Cade (10 page)

It didn’t matter, she decided. She had done the right thing by walking away. Stephen could easily have heard them, and then all hell would have broken loose. What mattered was what she did about it now. She was not about to let Cade get away.

But right now, they had to go. Cade’s eyes kept flicking to her, even as he stood talking to her brother and discussing the plans for the next couple of days. Every time they did, her breath would catch. She didn’t want to go home. She didn’t want to leave him for one moment. He needed their help, she told herself. He shouldn’t be left to deal with the boy alone. But Gemma knew it was more than that. She just wanted to be around him all the time. She hated the thought of being separated.

What if I never see him again
? The thought rose unbidden to her mind, and a shaft of pain lanced through her. Of course she’d see him again, she tried to calm herself. There was no reason why she wouldn’t. But the thought niggled inside her, and she longed to race back along the path and wrap her arms around him, never letting go.

She and Stephen were going to walk into town. From there, they would be collected by their father’s driver—Malcolm had insisted. Stephen had told him that they needed to feed first and would meet Seth, the driver, at The Shovels, a local pub. In truth, he didn’t want anyone, not even his father’s driver coming to the house. It would be just their luck that Seth would arrive at the exact same time the boy would decide to wake, Stephen had declared. Then, of course, they would be screwed without a doubt. Gemma knew he was right, but it didn’t make it any easier.

Stephen had gone out in the early hours and caught enough small animals to last Cade until tomorrow at least. It would last him two days if he stuck to eating the frozen stuff he had, which Gemma decided he probably would do. If there was anyone who had control of shit like that, it was Cade. He hungered like them all for the fresh kill, but he had willpower and a calmness about him that meant he could handle almost any difficult situation with level-headed patience. That was why he was suited to the DSA. They needed people who could keep their cool even under the most arduous circumstances. Cade was not a slave to his instincts, except … Gemma remembered the way he had lost control the night before, the way he’d been unable to stop himself from coming to her even though she had seen how hard he had tried to resist her. Liquid heat ran through her veins at the memory. She hoped that, like her, he would not be able to keep calm and deny this attraction between them. She hoped that he’d not try to be reasonable and use logic like he usually did with everything. She needed him to lose control—she needed him mindless around her.

She wrapped her arms around herself in an attempt at some semblance of comfort, but it was completely useless. She stared at her feet to try to keep from looking at the one thing she wanted more than anything in the world. She bit down on her trembling lip, barely holding herself together, ready to unravel with just one pull of a thread.

“Ready?” Startled, Gemma spun around to look at Stephen, who had come up behind her. She blinked in surprise then quickly tried to avert her eyes, but she wasn’t fast enough to hide the tears brimming there. Stephen caught her chin, worry etched on his features. “What’s wrong?”

Inadvertently, she glanced at Cade. Stephen’s gaze followed hers, his face softening as he mistook her tears for concern, not realising it reached much, much further than that. “Hey, we’re coming back” he said gently. “We’re not leaving them in this shit together. Okay?”

She nodded. It was all she could do. She didn’t trust herself to speak. Stephen pulled her into his embrace, and she wrapped her arms around his lean waist. Normally she could seek out comfort in her brother. But today, it wasn’t her brother’s consolation she wanted. Her eyes met Cade’s as she let her tears fall freely now. She saw the way he tensed and the worry that flitted over his features. He took a step towards them, but she shook her head. He came anyway, but just stood there quietly when he reached them. He let Stephen do the consoling, but she could see by the rigid way he held his body that he was straining to hold himself back.

“I’ll sneak Gemma here if I have to.” Stephen murmured, and Gemma froze in surprise, until he continued, “for hunting. I can't promise to get here every day. You understand, right?”

“You have duties to the Society. It has to come first—you’re the heir. It’s fine. I’ll be fine.”

She knew Stephen hated it. She knew that it killed him not to be there for his friend as much as he would like to. But there was more at stake here than just Cade and the boy. This entire incident could mean imminent war between the
Others
and the
Humans
. As she followed her brother with a heavy heart, she forced herself not to glance back at Cade as he stood there watching them leave. It didn’t matter that she told herself Cade would be fine without them. He was strong and he was smart. He could take care of himself without any problem. But her heart still wanted to stay—it didn’t want to be parted from him for even a minute. Like an invisible cord that seemed to pull tighter between them with each step she took away from him, she waited for it to finally snap and send her tumbling into an abyss of absolute misery.

She forced herself to put one foot in front of the other and walk.

Cade clutched a hand to his heart as he watched Gemma walk away. It literally physically hurt. Such longing in his gut and his chest—he had never felt this way before. It was total madness, he knew, but a hunger had awoken inside him, and he had no idea how to appease it. Cade could not give in to what it was demanding. He stood at the gate to his garden watching them disappear down the lane, unable to bring himself to just go inside. Not until they had disappeared around the corner did he turn towards the house. It was then that he realised he had been holding his breath, waiting for Gemma to turn around and look at him just one more time.

A sudden pain shot through his head and Cade fell to his knees from the force of it. He clutched his head, his knees digging into the gravel of his pathway as he waited for it to pass. When he could breathe again, he staggered to his feet and made a beeline for the house. He knew it was the boy—he was awake. As soon as he had stepped into the house, he heard the sounds of the boy moving around upstairs. The door rattled, the vibration resonating through the walls. Cade hoped that meant he had shifted to
wolf
again. He needed to do his first shift alone, and survive it. The one he had done with Cade was not the same. He searched his mind—it was like groping around the bottom of a dark closet. Try as he might, however, he couldn’t find the small
wolf
.

Heart thumping, Cade headed for the door that was off to the side of the kitchen. It opened to a small pantry—a pantry so small it could barely fit one person. Shelves filled it from floor to ceiling. Stephen had stuffed small animals into boxes and wedged them in below the shelves for Cade to get when he needed. It was rabbit mostly, Cade discovered from the scent. The smell of fear and life was so strong when Cade opened the door that his own stomach growled with hunger for it, his
wolf
waking from the scent of food and the crave for the hunt. Cade swallowed everything down and forced himself to breathe slow and deep. He had to calm down before it set the boy off upstairs. A loud thump from upstairs spurred him on, and he stuck his hand into the box and grabbed whatever was there. It didn’t matter what—rabbit, squirrel, hare. They were all the same. They all served the same purpose—to feed the boy.

Cade clutched the soft body of a rabbit in his hand and made his way up to the back room. He stopped at the door before opening it, not because he was afraid, but because he wasn’t stupid. If the boy was in
wolf
form, he could very well try and attack Cade the moment he opened the door, perceiving him as some kind of threat. Cade did not revel in the idea of hurting the child in any kind of act of defence. He listened for where the boy might be in the room. The door had stopped rattling, and his senses told him that the boy was across the room. Opening the door slowly, he was blinded momentarily by the sunlight that streamed in through the curtainless window. His eyes searched for the boy, eventually finding him curled by the bottom of the bed on the floor. He was curled up like a small, quivering child, shudders wracking his young frame as sweat ran down his face. Was he going to survive this?

The rabbit in Cade’s hand squirmed and fought against his grip, fought for freedom that it wasn’t going to get. Cade clenched his hand tighter around the animal, just enough so that it went still and stopped fighting. The boy had to be the one to kill it. He had to learn their ways if he was to integrate into this new way of life. Cade and Stephen had agreed on that.

He pushed the bedroom door shut with his booted foot but kept his sights on the boy’s weak form.  He was careful to keep his movement slow as he advanced on the boy. He didn’t want to startle him or cause him to attack. The boy looked up at Cade, his eyes wide, but it was the wolf, not the boy, who was looking out at him. His eyes were bright blue, almost white from their glow. Cade had never seen
wolf
eyes like that before. They were almost hypnotic. The boy’s teeth had come down, too, canines poking down over the boy’s bottom lip. Cade could see a droplet of blood where his tooth had pierced skin—a reminder that this was an inexperienced shifter. His breathing was harsh, too, a raspy growl in his throat.

“You're okay,” Cade soothed as he crept closer. He lowered himself, kneeling in front of the boy. He did not want to put out an air of dominance over the boy right now. He offered the rabbit to him, but the boy shook his head. “You need to eat,” Cade urged. “It’s the only way we’re going to get through this.” He wasn’t sure the boy could really understand, or how much of his mind was conscious at that moment. Cade inched closer with the rabbit until he was holding it under the boy’s nose. Cade could tell when the scent caught the
wolf
because the boy’s hands flew up and grabbed its prey. He bit down on the rabbit’s neck and although his hands were thin and bony, he had a grasp like a hawk. He tried to shove the entire rabbit into his mouth, but Cade placed his hands over the boy’s carefully but firmly, and prevented him from swallowing the whole thing down. “Slow. Slow or you’ll bring it all back up.”

Blood oozed down the boy’s chin. It ran along Cade’s arm and dripped down where gravity got the better of it. As the child devoured the animal, Cade pulled his hand away before he got his teeth into that, too. He was glad that the boy had gone for the rabbit’s neck right away. It meant that he had the instincts he needed.
Others
didn’t hunt for fun and torture—not really, anyway. They hunted for fun, but they didn’t torture their catch. It was a feral need inside to hunt, feed and survive. The boy growled as he ate, deep, throaty growls that echoed around the empty room with every beat of his heart.

Cade watched him curiously. The boy had deep welts on his bare legs and arms. His face was scratched, too. He must have clawed at himself at some point. He had ‘the itches’. It was what they called it when the body needed to shift. It was the thing that drove
Others
to the brink of insanity when they were forbidden to shift and caused them to claw their own skin off in a bid to free their animal. Cade just hoped that the boy would manage to shift himself before that happened.

He waited for him to finish off the rabbit, already thinking about the fact he’d need a new shirt. The boy’s arm finally dropped to the side, a partial bit of the rabbit left. Blinking, the brightness in his eyes slowly faded and was gradually replaced by the normal blue of his own eyes as his partial shift began to reverse itself. He stared at Cade, confused and hesitant.

Cade slid himself closer and slipped an arm behind him, intending to lift him up and place him back on the bed. But the boy slumped to the side and leant against Cade’s chest, shocking him. He stared down at the boy’s face and was greeted with softly blinking eyes looking helplessly back up at him.

“We can survive this. I promise. You and I. We’ll do it together.” The boy let out a tremulous breath and Cade lifted his hand to his face to brush his hair back. Carefully, he lifted the front of the boy’s shirt and wiped his face clean with it.

Seeing the innocence in those eyes that watched him made Cade’s anger flare inside. Who would do this? Who would bite a child,
Human
or
Other
? Like it didn’t matter, and then just leave them out in the world this way? It was cruel. He hoped that he would meet whoever had done this because he was sure as hell going to make them regret it. Maybe it was the bond between them, or maybe it was the same shit that was going on with Gemma—he didn’t know and he didn’t care—but the urge inside him to protect the boy was almost as immense as his need to take Gemma as his own.

Cade didn’t really hate
Humans
. Not the kids. Not like this boy. He knew that they were raised to hate
Others
. It wasn’t their fault what they were born into, and then the shit they were fed to believe every minute of their lives. They even taught them in school about the wars and the hatred they should feel for the wrong
Others
had done, for god’s sake, when, in fact, most of the wrongs had been done by
Humans
—by their stupidity and their fears.

What if this boy could be the link between both sides? To show that they really could just live in harmony without one side needing to feel like they had to control the other.