Strong arms picked her off the ground. She yelped before she realized it was Azriel and relaxed.
He turned as he held her to the taller of the two men. “Give me that blanket.”
Looking down she became suddenly aware that Azriel was completely naked as he held her. She gulped, at least internally. His body, well the parts she could see since she was held up against him, was sculpted like Michelangelo’s David. It was as if someone had decided to sculpt the perfect man and Azriel had been created. Of course, a very important portion of the male anatomy was totally hidden from her view…
She shook her head. It was disgusting that she was even thinking about it. Did she need to make a mental note that perhaps she was a sex addict or maybe it had just been a very long time since she’d had sex? No, she had to quit that line of thinking. Clearly, she was not focusing on the things she needed to be thinking about at that current time.
“Here.” One of the other men, the taller of the two who had scars on his face, handed Azriel a blanket, which he quickly wrapped around her. Grateful for the warmth, she again wished she could wrap herself up in it and never move.
“Dude,” the shorter of the two brothers spoke. “She has fur, you’re buck naked. We brought the blanket for you.”
“Thanks, but I’m okay. The lady wolf has been down in the lab for several months— it’s always hot—and she’s just been through a fire. I don’t want her to catch a chill.”
“That’s awful considerate of you, little brother.” It was the taller of the two again. So far, Leah preferred him to the other one.
Azriel coughed. “Who did it?”
“We were hoping you could tell us.” “How could I do that?”
“The magic alarm went off and then we saw on the monitors that your place was on fire. By the time we got here, the door was welded shut.”
She snuggled closer to Azriel, he still smelled like the ocean, as he had in the lab, but now he also smelled like the woods after a storm and that made her smile. He wrapped his arms around her tighter and the three men started walking. At the moment, she had no idea where they were going and for some reason she was completely fine with that.
“I never saw who firebombed the room. I was overwhelmed with the smell—you know that sick, sour milk smell that spreads before the fire from one of those things starts?”
The other two nodded their assent.
The shorter brother spoke again. “You’re holding her kind of tight there, Az. What have you been doing down there in that lab with her for so long?”
Leah wished she could bite him. If she had to be a wolf, maybe she should act like one. It could be fun.
“She can understand you, remember?” Azriel sighed and she remembered her impression of him from earlier in the day. He was tired, the kind of tired where he’d long since noticed how exhausted he really was. She thought there was an expression for that: bone weary.
She wondered why she cared.
Az continued. “I’ve been trying to figure out why she’s still alive.”
“Does she behave any differently than the others?” This time she appreciated the shorter one’s questions. She’d like to know the answers to that too considering she couldn’t really remember too many details since she’d opened her eyes about an hour earlier. No, that wasn’t entirely true; she knew lots of things about Azriel, just nothing about anything else. Was that odd?
“She has longer times of clarity—or at least as far as I can tell it’s clarity. I only started talking to her this morning so I don’t know if she’s been able to understand me this whole time or if it’s a recent development that’s going to precipitate some kind of change.” He paused. “I’m hoping it’s not the kind of scenario where she gets absolute understanding before she completely degrades and then dies.”
Oh wow, she hoped that too. Please, please, please don’t let it be that.
As if remembering that she understood him perfectly, he gave her a squeeze. “Anyway, she does have episodes where she is like the others: aggressive, almost feral, and desperate for the serum. I keep waiting for her physical appearance to alter like the others. Her fur should be falling out or oily and disgusting, her eyes should be glazing over. One of the last stages is the drool. It’s everywhere and damn if it doesn’t stink something fierce.”
The shorter man took a sniff. “She smells pretty good to me. For a wolf, she has a scent resemblance to lilacs.”
A growl formed from Azriel’s throat that had Leah’s ears poking backwards. She shivered; in no way did she like that sound.
“You don’t need to be smelling her, Gabriel.”
“I can smell whoever I want. What is the matter with you?”
The taller man laughed aloud, his eyes filled with laughter. “Oh boy, do I remember this phase; I all but killed Rex.”
Azriel’s whole body had gotten very still. All Leah could feel was the beating of his heart. “What does that mean, Theo?”
“It means from the way you’re behaving towards that ‘made’ wolf, Azriel, I would say the reason she is still alive and not altered like the others is because she is your mate.” Theo patted him on the shoulder. “Welcome to the party, brother.”
His what? Okay, someone was going to have to explain that. Wolf or no wolf she was going to make them go into more detail about exactly what that meant. She knew nothing about herself. No way could she be his ‘mate’. It was simply out of the question.
She might have a husband at home waiting for her; searching all over the place and not knowing that she had somehow become a wolf. Azriel’s ocean scent mixed with the smell of the woods hit her again and she wanted to smile.
Maybe it wasn’t such an impossibility that she belonged to him, but it was still scary as hell.
2
Azriel Kane stopped walking and stood perfectly still. Could it be true? How was it possible that Theo could have known the lady wolf in his arms was his mate when he didn’t know it himself?
Well you would have known it if you ever listened to anything I said to you.
His wolf was pissed; he could hear it in the sarcasm travelling over their link. I haven’t been ignoring you. When did you tell me the little she-wolf was my mate?
You know I can’t just come out and say it. How many times have I asked you why she was still alive or why you were so fixated on her?
Azriel let out the breath he’d held and squeezed the brown and white wolf a little tighter in his arms. Might have been nice if you could have been a little bit more direct than that. You know I don’t ‘get’ relationships. Subtlety is lost on me.
His wolf laughed. And don’t I know it…
Pulling himself out of his daze, he ran forward to catch up to Theo and Gabriel keeping his unnamed lady wolf, who happened to be his possible mate, close to his chest. Two of his five brothers, they were used to him occasionally drifting off into moments of deep thought and losing track of the ‘here and now’. If either of them had sensed immediate danger, they would have snapped him out of it but aside from that, they’d pretty much learned to let him be.
Theo, the shorter of the two, had mated about three months earlier to a recently rediscovered pack member named Faith. Their mating had been a gift for the whole pack as it had brought Theo back from near madness and eliminated a very serious threat from creatures called the fire demons. They’d first had to become demons themselves. Az really hoped he wasn’t going to have to do anything like that to complete his mating…
Gulping, he turned to Theo. “I think I’m in serious trouble.”
“I may not be a genius like you, little brother, but I’m pretty sure you’re right.” Theo’s tone held way too much humor for Az’s liking.
“Can the two of you get your heads out of your mated asses long enough to focus on the fact that we were just attacked, again?”
Az winced. Gabriel might be harsh but he was usually right. It was just that they were always being attacked. It didn’t matter if the
y eliminated a threat—and they had destroyed a big one when Theo and Faith had sent the demons back to their own dimension—another one popped up to replace it. Since finding their preordained mates seemed to be part of the ‘game plan’ in ending the destructive chaos their father, Kendrick Kane, liked to drop on their heads, sometimes literally, it seemed important to Azriel that he get his version of the mating thing figured out.
Besides, it was no secret that Gabriel had proclaimed several times that he had no desire to find his mate and found the whole thing to be a huge waste of time. He preferred battles to romance. Az often wondered exactly how tough a woman was going to have to be to survive mating with his second oldest brother.
“I don’t think discussing Azriel’s mating issue is going to mean the destruction of the pack, big brother. Theo jumped to his defense. “We can’t really work through any of this without Tristan and Cullen with us anyway.”
Az nodded his head. He shouldn’t have let Theo defend him to Gabriel. It only made Gabriel think he could continue to tell him what to do. He laughed, causing Gabriel to roll his eyes. Who was he kidding? They’d been doing this routine for at least eighty years; it wasn’t likely to change anytime soon. In his human form, Az preferred to live a more cerebral life than his kick-ass-and-ask-questions-later brothers. The others seemed to understand. Gabriel never did and Az knew enough to know he never would.
That didn’t mean he didn’t love him. Gabriel had just beat down a door with a battering ram to get him out of a burning lab. There was a bond between them, whether they’d ever really see eye to eye or not.
As they passed through a clearing in the woods, he could see their home up ahead. Every single window in the Westervelt lair was illuminated by light, creating a bright orange aura over the landscape. Much like a giant hotel, the lair had been constructed to house the entire pack until it was safe again for them to make their own homes elsewhere on the island. Az wasn’t sure, if today was any indication, that they’d ever get to that point.
In any case, it didn’t feel like home to him. As far as he was concerned, he’d had two homes in his life. The first had been the cottage he’d shared with his parents. He’d lived there with his brothers and, as it had turned out although the magic hadn’t worn off enough for anyone other than Cullen to remember her, their baby sister. The second one had been the building they’d called ‘The Institute’ until Tristan had burned it down.
He shook his head. Thinking about both of those things only gave him migraines. How was it possible—his mother’s strong magic aside—to simply forget one’s sister? Could he just be bespelled into forgetting Rex or Michael one day? It was an appalling reality he wished he didn’t have to live with.
The other place he’d thought of as home had burned to the ground during Tristan’s mating issues. Cursed into trying to kill his new love, he’d torched the Institute his father had built and they’d all watched it turn into ashes around them. The memory made him angry, and not at Tristan who had suffered more than any of them when he’d come back to his senses and realized what had happened, but at Kendrick and the pain—no, the hell—he’d put them all through.
Maybe his mating would finally put an end to Kendrick. Gabriel stalked forward, leaving the Theo and Azriel behind.
Azriel moved to follow but Theo placed a hand on his shoulder. “Let him go ahead. I want to talk to you—to the two of you.” Theo’s eyes stared down at the female wolf in his arms.
It was a small gesture but a nice one. She could understand them—he was pretty sure that was true. He couldn’t even begin to dwell on the idea that she couldn’t. It was bad enough she was trapped in the wolf body and he was mated to a woman whose human side, or name for that matter, he didn’t know. What if her brain was actually gone, eaten by the ‘wrongness’ of her creation?
“Are you paying attention, Az, or did I lose you to your inner musings again?” He smiled. “Sorry, man, I know it’s annoying.”
“It’s not annoying, it’s just part of the intricacies of talking with you. It’s not as if I can blame you,” Theo’s gaze fell to the she-wolf again. “You have a lot to think about but stay with me for a minute.”
“You’ve got my attention.”
Theo sighed. “I would say this to you telepathically except you want her to hear what you hear and I’m going to respect that. Faith would flip out if I ever tried to leave her out of conversations she should hear.” Az watched in amazement as Theo actually smiled at that thought. How was it possible that he would like the thought of Faith getting angry? He might never understand relationships.
Theo continued. “Anyway, I’m worried about Gabriel.” Az turned to watch their brother up ahead. “I know he can hear us. This isn’t going to come as any surprise to him and maybe it’s time someone started saying this aloud.”
Why was this the first time he was hearing that there was some kind of problem with Gabriel? “What’s been going on since I’ve been down in the lab?”
“What hasn’t been going on since you went down in the lab?” Enough. “Okay, all sarcasm aside, just tell me.”
“Tristan wanted to send Gabriel to find our sister.” “So why did he end up sending Michael?”
“Ever since Gabriel and I got back from Arizona and our encounter with our father…Gabriel has been a little ‘off’. He’s very violent right now. It actually worked to our favor in getting you out of the lab just now but he goes from zero to crazy in under two seconds.”
This part of being in a family didn’t work so well for Az. There was sure to be an appropriate thing for him to say at the moment and he didn’t have a clue what it was.
Want me to tell you what to say?
In no way did he want that. No, you’ll just start cursing and screaming, which even I know is not necessary at the moment.
His wolf argued. I would not.
He cleared his throat. “Then why isn’t Tristan doing something about it?”
“Tristan is off-island with Ashlee and the kids. Cullen and Summer went too. They brought the baby with them, too. Technically, I’m in charge only Gabriel doesn’t seem to remember that.”
Now Az saw where this was going. “Okay, then what you’re telling me that I’m slow to catch onto is that when Tristan gets back he’s going to have to bite the bullet and rank us?”
That would put Az way at the bottom of the pecking order of Kanes. Maybe right above Rex, maybe below him depending on just how pissed off Tristan currently was at their youngest brother.
“Well that, yes, but also that I want you to be careful with Gabriel. I know you’re less volatile than the rest of us, only I’ve been where you are. You’ve found your mate; however, for obvious reasons, you can’t mate her. That’s going to make you really nuts. Gabriel is going to taunt you. Please don’t kill him.”
“You know, even as a wolf, I could never take Gabriel in a physical fight.”
Oh bullshit. We could, if you ever let me loose. He ignored his wolf.
Theo raised an eyebrow. “You’ve never been mated before.”
“Are you telling me that mating increases physical strength and capabilities?” He was going to have to try to stay objective about this and observe the changes in himself scientifically. What was it about the mating exactly that brought on the physical alterations?
Because gods forbid you just enjoy finding your soul mate?
He sighed. Did everyone else have as contemptuous a relationship with his or her wolf as he did? This is fun for me.
“I’m telling you that if you wanted to, in order to protect your mate, you could fly to the moon using only a swat from your tail.”
“Theo, I don’t know if poetic references from fairytales are what’s called for in this situation.”
Theo only laughed, which made Az want to show him exactly what damage he could do with his tail. The thought stopped Az in his tracks. That was a fairly aggressive response, not something he usually bothered with where his brothers were co
ncerned. Maybe Theo was right, maybe he was out of synch and more…primal…due to his mate’s appearance and his inability to do anything about it.
He shook his head and looked down at the brown and white fur ball that he held in his arms. Narrowing his eyes, he realized she’d fallen asleep. This time he gave in and laughed aloud. Here he was obsessing over whether or not they were actually mated and what ramifications that meant for him and his future bride, the woman he was bound to for eternity, who he still had yet to lay eyes on, had fallen asleep in his arms.
Theo followed his gaze. “I guess she was tired after the fire. She’s probably not used to the chaos like we are.”
This sobered Az immediately. Was it a bad sign that his brother had twice now had to explain the woman to him? Why couldn’t he be as attuned to her needs as Theo?
“Theo, she dragged me across the lab with her teeth.”
“They’re all very strong, stronger than ‘normal’ wolves, maybe as strong as we are. You haven’t encountered one in battle yet. They really kick ass. Dad knew what he was doing when he created them.” Theo visibly shuddered. “It would be great if you could figure out how to turn them back so we could take away that advantage.”
“Are you under the impression that I’m not trying to get it done? Because I have been doing nothing else for months. All I do all day, every day, is work on the ‘man made’ wolf problem. You guys bring them in, I work on them, they die, and I burn their dead carcasses. Sound like a lot of fun to you? Sound like something you’d spend more than one extra second doing if you had the chance?”
Yeah, tell him to go screw himself.
Theo put his hands out in front of him in a placating gesture. “I’m sorry, Az, I mean clearly you must be doing something right if Dad is attempting to destroy your lab. We all know how hard you’ve been working. Maybe after your mating, your mind will feel clearer.”
“Dad has been trying to kill me since I was born, remember? When I was two days old he tried to drown me in the bathtub and as for the mating, there is a big problem there—mainly that she is currently a wolf without a human body. I have no idea what to do about this very large problem.”