Wolf Tales III (2 page)

Anton wanted to last, he tried to hold out, but the trembling woman in his arms, the hot rush of her fluids bathing his cock, Stefan’s deep groan as their balls pressed together when he hugged the three of them into a tight, hot, shivering mass of flesh catapulted Anton into his own release.

He arched his back and drove deep inside Alexandria, her tight pussy an even tighter sheath with Stefan’s cock pressing hard against his own.

Too much!

Once more… please… once more!

Gasping, crying out, Anton felt his testicles contract, felt the hot coil of life-giving seed burning the length of his cock, felt each spasm and contraction deep inside Alexandria’s hot sheath. The sensitive head of his cock found the hard opening of her womb as he filled her. She cried out once more, her thighs clamping hard against his, her pussy milking every last drop of seed, taking him deep inside, taking Stefan, holding both of them.

Loving both of them.

Heart and mind. Body, soul… still, it wasn’t enough.

She was Stefan’s mate.

She was the leader of their group.

She would bear a child only for Stefan.

Stefan.

Shuddering, still trembling in the aftermath of orgasm, Anton slowly withdrew.

Aware, once more, of the reason he’d come back to their room in the first place.

Chapter 2

Anton poured himself another cup of coffee and leaned against the counter. Both Alexandria and Stefan, freshly showered, were mesmerized by the article in the cheap supermarket tabloid. Finally, after a long moment, Alexandria raised her head and swept the thick fall of auburn hair back from her eyes.

“You think she’s one of us, don’t you?”

Anton nodded his head. “I’ve awakened a number of nights now with the sense that something is wrong. Not a true nightmare, just a strange sense of unease. I saw this when we picked up groceries yesterday and felt a strong compulsion to buy it.”

Stefan grinned. “What? And here I thought this was your regular reading material.”

Anton groaned. “Right… like I want to read about four-headed babies and alien abductions? I don’t think so. This…” He pointed at the lurid headline and photo and took a deep breath. “This sort of thing gets my attention. What if the woman is the wolf? What if the stress and fear of the attack forced her to shift? Imagine her now, alone and traumatized, possibly even unaware it happened?”

“That’s awful.” Alexandria shook her head. “I can’t imagine the horror of this attack, if it’s real.”

Anton nodded. “I think it’s real. I also think it’s what has been disturbing my sleep. I believe she is able to shift and I somehow sense when it happens.” He carefully set his coffee cup down. “Enjoy your breakfast. We’re flying out to San Francisco in about two hours. You’d better get moving.”

* * *

Xandi shook her head, grinning, as she, Stefan and Anton left San Francisco Police Department headquarters with the name and address of the rape victim. “Your powers to mesmerize the detective were, to say the least, mesmerizing.”

Anton smiled and winked at her as he carefully folded the slip of paper and put it inside his wallet. “Hey, when you’re good, you’re good. Don’t ever doubt it, woman. I am good.”

Stefan punched him lightly on the shoulder. “Don’t get cocky. He was so busy looking at Xandi he wasn’t even paying attention to you.”

“That’s how I got him.” Anton rubbed his fingers over his chest. “I convinced him Alexandria was the victim’s sister and was desperate to get in touch with her.”

“She’s black, Anton. I’m not.” Xandi shook her head, amazed. Sometimes Anton’s powers appeared limitless.

Anton stopped, his look serious and somewhat withdrawn. “In a way, my dear, if I’m right, you
are
sisters. I believe she is
Chanku
. She is also recovering from a horrible trauma. I hope that not only will she accept us as family, she will also allow us to help her.”

Xandi slipped her hand around Anton’s arm, linked her other with Stefan and hugged both men close to her. “Take us to her, Anton. We’ll figure out how to help her once we find her.”

* * *

Nibbling on a long strand of yellowed grass she’d plucked from a planter in her studio, Keisha stared blankly at the drawing in front of her. The job of a lifetime, the design for a memorial garden in Golden Gate Park, and all she could see were the terrified eyes of men awaiting their own brutal death.

A small, filthy apartment, awash in blood and gore.

A nightmare vision from the wrong point of view -- not through her own eyes, but through the eyes of a berserk predator -- a snarling wolf gone mad.

The men deserved to die. She wondered if she would ever move beyond the horrible memories -- memories of their violent, horrible acts that left her bruised, torn and bleeding. They’d planned to kill her. She knew that, felt it with every bit of her soul, but why did she continue to believe she was the one who had turned the tables and murdered them instead?

Impossible.

Late afternoon sun streamed through the French doors of her workroom, casting long shadows across the clutter and comfortable bits and pieces of her work… her life. What had always brought her peace now merely distracted. She rubbed her sweaty palm across her forehead and bit back a sob.

Therapy wasn’t helping. The comforting words of friends and coworkers merely reminded her she was still a victim, still worthy of handling with kid gloves.

She was not a victim. She refused to be a victim. She’d worked too hard all her life, paid too many debts, fought too many battles to get this far.

Her father might have been an excellent gardener, a job he loved until the day he died, but he’d never been respected for all his skill and knowledge. She was a landscape architect, a licensed professional already gaining notice in a very competitive market. It hadn’t been easy and damn it all, she was not going to lose sight of her goal now.

Success lay so close, the designs spread across her drawing board, the key to the prize she’d worked for since the first time she’d seen a professionally designed garden and fallen in love with the beauty of nature.

Nature shaped by the hand of man.

And the hands of men have taken it all away.

“Damn.” Flinging her pencil to the floor, Keisha stood up and paced about the room. Suddenly aware she was pacing in the pattern of wolves in the zoo enclosure, she came to a trembling halt.

A bell chimed on the ground floor. “Who the hell?” She brushed her hand across her forehead, threw the mangled piece of grass she’d grown in the habit of chewing on into the trash and straightened her work smock before heading down the stairs. She looked through the small peephole and saw an attractive young white woman on the front porch. The woman appeared to be alone.

Keisha slowly eased the door open. The woman smiled and held out her hand.

“Ms. Rialto? My name is Alexandria Olanet.”

Keisha nodded, aware the tiny hairs on the back of her neck were standing upright. Her heart leapt into overdrive. The hand she held out to the stranger trembled, then stilled as the woman’s fingers tightened around hers. She stared at her fingers, firmly clasped in the woman’s grasp, and was aware of a sense of calm, of peace she hadn’t felt now in weeks.

Wide-eyed, she raised her chin and studied the stranger.

The woman’s voice was soft, well modulated. “You don’t know who I am and you have no reason to trust me, but I’m here to help you.” Without waiting for an invitation, she stepped into the brightly lit foyer. “I probably should have called, but you would have told me not to come.”

Keisha stepped back, allowing the woman further into her home. “Why? What do you want with me?”

“I know what happened in that apartment two weeks ago. I know how those men died. You need to know the truth.”

Keisha’s blood ran cold. She backed against the wall, her breath lodged in her throat and it was all she could do to keep from screaming. “I think you’d better leave before I call the police.”

“Please.” Alexandria held her hands out as if in supplication. “I mean you no harm. You’re kin to me and I want to help.”

“Kin? Shit, woman. You’re white. We’re no more kin than…”

The woman didn’t look crazy. No, she looked as if she meant what she said. Maybe she was one of those religious fanatics who went around trying to save people from the devil.

“We’re sisters of the heart, you and me.” She stepped closer to Keisha. “I’ve not suffered as you have, but I know about the wolf.”

This woman was definitely nuts. “What wolf? That’s all tabloid garbage. It was pit bulls. Trained fighting dogs who killed those men. That’s all it was.”

The woman nodded. “I know that’s what you want to believe. In your heart you know differently.”

“No.” Keisha’s throat seemed to constrict around the word. “The police report said…”

“The police report is wrong. You killed those men. They deserved to die and you killed them.”

“No!” Keisha backed away, edging slowly toward the phone in the hallway.

The woman merely shook her head and sighed. “I should have thought this through… figured out a better way to approach you…” She smiled, almost self-consciously at Keisha. Then she started to melt. That’s the only way Keisha could explain it. She melted, right there in the marble foyer of Keisha’s new townhouse apartment.

Keisha opened her mouth to scream. No sound emerged. Her legs began to shake, her hands trembled so that she couldn’t grab the phone and if she’d thought of it in time she would have closed her eyes. Instead, they were open wide and saw it all, saw the beautiful auburn-haired woman sort of ripple and melt and fold in upon herself until there was a pile of clothing on the floor and a full sized she-wolf standing in the foyer.

Keisha did what any right-thinking young woman would do under similar circumstances.

She fainted dead away.

* * *

“Maybe that was a bit abrupt.” Xandi slipped the work smock over the young woman’s shoulders and loosened the top buttons on her blouse to make her more comfortable on the soft leather couch. Anton had carried Keisha’s limp body into the living room within seconds after she fainted, reacting instantly when Xandi’s mental cry of alarm brought him practically crashing through the door.

Stefan sat across the room, his fingers steepled under his chin, his amber eyes thoughtful. “There really isn’t another way. Poor thing has had a horrible experience, one shock following another. Tell me one easy way to explain that she’s also a shape-shifting wolf who just ruthlessly killed and partially devoured three men. Personally, my love, I think you did just fine.”

Xandi brushed a few loose tendrils of Keisha’s dark hair back from her eyes. The woman’s eyelids fluttered but remained closed. Xandi sighed and shook her head in dismay. “I came into my heritage in a world filled with love. Keisha hasn’t had that option. It’s been forced upon her, violently. Her body still hasn’t recovered from the assault, her mind doesn’t accept the attack. We need to proceed more gently with her. I really blew it.”

Anton moved closer, gliding silently to a spot beside the couch. He knelt beside the unconscious woman, his entire demeanor one of worry and solicitude. “She’s so beautiful, so frightened. She doesn’t understand any of this. She wants to… she’s very intelligent, very open to new ideas, but all of this scares the hell out of her.”

“How do you know?” Xandi cupped Anton’s jaw in her palm. “I tried to read her but her mind is closed to me. Do you understand her thoughts?”

“This close, her mind is practically melded with mine.” Anton shifted back on his heels but his palm still brushed Keisha’s hair. “I think we’ve had a partial link for the past couple of weeks, hence the dreams keeping me awake. I feel her thoughts, her fears. She’s terrified of the truth, afraid that what you told her actually happened. She doesn’t want that. She’s not violent by nature, or so she believes. That’s why the idea of the wolf in her is so frightening.”

“Can you calm her?” Xandi studied the woman’s face. She looked almost as if she’d been caught in the midst of a scream… her jaw was tense, her lips twisted. “I keep thinking she’d be more comfortable with a woman, especially since her assault, but not if we can’t link. Can you help her, Anton?”

He nodded his head. “Leave me alone with her. Take Stefan and go see the city. Golden Gate Park is only a block away. Enjoy the gardens… whatever. Don’t try to link with me. I need time completely alone with her.”

Xandi nodded. Stefan rose to his feet and held out his hand. She placed hers within his firm grip and followed him to the door. “We’ll take about an hour, Anton. You’ve got my cell phone number if we wander too far for a mental connection. If you need us sooner, just call.”

Just call
. Such simple words to a man who had spent most of his life alone. Anton stroked Keisha’s shoulder, but his thoughts followed the couple walking down the long hallway. Stefan and Alexandria. Mates, lovers, two people with enough love to share not only their bodies but their hearts and souls with a loner like Anton.

Who would have guessed?
He projected peace and warmth, calm and contentment to the unconscious woman, but part of his thoughts remained with Stefan and Alexandria. He wasn’t actually jealous of what they’d discovered with one another, but damn if he didn’t want the same thing for himself.

He sensed their love and laughter, their concern for Keisha, even their concern for him as they strolled the busy streets of San Francisco. Smiling, basking in the feelings still so new to him, he turned his mind back to the unconscious woman. She was beautiful. Her skin was very dark, an all-over coffee brown with hair that was black and thick, braided into neat little rows of braids stretching back from her high forehead.

He wished she’d open her eyes. He hadn’t seen them yet. Wondered if they were the same amber as his and Stefan’s or deep gray like Alexandria’s. Whatever color, he knew they would be perfect.

Everything about her cried out to him.

Chanku.

Anton raised his face to the heavens for a brief prayer of thanks. He had found her and she would survive. How many of their kind were out there, lost and afraid, unaware of the power just beyond their fingertips?

Unaware of the sense of brotherhood, of family?

He tried to focus on specific images in her mind, but found only a jumbled litany of fear, nightmarish snapshots of the faces of her abductors, the bloodied room and torn bodies, all of it intermingled with the beauty of her work and the lush gardens she designed.

He took her limp hands in his, concentrated on her thoughts and projected a sense of belonging, of brotherhood, of peace and acceptance.

He felt her slight flicker of awareness, the tightening reaction of fear, then heard her sigh quietly. Her tongue slipped between her full lips and she licked first the upper, then the lower one, moistening them. Anton thought his heart might stop altogether as she slowly, cautiously, opened her eyes.

Anton smiled when he recognized the flash of green in their amber depths. Hers truly were the eyes of a wolf.

It took her a moment to focus and he used every one of his mental tricks in that brief span of time to reassure her, to make her feel safe and protected. He felt the tension go out of her grasp and knew it was working, at least for now.

“Are you all right?” Anton kept his voice pitched low, professional. He kept a firm but comforting grip on her hand.