Karen Whiddon - The Wolf Siren

Then, while he stood drinking in the sight of her, she began trembling. A horrible, violent shivering, reminding him where she’d been and what a man looming over her bed most likely meant to her.

Horrified, he stepped back. His inner wolf snarled, evidently unsettled by the sudden, sharp ache just below his heart. Moving carefully, he crossed over to his own bed and pulled back the covers. A quick glance over his shoulder at her revealed her shaking hadn’t abated in the slightest. Poor Lilly was clearly terrified.

His chest tight, he considered his options. Deciding, he snagged his car keys from the dresser. “Be right back,” he murmured, even though he knew she wouldn’t acknowledge his words.

Unlocking his car, he reached into the backseat and retrieved his battered guitar case. While he was out there, he did a quick scope of the parking lot, reassured by the emptiness of the well-lit area. Even the highway seemed quiet. Not a lot of activity on I-90 near Billings at night.

Back inside the room, he bolted the door behind him. Lilly continued to lie in the same position, her slender body still wracked by shudders. Cursing under his breath, he sat down on the edge of his bed and fumbled with the latches on his case, careful not to look too long at her.

Once he had the old acoustic guitar out, he considered. He needed something soothing, not the rollicking bluesy-country music he generally favored. His entire family played one instrument or another. One of the first things he’d learned on the guitar was the old Beatles song “Let It Be.” Perfect.

She gave a reflexive jerk of her shoulders when he strummed the first chord. Ignoring this, he continued softly playing, singing the words in his low voice. While he sang, his wolf tried to sense hers. So far, even though such a thing was common among Shape-shifters, he hadn’t been able to do this with her, not even the most minute fraction of contact. Kane couldn’t understand why her wolf seemed to be locked away most of the time, though he guessed this was the result of the torture and experiments she’d suffered while locked away in the basement of Sanctuary. He had hopes that eventually, with the passage of time, she’d be able to return to a semblance of normalcy.

So he continued to play music for her, and for her wolf. He’d learned music not only calmed the savage beast, but provided a soothing balm to troubled souls.

Gradually, her trembling appeared to lessen. Encouraged, he began another song. This time the old Bob Dylan tune “Blowing in the Wind.” Though several artists had done covers of this song, in Kane’s head he always heard Bob Dylan’s gravelly voice. Kane knew all the words to this one, too, and he sang with his heart, quietly paying homage to a beautiful woman who should never have had to endure what she had.

Midway through this second song, Lilly opened her eyes. She turned her head and, after a moment of silent scrutiny, she pushed up on one elbow to watch him.

Progress. He barely managed to suppress an encouraging smile. Instead, pretending not to notice, he launched into some old Judy Collins, refusing to reflect on how every soothing song he could think of was from four or five decades ago. What could he say? He’d always liked oldies.

Once the last notes of the music died away, he placed the guitar on the chair next to his bed. “Good night,” he told her, inclining his head in a sort of salute before reaching up and quickly extinguishing the light.

As he lay in the darkness, his heart inexplicably pounding in his chest, with his wolf wanting to howl mournfully, he listened. The faint sounds of the nearby interstate were muted, and the rest of the motel was quiet. But these things barely registered in his consciousness, because he attuned every fiber of his being to hearing her.

At first, there was nothing, as if she was frozen in place. But then Lilly must have accepted the need to sleep or resigned herself to the inevitable. He heard the slight rustle of her sheets as she tried to make herself comfortable, the soft sigh that escaped her lips. And finally, her breathing slowed, became even and deep.

The tightness eased in his chest. She’d fallen asleep. Why he should feel as if he’d accomplished a victory, he couldn’t say. This drive would take four long days, with three overnight stops. They’d made it through the first. He could only hope the next two would be easier for her.

Eventually, he drifted into a restless slumber of his own.

* * *

Lilly came awake sometime in the dark of the night. As was her habit, she held herself utterly still while she gathered her bearings. The even breathing of the man in the bed next to her told her he was out, safely locked in the throes of REM sleep.

Kane. He looked like a fallen angel, or at least how she’d always pictured them when her father had ranted. Maybe not Lucifer, but one of the others caught in the fallout. She thought this because she detected no malice in those amazing silver eyes of his.

Everything about him affected her. Her experience outside of Sanctuary was too small for her to know why. She couldn’t understand her reaction toward him. Lucas had told her she could trust him, and she took what her twin brother told her as gospel. But the effect Kane had on her wasn’t like fear. He exerted some kind of magnetic pull on her, the way a candle attracts a moth. She wasn’t sure what it was exactly. An odd combination of trepidation and fascination, maybe. The latter worried her.

Of course, it seemed as if everything made her anxious these days—ever since gaining her freedom, something she’d once hoped for but had given up on. Now she wished for normalcy, to understand how to interact with others without the crippling sense of trepidation. Lucas had said she needed to be patient, to give it time.

But she couldn’t lie, not to herself. She suspected that the fear would always be with her. Even in Lucas’s home, she couldn’t control her immediate reaction if someone inadvertently startled her. The first few times that she’d dropped into a feral crouch and bared her teeth had been humiliating, to say the least. She’d just begun to try to train herself to relax when Kane had shown up and she’d learned she’d have to travel.

Among the many things she was working on was trying to blur her memory of the years of her captivity. Sometimes, she held out hope that she could be successful, but then the dreams would come and she’d wake panicked, believing herself to be still shackled to a bed, a helpless prisoner while nameless people shoved needles into her or hooked her up to machines that brought nothing but pain.

At such times, she’d learned the trick of leaving her body, a sort of disassociation that allowed her to travel far, far away. It was this ability, she now knew, that had enabled her to hang on to the last shreds of her sanity.

Had this been a good thing? Often, she found herself wondering. She certainly hadn’t expected life after captivity to be so painful. Sometimes she thought life might have been easier if she was mindless and drooling.

Pushing aside her dark thoughts, she wondered what the followers of Jacob Gideon and his church of Sanctuary found so valuable about her that would make them continue to hunt her. As far as she knew, none of the multitude of experiments they’d performed on her had been even remotely successful.

The man in the bed next to her, Kane, made a sound, low in his throat. More like a growl than a snore, even though she knew he was still deeply asleep. She wondered if he knew she sensed his wolf and how much such a thing terrified her. The only other wolf she’d ever been able to be aware of was her twin brother’s. And even that had been before the man who’d called himself their father had discovered that they were abominations.