Half Wolf. Linda Thomas-Sundstrom

his head. “Explanations later. For now, it’s enough that you’re alive and walking.”

      More than alive, Kaitlin thought. And how could she think about later when Michael’s expression told her he shared her hunger and was fighting to keep from letting his hunger out? Weren’t people supposed to live in the now? Experience each moment as if it were their last?

      Had she confronted that last moment recently?

      “I want to feel,” she whispered hoarsely, afraid to think back. “I need to know everything life has to offer.”

      “Yes, but for you tonight is merely a dream.”

      “That’s why you’re here, Michael? I’ve dreamed you up?”

      He took her hand in his and placed her open palm on his chest, making his remark about dreams seem ludicrous. This guy was solid sculpted male goodness through and through.

      “Enjoy this while you can because if it’s all good, you’ll be back to reality tomorrow,” he said.

      Another word floated through Kaitlin’s mind as if Michael had conjured it. College. Not a totally unfamiliar word, yet too distant to capture with a focus that already moved back to Michael’s taut body and the hardness below his waist that she knew was in her honor.

      “You want me,” she whispered.

      “Like I said, you know nothing.” Michael reached up to move a tangle of her hair back from her face, showing off arms corded with power and tension. No tats covered his biceps. His skin was actually sun-bronzed.

      Waves of lust struck Kaitlin so strongly that she would have swayed if he hadn’t pinned her to the tree.

      “I know this isn’t normal,” she said.

      “Not for you,” he agreed. “Not yet. Your feelings are tied to what happened.”

      Do not think back, her mind warned. You’ll be sorry if you do.

      Kaitlin glanced sideways. “No one is around?”

      “No one you can see.”

      Michael’s remark triggered a memory she had just warned herself not to find. Things hid in the dark. Bad things.

      Catching a whiff of some new scent, Kaitlin struggled to place it. She reached for her throat, found the rough surface of the bandage and pressed there. The sharp-edged pain beneath that touch caused the night to close in.

      “Oh, no, you don’t.” Michael’s hands tugged her fingers from her neck.

      “What...” Nearly breathless, Kaitlin started over. “What’s wrong with me?”

      “Nothing we can’t deal with.” Michael’s voice deepened further as he glanced up at a patch of night sky visible through the branches.

      Kaitlin followed his gaze. “Will I remember this dream?”

      She ran her palm over his chest, outlining one scroll of the tattoos. Michael twitched, stopped her progress with a tight grip on her wrist and shook his head.

      “It wouldn’t be fair for me to take you up on that,” he said.

      Her eyes strayed. “What does it matter, if it’s a dream?”

      “It matters,” he said. “And you will remember it all eventually.”

      She pulled away from his grip and moved her hand to his shoulder, where moonlight helped to outline his exquisite muscular shape. He stopped her again with a firm hand and a nebulous whispered comment. “You don’t, as yet, know anything. It’s hard for me to...”

      He backed up, stood tall, drenched in moonlight. The first pop Kaitlin heard after his little speech was a muted sound. There was no mistaking the second for anything benign. Or the third.

      Like a series of pinging buttons on an overstretched shirt, the bones of Michael’s jaw began to unhinge. The beautiful, sharp-featured face in front of her began to stretch. Michael’s dark hair lengthened as if someone invisible had tugged at the roots. His muscles danced as though something alive under the skin wanted to get out.

      As he dropped to a crouch, the scrolling tattoos on his chest began to spread, covering muscle, turning his skin dark. Then his legs furred up in fluid series of swishes and cracks.

      One minute the man had been there, and the next minute, something else appeared that uttered a reverberating growl. When his head lifted, familiar green eyes looked out, but it was no longer Michael, the angel’s namesake, facing her. It was an animal, dark as the night, tall as her thighs. Sleek. Primal. Down on all fours.

      Michael had turned into a wolf.

      And he had been right about one thing.

      She didn’t yet know anything about what was going on.

       Chapter 3

      Kaitlin woke up screaming, her body prepared to fight. Fists curled, mouth open, she felt trapped and unable to flee the nightmare because something was holding her down.

      She kicked out with her legs and opened her eyes. Expecting to see a big wolf leaning over her, she instead found another image. Trees.

      Hell, yes. There were trees in her sightline, and not the living kind. She was looking at a picture, a poster of a forest, on the wall above a desk that held a retro lava lamp, a silver telephone and an open laptop computer.

      Hesitating, consciously attempting to quiet her churning insides, Kaitlin’s mind filled in the gaps. These were her things. Familiar things. She wasn’t outside, running in a moonlit field. Nor was she pinned to a tree by a naked man.

      This was her apartment.

      But she wasn’t alone.

      Fine hairs at the nape of Kaitlin’s neck prickled with leftover panic as she turned her head. No wolf waited there with its black fur gleaming. A woman, a stranger, sat on the edge of her bed.

      “Kaitlin, is it?” her uninvited visitor asked.

      Kaitlin sat up to find that she’d been trapped by nothing more than a tangle of sheets. Eyeing the stranger, she scooted backward against the headboard. Quivers of muscle soreness accompanied her movement. She looked down to find her arms covered in red scratches already starting to scab.

      Instinctively, Kaitlin reached for her neck.

      “That bandage won’t be necessary for long,” the woman said. “You’ll have a pretty little scar that I suppose you can consider your first war wound.”

      The woman was close to Kaitlin in age—maybe twenty-three or four, with deeply tanned olive skin and glossy black hair that hung halfway down her back. Nothing out of the ordinary presented itself in the woman’s face or body. The problem was her eyes, which were an unusual shade of green that Kaitlin had seen before.

      Fingering the bandage taped to her neck, Kaitlin’s fear escalated. She tore off the bandage and winced at the raw, extremely sensitive puckered line of raised skin beneath her right ear.

      That can’t be right. I’m awake now.

      Dizziness threatened as flashes of memory returned. Night. Blood. An attacker with incredible strength. In that nightmare, she had been mauled by a monster.

      Her eyes swept the room in a desperate attempt to set things straight. No man, wolfish or otherwise, sat on the bed, or appeared anywhere else in the small studio apartment. Morning light seeped through the filmy curtains. There was no brown bedspread. She sat on familiar worn floral sheets.

      “Kaitlin?” her visitor repeated.

      “You can’t be real.” Kaitlin avoided the woman’s green-eyed stare.

      “Really? Then I wonder why I bothered to brush my hair. Still, I guess you’d have