Holiday Wolf Pack Read online

  She stares at me with such intensity that I actually look away.

  I shiver a little as I clear off the rest of the table, the tapers in their candleholders guttering out into darkness. The wolf remains seated in the middle of my apartment, watching my every movement with an interested gaze, flicking her ears in my direction.

  I don’t want to think about Angie, or the fact that I just broke up with her right now. I want to think about something happy, so I think about Tiger. The last time I had a dog, I was a teenager. The dog in question was a Jack Russell Terrier, and I named him Tiger because I thought he was as fierce as one. And even though he was a crazy, energetic little guy who gave me a run for my money every single day, I loved him deeply. We did everything together, and--in a lot of ways--he was my best friend. He passed away my senior year in high school, and I don’t think the ache and emptiness he left in my heart has ever lessened.

  But this wolf is nothing like Tiger.

  All I have in the apartment is cat food, which I drag out of the cabinet. Out of the paper bag I collect a bowlful of kibble for my new guest. The wolf regards me solemnly while I do this, and when I set the bowl down in front of her, she doesn’t even glance at the food. She continues to stare up at me, her head to the side a little like she’s trying to solve a difficult puzzle, her eyes wide and blue and unblinking.

  “Look, girl, I have to go to bed,” I tell her then. I chew on my lip as I glance up at my bathroom door. If there was anything Tiger taught me, it was to never leave a dog to his or her own mischief in your house overnight. Tiger had torn apart all of my childhood stuffed animals, had literally eaten my homework (and a couple of my favorite books while he was at it), and had chewed a hole in the wall between my bedroom and my sister’s on the one night that I learned that lesson.

  Again, not that the wolf is anything like Tiger...but I can’t leave her in my apartment overnight unsupervised. Especially with Tillie and Megan, my cats, hissing and spitting from under my bed in the corner, utterly shocked and enraged that a dog (and such a big one) should be allowed in the sanctuary of their apartment.

  “I’m so sorry, but it’s the bathroom for you, m’dear,” I tell the wolf quietly. “I know it’s not a penthouse suite, but it’s not too terribly small, and it’s the best I have for tonight. I hope you’ll forgive me.”

  I always talk to my cats, and I’d always talked to Tiger, but this seems...different, somehow, talking to this wolf. For one, the wolf’s ears swivel, like she’s genuinely listening to every word I say. And her eyes. They never leave mine. She considers me with her predatory blue gaze, and...honestly?

  It’s as if she understands everything I’m saying.

  Obviously, that isn’t possible. There’s no way that my combination of words is something an animal can decipher and understand, but still, there’s something to this idea, because I don’t have to lift a finger to get the wolf into the bathroom. I simply open the bathroom door, and the wolf rises off of her haunches gracefully, fluidly, like she’s one lithe muscle, and she prowls into the bathroom, turning around expertly in the small space to glance back my way.

  “Sleep tight...” I mutter, perplexed as I hesitate in the doorway, watching her. The wolf sighs for a long moment, lifting her chin to me, and then she folds her long legs down, and she’s lying on the tiled floor, paws regally out in front of her a little like a wolfish sphinx. I flick on the bathroom light, place some towels on the ground for a bed for her, give her the cat food and a big bowl of water, and shut the door behind me.

  Leaning against that door for a long moment, I take a deep breath, pressing my palms to my thighs. The events of the evening are catching up with me, and I can’t push them out of my mind anymore. I feel a little shaken. Okay--so maybe more than a little shaken.

  My Christmas Eve hasn’t gone exactly the way I wanted it to. I just broke up with my girlfriend. I was gifted a dog who looks a hell of a lot like a wolf, a dog I can’t keep, and tomorrow morning?

  It’ll be Christmas. And there are no shelters open in the city on Christmas day. So I’ll have to spend all day with this dog, and I’ll end up falling in love with her and want to keep her, because of all that time I’ll be spending with her. But I can’t keep her--it’s impossible. There are a million reasons that it’s unfair to her to keep her, not the least being that dogs are not allowed in my apartment building.

  So the day after Christmas, I’m going to have to find a no-kill shelter in the city that I feel good about that I can give her to (or, I could just give her back to the big animal shelter that Angie volunteers at, but that would probably involve seeing Angie, and that’s not really what I want to do at this point). Either way, giving her to an animal shelter is going to be terrible, because this falling-in-love-with-her thing is going to happen whether I want it to or not. My folks are back home in Arkansas, and--as of a couple of minutes ago--I no longer have a girlfriend. I’m alone in Boston for Christmas. So, spending Christmas alone with a new animal guarantees that I’m going to adore her. And I’ll still have to give her up.

  I feel so responsible for this wolf. She’s been in my care for a only handful of moments, but there’s just something about her. I want to make sure she’s okay, that she’ll have a good life and a good chance to be adopted by someone who can can keep her and give her the life she deserves.

  And I have to shove my feelings aside to make certain she gets that future.

  I make certain my cats are all right (and they are. They’re highly offended, but okay, Megan yowling at me for compensation for the psychological duress I just put them under. I give them wet food, and they instantly remember that they love me), and I get into my jammies.

  I’m so lost in this moment that I wrap my arms around myself. And then I do something I haven’t done in a long while: I take a long, hard look at my fireplace that I would have killed for as a kid, and I think about Santa Claus, but only for a brief second. Just because it’s Christmas Eve, and thinking about something so lighthearted and nice as Santa soothes me in that poignant, nostalgic sort of way.

  And then, with a head pounding with the beginnings of a wine headache that promises to try to split my skull in two, I crawl into bed and drift into dreamless sleep.

  ---

  I wake up to the very distinctive sound of my top dresser drawer being pulled open.

  It’s my grandmother’s dresser, an antique, and the top drawer has always had this very peculiar squeak. It’s very, very loud unless you lift up on the drawer when you pull it out, but whoever is opening my drawer has no idea of that.

  The squeak echoes so loudly through the apartment that it’s like a shot being fired.

  I sit bolt upright in bed, my heart pounding through me (and my head pounding so hard, I have to press my palm against my forehead to make certain my skull is still remaining on my spine. So far, so good), and honestly, as dorky as this sounds, the very first thing I think about is that perhaps Santa actually just visited my apartment. I told you it was dorky. And it, obviously, couldn’t have been Santa who just woke me up. So I blink away the sleep, try desperately to see in the dark.

  And what I see makes me catch my breath.

  Yeah. It’s definitely not Santa.

  There’s a naked woman standing in front of my dresser, her back pressed against it now as she stares at me, her eyes wide in the dark. When I say naked, I mean completely naked. She’s tall, and has a body (and curves) that draw your eyes like gravity, and with the muscles that ripple under her pale skin, it’s obvious that she works out. She’s tall and powerful looking, standing there, and she’s staring at me, watching me.

  I open my mouth, but before I can say a word, before I can even make a squeak, she’s across the room, on top of my bed...

  And on top of me.

  Her warm palm is pressed tightly to my mouth, and her arm is hard against my shoulders and breastbone, pinning me to the bed.

  She’s crouching over me like a predator, and even though
the room is dark, I can see well enough in the darkness (and with the help of the city lights through my blinds), to be able to make out my assailant quite clearly. She has long, jet-black hair that flows over her shoulders and back in great waves; high cheekbones that give her face a predatory shadow; a sensuous, curving mouth that is currently downturned sharply; and narrowed, calculating eyes that pin me to the spot with their ferocity.

  And those eyes? They’re so blue that they shock me to my core, like being plunged underwater in a frozen lake. But though her eyes are cold, her body is certainly not. She’s burning up, hot enough to be fevered, a heat I can feel even through my comforter.

  And, I’d like to point out again, that she’s entirely naked, and I’m only pointing out that fact because while it was quite obvious across the room, it’s even more obvious when she’s on top of me. Her muscular body is hard against mine as she pins me to the bed, straddling my hips with her legs, her knees firmly on either side of my thighs, her strong arm to my shoulders and throat.

  I stay perfectly still, my heartbeat roaring through me.

  “Don’t make a sound,” she growls out slowly, taking a deep breath that makes her nostrils flare. Her voice is so low that a shiver runs through me. She presses a little harder down on the hand covering my mouth. “Do you understand me? Not a sound.”

  I nod, or try to, and then her hand is gone from my mouth, though she hasn’t otherwise moved an inch.

  She grimaces over me and glances up at the glowing clock on my bedside table. Her long, black hair falls over her shoulder, drifting down and against the side of my face. It smells of pine, of the woods, and as I inhale that scent, I’m transported back to my childhood in the mountains, just for a heartbeat.

  The woman glances down at me, then raises a single eyebrow and sits back on her heels--still on top of me. “Can I trust you?” she asks me, her head to the side as she stares down at me, her voice low, hushed. “You won’t scream?”

  “Probably not?” I reply, and I’m utterly surprised...because she actually chuckles at that bit of honesty.

  Her laughter is low and throaty and delicious, and I realize that, in the darkness, I’m blushing.

  She moves easily, and then she’s no longer straddling my hips, but seated on the edge of the bed, her legs crossed as she leans back on her hands, regarding me. I sit up and then we stare at one another for a long moment before she speaks.

  “This situation is ludicrous,” is what she says then with a long sigh. She shrugs in frustration and rises without a hint of self-consciousness, prowling over to my dresser and pulling the top drawer out the rest of the way. It squeaks. “I apologize,” she tells me gruffly, digging through the drawer and removing one of my sweaters, my long, fuzzy black one that I always wear on freezing, snowy days. “I didn’t mean to wake you. I would rather you hadn’t seen me, but I hope that you’ll be kind enough to not mention this to anyone.” She opens up the second drawer, and then she’s drawing out a pair of my jeans. She’s taller than me, but when she pulls them on, they still manage to fit her pretty well.

  I stare at this stranger who’s opening and shutting my dresser drawers, pulling on pieces of my clothing over her naked body.

  I’m so clearly in over my head.

  “Am I being robbed?” I manage as she pulls her head through the sweater’s neck opening, sweeping her long, black hair out of the sweater and behind her as she tugs the hem down. She turns to me with a frown, and then she’s fluidly crouching beside the bed, close to me. The gesture is more intimate than I expected, her down on one knee at my bedside, her eyes narrowing in concern as she gazes at me, her warm fingers brushing against the side of my arm as she leans forward, her wild scent of pine surrounding me.

  “No,” she says softly--gently, I realize. She grimaces for a moment and sighs out, her nostrils flaring again as she gazes at me. “No, you aren’t being robbed. Please forget that you ever saw this. That you ever saw me. I didn’t want it to happen like this, but I won’t harm you. Please forget. I’m sorry that I have to take these clothes.” She stands up easily, fingering the hem of the sweater. “And I’m sorry to test your hospitality further, but can I take a pair of your shoes?” she asks me, staring down at me in the dark with unreadable blue eyes.

  My very eloquent response to this is a stuttered: “what for?”

  Again, she chuckles at that, the rich, deep sound of her laughter making me shiver under the covers, and suddenly I’m very glad that it’s still dark in my apartment, because I’m blushing. Again.

  “Because I didn’t come here with shoes,” she answers me simply, gazing down at me.

  For whatever reason, it’s this moment that I look past her. My cat Tillie is inching her way around the woman, slinking along the floor as she aims for the open bathroom door.

  Which, I realize at that moment, shouldn’t be open. Because that’s the room I shut the wolf in.

  My apartment? It’s a studio apartment, but even for one of those, it’s pretty darn small. I can see from my position on the bed that the bathroom is empty, and that there’s absolutely no place for a wolf to be hiding in the rest of the apartment. So, she’s not in the bathroom, and she’s not in the apartment itself.

  Which means she’s gone.

  I get up, my legs shaking, as I stand there in my pajamas and face off with this stranger who’s wearing my clothes. She crosses her arms, rocks back on her heels and sighs as I open my mouth, as if she knows exactly what I’m about to say.

  “Where the hell is the wolf?” I ask her, starting forward. I didn’t care this much about the fact that there was a stranger in my bedroom in the middle of the night on Christmas. I didn’t care this much that she was stealing my clothes (including my favorite sweater). But when I see that the wolf is gone, something rears up inside of me: anger that someone left in my care is gone without a trace. And I snap.

  “What the hell did you do with her?” I ask, stepping forward again, close enough to be under this woman’s nose. I don’t touch her, though, because as I step forward, she reaches out and curls her fingers gently around my shoulders and upper arms. She holds me tightly that way, her warm palms emanating heat, even through the fabric of my pajama shirt, heat that seems to sink into me, warming me, calming me.

  “I promise you, you don’t want to know the answer to that question,” she says softly, growling out the words as she searches my eyes. “You need to go back to sleep, and I need to leave, and you need to forget that any of this ever happened.” Then she says a surprising word, a word I wasn’t expecting. In a low, soft voice, she murmurs: “please.”

  But I can’t go back to sleep and forget, and I think she knows this. She takes a step back, her hands leaving my shoulders, and she runs her long fingers through her hair in exasperation, chewing at her lower lip as she looks at me. She takes a deep breath, and when a long moment goes by and I say nothing, she breaks the silence.

  “I’m the wolf,” she tells me then, with no preamble, no warning at all. “I’m the wolf,” she repeats, placing a hand over her heart and tapping her fingers against her breastbone. “Now you know,” she mutters, glancing away from me.

  I stare at her, waiting for the joke, the punchline...maybe waiting for Angie to appear out of the kitchen and tell me that this was all an enormous setup or prank or Christmas shenanigans or something. I wait, but nothing else happens. The silence stretches out between the stranger and I, and she sighs again, her mouth downturned in a frustrated frown as she runs her fingers through her hair again, staring me down.

  “I’m a werewolf,” she tells me, one brow arching as she shakes her head. “And...great.” She sighs in frustration. “Obviously I knew you wouldn’t believe me. So please just go back to bed and chalk this up as a dream, or whatever...I need to go.” She starts to walk past me.

  I don’t know what possesses me in that moment, but it is a very strange night.

  I reach across the space between us, and I grab her arm.

&n
bsp; “A werewolf,” I repeat with a desperate sort of chuckle at the end. The kind that indicates “we’ve all had a little fun, now tell me the real story.”

  But she gazes down at me with solemn blue eyes that seem to see to the very deepest part of me. She takes a step back, spreads her hands.

  “Please don’t scream,” she says then, wearily. And she begins to shrug out of my sweater.

  I watch, my mouth open, as she strips. She folds the sweater and jeans neatly and places them on the edge of my bed, then puts her hands on hips, takes a deep breath, closes her eyes and sort of folds forward. Her back begins to arch at a very unnatural angle as she bends forward, and out of the back of her spine, something begins to grow.

  Oh, my God. A tail grows out of her spine.

  Gray fur erupts in patches all over her body, merging together, growing longer...

  And then in a matter of seconds, standing in front of me is not the gorgeous naked woman.

  It’s the wolf I’d put in my bathroom. The wolf that Angie brought me for a Christmas present.

  The wolf. My wolf.

  I sit down abruptly, because my knees don’t really want to hold me up anymore. Luckily, the edge of the bed was right behind me, and I sort of crumple onto that. The wolf snorts and sneezes, then her shoulders seem to grow taller, and she’s rearing up, standing on her hind legs as her fur shortens, turns patchy and disappears...and then the naked woman is back, exactly where the wolf stood. But I’d watched closer this time. I’d seen every small change as she transformed from one form to the other, from woman to wolf back to woman again.

  I saw it with my own two eyes.

  She’s a werewolf. A real, actual werewolf.

  I stare at her, completely speechless.

  “This isn’t possible,” I finally whisper as she arches her brow again, and chuckles a little as she grabs the jeans off my bed and begins to pull them on again over her long, muscled legs.

  “I’m sorry,” she tells me, scooping up the sweater and tugging it on over her head. “I don’t have time for any of this...I’ve already overstayed, and time’s running out. I’m sorry that this seems so impossible...I just didn’t want to leave you like that with no explanation. You deserve better...” She pauses, the words running out as she gazes down at me. She’s folding forward again, crouching down this time in front of me as she breathes out. And then she lifts her hand and takes mine, clenched tightly in my lap. She threads her fingers through mine, her hot palm against my own, and she squeezes gently.