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“I hope you
understand,” he went on, still holding and stroking one of her hands. The cold
of his skin began to make hers crawl, even more than the “comforting” caresses.
“You are a wolfkin, Holly, and I had to know what kind. I had to know if you’d
turn.” Those blue eyes honed in on hers. “And what you’d turn into.”

“I don’t know what
you’re talking about.”

The shifter nodded. “I
know. Most wolfkin start out not knowing what they are. It means you carry the
blood to be one of us, Holly. You could be a shifter, if there’s enough wolf in
you. Sometimes there isn’t.”

“That makes no sense. I
mean, I’m not. I’d know that. Why would you even think….?”

“It’s the smell, Holly.
Trust me. I can smell it on you. We all can. The only matter is whether you
have enough that you can actually turn, and then….” Ivan’s serene expression
hardened before Holly’s eyes: his mouth pressed into a severe line, cheeks
sinking even further, gaze sharp and suspicious. “Whether you will be the right
kind of wolf.”

“You make it sound like
there’s more than one.”

“Many, actually, but
only two kinds I’m concerned with. Only two kinds related closely enough that I
can smell them. I’m Fenris-blooded, Holly, and we are rare. Especially females.
We are one of the few kinds that turn the first time from a bite by another of
our breed, and thus, I tracked you down that night by your scent and I bit
you.”

“And I didn’t turn,”
Holly whispered.

“You didn’t turn. So
either you do not have enough of our blood in you or you are the other kind of
wolf.”

“What other kind?”

The shifter’s hold on
Holly’s hand tightened until he was cutting off the circulation to several of
her fingers, until it hurt. “One of his soldiers, an Odin Wolf. Do you know
your Norse mythology, Holly?” She shook her head no without stopping to think
about it. “It doesn’t really matter, not now. You didn’t turn from the bite,
and so….”

“And so?”

“And so I cannot breed
with you.” He didn’t seem to notice, or maybe he just didn’t care, when Holly
leaned back hard at these words, at the thought. Without meaning to, Holly let
the idea cycle briefly through her imagination: the dead feeling of that cold
skin against her, the sour musk stink of him, his ghostly face and sunken
cheeks and haunted eyes staring down from above her as he….

The horrible image
broke when the reality before Holly started to shift and distort with a vision
more distressing, because she was not imagining this one. Ivan’s pale skin
began to darken, as he started to sweat and shake, his eyes rolling back in his
head. Holly bit down a panicked keen behind her closed lips and climbed
backward off the ottoman. She jerked her arm, even putting her feet flat on the
side of the stool for leverage. There was no breaking his hold on her hand. She
was bound tight to the shifter who was going to kill her, every bit as helpless
now as she’d been that first night.

“Stop,” she pleaded,
trying to sound reasonable to a shifting werewolf. Her tone peaked as hair
began to sprout from his neck and cheeks, black and wet and glistening. Holly didn’t
think it was her imagination that the body beneath his baggy clothes was
expanding to fill the space. “Ivan, don’t. You don’t have to hurt me. Ivan.
Ivan!”

Beyond the pounding of
her heart in her chest and her pulse in her ears, the world seemed to recede
and spin, moving too quickly for her. The sound of splintering wood came out of
nowhere just before the front door to her townhouse burst open and hit the
wall. Someone snarled, and she didn’t think it was Ivan. When he growled back
it was a deeper rumble, like it was shaking the whole apartment. Dazed by her
own paralyzing fear, Holly didn’t understand how Dustin had gotten into her
apartment, or why he looked…somehow taller. Was he the other one snarling?

The black-haired
shifter spun toward the door, even as he effortlessly tossed Holly against the
opposite wall, like she was a doll. Her head struck the textured surface with a
dull
thunk
,
and she slumped against the oddly comforting plushness of the carpeting while
listening to male voices she couldn’t quite make out. Seconds passed. Was it
minutes? If she could just rest….

Holly opened her eyes
as her brained stopped sloshing inside her skull and her daze cleared. At
least, maybe it had. It was harder to tell now that she recognized the man
facing down the black-haired shifter in her living room.

“Dustin?” she muttered
and winced. Talking hurt her head.

At the sound of her
voice, a great black wolf’s head on a hulking man’s body swung around to glare
down at her, and she shrieked. It was him. It really was the werewolf who’d
attacked her.

Dustin snarled. “Don’t
mind the little girl,
blackie
. You need to worry
about me.” The challenge might have urged the dark were to turn back toward her
neighbor, but Ivan was still stalking backward step by step toward Holly.
“Seriously? You have to tell me,
blackie
. Is it true
that the only black wolves are the ones mixed with dog?”

The taunt made Ivan
lunge at Dustin, who met the were with his own guttural cry of rage.

“I’m not seeing this,”
Holly muttered to herself even as she clearly watched Dustin’s skin take on the
same sheen of sweat and, in his case, brownish fur. He grew right before her
blinking eyes, muscles swelling, canine ears and teeth sprouting. “This isn’t
happening.” But it made so much more sense—that Dustin Berg was another shifter
tracking her because of her scent rather than a sexy male human flirting with a
heavy girl. What a world she lived in, what a sad world, where werewolves
tracking possible she-wolves were the more believable option.

More pressing, however,
was the fact that no matter how large Dustin grew as he shifted, Ivan was
bigger, heavier, more powerful. Her gaze raking the room, Holly’s attention
settled on a crystal vase holding pathetically faded and dusty silk flowers.
Because not only did she have trouble committing to pets but couldn’t even
justify fresh roses to herself. Now she scrambled unsteadily and ungracefully
to her feet and grabbed the glass container off her low bookcase. She flung out
the contents of the vase, scattering fake flowers across the room in a forlorn
plastic rain. Behind her, Ivan and Dustin grappled, bodies thumping against the
wall, teeth gnashing. In lieu of fangs of her own, Holly needed something
sharp, and this would have to do.

The vase was surprisingly
easy to smash against the heavy bookcase, leaving a pointy glass shard in
Holly’s hands.
Don’t hold back
, she
cautioned herself before she hurled all her weight at the struggling weres and
sank the thick sliver of crystal deep between Ivan’s shoulder blades. It
pierced him right through his coat and his sweater and all that black fur.
Stumbling backward until she tripped over the sofa, she left the weapon buried
several inches into Ivan’s flesh. He howled in pain and released his hold on
the brown shifter that was Dustin.

The pitch of Ivan’s
agonized yowl mounted as he felt onto his side, bleeding all over the tan
carpeting. Holly sucked in her breath, distressed by the sound at some deep,
instinctive level she couldn’t have explained. Putting her hands over her ears
didn’t block it out. It was like she could hear it from inside her head, from
inside her gut, at a blood and bone level.

“Holly!”

She couldn’t take her
eyes off the black were contorting in misery on her floor.

“Holly!”

Only when Dustin—the
man, not a furry half-wolf—bent over her and jerked her to her feet did she
shake herself out of the stupor induced by the black wolf’s mortal distress.

“We’ve got to get out
of here while he’s down,” Dustin insisted and dragged Holly from her townhouse
while she squirmed and dug in her heels.

CHAPTER
FOUR

Holly, clearly in
shock, fought Dustin all the way to his SUV. He had to use more strength and
force than he’d have liked, more than a human would have had even in his
weakened state, to stuff her into the vehicle through the driver’s side door
and over the center console. With one hand locked around her wrist, he still
managed to shift into reverse and peel out of the parking lot backwards,
spinning right way round only once they were out of the complex and on the
road. From the passenger seat, Holly kept squirming and scratching at the hand
binding her to him. She was whining and huffing but not actually talking, not
really focusing on anything but freeing her wrist.

“Put your seatbelt on,
Holly.”

She ignored him as
completely as if she hadn’t heard him, and maybe she hadn’t. The woman had just
come face to face again with the shifter who had shattered her whole idea of
the world less than a year ago, who’d assaulted her, sunk his teeth into her,
left her bleeding on the freezing asphalt of a dark empty lot. And she’d seen
Dustin half-shift, as well, right after he’d kissed her.

“Put your seatbelt on,”
he told her again, and again she didn’t react to the command.

So Dustin yanked Holly
up against him and, driving blind, took her lips in a sudden, ferocious kiss.
His hot, hungry tongue in her mouth and his sweaty, rough face against hers.
Then, for good measure and because he couldn’t help it, Dustin nipped her lip.
She yelped and reared in the seat, pressing herself back against the door. But
at least her eyes were focused now.

“Put your seatbelt on,
and I’ll let go of your hand.”

From his side of the
vehicle, Dustin had control of the door locks and windows anyway. He didn’t
tell Holly that. It took her a few seconds of processing his offer before she
secured the belt, and she shifted her weight into the seat only as much as
absolutely necessary to snap the metal tab into place. Then he made good on his
word and let her go and watched her from his peripheral vision for the next two
miles as she eyed her door handle.

Only when she sagged in
the seat, the muscles of her arms releasing their tension, did Dustin let
himself relax—and truly weaken. He used the back of his hand to mop the stream
of sweat from his forehead. Now that his pulse had slowed, the moisture chilled
his skin. Then the shivering set in.

He heard Holly ask in a
soft rasp from the passenger side, but sounding much further away than that,
“What’s wrong with you?”

Dustin counted out the
painted dashes on the roadway as they darted past in the glare of the
headlights, in time with the pounding behind his brow, as he debated telling
her. “It happens with the shift, afterward. We get weak—sick—for
awhile
once we turn back.”
If we turn back
, he thought but kept that to himself. “The longer
the shift, and the more complete the transformation, the worse the
aftereffects.”

“You’re just like him.”
Holly’s voice rang out louder, stronger, accusing.

“No, not in a lot of
ways, lupa.”

“What does that mean?
Lupa. Is that another word for a wolfkin?”

“Wolfkin? The varg told
you about that?” Christ, how long had the Fenris-blooded shifter been in there
with Holly, terrorizing her? If Dustin hadn’t been so fucking preoccupied with
his cock, he’d have smelled the bastard sooner. He’d have come for her before
the rogue wolf had filled her head with…. Well, Dustin couldn’t say lies
exactly. “Lupa,” Dustin repeated and sighed and sank lower in his seat, dead
tired. “It’s an endearment.”

“Then don’t say that to
me.” She had set her jaw with that supreme stubbornness of hers. Holly wielded
it like a warrior’s shield. Nothing touched her when she held that up in front
of her.

Too spent to argue with
her, to justify, to explain hours’ worth of shifter history and biology, Dustin
shook his head to himself and punched a half-remembered address into the GPS in
the dashboard. It took Holly a full thirty seconds to swallow down her temper
enough to speak.

“Where are you taking
me?”

“A safe house,” Dustin
said in a wheeze, then cleared his throat. “We’re going to a safe house. I had
my keys in my jacket but not my phone, so I can’t call for help until we get
there.” With smart phones, who memorized telephone numbers these days? After this,
Dustin would. For now, he’d use the address book locked in the desk at the
cabin.

He’d call for help,
warn them that the varg was in the open and hunting again. Help meant his pack
brothers, the same ones he’d walked away from, left bewildered by his distance
and his willingness to separate himself from them for such long periods as
their scout. Of course they’d still come. He was still their brother, not a
deserter, a rogue, a varg, and not half-crazy yet like
blackie
back there.

“Help against what? That
other shifter? He’s hurt and—.”

“And a hell of a lot
more powerful than I am, Holly. He’ll heal that wound in a couple of hours at
most.”

“He’s more powerful
than you?” The awe in her voice played on Dustin’s pride and drew a smile,
despite the fact that even that small reaction felt like an exertion.