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“Yeah, well, we can’t
all—.” Dustin bit off his attempted boast as a black wolf the size of a prize
bull streaked across the roadway. Instinctively he swerved, running off the
pavement. It was the perfect ambush point, garnering the perfect reaction from
the prey.

Of course the varg knew
that Dustin would have been weakened just then, his mind and reflexes slowed as
he recovered from the partial shift. To avoid that weakness, at least for the
time being, the varg had gone full shift. Then the Fenris-son had run after the
SUV, obviously, able not only to top sixty miles an hour but to do so in a
straight shot through yards and over hills that Dustin had to navigate around
on winding streets. The hunter had waited until Dustin and Holly had cleared
the suburbs and gotten into the meadows and foothills on their way into the
national forest northeast of the city, where there’d be no streetlights or
witnesses and only a narrow shoulder to prevent the SUV from ditching in a rut
alongside the road.

The vehicle skidded to
a stop with one wheel on the crumbling paved shoulder, one in a muddy furrow,
and two in a questionable position between road and ditch.

“You okay?” Dustin
asked. Bracing herself with one hand on the door, one on the dash, legs stiff
and feet planted, Holly swallowed her panting breath and nodded. “Stay inside.
Lock the door. I’m leaving the keys. If you lose sight of me at any time, you
start the engine and gun the motor as much as it takes to get out of the mud
and back on the road.”

“You’re leaving me here
alone?” The quaver in Holly’s voice made Dustin pause with his hand on the door
handle and look over at her. As angry and confused as she was, and obviously
terrified of shifters, there was still a part of the woman that understood he
was her protector, no matter what. The need in her tone, in the glimmer of her
eyes, made a feeling of possessive warmth well up in Dustin’s gut and chest.

“I’m not leaving you,
Holly.” Not like everyone else in her life. “Remember, if you lose sight of
me…. But that means you’re going to see this, all of it. You’re going to see me
turn again.”

After a second, Holly
nodded. “I can handle it.”

“No doubt, lupa,”
Dustin said, in part under his breath and without waiting for her protest. He
didn’t hear her offer one, surprisingly, before he slammed the door behind him
and caught the click of the latch. “Good girl,” he breathed, though he knew she
couldn’t hear him. He was already shirking off his jacket and stalking cautiously
away from the vehicle, senses perked to anticipate the attack he knew was
coming, just not from which direction.

The varg barreled into
Dustin from the right and just behind him, from the least likely direction, of
course. But the Odin’s Wolf rolled with the attack and let the rogue shifter
run right over and past him. Dustin tumbled, losing a layer of skin here and
there to the asphalt, along with his shirt, but came back up already
half-shifted.

And goddamn but it felt
good to let go, to unleash, to turn not half-measure but full wolf. In total
shift, Dustin was a dark brown
canid
the size of a
large buck, and capable of running down and killing just about anything half
again his height and weight. Only problem was the varg was twice that. It felt
like getting hit by a truck when the black wolf charged him again, all teeth
this time.

Dustin felt conscious
human thought slipping away from him but grasped tight to one priority. Do as
much damage as possible, to slow down the varg, to make him slink away and
heal, giving Holly time to escape. Oh and, preferably, don’t die in the
process.

CHAPTER
FIVE

Holly had promised not
to lose sight of Dustin, or else flee with the SUV, but that didn’t mean she
had to listen to the massive wolves as they snarled and growled and frothed.
She huddled on her knees on the driver’s seat and covered her ears with her
hands when she couldn’t take the sound of baying and snapping, the yelping and
whining, the canine shrieks of pain. The wolves were mauling one another,
clawing and tearing and then rolling through the mud leaving long bloody
streaks that shone dark red in the headlights. The sounds stabbed at her as she
folded herself down into a ball in the seat, as much as her full frame would
allow.

The first time one went
down, it was Ivan, his haunches giving way on him after a particularly violent
tumble with the brown wolf that was Dustin. But the second time and the third
it was Dustin in the muck, scrambling for purchase in the slippery mud while
much larger the black wolf tore bright gashes in his flanks. Each snap from the
great black jaws seemed to build strength and speed, until Holly couldn’t take
it anymore.

She turned the key and
revved the engine on the SUV. The metal beast roared to life, tires spinning.
Holly gunned the motor again, and again, as the vehicle’s hindquarters skidded
back and forth. The wolves were both directly in front of her, on the opposite
side of the road, in the full blast of the headlights. Dustin couldn’t have
seen her expression through the windshield, but she saw the flash of pain and
sadness in that brown face. She recognized the resigned look in his dark brown
eyes in the moment he realized she was trying to get out of the ditch, trying
to get away. Leaving him to fend for himself, to die alone.

What he didn’t seem to
expect was for Holly to yank the wheel as soon as the tires slid free, so she
could aim that huge hunk of metal at the black wolf and mow him down in a sharp
turn. Even Dustin had to lurch desperately to one side to avoid the steel
behemoth bearing down on the wolves; the black beast couldn’t. Ivan’s
fur-covered body made a sickening thud against the bumper and grill. Then he
bounced off and skidding along the gravelly shoulder like a rock skipping the
surface of a lake, with a spray of pebbles and wet earth around him. At his
size, that was a sight. But that didn’t stop Holly from putting down the petal
and going after him again.

Before the SUV could
take another chunk out of him, black Ivan clambered half-lame to his feet and
loped as quickly as he could off the road, around a tree, over an embankment,
and through a fence where Holly doubted she could pursue him. Panting, gripping
the steering wheel with white knuckles, Holly waited for the black wolf to
reappear. When she saw the brown wolf regain his footing only to have his left
front leg give out and topple him again, she threw the door open and ran for
Dustin.

By the time Holly
reached the shifter, he was nearly half human again, his arms and legs
elongating and reshaping behind a blurry ripple of fur with grace and power
that was both surreal and primal. The transformation pulled her up short, and
she skidded to a stop several feet from Dustin, until he was a man again. A
naked man panting and wheezing out a red froth from his bruised lips and
struggling to push himself up into a sitting position.

Ignoring the sweat and
the blood streaking Dustin’s bare flesh, Holly crouched to wedge herself up
under one of his arms and used her legs to brace herself for a herculean effort
to get the man to his feet. She really succeeded only in supporting his forward
fall as he partially limped, partially crawled toward the SUV. The woman was
smeared liberally in mud and bodily fluids before she got the disabled shifter
laid out in the back seat and resumed her position behind the wheel. Even
locking the doors didn’t make her feel safe; she checked all the windows and
mirrors for glimpses of Mad Ivan. Nothing.

“Dustin, what are we
doing?” His only response was a raspy groan and a feeble gesture from one hand
that then fell limp against his chest again. “Dustin?” No response.

A glowing line on the
GPS screen mounted in the dashboard glared in the darkness of the SUV. The
suggested route directed Holly up into the mountains, into the forest to…. God
knew what. That safe house? More shifters? His pack? She was going to run to
them
?

Why
did you save him from the other wolf
, Holly had to ask
herself. At some level she had to have known she could trust Dustin, or at
least she must have felt less threatened by him than by the rogue shifter—the
varg, Dustin called him—who was clearly trying to kill them both.

With a sigh that was
nowhere near as resigned as it sounded to her, Holly shifted the SUV into drive
and followed the GPS directions. What turned out to be a two hour drive into
the
Kingswood
National Forest gave her plenty of time
for second, third, and fourth thoughts. She was an employee of the Agency now,
after all, and as such she should have been on her way to their local
headquarters. Did she owe them no loyalty after they had reached out to her in
the hospital, relocated her for her safety at their expense? And what about her
promise to herself that she was going to make good on this chance to keep what
had happened to her from happening to other innocent people? How did she know
that Dustin hadn’t attacked defenseless humans out of hunger or rage or even
sport?

Holly glanced over her
shoulder, eyeing Dustin and the slow rise and fall of his bare, sculpted chest.
More than desire flared inside her. No, he really wasn’t the sort for preying
on innocents, was he? He had protected her from Ivan not once but twice. That
second time it had looked like it was going to cost his life, but he hadn’t
run, hadn’t abandoned her. The question was why. And the answer lay either in
the real reason the brown-haired shifter had gone to so much effort to get
close to her or…in the kiss outside her townhouse and again in the car.

The address on the GPS
led to a cabin on a rise right above
Reddinger
Lake
Reservoir, on federal forest land far northeast of the city. The building had
probably been grandfathered in when the Forestry Service took over the area,
which would have made it at least eighty years old. Whatever its age, the log
cottage had been thoroughly renovated.

It took Holly a good
fifteen minutes of sitting in the back of the SUV with Dustin, shaking him,
talking to him, and shaking him again, to rouse the shifter enough that he was
able to converse in one-word responses. Holly’s anxiety level subsided quite a
bit when she noted that the wide streaks of dried blood across his torso now
covered not open wounds but raised pink lines of fading scars. All that energy
that wasn’t going into sparkling wit and conversation on the werewolf’s part
was at least healing him.

With her own muscles
sore and straining, stiffened by the long car ride, Holly groaned behind
clenched teeth as she shifted some of Dustin’s weight to her own shoulders and
walked him into the open plan cabin. Thank God the bed and its inviting plaid
blankets sat not far inside the door. The shifter was heavier than he looked,
by a lot. Holly settled him and tossed a blanket over his hips, talked to him,
chided him about what a mess he was, decided to wash his chest and arms with a
warm cloth, all while she struggled to keep her mind and her eyes from
wandering over the defined musculature of his long, firm body.

Scars from older wounds
than the ones he had received that night crisscrossed the pronounced bulge of
one bicep and the curve of his pectoral muscle on the opposite side. Blushing
hot but unable to stop herself, Holly ran her fingertips lightly along the
raised flesh, not like she would have smoothed the marks away but like she
wanted to learn something of the stories and pain behind them by feeling them
herself, at least from the outside.

She’d have never looked
or touched Dustin like this under any other circumstance, of course. Certainly
not when he was awake. That made her a bit of a creeper, didn’t it? And even
worse, there was that one pale line that traced the inside of his pelvic
muscles on his right side, the set that made that amazing V shape some men had
tapering down into the waistband of their jeans toward…well…. Holly swallowed
and sighed out hard and left the bed to reheat the cloth with warm water. She
washed him down probably one more time than was strictly necessary, really, but
resisted the temptation to pull back the blanket. It was an effort.

The shifter
occasionally moaned or sighed or tossed his head at her ministrations but never
opened his eyes, and Holly…waited. For Dustin to wake up, for him to be okay
and “call help”, for his pack to arrive, and for the real story to come out
about what had actually been going on all around her during the past year.
There was obviously a lot to learn, a lot the Agency hadn’t thought to tell an
entry-level analyst.

Long wait. Long enough
for Holly to start snooping through drawers and bookshelves. She had always
wanted to be that size 4 girl who padded around looking so cute in nothing but
her boyfriend’s white t-shirt. Tonight, she was just happy to find a pair of
baggy men’s sweat pants, elastic around the cuffs, and a plaid shirt that would
have covered even the biggest steroid-enhanced professional wrestler.
Definitely not Dustin’s
, she thought.
Part of her wanted to see the man who fit that shirt; part of her didn’t. Holly
rinsed her track suit in the bathroom and left it dripping on the curtain rod
in favor of the borrowed clothes, selected a couple of old magazines from a
pile near the fireplace and a dog-eared copy of a historical mystery novel, and
ate peaches straight out of a can she’d found in the cupboard. Dustin slept
through all of it, even Holly clearing her throat too much and sitting down
hard on the bed, bouncing more than she had to.
Long, long wait
.