Jason: A Dystopian Paranormal Urban Fantasy Romance (Warrior World Book 3) Read online

  Whoever was hunting this female would have to go through me.

  The world went black.

  I woke up slowly with a massive headache and still in my Wolf form. It was the middle of the night, and I could smell the woman lying on the floor next to me even before I opened my eyes. She breathed softly, a hand on my fur.

  Where was I? It took a second for all of it to come back, and then I groaned, which was more like a huff since I wore fur. Gone as long as I had been, my pack would come looking for me soon. Well, maybe. I didn’t know exactly how long I’d been gone. How many hours had I been here? I was stiff, an unusual sensation in my Wolf body.

  She let go of me, which meant she might know I was awake. “Oh good. You’re up. You know what? It occurs to me that I am talking to you like you’re human. Maybe you don’t understand me.”

  Werewolves could always understand humans when they spoke. I also felt fairly confident that I’d never misunderstand a word this woman said, ever. She was… fascinating. I pulled myself to my feet. She smelled of roses. It had been longer than I could actually fathom since I’d smelled any, but I remembered the scent. It was… familiar. My mother used to fill the house with them because she liked them until my sister Autumn said they made her Werewolf senses go haywire. Mom stopped after, giving up what she loved to make my sister more comfortable. They were loving memories. At some point, I’d been a good son. Hundreds of years before.

  But I remembered.

  I shook my head. There was an edge to Margot’s aroma, telling me she was hungry. Also, she’d been soaked. In addition to her hunger, I could smell that she had that soggy she needed to bathe to get the rain off her thing going on, too. I should shift.

  The thing was I liked looking at her. My eyes took her in and the sight just filled me with… ease. It traveled all through me like a hot bath. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d felt this way. Or maybe it was fairer to say that I couldn’t just stare. As a human, that was considered odd. Outed as a Werewolf a long time before, one would think I’d be comfortable with my own inhumanity. Sure, I should. But I’d never gotten there and my new cloned self hadn’t changed it.

  With my Wolf eyes I gazed at her, and she didn’t make any indication that she minded.

  “I’m glad you’re okay. You saved my life.”

  I guessed I had. It had been a long time since I’d saved anyone, too. It was time the female—Margot—and I spoke, too. I wasn’t enough in my Wolf’s head. This in between thing was odd. I’d never had it happen before.

  I called the shift. Her eyes widened, and she gasped as I resumed my human form. My blond hair fell in my eyes, and I pushed it away.

  Her lips fell open. “Sorry, that was the first time I saw it in person. Before was always on a video screen. A distance… and… and… and you’re Jason Ulysses Kenwood, aren’t you?”

  I tugged on my coat. I’d hate to have been standing there naked as the day I was born. “Long time since I heard my middle name.”

  And how did she know it? Who was this woman?

  She let out a long breath. “Sorry, that must have been weird.”

  “Lots of things are weird. You’re hungry.” I nodded toward the door. “The rain stopped. Let’s go find food.”

  She blinked rapidly. “I…You go ahead. I’m going to hide out the night here. I was crazy going out to find one of those daywalking Vampires, but there are only a few of them. I’m not going to be good if we find a whole slew of regular Vamps. They’ll eat me alive. I have no fighting skills. None whatsoever.”

  Well, that was a problem to be dealt with in the future. “I’m as much a monster as they are. Nothing will get near you, Margot.” It was kind of fun to say her name. I hadn’t spoken to a woman who wasn’t old enough to be my mother in too long. “We can find you food and deposit you at Genesis. Or just bring you back there and you can eat there.” That made more sense when I thought about it. The trouble was I couldn’t enter Genesis, and I kind of wanted to eat with her. It would be nice to have company for a little bit longer. “That’s where you’re from, right?”

  I couldn’t imagine she’d have traveled a greater distance than that and managed not to die if she really had no fighting skills at all.

  She nodded. “That’s where I’m from. Or where I’m living now. I’m a clone, actually.” Anxiety tasted like sour milk, and it went over my tongue. But it wasn’t from me. It was her. “You may have seen me before. Doubleday likes to make a lot of us. I wanted you to know that wasn’t me.”

  “I’ve never seen you before.” I had seen Doubleday when I woke up in the cloning machine in her house of horrors, but I’d never seen this woman. I wouldn’t have put the two of them together.

  “I’m her clone. But I don’t remember it or anything. I’m not evil or psychotic. I don’t think. Not yet anyway. I’m sort of studying myself to see when that’ll happen. Shut up, Margot. Talking too much. You know Rachel is married to Chad right? I mean, I know you thought she was your mate. I kind of watched that whole situation. Oh dang it. Shut up.”

  She covered her mouth.

  Any pain I would have had about that didn’t come. She’d not told me anything I didn’t already suspect. “Come on, Dr. Margot. Let’s get you home. Nothing will hurt you tonight. You have your own private monster to keep the others away.”

  Two

  We walked together through the woods. For all the talking she’d done earlier, she was silent now. It wasn’t uncomfortable and I wasn’t sensing that she was hiding any strong discomfort. Usually I could smell that.

  “How did the Vampire walk through the day?”

  She shook her head. “That’s why I wanted to collect DNA. We’ve been seeing touches of them. Not a huge group of them but individual Vampires appearing with the ability. Could be evolution. Could be something that Doubleday and her cronies are doing. I don’t know. I’m not sure if I still worked for them that I’d know then. I was kept on the outside and the reasons for that have become increasingly apparent to me lately.”

  “The whole clone thing?” That made little sense to me. Chad Lyons was a clone, if I recalled correctly, and I’d be shocked if anyone ever mistrusted him.

  She shook her head. “The whole cloned thing only in as far as Doubleday is who I’m cloned from and she is evil. I think it’s more the whole used to work for Icahn’s people thing. Not that I had any choice.”

  It was especially nice to see someone else had similar problems. Having just been cloned in the last year, I’d had no opportunity to speak to anyone else about their experiences. Not to mention I sort of just liked talking to her. She was human. I didn’t get to speak to just regular humans anymore.

  “So you’re taking huge risks trying to prove yourself?” I actually understood that completely, unfortunately. “What do you remember about being cloned?”

  She scrunched up her face. “They cloned me as a baby. I was raised and grew up to now so not anything. What do you remember? This was actually part of what I studied when I worked for the Icahn crew. The cloning issues, things that did and did not happen.”

  The wind picked up through the trees. I wasn’t cold, but then again I was almost never cold. It was a Werewolf thing. The girl next to me might be though. I pulled off my coat and handed it to her. She shook her head and tried not to take it.

  “No, please. It’ll make me feel better. Discomfort eats at my senses. I won’t be cold. Take it.” Her face fell, and for a second I could almost hear the internal battle she had going on. To take the coat or not take the coat. Would it be rude to take it, would it be ruder not to take it? Was it weird to take a coat from a Werewolf you didn’t know…?

  “Margot.” I held out the coat again. “Take the coat. You’re still in clothes you got soaked in. Use your doctor brain. Good idea to get chilled?”

  She took the coat from me and slipped it on. I tried to ignore the satisfaction coursing through my veins or to even analyze why it had been so damned important to me t
hat she accepted the coat in the first place. I’d go with the reason I gave her and leave it at that. I didn’t understand women, evidenced by the fact that I hadn’t even been able to seal the deal with my fated mate. At least I could get one woman lost in the woods to take a coat.

  She rubbed the back of her neck. Nearby a tree branch cracked, followed by the sound of wings flapping. “You never told me what you remember about cloning.”

  I hadn’t, had I? “I’ve clearly lost some of my conversational skills. I remember waking up in the table. That Doubleday person was there. I guess maybe you look like her.” She didn’t smell like her for sure. “Then there was a lot of scampering around as I was ousted out of that hellhole and shoved outside. I saw Micah Lyons for two seconds and then my pack found me. Before that? I remember dying. That I remember doing.” The bullet piercing my skin. I didn’t really remember what that felt like, per se. Just that it happened. “But it technically didn’t happen to me. I mean, that was someone else. I have his memories, I feel like him, but this body was never shot. I guess they aged me three years in the time I was gone. That’s all I know.”

  “Are we our bodies or are we our souls? Eternal questions we have to wrestle with since the advent of cloning.” She shook her head. Talking to her was a little bit like being back in school. I’d been a pretty mediocre student, but I’d always admired the smart ones. Rachel had been on her way to a really good college. She made straight As. I would have convinced her to let me follow along, which my father would have hated.

  I pushed away those thoughts. They were from an entirely different existence. Who cared who would have done what when now?

  “I don’t know. That’s well above my IQ. I…” I quit talking as I smelled them. There were Vampires around. The regular kind. A growl sounded in my throat. “We’re about to have company.”

  She sucked in a breath. “Vampires.”

  “Yep.” We were close to Genesis. I’d avoided this part of the area like it was my job, but I knew just where it was. I’d always remember the time I’d spent here as the best and worst of life. Nothing was getting to Margot tonight. “Run.”

  She gasped. “I can’t leave you to deal with this alone.”

  “That’s the best thing you can do. Run, Margot. There is time for you to do that. Trust me. Okay? I know I’m a monster, but I hate the Vamps and so far I like you. I won’t let anything get through me before you have enough time to go.”

  A million emotions passed over her scent, and I wished it was a warm summer day where there was nothing to do but analyze every nuance. It had been too long since I did that, and being near a human who didn’t shield her emotions from my nose as my fellow Werewolves often did meant I was practically drowning in sensory overload. But we had no time.

  This was nighttime in hell, and she needed to run. Now.

  Margot finally turned and ran. I’d never been more relieved in my life. If she really had no fighting skills than I couldn’t be taking care of her and dealing with the undead at the same time. I called my shift onto myself. Maybe I should have just stayed like this permanently. It really was so much easier than trying to exist like a man right now.

  Or ever.

  The first of the Vamps appeared, and I lunged at them. The daywalker was hard but these would be no problem. I tore at the group, and prevented them from getting past me. No problem at all. Sheer numbers could overwhelm but so far I had this well under control.

  Noise sounded behind me and the scent of human males flooded my nostrils a split second before they joined the fight. There were at least three of them. Internally, I groaned. I was going to end up having to save one of them before I was done.

  I always did.

  The fight went on for a while, but it wasn’t particularly interesting. The Vamps were of normal strength and didn’t have any interesting fighting skills to make it all difficult. I knew the guys I was fighting with, too, which made it all the more irritating. If I could have gone my entire life without seeing another Lyons, or Deacon Evans, it wouldn’t have been too soon.

  Yet, there they were. The four of us together like some sort of sick take on the Three Musketeers. I’d always preferred d'Artagnan. I had to get my head out of the past and back to this world.

  I took down another Vampire, ripping his head from his body. He didn’t die right away. Kind of twitched for a second. It was sort of gross. There it went again. My human thoughts interfered with my Wolf body. What was happening?

  It was almost over. Maybe I’d been wrong. Maybe these guys wouldn’t need my help at all. They’d get through a battle without…

  “Deacon,” Micah called out, and I groaned.

  One final Vampire was about to take off Evans’ head. I didn’t even have to work that hard to get there. I jumped, knocking the undead down before it got onto Deacon. I shook my head as the rain resumed.

  If we had to be living in this fucked up world, couldn’t we have done it in Arizona?

  The three fighters stopped to stare at me. Chad Lyons who had married Rachel, Deacon Evans who had loved Rachel, or at least claimed he did, too, and Micah Lyons Rachel’s best friend. And here I was, the guy who had tried to destroy things by simply having had a claim on her first and not letting it go.

  I’d even waited until she was sixteen to insert myself back in her life.

  I was the bad guy in their eyes—hell most of the time in my own eyes—and I didn’t need this shit anymore.

  Micah nodded at me. “Nice job with getting that last Vamp.”

  If I had to face the music of seeing them again, I wasn’t going to do it on four legs. I called the shift onto myself and met the stare of three guys who hated me as much as I hated them. Funnily enough, Chad wasn’t sending me any negative scents at all. He seemed pretty neutrally fine. Well, he’d gotten the girl. Why bother being worked up anymore?

  “Gentlemen, bet you didn’t expect to see me again.”

  Micah looked at Deacon. “Are you going to thank him? He just saved your life.”

  Deacon shot Micah a look that matched the hostility waving off of him before he turned to me. “Thanks, Jason.”

  “Sure.” I nodded. “Too much blood spilled, right?”

  This moment defined awkward, but it was Micah who filled the silence instead of me. “I knew we’d see you again.”

  “I’m not here to cause issues. I walked one of your members back.”

  Chad nodded. “Margot. She said you saved her, too. You seem to be on a roll with that.”

  “Well, we all have our strengths. I need to speak to someone at Genesis anyway. My pack, we need to start building some homes for ourselves. I’m not interested in roaming around the countryside. I want a home to protect. Help cut down some of the local Vamp population. We don’t want to bother you. So I need to know what you consider the outlier of your boundaries to be. So we don’t accidently build on them.”

  Chad made eye contact with Micah. “We have a plan to continue to push outward.”

  Of course they did. I steeled my shoulders. There were more of them, but we were monsters, and they hadn’t managed to kill us yet. “To what edge?”

  No one answered me, which meant they either didn’t want to tell me or they didn’t have a ready response. That was fine. I had one. “Then we’ll just pick our spot and you can watch out for us on your own expanse.”

  “Is everyone okay?” A breathless Margot rushed to join us, accompanied by two women I didn’t know. One of them was blond, the other dark haired. Deacon threw his arm around the blondish one. “Get back inside. It’s a mess out here tonight.”

  The dark haired one pressed against Micah. Interesting. It looked like they’d found people, too. That was not at all surprising. Everyone got to do that except me.

  I was stuck. Eternally the idiot who didn’t get the girl.

  “We’re all alive. Thanks for the help, Margot.” Back in the day I would have winked at her. My heart was devoted to Rachel, but I’d liked how it fe
lt when women tittered around me. Yeah, I was that asshole. My winking days were over.

  I turned to leave but stopped myself. “Maybe this goes without saying but Werewolves are big on territory. I just gave you the chance to tell me where yours was. You didn’t. I’m going to pick mine, and I’m going to give you a wide berth. If you get in my territory after that is established we’re going to have problems. Otherwise we never will.”

  “The same old Jason making threats?” Chad asked me. I still didn’t get any emotional signal from him. Maybe he had the feelings the equivalent of a brick wall. It didn’t matter.

  I waved my hand in the air. “Say hi to your wife.”

  I took off running. I’d had enough hello again to last a long while.

  A long night making my way back to the makeshift area where we lived in tattered tents told me that it was as good as anywhere to plant ourselves down and make a home. At least half a day’s walk to Genesis meant there was plenty of room for them to grow and not get anywhere near us.

  Not that I never wanted to see humans again, ever. Margot had been a nice distraction. She’d had a way about her. It was hard to pinpoint exactly what that was. But it was there and…

  “Jason,” Trevor, one of my pack mates limped over to me. He had a leg injury that wouldn’t heal even with shifting, which was very unusual for us. “We were worried.”

  They were always worried. The rest of them could disappear as they felt inclined, but if I wasn’t standing right here like some kind of statue when they returned from anywhere, I had to pet their heads and make them feel better about life.

  I’d never had children, probably never would, but I still got to be everyone’s daddy.

  It was entirely possible I wasn’t cut out to be an Alpha despite my genetics. I just hated dealing with folks’ issues. I sighed. Maybe I was just tired. I hadn’t been to bed yet. Passing out didn’t count, not really.