Wulfe Untamed (Feral Warriors #8)(3)

“I love you, Rick. I just need time.”

“You’re different, Nat.”

Mentally, Wulfe blinked. She was different. And not in the way her fiancé meant. That sunrise glow—the gold, green, and blue aura—had followed her inside. Even out of the sunshine, it clung to her flesh, bright against the dark shadows of her living room.

What the hell?

Natalie dropped her gaze to the other man’s bare chest. “Rick . . .” She shook her head. “You’d be different, too, if you’d lost days, and friends. If your brother was missing.” She looked up, meeting the man’s gaze. “I have dreams . . . the most terrifying dreams. Sometimes I think I’m beginning to remember some of it, but the things I remember . . . aren’t possible.”

Wulfe gave a loud mental groan. The last thing they needed was for Natalie Cash to remember seeing shape-shifters and wraith Daemons and the inside of Feral House. Not that she’d be able to find it. Probably. And not that anyone else would believe her. Still . . .

“Nat, if you remember something, you have to tell the cops.”

“They’re just dreams, Rick.”

The man ran a frustrated hand through his hair, mussing it even more, then held out that hand to her. “Come back to bed, Natalie.”

For a moment, Wulfe thought she’d say no. Instead, she turned back to the screen door, to him, that odd aura clinging to her. “Go home, boy.”

Was he really seeing something, or were the changes that had been coming over him of late affecting his vision, now, too? Maybe it was just his wolf’s eyesight that was affected, but he couldn’t very well shift to human form to check. Not when his clothes were in his truck on the other side of the woods.

With a growl of frustration, he leaped off the deck and headed back into the trees. Natalie’s odd glow was probably just a factor of his own vision—either a side effect of the Ferals’ endangered immortality, or the Daemon blood within his own heritage that had begun to stir to life.

But his gut gnawed at him, the possibility raising its head that she really was glowing. That perhaps she’d been changed in some way by the Daemon who’d attacked her six weeks ago. He needed to get someone out here to take a look at her without alarming anyone. Because if Natalie Cash had been changed, and the humans started to see it, she could endanger the anonymity of the immortal races. Which could endanger her life.

Hell. She didn’t deserve this.

Leaping over a rotting log, he ran through the woods, his wolf’s paws quick and sure. The forest scents played in his senses, the smell of moss and leaves, of rabbit and spring dawn, pleasing the animal. But his mind remained firmly on Natalie.

He’d first met her on that field of battle where the evil Mage had captured her and her friends to use as Daemon bait. He’d noticed her because she was pretty, but also because her stoicism in the face of such horror had drawn his respect. In the end, only three of the six humans had survived, and the Ferals had taken them back to Feral House and locked them up until they could steal their memories of all they’d seen. They’d only succeeded with the two women, and had subsequently sent them home. But Xavier was blind, and memories were stolen through the eyes. He could never go home again. And Natalie could never know that her brother remained alive. No one could.

Her grief made Wulfe ache.

Clearing the woods on the other side, he loped down the hillside to the deserted warehouse outside Frederick, Maryland, where he’d parked his truck. Sending his wolf’s senses outward, he reassured himself no humans lurked about, then shifted, calling on the power of the animal spirit that lived within him to change back into a man in a rush of joy and sparkling colored lights. The June morning was warm, the birds twittering in the trees above as the sun slowly rose in the east.

As he rounded the cab to fetch his clothes out of the open bed, he caught a glimpse of himself in the window—the crooked nose set among nearly two dozen scars, one of which slashed across his mouth, tugging his lip downward, giving him the appearance of a perpetual scowl. His was a face that made women scream, a face that sent children running into the night.

With a sigh, he tugged on his jeans. He hadn’t always been this way, of course. Centuries ago, in his youth, women had sighed over his beauty, claiming him the most handsome of males. At seven feet tall, he’d towered over his competition in every way. Despite that, he’d never thought himself vain or arrogant, which in hindsight had probably been the height of conceit. The fates had punished him for his hubris. In a single day he’d lost it all—his looks, the admiration of his peers, his self-respect. The goddess had, in her terrible wisdom, declared his soul flawed, then marked him so that everyone would know it. Marks he’d carried for centuries now, and would for the rest of his immortal life.

He shrugged into his T-shirt, then pulled on his boots. At least the wolf animal spirit hadn’t found him lacking. Three years after the scarring, the sole wolf shifter had died, and he’d been marked to be the next. It was said that the animal spirit always chose the individual it considered to be the strongest and most honorable among those of the Therian race that still possessed wolf-shifter DNA. So Wulfe had learned to give thanks for the goddess’s painful lesson. He’d been taught a terrible humility, then been rewarded for embracing it.

The lesson had been a steep price to pay, but he’d pay it again a hundred times over if it meant remaining a Feral Warrior, one of only a handful of shape-shifters left in the world. At the moment, the Ferals were all that stood between the races of the Earth, both immortal and human, and destruction by the Daemons, if the soulless Mage succeeded in freeing the fiends, as they were determined to do.