o 35b0a02a46796a4f by deba schrott Page B

you.”
    His lips quirked. “You wanted me?”
    “As much as you wanted me.”
    “Who said I did?”
    Alex lowered her eyes to his now limp member; it twitched beneath her gaze. Alex smirked.
    Barlow sat up, flicking the corner of the quilt over his lap. “I did not use magic on you.”
    “You said—”
    “I healed you,” he ground out between clenched teeth. “I didn’t not have the anger for anything more?’
    “What the hell does that mean?”

    “My magic is based in anger.”
    “What are you, some kind of witch?”
    “Do I look like an old woman with a cauldron and a cat?”
    She tilted her head, peered at him for several seconds. “If youput on a hat, scowled just like that—maybe.”
    He sighed, unamused. “I’m not a witch.”
    “Sorcerer? Wizard? Warlock?”
    “I don’t know what I am. I only know that when I get angry, what I want to happen, does.”
    “Seriously?”
    He lifted one finger. “Invisibility cloak?’ A second finger. “Shifting in the sunlight.” A third. “Healing you.”
    Alex lifted her thumb. “Doing me?’
    “That I didn’t want.”
    Felt like it.’’
    He made an impatient sound. “I thought we were going pretend that didn’t happen.”
    “Right?’ She flashed her hand in front of her face.
    “Forgetting.” If only it were that easy. “Tell me more about your anger magic.”
    “I guess we aren’t going to sleep anymore.”
    “You’re tired?”
    “Guys usually fall asleep. . . after.”
    “After what?” Alex asked sweetly, and batted her e’ lashes.
    She could have sworn she heard him laugh, but when stopped batting and peered into his face all she saw was same sour expression he wore whenever she was near.
    “I have no idea how I became magic,” he said. “I only know that the first time I changed, I did so because of fury.”
    -
    “You weren’t bitten?” she asked.
    “Not all werewolves are bitten?’
    “True,” she agreed. “There were the genetically engineered ones.”
    “Mengele.”
    Alex cast him a quick glance. “You know about that?”
    “I’ve been around a very long time. I know about ever thing.”
    Not everything. He didn’t know Alex had been engineered to spy. And he’d better not ever find out or she might end up magically dead.
    “How old are you?” she asked.
    “I was born in the year 836 in what is now called Nor- way.”
    Alex let her gaze wander over him from his big feet, his big hands, to all the big parts in between. “You were Viking?”
    “To be correct, Viking was a verb. To go a Viking.”
    “The act of conquering wherever, whatever, and whomever you wished?’
    “Technically, yes.”
    “How did you become furry?”
    “Have you ever heard the Norse legend of the berserker?”
    “No,” she lied. She wanted to hear his version.
    Barlow lifted his brows, surprised. “Aren’t all Jäger-Suchers supposed to learn as much as they can about as many different types of shape-shifters as possible?”
    “Where did you bear that?” He appeared to know more about the Jäger-Suchers than they knew about him.
    “I have my sources.”
    Edward had said every agent he’d sent after Barlow had never returned, so Alex could surmise just who those sources had been. She wondered how long they’d lasted under Barlow’s torture before they’d told him everything.
    She didn’t plan to.
    “A berserker,” Barlow continued, “is a Norse warrior who, in the heat of battle, becomes an animal.”
    “Poof, he’s a zebra?”
    Barlow’s lips twisted as if he wanted to laugh but
    would never allow it. At least not around her. “Legend said that there were Norse warriors who wore the skin of a wolf; then they became one.”
    “How?” she asked.
    “No idea.”

    “Yet you’re one of those who became?”
    “As far as I know, I’m the only one.”
    “Say what?”
    “I’m the only one who actually became a wolf. Others wore the skin, fought with trance-like fury, became known as berserkers—”
    “Hold on,”