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Alex squinted at him through the gloomy glow cast by the lantern. “You’re awfully hip”—she snapped her fingers—“for a Viking.”
“I learned to fit in.”
She laughed. “Believe me. You do not fit in.”
He stiffened. “Of course I do.”
“Just because you talk like a human and sometimes walk like a human, that doesn’t make you human.”
His jaw tightened. “I am more human than many humans I’ve met.”
“Sure you are.”
He frowned and Alex stifled a smile. Good. She’d gotten to him. He was far too confident. Most werewolves were. They had reason to be. And Julian had more reason than most.
“Getting back to how you became furry,” she said. “Explain.”
“I just did.”
“You don’t think ‘I got pissed and became a wolf’ requires a tad more clarification?”
“There is no clarification,” he said. “We were in battle—”
“Where?”
He said a word that sounded like guttural gibberish to Alex. Then his lips tightened and he spat out, “Scotland now. They are nasty fighters, the Scottish.”
“So Braveheart wasn’t all Hollywood hype?” He appeared confused again, and she rolled her eyes. “You may talk like you’re from this century, but you need to watch a few movies if you ever want to fit in for real.”
“I don’t,” he said sharply. “I plan to stay in my village from now until the day that I—”
“Die?” she murmured. “Right. What was different about the battle in Scotland that made you—” She waved her hand. “You know.”
“Furry?” he supplied.
She shrugged. The quilt slipped, and his gaze went to her bare shoulder, heating before he tugged it away.
“I saw my brother fall.” His face filled with such anguish Alex got a chill and pulled the blanket closer. “I howled to the night sky. Called upon Odin to give me strength and fought my way toward him, but…” He shook his head. “In the fury that followed, the skin of the wolf that I carried upon me became my skin, and I ran beneath the fullness of the moon as a beast.”
“And then?” Alex prompted when his silence stretched too long.
He looked up, blinking as if he’d forgotten she was there. “Ever after I became a wolf when the moon was round. Or my anger made me so.”
He’d begun to speak with the formal cadence of those who spoke English as a second language, his memories more real, it seemed, than her.
“I discovered as time went by that fury brought forth my magic.”
“Magic in the blood,” she murmured. “Perhaps in your past.”
“Perhaps.”
“But you can make other wolves,” she said. “That’s strange.”
“Why?”
“Lycanthropy is a virus, passed through the saliva. If you became a wolf by magic, then how is it you can spread the virus through a bite?”
He turned his palms up. “All I know is that I can.”
