Needed something. Nash.
Her hands moved from his hair to his
back, drawing him nearer, longing for the
caress of his tongue to continue forever.
Her eyes drifted open when she found
something sticky at the nape of his neck.
She lifted her hand to peer her fingertips
quizzically. They were covered with
blood.
“You’re bleeding,” she gasped and he
lifted his head to look at her.
He seemed unconcerned by the wound
she had found. “Why did you want me to
lick you here?” he asked, drawing his
tongue over her swollen nipple again.
She shuddered involuntarily and
shoved him aside. “I didn’t,” she said,
incredulous he could even suggest such a
thing.
“Don’t be embarrassed. I didn’t mind
doing it and you seemed to enjoy it. I just
wondered why.”
“I don’t know,” she said testily,
closing her shirt over her exposed chest
and sitting up. “Let me see your back.”
Before he could dodge her, she had pulled
the back of his sweater down, and peered
at the four puncture marks on the back of
his neck. They weren’t large, but they
were deep. “What happened?”
“It’s nothing. My mother will tend it in
the morning.”
“I’ll do it,” she told him and pulled his
sweater off over his head.
Paths of dried blood streaked down
the center of his back, but the wounds
were still leaking slightly. The idea of
lapping up his blood with her tongue held
no appeal, so she climbed from the rug
and went to the kitchen for a towel. She
wet it with some water before returning to
Nash, who was still sitting on the rug. He
watched her over his shoulder curiously,
as she bathed the drying blood off his skin
with the wet towel.
“This looks like a bite,” she said as
she inspected the wound more closely.
“Did one of the Wolves bite you?”
He turned his attention to the rug in
front of him. He didn’t answer her
question, but sat there as if he had
disappeared into another world. She set
the towel aside and wrapped her arms
around his waist, dropping a tender kiss
near the wound.
“Are you alright?” she asked. “Does it
hurt?”
He untangled her arms from around his
waist and stood up. “I think I have
something you can sleep in tonight,” he
said and left the room.
Sleep? She hadn’t thought about that.
Where would she sleep? In his room. On
his pallet with him. Alone? In the dark.
Would he sleep naked, like she had found
him that morning beneath the ancient tree?
Would she mind if he did? When he
returned several minutes later, she was
sitting on the rug with her cool fingers on
her flaming cheeks.
“It’ll be too big and it’s kind of old,
but it’s clean,” he said, handing her one of
his undershirts.
“Thank you,” she said quietly,
accepting the shirt and looking up at him
with thousands of questions racing through
her mind.
“You go on to bed,” he said. “I have
some things I need to do before I turn in.”
“Your bed?” she asked, her voice
uncharacteristically squeaky.
“I only have one bed,” he said and
then seemed to realize their cultures were
clashing again. “Is it unacceptable for us
to share a bed?”
Her face was flaming and her heart
was pounding, but somehow she was able
to say, “It should be okay.”
He
smiled,
looking
relieved.
“Goodnight, Maralee.”
She realized he was dismissing her.
“Goodnight,” she returned morosely
and climbed to her feet to find the bed she
would share with him.
caught her arm. “Is something wrong? You
seem upset.”
She looked up at him; his face was
barely visible in the dim room. The lock
of hair that covered his eye appeared
whiter than usual, in stark contrast to the
gloom. She stared at it, reminded of a
shining crescent moon and then turned her
gaze to his golden eyes.
“I’m fine.”
“Would you like me to clean your
other breast for you?”
Maralee’s eyes widened and all the
blood in her body seemed to rush to her
face at once. “N-no,” she denied, though
her breasts began to ache with wanting his
warm, moist caresses.
“Did I say something wrong again?”
he asked. “You seem embarrassed.”
“I’m not embarrassed. Why would I be
embarrassed?” Her unconcerned laugh
sounded entirely unconvincing. If he
noticed, he didn’t say anything.
She pulled her arm free of his light
grasp and continued towards his bedroom.
Maralee opened the bedroom door and
ducked to enter the low-ceilinged room.
She half wanted him to follow her and
‘clean her other breast’ as he had put it,
but he didn’t. She left the door cracked
open so what little light there was in the
house could penetrate the absolute
darkness of the room and she could
change. She removed her clothing, folding
it neatly and storing it in a corner. She
glanced over her shoulder frequently to
see if Nash was watching her. He never
made an appearance.
She pulled his shirt on over her head
and burrowed into his soft bed. His scent
engulfed her. It clung to the bedclothes and
his shirt. Every slight sound made her
tense with nerves. She kept expecting
Nash to climb into bed with her, but if it
weren’t for the occasional scrape of his
chair at his desk, she would have thought
she was alone in the house. It was well
after midnight when sleep finally claimed
her.
CHAPTER 8
Nash watched Maralee disappear into
his room, longing to follow her. He
listened to the sounds of her undressing
and wondered why the thought of her
naked made his heart thud so violently and
his human cock grow rigid once again.
Nudity was a natural state of the body. He
had seen every woman of his pack in
naked human form dozens of times. The
thought of Maralee without clothes was
somehow different. Perhaps it was
because it wouldn’t be natural for her to
appear before him without clothes.
Despite her physical interest in him, he
knew she was inexperienced. He was
likewise
inexperienced
in human
expressions of physical intimacy. She had
seemed aroused by his attentive cleaning
of her wound and breast, and yet she had
not thought enough of him to clean his
wound properly. She had used a wet
towel, as if the taste of him was unsavory.
He had used the healing powers of his
saliva on her wound. Why hadn’t she done
the same for him? He didn’t understand
her, but she intrigued him.
When all sounds coming from the
bedroom ceased, he turned and went to his
desk beneath the window. The moon was
large and bright, but not full. His pack was
free of its madness for the time being and
if he fulfilled his obligation, they would
escape its curse forever. Nash lit
additional candles and selected several
books from the shelf. He’d accomplished
nothing all day. Sweet Maralee was far
too distracting to allow him to work. It
was impossible to believe she was the
same woman who had so viciously
slaughtered his brother. Had that really
only been the night before? It didn’t seem
real, as if it were all part of an alternate
reality. Cort would be scratching on his
door any minute now to ask his little
brother to accompany him on a midnight
hunt.
Nash sighed, and sat down at his desk
with a book. There would be no midnight
summons at his door ever again.
He forced his concentration to his
work. Nash had puzzled over these thick
volumes for almost a century now, and
still the answers were no clearer to him
than when he’d been named the pack’s
Guardian as a pup. Now that Nash had
their mortal enemy under his protection,
perhaps he would gain a sudden
understanding of the words written by the
last Guardian who had lived five hundred
years ago.
Nash opened the first volume, and
touched the crumbling, yellowed title
page. In neat print, the title Of Immortality
and the Curse was scarcely discernable.
The ink had faded. Nash had spent many
long years recopying the words in this
book to preserve them, but the general text
did not interest him tonight. Instead, he
wished to examine the random notes
written in the margins. At one time, they’d
been nothing but an annoyance.
He flipped several pages into the old,
hand-written manuscript to the description
of the curse. Nash knew the story well.
One of his species, a chieftain named
Burl, had captured a powerful sage. The
sage had been a philosopher and wizard
who had procured, in his vast knowledge,
the secret of life. For reasons undisclosed
—Nash was certain torture had played a
part—the sage had worked a spell of
immortality, granting eternal life to Burl
and all of his descendants.
Upon his release, the sage worked a
second bit of magic—a curse that would
drive the pack to insanity beneath the full
moon. Humans would hunt them as
monsters rather than allowing them the
peaceful eternal lives they desired. Only a
Wolf beneath the constant protection of the
crescent moon would be free of the Full
Moon Curse, and only that one, ordained
Wolf Guardian, could break the curse.
Unfortunately, though Nash had been born
with the white mark of the crescent moon,
he had no idea how to break the curse.
Each of the Wolf Guardians, grand total of
two in the pack’s long history, had studied
the words of the sage religiously. Neither
Nash nor the guardian before him had
come close to breaking the five hundred
year old spell.
Nash squinted, trying to read what was
written in the margin alongside the
description of the curse. The words were
faded and in places not visible at all. As
far as he could tell it read, Silver poisons
..ld’s soul. The Guard... ..st find l… in
the ..r. of the ..emy. True form is of ..e
..ver.
Nash sighed forlornly. How was he
supposed make sense of faded garble? It
seemed like a warning, but he was already
quite aware of silver being a poison. The
sage had not tried to hide their weakness
to silver from them, but the embittered
man had not been so open with
information concerning the curse.
Two things were made clear in the
text. Only the Wolf Guardian could break
the curse and once broken the Wolves
would lose all they had garnered. But
even what they would lose was unclear—
their lives, immortality, humanity, their
dual existence? Maybe he shouldn’t even
try to break the curse. The outcome might
be worse than the curse itself. Still he had
to try. They expected it of him. He must
have been born beneath the protection of
the crescent moon for a reason, and he
would do everything within his power to
see his duty fulfilled. Even befriend the
enemy.
Nash searched the familiar volumes
for more clues, hoping to stumble across
something related to the Wolf Hunters and
if they had anything to do with breaking
the curse. Something had always teased
Nash’s subconscious about their role in
the curse, but he found little specific
information. He marked several pages to
peruse more carefully when it wasn’t the
middle of the night and his thoughts
weren’t diverging every few minutes to
the warm body sleeping in his bed. It was
well after midnight when he returned his
books to their shelves, banked the fire in
the grate and snuffed all the candles in the
house.
He went to his room, careful not to
wake Maralee who slept on the far side of
the pallet. Nash typically slept naked, in
his Wolf form, but tonight he left his
undershorts in place and climbed into bed
with the beautiful young woman who
interrupted all coherent thoughts. Her
small body was warm and comforting
when she turned over in her sleep and
cuddled up against him. He tensed,
wondering how she would respond if he
used his tongue to clean her body from
head to toe, concentrating most of his
attention somewhere in the middle. Would
she allow him to taste a sample of that
glorious scent beckoning from between
her thighs? His groin tightened at the
memory of her delicate, lust-inducing
fragrance.
“I can’t let myself think like that,” he
murmured to the sleeping Maralee.
Sleeping with the enemy was one thing,
sleeping with her, something else entirely.
“Self-c
ontrol,” he said, and inhaled
deeply to catch her delightful, foreign
scent in his sensitive nose.
CHAPTER 9
The dream was forever the same. Maralee
always awoke just when the terrifying
growl of her memory sounded behind her,
but tonight she did not wake. Tonight she
relived the terror of fighting for her life
for the first time.
Six-year-old Maralee, trembling with
a mixture of grief and fear, turned to
look at the Wolf behind her. Her father
lay dead at her feet behind her on the
porch. She could not be certain which of
her blood relatives had fallen to this
particular enormous black beast, but it
had killed at least one of them. Its bared
teeth were stained with blood. Its muzzle
glistened with the substance.
The sword was heavy. She had to grip
it with both hands and use all of her
strength just to keep it from dragging on
the ground. The Wolf seemed unaware of
the weapon. It lunged for her and
Maralee lifted the sword in the same
instant. It impaled itself and dropped
lifeless at her feet.
Inexplicably, the sword in her hands
lightened, and was comforting instead of
horrifying. She was no longer six, but
twenty-one, with years of Wolf-slaying
experience. Nash materialized amongst
the bodies of the fallen Wolves. He
stared at her as if appalled by what
she’d done. He moved closer. A black
Wolf replaced him, still approaching.
Maralee took a step backwards, but Nash
replaced the Wolf again. A look of
devastation
twisted
his
handsome
features.
She wanted to hold him, to take the
pained look from his eyes, but he ignored
her. He bent down, lifted the body a dead
Wolf and disappeared again. Within the
same instant, he appeared directly in
front of her. She lifted her arms to reach
for him, but instead of embracing him,
she drove the point of her sword into his
chest. She knew what was happening, but
she couldn’t stop. She forced the blade
slowly into his heart. His golden eyes
transfixed her. She didn’t stop pressing
forward until the blade was buried to the
hilt, protruding from his back. He
blinked and she tore her eyes from his to
look down at her hands. It was apparent
why she hadn’t been able to stop driving
the sword deeper. Nash’s hands covered
hers, and he was forcing the sword into
his own body.