt I’m wearing and he holds it in front of my face and rubs thumb to forefinger. A curious, lilac-scented dust falls from his fingers. “She’s still here? I thought for sure she’d packed off by now. Guess the deal’s still on...”

Nearby, or at least near enough for me to hear, a leaf breaks under a toe. Just one, someone is being very careful. Then a moment later another one cracks, splitting right down the middle. I don’t want to look around and give away that I heard anything.

“She really is still here. I thought she was long gone and long dead. Still smells like lilac, too. Good to know she hasn’t changed her tastes.”

“Wh – what are you talking about?” I manage to say, summoning every ounce of will in my body to keep from looking behind me at whatever is creeping up from deeper in the forest.

Milton leans close to me and inhales deeply right behind my ear.

“Oh, you been...” he groans. “You ain’t just met Sebastien. This puts me in a real fix.”

“I’ve been what? Stop talking in half sentences.” I surprise myself with the urgency in my voice. And then I surprise myself by twisting away from him and to my feet in one quick motion and lifting my knee hard into his chin.

“Ah!” The leather-faced old man cries when his teeth clack together. I crouch low and steady myself.
Do I go at him or away? Knock him down or run?

Blood, just a trickle, runs down Milton’s lip and he smiles a grim, awful sort of smile. He bares teeth that I expect to be yellow, but turn out to be pure, glistening white. And then, even as I watch, he assumes an exaggerated crouch, his teeth elongate. He lets out a savage, gasping, moan.

“You...gonna...run...you...better...star-” his voice turns from words into a snarl before he can finish his warning. He sounds amused, like he’s looking forward to a little chase.

Don’t think Jaz, just go. Go, go, go, run to the sound you heard in the forest. It might be nothing, but it might also be the only way out you’ve got. Go!

I turn, and kick backwards. I hit something solid, and hear a pained sound as I will one foot to go, then the other. The gooey mud is so thick that at first my foot sinks a half-inch as soon as it hits the ground, and when I pull it free, there’s a gulping, sucking sound. The next time my foot hits earth, I make sure to put my toes down first.

Run, Jaz, just run. Don’t look back.

One after another.

Plop
.

Slurp
. The mud sucks at my foot, but I pull it free.

I dodge around a hanging vine, and see a puddle that is surely quicksand a moment before I hit it. Lunging, I barely clear the stuff and stumble. My knee hits the ground, my head hits a tree root, but somehow I manage to roll myself out of it and back to my feet. I can’t help but look back, just for a second.

“What the hell?”

There’s nothing behind me.

No rust-colored, shaggy beast-Milton that chased me.
Or that you imagined
.
No! Don’t think like that, this isn’t imagination, Jaz; don’t let yourself fall into that trap. You know what you’re seeing, you know where you are. Stay sharp. Stay alive.

I look left, then right, scanning the tree-line in front of me, then turning back and doing the same behind.

Nothing.

Not a trace, not a sound. Just a swamp.

I stare at the puddle I just jumped, hoping to see a ripple. It’s absolutely still. In fact, the whole place seems to have stopped in time, leaves aren’t moving. The moss hanging from the trees doesn’t have even the slightest little sway.

Still.

Too still, I know. I’ve been in swamps and bayous and marshes all my life and never seen one this devoid of movement. There’s always a bug, or a gator or a snake wriggling around just outside of vision’s grasp. The swamp isn’t ever still. Not for this long anyway.

Holding my breath, my eyes fall on a place in the tree-line fifty yards ahead of me.

“Are those eyes?” I say to no one in particular, and squint at the tiny, yellow dots. “Hello? Is someone there?”

The thought occurs to me that this could be some sort of trick, but I can’t tear myself away from the two – no, four – little dots. When my eyes focus on them, they seem to dart off to the sides of my vision. It seems almost like a little game they’re playing, although they always move together.

“What are you?” I ask, moving forward, nearer the tree-line.

Suddenly, a pair of them explodes in cascade of lights that stick to, and then drip down, the front of a bush. It’s the same color, I realize, as the unearthly crack that sucked me out of the swamp and deposited me in front of that strange dragonfly woman.

Something dances right outside my consciousness that I try to grab at – something about a child? I don’t know. As soon as I think it, I lose it. There and then gone, over and over, my mind continually refuses to focus on anything. “There you go again, Jaz,” I sigh, “worrying about things that you can’t control. Calm down and figure out where you are. Or better yet, figure out some way to contact Sebastien. He’ll know what to do.”

I’ve forgotten completely about the sound I heard back there when Milton was menacing me until I hear it again. Ten yards, maybe twenty inside the brush, a leaf breaks cleanly in two. It doesn’t occur to me to try and figure out how I know something so specific about a leaf crackling.

At almost the exact same instant that I sit down, I remember strange old Milton sniffing behind my ear and touch myself there.

“Oh boy, what are you going to do? Psychically contact a werewolf? What the hell have you got yourself into now?” I shake my head, sit down on a moss-covered rock, and feel a little tingle on the place behind my ear. My fingertip feels a little warm. I tap once, then again, like I’m clicking the button on a walkie-talkie. 

The crunching leaf seems nearer this time. A scratch on a tree sends me to my feet, well aware that something is close –
very
close. Something I can’t see, although that doesn’t mean much, I’ve come to realize. My eyes shoot back and forth.

Nothing again. You’re imagining things, Jaz. You’re going crazy.

“Not crazy,” I grit my teeth. “I know I’m not crazy. This stuff is
happening
to me and I know it is. It’s all implausible as hell but it’s real. And something is...”

“Above you. For someone who isn’t crazy, you sure do spend a lot of time talking to yourself.”

My eyes follow the sound straight up the tree trunk and into the branches. At first, all I see is a tangle of leaves and moss.

“Milton? Is that you? Or...?”

“Left,” it says.

I move my eyes, but not my head.

Behind me, something hits the ground. I feel teeth – big, sharp, hard and cold – on the back of my leg. Putting my hand there, I feel for blood or torn flesh or something, but all I find with my grasping fingertips is a muzzle. Gasping, and turning, a strange tail dangles in front of my face.

“You have got to be kidding.”

My eyes follow the tail up into the trees and I have to blink a few times before I believe what I’m seeing. Even afterwards, it’s difficult to grasp.

“Some of us can climb, you know.”

His rust-colored fur covers his entire body and the great, shaggy beard he wears as a man has become a mane around his thick, muscled neck. He glares down at me with a look that I hate to say is quizzical, but, well, it’s quizzical.

“Are you a...lion?”

Yank it. Whatever it is, pull it – him – down, kick it in the face and run. Don’t be stupid, Jaz, get over this idiot curiosity
.

“And some of us can talk after we’ve turned into...other things. We’re not all wild savages like Sebastien and his pups.” He responds, pointedly ignoring my question, and then melds back into the shadows.

There’s a soft puffing sound like breath trying to kindle a fire. Slow, patient, and warm, it crawls across my skin from out of the darkness.

“It’s you, isn’t it? Milton? St – stop, you’re scaring me.”

“Oh, I’m sorry, miss Jasmine, that’s not what I mean to do at all. No, not at all.” He lets out a curling purr at the end of his sentence. Then it strikes me – he said my name.

“How do you know who I am?”

The great cat stares at me for a moment as though he’s studying my reaction. Without answering, he closes his eyes and rolls backwards off the branch upon which he is laying, lands on the ground.

When he lands, he’s not a cat anymore, but a large lizard for a moment, then returns to his sleek, savagely beautiful feline form. My mouth falls open.

“What? Why is it for you so hard to believe there’s a whole world you never knew about in my swamps? You’ll believe werewolves, but not me? Well then,” he chuckled softly, his voice full of menace that becomes apparent as he creeps closer, his fur standing on end before he vanishes in a cloud of smoke. “I suppose I’m not real. There’s a relief, hmm? Good thing I’m not right behind you, about to pull you down here, isn’t it?”

“What happened to your accent?” As stupid as it is, my habit of fixating on something silly hits me full in the chest. When he was a man, he had the strongest, thickest deep-swamp tone I’d ever heard, but as this strange beast, he sounded like a Connecticut blue-blood.

“Funny, that.” He whispers right behind me. “Of all the things I can explain, that’s not one of them. Each of my forms seems to have a voice all its own. This is my favorite though. Don’t you think it’s wonderful? Aren’t you already just melting from the inside? Wanting me to touch you? Or would you rather wait for Whiskey to come back with his big brother? That’s the sort you are, isn’t it? Gave yourself to a pack of mongrel werewolves, now you’re happy to have us.”

“N – no,” I stammer. “I don’t want any part of you. Stay away. Stay away from me, or-”

“Or what?” Just a hint of his old voice bleeds through, menacing me with its slow, velvet drawl. “Or what, miss Jasmine? Are you going to send a wolf on me?” A cruel, rattling laugh wracks the creature and I want nothing more than to run. I think about being safe in Sebastien’s arms only a short time before, and wish to be back with him. At least with him I
feel
safe, even if that’s an illusion. This beast makes my skin crawl, although somewhere behind that is a little bit of guilty warmth.

He slowly stalks around me in a circle and rubs against the back of my leg. Just like the first time Remy or Sebastien or Leroux touched me, a chill crawls up my back and thrills my neck. This time though, the hairs on the back of my head prickle up. It’s either a sign of worry over danger, or a sign that I’m far more excited than I should be. Filling my lungs, I try to calm my breathing and my heartbeat.

“What are you doing, Milton? I – you’re scaring me.” For some reason using his name seemed to make him more human and less a monster. Kind of a Rumplestiltskin thing, say the name and the creature disappears, right? Well, not this time. Searching my mind for something to do, all I could come up with was either running or fighting.

Running, well, seems like a good idea except that this creature, whatever he is, is able to move so quickly I can’t see him, or just bounce around from place to place. Either way, running around lost in the forest is, I know, not going to do much good.

Fighting doesn’t make sense at all. If I can’t run from him, why would I be able to strike him?

With nothing else to do and no other plan apparent, I feel a tear run down my cheek and imagine myself in the maw of this terrible creature, his awful teeth ripping, his huge claws tearing. All I can think to do is beg Sebastien for help. Maybe if I cry loud enough, call out to him with every shred of my energy, he’ll hear me through the ethers or however it is that he hears and talks to me.