The Last Wolf: A Highplains Shifter Erotic Romance (Wolf Fire Book 1) (8 page)

“To bed!” Hakan shouted. I was shocked, the way he had flung the other man away spoke of a cruel and dangerous side I had yet to see in my new lover.

Earl spoke from where he had been sitting by the fire. “Now I’m not sure that’s really fair is it, shouldn’t you pick on someone your own size?”

The two men circled each other, their eyes blazing in the firelight, Earl’s reflecting the orange of the flames, Hakan’s shining with the mysterious inner light that seemed to burn through when we made love. Both men sunk lower as they eyed each other, creeping, almost stalking. I shuddered to watch them, it was clear that they were both in possession of a raw inner power, I was beginning to realise that maybe there was something sinister living in both of them.

“You can’t beat me one-on-one Earl so I really wouldn’t try.” Hakan snarled from between his teeth.

“I might not be able to fight you now Hakan, but I have been invited in, you have no safety from me now. You have no place to raise your child that I cannot reach. If you leave a window open, if you forget to lock a door, I’ll be there. The Lions of the Mountain will not allow The Prophesies to come true.”

Hakan launched himself at Earl and for a moment I saw them in their true forms, a huge powerful wolf flying towards a giant hissing cat. Their bodies connected and they were two men struggling on the ground together. I looked around the circle to see if anyone else had seen what I had momentarily witnessed, but the volunteers were helping Jase shakily to his feet and Earls friends seemed deep in drunken conversation.

Running over I tried to pull Hakan off the barman and received a heavy slap to my arm. “Stop it now!” I screamed as loud as I could, my whole body bursting with adrenalin. Everyone around the fire froze, including the two men on the floor. Earl stood up slowly and began wiping the rain wetted mud from his shirt, “come on boys, time to head back to the bar, I’ve got everything I needed to done here.” He said.

As I watched him help his two drunken friends back to the bar I felt something wet dripping from my fingers. I looked down at my arm and saw three deep gashes welling with dark crimson blood.

We sat in Hakan’s kitchen while he cleaned and dressed my wounds. The volunteers had finally gone to bed after much grumbling at the way they were being treated, leaving me and Hakan alone, not something I was entirely happy about given the violent and dangerous man he had proved himself to be, hurling poor scraggly Jase over the fire like that. Also I hadn’t seen whose hand, or claw, had struck me during the tussle. But I couldn’t be entirely sure that it wasn’t his.

“What was Earl talking about, The Prophesies?” I asked.

Hakan let out a deep sigh, “I was going to tell you, I really was. I just wanted to make sure that you were comfortable with the idea of us shifters first.” He continued wrapping the bandage around my arm as he spoke. “The last of the
Yee Naaldlooshii
left a prophesy before he died. A prophesy that told the future of the shifter folk. It’s never been written down, but has been passed orally from generation to generation of shifter folk.”

“But why was Earl talking about you and your baby? I didn’t even know you had children. What is it to do with you?”

Hakan looked uncomfortable. “I don’t have a baby,” he paused. “Yet.”

“Oh no, this isn’t about me is it? Was he talking about a baby he thinks we are going to have? That’s madness Hakan, I am not having a baby.”

“I’ll tell you what The Prophesy said.” Said Hakan, his voice changed, taking on a lilting tone, it was obvious that he was reciting something long committed to memory: “
Fear for the shifters, fear for my people, of the four races only three shall survive. The white man has come, the storm it has broken. Fear for the Eagle-Folk, pulled from the sky. Fear for the Bear-Men, caught in the caves. Fear for the Wolf-Folk, run down on the plains, and fear for the Lions of whom none shall remain.
”

“So,” I said. “The Prophesy told you that only three of the four races would survive, and the lions would die out. But you told me that the Eagle-Folk had all been killed, meaning that there are only three races left already. The prophesy is obviously not true, your Lee whoever got it wrong.”

“I told you that I had thought the Eagle-Folk were all dead, I don’t anymore, and neither does Earl, not since he saw you in the bar. Let me tell you the rest of The Prophesy, it will make things clearer.” He fell into his singsong voice again. “
The shifters shall rise when a new chief is born, a child to lead them to where they belong. Born of an eagle bred with a wolf, she will save three races and kill the last lion.”

“So let me get this straight. You and Earl think that I’m the eagle from your stupid prophesy and that my child is going to kill his people? That’s why he attacked me on the plain?” This was all getting far too intense for me. I needed to get away from these country folk, they had obviously spent too much time in isolation out here, it had poisoned their minds, made them strange.

“Yes, that’s why he tried to kill you. When they heard The Prophesy the Lion-Folk vowed they would not let it come true. They believed that the best way to prevent it was to stop the promised child ever being born between the Eagle-Folk and the Wolf-People. We wolves are hard to kill, so they went for the eagles, massacring them. It was genocide, hundreds were killed on both sides, but eventually none of the Eagle-Folk were left, it meant The Prophesy could not come true, that the last lion would not be killed by a shifter, but also that the promised chief who would save the three races could never be born.”

The horrible realisation of why I was here struck me and I felt sick, as if all the amazing experiences of the last few days had suddenly been ripped from my core and replaced with a swirling sea of bile. “You’ve kept me here to mate with me! All that talk about setting the wild in me free, all that time we spent together, I thought we were developing a connection but you just wanted to get me pregnant, to knock me up because of some stupid poem your parents told you. I can’t believe you lied to me like that. I can’t believe you used me!”

“Wait, that’s not how it happened!” Hakan protested. “Well, maybe at first I was thinking about The Prophesy, but afterwards I, I’ve started to fall in love with you.”

I pulled my bandaged arm from his lap “How can I believe anything you say? You’ve been playing me since the moment I met you.” I thought back to when he had approached me in the bar, the wonderful feeling I had got when he chose me over Cassie, how nice it had been to be singled out as the attractive one for the first time in my life. Now I knew why.

“I’ll be leaving with the others tomorrow morning. I would prefer it if you did not speak to me again.” I said, standing up and walking to the door.

“So?” Said Cassie, clinking her bottle against mine, “now I’ve finally got you out are you going to tell me about the rest of your time out there with Mr Big Dick.”

“I don’t want to talk about it.” I said, I tried not to meet her eyes and kept my head down, concentrating on picking the label from my bottle of beer. I’d gotten back to the city a few weeks earlier but I’d been refusing to pick up her calls or respond to her messages since then. I’d just wanted to be alone with my thoughts.

I couldn’t believe I’d allowed myself to be taken for a ride so easily. All my life I’d been told not to trust men, that they were only going to use you for your body, and then I finally found one I thought I had a connection to, one who I believed was different, one who was starting to bring out the real me, and it turns out he was only paying me attention because of some hundred-year-old mumbo-jumbo he’d been fed, I was getting a horrible feeling my mother might have been right about the male half of the species all along.

The worst thing was that I genuinely was starting to discover new things about myself under his tutorage, powerful new things. Alone in my apartment I would obsess over the way my body had felt under his hands, the pleasure he had given me, the way his big cock had felt inside me. Since I had returned from the prairie I had even started touching myself, it made me feel guilty and sick to do it, but every time I slid my hands between my thighs it had been him I was thinking of, him riding me by the fire, or his tongue between my legs.

I’d even been able to make myself cum at home, Cassie would probably be proud of me if I told her, she had been telling me that I needed to start paying attention to my body for years, but there was no way I was going to speak about something so private. I was paranoid that my new neighbours in the condo would hear me through the super-thin walls, so I bit down hard on a pillow at every orgasm.

I had been chasing that feeling of removal from myself, of flying above my body and looking down like the eagle Hakan and Earl had believed me to be, but I couldn’t find it, couldn’t let the wildness out. Each time I felt I was on the edge, when I could just kick my legs out and scream in pleasure I’d think of my elderly neighbours and freeze, so that although I’d feel the warmth rush over me it was never enough to take me away from my body like it had on the wide and empty plains.

“Well, why not?” Cassie asked. I snapped back to attention and realised I had been miles away, lost in my thoughts and emotions. I really wasn’t going to be good company tonight. “Okay, we don’t have to go into all the juicy details, though heaven knows they’re the best bits. Just tell me, did you do it.” She said, smiling expectantly, hoping that after all these years it would be me recounting salacious sex tales to her.

I said nothing but I could feel my cheeks heating under a heavy blush. “Hope!” Shouted Cassie, grabbing me by the shoulders and forcing me to meet her excited gaze. “You did! Didn’t you? My god, Hope Richardson you little slut.” She punched my arm playfully. “So tell me all about it, did you like it?”

I let out a sigh and tried to smile, but the corners of my mouth started to quiver and I could feel my eyes moistening. “It was amazing.” I said. “I don’t know why I didn’t listen to you sooner, it made me feel so good, so alive, so in touch with my body. I felt like I had a real connection to myself for the first time.”

“Well if it was so good why do you look like you are about to burst into tears?”

I sniffed, trying to hold them back, but the dam had burst and there was no stopping the flood. I felt the eyes of everyone in the bar on me as I broke down and started sobbing uncontrollably.

“Oh Cassie. He was just using me. I thought he was real and that we had a connection, but he didn’t mean any of it. I’ve been so stupid.”

My friend slid off her bar stool and hugged me close, “Oh Hope baby, I’m sorry” She stroked my hair then continued talking, “I think I’ve done a very silly thing.”

My tears dried up and I heard an edge of panic creeping into my voice. “Cassie what have you done?”

“Hakan phoned me, he told me that you guys had become, close and that he was going to be passing through the city, so he wanted to surprise you for your three week anniversary.”

“What did you tell him Cassie, what did you say.” I was almost shouting now, I’d never seen Cassie ashamed, but she kept her head down and mumbled something unintelligible. “What did you tell him Cassie.” I shook her by the shoulders.

“I told him he could meet us here, in the bar.”

I was picking up my coat and bag and walking towards the door before she had even finished speaking. “Wait, was it really that bad?” She called after me.

I turned around. “Yes it really was that fucking bad!” I spun on my heel and made to push through the door and instead walked straight into Hakan’s broad chest. It felt strange to see him in the city bar, this was my territory and he was jarringly out of place, a creature of the plains, it was like seeing a dust devil or a mustang cantering down Main Avenue.

“Hello Hope,” He said. I pushed past him without saying a word and started hurrying down the street. “Hope wait!” He called, and I could hear his heavy boots striking the sidewalk behind me.

“I have nothing to say to you.” I called over my shoulder, wondering if I was going to have to find a cop, or just start screaming right there in the middle of the street until he left me alone.

“Just let me explain why I’m here, give me five minutes.”

“Okay you’ve got five minutes and after that I never want to see you again, that’s the deal, got it?”

He looked relieved. “I’ll admit it, when I first saw you The Prophesy did creep into my mind. But then when I got to know you it faded away. Every moment I spent with you became less about some old legend and more about the girl who was coming to life in front of my eyes. It’s not what you represent I’ve fallen in love with, it’s you.”

“Well that’s a nice speech Hakan, but how can I believe it? I can’t tell if you’re lying to me, I don’t even know who you are.”