Dire Needs: A Novel of the Eternal Wolf Clan (5 page)

And the wolf… don’t forget the wolf.

No, it was just a dream. Her sex drive had kicked into overdrive these past months. The seizure meds were known to suppress libido, but somehow, they were having the opposite effect on her.

It was almost embarrassing, although she suspected that if she’d been a man it wouldn’t have been that bad.

God…
wolves
.

She needed to get to work—and fast—before her imagination drove her crazy.

She turned her head toward the clock and heard a soft crunch. She sat up and stared at the leaves on her pillow, touched them as though they were a hallucination and might not actually be there. But one crackled in her hand, and she stared at it before crumpling it in her fist and letting the pieces fall back onto the sheets.

R
ifter came with a howl that echoed through the darkness, staggered forward and rested his head against the nearest tree trunk as he was abruptly yanked from Gwen’s dream.

And back to reality.

He breathed deeply, his body shuddering, the orgasm twisting him inside out, his nails raking the bark as the ecstasy mixed with agony—not nearly as bad as it was with actual sex, but not nearly as satisfying either.

Gwen was awake and his connection to her was efficiently broken. As it should be.

There was a danger inherent in dreamwalking—not wanting to come out of the dream at all, because it was easier to live someone else’s dreams than his own life. But this felt different, like she’d walked into his fantasy. Which wasn’t possible.

A growl from inside his head reminded him that he owed his wolf. Brother hadn’t gotten what he needed the night before, although he’d had fun. And so he gave the word to Brother to take over, let the shift begin.

It felt no different than it had every other time except the first three, which were by far the worst and most dangerous. Only half the Dires survived the intensity of
those early changes, and Rifter had gone to a lot of funerals as a young boy.

Letting your Brother Wolf out was something to be revered and feared. Those who made it through the transition were stronger than they could have ever hoped to be.

The shift was a nearly indescribable combination of bones crunching and skin stretching, and an uncontrollable howl left his throat as an invisible weight pushed him hard to all fours. Brother Wolf whispered the ancient language in his ear to calm him as his breath caught and stopped for a moment during the worst of the change.

And then it was done. Less than thirty seconds from start to finish, and it felt at times like an eternity.

Rifter let his wolf travel into the deep darkness of the morning in the woods. He rushed past the life stirring, off the main paths, jumping and running and stretching muscles. These woods were not his natural hunting grounds, but reality—and his brothers—would interrupt him too soon if he ran closer to home.

Brother Wolf ran until Rifter stopped thinking, until they’d merged as one beautiful, primal beast, predatory and sleek, built for extremes—and for battle. The smell of pine and snow, the pull of the moon readying to give up her throne to daylight, all mixed in his nose as he sped along the slick forest floor, hunting for something he could never find.

But Brother Wolf would never give up.

It was nearly time to turn back. Brother Wolf sensed the incoming daylight, his signal, but instead of doing so, he suddenly stopped short and froze.

Danger.

Before he could turn tail, an arrow whizzed past his head, narrowly missing his ear. He ran a little farther
until he found a spot to squeeze through the brush and cut around silently, ending up behind the woman who’d tracked him.

Both he and Brother had been too distracted to notice she’d been following him. Tracking him, really. But now they could see the axe in her hand.

Weretrapper.

Brother growled behind her and she whipped around, brandishing the weapon as she ran toward him.

Bold. And stupid. She swung and he ducked, weaved his massive body around hers easily, because Brother Wolf was sleek and strong. And angry.

She dropped the axe and pulled a syringe out of her pocket, and that was all it took for Rifter to flash back to being held captive by the weretrappers. Brother Wolf sensed the anxiety and struck, biting into the hard muscle of her thigh, bringing her to the ground with a hard back-and-forth shake of his powerful head, even as she managed to jab a syringe into his side.

And then he spat her to the ground even before he felt the tingle from the drugs.

Witch.
They tasted different, and while Brother Wolf liked rare as a rule, he didn’t like witch at all.

Trap,
Rifter told Brother Wolf sharply when he went to grab her.
Let her go—good wolf,
Rifter urged, and Brother never wanted to be caged again and so he listened.

She was a young one—they were being recruited before they were even out of high school now—and Rifter needed to kill her. But she wasn’t alone—he could smell both weretrapper and witch on the wind, and he couldn’t fight as well with drugs on board. Drugs and wolves didn’t mix—wolves metabolized differently, and in larger doses drugs could be fatal. They had been what kept Rifter and Rogue prisoners. There was no way the weretrappers would’ve
been able to hold them as long as they did otherwise.

Modern medicine was fucking the Dires royally. They used to have to worry only about silver ill. When he was captured, his body had thankfully gotten used to the massive quantities of drugs they’d injected him with.

He would have to let her go now and find her again by the scar she’d wear. The bite of a Dire couldn’t be healed by a witch’s spell. Rifter had made sure of that years earlier. Seb wasn’t the only one who could cast spells.

Run,
he commanded Brother Wolf, and he did, fast and strong, while the girl couldn’t do more than hobble in the other direction, where Rifter saw a car parked close to where his Harley was hidden. He’d have the twins pick it up later, if the trappers didn’t take it. The agitation began to mix with sluggishness as Brother Wolf navigated the still-dark woods easily, his pace slower than it had been earlier, even as Rifter urged him along.

He breathed the winter’s air deeply to try to clear his head. Gwen’s scent called to him—carried along the wind—as if she could heal him, which was ridiculous, but he was in no position to fight it.

He needed to get somewhere safe to sleep off these drugs, so he sent the wolf toward Gwen’s—the closest safe haven he could think of. It was a struggle to keep the big wolf moving, but he managed.

He ended up in the back of Gwen’s house fairly quickly and without incident.

Not followed
. His wolf stumbled hazily, and his brothers in arms would kill him for being so foolish.

But what was the point of living if all he could do from now on was hide in the house on the hill that was spelled to keep the weretrappers out?

Rifter shifted back—barely able to do so with the drugs running through his system. His human form
would absorb them better than his wolf’s, and he jerked the needle from his side and shoved it into his pocket.

He watched and waited until Gwen’s car pulled out from the garage about ten minutes later, a good thing, since he wasn’t prepared to explain why he was like some kind of giant, naked Goldilocks and the Big Bad Wolf huffing and puffing combined, prepared to crash in her bed.

Her back door was disturbingly easy to unlock.

He was shivering as he went toward the bedroom. Brother Wolf was already out, unable to guard him while he slept. Rifter felt the steam from Gwen’s recent shower still hanging, rich and fragrant, in the air, and their scents still mingled on her sheets. He pushed his jacket aside, curled up on her pillows with the leaves around him, and remained in a daze, unable to fully lose himself in a deep sleep.

He thought he’d be pulled into one of the Dires’ dreams, but
still
, none of them had slept. That made for some fucking cranky wolves, and cranky wolves snapped easily. And hard. They’d no doubt remained up waiting for him, and none of his Dire brothers would be happy at this turn of events. Because Harm had deserted them, Rifter was their king—leader of this last remaining Dire pack—whether he wanted to be or not. And the Elders had made it clear that it was his brothers’ duty to protect Rifter. They’d used the word
serve
too, but Rifter would have none of that. The remaining Dires were all alphas because at one time, each of them had been destined to lead his own pack. They willingly submitted to Rifter and Rifter alone out of respect.

They’d tried the separate-pack thing for a while, each Dire heading up a werepack, but it wasn’t right. The balance was always off, and eventually the men found their way back to one another.

Five alphas under the same roof got tricky. They managed as well as they could, but all of them bore the scars from fights with one another.

Those were the only scars a Dire couldn’t heal.

The Elders had put him in charge of a group of men who could damned well lead themselves—and filling Harm’s shoes… well, it had pushed that wolf to go far off into the wild blue yonder when it was first suggested to him. Harm was never comfortable with his wolf—he related to humans, and given the first opportunity, he melded into that population when he and Rifter and the others were on their official Running, and he’d never looked back.

That happened when they were all twenty-one years old and newly shifted. Since then, Rifter and the others had all worked together to help the Weres, who were something like distant, more primitive cousins.

The wolf and his shifted male counterpart had too big of a disconnect for Rifter’s tastes. Then again, so did humans and their inner beasts.

For humans, pleasures were guilty. In Rifter’s eyes, that was the path to hell.

Humans were afraid of everything that wasn’t like them. Sheep, lemmings. While he’d been told by the Elders that he should pity rather than despise humans, his experiences were too colored by the antics of the weretrappers.

Which had been born because of the excesses of his kind—his pack had been the ones that massacred the humans that would later form the trappers. Hello, circle of life.

Yeah, that was the rub for sure.

G
wen still couldn’t explain the leaves, and so she’d left them on the pillow for no other reason than she wasn’t sure they weren’t a figment of her imagination. She’d left the leather jacket there too, showered quickly and headed out, because exhaustion rode her and she was simultaneously nauseous and starving.

She had nothing in the house and stopped at the deli outside the hospital to order two egg sandwiches. Large iced coffee. Two brownies.

That should hold her for a couple of hours. But no matter how much she ate, she couldn’t get her weight or energy up.

The ER was still bustling, which was never a good sign at five in the morning. Ever since the gangs had taken hold, the ER had been on constant overflow. Good for business, bad for the town.

“Leftovers from last night’s full moon,” one of the other third-year residents told her when she was barely three steps inside. He mimicked a vampire-fanged face. “Effing crazy.”

God, she hated people who couldn’t bring themselves to say the word
fuck
whenever they felt like it. “I think the moon brings out
wolves
,” she said, and yeah, speaking
of crazy, she was giving an awesome display and she was the president of crazy town. She’d fit right in.

She polished off the second egg sandwich and gulped the coffee, shoved the brownies in her pocket for sooner, rather than later, and attempted to head to the back room, where the lockers were.

Maximarius, aka Max, a nurse with a sleeve of intricate tribal tattoos and a face that made most of the male patients—and several female ones—fall into immediate lust, stopped her, took Gwen’s bag and jacket from her hands and pointed. “Curtain three.”

Gwen took a deep breath and realized she could taste the smells—the metallic taste of blood filled her senses, but above it all remained Rifter’s scent. Spicy, clean… slightly smoky. For a second, she caught sight of trees and smelled the pine—and panic—and she wasn’t in the sterile hospital environment any longer, her skin simultaneously hot and cold, and she shivered when a hand touched her arm.

“Hey, Doc, wake up—curtain three,” Max said gently. Gwen looked around cautiously, saw the front desk and no trees, and things were back to normal.

Yeah, right.
“Sorry—didn’t get a lot of sleep last night. What’s up?”

“She says it’s a dog bite, but it doesn’t look like that to me,” Max said, a brow raised before Gwen pulled back the curtain to survey the at most eighteen-year-old with short dark hair and a quizzical look in her eyes. She wore her own shirt, her bloodied jeans in the corner, her legs covered by a paper scrub with the wound exposed to the air.

It was
not
a dog bite. She could tell that from several feet away, looking as she washed and dried her hands.

“When did this happen?” Gwen asked, moving forward. She sat on the stool and got up close and personal as she stretched gloves over her hands.

“
About an hour ago. I don’t have insurance.”

Gwen would have to sew the muscle inside first and then try to make the flayed skin stitch up. If not, the young woman would need surgery. She glanced at the chart and saw that the patient was named Cordelia Smith.

She spoke briefly about the possibilities, of calling in Plastics to minimize the scarring, but Cordelia was shaking her head from the get-go.

“No surgery. Do the best you can with the stitches.”

Most girls wouldn’t want a huge scar on their thigh. But Cordelia shrugged, didn’t appear to be in much pain. Gwen checked through the blood tests Max had attached to the chart, which all showed no presence of drugs, illegal or otherwise.

A high pain tolerance was one thing, but this was simply odd.

There was already an IV set up with antibiotics. Gwen shot Cordelia’s thigh with lidocaine, and as she waited for it to numb out, she asked, “Do you know what did this? Because otherwise, you’ll need rabies shots.”