Wolf Dreams E-Book

Aimee Easterling

• Herausgeber: Aimee Easterling
• Kategorie: Fantasy und Science-Fiction
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021

Beschreibung

Scientist, loner...werewolf?

Fourteen years ago, I bit through the lip of the first boy brave enough to kiss me. Since then, I've acquired a Ph.D. in archaeology, a new teaching gig at a prestigious university, and research interests out the wazoo.

Unfortunately, my social life is still as bleak as a raided Egyptian tomb.

Until, that is, a stranger interrupts my class bearing the same ancient cat fang I see in my dreams. He's rough around the edges and entirely riveting. No wonder my inner monster wakes up and seizes the reins.

Soon, wolf tracks appear on campus, the monster begins holding conversations without my permission, and a shadowy figure breaks into my office in search of the cat fang. Can I afford to reopen old wounds and display my darker half to the world just when I'm finally finding my feet?

Science meets myth in this first book in a complete duology by the USA Today bestselling author of Wolf's Bane.

Leseprobe

Wolf Dreams

Moon Blind, Volume 1

Aimee Easterling

Published by Wetknee Books, 2019.

This is a work of fiction. Similarities to real people, places, or events are entirely coincidental.

WOLF DREAMS

First edition. April 17, 2019.

Copyright © 2019 Aimee Easterling.

ISBN: 978-1386869948

Written by Aimee Easterling.

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Table of Contents

Title Page

Copyright Page

Prologue

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Epilogue

Moon Dancer

Prologue

Do you remember your first date? The rush of excitement. The fumbling awkwardness. The way the boy bent down for a kiss, prompting your teeth to bite all the way through his cheek.

The blood. The ensuing faintness that progressed into a prehistoric vision. The visit to the emergency room. The awfulness when your father arrived to pick you up.

Okay, maybe my experience wasn’t precisely average. Normal is not my middle name.

“Olivia Nicole Hart!” my father raged as he took in the red streaks smearing my face and the wildness of my dilated pupils. His hand lashed out just shy of striking me, and that danger provided my inner monster permission to steal my body a second time.

Don’t touch us, she hissed, her voice raspy within the confines of my body. Then she leapt at him—I mean, I leapt at him. Sometimes it’s confusing when my body does things I don’t ask it to do.

But it was my manicured fingernails that scraped a long welt of red down the side of my father’s cheek and neck. It was my teeth that bared as if they intended to rip out his throat.

Blackness hovered around me, the vision attempting to pull me under before I could commit patricide. As if it wasn’t bad enough that I housed a monster, I lost my entire grasp on reality every time the beast came to call.

But my father was ready for me. “Get in the car,” he demanded, voice so cold my feet scurried to obey him. And, just like that, monster and vision both released their holds.

I shivered as I attempted to clean up their messes ten minutes later. “I’m so sorry,” I whispered as we drove out of the city. I’d used up half a box of Kleenexes wiping blood off my body, but I still felt like I’d been rolling around in offal. “I didn’t mean to.”

“The doctors warned us what would happen if you didn’t take your medicine.” My father—or Dr. Hart, as he preferred to be called—didn’t bother turning down the radio while he berated me. Didn’t take his eyes off the road as he pulled the hated pill bottle out of his pocket and tossed it into my lap.

It landed with the weight of lost potential. The promise of dulling the world to protect me from my own animal nature.

No, my monster growled. Starbursts flickered at the corners of my vision.

“Take two,” my father demanded.

I twisted off the lid and swallowed them dry.

Chapter 1

Fourteen years later....

“From the stunning renditions of horses in French and Spanish caves...” I started, only to pause as words drifted toward me from the fifth row of the audience at my Friday morning lecture.

“...walked out of the Peace Summit,” one student murmured, provoking a rustle of interest from those sitting nearby.

“Well, could you really blame them?” asked a young man who’d never once bothered to answer an in-class question. “I mean, our President acted like a hoodlum. He punched the guy. In the nose.”

Of all the times for current events to pop the collegiate bubble, I would have preferred it not to happen right before final exams during my first semester in a tenure-track job. Of course, I couldn’t really blame the kids for their lack of attention. I’d been so shaken by the news this morning that I’d forgotten my meds for the first time in months.

Still, I was supposed to be the authority figure here. “Excuse me,” I said, pushing my glasses up on my nose then glaring into the cluster of chattering students. “As fascinating as political drama might be, this course is focused on the past, not the present.”

“Then you focus, Dr. Oblivia,” a third student countered. “We don’t care about caves on the last day of the semester.”

The earlier whispers had been a minor annoyance, but this was outright insubordination. No wonder my pet raven—Adena—squawked her ire from the far corner of the room. She spread her wings as if preparing to protect me and I raised one finger in warning, holding my breath until the raven’s ruffled feathers smoothed back down and her attention wandered toward the clouds outside.

Of course, the backtalking student took advantage of my distraction to continue with her tirade. “This is a class, not a wander through a museum. Tell us what’s going to be on the test.”

Patricia Owens—congressman’s kid and troublemaker from head to toe—was spiky with amusement. She had classic good looks combined with edgy modern style, and she used the combination like a duelist’s sword. Now, rather than fading beneath my scowl as any right-minded twenty-two-year-old should have, she raised her eyebrows and glowered back.

No wonder the monster inside me surged awake the moment our gazes made contact. Images of teeth and blood and submissive students flooded my interior landscape, and I clenched my fists to push back the horror.

Clearing my throat, I used words rather than releasing my inner monster. “Ms. Owens,” I started. “If your sole interest lies with the test, please pick up a copy of the handout by the door on your way out and leave the rest of us in peace.”

Then I clicked to the next slide in my PowerPoint presentation, trying to ignore the way my vision tunneled even as a hum buzzed angrily through my mind. Here it came—part two of the craziness. First the monster, then the trance.

Clutching the podium, I whispered a silent rebuke to my brain chemistry: Not now. The department chair was just waiting to catch a slip in classroom protocol so he could write me up.

In desperation, I shot a glance at the ringleader of all my teaching problems. If she was sitting, the monster would subside and the vision would fade along with it....

Patricia had risen so she could sling a messenger bag across one shoulder. And that did it. The monster grabbed me. I’ll make her sit, it started.

No, wait, I countered, terrified by the way my muscles bunched without permission.

Then the trance responded by slapping us both into submission. The monster subsided and I fell backwards into the silence and the dark.

***

OKAY, SO PERHAPS silence was a bit of an overstatement. Sunlight was obscured by overhanging earth and rock, so even the drip of distant water became as loud as a roaring school bus. My feet scraped against pebbles while my breath echoed in the enclosed chamber. And my hand moved without conscious volition to uncover a smoldering coal housed within a tallow-filled lamp.

Light emerged slowly as the body I inhabited fed moss into the minuscule fire. I was here, but not here. Present inside this woman, but unable to do anything other than watch her actions unfold.

The first time this had happened, I’d been terrified. A mere child, I’d thought myself transported into a nightmare and had spent the entire trance struggling to get back out again. Now, though, I was an adult obsessed with archaeology. I could do nothing to hasten my return to the modern world, so I relaxed and took in every wonderful vision as a many-thousand-year-old cave painting gradually flickered into life.

Red and black animals danced across the rock wall before me. Today it was horses, so many horses, with one big bison smack dab in the center. It looked similar to the French cave I’d visited on a research expedition one year earlier, but with different paintings covering the curved and irregular walls.

Even though I knew this experience was merely my imagination playing tricks on me, I began taking mental notes the way I always did. Perfect curves made the animals lifelike, overlapping legs gave the illusion of three dimensions....

Distantly, I knew that my living body would be catatonic and terrifying to my students back in the lecture hall. Distantly, I accepted the psychiatrists’ assessment that these visions were nothing more than a rehashing of materials I’d pored over and studied ever since becoming obsessed with archaeology as a kid.

I knew all this...yet I didn’t care what I was missing in the real world as I gazed greedily at images that both did and didn’t match current scientific knowledge. My hands were speckled with red ochre—the cave person’s favorite pigment. Words I didn’t understand tripped off the woman’s tongue. Then she sucked up a mouthful of paint in preparation for spitting it back out onto the rock face.

Meanwhile, her hand rose to clasp fingers around the eight-inch-long fang that had hung around her neck for as long as I’d been visiting. As always, this single jarring element pushed me out of the daydream. “Saber-tooth cats are from the Americas,” I protested. “This type of cave art was made in Europe.”

Only then did I realize I was speaking aloud, the cave flickering away as a bevy of worried students clustered around me. Meanwhile, tapping against my forehead, was the exact same tooth I’d worn a moment earlier, this time threaded onto a modern metal chain.

***

“DR. BLACKBURN, ARE you alright?”

The name being spoken wasn’t mine, but I didn’t swivel to correct the speaker behind me. Instead, it was the silent man attached to the fang that snagged my attention and refused to let it go.

Unlike the body I’d recently inhabited, this tooth bearer was male instead of female. His features were craggy, his gaze so piercing it made me shiver despite the room’s sub-tropical heat. And was that a thin but very obvious scar completely encircling his neck?

Vaguely, I noted another stranger roughly the same age—early thirties—moving forward as if to assist me. This was the speaker, the one who was even now attempting to create a pocket of breathing space with me at its center. I appreciated the gesture and might have settled back into it if the chatter of surrounding students hadn’t spurred me into action.

“Do you think she’s okay?”

“What happened? I wasn’t looking...”

“Somebody call 911.”

Hospital visits never led in good directions. My father had lost faith in my ability to amount to anything after one memorable hospital visit. It wasn’t such a long shot to think the university might come to the same conclusion if my boss realized I popped three-times-a-day, maximum-dose anxiety meds to silence the voices in my head.

So I found my way to my feet and stepped away from the man who hovered above me. Then I raised my voice and regained control of the class.

“Nobody call 911,” I countered, forcing out a laugh that sounded like a mix between a pack-a-day smoker and the last gasp of an ailing hyena. “That embarrassing display of brain freeze was simply the result of low blood sugar. If you learn nothing else from my class, please write this down—always eat a complete breakfast before going to work.”

I think I actually saw someone recording my words of wisdom at the edge of the mob of students, so I didn’t blame the craggy-faced stranger for his snort. This was the most amusing part about being a professor. At my best, these students thought I was some combination of their mother and an all-knowing soothsayer. It was only when I assigned homework that certain students lost the rose-tinted glasses they usually perched on the bridge of their nose.

Right now, unfortunately, I was far from my best, and rose-tinted glasses were in short supply in the classroom. Which meant it was time to truncate the final lecture and send these students away with the handout I’d offered to the class’s least pleasant member a few moments before.

“It’s been a pleasure teaching all of you,” I lied. “Have a wonderful holiday. Grab a paper from the stack on your way out.”

I tensed, fully expecting some reaction to the bombshell waiting for them on those handouts. But I wasn’t prepared for the volume of Patricia’s shriek.

Neither, apparently, were the strangers in my classroom. Because even as Patricia bellowed her disapproval of the final exam changing into a five-page paper, the more ordinary of the two men yanked aside his suit jacket, hand landing on a pistol that gleamed dully from a holster beneath his armpit.

Chapter 2

“No, absolutely not!” Patricia proclaimed, waving the paper wildly in front of her face without taking in the fact that she was one step away from being menaced by a weapon.

“What is it?” This was Joe, my people-pleasing kid-genius. He paled as he scanned the handout someone thrust toward him. “Due Wednesday?” he groaned, no less horrified than Patricia was. “That doesn’t even give us time for interlibrary loan.”

I wanted to tell him that he didn’t need interlibrary loan—there were thousands of volumes in our own library and millions of articles in our online system. But I didn’t want to draw anyone’s attention to the armed intruder. Not when the ensuing panic might result in somebody getting shot.

Instead, I took a chance that I was reading the situation properly. I snapped my fingers at my inherited raven even as I dove into the scrum.

“You don’t understand...” one student started.

“Here, this is for you.” A bright red apple perfect enough to have graced a teacher’s desk in a comic strip was thrust into my hands.

“Thank you,” I told the blushing teenager, sliding past to lead the mass of youngsters like goslings toward the door.

Behind me, the rustle of wings was met by a grunt of annoyance. Ever since inheriting Adena from my predecessor, I’d spent my evenings training her to land on shoulders when commanded. Surely the stranger would find it hard to pull and fire a pistol when weighed down by a two-foot-tall bird.

Of course, a perching raven wouldn’t stop a determined gunman. But my gut said this wasn’t a school shooter. This was a man reacting to past trauma by drawing upon his only available resource.

Or so I hoped. I couldn’t hear whether or not the gun emerged from its holster. Instead, Patricia was nose-to-nose with me now, her piercing voice overwhelming all other sounds.

“You said there was going to be a test!” she snapped. “Multiple choice. Easy peasy. It’s on the syllabus!”

“No, it’s not,” I countered. “If you’ll check again, you’ll notice the line in question says ‘TBD.’”

Immediately, three students began pulling up evidence on their cell phones. “TBA, actually,” reported the most pedantic of my followers. In reaction, Patricia raised her claws in preparation for tearing out his eyes.

I didn’t think she was angry enough to follow through on her threat, but these were my students. I was responsible for their wellbeing. So I threw myself between Patricia and the object of her ire...only to thud up against a huge body that had gotten there first.

A minute ago, I’d been positive Craggy Face was standing on the far side of the lecture hall. I’d felt his eyes like icy fingers running up and down my spine.

But I must have been mistaken. Because the man in question was now gripping Patricia’s shoulders in a manner that was entirely platonic but nonetheless went against the department’s code of ethics. His face was even more terrifyingly intent than it had been when I woke from my vision, angry russeting making the scar around his neck stand out in stark relief.

I think he even growled, a rumble that sounded more animalistic than human. Patricia had chosen the wrong day to mess around.

Which is exactly when Dr. Dick Duncan, department chair and pain in my ass, chose to stroll down the hall toward us. His eyebrows rose as he took in the scene in my classroom, and I could see my job disappearing without a trace.

***

HERE’S WHAT I’D LEARNED about Dick during the semester he’d been my de-facto manager:

His area of expertise was Roman archaeology but I was pretty sure he hadn’t bothered to so much as skim new literature during the preceding decade. “Archaeology is all old,” he’d told me when I pressed him on the issue. “There’s nothing new under the sun.”

As if that wasn’t bad enough, the wispy-haired stick-in-the-mud had set himself up as my mentor when I first entered the department. Then he’d quickly turned against me when it became apparent I knew more than he did about modern field techniques.

“You weren’t what he expected,” our department secretary Suzy had explained last week as she and I chatted around the water cooler. “He thought a newly minted PhD—especially one as young as you are—wouldn’t be up to speed until his retirement. Then he’d look like a hero for molding such a perfect professor as his replacement. The trouble is, you’re already better at this gig than Dick was in his prime. Now he’s starting to look like an idiot in front of the rest of the staff.”

Worries about his professional reputation aside, the department head possessed all the power in our relationship. And the expression on his face when he took in the circus-like ruckus in my classroom resembled nothing so much as anticipatory glee.

I took a deep breath and channeled my father. “Mr. Wolf, take your hands off that student,” I barked, making up a name on the spot that seemed to match Craggy Face better than the moniker I’d been using for him previously. “Ms. Owens, the paper is due next week, no ifs, ands, or buts about it. This should be an easy assignment after everything you’ve learned in my class.”

If Patricia had been a dog, her ears would have pinned back and her tail would have tucked in submission. She wasn’t used to being yelled at, and I felt a little bad for taking her to task.

The huffed laugh from “Mr. Wolf,” however, reminded me that Patricia and I weren’t the only ones present. So I addressed the rest of the students in a slightly warmer manner, reminding them that my usual office hours would be shaken up during exam week. “If you have any questions,” I finished, “please don’t hesitate to email or call me. You know I’m always willing to help.”

Then they were gone. My pupils, the department chair, and every single one of the handouts. I’d printed three extra papers and there’d been two absent students, so simple arithmetic suggested there should have been five handouts left on the table. But...

“I’m pretty sure Apple Kid took the last handful to build into a shrine.”

That was Mr. Wolf, still very much present as he pushed himself further than he properly should have into my personal space. His scent enfolded me, mossy and enticing, and my skin tingled as if I’d been stroked...or wanted to be.

Yes. Pet us, whispered the monster deep in my belly. Shaken by the feeling I wasn’t entirely in control of my own internal dialogue, I forced my eyes aside to take my first proper look at the second man.

The gun was gone. Adena perched on his shoulder like a pirate’s parrot. But he didn’t appear at all piratical. Instead, the stark black bird added to the stranger’s handsomeness to turn him into a fairy-tale prince in appearance, all blond hair and blue eyes.

“Ma’am, I apologize for earlier,” he started. “I can assure you, nothing like that will ever happen again.”

I nodded absently. I’d known he wasn’t really dangerous—my monster had somehow smelled it on his breath.

“Apology accepted,” I answered. But my attention kept returning, like a heat-seeking missile, to the man with the saber-tooth fang around his neck.

***

“NOW YOU’LL TELL US where you went,” Mr. Wolf ordered, not bothering to turn his query into a question. His eyebrows were so dark they almost became a brow ridge when they V’ed downwards. But he was no Neanderthal. His eyes possessed the intensity of Homo sapiens sapiens and I got the distinct impression he was aware of the monster lurking beneath my skin.

Perhaps that’s why I started spitting out my secret. “I...the cave...” I answered without thinking, halting only when that familiar glimmer of disappointment rose behind his pupils.

Of course. Mentioning my visions wasn’t the way to assert my sanity.

Mad at myself for the slip, I turned to the other stranger as I tried to nudge them both out the door. “Can I help you? I assume you dropped by for a reason other than to draw a gun on my students?”

“That was a mistake, Dr. Blackburn,” Prince Charming started. Which is when I remembered he’d used my predecessor’s name the first time he’d spoken to me also.

These men didn’t want me. They wanted Dr. Frank Blackburn, who had died of a heart attack so close to the start of the semester that no one even bothered to clean out his office before I moved in. I’d inherited his classes, his bird, and apparently his problems in the form of these two intruders.

“I’m afraid you’re mistaken,” I said, hating the fact that my voice quavered slightly. The trouble was, Mr. Wolf—still silent—continued circling me like a turkey vulture homing in on a piece of choice roadkill. At the moment, he was behind my back...and being unable to see him made me so twitchy it was all I could do to meet the speaker’s eyes.

“You’re not F. Blackburn?” Prince Suddenly-Not-So-Charming snapped, mouth pursing.

“I’m O. Hart,” I countered. “Frank died in his sleep over the summer. I took his place....”

Oops. That was more information than they likely needed or wanted. Plus, I couldn’t hold myself still any longer, not when I could have sworn I felt hot breath drifting across the nape of my neck.

Whirling, I found myself face to face with the larger stranger. Or, rather, face to scar-encircling-his-neck.

Chapter 3

“Then this isn’t yours.”

The words should have been a question, but they weren’t. Instead, they were a statement of ownership even as he slipped the silver chain that had recently been around his neck over my head.

The saber-tooth-cat fang tapped against my nose as it lowered from my forehead to my chin then continued its way downward. Calloused skin grazed my cheek as his hand retreated. And I couldn’t seem to stop my fingers from cupping the heavy artifact that seemed to burn through my sweater with borrowed heat.

“No, it’s not mine,” I answered, even though the fang felt right hanging there. Even though the weight around my neck seemed to lift me up rather than bowing me down.

The men on either side of me exchanged loaded glances. “She isn’t...” started Prince Charming.

“Doesn’t matter,” answered Mr. Wolf. Then, spearing me again with his unbreakable attention, he introduced both of them in rapid succession. “Claw.” This was himself. “Harry.” A thumb jab in the direction of the fairy-tale prince.

“Olivia,” I replied, somehow needing him to know my first name even though a second ago I’d been trying to rush him out the door.

“O-liv-ia,” he repeated, the word seductive and warm in his deep rumble. For a moment, we were suspended in the lull that followed. Then: “We need your help.”

Yes, anything. I wasn’t sure if that was me or the monster. But I somehow managed not to speak the words aloud.

As if responding to my caution, Claw raised his eyebrows at Harry. And the latter accepted the conversational ball as easily as he’d dropped it in the first place. “Ma’am, we work for the President.”

“Of the university?”

Adena cackled a throaty laugh at my confusion while Harry corrected me. “No. Of the nation. As you may have noticed, Jim Kelter...hasn’t been feeling quite himself.”

This made no sense. “I’m not a medical doctor,” I pointed out, although my gaze remained focused on Claw. “My PhD is in archaeology. I study cave paintings, ancient artifacts, and old bones.”

“Like this?” Claw’s finger almost grazed my breast as he tapped the fang he’d given me. But his motion was careful, calculated. Only air slid across my sweater to impact the underlying skin.

I shivered, knowing there was no point in explaining that a bone and a tooth were slightly different in molecular structure. No one would care about biochemistry when dealing with an erratic head of state.

“Yes,” I started. “But...”

“Then we need you.” Claw’s voice reverberated through my bones like the beat of a drum.

He smells like home, the monster inside me whispered, forcing my body to lean forward and inhale a deeper whiff of his woodsy scent.

And the monster’s mirroring of my own feelings slapped me back to reality. I couldn’t afford to be sidetracked by a sexual fancy that would send my mental health floundering.

Plus: “You look out for you,” my father was fond of saying. “Everyone else is doing the same.”

Our nation’s President had dozens—hundreds—of people on staff to ensure his well-being. I had myself...plus Adena when she felt like obeying my commands.

Rationally, I was making the right decision. So I wasn’t sure why it hurt so badly to deny Claw’s request.

“I’m afraid I can’t help,” I answered, snapping my fingers at the raven. She landed on my shoulder with the weight of disappointment, head swiveling to peer behind us as I strode out of the room.

***

THERE WAS A STUDENT waiting for me in the hallway when I headed back to campus to deal with my inherited mess after a quick stop home to swallow my meds and toss the cat tooth into my kitchen junk drawer. Adena had also demanded a bite to eat, and I’d changed my shoes because my feet were killing me. To cut a long story short, by the time I rounded the corner and found the freckled class perfectionist waiting for me, I was running quite a bit behind.

He was bundled up against the winter chill, head bowed in a manner that promised our interlude wouldn’t be brief. Still, I smiled and welcomed him. “Joe.”

“I know this isn’t your office hours....” The sixteen-year-old freshman started apologizing the moment I came into view.

“Don’t worry about it.” I dug for my keys in my bag then took a look through the narrow office-door window as I fumbled with the lock. Inside, the piles of my predecessor’s jumbled-together stuff looked taller than when I’d left them. Great.