Linda Thomas-Sundstrom - Half Wolf

He backed up, stood tall, drenched in moonlight. The first pop Kaitlin heard after his little speech was a muted sound. There was no mistaking the second for anything benign. Or the third.

Like a series of pinging buttons on an overstretched shirt, the bones of Michael’s jaw began to unhinge. The beautiful, sharp-featured face in front of her began to stretch. Michael’s dark hair lengthened as if someone invisible had tugged at the roots. His muscles danced as though something alive under the skin wanted to get out.

As he dropped to a crouch, the scrolling tattoos on his chest began to spread, covering muscle, turning his skin dark. Then his legs furred up in fluid series of swishes and cracks.

One minute the man had been there, and the next minute, something else appeared that uttered a reverberating growl. When his head lifted, familiar green eyes looked out, but it was no longer Michael, the angel’s namesake, facing her. It was an animal, dark as the night, tall as her thighs. Sleek. Primal. Down on all fours.

Michael had turned into a wolf.

And he had been right about one thing.

She didn’t yet know anything about what was going on.

Chapter 3

Kaitlin woke up screaming, her body prepared to fight. Fists curled, mouth open, she felt trapped and unable to flee the nightmare because something was holding her down.

She kicked out with her legs and opened her eyes. Expecting to see a big wolf leaning over her, she instead found another image. Trees.

Hell, yes. There were trees in her sightline, and not the living kind. She was looking at a picture, a poster of a forest, on the wall above a desk that held a retro lava lamp, a silver telephone and an open laptop computer.

Hesitating, consciously attempting to quiet her churning insides, Kaitlin’s mind filled in the gaps. These were her things. Familiar things. She wasn’t outside, running in a moonlit field. Nor was she pinned to a tree by a naked man.

This was her apartment.

But she wasn’t alone.

Fine hairs at the nape of Kaitlin’s neck prickled with leftover panic as she turned her head. No wolf waited there with its black fur gleaming. A woman, a stranger, sat on the edge of her bed.

“Kaitlin, is it?” her uninvited visitor asked.

Kaitlin sat up to find that she’d been trapped by nothing more than a tangle of sheets. Eyeing the stranger, she scooted backward against the headboard. Quivers of muscle soreness accompanied her movement. She looked down to find her arms covered in red scratches already starting to scab.

Instinctively, Kaitlin reached for her neck.

“That bandage won’t be necessary for long,” the woman said. “You’ll have a pretty little scar that I suppose you can consider your first war wound.”

The woman was close to Kaitlin in age—maybe twenty-three or four, with deeply tanned olive skin and glossy black hair that hung halfway down her back. Nothing out of the ordinary presented itself in the woman’s face or body. The problem was her eyes, which were an unusual shade of green that Kaitlin had seen before.

Fingering the bandage taped to her neck, Kaitlin’s fear escalated. She tore off the bandage and winced at the raw, extremely sensitive puckered line of raised skin beneath her right ear.

That can’t be right. I’m awake now.

Dizziness threatened as flashes of memory returned. Night. Blood. An attacker with incredible strength. In that nightmare, she had been mauled by a monster.

Her eyes swept the room in a desperate attempt to set things straight. No man, wolfish or otherwise, sat on the bed, or appeared anywhere else in the small studio apartment. Morning light seeped through the filmy curtains. There was no brown bedspread. She sat on familiar worn floral sheets.

“Kaitlin?” her visitor repeated.

“You can’t be real.” Kaitlin avoided the woman’s green-eyed stare.

“Really? Then I wonder why I bothered to brush my hair. Still, I guess you’d have to think that way, wouldn’t you, since your reality is being inconveniently rearranged.”

“Who are you?”

Her visitor tossed her hair, scattering a whole bunch of scents into the air at once: soap, lipstick and something else Kaitlin had no time to pin down. Damp fur?

Also, now that she thought about it, other smells came to her above and beyond those: dust, pencil lead, chemicals from the lava lamp and a pair of dirty socks stashed under the bed. She also smelled the iron tang of anxiety. Her anxiety. Because, hell...the crisp denim of this stranger’s dark blue jeans had a unique smell. Also discernible was the scent of the worn-out fabric of her own T-shirt. Edging those smells was a lingering odor of badly injured skin, blood and matted hair.

Her hands fell like rocks to the mattress as she studied the scratches crisscrossing her forearms.

“Looks like you might have picked those up last night,” her visitor said. “Sometimes puppies forget how vulnerable their skin really is.”

“Who are you?” Kaitlin repeated.

“I’m Rena. And you, it seems, are Michael’s little secret. Until now.”

Michael. That name belonged in a dream. Kaitlin refused to let this woman see her shake. She swallowed a rising protest.

“He hasn’t told us about you,” Rena continued. “Since Michael has been MIA for a few days, I got worried and followed him here.”

Michael was here? Yes. With her eyes closed, Kaitlin found hints of her dream man in the room. There were scents of shaving cream, faded jeans and musky maleness.

“Who are you, exactly?” she asked Rena, her voice faint.

“Kind of a new relative. A distant cousin.”

That made no sense at all. Kaitlin tried another tactic. “What do you want?”

“Merely to see you and find out why Michael would do something like this. I suppose he wanted to ease you through the process on his own first, before letting us know what he’d done.”

“What process would that be?”

In Kaitlin’s mind the word wolf kept flashing. Fragments of what she’d begun to worry had not been a dream began to coalesce. In it, the man this woman spoke of had turned into an animal right before her eyes.

The fine line between reason and insanity made Kaitlin’s nerve endings fire. As she wrapped her arms around her knees and considered Rena carefully, fear continued to make her heart race.

She looked again at the scratches on her arms. Had she gotten those from being pressed to the bark of a tree, or from a madman trying to kill her in the park?

Rena’s smile suggested that none of these panic attacks Kaitlin was having might be warranted. Whoever this Michael guy was, and whatever kind of trauma she had been through, she couldn’t believe there were alternate species in the world. If she’d had an accident and some guy named Michael, acting like a Good Samaritan, had helped her home, possibly jealousy was what had brought Rena here today. Rena could be Michael’s girlfriend. His lover.

As calmly as she could, Kaitlin met Rena’s scrutinizing gaze. “Where did your friend go?”

“To the corner store, probably to bring you something to eat,” Rena said. “We need to keep our strength up and require lots of fuel. More than usual.”

“We, as in what? Wolves?” Kaitlin asked cynically.

Rena smiled again, flashing very white teeth that almost made the idea of wolves seem plausible.

“He didn’t have to bother. I’m not hungry,” Kaitlin said. In fact, she was sure she’d never be hungry again.

“You’ll be hungry as soon as you smell the food,” Rena told her. “Our metabolisms run hot.”

In her dream, Michael had been hot in more ways than one. But Kaitlin couldn’t turn inward to look for answers to the problems at hand with this woman staring at her. In another minute, she’d sprint for the door.