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“Unlock the door, Marlena,” he said. “I won’t bite.”

My head shook from side to side of its own volition. Obviously, it agreed with my hands and didn’t want to open the door either.

The man leaned over and put his hands on his knees.

“I’m sorry we frightened you. We don’t get many visitors. Rune called and told me you were coming.”

He reached over and tugged at the door handle.

“Unlock the door. I guarantee your safety. Rune made me swear to it, and oaths to Rune are blood binding.”

My shaking hand grabbed the door handle and tugged twice before the door opened. I held the handle and glanced around the car.

“They’re gone,” the man said. “They won’t return.”

I opened the door inch by inch then got out on wobbly legs.

He held his hand out.

“My name is Bader.”

Ingrained politeness won out on sheer terror, and I shook his hand. Crackling heat danced from his warm palm up my arm. His smile faltered. He pulled his hand back and inspected his palm.

Curiosity surged from him as he looked back to me.

“Rune said you were a special friend.” He looked to the lightening sky. “You’re obviously not of his kind. What exactly are you?”

“I don’t know,” I said. The words and the realization came as one. I rubbed my arms. “Right now, I feel like Alice down the rabbit hole.”

I scanned the trees and road. Then I scanned his body, but I caught myself and jerked my gaze back to his face.

He laughed.

“God, I’m sorry. I forget sometimes that not everyone is comfortable naked in the forest.” He glanced at the Escort. “I take it this is going no farther. Let me grab your bag. The compound is a little over a mile up the road.”

I watched him open the back door of the car, lean in, and grab my small suitcase, proving my lack of virtue, willpower, and tact. He backed out of the car and closed the door.

“Do you want what’s left of the groceries in the front?” His grin beamed, and his eyes sparkled in the early morning light. He knew I was embarrassed, and he was enjoying it.

“Yeah,” I said. “I’ll get them, though.” I leaned into the car and grabbed my one remaining sack of junk food and my backpack. “Maybe we can tape together some clothes for you out of the paper bag when I’m finished.”

I stood and looped my arms through the backpack straps. His grin broadened and gave way to a howling laugh. He turned and walked down the road.

“Rune said you were a smartass when you were tired, scared, stressed, threatened.” He counted of the list on his free hand then shrugged. “Hell, he pretty much just said you were always a smart ass,” he said.

I hurried to catch up with his striding gait.

“Great, a character reference from a vampire to a guy who owns ravenous wolves.”

“Nobody owns them. We all just live together.”

“Oh.” I stumbled on something. How the heck did he walk across this nature’s minefield in the dark, barefoot, without killing himself?

“What else did Rune say about me?” I grimaced after I said it. It was something a teenager would say.

“Not much else. Just that you were special to him, and that if I let you come to harm he’d rip my throat out.”

His nonchalant tone and sincerity stopped me. Bader stopped and turned.

“You’re serious?” I asked the question but already sensed the answer. Lack of sleep, stress, and the slight buzz from all the sugar, caffeine, my new best friend Midol, and sedatives shifted my world into surreal mode—that dreamy sensation that none of this was real.

“Dead serious. It’s a blood oath. I’ve seen him do worse.”

My dream world tilted. I swayed and reached my arm out. Bader closed the five-foot gap between us in an instant and grabbed my arm.

“Whoa easy,” he said and lifted the grocery bag from my arm. “Not to worry. I won’t let anything happen to you.”

He lifted my chin and checked my eyes. “I would have looked after you if he had just asked. He only threatens because he still thinks of me as a child and not a thirty-two-year-old man.”

My scattered wits reassembled themselves, but I needed a few minutes to try to get a handle on my energy level. “You don’t look thirty-two.”

“What can I say. My family is blessed with good health and complexions.”

A grin lifted his mouth, and he pushed my hair from my eyes with one finger.

“Are you going to make it, or do I carry you?”

The thought of being carried by a naked man, especially one who looked like Bader, shot a jolt through me.

I pulled away from him. A sharp crack split the air and seconds later, a fifteen-foot pine tree crashed onto the Escort.

Bader and I both jumped and yelled at the same time. He put a hand on his chest and regarded me wide-eyed.

“Rune said you were telekinetic, but he didn’t give details. I thought maybe you moved spoons and pencils and stuff.”

I’d felt that pine-tree killing pulse right down to my toes, and it hurt. I rubbed my temples and fought the urge to cry or scream or stomp my feet and cuss.

Bader held up his hand.

“Hey it’s cool with me. That’s not the strangest thing I’ve seen, by a long shot.”

I felt my energy building again, and I silently cursed the makers of energy drinks and Twinkies. I needed to burn off some of this rampant power before I brought a ponderosa pine down on our heads.

“Hold on a minute,” I said. I took a few steps toward the car and held my hands out.

I felt Bader looking at me. I hated being looked at. It’s one of the reasons I’d perfected my wallflower disappearing act. I usually blended in so well, people didn’t notice me at all. I scanned our surroundings. It would be impossible to disappear with only two people in a remote forest.

“Bader.” He stood staring at me like a spectator at a Monster Truck show—ready to be amazed, but poised to take flight in case something went wrong.

He blinked a few times but said nothing.

“Would you please turn around?” I said.

“Why?”

“I’ve never really done this with somebody watching. Well . . . not on purpose anyway.”

It was like adjusting creeping underwear. You had to do it to be comfortable, but you didn’t want people to see you do it.

He walked around a nearby pine and stood with his back to it and me. I raised my hands toward the car again. Energy gathered in my shoulders, and with a mental shove, I released it down my arms in an almost steady, almost controlled stream. The tree lifted off the car, and twirling like a huge car wash brush, it spun its way to the end of the Escort and dropped to the ground.

When I turned, Bader was just ducking back behind the tree. I rolled my eyes and sighed. I stomped down the road and spoke to him as I passed. “You peeked.”

“Yes.” He fell into step beside me. “That was amazing.”

Being irritating and nosy must have been a prerequisite of being Rune’s friend.

“Why did you want me to turn around?”

“I just—” I shrugged and threw my palms out in the air.

“I just,” My hands dropped and slapped my jeans. “Hell, I don’t know, okay? It’s just not something I want people to see.”
And now I’m so far down the rabbit hole, I’m cussing. I hate cussing. My dad is the cusser in the family.

“But what you can do is amazing. You’re amazing.”

“Yeah, yeah, and fascinating and marvelous, I’ve been through all the adjectives with Rune. It just tends to freak normal people out.” I shot a glance his way. “No offense.”

He chuckled. “Perfectly all right. I’m not normal. Don’t want to be.”

His eyes registered sincerity. Strange, I’d almost forgotten he was nude. I jerked my gaze back forward.

“Yeah, funny what you can get used to, but I’d rather my little oddity would go away. I want to be normal.”

“No such thing.” He rooted around in my grocery bag. “People can be common, but no one’s really normal.”

He sounded just like Rune.

“So how long have you known Rune?” I asked.

Bader took a giant pixie stick out of the bag and grimaced at it.

“All my life. He and Griss have been friends of my people for a couple of hundred years. Actually, we knew Griss first.”

“Your people? Are you Indian or something?” What kind of people lived in a compound?

He smiled, and his eyes sparked with mischief again.

“Or something.” He dropped the two-foot pixie stick back in the bag. “You know Griss?”

I must have made a face because Bader laughed.

“Oh yeah, you know him. Anyway, Rune and Griss come up here every year or so and hang out with us. They’re good friends. If we ever need help, they’re the first to show up. You can’t say that about many of your so-called normal people. In fact, none that I know of.”

“So you’re not afraid of him?”

Bader lifted my last energy drink out of the sack, read the ingredients, and grimaced again.

“I didn’t say that. He scares the shit out of me sometimes. Having him and Griss as friends is like having a tiger as a pet. You always know in the back of your mind they could kill you. You never want to show them your underbelly. Well, you know, you probably feel the same way, right?”

He dropped the drink back in the bag.

“Yeah, well no, not exactly. I still don’t know if I want the tiger as a pet.”

“Ah,” he said. “Still want to be common.”

”Normal.”

”Same thing.”

We reached a fork in the road and Bader pointed to the right where the two ruts we followed wound upward through the trees.

I trudged up the road, thinking that if I lived in a place like this, I wouldn’t need my kick-aerobics DVDs. Bader carried my suitcase and the grocery bag in one arm and loped along like the weight and the incline didn’t exist.

I stopped to suck in some air before I could continue. “So,” I said. “How much do you know about Rune?”

Bader shrugged. “I know a lot, and I know hardly anything. Almost all that I do know, came from Griss. He told us that Rune was born sometime in the three hundreds BC Athens. He and his father, Protagoras, were traveling teachers.”

“Protagoras? Is that the math guy?”

“No. That’s Pythagoras. Protagoras was a philosopher and pretty radical for his time. I did a paper on him in college since I sort of had a connection to him through Rune. Protagoras is the one who came up with the quote about all things being a measure of man. In other words, laws, customs, right, and wrong all are just what man says they are. There are no right and wrong unless man says so.”

“Rune told me that in almost those exact words,” I said.

“Sounds like him. After all, he taught the stuff under his father for years. His father also was the guy who started most of the rules for grammar. Have you ever noticed how properly Rune speaks?”

“I thought it was just a part of the whole accent thing.”

“Nope.” Bader scoffed. “Hell, he only sporadically started using contractions in the last ten years or so. It still sounds weird to hear him say words like won’t or can’t. It’s like hearing a preacher cuss.”

“What about Griss? What’s the story with those two?”

“From what I’ve been able to gather,” Bader said. “Rune was locked in a silver coffin at Lindesfarne.”

“What’s a Lindesfarne?”

“A monastery in England, I think. Anyway, the Vikings heard rumors about this silver coffin and they raided Lindesfarne. They found the coffin and opened it and got a big surprise.”

“Rune?”

“A very hungry, very angry at being disturbed, Rune. I guess he’d been locked away for a couple hundred years at that point and he’d worked up a good appetite. So he killed all the Vikings that opened the coffin but one who managed to talk his way out of it.”

“That was Griss, I take it?”

“Yep, that was our Griss. Those two have a sort of symbiotic relationship.”

“How so?”

“Griss reminds Rune how enjoyable life is and keeps him from going to ground again, and Rune bails Griss out of all the trouble he gets into.”

“What’s going to ground?”

“It’s what vampires do when they get fed up with the monotony of living for so long.” Bader glanced at the lightening sky. “That or watch the sun rise.”

I remembered the mural in Rune’s office, and I shivered.

“What do they do when they go to ground?”

“They lock themselves into a coffin and sort of hibernate.”

“Oh.” Something else I didn’t know three days ago and really didn’t care to know now. I filed it away with the other million and two things I didn’t want to deal with, but that mental closet was getting pretty full, especially after this week.

I wiped sweat from my forehead.

“So does this compound of yours really exist?”

“It’s just around the next corner. Keep your shirt on.”

“Oh that’s a good one coming from you.”

He looked down at his body, and we both laughed. For me, it was one of those soul-cleansing laughs, one of those “Hey look at me, I’m still alive” relief laughs bordering on a “Hey, I may be completely losing it” laugh.

Talking to Bader was comfortable. It was hard to believe I’d thought him menacing at first. He was like a big friendly dog—a big, naked, tanned, drop-dead gorgeous, friendly dog.

Yep, he fit in nicely with the Cheshire Cat and White Rabbit in the rabbit hole that’d become my life.

CHAPTER EIGHT

W
HO
L
ET
THE
D
OGS
O
UT
?

We rounded the last curve, and the forest retreated to reveal an enormous square clearing. A mammoth tree commanded the center. Its branches swept out twenty feet from a trunk as big around as the now-deceased Escort. The lowest of its branches hung ten feet from the smooth, hard dirt below, creating a living twenty-four-foot-round canopy. Rough-hewn wooden tables and benches rested underneath, behind a stone barbecue grill that was almost as long as the canopy was wide.

I didn’t realize I’d stopped to gawk until Bader cleared his throat. His face beamed with pride.

“Magnificent, isn’t it?” he said.

“That’s an understatement.” I pointed to a Plymouth-size barbecue. “Expecting visitors?”

He laughed. “Yes and no. Fifty to sixty of us live here at any given time. It’s easier and more economical to cook en mass.”

“Makes sense.” I tore my gaze away from the tree and scanned the rest of the so-called compound. Eight large cabins, four on each side, lined the left and right. Two cabins sat in back, but one of them was larger than the others and lined with screen instead of wood.

Work trucks and vans were parked at the side of each building. I couldn’t tell how many vehicles there were because they were parked two and three deep in spots.

“Marlena?” Bader stood fifteen feet from me.

“Huh? Oh, sorry.” I caught up with him, amazed at how stiff my body felt after a few seconds of inactivity. “I think I’m crashing.”

“Mentally or physically?”

“Yes,” I said. He snickered as we made our way to the screened cabin.

“Where is everybody?”

“We had a party of sorts last night and since today’s Saturday, most of them will be asleep till noon or after.”

Long wooden tables and benches filled the screened cabin, making it a dining tent or meeting area or maybe both. Bader ushered me inside and told me to make myself comfortable while he went to his cabin and put on some clothes.

I sat at a table in the center of the room and pulled my suitcase across the rough surface of the tabletop. I rested my head and arms on the suitcase and smiled. Bader had paraded around naked in front of me for the last half hour, but he needed privacy to dress. My eyelids drifted down as a myriad of worries and thoughts fought for dominance in my brain. I kept shoving the ugly ones back under the cerebral carpet and tried to find something innocuous to think about. Just before sleep took me, I wondered what I’d wear if the compound turned out to be a nudist colony.

My neck hurt. The pain nagged me awake. I woke as I had since I was a child. I lay with my eyes closed listening to my surroundings. In an alcoholic family, it sometimes paid to feign sleep while getting the lay of the land.

Voices whispered near me in a quiet but heated argument. I recognized Bader’s voice, but the husky female’s voice was unfamiliar.

“I had no choice,” Bader said.

“Why, because that blood-sucking bastard told you to?” the female said.

“You know it’s not like that. We owe it to Griss and Rune, and she was in trouble.”

“She’s an outsider. When have we ever owed them anything?”

“We’re just keeping her safe for a few more hours until they come for her.”

“And how do you suggest we do that? What were you thinking bringing a female who’s in season to the compound?”

“I didn’t know.”

The female chuffed. “Jesus, Bader, I could smell her as soon as she entered the compound. We have too many young males here and only five females. She’s in season with no mate tonight of all nights and she’s helpless.”

In season? Sure it was my time of the month, but she was talking about me like I was a bitch in heat. And what did she mean she could smell me? My face warmed and my energy level spiked.

Bader and the woman fell silent.

“What the hell was that?” the woman asked, and I heard her rub her arms.

The jig, as they say, was up. I raised my head and tried not to wince as my neck muscles fought me.

“That was me.” I looked up at Bader and a short, curvy brunette. She faced Bader, her whole body ram-rod straight.

Good, I’d startled her.

My short-lived cockiness faded when she turned to look at me. Two things struck me at once. She had the same high-level, raw energy that Bader possessed, which was elevated because of her anger, and her eyes were two different colors, brilliant green and ice blue. The wolf’s face from earlier that day flashed in my mind. The eyes and the energy signal were identical.

How could that be?

No, I refused to entertain the thought that—

Her eyes locked on mine and unspoken words carried across on her prickly energy.

Intruder. Kill. Protect the pack.

I pushed away from her, my heart slamming in my chest. My hair crackled as it rose. Desperately, I tried to rein my fear.

The female backed away, too, eyes wide, one hand held out as if to block the energy radiating from me.

Bader held one hand toward me and grabbed the woman’s shoulder with his other hand.

“Marlena, no. It’s okay.” He turned to the woman. “Jesse, calm down. Don’t move.”

But Jesse moved. She took a step toward me and bared her teeth. A low growl rumbled from her chest.

Survival instinct clicked in my brain, but this time instead of uncontrolled reaction, a part of my brain warmed and took command. I lifted my hands and spoke two firm words, “Go away.”

Bader and Jesse shot off their feet and hurtled backward. A loud rip split the air as they sailed through the screening. Their journey ended with the two of them on their butts ten feet from the cabin.

Outside energy warmed my skin. About thirty people rushed to the cabin. A few helped Bader and Jesse, the rest stood and glared at me.

On some unseen signal, the watchers advanced toward me.

Screen walls provided no protection. I searched around my table for a more secure hiding place.

What I need is walls.

As soon as the thought flashed into my mind, power flowed through me and chaos ensued. All the wooden tables and benches except the ones I sat at launched into the air toward me.

I screamed as I ducked under the table and threw my arms over my head. The clatter of wood continued for a few seconds, which seemed like an eternity, while I expected death by picnic bench at any moment. When it ended, an odd silence fell.

I uncovered my head and peeked out. Through the dim light, I saw nothing but piled wood. I crept out from under the table and turned a full circle. The newly formed enclosure I now stood in was round and roughly the size of my kitchen back home. Stacked tables and benches formed walls from floor to ceiling.

I had barricaded myself without any conscious thought of doing so. This wasn’t flying books or wiggling office plants, nor was this a planned telekinetic event. Some part of my psyche heard my wish for solid walls, turned that wish into action, and executed the command.

“Shit,” I muttered.

Fear, anger, awe, and curiosity radiated from outside my makeshift refuge, where stunned silence erupted into noisy bedlam.

“Shut up! People, shut up,” Bader’s voice rang out.

The crowd quieted. Footsteps neared my enclosure.

“Marlena, are you all right?” he shouted.

“I’m okay. Are you and Jesse okay?”

“Yes. A few scrapes and bruises, but we’re all right.”

“I’m really sorry,” I said. “It felt threatened, and it got away from me.”
And did whatever it wanted without my say so.

“We’re sorry, too. It was no way to treat a guest.”

“I’m not sorry. She attacked us,” Jesse said.

Jesse’s anger wafted through the spaces in my table-stacked wall.

“Hey,” I shouted, “you’re the one that went all rabid dog on me.”

“That’s it,” Jesse said. I heard her throw herself at the wall of my enclosure and grunt as she tried to pull a table or bench away. “I’m going to dig her out and kill her.”

My body sucked energy from the crowd. The enclosure walls shook and tightened. I crouched, ready to duck back under the table, but the walls only constricted a few inches.

A struggle lasted several seconds then receded. From the sound, it took several people to tear Jesse off the enclosure and out of the cabin.

“Everybody out,” Bader shouted. “If I see any one of you within twenty feet of this cabin, I’ll tear your hide.”

Footsteps shuffled across the wood floor and out of the cabin.

“Marlena?” Bader said. “They’re gone.”

I sat on the table, plopped my feet on the bench, and covered my face with my hands.

“Marlena?”

“What?”

“Open this thing and come out. I’ll keep you safe.”

I laughed.

“No, really. You’ll be safe.”

Tears welled in my eyes, but I refused to let them fall. All the memories and thoughts I’d been trying to block crowded through. I’d killed or almost killed between two to six people. The fact that I didn’t know the exact body count depressed me further. I’d assume five people, unless I counted Aunt Tibby. I hadn’t killed her, but she wouldn’t be dead if I hadn’t visited her. So, okay, I’d count her, too. That made six. I was right up there with Dahmer and the Zodiac Killer. And oh yes, I couldn’t forget that an honest-to-God evil scientist was after me, and now werewolves were trying to kill me.

I pulled my feet up on the table and wrapped my arms around my knees. My head fell forward and clunked against my knees. I was as close as I could come to a fetal position without lying down.

“If I only had my ruby slippers, I could click them and go home,” I mumbled.

“What?” Bader said.

“I said I want to go home.”

“Rune and Griss will be here in about seven hours, but you can’t stay in there that long.”

“Why not?”

He was quiet for a moment.

“You need to eat and don’t you have to go to the . . . uh . . . ladies’ room?”

He runs around naked in the woods and he’s embarrassed to say ladies’ room? Men!

I shifted on the tabletop. Now that he mentioned it, I did have to go. I shifted again. Okay, I had to go pretty badly.

“Aren’t you hungry? It’s past five in the afternoon. You’ve been asleep all day,” he said.

My stomach growled as if on queue.

“Damn,” I muttered.

“What?”

“I said, I’m not going to get eaten by Ms. Cujo out there just because I’m hungry and have to pee.”

“Come on, Marlena.”

“Marlee. My name is Marlee.”

“Sorry. Come on, Marlee. Open up and come out.”

Crud, he was right. I couldn’t wait for Rune to get there. I could do without food, but I needed a bathroom and something to drink. Using my telekinesis always left me thirsty.

“Is she out there?” I said.

“No, I sent her back to our cabin.”

“
Our
cabin? What is she, your girlfriend?”

“She’s my mate, yes, but we share the cabin with eight other people.”

“Werewolves you mean.”

He sighed. “Werewolves are people, Marlee. We just have a virus that makes us different from common people.”

“Makes you dangerous, you mean.”

“Jesse just talks big, Marlee. She’s never killed anyone. Neither have I.”

I sucked in a sharp breath. That was certainly more than I could say for myself after yesterday. So who was the biggest monster?

Hot tears escaped onto my cheeks, and I swiped them away with a shaky hand.

I hated crying. Leaving my enclosure and being torn limb from limb was preferable to sitting here and blubbering. The only thing more pathetic would be to cry and pee on myself, which was what was going to happen if I didn’t get to a bathroom soon.

“Okay. I’m coming out, but keep those people away from me, or we might have an accident. I don’t want to hurt anybody else,” I said.

“Great,” I muttered. “I’m going to walk out into a pack of werewolves, and I’m worried about hurting one. What a loser.”

“I’ll keep them away,” Bader said.

I looked at the walls of tables and benches. Now that I’d decided to leave, I wasn’t sure how.

I lifted my hands and pushed energy toward a spot that faced away from where Bader stood. The wall creaked and moved a few inches, and the areas on either side of where I pushed wobbled. I stopped. The enclosure popped and swayed.

I ducked back toward the table behind me, and the enclosure tightened again. My “gift” was weird enough, but this new habit it had developed of moving things before I specifically asked it was downright creepy.

“What happened?”

“I can’t just make an opening and walk through. The way this thing is stacked, it’ll collapse on me.”

“Can’t you just put them back like you brought them here?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Because I’m not sure how I got them here in the first place.”

“What’re you going to do?”

Good question. I climbed on top of the table and jumped on it a few times. It was sturdy and stable.