Lori Handeland - Marked by the Moon

“How?” she asked.

“No idea.”

“Yet you’re one of those who became?”

“As far as I know, I’m the only one.”

“Say what?”

“I’m the only one who actually became a wolf. Others wore the skin, fought with trance-like fury, became known as berserkers—”

“Hold on,” she interrupted. “You’re telling me you were the legend?”

“Could be.”

“Did you ever hear the legend before you shape-shifted?”

“No. But it wasn’t as if we had cell phones back then. We barely had books.”

“Did you ever hear it on your travels? Before your story spread to the masses?”

He peered at the ceiling, considering, before he said, “No.”

“Fantastic,” she muttered. “You can’t just be a regular werewolf, you have to be a magical legend with anger management issues.”

“Go figure,” he said.

Alex squinted at him through the gloomy glow cast by the lantern. “You’re awfully hip”—she snapped her fingers—“for a Viking.”

“I learned to fit in.”

She laughed. “Believe me. You do not fit in.”

He stiffened. “Of course I do.”

“Just because you talk like a human and sometimes walk like a human, that doesn’t make you human.”

His jaw tightened. “I am more human than many humans I’ve met.”

“Sure you are.”

He frowned and Alex stifled a smile. Good. She’d gotten to him. He was far too confident. Most werewolves were. They had reason to be. And Julian had more reason than most.

“Getting back to how you became furry,” she said. “Explain.”

“I just did.”

“You don’t think ‘I got pissed and became a wolf’ requires a tad more clarification?”

“There is no clarification, ” he said. “We were in battle—”

“Where?”

He said a word that sounded like guttural gibberish to Alex. Then his lips tightened and he spat out, “Scotland now. They are nasty fighters, the Scottish.”

“So Braveheart wasn’t all Hollywood hype?” He appeared confused again, and she rolled her eyes. “You may talk like you’re from this century, but you need to watch a few movies if you ever want to fit in for real.”

“I don’t,” he said sharply. “I plan to stay in my village from now until the day that I—”

“Die?” she murmured. “Right. What was different about the battle in Scotland that made you—” She waved her hand. “You know.”

“Furry?” he supplied.

She shrugged. The quilt slipped, and his gaze went to her bare shoulder, heating before he tugged it away.

“I saw my brother fall.” His face filled with such anguish Alex got a chill and pulled the blanket closer. “I howled to the night sky. Called upon Odin to give me strength and fought my way toward him, but…” He shook his head. “In the fury that followed, the skin of the wolf that I carried upon me became my skin, and I ran beneath the fullness of the moon as a beast.”

“And then?” Alex prompted when his silence stretched too long.

He looked up, blinking as if he’d forgotten she was there. “Ever after I became a wolf when the moon was round. Or my anger made me so.”

He’d begun to speak with the formal cadence of those who spoke English as a second language, his memories more real, it seemed, than her.

“I discovered as time went by that fury brought forth my magic.”

“Magic in the blood,” she murmured. “Perhaps in your past.”

“Perhaps.”

“But you can make other wolves,” she said. “That’s strange.”

“Why?”

“Lycanthropy is a virus, passed through the saliva. If you became a wolf by magic, then how is it you can spread the virus through a bite?”

He turned his palms up. “All I know is that I can.”

Alex fell asleep again. Shape-shifting required voracious amounts of energy, and the one small rabbit Julian had left for her dinner would barely have taken the edge off her hunger. Combined with the adrenaline rush from being chased by a polar bear, then being severely injured, her becoming unconscious for several more hours had been a given.

Julian, however, was wide awake. He lay side by side with Alex, trying not to let their skin brush, but every once in a while it did. Then he would have a flash of them together, and the only way to make the images stop would be to think of Alana and how he had lost her.

This child—and Alex was a child, even without the nearly twelve centuries that separated them—had killed Alana in cold blood and without remorse. That he’d touched her, kissed her, been inside her, not only kept him awake but made him slightly ill. That his body kept responding as if it wanted to do so again eventually forced him to leave behind the warmth of the quilt and venture into the chill of the cave where he sat with his back against the hard, icy stone and stared at her sleeping face. She really was quite beautiful.

Julian growled a curse in Norwegian and banged his head against the wall. The resulting thud echoed throughout the small space and caused Alex to murmur what sounded suspiciously like his name.

What in Thor’s hammer had possessed him to bring her along? Besides the fact that he’d been physically unable to leave her behind.

By dusk the storm had petered out. The sun set in a clear sky, red and pink and orange rays spreading across a vista of ice and snow. Julian shape-shifted, relishing the brush of the wind in his fur and the drift of the last few snowflakes tumbling onto his face.

“Planning to leave without me?” Alex stood in the opening. The quilt around her shoulders only reached to the apex of her thighs.

Julian’s gaze was drawn to the long, toned length of her legs, and he remembered how they’d felt clasped around his hips as he’d pounded into her again and again—

“Wake up on the wrong side of the cave?” she murmured.

Only then did he realize he’d been growling.

Annoyed with himself for the hard-on he couldn’t seem to shake, and with her for giving it to him, Julian ran into the deepening gloom. Once Barlow’s tail disappeared over a near ridge, Alex dropped the blanket and changed.

She’d slept better than she could remember sleeping in years. Had that been because of the great sex or because for the first time since her father had died she hadn’t felt alone?

Alex caught the flash of Julian’s golden fur just ahead and increased her speed. How was it that a man she considered her enemy, an animal that had turned her into one, too, had made her feel secure enough in his presence to sleep peacefully for hours? Just because the man had made her come didn’t mean he was anything less than a beast.

They continued on throughout the night, moving farther and farther north. Julian appeared and disappeared ahead, but he never allowed Alex close enough to actually run at his side, and that was fine by her. Despite being housed in a wolf’s body, her woman’s mind remained confused.

She saw nothing but snow and ice and trees, a few bunnies, which she managed to catch and eat. Her legs were working almost in tandem with her brain tonight. She only tangled them together and fell once or twice.

Not long after midnight, lights sparkled on the horizon. Alex blinked and they disappeared. She figured they’d been a mirage, especially when they reappeared several times over the next few hours, winking out again each time she tried to focus on them more clearly.

The air was so cold her eyeballs ached. Maybe that was why.

They’d left the trees behind. Eons of ice and snow spread to the sky. Alex began to worry about what would happen when the sun came up and she changed. Naked, without any kind of shelter, life would become extremely unpleasant.