Stars filled his vision, his forehead throbbing fiercely, and Zach realized, with the taste of blood in his mouth, he’d struck a tree. It was too hard to breathe, and the world was going by him in a rush. Snow crept in everywhere, his shirt, into his mouth, and the cold dug into his torn-up hands.
He saw the rock, a fallen moon lodged into the shoreline, but the angle of the hill was too steep and he couldn’t stop. God, he couldn’t stop. And still behind him there was the shadow, slavering and now on silent paws, but it danced in and out of his line of sight, keeping pace with his descent. Zach tried to angle his legs, to do anything to prevent himself from hitting a piece of the Earth’s bones, but no amount of gyrations helped. Much like the flight the wolf triggered in his mind, the rock filling his sight prepared him for pain, his brain calling up every single frazzled nerve and torn muscle he’d lived through months before.
If he saw stars for the tree, he unspooled the Milky Way when he struck the boulder. The pain was immense. Flashes of crackling red through his already abused muscles, and bones he had knitted together so carefully before strained under the hit. There wasn’t any time to scream. Zach was choking on his own tongue when he struck the lake. He hadn’t realized he was so close to the shore, so very close, and glancing off the boulder, his body twisted around and he skidded into the water.
For a brief moment, the unbearable cold felt good. He was hot with pain, and the frosted-over water quenched the embers set alight under his skin. But the relief was over in a flash, and then agony overwhelmed him. His muscles seizing, Zach struggled to find solid ground beneath him, stretching for the shore in the hopes of grabbing something he could pull on, but his trembling hands found nothing.
The cold was swallowing him whole, a ravenous snake consuming him as prey. A darkness as thick as the menacing shadow in the trees began to take him, and as the not-quite-frozen lake stole the life from his body, he saw the wolf mount the boulder, throw its head back, and cast out an eerie, haunting cry.
“ELLIS, I swear to God if he dies on us, I’m going to skin you and use your pelt for a rug.” Gibson got no response from the massive black wolf curled up near the roaring fireplace, but he wasn’t really expecting one. “I’ve always wanted one, and yours will do just fine.”
Still, it would’ve been nice if he had gotten even an ear flick from the snoozing creature.
He’d heard Ellis’s howl, a timbre of panic and worry woven into rolling bass tones, and took off running. There’d been a brief moment when Gibson considered changing, shedding his human form to wrap his father’s blood and fur around him, but there were hunters sometimes in the woods, and he couldn’t risk being shot, not when Ellis needed him. The ground was treacherous beneath his feet, and he’d forgotten to put on shoes—he always fucking forgot to put on shoes—so running through the undergrowth with its uneven terrain and patchy snowbanks was slow going compared to the miles he could eat up as a wolf.
Discovering Ellis at the shoreline attempting to drag the sudden dead weight of an unconscious man from the iced-over waters was not how Gibson wanted to start his day, but judging by the blue tint spreading over the man’s pale face and cold-reddened hands, his morning had gone a whole hell of a lot worse.
“You didn’t have to chase him through the trees, asshole,” Gibson remarked as he stepped over Ellis’s massive hindquarters to get to the cabin’s galley kitchen. “I don’t care if he was on our property. People aren’t playthings, remember?”
A blaze of yellow through Ellis’s nearly shut eyes assured Gibson he’d been heard, but the ensuing sniff and the brief puff of rancid gas the wolf let go to ghost over the kitchen was pretty much Ellis’s way of telling him to fuck off. Gibson nudged Ellis with his foot as he walked by, carrying another load of dryer-warmed towels to lay over the man’s torso and legs.
Winter struck hard before they’d made it back to the cabin, snow obscuring the path ahead of them. Ellis’s enormous bulk warmed Gibson’s legs, and the wolf guided them along, keeping his pace slow so Gibson could keep up. Burdened with the unconscious man’s weight slung over his shoulders in a fireman’s carry, he couldn’t outrun the storm. Not by a long shot. He’d wanted Ellis to run ahead, to go through the front door he’d left open, and get warm by the fire, but there was no way he’d be able to make it back to the cabin without the wolf’s assistance.
Gibson’s human form was a curse at times, more controlled by instinct and dulled senses than when the wolf rode him. His mind knew with a simple push of his will against the thin skin over his bones and muscles he could change his world, brighten the scents in the air and on the ground, and peel back the obscuring film his body wrapped around everything. Holding an attractive man in his arms was frustrating and maddening… arousing primal instincts in Gibson. The small flutter in the man’s heartbeat resonating through his body and the flicker of an unsteady pulse on the man’s throat reassured Gibson the man was alive, but the elements had taken their toll.
He had to get the man inside, someplace safe and warm, even though it meant opening up his very closed-in world, an existence where he’d shoved everyone out except for his brother.
Now he was stuck with a rangy, long-legged man with the face of a battered angel and a mouthwatering body mottled by bruises and scars.
Soon after he’d closed the front door against the storm, Gibson laid the shivering man on the long side of the cabin’s sectional and stripped off the man’s sodden clothes. The fabric was rigid with ice shards, and the flannel shirt tore when Gibson attempted to unbutton it. His jeans, stiff and unyielding, raked long red welts over the man’s lightly furred thighs and calves, the seams of the denim a sharp abrasion that couldn’t be avoided. Gibson thought he was handling his arousal well, but it hit him hard when he stripped off the man’s soaked-through boxer briefs, an incongruous black pair dotted with tiny rainbow-maned unicorns, and he took a moment to inhale a long, shuddering breath.