Venice Heat (9 page)

Chapter Six

For the first time in what must be days, Shae opened her eyes, and the light didn’t blind her. Not completely anyway. Every muscle still pulsed with pain, and the migraine hadn’t receded. She’d found no ability to rise from the bed today, so she lay there unmoving, existing. Her cell phone had gone off countless times, and the ringing noise had hurt so bad, she’d wept. Sleep escaped her, but then she thought she must have passed out a few times too because sometimes daylight streamed through the window and often moonlight.

She longed to call her dad for help, but she hesitated. She’d spoken the truth to Darryl as far as she knew it. Keiths did not spare shifters no matter who they were. She believed it was a matter of time before her dad ordered his men back into Juneau to kill Shiya’s boyfriends, so it was for certain he would do the same to her. Even if she never turned, she was infected and could not be allowed to live.

Nausea assailed her, driving her to make an effort to leave the bed. Today, she made it onto the floor on her hands and knees. She collapsed and then managed a shuffle to the bathroom. Head hanging over the toilet bowl, she dry heaved for a good hour and then passed out on the cold tile floor.

In the bedroom, her cell rang, and she whimpered, covering her ears. Something nearby made a
shooshing
noise, and then a flowery scent like a fist rammed up her nose. She screamed. The hacking came back. “No, no, I can’t. Please, I can’t do it again.”

Darkness descended.

“Shae? Shae, open your eyes.
Okiru
. Wake up.”

She blinked at Eiji. Concern creased his brows and darkened his eyes. He raised her in his arms and carried her into the room to lay her on the bed. She breathed deep and yelped in fear, rolling away from him.

“It’s okay. I’m not going to hurt you.” He reached a hand out to her, but she scooted farther down the bed toward the opposite side from where he stood. She inhaled again and smelled it, that scent so familiar and yet terrifying. Scanning the room, she couldn’t identify what it was. Eiji stirred into her line of sight, but he made no move to approach her. “Do you know who I am?”

She licked her dry lips.

“Shae, do you know my name?”

“Eiji.” Her voice came out hoarse, and she remembered crying out in pain so long, but no one had heard or come to help. Not even Eiji. Although she’d sobbed nonstop, it surprised her when water clouded her vision. She scrubbed a hand over her eyes and glared at him. “Why are you here now? Why couldn’t you come when I needed you?”

“
Gomen
. I would give anything for this not to have happened to you.”

She blinked. Did he know? Of course he didn’t. He probably thought that bastard had attacked and raped her, nothing more. The next minute he’d be telling her they needed to call the police and report Darryl, but she knew help from the authorities—help from
anyone
—was now beyond her.

“He should have killed me.” She hung her head, and Eiji appeared by her side in a heartbeat. He drew her onto his lap, but this time she couldn’t mistake the scent. She screamed and scratched his arm. Unlike Darryl, Eiji didn’t force her to stay in his embrace. He let her find her footing and back away until she bumped the wall. The exit from her bedroom lay on the other side, behind him. “You’re…you’re…”

“I’m not one of them,” Eiji said, his tone low.

“Liar! I can smell it. I can smell everything, and it hurts like a mother!” She pushed the back of her hand to her nose. “That scented thing in the bathroom is killing me. I smell you, Eiji. You’re a shifter. You smell just like Darryl!”

His broad shoulders slumped as he stood before her, but he made no attempt to close the space between them. “I am a wolf shifter, but I’m not one of his pack. I am what you call a rogue wolf, like my cousin Izumi was before me.”

“Your cousin?” She frowned.

“The one I told you about, the one who died, the reason I came to America.”

The
shooshing
, and she whimpered. Eiji patted the air in a gesture for her to stay where she was. He turned toward the bathroom, and she had the thought to escape, but all the strength she’d used to stand abandoned her. The most she could do at that moment was sink to the floor and try to stay awake.

Something cracked in the bathroom as if Eiji had ripped the air freshener from the wall. She knew it had been screwed into place. He came back with it in his hand and carried it from the room. How could he bear the smell? A few days ago, before this mess happened to her, she’d loved it. Now her stomach turned, and her nostrils burned.

In the kitchen, water came on, followed by a few clicks and bangs. The refrigerator door opened and closed. She capitulated to gravity. The
thud
from landing face-first on the floor sounded dull, but she passed out nonetheless, and when she opened her eyes again, she lay on the bed. Eiji sat on the side, removing her clothes.

“Get off me,” she screamed and hit at his hands. He caught her wrists in a grip she couldn’t escape from. The humiliation of meeting a second man she couldn’t beat was too much. She kicked out, aiming for his nuts.

Eiji swiveled his hips to the left with the ease he’d used that night he blocked a punch. She hated him.

“Stop fighting me, Shae. You are still ill. If I don’t help you, there’s still a chance you will die.”

“It’s better if I do.”

He glared at her and shoved her down with her hands at her sides. For some reason, with him so close yet not touching, she felt even more vulnerable than she had with Darryl. Eiji, with his quiet self-assurance, his air of being there but being far away at the same time, pissed her off and drew her to him.

“I don’t want this.”

“You will live, and you will be wolf.”

“No!”

Without ceremony, he stripped the last of her clothing from her and left her naked. She peeked into his face as he turned to toss the dirty garments on the floor. Not even a hint of desire cracked his visage. That should reassure her, but it irritated instead. She checked his crotch. Fucker didn’t have a hard-on either.
What does it matter? I’m losing my sanity.

Eiji left the room, and she began to shiver. At first she thought tossing a sheet over her, covering the goose bumps that had popped out along her arms and legs, would do it, but then her teeth chattered, and she gasped for breath. Just as panic set in a roaring fire in her belly so strong she had no energy to scream, Eiji reappeared and put a cup of some foul-smelling black liquid to her lips. She managed to get a floppy hand lifted.

“Get that away. It stinks.”

“Drink it.”

“No!”

He put an arm around her shoulders and raised her toward him. The sheet slipped, and her bare breast flattened against his bicep. “Drink it, or I will force it into you.”

She darted her gaze to his eyes, expecting anger, but found no vehemence. He jiggled the cup, waiting, and she nodded. The crap tasted like liquid dirt. She choked, but Eiji kept the cup to her lips until she’d swallowed it all. To her surprise, when the last bit went down, the fire in her belly eased, and the shaking subsided enough for sleep. She shut her eyes and forgot everything until the next time she woke up.

This time she sat in bed with a nightgown on, a blanket pulled up to her shoulders. Eiji brought in breakfast of a boiled egg and dry toast. She tried not to wrinkle her nose at it.

“Tell me about your kind,” she demanded. “Are there a lot where you come from? In Japan?”

“No.”

“You told me you have a brother and parents and grandparents.”

His movements were precise as he arranged food on her plate and stirred her tea. After tapping the spoon on the side of the teacup once, he set it aside and turned the cup with both hands, but she didn’t know why because it wasn’t like there was a handle she needed to grab. She reached out to try her ability to pick it up, but it wobbled, and he helped her take a sip.

“And great-grandparents,” he corrected her as if no time had passed. “
Okaasan
is wolf.”

“Oka…” she repeated. “Your mom?”

He nodded.

“And?”

“All of the women.”

That shocked Shae into silence. She sat there watching him, knowing she smelled it strong on him, but since she had no training to tell her why she smelled the wolf on Eiji, and if all the others smelled that way even if they weren’t, she didn’t know what to make of it. On the edge of her mind, she still felt panic. She wanted to give in to more tears and scream and rage at him for not protecting her, as if that was his fault. There was something else too, something at this point she was too scared to broach with Eiji. At least in her semi-reasonable right mind, she didn’t believe he intended to hurt her.

Rather than approach the biggest fear niggling at her mind, she asked him, “Do you know who I am too?”

“Too?”

“Also.”

He appeared to think about it. “Shae Jones.”

So Eiji might have been hiding what he was, but he didn’t know she was a Keith. Maybe—and it was a slim chance—he hadn’t heard of her family at all. She didn’t want to tell him. He might have lost a few of those women in his line who were shifters and held a grudge. She’d told him she wanted to die, but she hadn’t meant it—at least not now. But as each hour passed, she felt the virus spread. At some point—she wondered if it were only at the full moon—she would change, and from that point on, she would be a wolf shifter, no longer human. Maybe she wasn’t considered human now.

A teardrop rolled down her cheek, and Eiji leaned over to brush it away with his thumb. He moved closer and kissed her lips. Shaking and lost, she clung to him, allowing him to share his warmth and his energy.

“I won’t always be on my back,” she whispered when he moved away.

“I know.”

He ended up feeding her as if she were a baby and letting her sleep the afternoon away. In the evening, she went through another rough patch where Eiji force-fed her more of the mud drink. All the time, Shae strained her ears to pick up sounds outside the house, wondering when Darryl would come back. She wanted to warn Eiji and tell him to go away for his own safety, but to be left alone seemed more than she could bear. She knew it was selfish, but when he held her in his arms at her weakest points, she let him.

One night Eiji took her outside on the porch and sat in a chair with her on his lap. The night air cooled her fevered skin, and she didn’t complain that she was strong enough to sit up by herself.

The entire time she’d kept her eyes shut from exhaustion, but now she opened them and peered into the night. “I still can’t see any more than I could before.”

“You will later.”

Shadows shifted, but whether it was a figment of her imagination, she couldn’t tell. “We shouldn’t be out here.”

“They won’t come yet.”

She jumped at his words, and Eiji’s arms tightened around her. “T-Tell me about your family again. Why are only the women wolves, and does that mean you can’t change?”

He didn’t say anything at first. She wasn’t sure if he considered whether he wanted to go on protecting his secret from her or if he weighed whether he should force her to talk about Darryl.

“Many years ago, during the Edo period in my country, wolves were viewed as being evil. Because of this, they were hunted and killed until they were near extinction. Some believe this is why my ancestors sought to become shifters—to hide among humans.”

Shae twisted around to look at him. “Are you serious? You think you’re originally from animals?”

“Am I wrong to say you are taught here that humans evolved from monkeys?”

“Please, don’t even get me started with a religious debate. Anyway, that doesn’t explain why only the women become shifters in your family.”

“You may not know, but there are many types of shifters in the world.”

She didn’t bother correcting him in his assumption.

“Families carry the shifter gene, but not all members become shifters. Some are limited to a few or skip generations. Wolf shifters do not follow all the rules of the others.”

She clenched her hands into fists on her lap. “So I’ve learned.”

“More or fewer rules can surface among families. Mine is not all women, just mostly women. Over generations, a male can arise.”

“You?”

He pressed his lips together. She wished she knew more, but he was so reticent, and she was scared to learn something she never wanted to know. Shae sat back and thought of his situation to avoid thinking about her own.

“Is your brother jealous of you for being something he’s not?”

Eiji started and looked down at her.

“Am I wrong? Sorry. I didn’t mean to offend you.”

“You have not.”

“Why didn’t your mom or great-grandmother just make all the men like her? She could have bitten them all.” She might have spoken the words with a calm tone, but the moment the words left her lips, a pain started in her neck. The spot Darryl bit throbbed, and she shivered with cold and fear. Eiji encircled her in his arms and drew her back to his strong chest. She nuzzled her face in his neck. What would she do when the sickness passed? Where would she go? She reached up to touch the mark, but Eiji caught her fingers and pulled them away. He’d bandaged the spot, and she hadn’t seen it.

“The weight of being what I am is heavy, an honor for only those who are born this way,” he advised her and frowned. “This man is dishonorable for turning you.”

“This man. You mean Darryl. You can tell it was him?”

“I know his scent from the first night.”

She licked her lips and swallowed. “Eiji, what’s going to happen to me?”

“You will live.”

“I mean beyond that. Am I going to…We don’t know a lot about the wolves, funny enough. They run in packs and are considered more dangerous than the others.” He looked at her, and she spun away to face the street. “I know a thing or two about shifters, but just in case you’re wondering, I did not want this! Darryl attacked me, and the first chance I get, I’m going to kill him.”

“You won’t.”

“I will! How are you going to tell me?”