“All right.”
Moderately disappointed, Brynn turned around to face the vegetable garden. As she studied the neat rows of tomatoes and string beans, she listened to the rustle of fabric, the snick of a zipper lowering. She could almost sense the air moving behind her, displaced by Rook’s simple act of undressing. Her senses hadn’t changed since her arrival at Cornerstone—that was impossible. Perhaps the change was simply psychosomatic. Here among the other side of her nature, new things were coming to the forefront.
Like my visions. They’re certainly more active here.
“Strip tease complete,” Rook said. “It’s not pretty in-progress, so you don’t have to watch.”
She peeked over her shoulder. Rook was on his hands and knees, angled away from her, which gave a lovely view of his rear end.
Naked man kneeling. Oh my.
She forced her eyes up to his shoulders and the back of his head, as she allowed the rest of her body to turn around. What she saw of him was gorgeous. Smooth skin. Rippling muscles. So much power. Something tickled just below her breastbone and in the back of her throat—something strange that wanted her to . . . growl.
It’s the magic of his shift. It’s affecting my loup side.
Rook grunted and arched his back. Fingers dug into the grass. His spine rippled as if a wave of water had traveled down it from top to bottom, only it didn’t stop at his coccyx. The end of the spine lengthened, as did the skin around it.
He’s growing a tail
.
A sound like twigs snapping in half, dozens in a row, filled the quiet air behind the shed, matched only by the harsh rasp of Rook’s breathing. His skin darkened, first to a golden bronze, and then an oily black. Limbs reformed, snapping and creaking as they took a new shape. Black fur sprouted across naked skin, and still she wanted to growl. Or howl. Anything to ease the tickle in her throat that no amount of coughing would dislodge.
She was just grateful that she couldn’t see his face. She didn’t want to see that part of him ripped apart and rearranged.
Time meant nothing as she watched the transformation, and soon he shook himself from head to tail, fluffing out thick ebony fur and testing the new placement of his limbs. He turned to face her. Copper eyes shined from the pitch-black face of the largest wolf she’d ever seen in her life, bigger even than O’Bannen’s beast. Rook had to be closer to two hundred fifty pounds, more like a small horse than a canine, and glimmering in each ear was a steel gauge.
He tilted his head and seemed to smile. Brynn crouched. He approached slowly and stood in front her, presenting himself. She stroked one hand down his muzzle, surprised at the softness. He licked her palm. Despite the length of his teeth, despite the bulk of his size, despite the fact that he could kill her in five seconds flat, Brynn was not afraid.
“You’re beautiful.” Perhaps “beautiful” wasn’t a word best applied verbally to a man, but she could easily apply it to his beast. Beauty and power encaged in the shape of a wolf who would never make a move to hurt her—she was certain of that, if of nothing else.
She stroked the velvety fur around his face and the tufts by his ears. He wagged his tail and nudged her hand with his head, so she stood up. His shoulder came up to just above her waist. She petted along his shoulders and back, aware of the iron muscles beneath the silky fur, framing the body of a creature born to hunt and kill.
“I’m so glad you showed me, Rook.”
He bumped his head against her hip, and she petted him for a few moments longer. She ruffled the fur between his ears, then said, “Thank you.”
Brynn stepped to the corner of the shed and turned her back, giving him privacy to change.
***
Shifting back from his beast was the hardest transformation of his life, and not just because it had been somewhat risky. The odds of needing to shift again in the next quarter hour in order to defend his town weren’t high enough to stop him from showing Brynn his beast. He’d need time to recover before he could shift again, sure, but he’d been beast for only a few minutes. No, he was having difficulty with the reverse shift because the beast was battling to stay out.
Rook struggled with his animal side that did not want to let go and return control to skin. His beast craved vengeance—for Stonehill and Potomac, for Knight, and for himself. The man who wore his skin craved it, as well, but he understood the need to wait. The need to plan. The beast only wanted blood and resisted Rook’s demand that he retreat. The beast had done his job for now—the shift would help his torn fingernails heal, and while he’d forever wear a bracelet of scars on each wrist and a faint line around his neck, the wounds would be gone. Rook needed to regain control before Brynn realized something was wrong.
Brynn.
His beast reared at the thought of her name, and her presence only a few yards away wasn’t helping his concentration. She’d been so tender, so curious, not a trace of fear in her eyes or body language. He’d seen amateur performers freak out more over something less stressful than facing a loup garou beast for the first time. But Brynn wasn’t afraid of him. She’d gazed at him with affection in her eyes.
He held back a groan as his spine realigned, each vertebrae a slash of fire. His tail was the most painful part of the transformation—all other parts lengthened or changed shape. His tail was the only thing that was created and destroyed with each shift, and it hurt like hell.
Hipbones snapped back with a brief jolt of agony and his jaw popped. The overall haze of pain subsided, and he tested out his reformed body. A tremor of fatigue danced through him like a badly played F chord, as it always did after a shift. Still, he felt better than he had before. Like he’d shaken off the filth of the last few days.
If only memories were as easy to cleanse.
He dressed quickly, more for Brynn’s sake than his own. Loup garou did not have the same inborn sense of modesty as humans, and bare skin felt wonderful in the scorching August temperatures. A creek in the mountains west of town was a favorite skinny dipping spot for young loup, and he’d gone up there a lot while he and Knight were growing up. Still, he didn’t want to risk the temptations that came along with total nudity—not when the heated look in her eyes made his blood burn.
She still hadn’t turned around. Rook slipped up behind her and rested his hands on her hips. The dress fabric was some thin cotton, and the warmth of her body came through. She leaned into him, resting her back against his chest, and she covered his hands with hers. Her head fell against his shoulder, and he kissed her temple. It all felt so natural, so easy.
“Thank you for showing me,” she said.
“Thank you for accepting me.”
“I’ve always known what you are, Rook. The beast is just another part of you, and he’s beautiful. Are all loup so large?”
He pressed his hips firmly against her ass. “Only the lucky ones.”
She laughed. “You know what I mean.”
“White and Gray aren’t. Black Wolves are protectors. We’re born faster, stronger, and larger, yes.”
“Good to know.”
He brushed his nose along the shell of her ear, enjoying the scent of her so close and real. The heat of her in his arms and the gentle rhythm of her breathing. He’d never imagined holding a woman could feel so perfect.
Her fingertips played over the scars on his wrists. “How are you with everything that happened last night?” she asked.
Had it really only been last night? “Feels like I’ve lived a lifetime in twenty-four hours.”
“I know the feeling. I’ve been here three days that feel like a month’s time, and I’ve spent it all on the same two streets. I wish I could see more of this place.”
“The yard?”
“No, the town. My vision of the fire was incredibly vague but perhaps seeing a location will ping something in my mind.”
Father’s request for Brynn to keep her movements localized made sense, and Rook supported it. He also understood Brynn’s need to explore her surroundings and her latest vision. The details she’d fed him suggested a very sheltered life with few opportunities to experience new things. Even something as simple as a small Pennsylvania town could be an adventure for her. He wanted to show her more of Cornerstone. His home.
“I have an idea,” Rook said.
Without question she followed him around the side of the house to the front yard, straight to the sidewalk. He desperately wanted to hold her hand. Instead, he kept their pace steady so their arms brushed occasionally as they walked toward Main Street. The Smythe building on the corner was the tallest in Cornerstone—not saying much when it was only four stories. The top three floors were storage and apartments. Ground level housed Smythe’s Restaurant, owned and operated by the Smythes for over a hundred years, and the most popular dining establishment in town—facts he pointed out as he led her to the fire escape in the rear alley.
He pulled the ladder down, then held it for Brynn. Not looking up while she climbed took an impressive amount of self-control (not to mention it was disrespectful to her) and then he followed. She seemed to have caught on to the plan, and she ascended to the roof in short order. Most of the surface was tarred, and it practically steamed under the hot summer sun, tossing up a sharp, nose-tingling odor. A narrow path of cement ran the border of the roof, allowing access to various ducts and piping.
They walked single file to the front, which looked down over Main Street and gave a decent view of the town. Mountains rose up around them. Rooftops spread out to the front and left, the majority private homes. The occasional voice drifted up from the street below. The diner’s daily special of chicken and dumplings scented the air with the rich aromas of meat and gravy. A lawn mower roared far in the distance. And in the privacy of the roof, he did hold her hand.
“How many people live here?” she asked.
“Six hundred and forty-one.” He grimaced, thinking first of O’Bannen’s loss, then of their recent additions. “Give or take now.”
She seemed to be on the same train of thought. “Where did O’Bannen live?”
He pointed to green-roofed home a few blocks north, its perimeter dotted with Scots pine trees. “There. His wife—widow’s name is Jennifer. Their daughter’s name is Lucy.”
“I can’t imagine the pain they’re in.”
“It wasn’t your fault, Brynn.”
“Logically, I know that. We took a risk and he died.”
“He died serving his Alpha. It’s an honorable death for our people.”
She nodded, her mood still melancholy.
Hoping to shift the conversation into something less gloomy, he extended his hand toward an open area half a mile west. “There’s a playground and ball field over there, right next to the school.”
“You learned there?”
“Everyone was taught K through twelfth grade in that schoolhouse.”
“I always had private tutors so I never experienced the socialization of schools.”
He smiled. “Well, small towns mean small classes. I only had one girl my age and two boys a year younger. The next oldest were Knight and Devlin.”
“That must have made dating difficult.”
Understatement of the day.
Across the street from their building, a very pregnant woman waddled out of the Second Chances thrift store with a bag of items in one hand and a small child hanging off the other. Michelle Barnes. Gray Wolf. Married to Francis Barnes, a Black and one of their enforcers. He remembered the wedding and Michelle’s first pregnancy very vividly, because Francis had been a stuttering mess the entire time. He’d drive forty minutes to Harrisburg just to find the specific brand of local barbecue potato chips that she craved. Dr. Mike nearly had to sedate him during the birth.
Small towns meant fewer options in many things, but it also meant Rook knew every single face on the street, every single story—and everyone knew his. No sense in hiding anything from Brynn. “Dating’s always been a bit of a minefield for me,” he said.
“Because of your status?”
“Yeah. There is no divorce among loup garou. No matter our color, we marry for life. But Black Wolves . . . well, for lack of a better turn of phrase, we literally
mate
for life. There’s no such thing as casual sex with other loup.”
“Never?”
“Well, not exactly never. Widows and widowers have more leeway to seek physical relationships with each other, but it’s different for unmarried Blacks.” He’d expected to be a bit more embarrassed having this conversation with Brynn, but her open curiosity and lack of judgment encouraged him. “I couldn’t have slept with anyone here without it meaning an engagement.”
“What about college?”
“Humans are exempt from the marriage intentions, if that’s what you’re asking. They wouldn’t know I was loup, anyway. However, condoms aren’t one hundred percent effective, so I didn’t chance it very often. Getting a human woman pregnant would have been a disaster. Runs have very strict rules about allowing humans to know about our existence, and only Grays are allowed to marry them. Even then, children are forbidden.”
She studied him with a calm expression as she puzzled through the information he was feeding her. “I always imaged rock bands were all about music, partying, and sex. How did you manage college and band life?”
“Band life isn’t always what you think. The great thing about being loup garou, though, is I can drink people under the table without actually get drunk myself. I got good at faking a lot of things, including one-night stands with girls who just wanted to brag that they’d slept with the lead singer.”
“So you’d get them drunk, make out with them, and then not sleep with them?”
“Mostly, yes. I let them pass out before things got too heavy. Sometimes they assumed we had sex and bragged to their friends and I never contradicted it. But if a girl ever asked, I always told her the truth.” He sighed, never happy with the decisions he’d made to try to fit in there. “In a way I lied all four years I was in college. No one ever knew I wasn’t human because I got so good at hiding it. And it all feels like a lifetime ago.”
Far down Main Street, closer to the heart of town, a trio of loup males came into view. Jonas walked in the center, flanked by the other two. They weren’t doing anything except walking and talking, but Rook’s skin still prickled with warning.