The Passion (48 page)

He bent his head over hers and the aroma of her hair and her skul fil ed his nostrils. Thickly human, redolent of smoke and snow and earth and bearskin and a thousand other scents now gone stale, tip chronicle of their journey together. He smel ed himself on her, and it seemed a natural mixture, her scent and his, a comforting one. He pushed her tangled hair away from her face; with his fingertips he smoothed the tears from the corners of her eyes.

Eventual y her shuddering sobs lessened, and stopped altogether, and she lay quiescent in his arms, her warm breath light upon his skin and interrupted only by the occasional hitch; her hands, which had once been closed into tight fearful fists, now open and relaxed upon his chest. There was a feeling of power in this, the frightened girl who now lay comforted in his arms, and also a great unexpected pleasure.

He understood, for the very first time, what it was that had drawn his brother—and others like him—to human companions. The knowledge came to him so subtly, so natural y, that there was no shock in it, and he did not recoil from it as perhaps he should have done. It was the feel of skin like your own, warm in the cold, a face that could smile like yours, eyes that could weep like yours, the sound of a voice like yours in the darkness. That was al . It was the feel of this smal helpless creature nestled in his arms, quiet now and trusting. He made her safe.

She made him strong.

That was what he felt as he held her, drinking in her warmth, listening to her heartbeat: a surcease to the loneliness, a pause in the battle. A moment's contentment… and more. A subtle curiosity, a tingling thread of promise that caused him to move his fingers to her throat, stroking gently there until she lifted her eyes to his, deep dark eyes that held no fear, only waiting, only question. Her breathing quickened and her heartbeat changed rhythm as he looked at her, and he remembered the day in the orchard, how he had touched her and how she had melted with his touch, been captured in his thral .

That he had done deliberately, because he knew his own power and because he could. But now as he bent his face close to hers and drank in the scent of her skin, tasted her breath in his mouth, other memories came to him unbidden; memories of werewolves who played the sex games with humans, who took them like lovers, and he thought,
I could do that for her. I could show her such
pleasure she would forget the pain those humans
caused her. Tessa, sweet broken human, I could do
that for you
…

He spread his fingers along the side of her face, stroking the corner of her eye, the fragile fluttering feathers of her eyelash. Her scent was drugging, her heartbeat thickened his blood. He moved his face closer to her and closer, drinking her in by inches, by mil imeters, until his mouth was a whisper from hers and her breath flowed between his parted lips. He tasted her with his tongue, her salt, her sweetness, and the taste of her made his heart pound, pound so hard that it shook the breath in his lungs, pound with dread and anticipation and a dark forbidden need. Her eyes held him like the gaze of a mother holding a cub and he was just as helpless in it, just as commanded by it. She spread her fingers then lightly over his shoulder, caressing his throat, and the gentleness of her touch, the shy sweet tenderness of it, brought a thril of pleasure to his skin that spread with slow delicious warmth to the base of his spine, to the center of his soul.

And it was that, his own wil ing response to her touch, that shocked him at last out of his self-induced thral , that fil ed him with horror and helplessness and the dawning truth of something changing that could not be recal ed. He pushed her away roughly, so that she fel back, gasping, on the ground, and he got to his feet. He stood over her for a moment, fists clenched, breath tight and control ed. Then he strode away from the fire, out of the cave, into the darkness.

Late in the night he returned to her in wolf form and slept beside her to keep her warm. In the morning they left the cave; he leading, Tessa fol owing the footprints in the snow.

Chapter Twenty-nine

And so it was for days. He did not resume his human form, and sometimes he didn't come to her at al . He moved north and west, fol owing a scent he could not define, outrunning the storms.

Instinctively he sought shelters in the rock and, when he smel ed the smoke, knew she had found them, too. And it was instinct that compel ed him to leave a portion of his kil near the shelter each night.

But the kil s were smal er and harder to share.

Skinny hares, an arctic fox, sometimes rodents unearthed from the frozen ground… yet he pressed on, burning fuel he could il afford in wolf form, refusing to return to his human form.

And then came the day when he could no longer outrun the storm.

The snow blew and piled up high, caking in his fur and stinging his ears. His paws sank deep into drifts and he climbed higher, seeking purchase on slick rocks, searching for the scent of some unwary game which had been caught in the open when the blanket of snow moved in. Automatical y his body had increased its production of heat to ward off the knife blades of wind, and he could survive the cold.

But his hunger was a fierce demand he could no longer ignore.

And then he became aware of something that caused him to forget even his hunger. It was the lack of something, something so familiar that it had become almost second nature, something whose absence was so disorienting that he could not even determine what was wrong for a long time. And then he knew.

The human. Her scent was gone.

He turned ful circle, testing the wind slowly. He scrambled to a higher precipice and peered through the blowing snow, but al he saw were shapes in white, twilight sky, curtains of snow. An anxiety built within him that he could not entirely understand. He lifted his head and howled.

Nothing replied except the wind.

He descended the precipice, sliding on the icy surface, and began to retrace his own tracks in the snow.

A strange kind of desperation seized him after an hour or so of tracking, a coldness deep in his bel y that had nothing to do with hunger. The snow was blowing so hard that his own tracks were mere icy indentations beneath a half a foot of snow, but his nose had no trouble picking up the scent of them—

and no other. Always before, her footsteps had been close behind, her scent close enough to mix with his. How long had it been since he had last noticed her? Had it been a day, or only a few hours?

With his eyes, his ears, his nose he tried to reconstruct a sequence of events since the onset of the worst of the storm. There was nothing. The weight of failure lodged in his throat like a lump of ice. Failure to his pack, failure to the future, now failure to her.

Darkness came, and with it a cold so fierce that there were times when he had to stop and plant his feet, head lowered to the ground, to keep from being swept away by the wind. His progress was slow and as the hours passed, the journey almost became an end unto itself, while any real hope of finding anything at its end receded into a distant memory.

And then he caught a familiar scent. He tracked it along the ground beneath the layers of snow and ice until the concentration of scent was at its strongest. He began to dig, flinging back sprays of snow until he unearthed the object with its warm memories of meat and fire. The charred cooking stick.

His heart was fast, his senses keen. He tracked in ever-widening circles, his nose to the ground, until the particles of her scent coalesced into the shape of a whole, and he started to dig again.

Her body beneath the snow was as cold as earth, her heartbeat faint and slow, so slow. The heat of her breath had formed a smal pocket near her mouth where snow had not col ected, and the bearskin had protected her face and head.

Exhausted and nearly frozen, her frail human body had simply col apsed into the snow and refused to rise again.

He uncovered her face and cleared a tunnel for her breath, then turned and surveyed his surroundings.

Spotting a snowbank that had drifted against a rock, he began burrowing into it. He used the heat of his body to flatten the wal s and his claws to widen them, repeating the process over and over until the.

cave was wide enough for two, and strong enough to support the weight of the snow that had piled up on top of it. Al the while he listened for her heartbeat, tensing against the smel of the frozen death that was creeping upon her with every minute that passed.

By the time he had freed her body from the snow and dragged her inside the cave, his muscles were trembling with exhaustion and great shivers shook him and he struggled to maintain his body temperature. With the last of his strength he pul ed away the frozen layers of her outer clothing and stretched out on top of her, warming her, guarding her throughout the night.

In the morning she was stil alive. The snow had fal en to obscure the entrance to the cave and he had to dig his way out. He dug open a rabbit burrow and consumed the three skinny, stringy creatures inside without stopping for breath, and he began to prowl. The snow was stil fal ing, but the prey was as hungry as the predators, and more than one creature was moving about. He found enough to save himself from starvation and returned to the ice cave, where he once again stretched himself over her to keep her warm.

And so it was, day after day. He hunted to keep himself alive, and he returned to keep her alive. She shivered and moaned in her sleep, and he licked her cold face and lips and fingertips until the danger of frostbite was gone. Sometimes she mumbled words to him, but he, in wolf form, didn't care what they were. And over those days he gradual y came to realize a truth that surprised him: this fragile human would never survive the winter in this place, and that distressed him. It distressed him very much. He had considered many ways in which they both might die since coming here: predators, starvation, thirst, fal ing trees, cracking ice, earth that gave way on a mountaintop, disease, injury—

but simple cold had never been one of them. She was going to freeze to death, if not now, then inevitably. He had simply not considered it before.

When the snow stopped he went in search of fuel.

It took hours, digging beneath the snow for broken branches, dragging them back to the cave to dry, hunting enough to keep himself going, searching for branches again. He dug up some ground rodents and snapped their necks, then carried them back to the cave. While stil in wolf form he plucked out tufts of his own fur to use as kindling for the fire. And then, with a greater exertion of energy than he would have thought he possessed and against every instinct in his body, he transformed himself into human shape.

He built the fire with the matches she had guarded so zealously, and roasted meat in the coals. The warmth of the fire softened the wal s of the snow cave, but the cold froze them again immediately, harder and stronger than before. He captured some of the dripping water in the stone bowl from her pack and made her drink it, and when she would sink again into her cold dark dreams, he forced smal pieces of cooked meat between her lips. She couldn't swal ow, so he chewed the meat himself and transferred it from his mouth to hers, muttering,

"Eat, you stupid human; do you want to die in this wretched place?"

The hours turned into days. He hunted for fuel and whatever smal game he could find, he tended the fire, he forced water and chewed food into her mouth, and sometimes she gagged on it and sometimes she swal owed. Occasional y she would open her eyes and make the effort to mutter a few words to him through broken lips. Once he understood her to say Alexander's name, and his heart clenched with an odd bitter hurt. Another time she opened her eyes and whispered to him, "It's not your fault, you know. It's not your fault I couldn't keep up."

It made him angry to hear her say that, and it also made him want to weep. He left the cave abruptly to hunt, and he never knew when he returned whether she would have taken her last breath in his absence.

His days, his nights, his thoughts and his instincts were consumed with her. He hated himself for it, yet he couldn't help it. There was no logic to it. She was a drain on his energy and his resources. She was only a human and he had dedicated his life to the belief that the world would be a better place if al humans were dead. This he knew. This he told himself over and over again, but no power on earth could keep him from returning to her. She was only a human, but she was
his
human, and he cared what became of her.

Yet he was frightened by the fact that nothing he could do would restore her failing strength, and was infuriated by his impotence. "Fight, you weakling girl," he told her angrily. He lifted her head and made her drink a tea infused from a strong smel ing bark that he knew had restorative powers. She coughed and tried to swal ow, but most of it spil ed onto her neck and her gown. "You didn't give up in a cage on a ship with a high fever, and you didn't give up in the human lodge where they tortured you.

Why do you turn your back on the battle now?"

She looked up at him, her eyes big with pain and confusion. "Leave me, please," she whispered. "Let me die. It wil be less cruel in the end."

His hand clenched convulsively and he turned away from her, setting the bowl of tea aside. "I shal never leave you, little human," he said roughly, and once the words were spoken he knew them to be true.