Ellie's Wolf (7 page)

“Oh, my God!” she bleated, and this time when Stone pulled her to his chest she didn’t push him away.

Paint stepped out into the hall. “We’ve got trouble. When we got here, Mrs. Fosse was in this room, screaming. We could hear three men laughing and slapping noises, like somebody hitting someone with an open palm. It sounded ugly. Snake busted in the door, and we saw the lady was fighting with everything she had, but those men were holding her down, trying to tear her clothes off.”

Several of the men growled.

Paint agreed grimly. “Yeah. Well, Snake took one look and went crazy. I think his wolf had chosen her to be his mate. He changed and killed all three of those men. Just tore them to pieces.” Paint shook his head and adjusted his eye patch. “Now he won’t let anyone close. Those men down there with the weak stomachs found that out the hard way.” He flicked a glance from the vomit to the men still huddled together at the far end of the hallway. “The lady ain’t crying anymore, but Snake hasn’t changed back. He just stands in front of her and shows his teeth at any man who comes into the room.”

Quill brushed past the others and entered the room. Ellie could hear his voice speaking in a low, soothing tone, but she couldn’t make out the words. A low rumble of growls drowned out his voice. Ellie shivered in spite of the sweat that ran down her back. After a minute, Quill came back out. He took her hands and looked into her eyes.

“I think he’ll listen to you,” he said. “He knows you, and his wolf won’t see a woman as a threat.”

“Me?” Ellie squeaked.

“Yeah. Just go one step into the room but don’t look around, okay? It’s ugly in there. Concentrate on Snake. See if you can get him to make the change.”

Ellie swallowed. No wolf would ever hurt a woman. Taye and all of his Pack had told her that over and over. So why was she trembling? Quill gave her hands a squeeze and let her go, stepping out of her way. Ellie walked forward. She forgot about the puddle until her shoe landed squarely in it. She shook it off and stepped into the room. Taking a deep breath, she almost forgot about Snake. A strong smell hung in the air like a curtain. Ellie held her finger beneath her nose to block the stench and looked around.

An extra-large bed was on the left, its covers half dragged to the floor in a tangle of darkly stained sheets and blankets. Mel was half-crouched on the mattress, pressing herself into the headboard, her torn shirt clutched over her front, her eyes fixed and staring at one of the lumps that were scattered over the bed and floor. Ellie’s mind had trouble processing the lumps. They looked like red glistening hunks of meat wrapped in burlap sacks…

Ellie’s stomach tried to turn itself inside out. None of the lumps was big enough to be a whole man. The lump lying just beyond the footboard had a boot at the end of it, and a pool of blood clotted with flies beneath it. She recognized the stench now. It was like the butchering pen in Odessa, magnified by the heat of the room.

Finally, her eyes found Snake, all two hundred, gray-furred pounds of him, crouched on the floor beside the bed. His muzzle was smeared with blood, shreds of…something…in his teeth.

“Mel,” Ellie said in a quiet, soothing tone.

After a long moment, Mel croaked, “Ellie?”

“Yes.”

Snake growled at Ellie, and Mel crunched herself even smaller against the headboard.

“Run, Ellie!” she whispered. “Go find someone with a gun to shoot it.”

Shoot it? Shoot Snake? He wasn’t acting the way she was used to wolves acting, but it was Snake, not a wild animal.

“Snake!” she said in the same tone she used when she wanted her misbehaving son’s attention. “You’re scaring Mel. You don’t want to scare Mel, do you?”

The growling lessened, but didn’t stop. The big gray head sunk low, the yellow eyes fixed on her.

“Don’t you remember me?” she coaxed. “Ellie Overdahl. I’m Taye’s cousin. Mel needs my help. Okay? See? She has bruises on her face.”

Ellie stood very still as the wolf glowered at her before turning his head to look over his shoulder at Mel.

“Is Mel your mate?” Ellie tried to sound calm while her heart pounded like a drum. “Then you shouldn’t be frightening her. She needs me.”

Ellie could almost see the wolf trying to think. In other circumstances it would have been comical to see his face wrinkle. Mel’s mouth hung open in disbelief.

“You can’t reason with a wild animal, Ellie,” she hissed. “Escape while you can!”

“Can Snake come out now?” Ellie begged the wolf. “Look, Mel thinks she’s in danger. She doesn’t know who you are. Please change back to Snake.”

The wolf shook himself, and when he was done, Snake the man collapsed in a bloody heap on the floor. One of his long black braids dragged through the blood on the carpet. When he lifted his head, blood covered his mouth and chin. Mel shrieked, and her legs folded as if all strength had left her knees. She landed face first on the mattress.

Ellie rushed passed Snake to the side of the bed. “Mel, are you okay? Mel?”

Mel raised a face that was paper-white under her tan. She pointed a shaking finger at Snake’s back. “What is he?”

Ellie glanced quickly over her shoulder and noticed that the torn remnants of jeans still clung to Snake’s bottom half. He must have changed into a wolf before removing his clothing. “This is Snake. He’s one of my cousin’s friends. They came to rescue us.”

Snake spat a few times and wiped his chin with the back of his wrist. “Your name is Mel?”

Since Mel seemed incapable of speech, Ellie answered. “Melissa Fosse.”

“Not Fosse!” Snake’s voice was a low snarl that made Ellie jump.

“Dirk,” she substituted.

“Wolfe,” spat Snake. “My mate takes my name.”

Mel, still on the bed, surged to her feet with a skirl of bedsprings, visibly trembling. “Excuse me?”

Paint cleared his throat at the door. Mel clutched the tatters of her shirt closed over her chest, seeming to shrink a little from Paint. Snake’s outline wavered between wolf and human for a moment before settling on human, and he stepped closer to the bed, as if to guard Mel even from his friend.

“What?” he growled at Paint.

Paint blew out air in a sigh, raising his empty hands. “I think the lady needs a bath and some clean clothes, and so do you, Snake. Quill sent someone to get us a couple of rooms and the ladies’ bags. You okay, man?”

The tendons in Snake’s arms stood out as he clenched his fists and struggled for control. “I will be. I just need to talk to Melissa.”

Mel shoved her palm out at him. “No. I have nothing to say to you. Just leave me alone.”

Ellie braced herself to step between them. “I’ll take care of her, Snake.”

* * * *

“They’re out there, aren’t they?” Mel’s voice was muffled by the washcloth she scrubbed over her face. “Those guys?”

The three women were in a room on the third floor of the hotel, their pitifully few belongings piled on the two beds. Ellie had stayed in only one other hotel in her life, and this one was more run down than that one had been. The floor here was bare, unpolished wood with a couple of throw rugs tossed over the open areas. It might have been a palace in its glory days, going by the crown moldings along the ceiling and the once-fine woodwork, but those days were long gone. Still, it had the advantage of being private and secure.

“Four of them are in the hall guarding us,” Ellie said. “And two are outside in view of the windows. They won’t let anybody bother us.”

Mel’s pistol was once again strapped to her hip, even though she was bare from the waist up, washing away the blood that had splattered on her when Snake had killed to defend her. Ellie wondered if Mel would ever take her gun off again. Mel glided a hand over the gun’s butt every now and then, the way Connor sometimes stroked the edge of his blanket for comfort after a nightmare.

“No one will bother us except them,” Mel corrected. The washcloth plopped back into the bowl. “And that one thinks I’m his mate. Snake. Who calls a werewolf Snake?”

Sara sat on the edge of one of the beds, legs crossed, elbows on her knees, and chin on her fists. “You didn’t tell me your cousin was a werewolf.”

Ellie spread her hands at the accusation. Taye didn’t like being called a werewolf, but Ellie didn’t argue the word. “I love my cousin, and he loves me. What does it matter if he’s a wolf? He sent help. That’s the important thing.”

“Stone.” Sara spoke the word with disbelief tinged with loathing. “That guy thinks he owns me.”

“Well, he did win the Bride Fight,” Ellie reminded her.

“You were won too,” Sara retorted. “Does that guy think you are his mate?”

“I think so.” Ellie cleared her throat. “His name is Quill.”

“Whatever,” Sara said with fiercely feigned boredom.

Mel wiped her torso dry with a towel and turned to dig through her bag for a clean shirt. “What exactly do they mean by mate?”

Ellie had often wondered that herself when Taye called Carla his mate. His explanations had gone over her head, and she hadn’t bothered to try to understand since she was married to Neal and not mated to a wolf. She should have tried harder. Lifting helpless hands, she said, “It’s like a wife. The wolf chooses the woman, and the man doesn’t have a choice. Either he courts and marries that woman, or he remains a bachelor all his life.”

Sara made a grumbling sound. “So why did he pick me? Stupid dog.”

Mel buttoned her shirt with jerky fingers. “But how can they be werewolves? That’s just in stories.”

“I don’t know. They just are. They’re from the Lakota Wolf Clan. I was told that hundreds of years ago, the Wolf Clan was famous, but after the white man came, the Clan became just a legend. Taye said the wolves hid inside the men, and they didn’t make the change. But then the Terrible Times came, and the Clan left the reservation to live in tents on the prairie like their ancestors to get away from the Woman-Killer Plague. That’s when some of the sleeping animals began to emerge again, and the boys started turning into wolves.”

“Why haven’t I ever heard of them?” Sara demanded.

Ellie shrugged. “I don’t know. I thought everyone knew about them. I guess I grew up knowing since my aunt married one of them.”

She inwardly flinched at the memory of her father’s tirade against his sister. Maybe if Ellie’s mother had lived, she could have calmed his rage against what he called “filthy, devil-spawned animals” and he would have allowed his widowed sister to return to her childhood home. Once a year Aunt Naomi and her son had come to Odessa to beg her brother to allow her to come home. Each time her father refused. He had locked Ellie in her room during those visits, so she’d never met her cousin Taye until after her father died and she had gone to live with her mother’s father in Kearney.

“Not everyone born in the Clan have wolves inside them, but some do, and they’re good men, not evil.” A surge of desperation welled up in Ellie. She wanted her new friends to understand that the wolves were the good guys. “They are protective of all women. Every one of them I’ve ever met treats his mate really well. We could be so much worse off.”

“Right.” Mel bit the word off. Ellie wasn’t sure if she were sarcastic or sincere. “I could be raped and murdered instead of splashed with blood and tied to a man who turns into a bloodthirsty wolf when he loses his temper.”

Ellie sank onto the bed across from Sara. “That must have been horrible to see,” she whispered.

“Horrible doesn’t cover it. I suppose, since the Fosses weren’t from Ellsworth, the law here won’t make any arrests. Or maybe they’re afraid they’ll get eaten. Can’t blame ’em for that. God, what am I going to do?”

Sara put her feet on the floor. “We could run away.”

Mel gave her a look eloquent of scorn. “And go where? Don’t you think those wolves could track us? I bet they have noses like bloodhounds, and having to chase us might piss them off. I’ve seen one of them pissed off already. I’d rather not see that again, thanks anyway.”

Sara folded her arms with a scowl.

Ellie said soothingly, “They would never hurt us. And I remember my cousin telling me that the woman gets to decide whether or not she’ll accept the wolf. If you say no, they’ll abide by it.”

“How many times have I said no already? Do you think that idiot Stone listens?”

“Sara, has he raped you? Forced you to do anything bad?”

The teenager’s lips compressed. “No,” she admitted reluctantly. “So what do they plan for us? Are they taking us home with them? Where do they live anyway?”

“Kearney, Nebraska.” Ellie was glad to have at least one easy answer to offer. “Quill said we would go first to get my son. After that, I guess we’ll go to Kearney.”

Mel’s mouth turned down into a thin, grim line. “I s’pose that’s as good a place as any. I can’t go back to the Flying D. The rest of the Fosse family will come after me if I do. There’s still three brothers left. We…my family, I mean…We can’t afford a feud. The extra ammunition, the stolen stock…We can barely afford to pay the—I mean, keep the ranch going as it is. Does Snake have any money? If he can help us, I’ll do anything for him. I’ll marry him, or be his mate, or whatever they call it.”

Ellie didn’t know if Snake had any money. As far as she knew, Taye and his men supported themselves by hunting and selling or trading the meat and hides. All the Pack shared the work and the profits equally. “I’m sure that anything Snake has he’ll share with you. I think you’ll need to talk to him about it.”

The three women slept in the hotel room while the men paid for the right to stay out in the hall, guarding the women. In the early hours of the morning, before the sun was fully up, Quill rapped on their door and told them they were headed out within the hour.

Ellie was so anxious to see Connor she barely slept. Mel woke to instant alertness. Sara moved as though she was crawling through molasses as she dragged herself out of bed. “I would kill for coffee,” she moaned, fumbling to pull her boots on.

Stone must have heard her because, fifteen minutes later, he knocked on the door, balancing a large tray of pancakes and sausages and a pot of fragrant coffee. Ellie’s mouth twisted a little when she remembered how Sara had complained of being made sick by the scent of coffee beans in the wagon. It seemed Sara had forgotten her distaste very quickly.