“You are starting to sound more like a vampire.”
He laughed. “The legend of the vampire’s ability to mesmerize stems from our kind.”
Rachel quivered. “Okay, spill the beans, what the hell are you?”
“I’m a lycan, what your myths call a werewolf.” He grinned, showing his long glistening white fangs.
Despite everything she’d seen and experienced, doubt shadowed her scientifically trained mind. Lev could suffer from Cutaneous Porphyria, the rare genetic disorder which often included long canines. Yet, he looked healthy, in an Olympic athlete sort of way. Without blinking, she stared at him. Besides the fangs, he didn’t have obvious wolfish features. He was a hot attractive human male, without a unibrow or having more than normal body hair. Just the right amount of chest hair to enhance his broad muscular chest. Yet, his blue eyes exhibited feral intensity. “Only, you are not a my
th.”
“Do you wish a quick demonstration, Dr. Becker?”
Way to appeal to the scientist in me. “Yes.” She put her coffee down.
“Our transformation is quick, a blink of an eye, but I will slow the shift.” Lev dropped the blanket and stood, naked. His arms furred, claws formed, his face changed in contour from a man’s to a wolf’s long snout.
Rachel gasped as he went from man to Hollywood horror movie werewolf to giant wolf. The same black wolf that had scared the crap out of her back in New Orleans. “Holy, holy shit!”
Lev shifted back to human form and wrapped the blanket around his waist. Rachel stood gaping. Staring. Silent. Was she in shock? Had he pushed her to the edge of insanity? “Rachel?”
Rachel circled him, not like a frightened human, but like a scientist examining a new species. Almost too detached. She furrowed her brows. “This can’t be bioengineering.”
“You are right. We are a separate or rather created species long before the science of genetics.”
“No.” Rachel pressed her hand against the cut on her forehead and shook her head. “It’s the elevation and now a possible concussion. I’m hallucinating.”
He sat next to her and brushed a curl from her forehead. “No. Your head is good, better.”
“How do you know? It’s not like you have x-ray vision.”
The pack had jokingly said he used x-ray vision to see through walls, but that wasn’t true. He had acute vision, like most weres, but his mutations had taken on other manifestations. Super strength, enhanced senses, human speech as a wolf, superior mind control and the ability to temporary shift into other predator species. Not to mention his ability to heal quicker than most alphas, and from what he could see her injury, his healing worked even better on humans. Rachel was the first human he’d bitten . “No, I don’t.” He smiled. “You know how dogs can be trained to sniff out disease?”
“Yes.”
“I can, too.”
She swallowed. “Better than a dog?”
“In my case, better than other lycans, or as you say, werewolves.”
“So the politically correct term is lycan?”
“There is no political correctness. We go by lycan, werewolf, loup-garou, rougarou, hombre-lobo, or any other term for a shifter who can transform from wolf to man. Whatever, as you Americans say, works.”
She bit her bottom lip. “How long has your kind been around?”
“Millennia.”
Her amber eyes met his. “Was it some sort of mutation?”
“According to our sacred texts, our kind was created by a great mage known as Stallo.”
“How was that possible? Recombinant DNA science didn’t exist a thousand years ago.”
“Stallo, known as a Wolf Wizard, used magic not science to create us. Our scholars believe he used the forbidden art of necromancy.”
“Isn’t that the magic of bringing back the dead?”