Rogue: An Imp World Novella (Northern Wolves Book 2) Read online

  We were at the car and close to the more populated areas, and even though Alaskans were fairly used to seeing bears wandering around, given the recent events with the rogue, we didn’t want to risk the chance of Karl getting shot. Which had meant he’d needed to shift into a human form rather than jog alongside the Jeep, or ride as a grizzly. And human meant he should probably at least have some pants on.

  The silly bear wanted to climb into the car and ride through the streets naked. As entertaining as the prospect was, I didn’t want him arrested for indecent exposure. Plus, I’d probably wreck from the distraction of naked Karl riding shotgun. I was distracted enough by naked Karl trying to get his pants to stay together and remain up over his hips.

  I’d begun to get used to his grizzly form. The shadowed darkness behind his eyes was quickly becoming part of the near constant attraction I felt for him. As we’d hiked to the car this morning, I’d found myself reaching out to brush a hand along his rough fur, watching the movement of his powerful muscles as he walked, warming at the very human expression in his eyes as he’d turned back to look at me.

  And when he’d shifted in that smooth, liquid motion into his human form, I’d felt my mouth go dry. He was gorgeous, formidable…and dark. And he looked at me like he wanted nothing more than to drag me off into the woods and have his way with me.

  I was kinda on board with that idea. But first I needed to get into town and talk to the police. Actually, first we needed to get his darned pants to stay closed.

  I had a few safety pins in my duffle and some hair ties, so I tried to at least get the fly together with a weird combo of the two, figuring the ripped legs and hole-in-the-crotch weren’t as critical.

  I’d barely gotten the safety pins in place when I realized we had a problem.

  “Dang it, Karl. Stop with the boner, okay? I can’t get your jeans closed with your big dick trying to poke me in the eye.”

  He grinned. “Quick hand job would do the trick.”

  No, it wouldn’t. “I’ve had sex with you. It doesn’t go down. Even if I jerk you off, you’ll be hard again in seconds and ready to go for another ten to twenty minutes. Just think unsexy thoughts or something, at least until I get your pants together.”

  I couldn’t resist leaning forward and placing a lingering kiss on the tip trying its best to escape the jeans.

  He groaned. “You’re not helping. Actually, you are helping. Keep going with that.”

  Should I? How urgent was it for me to get back to Ketchikan? Ten minutes wouldn’t matter in the scheme of things, and I was sooo tempted. I ran a finger over the exposed skin of his cock and he leaned forward trying to increase the contact.

  “We need to get moving,” I told him reluctantly, trying to stuff his hard cock back into the pants. It sprang free, teasing me, mocking me, tempting me.

  There was a dead rogue in the forest. There was someone somewhere creating bullets that disabled, infected, and even killed shifters. There were quite possibly more hunters prowling around coastal Alaska. And I was about to give a bear a blow job.

  Pushing the fly I’d just been trying to pin closed open, I pulled his cock free. Then I kissed the tip, licking underneath and tickling my fingers up his shaft. Karl’s hips jerked forward, nearly punching me in the face with his dick.

  “Brina, don’t tease, girl.”

  I looked up at him from under my lashes. “I don’t tease, Karl.”

  Then I took him in my mouth, encircling him at the base with my hand and bracing myself against his knees. His hands came up to tangle in my hair, urging me on as I sucked and licked along the skin of his shaft, running my tongue along the slit at the tip. Then I paused for a dramatic moment and took him in deep—so deep he bumped the back of my throat. His hands fisted in my hair as I built up a rhythm. I brought one of my hands up from his knee to fondle his balls, the other giving his shaft a firm stroke each time I pulled my mouth to the edge.

  His breathing was harsh and ragged, his hands starting to be a bit demanding on the back of my head. A groan tore from deep in his throat and I laughed, the vibration sending him over the edge. He thickened and jerked his hips, shoving my head forward and holding me tight as he came down my throat. I felt his legs tremble, heard him let out a held breath, felt his grip on my hair suddenly loosen, as if he’d just realized he was holding me tightly in place, my nose pressed against the lower part of his stomach.

  I pulled back, still sucking hard, and released him with a pop. Then I licked along his entire length before tucking him back inside his jeans.

  “Sorry.”

  He was apologizing. And he had nothing to apologize for. It was actually quite flattering that I’d been skilled enough to make him come so quickly. Besides, it was a good thing he’d lost control when he had since I wasn’t accustomed to marathon oral sex performances. If that was his expectation, I’d need to practice more and work up to it.

  “It’s been a year,” he added. “Tough for me to hold back, ya know?”

  Eek. “Surely you’ve taken care of things yourself since last August?”

  His smile was slow, mirroring the sexy spark in his eyes. “My hand doesn’t feel like your hand, or your pussy, and it especially doesn’t feel like your mouth.” His voice grew husky. “Been thinking about you all fall, winter and spring, Brina, hoping that you’d be wanting a repeat of last summer.”

  Yeah, me too. And that was just a shame when we could have been getting it on all fall, winter and spring. “Why didn’t you reach out to me, Karl? I know you said you don’t have a phone, and you thought sex was just a seasonal thing for us, but you could have let me know you were interested in something beyond a quickie by the stream.”

  “As I recall, that weren’t exactly a quickie.” He grinned, then ran his fingers through my hair. “Sows are seasonal about sex with male grizzly shifters, and they don’t want contact with us outside of the rut season. Thought you might be the same and didn’t want to ruin my chances with you by being pushy. I’m a patient man. I’m willing to wait eleven or twelve months for you to come into season, for you to want to take me to your bed.”

  Well I wasn’t so patient. “I’m going to straighten this out right now. Werewolves are like humans. We don’t have a season. We get turned on any time during the year, and it doesn’t matter whether the object of our lust is a human or a shifter, we’re always receptive. Having sex with someone and not contacting them for almost a year means you’re either not interested or just want an occasional, no-strings-attached booty call, not that you’re worried about being pushy.”

  He reached out and brushed the calloused pad of his thumb over my cheekbone, then down across my lower lip. “Then why didn’t you contact me?”

  Because in spite of being a dominant wolf, when it came to guys I was a bit of a traditional girl. And I’d been scared. Being a skinny girl with barely any boobs, bright red-colored hair and freckles meant I’d faced rejection more times than I’d like to admit. I’d learned to play it casual, to keep my heart safe, to act like a hook-up and no call wasn’t any big deal. It was. And I’d been terrified to face rejection after the night we’d shared. I’d rather just not know and keep my pride intact.

  “Could’a called me, Brina,” he accused.

  I snorted. “No cell phone. No consistent location. You bears are a pain to track down. And…” I needed to be somewhat honest here. “I thought you guys were solitary, that maybe you didn’t want more from me than just one night. I didn’t want to be pushy and look like that crazy wolf chasing after a bear.”

  His smile changed, becoming warm, affectionate. “Seems we both had the same misconceptions ’bout each other. How about I get a cell phone, and you be willing every now and then to go off the grid with me, and in the meantime we screw like monkeys.”

  “How bout we screw like monkeys even when we’re off the grid or enduring the company of a whole pack of rowdy wolves.”

  “In front of them?” He was now smirking. “Didn
’t think you were into that sort of thing Brina.”

  I tugged the last hair tie around his pants and stood, placing a quick kiss on the corner of his mouth. “With you? I could be.”

  I drove back to Karl’s cabin. He leaned over and kissed me before climbing out of the Jeep. It was the kind of kiss that made me want to change my mind and head into town tomorrow, but I’d have more fun with him tonight knowing I’d already let the police know that the rogue was no longer a danger.

  “You coming back tonight?” he murmured, his lips brushing mine.

  “Yes.” I felt hypnotized by him, mesmerized. His was so darned distracting.

  “I’ll feed you,” he announced, finally pulling away. “Don’t eat any of that human food.”

  Smoked trout? He’d promised to bring some to the barbeque and my mouth watered just thinking about it. Having nothing but beef jerky and summer sausage for two days had left me craving fresh-cooked meat.

  “I’ll call you when I’m on my way,” I promised. Oh, crap. No, I couldn’t. The crazy guy didn’t have a phone. “Actually hold off cooking anything until I get back. I’ll try to make it before seven, but I don’t want everything getting cold if I’m late.”

  He nodded, then spun around and without another word or glance headed over and began chopping wood once more. Strange, antisocial, weird-mannered bear. It didn’t matter though, because I knew he was just as excited for tonight as I was. I hesitated a few minutes, just to see if my hair-elastic and safety pin job on his pants managed to survive the axe swinging motions, then drove off. I’d see plenty of naked Karl tonight. And I couldn’t wait.

  I was an hour out of Ketchikan when I got cell phone coverage and started to get the texts. It was Brent, wanting an update and telling me that there had been other reports of rogues in the Juneau area and northern Alaska. I pulled over to the side of the road to look at the YouTube videos he’d sent, staring with shock at my tiny phone screen.

  They were horrifying. Three videos of campers and hunters, seemingly minding their own business when suddenly a shifter burst upon them in human form, shifted into their animal in a matter of seconds, then went on the attack. All three were werewolves, and all three seriously injured the humans before they were killed. The videos were jumpy, obviously edited, but the effect was still chilling.

  But the videos didn’t tell the whole story. Outside of Karl and Nephilim, I’d never seen a shifter who could change form that fast. Brent had said the magic on the hunters’ bullets up in Kenai had forced a rapid shift—seconds instead of ten to twenty minutes. The parts that hit the cutting room floor must have included someone shooting a shifter. That and the campers and hunters who’d finally taken the rogue down clearly had magical weapons of their own. A few hunting rifles wouldn’t kill a shifter, especially one gone rogue. Unless they had a stockpile of assault weapons at their campsite, they had “special” bullets.

  My phone dinged again and I clicked the latest link that Brent had sent, feeling my heart sink further.

  We’d always had a good relationship with the humans in Alaska, but word of these “rogues” had stretched beyond the state. News organizations and major outdoor/adventuring websites were warning people about shifter attacks.

  It was bad enough that the humans we’d trusted in our own state would now eye us with uncertainty, but a world that hadn’t even known we existed would now be terrified of us. The humans here who’d coexisted peacefully with us would be put in the middle, needing to either defend us against the scared folks in the lower forty-eight whose only knowledge of shifters was what these videos showed, or placate the scared tourists by placing restrictions on us.

  I foresaw shifter registries, regulations on where we were to live, times and dates that we’d be allowed to assume our animal forms. We’d have curfews, have to wear something that would easily identify us as shifters to any human who saw us. And with these videos, any attack on us would be easily justified as self-defense. It wasn’t just the pain of a bullet we’d need to fear, but death.

  All the freedoms we’d had would be taken away in the name of human safety. Karl was wrong. We couldn’t afford to mind our own business and let it blow over, or to just avoid humans. I didn’t want to be forced out of my home and job, to have to choose between going off the grid and hiding in the wilderness or dealing with restrictions that were one step away from life in a cage.

  We needed to find out who was responsible for this and stop them as well as repair our public image because Karl might be able to live like a wild man in isolation, but I couldn’t, and neither could most of the shifters in Alaska. We needed to fight this, and we needed to win.

  7

  Sheriff Murray pulled me into his office and shut the door. “Please tell me you got that rogue bear.”

  I nodded. “Yes. He’s dead. The official word was that this was a grizzly attack that killed the five scientists, right?”

  Brent’s texts and those YouTube videos worried me. If people thought shifters were behind this last string of killings, then it would just add fuel to the fire of hysteria.

  “Sabrina, no one in their right mind is going to think a wild grizzly killed five people, one of them armed with a rifle. The locals know it was a rogue, and up until recently they’ve trusted you shifters to take care of the, frankly, very few problems. But there were three wolves up north that attacked people, and now this grizzly kills five. Word is out—and I mean out beyond Alaska. People know, and they’re scared.”

  “Those videos were carefully edited. We don’t shift that fast, ever.”

  Sheriff Murray lifted his hands up. “Then what’s happening? Because people are scared, and it really looks like those werewolves were trying to kill those people.”

  “They’re shot before they transform. Something on the bullets is causing a rapid shift. It kills us, and I think in some instances it’s causing shifters to go rogue, to attack,” I told him. “We’re not like this. You’ve grown up around shifters. We don’t attack people. We mind our own business and get along with the humans. We’ve lived peacefully among you for hundreds of years up here in Alaska, and I can count the number of rogue incidents on one hand.”

  “Before this week, yes. But there’s been four reported incidents and five humans are dead, Sabrina.” He pulled out a piece of paper and showed it to me. “This is a phone call we got from some hiker claiming a grizzly attacked him. He shot it twice and it didn’t even flinch. Then he claims a wolf joined in the attack. He barely got away with his life.”

  Oh that ungrateful jerk. “It was the rogue that attacked him, and I was the wolf. But I was defending him, putting myself between the hiker and the rogue. Karl and I distracted the rogue then killed him. The hiker got away unscathed because we—two shifters—were there to help him.”

  “He wouldn’t have needed your help if there hadn’t been a rogue shifter attacking him,” the sheriff countered.

  “There wouldn’t have been a rogue if he hadn’t been shot with a tainted bullet. It drove him mad. He was probably a normal guy before someone shot him. The people making and selling those bullets are the ones you should be afraid of, the ones you should be going after, not us.”

  He scratched his beard and shook his head. “I like Brent. I’ve got a lot of respect for him, and the shifters I’ve met from his pack are good folk, but I can’t ignore this. Five people are dead. People are panicking.”

  How could I convince him that the shifters weren’t to blame for any of this? “In May there was a group of human hunters up in Kenai with some kind of magic coated bullets that forced us to shift, blocked our ability to heal, and killed us. They were hunting us. They’d already killed a bear shifter and nearly killed two werewolves. I think whoever made those bullets and sold them is behind this. We took a bullet from that rogue bear, and it was tainted. Someone shot him and made him go rogue—made him crazy. And if we hadn’t killed him, he would have eventually died from what was on that bullet.”

 
I handed him the bullets, separating the two that the hiker had shot from the tainted one. The sheriff picked up each one, examined it and shook his head. He couldn’t tell the difference. I could feel the magic tainting the one bullet, but to the human, they were all the same.

  “I don’t know, Sabrina. It sounds pretty farfetched. I can’t exactly defend you guys with a tale of magic bullets and some conspiracy theory of wizards or something out to kill shifters.”

  Great. “The world believes there are elves migrating to live among us, that angels walk the earth, that there is a dragon in a museum in London and mermaids in the Great Lakes. The locals believe that there are interdimensional rifts opening that spit out manticores and drop bears and hydras. They’ll accept that shifters exist, but they won’t believe that someone has the motive and ability to create magic bullets capable of killing us or driving us into insane killers?”

  “They can see all those other things, but this bullet.” He held it up to my face. “This bullet looks just like a regular bullet. If you can prove that someone is deliberately shooting shifters—and not in self-defense—then we can do something about it. Otherwise I need to do everything I can to protect human lives and keep everyone, tourists and locals alike, from panicking and taking the law into their own hands—for your safety as well as ours.”

  The police were already scratching their heads over the appearance of other supernatural beings in the world. We didn’t have dragons or elves in Alaska, but I knew the humans were grappling with how to enforce the law when it came to beings that had magic, or breathed fire. We shifters had melded in with human society up here, but the police weren’t equipped to prosecute someone for making magic-coated bullets, even if I could prove to them they existed. The only way we’d get human cooperation on this is if we found proof of hunters shooting shifters while they were in human form. If we could show premeditated murder, then we might have a chance of regaining human trust.