Dire Needs: A Novel of the Eternal Wolf Clan Read Free Page A

helpless—she probably hated that most of all.
    The only thing he could do to comfort her was sometimes not a comfort at all. He had the ability to dreamwalk, which made him a sort of human dream catcher by default. He could hold someone’s nightmare at bay or help them through it by absorbing the fear and pain.
    His curse alternately freaked and pissed off the Dires, and the Weres who knew about it. But his pull was strong and there wasn’t a whole hell of a lot his family of Dires could do about it when he would involuntarily walk through their dreams in order to capture their nightmares.
    The pack hated being so vulnerable to him, hated that he was forced to carry all their fears, but that had been his ability since he’d been born. He’d learned to deal with the burdens he carried and the fallout that came with them.
    As a child, he’d been confused by the ability, but as he got older, his mother explained,
It’s a blessing
. It was only before his Running that he’d been told that he’d actually
been
cursed with the ability, not born with it, and that he’d never be free of it.
    Still, it helped him to keep track of what was happening in his pack.
    While Jinx didn’t love it, he was used to it—his own born ability of being able to talk to ghosts and helping them pass over into the spirit world meant someone was always fucking with his mind, and he would typically tell Rifter to just
get the fuck out.
    Vice was usually too busy indulging in one of his vices to give a shit what Rifter did. The man was born with seven deadly sins rolled into one sinful-as-hell body that women and men—both human and wolf—couldn’t get enough of. And although he couldn’t be separated from the sins that ruled his life, his ability let him use those extremes to help others find their balance.
    Stray’s dreams were almost completely quiet—centered more on hiding and being caught—and Rifter often wondered if he had the power to block Rifter from them, but he never asked. No, Stray was jumpy enough, having been found fifty years earlier in some back alley. He’d been separated from the pack after what the Elders called the Extinction, when they had smote all living Dire wolves except for them during the Viking Age, and ended up nearly losing his mind from lack of pack company.
    These days, he spent most of his time hanging at the house, listing to old-school eighties metal and keeping up with the latest technology. But man, Rifter would let Stray have his back during a fight any damned time.
    If the man had an ability beyond being an immortal Dire, he hadn’t let anyone in on it, although Rifter had his suspicions.
    And then there was Rogue—Jinx’s twin, who could contact spirits. Rogue, who’d been captured months earlier by the weretrappers, a group not unlike homegrown terrorists who wanted to experiment on Weres and Dires. Lately, there were rumors that the trappers planned to clone the Weres for some kind of superarmy to use for their own purposes.
    The weretrappers were humans, but they’d made a deal with the witches—one of whom was Rifter’s former best friend, Seb, and now the trappers had some powerful spells on their side.
    The enemy of my enemy is my friend.
    Rifter and the other Dires were charged with keeping the rest of the humans safe from the evil that could entail.
    But he didn’t want to think about Seb right now. Not when Rifter could close his eyes and still hear Rogue’s howls in the night. They’d gotten him back, but not until terrible things had been done to him.
    Rifter knew from personal experience what kinds of horrors the man and his wolf had endured. He’d been with Rogue that night six months earlier. Both had been captured and taken to separate cells. It took Rifter three weeks to escape and take Rogue with him.
    By that time, the man was a shell of his former self.
    Now Rogue remained in the attic of the house, as comfortable as they could make an immortal in a coma. Whether he