Jacks, Marcy - Taken by the Alpha Wolf [DeWitt's Pack 9] (Siren Publishing Everlasting Classic ManLove) (7 page)

Ryan wished he would stop. He tried to tell him to stop, that he was only making his own suffering worse, but again, his words came out in that strange language he didn’t understand, and they were barely audible at that, even to his own ears.

“I will kill ye all!” Blasius screamed. “I will peel the skin from yer bones! Ye will never have peace again! Do ye hear me! Do ye hear me?” Blasius raged.

The leader of the other clan of wolves sneered at Blasius. “You

were the one to break our bargain with a dragon.”

Somehow, Ryan knew what they were talking about. This man,  the one who was so angry with Blasius that he was willing to hunt  down and kill Ryan for it, had offered one of his females to Blasius  for them to produce pups with, but Blasius had refused after meeting  and mating with Ryan, and that had severely angered the werewolf  who was glaring down at Blasius right now.

The man nodded his head toward the wolves who were standing  guard over Ryan’s body, and Ryan looked up just in time to see an  open mouth and long jaws come down on his face. The last sound he  heard was Blasius’s screams.

46
                          
Marcy Jacks

* * * *

Ryan jumped awake with a gasp. He clutched at his chest and his face, scrambling away from the spot where he’d just woken up. He searched around, expecting to see the werewolves who’d hunted and tortured him until he’d…died?

Yes, in that dream he’d died, and whatever strange calmness he’d felt when death was taking him away was gone. Now his heart was thumping, and not in a good way.

“Rhyan!” Blasius was there, still naked, and he ran around the crackling fire and came down to Ryan’s eye level, holding his face in those massive hands of his. “Calm yourself, man, it was a dream.”

Ryan looked up at him, and then he threw his arms around the other man’s shoulders, holding onto him tightly, and only then, when the feeling of safety came over him from being enveloped by  Blasius’s arms, did his body start to relax and realize that, yes, he was indeed safe and not being eaten alive by werewolves.

Ryan figured his days of being an adrenaline junkie were officially over. That had been way too much. “Jesus Christ,” he rasped. “
Jesus fucking Christ
.”

Blasius pet his hair and held him close. “I’m sorry for nearly drownin’ you. Was not my intention.”

“Not that,” Ryan said, still gripping Blasius as though his life depended on it. His brain was thinking about what he’d just seen in that dream and everything that was happening to him now, putting it all together as neatly as a children’s puzzle.

It hadn’t been a dream. Not really. That had been a memory he’d seen. It was crazy for him to even be thinking it, but he knew with every bone in his body that everything he’d seen had happened.

“Fuck, they were eating me alive,” Ryan gasped, and then he pulled away from Blasius’s arms, his hands trailing down his sides, searching for any scars, bite marks, blood, anything.

There was nothing. The memories had been just that. Memories.

Taken by the Alpha Wolf
                     
47

From when?

Blasius had gone still at his words. “What did you see?” he asked, his voice cool even though they were discussing Ryan’s death from whenever that had been.

Despite the sound of his voice, Ryan could tell the other man was bothered, and it wasn’t just the body language that gave that away to him either. Somehow, he could sense it from the other man.

“I saw you.” Ryan frowned. “Kind of. It looked like you and that  one guy in the skins called you by your name, but you looked a little  different.”

Ryan looked up at Blasius. Now that he thought about it, there was a difference between how Blasius looked now compared to then.

His hair was about the same length, to the shoulders. His eyes

were no longer green but a dark blue, and his hair color was now a  light blond compared to the dark blond, nearly brown it had been  before. There had also been a small scar running across Blasius’s  nose, but that too was gone.

Aside from those differences, the basic shape of Blasius’s face

and body remained the same.

“What happened to you? Why do you look different now

compared to then?”

“Over a thousand years will cause such differences, I’m afraid.”

A thousand years? The number was like a punch in the stomach.

“Do

…do I look different?”

Blasius put his fingers into Ryan’s dark hair. “No. You look exactly the same.”

“Is this… I mean, we were reincarnated? They said I was a dragon,

but I can’t ”…

“Be at ease, Rhyan. You were reborn, I am more than certain of  it,” he said, his fingers now touching down on the dragon birthmark  on Ryan’s neck.

“What happened to me, on the other hand, is a little too  complicated to explain at the moment. Tell me, what else do you

48
                          
Marcy Jacks

remember? Do you remember us?”

Blasius seemed more concerned with that one than anything. His  eyes held that slight trace of desperation that Ryan was getting used to  seeing on his face.

“I remember they killed me because you wouldn’t take one of  their females,” Ryan said.

Blasius’s eyes became pained, and he pulled his hands away from  Ryan’s body. It was almost as though he were expected Ryan to push  him away.

“I made a bargain with the lord of a neighboring pack of  werewolves. One of their females and myself would come together to  produce pups. We would not mate,  something of that nature cannot be  forced, but exchanges between unmated alphas such as that were not  uncommon. Then I met you.”

Ryan waited for him to continue.

Blasius sat back on his haunches. “I do not recall much of it, other

than I was injured and you appeared before me. Dragons are a solitary  species, from what I understand. I never expected to find my mate  with one, or even a male mate for that matter. In my time, such things  were hardly common, but it seems to happen rather frequently in this  pack.”

Ryan wouldn’t know anything about that since he never had the  chance to really meet anyone in this pack. He waited for Blasius to  continue.

“I could not lay with the female after that, not if it meant  betraying my lover, and I did love you. You were my sunlight on dark  mornings, a warrior who could match even my foul moods, battle  friendly matches with me, and hunt the hunters that preyed upon both  of our clans.”

“Do dragon people still exist?” Ryan asked. Werewolves were one  thing, but he got the impression that when a dragon-shifter  transformed, from what he could recall of that dream of his, they got  big. Really big.

Taken by the Alpha Wolf
                     
49

If anyone with a camera were to see a transformed werewolf, a sight like that could easily be passed off as an overly large wolf. If the same thing were to happen with a dragon, Ryan doubted the sight of something like that could be shrugged off so easily.

Blasius shook his head. “I was quite heartbroken to learn that dragons are extinct now. The hunters drove them into the mountains and killed all that they could find. I’ve had this confirmed with the pack leader, Lord DeWitt. There has not been a dragon sighting, even among our own kind, in hundreds of years.”

Ryan reached up to touch the dragon birthmark on his neck.  Blasius reached for him as well. “But you are alive now,” he said, smiling. “That is all I care about.”

Ryan wasn’t done with his questions. There were still so many things he wanted to know. Things that didn’t make sense. “If we were mated, then why did that one werewolf want to kill me? He must’ve known that it wouldn’t make you want to have babies with that female.”

“It was for the honor of his pack,” Blasius said. “He did not  believe for a moment that it was possible for two men to mate like  that. If warriors came together  in lust, it was only because there were  no females to cater to them. He thought I spoke an untruth when I  explained. He was further insulted when he demanded to know who  this supposed male I had mated with was, and I explained that you  were of the dragon clan.

“I did not tell him your name or which clan of dragons you haled  from, but he must have been stalking me after that, waiting until you  and I met in one of our locations. Then he had you hunted and  murdered before my eyes.”

Blasius choked on his words  after that, and Ryan’s heart lurched

for him.

Because he only knew of these events through Blasius’s words and that strange vision of the past he’d had, all of this still felt surreal to him. Almost like it was still happening to someone else.

50
                          
Marcy Jacks

He didn’t believe for a second that everything he’d seen and felt in that vision was the full force of what had happened to him. Those wolves had been eating him for God’s sake. There was no way he hadn’t suffered more than what he’d felt in that dream. He was glad he couldn’t remember those parts.

“I sent my pack after them, of course. It was a glorious war, made all the sweeter when I took off the head of the wolf who had ordered

you dead. Of course, he had thrown his claws into my chest, and that  was what killed me, but I got revenge for you and died happy for it.”

“How is it that you have more memories of this than I do?” Ryan  asked. “If we were both reincarnated, then what makes you  different?”

Blasius scratched the back of his head. “Perhaps that is a story better for another time. We must be heading back now. We are much too far away from the pack for my liking, and if we do not return soon, Lord DeWitt shall be forced to send his wolves out searching for us. We do not want that.”

Just the way he looked at Ryan as he said it let him know that, no, being hunted by werewolves was definitely not something that Ryan wanted. The memories of the last time he’d been hunted by wolves was enough to cause a spidery shiver to run up his spine.

He got up, and Blasius snuffed out the fire by picking up clumps of sand and dropping it over the flames.

“Will I ever be able to go back to my life?” Ryan asked.

Blasius would not look at him. “No.”

“Would you let me even if I could?”

This time the other man did look at him. “Do not ask such

questions of me. You will not get an honest answer.”

Ryan shivered again, and his eyes couldn’t help but wander when  Blasius stood up before him, still naked, his erection in plain sight and  curved toward his belly.

Did Ryan want him because they were mates? Because of this  strange bond they shared? He was still trying to decide whether or not

Taken by the Alpha Wolf
                     
51

he liked the way they were now apparently connected.

He was attracted to Blasius, very much so if the reaction if his  body was anything to go by, but attraction was not reason enough for  him to give up his life to be here, and neither were these memories of  the two of them in a past life.
 
That was then, this is now
.

“I can see in your eyes that you are thinking,” Blasius said,  approaching Ryan.

He expected the other man to kiss him, maybe to get him to stop  thinking so much like he was.

Ryan squawked when Blasius reached down, scooped his arms  around Ryan’s knees, and lifted him into the air, over Blasius’s  shoulder, fireman style.

“What the fuck are you doing?” he demanded.

“Keeping you from running again, and I’ll not be putting you back  on your feet until we return to the pack together.

Ryan struggled briefly before giving up, his face heating in  mortification at the position. His ass exposed to the air, about to be  seen by everyone who lived at the pack.

“I won’t run, I promise. Put me down,” Ryan said, hoping that his  calm words would be enough to convince this huge alpha male to do  what he wanted.

One of Blasius’s hands came down in a hard yet painful smack

across his ass cheeks, and Ryan jumped.

Blasius laughed. “I rather enjoy your new position too much to  want to part with you. Besides,” he added before Ryan could start  yelling and struggling again, “I don’t believe you for a moment.”

Now Ryan started to really struggle, but that hardly seemed to  matter as Blasius was more than happy to keep him on his shoulder as  they walked back to the pack.

52
                          
Marcy Jacks

Chapter Six

“Where’d you bury Decker?”

Blasius thought for a moment. He and Rhyan were sitting at one

of the wooden benches and tables outside. Blasius had so far refused

to leave his mate alone, even to change into some clothing.

“Who?” Blasius finally asked.

“The man who was with me, the other human that died when