Authors: Celeste Anwar
The man still holding her uttered a bark of a
laugh. “Weren’t no dawgs,
chère. I
tink you know dat. It’s why you run
so fast, no?”
“Look, I’m sorry if I was trespassing. Just let
me go. I’ll leave.”
“It’s a liddle late for sorry,
chère.
Dare’s
somebody got a bone ta pick wid you.” Rising, he hauled her to her feet. “Be
a good liddle gal now, you hear? He won’t be happy if we have ta git rough.”
Despite the threat, she fought for all she was
worth as soon as she was on her feet. She caught them off guard, managing to
slip free for a handful of moments before she was tackled again. That time
they bound her wrists before they hauled her up. She screamed, partly from
frustration and partly with the forlorn hope that someone might hear her and
come to help.
“Scream all you like. Dey ain’t nobody ta hear
ya out here but the brethren,
chère.”
She knew he was probably right and the fear broke through the
cocoon of shock that had surrounded her. The failing light concealed them in
deepening shadows, but she didn’t need more light to know what they were. She
would have known even if the one holding her had not mentioned the brethren.
There was an air about them that told its own
tale.
She was in the company of wolves.
* * * *
The soft, sucking sound of mud and the faint
splash and gurgle of water around the poles vied with the croak of frogs, the
chirp of crickets and night birds, and the croaking, thankfully distant,
bellows of alligators as the boat they were in moved smoothly through the
bayous.
Erin jerked as yet another blood sucking insect
latched onto her, wishing she had her hands free so that she could beat the
swarming mosquitoes back.
She had heard others, but she had not seen more
than the two werewolves that had captured her. They had walked her all the way
across the island to the landward side. When she’d finally collapsed from
weariness, hoping to at least slow them down so that she could have time to
come up with a possibility of escape, the one behind her had simply picked her
up and tossed her over his shoulder as if she’d weighed no more than a feather.
Unfortunately, she weighed considerably more and
her own weight was sheer agony, especially since they picked up the pace when
she was no longer slowing them down, loping along the pitch black paths as if
it were broad daylight. They hadn’t been moving long before she’d been begging
them to let her walk on her own again.
They ignored her. She blacked out when she was
finally set on her feet and the blood ceased to pound in her brain. When she
came around, she was already in the boat. The one that had been carrying her
moved to the front and picked up a pole while the other one shoved the boat
into the water, waded out and climbed in.
Without any apparent hesitation about where they
were going, they moved along the inner coastal waterway for a while and then
nosed the boat into a shallow thread of water running through the marshes that
was barely wide enough for the boat. It widened a short distance in and the
boat began to move more smoothly.
For what seemed like hours, and probably was,
they followed a map in their heads that led them deeper and deeper into the
swamp. Erin had long since become too tired to really feel much fear.
It was there still, but lying beneath layer upon
layer of weariness, misery, despair, and the grief that had ridden her so long
she hardly even recognized it any more.
A light somewhere ahead of them finally
penetrated the daze she’d fallen into and Erin strained to peer though the
darkness. She found that they were moving toward it. A rough hewn cypress
dock that looked too rickety to stand on emerged from the gloom. The tendrils
of fog that had begun to creep along the surface of the water, parted slightly
and she caught a glimpse of weathered boards amongst the trees a short distance
from the docks.
She doubted she would even have seen that much
except for the fact that there was a light in one of the windows of the cabin.
She suspected, even in daylight, the building merged with its surroundings so
completely that it was virtually invisible to anyone who didn’t know it was
there.
As they poled the boat toward the dock, a dark
figure emerged from the deeper shadows. The flickering light from the torches
set along the dock limned his figure, the shadows elongating as he moved toward
the end of the dock until he seemed like a giant as he planted his feet
slightly apart and waited. Despite the wide legged stance, she might have
thought he was completely relaxed except for the fact that his hands were
balled into tight fists.
The side of the boat butted against one of the
poles holding the dock up. It jolted Erin out of her abstraction.
The man on the dock didn’t speak until she’d been
lifted out of the boat and deposited on the dock in front of him. He crouched
before her, studying her face in the flickering light for several moments. He
lifted a hand, flicking a finger over the place along her neck where there was
a tiny, whitened scar. “I knew, eventually, the mark would bring you back to
me,
chère.”
A wave of shock swept over Erin as his voice filtered into
her mind. “Jesse?”
He wrapped his hands around her waist, lifting
her to her feet as he stood, thrusting his shoulder into her belly and hauling
her over the hard ridge like a sack of potatoes. It knocked the breath out of
her, focusing her attention on struggling to drag air into her lungs.
“She was alone?”
“
Oui
. No others. She went back ta de
place, like you said she would. She was callin’ for you so we come ta bring
her ta you. Run like hell when she seen us, though. You watch her,
mon ami.
I guarantee she be gone you doan mind out. She fast, move like greased
lightnin’ when de mood move her.”
“Many thanks--for everything,
mes ami
,”
Jesse responded.
“You shore you doan need help wid dat one?” one
of the men asked with a laugh.
Jesse swatted her ass smartly with the palm of
his hand. “But,
oui
,
mon ami
. Dis woman an’ me, we go way back,
don’ we
chère
? We been good friends, very good friends.”
The swat jolted Erin out of her shocked stupor.
She sucked in a painful bite of air and let out a huff of anger. Rearing up
abruptly, she wiggled her legs, trying to free herself from his grip. He
placed a palm in the middle of her shoulders and shoved her down again.
The two men in the boat began to laugh. Waving,
they pushed the boat away from the pier and disappeared into the gloom as Jesse
turned and strode purposefully along the dock, the heels of his boots beating
out a threatening tattoo that made Erin’s belly quiver with dread.
The darkness closed in around them as Jesse
stepped off of the dock and onto soft, mossy grass. He continued without any
noticeable difficultly in negotiating the pitch darkness. His feet struck wood
again a few moments layer as he climbed a shallow set of steps and crossed a
wooden porch.
A door creaked open on rusted hinges. Erin’s
head spun as he turned to close it again, bolting it. She caught a glimpse of
a surprisingly comfortable living room and then he crossed the room and opened
another door.
She let out a gasp of fright as he shifted her
from his shoulder and she felt herself falling. She bit her tongue when she
hit the mattress and bounced. Before she could recover from the fall, he
grabbed her bound wrists and yanked her arms over her head. She tried to jerk
free, twisting at the waist at the same time to kick him. He released his grip
on her hands long enough to shove her flat and straddle her, then pushed her
arms above her head again and secured them to the headboard.
Even in the dimness of the room the look he bent
upon her was enough to freeze the blood in her veins.
She was too mindless with fear to consider giving
up without a fight though. The minute he climbed off of her, she launched
another attack, drawing her knees up and kicking out at him. He sprawled
across her, pinning her to the bed as he grabbed one leg, straightened it in
spite of all she could do to prevent it and tied something around her ankle.
She winced as he jerked the knot tight.
He levered himself off of her then.
She swung her foot at his face as he reached to
grab her other ankle. He caught it mid-air. Shoving her leg to the mattress,
he looped something around her ankle and jerked that tight as well.
She stared at him, panting for breath as he got
off the bed and moved around to the foot, checking the rope he’d used to secure
her ankles.
Apparently satisfied, he moved away from the
bed. Erin heard a scratching noise. The smell of sulfur wafted past her nose
as a match sprang to life. Holding it to the wick of a lamp, he adjusted it,
replaced the globe over the flame and moved back to the bed, setting the lamp
down on a small table beside it.
Erin’s belly tightened spasmodically as he
settled on the side of the bed and she saw his face clearly for the first time
in the light of the lamp.
Her memories hadn’t done him justice. Or maybe
she had simply never really looked at him before when she’d only thought of him
as an animal?
Analyzed one by one, she supposed there was
nothing particularly remarkable about his features or the lean plains of his
cheeks and strong jaw and chin. There was a hint of a cleft in his chin and a
slightly crescent shaped dimple in each cheek, faintly visible even when he wasn’t
smiling. His nose was straight and well shaped, his nostrils flaring in a way
that left them just shy of a perpetual sneer. His lips were well defined, but
thin and hard. His brows were nothing more than a thick, dark slash, without a
hint of an arch.
His eyes of all his features, was the only one
truly remarkable. Surrounded by thick, curling black lashes, they would’ve
been beautiful if not for the fury glittering in them as he studied her.
Taken together as a whole, he was enough to knock
any red blooded woman’s socks off, particularly with the long, glossy black
hair that framed his purely male face.
“I thought you were dead,” she said finally.
His lips tightened. “Thought? Or hoped?”
She felt the color leave her face. “You think I
wanted you dead?”
“Didn’t you? Isn’t that why you released me? It
was you, wasn’t it,
chère
?”
She gaped at him in disbelief. “I was trying to
help….”
“Me? Or yourself?” he growled menacingly.
Dragging his shirt off, he displayed his back for
her and then his chest. Erin was so mesmerized by the play of hard, bulging
muscles with his movements that it took her several moments to realize his
back, chest and arms were marred with scars--round scars--at least a half a
dozen, she thought, though it was very likely that some of the bullets had
passed through him and made two holes.
She found it nearly impossible to accept that
he’d been hit that many times and survived.
But then again … he wasn’t human.
Strange that she had to remind herself of that
now when before she hadn’t thought of him as human at all.
Or maybe it wasn’t so strange. In the scheme of
things, the revulsion she’d learned for her own species because of the things
they were capable of made it a little harder to decide which species was more
animalistic than the other. He, at least, had had ample reason to behave as he
had. He’d been put through things that would have broken a human’s mind. The
pursuit of knowledge wasn’t an excuse for what they’d done to him--and to her.
He leaned over her, bracing a fist on either side
of her on the bed and she realized the question hadn’t been purely rhetorical.
He wanted to know. The problem was … there was no simple answer. “If I’d
wanted you dead, I didn’t have to do anything at all. They would’ve destroyed
you when they were done. Don’t tell me you don’t know that!”
It wasn’t the answer he’d been looking for. She
could see that in his expression. He pushed away from her abruptly, stood up.
Her heart squeezed painfully in her chest when he pulled a long knife from a
sheathe on his belt, testing the sharpness of the blade with the ball of his
thumb.
His gaze moved from the thin cut on his thumb to
her, snagging her gaze for a pregnant moment. “You should hold real still,
chère
.”