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* * *
Stunned for a moment by the sight ahead of her, Rosalind slammed to a halt some distance away from the disturbance to get her bearings.
These weren’t humans the Were had gone after. She didn’t immediately recognize the scent, but the odor of maliciousness these creatures gave off saturated the otherwise spring-flavored night with something similar to the iron-like taint of blood.
They were a kind of creature new to her, and they moved too fast to see details, or get a head count. Ten of them, maybe twelve, she figured. Fifteen?
Dropping from the trees like winged bats falling on an insect, they had either been waiting for some other poor, unsuspecting soul to trespass here, or else they had laid a well-planned ambush for the brown Were, having expected him to pursue.
She gave a soft roar of sympathy as she carefully studied the scene.
The big Were rushed through the blur of monsters. The beautiful werewolf who had been a golden-skinned man not long before this tore into the attackers with aggressive, fluid skills and a look of pure madness on his face.
She caught a word from the brown Were’s mind without knowing how she could do that. Vampire. That’s what this werewolf faced.
Her blood began to pound in her veins. Some distant part of her recognized the concept of bloodsucker even if she didn’t fully understand it. What she did realize was that a masterful, powered-up Were didn’t stand much of a chance here without the aid of several more like him. There were just too many monsters in this fight.
Also clear was the realization that she truly couldn’t leave him to fight alone.
I’m here.
Moving in from the werewolf’s left side with the fury of a black tornado, Rosalind plowed through the haze of bodies, wielding her claws like the weapons they were originally intended to be, slashing at everything in her way.
The shockingly gaunt, fleshless creatures targeting the brown Were shrieked when hit, and came back at her baring long yellow fangs. Up close, their faces were spectral and expressionless. Dull red eyes sank deeply into bottomless sockets. They had Lycan blood on their breath.
The brown Were, too busy to acknowledge her help or toss her a look, had felled two monsters by landing well-placed swipes to their necks that cut cleanly through to the bone. When those monsters sagged, their bodies exploded into a rainfall of foul-scented gray ash that drove the remaining creatures into a frenzy.
Only two down—out of too many.
Using the Were’s technique as an example, Rosalind aimed for their necks and exploded one bony mass of her own.
Her first kill.
An odd sensation flowed through her, as though she had swallowed the wind and it continued to churn her insides. As gray ash clouded the area, her beast’s energy began to blaze. Surging ahead like a caged animal that had finally been freed, she felt a new and terrible energy take her over; it flowed through her muscle like a river of fire, and left an icy residue.
She doubled her efforts.
More vampires came on, each of them fighting with ungodly speed and an unearthly agility of jaws that housed far too many gnashing, needle-sharp teeth.
The new, crazed kind of energy fueled Rosalind’s fury. An unrecognizable thrill for battle made her fight on without thinking of the consequences. She was fast, strong and good at fighting. She felt as if she were made for this.
She wanted to kill them all.
Driven by that objective, she whirled, bit and clawed at the corpselike flesh around her. As she took another vampire down, Rosalind howled.
The air trembled with her silent battle cry.
Death comes to all who oppose me!
* * *
Colton fought with all his might. To the right. To the left. Coming from behind. Dropping down from above his head.
He barely heard the sounds over his own rattled breathing. He was moving so fast, he’d lost some control over his actions. His arms were tiring. He’d lost count of how many vampires he’d taken down, but had taken several vicious blows himself.
He smelled blood, and knew it was his. His face was damp, and it wasn’t sweat. In five years on the police force, he had garnered a reputation for fearlessness, driven by a werewolf’s need to protect innocent citizens and the knowledge of how fast he would heal if he were ever to be injured on the job. But this was no street gang or worrisome mob. This was a nest of particularly bloodthirsty monsters, attacking with intent.
More of them arrived. Each kill was replaced by another set of snapping teeth. Another Were had arrived from who knew where, but he had no idea what was happening to that beast, and had no opportunity to look. He thought he could hear that other Were close by, making growling sounds that mirrored his own. But the fight had gone on for so long, with no end in sight, that Colton wondered if they’d make it out of this one.
He fought with a renewed vigor, bolstered by the thought that someone had come to his aid. He swung his arms, swiped through fetid vampire flesh with his claws, and bit through the bones of several hands and many thin necks. And still the monsters came on; an unending supply of mindless foes animated by something purely evil in design.
God, where did these monsters come from?
I’m sorry, he wanted to say to the Were that was someplace beside him because, too late, he had realized that this may have been a trap.
* * *
Rosalind slashed her way through the flood of fanged monsters, determined to beat her way to the brown Were’s side. But as she finally reached him and saw the wounds he had already taken, she opened her throat again and let out a howl that rose from the depths of her soul.
Her beautiful Were’s face and shoulders had been slashed nearly to pieces. He was covered in blood that seemed to drive the monsters mad. And still, as his limbs moved, weaker now but with whatever determination he had left, the brown Were was a magnificent beast.
Her howl echoed in the park with the effect of a sonic boom, a throwback to ancient times when like called like, and species survival was paramount. The call was answered.
Sounds rose above the fighting, rolling like thunder over the bloodstained grass. She recognized her father’s voice, alongside the furious vocalization of another wulf. A third howl arrived, and a fourth. From just past the trees, harrowing werewolf voices lifted in an eerily beautiful Lycan symphony, crowding out the grunts of the remaining bloodsuckers. These were low, aged voices—terrible, experienced and deadly to all that would stand against their song.
Rosalind’s big mistake was stopping to listen.
She heard the terrible growling breath that escaped from the brown Were’s throat, knowing with a sudden and overwhelming feeling of horror that she had hesitated a mere minute too long.
Chapter 5
Rosalind couldn’t stop pacing. Her heart continued to race as she moved back and forth in the hallway leading to Judge Landau’s living room. She felt caged, and anxious. The walls were closing in. She needed to be out in the dark, under the moon, where she could breathe...but she couldn’t go anywhere.
Her father faced her, sitting on a step, observing her motions in a quiet manner.
“He will heal?” she asked him.
“Not completely, I’m afraid,” he replied.
“We always heal, miraculously,” she pointed out.
“This is different, Rosalind. He has been torn to pieces by vampires. It’s a miracle that he survived at all.”
Rosalind shook her head, and continued to pace. Her heart was racing. She hadn’t been able to ease the edge of her anxiety since her father and his friends had turned the tide of the fight, and then brought the severely injured brown Were here.
Her brown Were.
“The wounds have ravaged his immune system. If he comes out of this, he will be changed,” her father said.
Rosalind paused, every muscle feeling strained. “How, exactly, will he change?”
“We don’t yet know the full extent.”
“Then how can you predict that he won’t completely recover?”
“You saw him not minutes ago, Rosalind. What did you see?”
“He is alive, and breathing much easier than he did two days ago.”
“What else?”
“His wounds are already better. Less vivid. Closed over.”
“Please state the obvious, Rosalind.”
Her father expected a reply. She didn’t offer him one.
“His color has changed,” her father said. “You saw that. What was he before this happened?”
Her father was in the way. She could have leaped over him, but knew that he was keeping her from going upstairs, to the wounded Were’s side.
“Brown and beautiful,” she said. “He was brown-pelted, and beautiful.”
“And now?” her father pressed.
“His hair is white. His skin is pale. But maybe that will change again.”
Jared Kirk shook his head. “White Weres exist only in legend, or so we thought. No one here has ever seen one, and the minds of the Weres visiting the Landaus go back quite a distance.”
Rosalind noted how her father paused to allow her time to soak that information in.
“He won’t be what he was before this if he heals enough to open his eyes,” he continued. “He’s a ghost, Rosalind. That’s what legend calls a wulf who shouldn’t have survived such horrific trauma, yet somehow did.”
Trauma. Was that the right word for near total destruction? Rosalind didn’t like the description. It left a bitter taste in her mouth.
“If he were to continue to get better,” her father went on, “he will likely choose to walk his own path, because he will have one foot in this world and one in the next. He has straddled the fine line at the end of his own existence.”
Rosalind ignored the fact that her father was eyeing her closely. She held her breath until he spoke again.
“Ghosts see out of the eyes of both worlds. This wulf was strong, and of royal lineage, but who could be the same after what has happened?”
“He is a wulf, and a cop. He will know what to do,” she protested.
“Rosalind. Listen to what I’m telling you. No soul can survive the cost of those kinds of internal damages intact. He wasn’t just wounded, he was mauled by vampires. Their blood has mingled with his. This fight didn’t kill him, but it has changed him. He has been altered. The white hair proves that. The best healers can’t change or reverse the process.”
No, Rosalind silently protested. She had just found her brave, lovely Were, and wasn’t ready to let him go. She was eager to find out why she felt connected to him, and why she wished so fervently for him to heal.
She desperately wanted to be near to this wulf—ghost or otherwise. She could feel him upstairs. She wanted to go to him.
“Maybe those are just stories, about the ghost wulf,” she suggested.
This strapping Were could not have been broken by vampires. Fate couldn’t be so cruel.
“Truth often fans the flames of myth and rumor, as you well know,” her father counseled.
“And some rumors are just rumors.”
“Werewolves, to the human population, are a myth. But we exist. We blend with humans because we choose to. We keep our secrets because it’s better for everyone that we do. A ghost wulf who has had a life here won’t be able to blend so easily. What will his friends think when they see him? How could he go back to work, or explain?”
Rosalind stopped pacing and looked at her father.
“He will leave them behind,” he father said. “He might choose to live in the shadows, on the fringes, not because he will be forced to, but because he will have to make peace with what he has become.”
“Which is?”
“An old legend, made new. A ghost wulf. Part man, part wulf, and for all we know, part vampire.”
Her father sighed, as if these explanations were a chore, and painful for him.
“You don’t know that. You’re not sure of anything,” Rosalind said.
“You’re right. Time will tell. But the elders who have tended to him have noted that something new has entered his bloodstream, and that out of necessity, this new thing will likely change his soul.”
This information didn’t sit well with Rosalind. In spite of everything being told to her, she still felt connected to the Were, oddly enough, now more than ever.
She had rushed to his side when the other Weres had arrived. She had seen him close his eyes, and fall to his knees.
She had pressed her mouth to his while the others finished off the vampires, and breathed into him some of her own chaotic energy.
If he was changed, as her father was saying, theirs would be a sympathetic bond. She had been forced to be a loner, almost held captive by her father for most of her life. She could relate to being apart from others, and living on the fringes. She had been called special. Which also translated to mean different.
They were both different.
A ghost and a loner. She and this injured Lycan were perfect for each other.
Her father’s voice dropped in tone. “You can’t wish him back to normal, Rosalind. You must accept this as fact, just as the Were upstairs will have to accept his fate.”
Rosalind squeezed her eyes shut to avoid her father’s wary expression. But the thought persisted that he had kept her from all Weres in the past, and that maybe this warning was just another example of her father’s overbearing overprotection.
Well, she wanted to say to him, I can’t be kept from this one. I won’t be kept from him. Not this one.
“He’s a ghost because of me,” she said. “The responsibility is mine.”
“Not so,” her father countered vehemently. “A vampire attack caused this. You were brave, but also foolish to have joined in such a fight. It’s a miracle you weren’t hurt equally as badly, and that Landau and the elders were with me, searching for you. You could be lying in a bed upstairs. What would I have done then?”
“Those monsters killed his family. He went after them, just as you or I or Judge Landau would have. He did this alone.”
A long pause preceded her father’s next remarks.
“Rosalind. It’s important that you hear what I’m going to say to you now. You and I will go home tomorrow. You have to let this wulf go. We will leave him in the Landaus’ care.”
“No.”
“I’m not blind or insensitive to your feelings, but this male is not for you. He wouldn’t have been compatible before this event, and certainly isn’t now. You have no idea what would happen if...” Her father’s voice trailed off, then returned. “You have no inkling of what his life might be like if he heals well enough to keep it.”
You have no idea what would happen if...
If what? Rosalind wanted to know, picking up on the unsaid portion of an argument and tasting the tang of withheld secrets.
Rosalind chilled up as she stared at her father with a new thought. Has he been keeping secrets from me all this time?
“I want to stay with him,” she said.
“That’s impossible.” Her father shook his head.
“Judge Landau will let me stay, if I ask.”
“You won’t ask. I forbid it.”
“Then the wounded Were can come with us.”
“You cannot have your way in this, Rosalind. My decision is final. You might be in real danger here, now that vampires have your scent in their filthy noses.”
“The bloodsuckers were killed.”
“They can transmit signals we have no notion of.”
Rosalind stubbornly stood her ground, legs splayed, hands on her hips. “It was my fault he was hurt so badly. My inattention did this. I owe him. Don’t you get that?”
“The Landaus are a powerful clan with powerful friends, and are experienced healers. He needs time, and couldn’t be in better hands.”
“He could be in mine.”
Her father got to his feet. “You can’t help him. This is a fact. Moreover, you cannot remain near to him. It’s imperative that you two are separated, the sooner the better.”
The authority in her father’s tone had hardened his formidable features. In the firm set of his mouth, Rosalind sensed the gap in his explanations. Her father’s secrets were heavy enough to be like the aura of another person in the room.
“Are you going to tell me the real reason he can’t come with us, without going around in circles?” she asked.
“It isn’t time for that, or necessary.”
“I’m not a child.”
“I know that. But two such extremes are destined never to meet, if in fact they could exist at all,” her father said.
His reply came with a sting. An unspoken message resided in what her father had said a message so terrible it couldn’t be spoken. A dark secret?
Extremes, he said.
Two such extremes are never destined to meet. If they could exist at all.
Her father had just called her a freak, without coming right out with the word.
He had uttered this remark as if he’d been near wit’s end and it had merely slipped out. Whatever he held inside didn’t want to see the light of day; a secret that if spoken, might come to pass all the quicker.
But she couldn’t accept that, and needed to have things in the open. Her father was keeping something important from her. And even though knowing he thought his daughter a freak hurt like a knife to the chest, she had to stand her ground. What other option was there?
“Not good enough,” she said. “Nothing you’ve said is good enough to change my mind about this Were.”
You aren’t the only one with secrets, she wanted to shout.
Separating me from the wulf upstairs will do no good, because against all odds, he and I have already bonded. And bonds between Lycans are unbreakable, except by death.
She had another secret. Her insides ached with longing for the Were upstairs. Her womb thrummed for the golden-fleshed man who had shed his clothes in the moonlight. She hungered for his gaze, and for what hung, hard and swollen, between his powerful thighs.
Instincts trumped innocence here, and she wasn’t to have that? Wasn’t to see him again?
“I know better than to argue with you,” she said.
Indeed, nothing would influence her father once his mind had been made up. Still, she was responsible for the Were’s injuries, at least in part. If she had gotten to him sooner, fought harder, not stopped to listen to the calls in the night, he might have been spared some of his wounds.
She looked past her father. The Were upstairs was stirring. She felt this, and her fingers twitched in reaction. Her inner defiance against her father’s restraints rose again.
There was more truth she had to hide from her father. Another secret pain that she didn’t understand. When she had issued the howl in the park that had brought help, something had happened to her. It was as if restraining straps had been unbuckled, setting part of her free that she’d had no idea existed. Wild. Complicated. New.
God, there was more, yet. The worst part.
In hearing her cry, the fanged monsters attacking her had stopped their attack. After that cry, they had transferred all their attention to the brown Were, leaving her alone, leaving her standing there, unheeded, untouched, while her golden-skinned, brown-furred male, heavily outnumbered, was ripped to shreds.
After her call, the fanged creatures had bypassed her as if she no longer existed; as if she had suddenly become invisible to them, and no longer mattered.
I’m not quite right inside. But how do I tell you the extent of this, Father? Your wizened eyes, gazing at me, suggest that you might know the reason for this, and possibly even why those bloodsuckers had left me alone. Freak, is what you were thinking. Not the time for reasons, you said.
Everyone, it suddenly seemed to Rosalind, had secrets. But so many secrets made the world a much darker, more unbearable place. She was going to get some answers. Now.
* * *
Colton wasn’t sure if he had died. His first thought was that he must have.
The last thing he remembered was that his heartbeat had slowed to near nothing when the last wave of fangs hit him. He recalled shutting his eyes when the pain had become too great and his limbs had stopped working.
Soon after that, he had fallen into a dark tunnel, listening to the sounds of a continued battle all around him without being able to participate.
As he lay where he was now, wherever that might be—heaven or hell, maybe—his thoughts kept returning to that brave Were who had come to his aid, and was little more than another smudge of darkness in his mind. He had, for the briefest seconds of time before his fall, imagined that other Were to be female. Maybe her lips had touched his, he thought, or else he had been dreaming.
Female werewolves were nearly as able as males, and he had sensed one in that park, earlier. But the werewolf fighting beside him had torn through the vampires like a creature hell-bent on utter destruction. That dark-coated werewolf, merely a blur in the night, had been nothing less than a total fighting machine.
Had he died out there? Was he in shock? There seemed to be a disconnect between his mind and his limbs. It didn’t hurt him to think, and his thoughts kept returning to the same questions. If he had died, had the other Were who’d helped him died, as well? Had she whispered something to him out there as his eyes had closed? More important, had those fanged vipers who had stolen the life from his family been defeated?
Colton’s pulse gave a sudden kick. He groped for the reason for this sudden alertness.
There was no sense of anything waiting to take him over. No overriding awareness of angels or demons surrounded him. The blanks in his mind were holes occupied by swirling drifts of a silver-gray mist. In that mist, he thought he saw Death’s outline hovering. He was almost sure he heard Death’s call.
The cop side of him wanted to fill the holes in his reasoning so he could understand his current state. Cops were trained to fill in gaps and connect the dots. But he just didn’t seem able to do that.
Pertinent lapses in memory could be his mind’s way of reaching for a temporary peace after encountering the rabid side of chaos, he reasoned. Those lapses could just as easily mean that consciousness continued for a time after the body formerly housing it had succumbed to its final loss of breath.
But he hadn’t lost his breath.
He was breathing now.
Colton suddenly sensed something else. He reached out to this new presence with his senses.
“Hey.”
The voice cut through the swirl of gray. He classified the sound as a word. Beyond it lay a familiar fragrance that was nothing at all like the stench of vampires.
Flowers. Musk and flowers.
Not hell, then.
“Can you open your eyes?” the soft voice asked.
It was an odd request, he thought, since he’d been sure his eyes were already open.
“Can you see me?”
This was said in the slightly husky tone of a female’s whisper.
Turning his head took effort.
“I’m not supposed to be here, but I had to see you,” she said. “My father will take me away tomorrow.”
Father? Some feeling came, centered in Colton’s chest. He knew that particular word because he had a father.
Sharp pain struck without warning, as though an arrow had pierced him. It was the arrow of past tense. He’d had a father. But not anymore.
“Can you talk? Will you make the effort to speak to me?” the female asked, her breathy voice bringing with it another hint of the taste of a floral bouquet. Roses. Bloodred roses, rich in color and sprinkled with dew.
No. Not dew. These roses were covered in fur.
Black fur.
Memory zigzagged. Colton wanted to slap his head to make things work more smoothly, but couldn’t move his arm.