Page 17 of The Alpha Dire Wolf (Bloodlines & Bloodbonds #1)

Sylvie

B oom-boom.

Boom-boom.

Boom-boom.

The drums beat relentlessly in the deep dark, thunderously loud in my ears no matter how far I ran. The pattern never changed, beating like a heart. Tearing at my ears, it threatened to split my skull in half with every crescendo.

Boom-boom.

My bare feet splashed through puddles, toes sinking into mud as I raced on. Raindrops lashed at my skin. I couldn’t see the ground. Or the sky. Everything around me was pure, inky darkness.

Everything except for the amber and azure glows from behind me. Twin points of light stalked me, matching every move I made. The wolf was following me. No, not following. Stalking . I was being hunted.

And I couldn’t shake him.

I darted left. Then right. Scrambling through the pitch dark, trying with all my might to escape the beast.

Boom-boom.

Boom-boom.

The drums heralded my end, my doom. When the wolf caught me, they would go silent. I didn’t know how, but I was sure that’s what would happen.

Just as I was certain the wolf was a he. My gut, my “sixth-sense” instinct, was telling me I was right, and I believed it. I always believed it. Why wouldn’t I? It was never wrong, had never led me astray. I trusted it.

Boom-boom.

I stumbled in the dark, glancing over my shoulder. As always, the eyes were right there. Bright. Clear. Unblinking.

“ What do you want from me?” I screamed at it.

There was no response. I ran on, and on, and on, wondering if I was actually going anywhere. Was I on a treadmill? What was this all about?

Boom-boom.

Boom-boom.

The drums were growing louder.

The shadows grew thinner.

I looked around wildly as I could suddenly see. Up ahead was a river, the waters running fast and deep. Somehow I knew, if I could just clear the river, I would be safe from the wolf. It wouldn’t follow.

Charging ahead, through the trees that grew right to the banks on either side, I gathered myself and flung my body out into the river, trying to get as far as possible. But I didn’t land in the water. Somehow, I cleared the entire thing, landing on the far side, bouncing and rolling twice.

The wolf didn’t follow. It stood on the far bank, its entire form visible now, mottled gray fur with paws that sank into the soft, wet ground.

Boom-boom.

The drums were very close now.

The wolf stood still. Watching. Waiting.

Boom-boom.

The wolf whined unhappily.

I smiled, glad to have frustrated it, made it angry to have not gotten me. Apparently it didn’t want to cross the river.

A single word flitted through my head: Why?

Boom-boom.

If I could jump the distance, surely it could do so even easier. It was a wolf!

The giant beast must have sensed my thoughts. It bared its teeth and crouched low. Was it about to come after me?

Hairs stood all over my body. Warning signs. The wolf wasn’t looking at me. It was looking past me.

Boom-boom.

Boom-boom.

Boom-boom.

The drumbeat was getting faster and faster. Practically right on top of one another.

The muscles on my spine tightened, and I knew that something bad was coming. And it wasn’t the wolf.

I’ve made a big mistake.

Without thinking, I got to my feet and took off for the river. If it was a choice between the wolf hunting me or the nameless sense of danger behind me, it was no choice at all. Give me the wolf any day.

Boom-boom.

Boom-boom.

As I neared the river bank, I jumped.

But I didn’t make it. The trees on my side of the river moaned and twisted, their branches threading together to block my way, grasping at me as I was tangled up in them.

Boom-boom.

I screamed, thrashing about wildly. Wood snapped. The wolf howled.

And I woke up as I hit the floor in a tangled heap of limbs and sheets, having fallen out of bed.

Jerked awake by the impact, I lay there for a moment, gasping for air, my lungs working triple overtime to provide me with the oxygen I so desperately needed.

“What the fuck was that all about?” I asked to the empty room, trying to decipher the meaning behind my wild dream.

The walls had no answers for me. Only silence.

That was preferable to the pounding of the drums, though, so I took it as a marginal victory. Tossing the sheets and comforter over my head and onto the bed, I got to my feet. It was still dark outside, the bedside clock telling me it was just after two in the morning.

I was just setting to the sheets when my neck tingled, and the hairs on my arms rose straight up. Immediately, I looked out the window. There was nothing to see, it was too dark. But I knew something was out there. Watching me.

Was it the wolf again? Or the forest lumberjack with the same eyes? I pinched my arm hard, but all I got was pain. So I wasn’t dreaming. This was real.

I walked to the window and opened it. “I know you’re out there,” I called to the silence of the night, very happy that nobody would hear me. “Watching me like some creep.”

There was no response, but the pinpricks up and down my neck weren’t fading.

I wasn’t imaging it. This was real. Throwing on a thicker shirt, I made my way down the stairs and out onto the back porch.

I stopped there. I was getting frustrated at the lack of response, but I wasn’t insane.

No way would I enter the forest in the middle of the night.

I swung my gaze up and down the black outline of the trees, letting my gut tell me where to stop, and stare, and wait. After a minute, I crossed my arms impatiently.

It took another minute or so, but then, from right where I was looking, Lincoln stepped out of the darkness and eventually into the light from the house.

“Now who’s stalking who,” I called as he approached.

He ignored my jab, walking up to the base of the steps before gesturing for permission to come up onto the porch with me.

“Yeah, sure, why not,” I said with a shrug. “It’s not like it’s going to stop you from watching me.”

Lincoln ascended the stairs, his yellow and blue eyes locked on to me with unnerving intensity. He didn’t say a word, but his presence was electric, eliciting a tingling response from me that I tried my hardest to shut down but failed.

“Can you stop looking at me like that?”

He blinked those peculiar eyes of his and adjusted his shoulders, pulling the plain white T-shirt tightly across his upper body with the movement. I didn’t let myself take full note of the way it hugged his chest or wrapped snugly around his biceps.

“How would you prefer I look at you, if not with my eyes?” he asked, his voice rumbling like a distant freight train.

“It’s not your eyes. It’s the look behind them. Like you’re constantly evaluating me and judging me,” I told him before adding sarcastically, “like you’re seeing if I’m ‘ready to believe,’ whatever the hell that means.”

Waking up from a nightmare on the floor really had left me in a foul mood, and now I was taking it out on Lincoln. He didn’t seem to care. His face didn’t show an ounce of irritation at my tone.

“Believe in what?” he asked in that same tone.

“I don’t know.” I crossed my arms. “That the animals here are crazy? That you’re not a weird stalker who is going to hurt me?”

His face went so still it could have been carved from marble. I’d hit a nerve.

“Do you think I’m going to hurt you?” he asked with heart-stopping intensity.

Something told me a great deal hinged on my response, and not to take it lightly.

“I don’t know,” I said after giving it real thought. “I have no idea if I can trust you because sometimes you look at me like I’m a threat, and your fingers clench into fists. I wonder what you intend to do with them.”

Lincoln looked down, noting the tightly clenched fist of his right hand. With a visible effort, he let his fingers drop.

“I don’t want to hurt you,” he said, lifting his head, his eyes ablaze with color so intense I rocked backward under the weight of it.

“I believe that,” I said. I looked away and shoved the rising flutters in my stomach back down, burying them under the weight of all my unacknowledged emotions and trauma.

Now was not the time for this. “But I also know that you, and everyone else in town for that matter, are holding things back from me. And it’s making me tired. ”

“What do you mean?”

“You damn well know what I mean!” I shouted, my temper snatching the reins momentarily.

“My grandmother knew, the neighbors do, half the people in this town seem to know something is up or different. I don’t even know what it is all you people know, but it’s clear it’s something, and you’re all trying to pretend like you don’t.

Then of course there’s all this curse of the woods and guardian stuff. It’s exhausting.”

“Not everything in the woods is a curse,” Lincoln ground out through a clenched jaw.

Was he angry with me for calling him out? That seemed awfully petty of him. It had to be something else.

“There you go again! Does anyone around here not talk in riddles?” I asked hotly, shoving his feelings aside. This wasn’t about him. He’d come to my house in the middle of the night. This was about me.

“Only those who understand,” came the reply.

I’d had enough.

“Leave,” I said, pointing past him. “Just walk back into the forest, and leave. I’ve had enough of this crap.

I’m done. I am so done with it all. I’ve got enough other things to deal with.

Your secrets just aren’t going to be one of them.

So go away. Go back to your forest life. I don’t want you around.”

Lincoln hadn’t moved the entire time I spoke. Now he stepped forward, grabbing my outstretched arm and holding it tightly as he entered my personal space, invading my bubble with his presence and holding it hostage.

“Yes, you do,” he rumbled, looking down at me, the closeness between us emphasizing just how much taller he was. Among other things it emphasized, like his strength, the casual ease with which his fingers wrapped around my biceps held me immobile.

I wanted to throw his hand off me, toss it aside and shove him back. Create some space around me again. But I didn’t do any of it. I couldn’t do any of it. I was frozen at his touch. Locked in place, rooted to the ground. Not because he was pinning me there, even though he had a hold of my arm.

But because my body was betraying me. Reacting to his closeness, to the swell of his pecs, and the heat radiating off his body. Lava coursed through my body, lighting it on fire from head to toe and clouding my vision with the heatwave. It lingered in places I did not want it to go.

Who is this man?

“Your heart is beating faster,” Lincoln breathed into my ear. “Your blood is heated. I can feel it. You want me close.”

“You can feel it?” Apparently, my voice still worked, as did my skepticism.

“Yes,” he said. “I can. Because I—”

Ice water doused any source of heat as it washed over me like a tsunami in unison with nails digging into my spine, dragging my attention away from Lincoln’s imposing presence and drawing it back to the dark outline of the forest.

At the same instant, Lincoln spun around, placing himself between me and the forest as he stared at it with eerie intensity. His entire body was still. It didn’t move, not even rising and falling. Was he breathing?

“Something is wrong,” I whispered, my instincts’ warning ending all further thoughts of Lincoln’s body for good. The alarm bells in my mind were louder than the drums in my dream.

“I agree. But how did you know that so soon?” Lincoln asked suspiciously, though he never took his attention off the forest, scanning it left and right, trying to locate the source of whatever was setting us both off.

“I have a good sixth sense for danger,” I said. “It went off. I listened.”

“Good. Listen to it now. Go inside,” he rumbled. “I’ll handle whatever is out there.”

“You’ll handle it?” I asked, disbelieving what I was hearing. What if it was a wild animal? Another rabid bear?

“Yes. I’ll handle it,” he replied with unbreakable confidence. “Please go inside, where you’re safe. I promise I won’t let anything hurt you, Sylvie.”

I inhaled shakily at the sound of my name coming from his lips. It was good. Too good. I hated the way it rolled off his tongue and into my ears.

“Don’t do anything stupid,” I said, wondering why he cared so much about not letting something hurt me.

“Already done that,” he muttered, stepping down to the lawn and heading for the forest without looking back.