Half Wolf. Linda Thomas-Sundstrom

a fly, even if she knew about the existence of werewolves, and that it would be a shame for the world to lose such a small bundle.

      “Breathe,” he said to her. “That’s right. Now breathe again.”

      It’s a damn shame that if you live and decide to threaten or expose my kind, it will be my job to kill you. Saving your life tonight would have been for nothing.

      Her lashes fluttered, which was a good sign. He said to her, “Some of the pain will ease temporarily, though probably not nearly enough.”

      He watched her face for another reaction without finding one.

      “The pain will return and get worse. I won’t lie about that. You’ll have to hold on, ride this out, if you want to survive. You’ll have to prove yourself stronger than you look.”

      The woman’s pale lips, beautifully shaped and so close to his own, were stiff with shock. Her temporary respite from the agony—either of losing her life altogether or losing life as she’d known it—was as fragile as the rest of her. Michael lowered the odds of her ever opening her big gray eyes.

      Still, he held her possessively, liking the feel of her body against his despite her chance of surviving. Liking the velvety softness of her hair against his chest, and how her silky legs dangled over his arms.

      Seemed even badasses weren’t immune to an attractive woman.

      Something inside him stirred when she moaned. His thoughts grew softer. Is someone waiting for you to come home?

      No response came from the prize in his arms. She wasn’t yet alive enough to speak. Possibly she didn’t even hear him.

      “I don’t know you. Don’t know your name,” he said. “But here we are, about to either become allies or enemies. Provided that you gain back the strength to open your eyes.”

      Michael felt his pulse skip again as he carefully observed his unintentional captive. His victim. His new, awkward responsibility. He wondered if maybe it was only the moon causing the hum in his chest.

      Glancing up at the sky, where that nearly full moon blazed a luminous silver white, he held off the muscle burn that urged him to shift shape.

      “Hold on,” he whispered to the woman nestled in his arms, willing her to hear, commanding the few drops of his blood, now inside her body, to obey their codes and offer assistance.

      His voice lowered to a growl as his internal wolfishness finally rushed to meet the moonlight. “Hold tight, little wolf, and pray for a miracle. If we’re very lucky, maybe you’ll actually thank me someday.”

       Chapter 2

      “Are you awake?”

      The voice was close enough to be inside her mind. Kaitlin struggled to place the words, found meaning and instantly, in some distant part of herself, recognized the tone.

      “Can you speak?” the man asked.

      Don’t move. Don’t you dare move or answer him. He could be anyone. Another wacko. Seriously ill.

      This guy had hurt her, too, Kaitlin remembered, after he had actually asked for permission first. That’s what had gone down.

      Willing herself to stillness, to silence, while her heartbeat shuddered uncomfortably against her rib cage, Kaitlin desperately wanted to know what was happening. But she was afraid to find out. She was afraid to move.

      She was lying down, curled up in a fetal position with her knees almost to her chin, and she hurt everywhere—head, body, skin, and all the way to the roots of her hair. Pain lashed out each time she attempted a shallow breath, that pain just barely tolerable.

      The urge came to whimper, shout, cry. But not to die. No matter what, she did not want to die, or be dead already.

      “Can you answer me?” he asked.

      Above her pounding heart she perceived another beat—slower than her own, steady against her shoulder blades. Puffs of air skittered along her neck, telling her that the guy was very close to her. She nearly cried out against this kind of intrusion as a fresh wave of panic struck.

      Struggling to keep her eyes open, she looked straight ahead at something that had to be a length of chocolate-brown fabric. She was almost positive it wasn’t dirt.

      Fire sang through her skull when she tried to place even that one small thing. Her lungs ached. Her eye sockets throbbed. She welcomed the discomfort because those things had to mean she was alive.

      Focus.

      The brown surface had white lines that looked like stitching. White thread. She was on a blanket. This was good. She hadn’t been left in the park for early morning foot traffic to find.

      More relief and another round of chills accompanied a further perception. She wasn’t cold. She rested on a blanket, and the man who had rescued her was here. She remembered the hardness of his chest in what still seemed like a dream. Though she had stopped shaking, she felt like she might throw up.

      “Can you speak?” he asked again.

      Was he casually posing a question when she had no idea where she was, who he was or what had happened to her? When she couldn’t have uttered one word if she’d wanted to? Her throat was tight, raw and constricted, because a fiend had chomped on it.

      Yes. A fiend. I remember that, too.

      Swallowing was a chore. Something tight had been wrapped around her throat, from which a distinctive smell arose.

      Gauze?

      It was a scent out of childhood memory—of scraped knees and knuckles. In this instance, it was the smell of a treated bandage and implied that not only had she survived, but the man beside her had to be a good guy. Still...hospitals didn’t have brown blankets or intimate sleeping accommodations.

      More panic threatened with a dangerous undertow. Why hadn’t she been taken to a hospital?

      Kaitlin waited to find out if she was wrong about her rescuer and if this guy might have saved her for nefarious purposes of his own. She’d have to rally somehow. She would have to run.

      “You’re in my room,” her companion explained, his voice producing a familiar tingling vibration inside her chest. “I didn’t know where else to take you. Didn’t know where you belonged. In truth, taking you anywhere else might have been bad for both of us.”

      His voice had the mesmerizing quality of a dangerous animal temporarily appeased. While the words themselves were gentle, they were underscored by a hint of something scary that chilled Kaitlin to the bone.

      She gasped and managed to suck in a lungful of daylight-filled air. Stripes of light filled with dancing dust particles lay across the blanket beside her, she now saw. Sunlight was seeping through curtains or shutters.

      She withheld a shout of relief. Daylight would chase the nightmares away; keep the horrors out of reach.

      Any time now.

      “Hospitals are out of the question,” her host continued. “I’m afraid they don’t deal well with people like us. Their physicians wouldn’t know what to do or what we’d need.”

      People like us. Kaitlin hoped to God he meant doctorate students without health insurance. She hoped with all her might this guy would turn out to be from the campus police.

      She was twenty-three years old and felt terribly small and inadequate. More than anything, she wanted to hear her parents’ voices. Without the people she loved, sunlight and fresh blankets weren’t completely normal things or as comforting as they could be.

      She fought back tears.

      Squeaking bedsprings made her heart flutter. Her center of gravity shifted as the man behind her moved on the bed.

      “You