“I’ve got you, brother,” Gibson crooned into the wolf’s ear. Ellis rumbled, and then his voice pitched up, turning his whine into a reedy thin screech. The wolf twisted, trying to break free of Gibson’s arms, but he held tight, refusing to let Ellis go. Digging his fingers into the thick fur on Ellis’s chest, Gibson rubbed at a spot he knew would drive calm through Ellis’s thoughts. “Listen to me, El, and not the storm. You’re not there. You’re here with me in California. Whatever you do, you need to hold on to that. You can do this. You can make it past this. We can ride this out.”
The wolf’s gyrations grew frenzied, surging with the growing storm. With each shatter of lightning against the dark sky, Ellis’s mewling intensified until he worked himself into a long keen, spittle and froth speckling his muzzle. Gibson felt Ellis’s bones shifting, vibrating against the flat of his palm. The wolf’s fur rippled, shedding in chunks from his haunches and shoulders, his back arching high and his vertebrae popping, parting the hair along his spine and thinning Ellis’s skin.
Gibson’s stomach roiled, clenching around a sour he’d held in his guts since the moment he’d gotten that ill-fated phone call from Old Walter telling him Ellis had come home… only to go wolf. He couldn’t ease the pain wrapping around Ellis’s mind, nor could he lessen the anguish twisting at his bones and flesh. Worry filled his thoughts, intense and fierce, so strong he didn’t notice Ellis’s teeth sinking into his forearm until his dripping blood hit the floor. The bite didn’t matter. Neither did the blood. He’d heal over the wound in a matter of seconds, one of the few blessings of their family line, but he was worried about the insanity riding his brother’s mind. Gibson didn’t know what was forcing the change, the storm riding the wolf’s instincts or the memories of war holding Ellis hostage.
Once started, the change was nearly impossible to stop.
Chunks of Ellis’s fur peeled off from his skin, falling to the cabin’s floor. Other patches folded into the wolf’s now rippling flesh, churning under the stretches of human emerging from within. His bones cracked, elongating, and his body mass shifted, changing beneath Gibson’s hands. It was painful to watch. Gibson’s body ached with the memory of going through the transformation himself, but Ellis—tortured, haunted Ellis—carried more agony than Gibson could ever imagine. He didn’t know if Ellis even understood what was happening to him anymore, if there was any awareness left in the overgrown maze of Ellis’s mind.
The wolf’s amber eyes bled gray around the edges, Ellis’s humanity taking hold. Transformations, the shifting of one body to the next, were usually rapid, a push of will against flesh and form and the genetic flow of one half to the next that took mere seconds. It was never instantaneous, and the shed of fur or skin left behind was easily disposed of, but the shift itself, while painful, evolved over generations to be a quick process, either for survival or to minimize psychological damage.
Ellis wasn’t so lucky. Not now. Not when his shattered mind longed for his wolf form but his flight instinct, more human than lupine, forced his change. Gibson could only watch helplessly, arms wrapped tight around Ellis’s shifting chest, mostly skin now with patches of wolf fur, and pray Ellis could survive the pain of an agonizingly slow transformation.
The sound of the skull cracking, bones changing, tore at Gibson’s heart. Then Ellis’s face emerged from his wolf form.
It broke Gibson. Ellis’s expression, the horror in his eyes, the grimace on his face. And just when Gibson thought Ellis finally broke through—the Ellis he’d come to protect, nourish, and hope to heal—the moment was gone. Ellis was gone. More shifting, but this time against the skin, the wolf’s thick black pelt swiftly covering his lengthening body. Ellis’s broad chest barreled out, his hips tucking up and his legs morphing back to the form he felt so very safe in.
Gibson wanted to think the shimmer of gray he saw slowly fading into the amber of the wolf’s gaze expressed regret, perhaps even remorse, but there was no guilt there. Only the release of pain, the shedding of humanity, and the echo of relief as the wolf took over once again.
“No, no. Please. Ellis, stay with me,” Gibson begged. “Let me help you. Please give me a chance to help.”
The wolf pulled away from him, skulking off on shaky legs. And Gibson was left surrounded by handfuls of shed fur and an immense loss gutting him. He was crying, he could taste the salt on his face when his tears touched his lips, but his thoughts were solely on the man lost inside of the wolf.
Until he heard a gasp behind him and the sweet rasp of the honeyed baritone exclaiming, “Oh my God, what are you people?”
Two
FEAR TURNED Zach’s mouth into a desert. He was alive, cold along the spine but alive, yet staring into the rough features of the man sitting on the other end of the L-shaped couch, he wasn’t sure how much longer he would survive. There was an iciness in his storm-cloud-colored gaze, his gray eyes folded with a marble of blue and dove and a chilly detachment more keen than any knife Zach ever handled. It sliced through him, sharper and colder than the lake waters he’d fallen into, and he quickly discovered he feared the man more than he did the wolf lying near the fireplace.
The man was large, the kind of bulk gained by hard work and determination. His shoulders strained at the seams of his shirt, its long sleeves ruched up past corded forearms, and his thick thighs, encased in faded denim jeans, surged with power as he stood. A few short strides and the man stood over him, his bulk as terrifying as the wolf’s growl when he chased Zach through the trees. A scruff of beard dappled his square jaw, a mink brown slightly darker than the sienna mane pushed back from his face. He was handsome in the way a man was when he carried himself with confidence, a stalking swagger demanding the world part in front of him, leaving him with an open field to run.
He was terrifying and arousing. And Zach hated himself for the tickle of attraction forming in his belly even as his fright stole the spit from the back of his throat.
It probably also didn’t help he was naked and trapped beneath the wealth of quilts. The rub of fabric against his dick and nipples was an odd distraction to have when facing down death, but there he lay, stroked with soft cotton and terrified by what he’d seen just a few moments ago.
“Please, don’t kill me,” Zach whispered. “I won’t tell anyone. I won’t—”