She rolled until she faced him nose to nose. His breathing was hard and she placed her hands back on his chest where she'd had them earlier. "I know, you're big and mean and dangerous, right? Somehow you're a danger to me and everyone here, right?"
"I am, Faith, never doubt it. The acid that destroyed my body has started playing havoc with my human brain."
Reaching up, she placed her right hand on the scarred part of his face. He flinched and tried to pull away but she held him still. "Except I saw it too, Theo. I couldn't see the actual bullet or hear the fire but I saw hole that wasn't there only moments earlier. Something did that and maybe you're the only one who can see it, maybe whatever happened to you is going to turn out to be a gift, to save us all."
"Faith, before I left, I was having terrible thoughts. Violent, dangerous images I could have acted on."
"Except you didn't."
"I could have."
Faith placed a kiss on his nose. "Theo, I could have dyed my hair blue, I didn't. Just because we think something doesn't mean we act on them."
Theo sighed. "It's so much more complicated than that."
"Most things are simple. We'll figure it out." She felt warm in his embrace and for the first time in a long time not alone in the world. Yawning, she rolled over onto her side. He placed his hand over her waist and pulled her tight against him. Even though it seemed crazy, within seconds she found herself drifting off to sleep as if they'd been sharing a bed for years.
Chapter Five
Theo woke suddenly. He was drenched in cold sweat and what was worse was that he knew it hadn't just been a nightmare that had roused him in the middle of the night. He leapt from the bed.
Call the shift.
No, it would be too easy. He needed to beat this by himself while he still could if there was any chance of having a future with Faith within the pack. The images he hadn't seen since he'd made the decision to live in his life in his wolf form started. He needed to find a way to remember they were just that: waking dreams, scenes in his mind, not real.
The room spun and he hit the floor. When he sat up he was in Faith's room but it was daylight and she wasn't there. In her place on the bed was the creature from his worst living nightmare: the flying demon.
It had been months since he'd seen one. Living like a wolf had protected him from having to endure it. Colored like russet potatoes, the creature's wingspan must have been about eight feet wide; the non-winged parts much shorter maybe something like three feet. Its face was a mixture of a lizard and a snake and most of it looked slimy. Every four minutes, the facial features dissolved, only to reform seconds later. It was at this time the creatures were vulnerable and could be killed, but you had to be careful. As he'd learned from personal experience, the creature had a gland on the back of its hands that secreted an acid that was so potent the second it touched your skin you begged for death.
But in his case, the end had not come. Instead he'd gotten to live with it infecting him every day since even after it burned off one side of his face.
"Hello, Theo, I've been waiting for you."
Theo growled. Once he was confronted with the talking version of the beast, there was no shifting, no speaking to his wolf at all. He was completely on his own in these situations and he had no idea why and wasn't sure there was even anyone he could ask.
"I told you the last time I saw you that you could run but you could never escape us. We're always with you."
"You're a figment of my imagination, a hallucination brought on by the lingering presence of your acid in my body."
"Perhaps...that sounds so reasonable. But how about this explanation?" The creature took off in flight, breaking through Faith's ceiling. Theo ducked and rolled to miss being hit by large chunks of plaster coming down, as the demon hovered outside the hole in the ceiling "You've always been of two natures. One you could control, one you fought to not have control you. This is true of all shifters. Now you are also more than you were before. These days you have three inside of you, not just two."
Theo shook his head. The longer he stayed in here in this waking dream and let this thing infect him, the more his behavior in the real world would become unpredictable and dangerous. His body could be doing all kinds of dangerous, horrible things there while he did nothing more than talk in here. He'd left Faith sleeping. She had no way of protecting herself from him and he'd be unreachable, there would be no way to reason with him.
This was why he couldn't be around anyone or spend any time in his human form.
"Eventually, you'll have to face this in your wolf form too. As a person who grew up with two natures, you'd think you wouldn't be so afraid of a third one."
Theo's ears rang. "If that were true, Cullen would have told us about it. We would have known that was what happened to me."
The creature had the audacity to snort as he landed directly in front of Theo. "You rely so heavily on what your elders knew or what they should know. It's nonsense. You're the first person to survive one of our attacks in five centuries. Everyone your Cullen knew who got hit like you did died within twenty-four hours. I guess we could call you...us...something of a miracle. Now, why do you suppose that is?"
If any of this was true, there was no way in hell Theo was going to let this thing exist inside of his body. He'd rip it out himself if he had to.
"I don't know, maybe it just wasn't my time to die or you were having an off day when you struck me."
The demon laughed, a long series of snickers that sounded more like a hisses. "Oh, I think I'm going to like being inside of you. When you're not hidden away as a wolf you're rather amusing."
"So what you're saying is I'm going to turn into you?"
He needed to wake up and get away from Faith immediately. The single most grotesque creature he'd ever seen lived inside of him. It was a terrible situation and his heart pounded just thinking about it.
Shaking his head, the demon laughed heartily now. "No, but I'll always be with you now. Tell me Theo Kane, how much control do you have?"
A sharp wrenching pain pierced Theo's body and threw him onto the floor. He stared at the demon in shock but the demon looked confused as if he hadn't just caused what happened to Theo.
The same pain struck him again and he rolled over onto his stomach in agony. Colors swirled in front of his eyes in a circular pattern and he felt as though he was sucked into a long tunnel filled with every color he'd ever seen and some he had never noticed before.
His head felt like he was on fire. He groaned and pulled his hands to his face to grab his throbbing temples.
"Come back to me."
Theo thrashed back and forth, desperate to avoid the demon and whatever game it played by doing this to him.
"Come back to me."
Seconds passed before he registered the voice. Faith? He tried to open his eyes but the light in the room blinded him.
"Don't look until I tell you to."
He nodded, unable to do anything else. Slowly the swirling colors and the white light faded. A moment later, he was back in Faith's calm, dark walled bedroom, he didn't have to open his eyes to know, he could smell it. Everything about it screamed Faith from the scent of lavender on the sheets--also present on her skin--to the vanilla candles he knew she burned from both their scented presence on the walls to the vague remnant of them on her hair.
"Okay, I think that light is gone now." He heard both relief and astonishment in her voice.
He opened his eyes and sat up, shaking his head. "What happened?"
She crossed her arms over her chest. "You tell me."
"Did I hurt you?" He couldn't stand the thought.
"No." After a second she continued. "Did I hurt you?"