The Better to Hold You (30 page)

“Fine.” I wasn’t going to thank her, but I walked into the house and headed for my bathroom. Getting my jeans off was the hard part, but the wound underneath wasn’t too bad. Ideally, I would have stitched it up, but instead I washed it off, applied some antibiotic cream, and closed it with a couple of butterfly bandages. I found a pair of fresh pan ties and a sanitary pad and changed into a pair of loose sweatpants. On the bright side, my injured hands seemed to be in fine working order.

On the downside, Magdalena’s toothbrush and makeup were all over my sink.

And her skanky wolf-bitch smell was all over my bed.

I limped down the stairs and saw Red, pale and human, sitting in the living room. There was a cut under his right eye, and bruising on his neck. He was wearing his jeans, but naked from the chest up. He was holding a wad of reddened pillowcase against his ribs.

“Oh, God, Red, are you all right?” I hadn’t realized how badly he was injured.

Red smiled grimly. “I’ll be fine, darlin’. You just tell this husband of yours that this is not a fight over who gets you.”

I turned to my husband, who did not look quite right and seemed incapable of standing still. His eyes still burned yellow. His hairline seemed lower, almost meeting his eyebrows. But he was wearing jeans and a T-shirt, and, as I now realized, the clothes inhibited the change. “You can’t go with him, you know,” he said. “Not when you carry my child.”

“Hunter,” I said, “weren’t you listening before? I am not pregnant.”

Magda looked at him sharply. “She is not, my love. Use your nose if you do not believe me.”

“And what was your plan if I was pregnant? Set me up in the guest room while you slept with Magda? Or were the two of us going to take turns?”

“I would never—” Magda began, but Hunter lurched over to me, his misshapen legs making him clumsy.

“I’m not completely insensitive. Magda came to make sure I could handle what was happening. She was here to help you.”

I put my hands on my hips. “Funny she never came by before. Where did you stash her, at the local bed-and-breakfast? In the attic? And how did you have the energy for both her and Kayla? No wonder you didn’t want to have anything to do with me!”

“Don’t be such a child. If Magda hadn’t been around, I would have damaged you. And I thought you were pregnant,” Hunter went on, his voice roughened to a near growl. “Didn’t you notice anything different, Abs? How blind can you be? I could have torn you in two. Magda was here to help me leash what I could no longer control.”

Magdalena walked over to Hunter and placed a hand on his shoulder. Instantly, he quieted down. “The initial change is a very sexual time, Abra.” Her voice was the voice of a seductive schoolmistress, something British mixed in with the Eastern European accent. “It cannot be gentle, controlled. It is a time of instinct and passion.”

“Oh, and I’m supposed to thank you for relieving me of the duty? Well, no thanks, lady. You infected my husband, you’ve ruined my life—”

“Your friend here understands.”

We both turned to look at Red, who flushed, though not as deeply as I would have expected. “Red?”

Magda smiled. “Your friend allowed me to stay at his house. It was nearby, and convenient for visitation.”

“Red?” I felt a rush of blood between my legs. I wanted to sit down.

He started to get up, then winced as if his ribs were hurting him, and sat back down. “Listen, Doc, you have to understand. I knew what was going on. I knew there was a damn good chance that Hunter could kill you, playing slave and master or what ever the hell you were doing.”

I didn’t understand. How could he know this? I turned to Hunter. “What’s going on here?”

Hunter smiled, and suddenly I saw his father in his face, arch and sarcastic. “Oh, come on, Abs. You knew. Do we really need to sit around explaining things like this is some kind of soap opera? Darling, Red here is therian and so am I. I had questions.”

I looked back and forth between Red and Hunter. “Okay, I’ve heard about Unwolves, werewolves, shapeshifters, Limmikin, pricolwhatsit—now what the hell is a therian?”

“ ‘Pricolici’ is a Romanian word—in English you would say Unwolf, or werewolf, although the ‘were’ is Old English for man, so I would not call myself a werewolf. I have never heard of Limmikin. In my country we would call him a vậrcolac, because he uses magic to control the change. And a therian is any being that can change into a beastly form,” said Magda. “I see you haven’t had a classical education.”

“This isn’t part of a classical education!”

Magda raised her eyebrows. “Well, it does help to know Latin and Greek roots.”

I dragged my hands over my hair. “Okay, wait a minute. Forget the vocabulary lesson. Let me get the facts straight. Hunter, you told Red about me and our sex life—to ask him advice?”

“And to make him suffer, of course. It made him so unhappy when I described how much you liked me holding you down and treating you roughly,” Hunter rasped. “And then, when I said I wasn’t sure I could stop myself from getting really rough, he suggested I contact Magda.”

There was a buzzing in my ears. “Red, how can you not have told me any of this?”

Red stood up and walked toward me. “I didn’t think you’d believe me, Doc.” He tried to draw me into his arms and I pushed him away. “Oh, no you don’t. I’m sorry, but I am not happy with all these secrets you’ve been keeping from me.”

Magda laughed. “Wait a moment—I think I do remember hearing something about the Limmikin. I believe my father once said that—”

“It’s a Mohawk word,” Red interrupted. “It means a shapeshifter.”

“A therian,” she corrected him. “Does it really? I thought the American Indians believed in skinwalkers.”

“There are different traditions.”

“And you have a wolfskin in your cabin, do you not?”

Red seemed irritated, and I understood that he did not keep it out in plain sight. “It ain’t magic,” he said. “I don’t need it to change. But it is personal.”

“Yet you keep it hidden and heavily warded.”

Red looked at her, and I realized he didn’t like her any more than I did. “I control the change,” he said. “Not the skin. And not the moon,” he added pointedly.

“Do you really?” Magda sounded truly interested. Then she slowly pulled her sweater over her head. Her generous breasts were not completely firm, I noted. She slid her long skirt down her thighs and stood there naked, a forty-five-year-old woman, muscular and confident. And then she smiled at Red, and stepped closer in to him. I wanted to say something—Stop, I suppose. Don’t. But instead I just watched as she knelt beside him and began licking his wound. And as she licked, her nipples puckered and grew erect, and her fair skin flushed and darkened. Red’s head went back. I could hear the moan gathering in his throat as she pulled his pants down. I retreated a step, toward Hunter, and heard the growl in Hunter’s chest as he, too, stepped out of his jeans.

I turned back and Red was a wolf again, whimpering, smaller and ruddier than the dark, sleek female with the surprising arctic blue eyes. She continued licking at him, now at his belly, now lower still. She presented her back to him, lifting her tail. And then Hunter growled and shifted into wolf form. He paced back and forth, putting himself between Magda and Red until she raised her hackles at him: Keep to your place.

As the wolf Magda looked at me, I understood what she was saying: I am alpha, and I rule here. I will have both males as my mates and you will stand and watch, losing your husband, losing the man who would have been your lover.

Red had said the virus was in me. He’d said I could change. But would I? There had to be some predisposition. Did I have the right genes, the right mixture of magic and intuition? I watched as Red whimpered and turned back and forth, torn between instinct and something else, something strong enough to make him stop, trembling with the effort, with the scent of estrus in his nostrils.

Hunter had no such qualms. He lunged forward, gripped the ruff of the female’s neck, and mounted her. Then he looked up, and there was still something human in his eyes. Something that found it amusing that I was watching.

I took off my clothes, feeling supremely self-conscious. Absurdly, I wondered if my stomach was pooching out. As I inhaled to flatten my belly, the dull ache of a cramp rippled through my abdomen. Ignore it. I closed my eyes and tried to awaken something. Rage. Grief. Jealousy. Some tidal wave of emotion strong enough to wash through logic and civilization and the whole of my upright primate’s sense of self.

But there were too many emotions, and the main thing I felt, standing there naked in Hunter’s family’s living room with all the ancestral Barrow furniture around me, was stupid. I was going to leave a stain on the carpet.

But then Red, loyal Red, came over and started to lick the back of my hand before taking my wrist in his mouth and gently tugging me toward the door.

“No, Red, I don’t want to leave,” I said. I was tired of being the good girl. I wanted my turn to be the bitch. But then he bit down harder, and I was forced to follow him. Growling and snarling, nipping at my bare fingers, he herded me outside.

For a moment, I felt relief to be standing inhaling fresh air instead of stale hostility. And then I realized that I was standing on what had been my front porch, stark naked in the moonlight. I had just lost everything to Magda, including the shirt off my back. Shit. Red sat back on his haunches, wagging his tail as if he’d just done something marvelous.

I rounded on him, frustration and inarticulate rage boiling up in me. “No! No! You stupid, mangy—bad dog!” I chased after him, too furious to care what kind of a spectacle I was creating, and Red bounded away. I had never wanted to swat a dog so much in my life. “Get back here! Come here this instant, you …” Red used the tried-and-true dog ploy of pretending this was a game, putting his front legs down and raising his hindquarters up in a puppy-play bow, his tail wagging optimistically.

“No, I’m not playing with you—this isn’t funny, Red …” Now he was running from me, looking coyly over his shoulder. I lunged forward and grabbed his tail, but he slipped away, giving little mock growls and shaking his head from side to side, as if playing tug-of-war with an imaginary toy. “I’m. Not. Joking!” I bellowed, shaking with fury, and then I realized that I couldn’t stop the tremors quaking through me, or the strange, icy sensation racing through my limbs, like the aftereffect of a powerful anesthesia. The first contraction took me by surprise, and I stopped in my tracks. Even with the odd, tingling numbness in my arms and legs, the pain was incredible. It felt like the worst menstrual cramp I’d ever had, magnified and attenuated, and I looked at Red, who was next to me now, his wolf eyes wide with concern. I tried to say, This really hurts, but no words came out.

The second contraction made the first seem like the edited-for-television version, and I dropped to my knees and screamed.

The third contraction felt like it was turning me inside out, and didn’t so much end as bleed into the fourth, and then the fifth. All coherent thought ceased, and I stopped making any sounds, and then something ripped and I thought, I’m not going to survive this.

But after a while, the pain began to recede, and I opened my eyes, exhausted. Something was wrong with my vision, I thought, because everything looked grayed-out and blurry. I tried to stand up and realized that my body wasn’t responding the way I expected. And then I realized why.

I was a wolf. I was a wolf!

And Magda, walking out to meet me, was a bigger wolf.

It wasn’t a fair contest. I was smaller, weaker, new to this idea of running around on four legs. Magda was top dog. As Magda began to circle me, flanked by my faithless husband, I really missed the ability to form words. There had to be some way to communicate our feelings that didn’t draw blood. Couldn’t she just take Hunter, I’d take Red, and we could all go home and call it a day?

And that’s what I told Magda. Or at least, that’s what I thought at her. Out loud, what I said was, whimper, whimper.

Red looked at me, and his ears went back. Ears back—that’s a signal. But what did it mean?

Magda lunged at me and inflicted a painful blow near my left shoulder that made me yip and dart away. Ears back meant protect yourself, I realized. Damn it, I knew that.

Magda stalked toward me, and as I moved toward the protection of a wall I felt someone behind me and skittered sideways a moment before my husband tried to take a bite out of my hindquarters. He had finally managed to get himself into full wolf form, although there was still something a little wonky about his hind legs.

I snarled at him, so incensed by his sneaking up on me that I missed Red’s streaking out from my right side and grabbing Hunter right under the throat—a benefit of being smaller in stature. But Hunter swung his muzzle and knocked Red loose, and then Magda was on me, the ruff on the back of her neck sticking straight up, her head held low as she growled.

I didn’t know exactly how I wound up on my belly on the floor. But then I rolled onto my back and began posturing faster than you can say “submissive.” Magda looked like she wasn’t going to be having any of it. She and Hunter kept nosing at me, trying to get me to stand up and take it like a wolf. But I did not want those Alpha Female fangs ripping my beta throat out, and my current posture of abasement seemed to be inhibiting her from doing just that.

Red was walking back and forth, head held low, trying to figure out what to do now that his teammate had chosen to throw the game. And that’s what I was doing, I realized. Letting that bitch win. No sooner had my thoughts turned aggressive than I found myself in motion, rolling off the floor and launching my attack on the male—I mean on Hunter—while Red came in to distract Magda, the more experienced fighter.

We did all right for a few moments, Red and I, holding the other two at bay. And then I heard a particularly painful yelp from Red. When I turned to look at him, I saw that Magda had torn a chunk from his ear. I think what happened next surprised even me. I leaped past Hunter onto Magda, my teeth going for her ear. I wasn’t thinking biblically, I swear. It was a purely bloodthirsty moment, a moment in which I just saw a vulnerable spot and went for it. I had her ear in my jaws and her pain was music to my ears.