Dire Needs: A Novel of the Eternal Wolf Clan (2 page)

She looked healthy to him—healthy and beautiful, with long blond hair, wearing leather, and she did fit in here, in a weird way. And Christ, he could think of nothing more he wanted to do than die.
I-fucking-ronic
, as Vice would say. “How long do you have?”

“At least through the night. And it’s not catching,” she added as an afterthought. “Are you worth it?”

He didn’t know how the hell to answer that. So he did so truthfully. “Hell yes.”

“Then let’s go.”

Rifter checked to see if Vice was hanging around, because women sometimes acted this way with his packmate, who was a walking ball of sin. But no, Vice was nowhere in sight and everyone was antsy.

Goddamned full fucking moon. Like a bitch with a whip.

He didn’t bother to fight the urge to pick her up, and he slung her over his shoulder, caveman-style, grabbing her jacket off the back of her chair. He heard her startled, soft gasp, but she didn’t protest as he walked out with her, daring any of the wolves to follow him.

They all knew what he was—they may not like him, but they sure as hell knew to respect his power.

When he got to his bike, he set her down and handed her the coat. Her hair tumbled over her shoulders, her black tank top had ridden up a little along her belly and her cheeks flushed from the cold. “Thanks for the ride.”

“That was nothing.”

She refused the helmet he offered, instead wrapping her arms around as much of his waist as she could, and
off they went. Normally, he didn’t give a shit about the icy roads, but his passenger wasn’t as indestructible as he was. Though he gave the bike lots of gas, he didn’t get stupid on icy corners and snowy shoulders. After a while, she was no longer holding on and had put her hands in the air, yelling into the wind. He went faster because it seemed to excite her.

When he stopped in front of her house, a pretty little Victorian in the middle of nowhere, she hopped off and he followed her as she walked up the path. Before she could get to the door, he took her arm and pulled her close and brought his mouth down on hers before he could stop himself. She tasted like sugar and cranberries—tart and sweet—and he wanted more. Wanted it all, and Brother Wolf seemed to agree, as he was ignoring the running in favor of letting Rifter take his time.

When he pulled back, her lips were swollen and she was breathing hard and he was glad about that. “Every guy in that bar wanted to take you home tonight. Why me?”

Her eyes flicked over him coolly. “You were the biggest.”

He couldn’t tell if she was joking.

G
wen wasn’t. He was huge. Really freaking huge—built like a brick shithouse, with long, shaggy dark hair, hard jaw, cut cheekbones and those eyes—holy hell, they were gorgeous. Gray and blue and black and brown, all speckled like a kaleidoscope that could pull her really far in.

She’d more than noticed him when he’d walked in—no, she’d felt him.

Rifter.
Even the name tugged at her.

He wouldn’t be gentle, and she was so tired of being treated carefully. She just needed to get through the next few hours without a seizure.

“Just give me a few minutes, okay?” she asked, and he nodded, his gaze raking over her as he stripped off his leather jacket and threw it across her couch. Looked between it and her, and my God, she already felt naked.

He made her already small house seem like it was made for dolls, but somehow, she’d fit against him surprisingly well, despite the height difference. Her lips felt well kissed and her body strummed in anticipation of more.

“Just a minute,” she repeated and backed out of the room before she stripped down and jumped him. A little tequila and all her carefully held self-control obviously had disintegrated.

In the privacy of her bedroom, she downed a couple of extra pills, the newest in a long line prescribed by the neuro, but they wouldn’t work. None of them ever worked for long, which was why she’d had to choose between med school and having a life. Well, more so than the average med student, because the damned seizures got in the way of everything and the meds made her stupid or silly or sleepy.

She was tempted to throw them away, but then functioning would be gone. She was already living with a death sentence, so why make it harder?

God, the morning’s neuro appointment couldn’t have been any worse. She’d demanded the truth and she’d gotten it.

“The seizures will kill you,” he’d said. “You’re close to OD’ing on the meds and they’re not helping. The activity is everywhere. I’ve never seen anything like it.”

The MRI film left little doubt: The length and increasing severity of each episode debilitated her—inside her brain was the perfect storm of electrical impulses.

“Feel free to use my case as a write-up,” she’d told him, and the doctor’s mouth had twisted in empathy and pain.

He’d been frank but not unsympathetic.

She’d gone straight to the bar from the consult.

Tomorrow, she’d go back to work for a twenty-four-hour shift because what else was she supposed to do? Stay in bed with this man for the next few weeks?

She peeked out at Rifter, the breadth of his back taking her breath away. The leather jacket lay on her couch and she shivered, thinking about the way she’d be wearing it.

There were definitely worse ways to go.

He was looking out the window, no doubt because there was nothing else to look at, unless he liked medical
textbooks. For the first time, she saw her place through someone else’s eyes and realized how stark it was.

The house was white walls, bare floors. Rented. Even the furniture wasn’t hers. The linens were bought on the cheap—without much thought, at the closest store when they’d had a sale. Everything was disposable because she never wanted to get that attached to anything—or even anyone, something she admitted to herself only in moments of extreme honesty—again.

She didn’t want roommates—didn’t want to live in a dorm or an apartment with people. In the past years, being around them had made her feel crowded, like she wanted to jump out of her own skin.

No, the only thing that had given her peace over the past years had been her daily runs. Sometimes she went twice, if only to feel the freedom of the wind on her face, the road before her open, her feet flying across the ground.

She wondered what would happen if she simply continued running without looking back, running until she literally dropped.

She’d lost so much and now she was literally losing time, sand through an hourglass that slipped through her hands no matter how tightly she fisted it. And her house mocked her now, a blank slate, much like her life. She’d thrown herself into medicine, wanting a way to make people feel better in the way no doctor had ever really been able to help her.

At first, the seizures hadn’t been an issue. They’d been well controlled, almost suppressed while she was growing up, but when she’d hit twenty-one, they exploded, and four years later they were daily occurrences. She’d been so good—slept as much as she could, ate well, exercised.

Being good was so overrated. No one ever looked back on their lives and thought,
Well, at least I was good.

She’d
bet even Mother Teresa had regrets about that.

And so, when she’d gone to the bar tonight, she’d been looking to feed those long-buried instincts, her nerve endings tingling as she’d downed the tequila, as if her body was thanking her for finally allowing it some enjoyment.

How long had it been for her? Felt like forever since she’d had to choose between medicine and men. She couldn’t believe she was still a goddamned virgin.

She’d made her bed and now she was so ready to undo it and experience it all.

Funny thing—she didn’t feel like a virgin. It was like her body knew what it needed, and now that she was finally giving in to that baser set of pleasures, it would guide her with touchstones every step of the way, starting with the man she’d brought home.

And so she went back out to Rifter. “Can I get you anything?”

“You.” He tugged her to him without further preamble. She liked that—having spent her life dealing with logic and science, and with her disease these last years, it was wonderful simply to give in.

Tonight she’d worn black leather pants, boots and a tight black top and had felt more like herself than she had in a long time. But now she just wanted skin to skin—needed to strip all the clothes off and roll around with this man. She reached up to twine her hands in his hair, pulling his face to hers for a kiss.

He tasted better than any drug or drink—instant intoxication.

His hands skimmed her body, cupped her breasts and then lifted her shirt and broke the kiss to pull it off her. It flew over her head with a soft breeze as his hands cupped her ass, his arousal thick against her belly.

“Beautiful.” His voice was husky, and for a minute she was sure she couldn’t breathe, because he looked at her
with such hunger… she’d never felt more wanted in her entire life.

She tilted her head up, sure he would kiss her again, or touch her breasts, take her pants off before she got more frantic, but he didn’t.

Instead, he tilted his head, but only to look at her strangely. Narrowed his eyes and moved his hands from her ass to her waist, as if holding her up.

“I understand if you’re freaked. But I’m not going to die in bed with you. At least I don’t think so,” she muttered.

“Death doesn’t scare me.”

“I suspect not much does.”

He nodded his agreement but he still didn’t move.

It took her another thirty seconds to understand why, and by then it was far too late to stop anything.

Brother Wolf caught the scent first—the bitter, cloying tang of trouble—and then Rifter smelled it as well. It was the odor of a shift from human to wolf form. But the shift wasn’t his, and Rifter went on full alert, a low growl rumbling up from his chest. He tensed, prepared to bolt outside to find whatever stray wolf was prowling nearby, but a heartbeat later, Gwen collapsed in his arms and the scent dissipated.

Brother Wolf howled, wanted to pace restlessly, and it was then that Rifter understood.

Seizure. Shit, in all his years, had he really never been around a seizing human before to notice that a seizure smelled like a wolf shift? Quickly, he lowered her to the bed, kept her on her side facing him and watched her body struggle, fighting with itself for control. Gwen would hate him for witnessing this, but he couldn’t leave her. And goddamn, that bothered the shit out of him, since he’d known this human for less than an hour.

He looked toward the night table, checked the drawer as he kept a hand on her and rifled through the pill bottles, wondering if any of these might help. But Brother Wolf was calming down a little now, and Rifter hoped that was a good sign.

She was still helpless—she probably hated that most of all.

The only thing he could do to comfort her was sometimes not a comfort at all. He had the ability to dreamwalk, which made him a sort of human dream catcher by default. He could hold someone’s nightmare at bay or help them through it by absorbing the fear and pain.

His curse alternately freaked and pissed off the Dires, and the Weres who knew about it. But his pull was strong and there wasn’t a whole hell of a lot his family of Dires could do about it when he would involuntarily walk through their dreams in order to capture their nightmares.

The pack hated being so vulnerable to him, hated that he was forced to carry all their fears, but that had been his ability since he’d been born. He’d learned to deal with the burdens he carried and the fallout that came with them.

As a child, he’d been confused by the ability, but as he got older, his mother explained,
It’s a blessing
. It was only before his Running that he’d been told that he’d actually
been
cursed with the ability, not born with it, and that he’d never be free of it.

Still, it helped him to keep track of what was happening in his pack.

While Jinx didn’t love it, he was used to it—his own born ability of being able to talk to ghosts and helping them pass over into the spirit world meant someone was always fucking with his mind, and he would typically tell Rifter to just
get the fuck out.

Vice was usually too busy indulging in one of his vices to give a shit what Rifter did. The man was born with seven deadly sins rolled into one sinful-as-hell body that women and men—both human and wolf—couldn’t get enough of. And although he couldn’t be separated from the sins that ruled his life, his ability let him use those extremes to help others find their balance.

Stray’s dreams were almost completely quiet—centered more on hiding and being caught—and Rifter often wondered if he had the power to block Rifter from them, but he never asked. No, Stray was jumpy enough, having been found fifty years earlier in some back alley. He’d been separated from the pack after what the Elders called the Extinction, when they had smote all living Dire wolves except for them during the Viking Age, and ended up nearly losing his mind from lack of pack company.

These days, he spent most of his time hanging at the house, listing to old-school eighties metal and keeping up with the latest technology. But man, Rifter would let Stray have his back during a fight any damned time.

If the man had an ability beyond being an immortal Dire, he hadn’t let anyone in on it, although Rifter had his suspicions.

And then there was Rogue—Jinx’s twin, who could contact spirits. Rogue, who’d been captured months earlier by the weretrappers, a group not unlike homegrown terrorists who wanted to experiment on Weres and Dires. Lately, there were rumors that the trappers planned to clone the Weres for some kind of superarmy to use for their own purposes.

The weretrappers were humans, but they’d made a deal with the witches—one of whom was Rifter’s former best friend, Seb, and now the trappers had some powerful spells on their side.

The enemy of my enemy is my friend.

Rifter and the other Dires were charged with keeping the rest of the humans safe from the evil that could entail.