Cry Wolf (35 page)

Malcolm surged forward, burying his face in her shoulder and panting Kelly’s name. He twitched inside her as he came. He bit at her neck, licking where he’d left marks on uninked skin. He didn’t miss a beat, eager to give her some kind of pleasure of his own, eager almost to prove that he was a worthy partner after what he had seen between her and Abraham.

Kelly couldn’t deny that there was a certain kind of inexorable desire that linked her to Abraham. If he weren’t a murderer and a cultist, staying by his side wouldn’t have even been a choice, but it wouldn’t have been out of love. It would have been out of everyone’s need to be with people who are like them, and there were no other people like Kelly and Abraham—or at least there were very few. She was effectively alone.

But Malcolm had chosen her, and she’d loved Malcolm before she’d let herself acknowledge it. Everything else was window dressing—their differences, his ambivalence about lycanthropy, their respective sexual styles, her magical outbursts and her experience as a killer. They could be dealt with over time, if time was something they had.

Malcolm worshipped the peaks of her breasts, and she groaned as her nipples tightened against his tongue. He made his way down to the crux between her legs, as though kneeling before an altar. Malcolm was a devotee, a follower, a relatively passive man quite unlike anyone she had ever been with or wanted to be with—yet he had such willingness to submit in addition to offering his complete loyalty to whoever brought him out of his loneliness.

It was as sad, in some ways, as Abraham’s own loneliness. Each man had reacted in diametrically opposed ways to being alone—Malcolm with a patina of suspicion over his fear of abandonment, a kicked stray learning how to be kept, and Abraham with an imperious nature that merely masked empty charm.

And Kelly? Abraham had unravelled what control she’d thought she possessed. Now the full weight of her untapped magic pulled at the frayed edges of the control she had left. The potential dangers of her lycanthropy were almost an afterthought when she had to make sure that the skies didn’t open up as Malcolm licked deeply at her cunt to drink the pleasure he had drawn from her.

Kelly guided Malcolm’s mouth up to her clit and pressed him closer as the early stirrings of her climax shot inside her like little bursts of electricity. Kelly clenched her fists into the sheets to keep the magic at bay. It was like how it used to be, when the magic would burst with static, burnouts and mechanical chaos, except that none of the electronics around her were on, so she could only feel it build up inside her before it burst. Heaven knew what would happen when it did.

“Malcolm,” she gasped.

His mouth worked her over, his teeth clicking against her piercing. He was tireless, passionate, desperate. As she rode over the crest of her orgasm, she closed her eyes and saw Abraham in her mind, watching her as she watched her people. She poured her built-up magic into slamming the door in his face.

“Malcolm,” she whispered again, pulling him up her body so that she could kiss her taste from him until there was just him, convincing him in her own way that she had chosen him, too.

Kelly held him close as sleep settled soft and inviting behind her eyes. Butch Cassidy adjusted his position on the bed nearer to them now that they had stilled. She wished that this moment was all she ever had to have, that she didn’t have to wake up and run to a slaughter.

* * * *

When Kelly woke up, she did so on her own without any sense of urgency from her magic. She sensed Abraham closer than before but not yet close enough that they had to evacuate the sanctuary.

She told everyone to eat a good meal.

Then they slowly walked down the driveway, meeting with the werewolves at the gate. Everyone was there, the core shapeshifter pack as well as Lotus, who had decided to tag along instead of waiting behind with the other shapeshifters to look over the dogs. It physically pained Kelly to see him with them, just barely crossed into adulthood and still appearing as a child in her eyes.

Kelly pushed through the crowd to get ahead of them. The werewolves knew the place where she was going—they had run those paths before. It was a place where the trees were less dense, a clearing that would be ideal for her and Abraham in a confrontation. But the rest of the team was to stay in the forest, where it was easier for them to use the trees to block any potential attack. Also, if Abraham were bringing his own followers, they wouldn’t know how to manoeuvre as well as the shifters and wolves in untamed terrain.

If Abraham’s congregation was closer to his skill than the average witch, they were all in trouble, but Kelly doubted that was the case. People who weren’t born with certain power probably couldn’t do much more than the average apothecary. Kelly was betting on it, because if she were wrong, she had just led everyone she cared about into a trap. It wouldn’t matter how big the shifters’ or the werewolves’ teeth were if Abraham’s followers threw fireballs and sterling silver needles at their faces.

Kelly’s fingers went numb as she realised that silver would truly be a problem. Abraham worked with werewolves. He would be an idiot not to keep silver weapons around.

She pulled back and murmured in Damien’s ear, “He’ll bring silver. Tell the pack to avoid anything that shines.”

“Check,” Damien said, trying to sound nonchalant, but Kelly thought his lips lost a little colour. “Duck and cover, dodge and attack, folks. The man’s brought all his fine silver.”

“And do stay out of the way of Renee’s gun,” Malcolm added.

“That, too,” Kelly said.

“Don’t worry about that,” Damien said. “We’ve seen her shoot. Girl’s got aim.”

“I’ve been practising,” Renee said. Her already pale skin, paler than Kelly’s, seemed to have gone white.

“Her bullets won’t kill us, though,” Jada said.

“I didn’t say stay away from her bullets,” Malcolm replied. “I said stay away from her gun. She’s a good shot, but she’s pretty solid with a knife, too.”

“Duly noted,” Leon said, inching away from the silver knife and putting himself between it and Damien. The gesture was completely unconscious, the beta wolf doing his duty to protect his alpha. Leon was a soldier—anyone could see it. And he was good at what he did, otherwise Damien would have told him to loosen up. Kelly didn’t know Leon well, but she was already starting to like him.

“All right,” Kelly said when they reached the edge of the clearing. “Stay back. The Father will come for me.” The impression of insects at a picnic burned into her eyelids. “His ants will surround us, so watch your back.”

“So he did bring some friends,” Malcolm said, crouching.

“Game faces, children,” Damien told his pack. He creaked into his compact but powerful grey werewolf. Jada, Leon and Landon transformed next, all of them variations of white and black markings that made Britt look like a miniature version of them. Lily shivered into a shaggy grey pelt, and Tanya circled around her in her whitish grey wolf skin. Stephanie, with her brownish pelt, and Jeremy took up the rear, staying nearer to the shapeshifters. Jeremy’s werewolf looked amazingly healthy in an charcoal grey, shaggy coat—his wolf was as robust as his human skin seemed frail.

The shapeshifters stayed in their human skins, removing their bathrobes at the edge of the clearing. Now they shivered in the chill, but they’d handled worse. Although it was hard for just five of them to form a circle around Max and Renee, they managed to arrange themselves so that anything would have to get through them first. Max’s gun was less useful against werewolves than Renee’s, but it would serve as extra protection against a human being, since he couldn’t do much to an enemy as a Yorkie terrier.

Malcolm also stayed in his human skin. His sour anxiety suffused his cold sweat. Kelly knew his fear—he wouldn’t be afraid of dying nearly as much as killing someone he didn’t mean to kill.

Kelly stepped into the light of the late morning sun. Though it was still early spring, the sun already felt warmer against her skin. Like the werewolves and most of the shifters, she was also naked. It wouldn’t distract Abraham, who had already seen her like this, but it might distract his followers. Regardless of Abraham’s liberality regarding sex, Kelly doubted that the kind of people attracted to him would feel the same way. She’d use whatever she could.

Abraham met her in the middle, a distance of about twenty feet between them. If she trusted only her eyes, she would think he was all alone, but she could sense his followers, mostly human. If she listened closely enough, she heard whispers that might have been their minds or might have been them coordinating with each other. If it was the latter, Damien’s pack would also be able to hear them.

“You tried to take my spell book,” Abraham said. He had swathed himself again in all his imposing layers. He showed no sign of being intimidated by her or by the ones she had brought with her, although if she were aware of his entourage, he had to be aware of hers.

“I made a promise to a friend,” Kelly said.

“You thought you could use the spell I made for you on Malcolm, the young man you brought with you.” He held up his hands in a benevolent shrug. “No, I understand, Kelly. Although if it makes you feel less like a failure, the spell wouldn’t have worked on him. It was created for you and your magic alone. You could have survived the process. He couldn’t.”

“Actually, that does make me feel better,” Kelly said. “Although if you’d spent half the energy figuring out a way to leave your victims intact after taking their magic as you did for me, maybe I wouldn’t be here to kill you.”

“Alas, soul separation is a terrible, terrible experience for even the most powerful. Killing them was the only way to save them. I would have to nearly kill you to make that spell work,” Abraham said. “I’ll do it against your will if I have to, but I would much rather work with someone willing.”

“Not going to happen,” Kelly said.

“Pity,” Abraham said. “I see you’ve brought your friends to die. You refuse to give yourself as a sacrifice, yet you present me with such rich gifts.”

“And you seem eager to have your acolytes eaten,” Kelly replied. “
I
would have preferred it to be just you and me and a swath of destruction as far as the eye can see, with your soldiers feeding the earth.”

“And yet your friends are here to sustain me instead.”

“I didn’t force them to not come like I wanted to. It was their choice.”

“How noble to let them die on principle. Even the young man you tried to save, I sense him here as well,” Abraham said. “His soul cries out to me for mercy. Why give him to me now when you would not at Salvation?”

“Well, you were going to kill him anyway,” Kelly said. Her spine felt like a tree trunk. Her limbs shivered as if in a strong breeze. Her magic recognised the magic that had freed it. It wanted to be let out again, to intertwine with his, to bring them together either to fight or fuck—her magic didn’t particularly care, as long as it was used. Thunder rumbled in the distance, vibrating under her feet like a minor temblor.

“I was going to save him,” Abraham said. He spread the sides of his robes and shed them there on the grass. Kelly had nothing to fetter her magic or her flexibility. He wanted the same range of motion. Without the robes, he was a sleek, suited figure, a bit diminished. “I
was
going to save him.
Now
I’m going to kill him.”

“You can try,” Kelly said. She clenched her teeth tight. She was not angry—well, not that much—but she didn’t know whether she could hold back much longer.

“I sense the storm coming,” Abraham said softly, approaching with his hands steepled near his chest, as though he were in the middle of a university lecture. “You do have power, Kelly, there is no denying that. If it were a battle of sheer strength, you would win. You have power, my dear, but you have no control.”

“No thanks to you,” she replied.

“No, you should thank me,” Abraham said. “If I had known that we would be needlessly fighting like this, I wouldn’t have freed the magic that you caged. However, although I made a more formidable foe, I didn’t make an invincible one.”

“I never said I was invincible,” Kelly said.

“Yet you are here.”

“So are you,” Kelly said. She rose from the ground from the effort of holding the magic back, the way a wave might lift a person from the sand. “But I feel no fear in you, in spite of my magic.”

“I have nothing to fear,” Abraham said.

“No? But you do fear death.”

“I know no one who doesn’t,” Abraham said. “But you’re not death. I am death. Fear
me
.”

A bullet just missed her. It would have hit her leg if she hadn’t risen a few feet higher with the build-up of her magic. Kelly twisted around in the air, keeping part of her focus on the man behind her.

All of them, all the people who had come to watch her back, now crept up on her. Max’s gun clicked as he set the next round. The werewolves were low on the ground, hackles up and ears perked. Abraham’s followers came up behind them, waiting and watching, holding various versions of weapons and wands. They didn’t want to attack unless they had to. Abraham had probably assured them that they might not have to fight at all.

Abraham had pulled her friends’ strings as expertly as any artist. Even Renee had her gun trained on Kelly’s chest. She was a better marksman than Max. She would not miss.

Leon and Damien crouched lower, their legs coiled to spring, their mouths shining with hunger. She would appear vulnerable prey, wearing nothing but flesh and ink. Even the dogs slavered.

She saw through their eyes collectively, because with the exception of Renee, Abraham used the same illusion on all of them— She was a traitor, so she was food.

Malcolm came from the side, launching at her. Kelly pushed him away with her magic. He bounced back and whimpered as if he had hit a rubber wall. Malcolm wriggled in the air to land on his feet, which was when Leon and Damien leapt at her. She sent them rolling, shoving them to the sides rather than into the group of her friends.

“Endanger my sanctuary?” Renee muttered, yet Kelly heard every word. “I’m not going to let you hurt them again.”