“You,” he whispered with his mouth on hers. “It really was you.”

Ignoring shaky limbs that refused to behave properly and his heart’s off-beat rhythm, Colton leaned into her. Licking gingerly at her lips, nipping lightly at the corners of her mouth before again sealing his lips to hers, he took her breath into his lungs, and felt that breath warm him.

Had this slight, ebony-haired creature truly fought beside him, placing herself in jeopardy in order to help? Although Rosalind’s mouth was momentarily motionless beneath his, Colton sensed with every instinct he possessed how much she wanted to respond.

He wanted her in that moment as much as his beast had desired her in the park. Every inch of him yearned for her, now that he’d been awakened and had captured her in his arms.

One word resonated in his mind, on its own loop, playing over and over.

Mine.

Wolf Born

Linda Thomas-Sundstrom

www.millsandboon.co.uk

LINDA THOMAS-SUNDSTROM writes contemporary and paranormal romance novels for Mills & Boon® Nocturne™ and Mills & Boon® Desire™. A teacher by day and a writer by night, Linda lives in the West, juggling teaching, writing, family and caring for a big stretch of land. She swears she has a resident Muse who sings so loudly, she often wears earplugs in order to get anything else done. But she has big plans to eventually get to all those ideas. Visit Linda at lindathomas-sundstrom.com or on Facebook.

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To my family, those here and those gone, who always believed I had a story to tell.

Contents

Cover

Introduction

Title Page

About the Author

Dedication

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Extract

Copyright

Chapter 1

Everyone had demons.

“Some species are just closer to them than others,” Colton Killion muttered as he ran beneath the light of a huge Miami moon. For a werewolf like himself, the desire for what the moon offered fit into another category altogether. But now wasn’t the time for beastly antics. He’d had an emergency call.

Drenched in moonlight, and in human form, he sprinted over a wide stretch of dirt and grass. The night air, filled with the scent of the ocean and a dozen kinds of Cuban food, burned his throat as he sucked in it, and left a warm sensation in his groin.

Running appealed to his animal nature.

At the moment, though, he couldn’t afford to blow his cover. Two other cops were on his heels, running as fast as their human legs would take them. The radio on his shoulder kept repeating directions interspersed with static.

“Officer down. All units on the south side respond to the following address. 521 Baker.”

The harsh words wouldn’t have been half as bad without the address the dispatcher had given out. Damn if his family didn’t live on the same street.

Colton lengthened his stride to reach an area of what in Miami passed for a forest of trees. Liquid moonlight had already begun to move through his veins as if he had injected it into an artery. The phantom sensation of an elongated muzzle made him reach up to check that it hadn’t materialized yet.

Those cops behind him couldn’t see that. There was no way they would understand having a Lycan in their midst, and that a searing, breath-robbing heat was spreading outward from deep inside his chest where a sleeping beast lay curled, craving the night, awaiting its freedom.

“Killion! Wait up!” Julias Davidson, the officer responsible for this beat yelled, the strain in the man’s voice due to him being shamefully out of shape and having to run to the cruiser parked on the street.

Colton didn’t care about the identity of the officer loping along in Davidson’s wake. He was more concerned that Davidson, usually nosy as hell, hadn’t asked why Colton had been passing through this way in the first place when he was officially off duty.

Good thing he hadn’t been asked that question, since Colton didn’t know the answer. He’d just acted on a feeling that something was up with this park and had dropped by for a look. Most of the time, he paid attention to those little sparks of intuition.

“Hell.” In deference to the unanswerable why he was here, Colton found himself in a precarious state. With the muscles of his neck throbbing and the skin on his bare arms undulating like disturbed water in a pond, restraining his lupine abilities took every ounce of willpower he possessed.

The moon called to him, but there was also an officer down just two doors shy of his parents’ house. And the sudden notoriety of an injured or, God forbid, dead police officer would be unwanted attention for a family like his that had a lot to hide—and even more to lose, if they were identified as Lycan.

“Hellfire!”

The whitewashed oath didn’t satisfy him, or take the edge off his anxiety. “I’ve got a bad premonition about this dispatch to Baker Street,” he whispered hoarsely. In fact, his gut told him he shouldn’t wait for the others, and that he would get to the crime scene faster if he ditched the limiting human persona.

Too late now. He had company. Turning, he said to a breathless Davidson in a steady voice, “I’ll go ahead,” as Davidson hit the edge of the trees.

“On foot?” Davidson tossed back.

“I know a shortcut through the park.”

“This park’s dangerous enough with three of us out here.”

“There hasn’t been much real trouble since Scott, Wilson and the other boys cleaned it up last year,” Colton said.

Key word there: Other boys. Capital O. There weren’t many completely human bones left in the bodies of detectives Adam Scott and Matt Wilson, whose lives had radically changed after receiving rogue werewolf bites less than a year ago, and who now had their own secrets to keep.

“Yeah? Well, suit yourself, Killion,” Davidson said. “Some bastard shot a cop, and we need to be there.”

Without stopping for anything longer than two quick breaths, Davidson and his partner took off again. Colton watched them go, his own breath regulating now that he was about to be alone.

Or almost alone. That initial spark of intuition nagged at him again. The night had a strange feel to it that was thicker, denser than a normal night. It felt to him like too many unseen things moved through the dark, taking up space and crowding the atmosphere. Notable oddities like these seemed to hint at an unusual kind of energy massing on the park’s periphery.

He could taste that wayward energy. The word to describe it was wild.

Raising his face to the moon, he absorbed the tingle of light on his skin, and sniffed the air. Most of the scents under the trees were familiar to him. He often worked this part of Miami.

He sniffed again and waited to make sure no intruders appeared, knowing that he had to let the moon have her way this time. He had to let the beast out because of his need to get somewhere fast. Werewolf speed was legendary and what he needed right now was to beat the other officers to the crime scene.

In order to beat Davidson and the others to the crime scene on Baker, Colton Killion, officer of the law, but also much more than his seemingly human appearance or profession, needed to morph into a creature that really wasn’t an entity other than himself, but an integral part of him.

Not a metaphorical twin or the symptom of a split personality with an evil side, his beast was something he birthed by merely turning himself inside out to expose what lay beneath the surface of his skin.

All true Lycans, with pure, undiluted Lycan blood in them, were born to this. Lycanthropy, the oldest form of werewolfism, meant housing a rare blood disorder that predated history, escaped explanation and encompassed the strongest, fiercest of the beings falling under the heading of wulf.

Man-wolf hybrids. Not wolf, but wulf. Royal-blooded werewolves, able most of the time to blend in with human society in a world that had unknowingly absorbed them.

“Okay,” he said with calm finality. “Bring it on.”

Lupine euphoria hit before he finished the invitation. His body quivered with excitement. His core temperature rose in a lightning-fast ascent, reaching the level of “sizzling” before his next intake of air.

Claws popped from the ends of all ten of his fingertips like spring-loaded blades. Brief, swollen seconds of what felt like dark-dipped madness came and went, a throwback to a state people once called Lunacy. And then the process of a man becoming a werewolf took over.

Bones snapped. Ligaments stretched. The sound of hot, wet flesh tearing echoed in the night as his muscles redefined themselves. Colton’s stomach knotted and clenched, doubling him over at the waist for a few more tense seconds as rich brown fur sprouted from his pores.

When he again stood upright, feeling inches taller than his usual six-two, and confined and claustrophobic in his clothes, he opened a mouth full of razor-sharp teeth and issued a low guttural growl that mimicked the sound of distant thunder, a sound that was both a response to the temporary pain of this shape-shift and a keen acknowledgment of being something other than one hundred percent human.

Following that, he belted out a harrowing, piercing howl that rolled through the park’s vast emptiness with a feral quality that would have sufficed to make any animal’s skin crawl, and was meant to do just that.

But as he gathered himself, ready to utilize the animal’s agility and superior speed, Colton’s senses suddenly jerked again to a state of full alertness. The feeling of not being alone made a comeback.

And then, out of the silver-coated darkness, came the surprise of an answering howl.

What the hell?

Had he missed something out there?

Colton’s fur stood on end. He backed up a step, stunned as another howl followed the first. This one was higher in pitch than his own vocalization and no less menacing. But it was also tantalizing and seductive.

Colton glanced up, thinking that the moon must have been playing a trick. But a third sound came soon after the second, closer this time, and from ground level.

Haunting, preternatural, seductive in nature, this howl originated from the part of the park where he’d sensed strangeness but had seen no one. No human, anyway.

The wulf’s immediate natural instinct was to find what had made that sound and mount it, instead of dashing off in the direction he needed to go. The animal’s need to chase down whatever had made those wolfish sounds was so strong and insistent that Colton tightened his mental leash on the beast.

Despite the check of restraint that had him frozen to stillness, Colton’s insides writhed with the new dilemma he faced due to hearing that answering howl. Should he hurry to Baker Street and see what had happened there, or take the time to find out who or what else roamed this park?

He and his beast weren’t completely at odds over voting for the last one. It was, however, an unexpected trip in the agenda when timing might be critical.

Waiting out several more thunderous heartbeats, the blood inside his distended arteries began to burn. Judging by his arousal, he knew that the unexpected visitor was female.

Not just any female, either. Not with a voice like that. This was a she-wulf—powerful, practiced and pure Lycan, or he was a sorry son of a bitch who didn’t know a Lycan from a hole in the ground.

Who are you?

Where did you come from?

He hadn’t met many purebred female Lycanthropes.

The rarity of full-blooded she-wulfs was the reason true Lycans as a breed were slowly dying out. Females often weren’t wired correctly for the transition from human to werewolf, and many of them didn’t make it past the Blackout phase of their coming-of-age party for reasons no one actually knew. Special Lycan matchmakers traveled the world to find females to bring home to a qualified clan. He, himself, had been waiting ten years.

And what? One of those rarest of creatures has just announced her presence here in Miami, on the edge of this park? To me?

The acknowledgment of this possibility hit Colton with the force of an oncoming train. His wulf-heavy limbs shuddered. His teeth snapped together, filling his mouth with the acrid taste of his own blood. He grew hotter, and a little confused.

Hell, his human side wanted to chase after whatever had made those sounds as much as the beast did. Finding a She fulfilled a powerful need and provided a possible solution to a lot of problems of sheer physical necessity for a male. Keep the line going. Keep it strong. Choose a mate.

But damn the timing of finding this female. Not only did duty call, it also called with an overriding personal necessity that meant the possible welfare of his family. He had taken an oath to protect and serve not only the population of Miami but the few Lycans left in his scattered clan. Oaths were binding for werewolves, and lifelong.

In addition to that, he might know the cop who had been shot.

Shit. He visualized the scene. There would be officers, CSI techs and television crews all over the place, knocking on doors.

And a she-wulf appeared now?

Really bad timing. Effing bad.

Worse yet, his beast had already driven him to take a step toward the female’s invitation, stretching at its leash.

Colton hauled himself back with difficulty and a barked chastisement. Can’t have this. Get a freaking grip. There’s too much at stake.

Good advice in the best of times, but the beast’s needs were elemental and approaching the point of no return. It was hungry to bury its cock in that female’s damp, furry, feminine folds, and angered by the restraint.

He had to get away, though leaving this spot would be one of the hardest things he had ever done. He had to ignore this she-wulf, knowing the odds of ever finding another one.

Resolutely, regretfully, he echoed the she-wulf’s call with a low-pitched howl that could have been translated as: You have no idea how sorry I am for having to go. Though it actually meant so very much more than that, and perhaps even the extinction of his family’s line.

Stepping out from under the trees, and filled with regret, Colton took off. Alone. Into the night. Toward the scent of a downed cop’s blood in the distance.

Chapter 2

Rosalind Kirk dropped to her haunches and slammed a furred-up fist into the ground to keep herself from following the Were in the park, whose scent was new, feral and overtly masculine.

Her hackles rose with a mixture of curiosity and anger.

That wulf had ignored her invitation.

She stared at the way he cut a smooth swath through the trees, running faster than anything she had ever seen. He was a big werewolf, tall and powerfully built. His brown pelt blended with the shadows. Highlighted by moonlight, it appeared that he wore clothes.

Strange.

Although anger flared over his rude rejection of her call, Rosalind’s heart raced as she watched him run. She felt the rhythm of the movement of the brown Were’s legs in her muscles, and heard the harshness of his breathing echo inside her chest. All this made her feel disturbed in a way she’d never experienced before.

Her fur ruffled.

Her chin lifted.

Finding a male of her species hadn’t been the reason she had slipped her father’s net when he wasn’t looking, but suddenly seemed like a bonus.

She’d been homesick for her bayou property, where she could run unhindered. Here in Miami, where her father had accepted an invitation to visit the Landaus—an ancient Lycan line as old as her own—she had been quarantined on the estate’s grounds. Her father had forbidden her to go past the expansive property’s stone walls.

Right. Like she’d listen to that, or be chained to a ridiculous confinement, however lovingly the directive had been issued by a father who said he had her best interests in mind.

Like she had ever met his expectations.

I’m a woman now.

Even her father, an elegant, intelligent Lycan, had no idea how elevated her metabolism became on a night like this one.

Sure, it was dangerous being out here in wulf form. There were plenty of risks in ignoring the rules and restrictions. It was equally dangerous to expose herself to a member of another pack without being properly introduced. Yet her boundless need for freedom resonated in every bone and cell in her body. The moon’s influence blasted through her like some kind of invisible ray, dispersing her humanness almost completely.

She had too much pent-up energy, and her search for freedom had been interrupted before she’d used it up. Her focus had been riveted to a big brown werewolf sprinting in the opposite direction who hadn’t paid any attention to her at all.

Didn’t you hear me, Were?

Shaking her head without taking her eyes off him, she leaned forward, into his scent. A series of disgruntled growls rumbled in her chest, registering her displeasure. Maybe Miami Weres held contempt for those outside of their packs, and that’s why he had turned from her.

His loss. She was lithe, smart, fast and strong—a worthy mate for a purebred male. In spite of that, she had been shielded from all eligible partners and kept from pursuing any outside company at all, leaving her to wonder what everyone had been waiting for.

She was sick of the tight ring of supervision surrounding her, and ready for her first close-up with a prime example of her species.

Like you, pretty, brown-pelted wulf.

Wasn’t finding a mate what she was eventually supposed to do?

Had the brown Were considered her unworthy, when the whispers behind her back at the Landaus’ place had described her as special?

Special...

The dreaded Blackout phase wired into her family’s line had come upon her at thirteen, instead of the usual age of twenty-one. Surviving her body’s internal rewiring at so young an age had caused her to acquire a stellar repertoire of abilities.

Special...

At fifteen, she outdistanced her father in races. By sixteen, she could painlessly shape-shift in seconds whenever she chose to, with or without the moon. Even her father couldn’t do that.

Tonight, at the matronly age of twenty, eight-foot-tall stone walls hadn’t stood a chance of containing her. One agile leap was all it took to escape the Landaus’ boundaries.

Piece of cake.

In her defense, she hadn’t planned on being outside those walls for very long. Merely one good sprint to calm her had been the justification...

Until she felt the ongoing song of this male’s Lycan blood as if that song had been written for her. Until she had sensed him in the shadows as clearly as if he’d stood five feet away.

Even now, his earthy, alluring scent pulled her like some sort of unavoidable undertow.

Unsure of what to do next, because she actually was socially inept, and had been more or less a prisoner in her own home all of her life, Rosalind didn’t completely understand the feelings of wanting to catch up with the brown wulf in spite of his rebuff.

Seconds ticked past as she stood there, longing to give chase. Her legs trembled with the desire to move. Her dark muzzle quirked at the thought of werewolves having one-night stands in public spaces, and how that would go down.

So, which way to go? Back to her father, or after the rude brown Were?

With a glance over her shoulder toward the Landaus’ walled border in the distance, Rosalind straightened to her full five-foot-five-inch height. Her black pelt—thick, rich, shining like polished obsidian in the moonlight—reflected the bright look of rebelliousness in her amber-green eyes as she made her decision.

* * *

As Colton had feared, the five-hundred block of Baker Street crawled with people. Too many people gumming up a crime scene always made a bad situation worse.

He hit the side of a building hard with his left shoulder to shock his wulf side back to reality. Closing his eyes, blowing out a breath, he willed his beast into the background and corralled it with a word of promise. Later.

The reversal of his shift was equally as hard on his body, but one hell of a lot quicker. Everything rearranged with a soft snapping of ligament and bone. On human legs, Colton cut a path through the hordes of neighbors out in full force behind fluttering expanses of yellow crime tape. But after those few moments of letting the beast out, the sensory bombardment of being near to all these human bodies weighed him down. Fresh from his run, his thermostat had yet to settle. He was damp with perspiration and needed about ten more deep breaths in a quiet place where he could fully recover before showing himself—a luxury he didn’t have.

In spite of the distraction in the park, he had beat Davidson to the scene. Six other cruisers were parked along the street. Two emergency vehicles were in attendance with their back doors wide-open. Uniforms moved like an army of ants up and down sidewalks in the dark.

Colton grabbed hold of a blue uniform whose name tag said EMT Smith. “What happened here?”

“Homicide,” Smith said after checking out Colton’s badge.

“Where? Who?” Colton’s voice cracked with emotion.

“Name’s Connelly. And one officer was shot after arriving at the scene.”

“Connelly.” Colton processed the news. “Which Connelly?”

“All of them.”

“What?”

“The whole family was killed. Two adults and two kids. It’s one of the worst scenes I’ve been to. Blood and body parts are spewed all over the place. The house looks like a freaking horror movie set. No offense or disrespect, Officer, but I need some air. I’ve only been on this job for three weeks.”

Colton felt a rush of adrenaline returning in a bad way. He knew the Connellys. His parents had socialized with that family on occasion. A year ago he had helped to build their kids’ swing set.

But the arctic adrenaline dump jarring him was also an indication that he needed to chill out in public. EMT Smith was still looking at him as if the guy awaited permission to be dismissed, so that he could slink away and hurl his dinner.

“Thanks,” Colton said. Staring at what Smith had called a house of horror, he added, “The injured officer? How is he?”

“He’s been taken to Miami General. Took a bullet in the upper abdomen, but it looks like the gun might have belonged to one of the other victims, perhaps shooting at whatever moved. I heard another EMT say that if he’s in good shape physically, he’ll probably make it.”

“His name?”

“Don’t know. Sorry. Got to go.” Smith hurried back to his truck.

Colton looked down the block to where a city streetlight should have been glowing and wasn’t. The bad feeling in his gut quadrupled in intensity. His parents’ house sat beneath that blown-out bulb. The front windows were dark.

He ran. Ducking under the yellow tape with his eyes locked on his parents’ house, he rushed across the lawn and up the front steps. Forgetting himself and his innate strength, he tore the screen door off its hinges and reached for the knob.

He stepped across the threshold, where the brutal odor of blood and exposed Lycan secrets hit him in a moment of monumental frenzy, and the severed head of his proud Lycan father lay on the carpet at Colton’s feet.

Stunned by the sight, Colton let out a wail of anguish that nearly buckled him at the knees.

Chapter 3

Rosalind heard the sound of a Lycan’s roar and froze midstep. Registering the sounds as pain and loss, the intensity of the emotion in the roar rocked her. Hearing something so personal made her want to run away. Stubbornly, she stayed.

Drifts of a dreadful odor hit her, tearing her from the shadows. Enemy stink. But what kind?

After the darkness of the park, the revolving lights on the police cars hurt her light-sensitive eyes. She was in werewolf form and in danger because of it. She couldn’t be found like this. She didn’t dare follow the big male’s muffled howl of pain. She wasn’t used to crowds. With so many people around, changing back to her human semblance wasn’t an option, since she’d be naked if she did.

Nevertheless, she was drawn to the sound of the brown Were’s pain, and moved through the dark spaces between houses on the opposite side of the street, her black pelt acting as camouflage in the night.

She was stopped by the sight of three human police officers heading toward where she hid.

Time to get away.

She had to leave the wulf and what had happened here, and didn’t want to. That sound. The pain in it. Where are you?

She had been gone for a long time now. Her father would be frantic. Still, she couldn’t dismiss her feelings of connection to this male, or what might have happened here. His pain had become her pain. She hurt, and shared his sorrow.

Hugging the building, she watched the scene with her heart in her throat. Go, or stay? For the second time in so very few minutes, the decision of what to do was a heavy weight on her shoulders.

* * *

Colton’s world began to spin. Walls closed in.

He made himself stand still and forced down another scream, too shocked to regulate his breathing. If this was what was left of his father, he definitely didn’t want to stumble upon what might be left of his mother. He couldn’t pinpoint her life force amid the carnage when he should have been able to. Her amiable presence didn’t call out to him like it always had.

His body wasn’t so frozen by shock that he didn’t feel his heart break. His insides roiled. His mouth was dry. At the same time, a nagging insistence warned that he had to move, had to take care of this. Officers might knock on the door any minute now. Beyond family, there was a secret to protect.

The cop side of his training began to seep through the sickening whirl, perhaps as a defense mechanism for coping with a loss this great. With that training, one thing became perfectly clear: whoever had enacted this rampage of evil deeds not only knew who the werewolves in this neighborhood were, but how to kill them.

Silver bullets in the chest or a full beheading were the only ways to truly rid the world of a strain of very powerful Lycans. The Killions had been around for more years than a human could count. They knew how to defend themselves and should have scented trouble before it arrived.

Why then, how then, had his parents been taken down in their own home? The answer came to him in the form of a jolt that further messed with his head and equilibrium.

No human did this.

What about the Connellys then who, according to the young EMT, had been slaughtered? Not beheaded, but “slaughtered.” Could those poor people have been decoy killings to cover up the murder of his family?

His parents had been down-to-earth in their day-to-day living. His father had been a college professor. His mother had worked in a dress store. They hadn’t concerned themselves with their royal genes or the special Lycan blood in their veins that made them honored within their species. They had raised him in the same down-home way, and instilled in him their values.

The Killions were protectors. Had always been protectors...of Lycan secrets, of their Lycan blood, in their low-key relationships with the humans they lived among.

“Not just paranoia,” Colton snapped. “There’s more here to discover.”

He smelled something beyond the cloying odor of Lycan blood. In order to identify this, Colton made himself breathe. Through the forced intake of air he began to soak up anomalies in the environment, realizing that every minute he stood there in a state of silent agony was a minute wasted in going after the monsters responsible for this heinous crime.

“Who were you?” he demanded angrily of the invisible, murderous fiends, tuning in to clues by opening up his senses up full throttle.

“Help me, wulf.”

The arrival of his beast’s keen awareness came to him like a swift kick in the solar plexus as it melded with his own intuition. Colton glanced up. Hovering near the ceiling lay a subtle scent, hardly there at all, that made him sway on his feet.

“Can’t be,” he objected. “Look again.”

The wulf growled adamantly.

“Christ! Vampires?”

Colton took the sudden weight of his beast pressing against him as confirmation of the deduction being correct. Could it honestly be true, though? “Yes. Hell.” Only the dead would stink like old soil and sour, aged, rotting wood. Nothing else could possibly smell like that.

There were vampires loose in Miami, and this was very bad news. The worst kind of news. And a Lycan’s age-old enemies had found his family.

Not many humans knew about the presence of werewolves in their communities. If the world wasn’t ready for werewolves, how would people feel about a new breed of enemy that amounted to a plague of murderous bloodsuckers in their neighborhoods?

“Shackled.” Colton’s voice broke. The awful truth was that he couldn’t warn the world to be on guard. He couldn’t tell anyone what had happened here, or allow this scene to come under public scrutiny. He was therefore virtually shackled to silence.

“Besides, who would believe it?”

If this had been a vampire kill, no evidence would have been left for CSI teams to catch. There’d be no fingerprints or footprints or detectable stray hairs for any system to analyze. For all the advances in human technological wizardry, as far as that technology went, the dead were dead.

Still, other than trained werewolf hunters, only vampires would know exactly how to take a werewolf down. Unlike with human criminals confronting a powerful Were family able to hold their own, vampires couldn’t easily die trying to tackle a wolf-human hybrid, since vampires had the advantage of being dead already.

And damn it, if the rumors were true, those fanged children of the night were the fastest creatures on the planet. One blink, and they could be on you, then gone before your last breath rattled.

Reason this out. Why did they strike at us here?

Reasoning was another important part of the cop game, as was following suppositions with hopes of getting somewhere.

It was possible that his parents, with the addition of the Connellys as a distraction for the law enforcement system, had died because of a centuries-old vendetta between species. Vampires and Weres hated each other.

Then again, maybe a vamp had merely stumbled upon his parents somehow and had been hungry.

“No. That’s not it,” he shouted, because vampires hadn’t been here for a drink. Bloodsuckers couldn’t ingest werewolf blood of any kind. Lycans were poisonous to them.

“Premeditated strike, then.”

If his family had been outside tonight, conversing with the full moon, they would have been ten times stronger and able to withstand an attack. But for some reason, they hadn’t made it to the door.

“Hate crime.”

The mortal world was filled with such things in this day and age. So was the supernatural one.

The more Colton thought about it, the more likely it seemed that the Connellys had merely been in the wrong place at the wrong time. After the carnage here, it was possible the pale, dead, fanged bastards had worked up an appetite.

Besides all the usual gangsters and gangbangers around, vampires were a horrific addition to Miami’s rising crime wave, and what had happened on this block might be an indication of things to come.

As Colton stared down at his father’s silver-haired head, he felt the rise of a blazing anger at the atrocity committed to a man he dearly loved. He couldn’t stay here to grieve, though.

“They’re all gone.” He whispered this with a grim finality that made the beast inside him spasm with anger and disgust. He and his wulf shared the agony because they were one, one and the same with the same memories.

With a brief glance to the door, he remembered that there was a young EMT named Smith outside who had run from a gruesome sight a few houses away. He wondered what the poor guy would think of this.

“No one will know that two sets of murders have been committed tonight,” he said. For now, he had to manage his pain so that he could find his mother.

Stepping over the body of his father, he searched the room, then the house. His hopes rose, as hopes always did, despite his inner premonition. Maybe she had been spared. Possibly his mother hadn’t been here, which would have been a rare occasion, since imprinted pairs wouldn’t tolerate separation.

Colton searched all over again, feeling each agonizing second that hurtled by.

Then he found his mother on the back porch step, half in the house, half out, as if she’d been reaching for the moon. The brutality that had been dealt to her washed over him like an icy wave. Nausea threatened. She also had been beheaded.

“Damn those filthy bloodsuckers!” he cried.

Two members of one of the oldest Lycan families in existence had been taken out. And the stench of the undead hung over the tidy backyard like an insidious vapor.

Despite the gnawing ache growing by bounds in Colton’s chest, he’d have to invent a way to cover this up. His pain, great enough to be nearly intolerable, had to be internalized. In order to go on, he’d have to focus elsewhere.

“Vengeance.” His whisper fell flat. Vengeance was an emotional state Lycans had tried to outdistance as human populations began to rise and the sheer number of humans forced Weres into hiding. Revenge was a reaction Weres had learned to tamp down in favor of more peaceful aspirations and acceptable coexistence.

Contrary to all that, rage was overtaking him. He felt sick, shaky, pissed off and ready to do something about it.

As Colton lifted his mother’s limp, desecrated body in his arms, his beast, tucked inside him, trembled with rage.

* * *

Aware of the disturbed emotions surfing the air, Rosalind had to move. She ran past the hordes of cops and stopped when she spotted a house that radiated the familiar scent of Were. Silently, she crept up the steps and through the open doorway.

The front room was dark and empty, but it reeked of both sadness and Lycan damage.

Not just Were. Lycan.

The reality of that turned her stomach. Chills covered every inch of her body. Did the brown Were live here? What had happened in this place?

She rolled a series of throaty growls meant as a warning that if someone was in this house, they now had company.

No reply came.

Exploring on bare, padding feet, she found two bodies on a bed in a small room, and choked back a cry. These were dead Lycans. Someone had placed them there.

The scene seemed insanely surreal, but the room also gave off the scent of the male she had followed. He had been here mere seconds before she arrived. She hadn’t missed him by much.

Leaping over the furniture, feeling her anger sift to the surface of her skin, Rosalind raced for the back door. Then she was out again, in the moonlight, back in the relative comfort of the cover of darkness.

Chapter 4

Vampire tracks weren’t easy to follow. Nevertheless, Colton knew a trail of rot when he smelled one.

The alley behind the houses snaked through the neighborhood, eventually leading back to the park. Colton started that way without getting far. An icy prickle at the base of his neck made him spin around. He scanned the dark. This section of the alley seemed too quiet. No one was out. Not one dog barked.

Standing in the open, he allowed moonlight to caress his human hands and forearms as he waited for his senses to skip past the tragedy and delve into the arena of hunter and prey. Red flags waving in his mind told him the vampires had been this way not long before. More than one of them, by the intensity of the odor.

It was no wonder that the neighborhood dogs had run.

Rolling his shoulders helped him to gain control of his tension, but his nerves felt like long threads of fire. Inching sideways, closer to a fence, he cocked his head to listen for clues. All the while, his beast pummeled at him, wanting to be free, its desire to take over the hunt stirred by a cop’s ingrained need to catch some killers.

But freeing his animal side was not doable at the moment with uniforms swarming around a short distance behind. He had to fight the moon and the wulf for the time being and hope he’d win.

“No movement. No sound.”

Gazing through the shadows of the alley, Colton felt his knuckles ache from holding back his claws. The sinister stink of these particular blood-drinking intruders was especially bothersome to his beast.

Colton had never seen a vampire up close, yet his soul seemed to recognize them. The wolf particles embedded in his long-term memory knew the smell and taste and feel of an ancient enemy.

“Burned toast,” he said, picking a valid description of the sum of all those parts. “Disgusting.”

The beast gave a rattle that shook Colton to his boots. The closeness of monsters was luring his animal instincts to a riotous state that messed with his hard-won self-control.

He flinched as the ligaments in his shoulders and knees began to stretch, and exhaled some air as the skin covering his biceps began to bubble. The whooshing sound he heard was a claw bursting through his skin. Another claw appeared. Then more, until all ten fingers were lethal.

Did this minimorph mean that the wulf knew something he didn’t? He was willing to bet that it did.

A shout came from behind, untimely as hell because it came from a cop who had no doubt seen something in the alley. Colton was in uniform, but his body was half in transition and burning badly with the need to chuck the binding accoutrements tying him to a human’s sense of justice.

“Hey! You!” the uniform said from the other end of the alley; a cop who couldn’t help here or offer moral support. A human, either in or out of uniform, would in fact be easy pickings for any walking undead hanging around.

He had to remove the cop from this equation.

“Killion,” he shouted back to the officer, his voice gruff. He coughed, unlocked his throat and added, “Metro PD. I’m on it. All is clear. No sign of anything back here.”

“Okay,” the cop shouted back.

“Killion?” Davidson’s familiar shout followed the other one.

“Yeah. It’s me,” he said.

“You’re one fast son of a bitch. You actually beat me here?”

“Pays to be in shape.”

“Not if that doesn’t include pizza.”

More footfalls, then Davidson’s final remark. “We’ll go around the other way. The bastards had to come and go from somewhere.”

After agonizing seconds spent waiting for the men to disappear, Colton’s internal heat finally overwhelmed him, and his clothes ripped apart at the seams.

* * *

Rosalind watched the brown-furred werewolf hurdle the wooden fence as if it were nothing as soon as the humans at the head of the alley had gone. She covered the length of that alley in twelve huge strides. One good leap after that, and she, too, was over the fence.

She had seen the beautiful Lycan before and after his shift, but this time she had been close enough to take stock—a second rare occurrence in the highly personal world of werewolves and only, she supposed, because he had been distracted to the point of not recognizing the presence of another wulf in the area.

Her brown wulf had been incredibly handsome as a man. His face was angular. Tanned skin stretched over high cheekbones. His mouth was wide, his eyes deep-set. Dark, slightly wavy hair framed those features, long enough to cover the tops of his ears. Each strand glinted like gold in the moonlight.

The man side of the Were was tall, his physique leanly muscular, with broad shoulders and a narrow waist. He had spectacularly molded thighs that hinted at a Were’s hidden strengths. Rosalind guessed him to be in his late twenties, though it was hard to gauge werewolves, especially since she had met so few of them.

This one had been not only beautiful, but naked. Her first naked male of any kind. And he was definitely a perfect specimen that she imagined most women would call mouthwatering.

The skin of his bare back and buttocks had shined with a tanned tautness that suggested he saw a lot of sun without wearing clothes. No white lines traversed the flowing, golden flesh. Nor did he bear tattoos, other than the ring of scar tissue on one upper arm in the shape of a wolf’s bite that all true Lycans possessed.

Rosalind passed a clawed hand over her own similar mark, taking this as a further sign of an unmistakable bond with whoever he was.

She had held herself back so he couldn’t see her when he’d turned. She had observed how a light drift of masculine hair ran the length of his powerful chest and over his sculpted abs to become even darker as it nestled between his legs. The feature that had been momentarily displayed between those thighs made Rosalind flush.

And then there was the werewolf.

The beast that unfolded from all that glorious humanness had brown-auburn fur the same color as the man’s hair. Denser than his human form, and heavier with tension-loaded muscle, this werewolf was also damn near perfect, and too magnificent to be real.

Rosalind fielded the arrival of a full-fledged hunger for him. Battling sensations that were new, instinctual, primal, she wanted to wrap her arms around him and lick his golden-brown neck.

Her sexual appetite intensified with each ripple of his incredible Lycan muscle. But Rosalind also sensed a pain-filled anger that would prohibit him from shifting in such close proximity to others. His body visibly shook with that anger.

In spite of all the possible repercussions of empathy with a stranger, as well as a fair amount of misplaced erotic hallucinations, Rosalind followed him when he moved, as if she were his shadow.

He had ignored her in the park, not because she was a stranger, she now knew, but because he had been needed elsewhere. He hadn’t rejected her out of choice.

Picking up her speed when he started to run, she raced in his wake, keeping back apace, watchful, careful, realizing that she was going to pay for this in one way or another when she got back to Judge Landau’s place.

Then again, surely her father would understand the situation once he heard about the Lycan killings, and comprehend her need to help this wronged Were. Maybe she could lead this male to the Landau retreat, where he’d be safe and among friends, even if Were packs were private and didn’t usually mingle.

At that moment, she was willing to place her own life and secrets in jeopardy for the chance to offer comfort and support to the first young Lycan she had ever come across, one who made her feel viciously alive.

Silent words tumbled in her throat.

You are not alone.

My strength will come in handy. I give my strength to you.

As Rosalind sprinted after him, she felt the chill of a terrible premonition about what awaited them both in the cover of darkness. The night rippled around them as though tugged by an unseen force.

If werewolves had pockets for cell phones, she’d have sent an SOS to her father. Still, in whatever faced them out there, two Lycans were always better than one.

Pity the poor soul, she growled, who finds this out firsthand.

* * *

Colton ran like a fiend, working with each stride to maintain enough humanity to keep his reasoning powers functioning. He couldn’t afford for Otherness to overtake him completely—or for his pain to overwhelm him.

Once he was through the last of the suburban homes, his vision sharpened. He sped across open ground on the west side of the park, heading for the trees, calculating how many buildings rose in the distance on the eastern and southern sides.

He knew the night creatures hadn’t headed toward those buildings, toward civilization. Rationalization told him that perhaps they hadn’t been randomly hungry, but on a mission. There had been plenty of opportunities in the surrounding neighborhoods between here and his house for a freak’s blood buffet, and yet they had picked his street.

So, where are the murderous vipers headed?

North of the park lay the posh estates of prominent Miami citizens wealthy enough to enjoy the luxury of space and privacy. Big houses protected by security gates. Lycan presence lay in at least one of them. The famous Landaus, head of their own pack. Surely no fanged monsters existed near there.

His knowledge of the habits of vampires was insufficient, and that was a snag. Did they have clans, packs, dens? Did the presence of these few mean, like cockroaches, there were others in the area?

What sort of weapon would de-animate a creature already dead? The mythology listed wooden stakes, exposure to sunlight and beheading. Thinking that holy water could do the trick had, so rumor said, always been a mistake. Garlic as a deterrent was laughable.

The only question remaining was about how many vampires a werewolf could handle at once with his bare hands.

No matter. Have to try.

Finding his rhythm in much the same way that real wolves chased down prey, Colton took in great gulps of night air that were like candy to a beast so hot inside and out. Apprehension was in itself a kind of narcotic.

He ran, driven by what may have been his own kind of bloodlust, able to tell he was getting closer to the vampires. The mood in the park changed, darkened, intensified, along the park’s edge.

Movement.

Rustling in the shadows.

Don’t vampires know that Lycans can hear?

Colton veered to his right with his nerve endings blazing in time to see an outline of whatever was out there coming on exceptionally fast. A fuzzy blur.

His senses all but exploded. He had time for just one more breath and to bare his teeth. Then they were on him.

Too many of them, maybe, Colton acknowledged as his claws began to swing.

* * *

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.

A Were with a black pelt? Had he seen that out there?

Absurd.

Why should he remember that, when there were no true black-pelted Weres? Dark brown, yes, but not black. The color itself denoted unfathomable darkness. Even black-haired Weres in human form shifted to a different color.

“Yes,” she, whoever she was, coaxed. “I’m here. If you open your eyes, you’ll see me.”

The voice struck a distant chord. It was filled with submerged emotion and as demanding as it was inviting. This voice was the human equivalent of the howl of invitation a she-wulf had issued to him in that blasted park.

It’s her.

You.

Wanting nothing more than to see who was near, Colton struggled to do as she asked. His eyes hadn’t been open, after all. He opened them, sorry that he had when a glare of hurtful light hit him.

“Wait. I’ll dim the lamp,” she said. “It’s just one lamp, by your bed.”

Absorbing the ache that followed so much time spent in darkness, Colton forced himself to focus. His vision took a while to get into working order, and then he found himself gazing into a pair of large green eyes, very near to his.

His insides stirred restlessly.

There was something about those eyes. Not exactly familiar, but...

A surge of heat broke through his numbness. Again, he heard a howl, far away now, but there, all the same. He saw a dark-pelted wulf charge in to help him, and join in the fight.

His nerves began to simmer, then fry, which in turn caused feeling where there had been nothing but a wasteland.

The fire spread.

Hunger came upon him, heated, and with a ravenous need for the She with that mesmerizing voice.

His biceps tensed. His toes curled. He heard the crack of his spine straightening as whatever power those green eyes held hurled him toward full consciousness.

The flames tearing through him called up his beast. His wulf unfurled as fluidly and easily as if he’d merely spread his arms, the shift silent and uncommonly fast. It came on in a wave, similar to a smooth ruffle of air between two breaths. No extra pain. No forethought. No moon necessary.

Left panting from a transition that had no right to have happened in the first place, Colton, in werewolf form, squatted on a soft blue cloudlike surface, trembling and in shock. All he saw was the brilliance of the green eyes across from his that had not wavered in intensity or retreated by so much as an inch.

This female wasn’t afraid of him.

I know you, he thought again.

His growl was the sum total of his strange new feelings of hunger and longing, and lingered in the space around him.

“I knew it,” the green-eyed woman beside him said. “You’re still in there.”

* * *

Rosalind felt the throb of this werewolf’s blood in her veins. The erratic rhythm of his heart spoke of the depth of his inexplicable need for her.

There was no second-guessing what this need was. It came across as primitive, hotly sexual, and was, Rosalind would have known without the rapid acceleration of her own pulse, very much reciprocated.

She wanted to be with him. Be like him. She wanted to meet him wulf to wulf. Wanted everything this male had to offer.

Exerting pressure to control herself, Rosalind knew that she had been right. They had imprinted not long ago, without their eyes meeting, a fact as unusual as this wulf’s snowy-white pelt. Their hunger was mutual, no matter what shape he was in.

Rosalind was glad she had locked the door. As she stared into his eyes, she could barely keep her hands off the wulf on the bed. Her beast was starved for his beast. She craved his touch, and was left trembling.

“Yes,” she whispered. “We have bonded.”

Tremors rocked her. Similar tremors moved through the white wulf beside her. He was sharing the effects of their bond. He felt what she felt.

“I don’t understand why they would separate us,” she said, tilting her head, trying to speak slowly. “You’ll need details of what happened, some of which you probably already know.”

Rosalind swallowed her beast’s needs down and lowered her voice. “You’ve been badly hurt, attacked by bloodsuckers in the park. The same suckers that killed your family, I suppose. We’ve taken care of those fiends, got rid of them. My father and the judge brought you to Landau’s house. Judge Landau’s wife has been treating you.”

Placing a hand on her chest, as if that would slow her racing heartbeat, she continued. “These vampires were savages. The Landaus say you’ve knocked on Death’s door and stepped across the threshold, only to be pulled back by the strength of your will.”

It was impossible for her to slow down. A deep breath didn’t help.

“You’re alive, but changed. I don’t know how, exactly. I’m not sure what your white pelt means. They won’t tell me everything. They never have.”

The creature her father had called a ghost remained almost motionless, though his white fur rippled with the force of his pulse.

“I’m Rosalind Kirk,” she said. “My father is Jared Kirk. You’ll need to know those things in order to find me.”

The white wulf stared at her soundlessly.

She fell silent for a minute, maybe two, noting how the room at the top of the Landaus’ house that posed as a one-bed makeshift hospital ward smelled of clean laundry and antiseptic. It was sparsely furnished, with a large bed, one soft chair and two bedside tables. The window in the wall opposite the bed was open. The curtains moved in a faint breeze.

Rosalind had no idea what kind of care they had given this Were, or what those treatments entailed, but he had pulled through. Her actions in the park hadn’t killed him.

She blinked slowly to take that in.

On the surface, most of the stink of the vampires had been wiped clean from this wulf, and from the room housing him. Underscoring the room’s aura of calm, however, Rosalind still perceived hints of vampire. Black glittering molecules, as shiny and sharp as polished shards of glass, seemed a part of every breath she took.

Wary of this, and mindful of the fact that she had sneaked upstairs when the judge’s wife had gone for food, Rosalind went on.

“You’re at the Landau estate at the edge of the park. Since you’re a cop and a Were, I’m guessing you know Judge Landau and about some of the secrets kept in this place.”

The white wulf growled softly, as if trying out his voice through a throat the bloodsuckers had ripped open several times over. It seemed to Rosalind that she might have made a similar sound without realizing it, because her own throat felt raw.

The eyes looking at her were intent, piercing and the palest green. They were ringed by deep purple circles, leftovers indicative of how badly his face and body had been injured.

She didn’t want to think of how he had looked when her father and the others had come to the rescue. All that blood. And she had seen glimpses of bone beneath his torn and mangled flesh.

At the time, it seemed that a true miracle would be necessary in order for him to survive. “You look better,” she said, hoping this might calm him.

And that was true. He did look better. Already, after just two days, new skin covered bone and sinew, though several patches of fur and flesh were missing from his neck and shoulders, leaving lines of raw, reddened flesh. Red welts lined his face like the stripes of a tiger, but they were no longer oozing blood.

His moon mark, an indication of his superior place within their species, showed through the colorless fur of his left upper arm. It was riddled with tiny puncture holes, as though the vampires had purposefully gone for it with gusto, hoping to tear the mark clean off.

For a Were, removal of a moon mark was a blasphemy. For this big male, it would have been a forced emasculation. But the filthy blood drinkers hadn’t tackled this Lycan easily. He’d fought hard before succumbing to the sheer number of attackers. Burned into her mind was the image of the brown Were feverishly taking on the monsters.

“Brown or white, Were or ghost, you are the most beautiful, the most courageous being I have ever encountered,” she said.

And I have nearly caused your death.

“I’m to be taken away,” she repeated. “They will separate us, and it will hurt, when you’ve already been hurt so badly.”

Another growl came from him, noticeably stronger, and meaning for her to go on. Coming from this formidable creature who had looked Death in the eye, the sound seemed strangely exotic, and took her breath away.

“I come from the bayou country. I’m seldom allowed out from under my father’s strict supervision and rules. We have no modern forms of communication there. No computer, no television, no phones. Only a radio,” she said, pausing as the absurdity of these facts registered. “I learn about the world through that radio.”

They had, in fact, been living like they were deprived backwoods folk. Compared to the Landaus, they were decades behind the times. Backwoods cousins.

“This is the first occasion the Landaus have hosted us as guests, and I think this was due to an important meeting between Lycan elders. For me, it’s a quick visit here, and then back.”

They had so little time. She could hear it ticking away.

“Landau’s son and some of his pack aren’t here, though I’ve heard them talked about. I’ve seen no one my age, and only briefly have met Landau and his wife. I don’t think I’ll be allowed here again after this.”

She waited out a span of several shallow, rapid breaths before continuing, needing to get all this out in the open.

“There are other secrets hidden here. I don’t pretend to understand what’s really going on, only that some of those secrets pertain to me. I can sense being the focus of this meeting, and believe those secrets are why I’ve been kept away from other Weres, and ultimately why I’ll be kept from you. There is, I think, something wrong with me.”

Do you want me to go on?

The wulf continued to study her intently. He hadn’t moved.

“I understand the pain of loss.” Her voice was beseeching. “My mother was killed by hunters. Not vampires, but monsters in their own right.”

The white wulf blinked slowly, as if he was riding out a wave of pain.

“My father says that your fur has turned white due to the intensity of the injuries you have sustained. It might also be a physical manifestation of devastation and loss.”

She cleared her throat. “I wish I could take away the anguish of that.”

It had taken more than a dozen vampires to gain hold of him. This Were had fought like he was the right hand of Death, when even death, as vampires proved, didn’t have to be the end.

“I feel your pain. And I am so very sorry.”

She was hurting for herself, and for him. In sharing his heartache, she had to let him know how sorry she was that he’d been injured so badly. As much as she could bring herself to confess. When their imprinting was complete, he’d find out her secrets by easily reading her. They would eventually share thoughts.

“I didn’t help you enough out there,” she said, noting the alertness in this ghost’s eyes.

She couldn’t go on, was unable to utter the words that might have freed her from the terrible, plaguing guilt. If she spoke the truth in its entirety, if she confessed what she had or hadn’t done now, her white wulf wouldn’t want her. There was no way he’d come after her, find her, mate with her, when she wanted those things so desperately.

“I—” She paused when the green eyes across from her began to recede, and the white wulf shape-shifted in a slick, soundless, reversal.

“I couldn’t leave you to face them alone,” Rosalind whispered as the man from the park, who was now just as captivating with his white hair framing his wounded, angular face, reached for her.

* * *

Colton jumped to his feet. With both of his hands on Rosalind Kirk’s shoulders, he backed her into a corner so quickly that her breath escaped in a startled hiss of surprise.

He gave her no opportunity for further sound or protest. His mouth covered hers as if her breath alone could make him whole again. As if the beating of her heart against his bare chest could jump-start his, and prove finally, absolutely, that he was alive.

His need was all-consuming. His body was on fire.

He drank her in as if his survival counted on those things.

The fragrance of her breath seemed familiar.

Rosalind Kirk was a young, black-haired, oval-faced vision, and slight to the point of an ethereal thinness. Although her mouth was momentarily motionless beneath his, Colton sensed with every instinct he possessed how much she wanted to respond.

There was a possibility, he realized, that she didn’t know how.

Her lips were warm, supple, tender, sweet and not in the least bit rigid. In her stillness came a reminder of what she had told him. She had been kept from others. She’d been sheltered from actions like this by an overprotective Lycan father. She had no family or friends. This might, in fact, have been her first real kiss.

He wanted her in that moment as much as his beast had desired her in the park. Every inch of him yearned for her, now that he’d been awakened, and had captured her in his arms.

Had this slight, ebony-haired creature truly fought beside him, placing herself in jeopardy in order to help? Was she the one who had come to aid him in a time of trouble?

“You,” he whispered with his mouth on hers. “It really was you.”

Ignoring shaky limbs that refused to behave properly, and his heart’s offbeat rhythm, Colton leaned into her. Licking gingerly at her lips, nipping lightly at the corners of her mouth before again sealing his lips to hers, he took her breath into his lungs, and felt that breath warm him. One word resonated in his mind, on its own loop, playing over and over.

Mine.

He wasn’t dead. This moment was real. Where there was feeling, there was hope, and he desperately needed some.

He kissed her, and the kiss drew a gasp. The raspy sound of Rosalind’s breathlessness shuddered through him as the pleasure of being close to her far outweighed the nagging internal pain he harbored.

His captive wore a black shirt he hardly noticed, except that it felt cool and silky against his bare chest. His current impulse was to tear the shirt from her and get down to it, chest to chest, groin to groin. This was his animal side taking over. His beast voted for that.

Injuries be damned! This Were female had a name that rolled easily on his tongue. Rosalind. A name as creamy as the sexual act itself.

Her black hair, worn long and straight, spilled over her shoulders in a gleaming cascade. Her face, with its prominent, sharp-edged bones, would suit few people, but somehow suited him. She had a small, tapered nose. Perfectly arched eyebrows looked like dark smudges of paint on ivory skin decorated by huge, penetrating green eyes.

Her shoulders were narrow, her hip bones like blades. Lycan females never had overindulgent curves or ponderous shapes due to their super-revved metabolisms and the frequent nighttime sprints, and Rosalind didn’t break that mold.

Small, firm breasts, perfectly proportioned to the trimness of her body, pressed against him through her shirt, begging to be touched, licked, suckled, by someone who would understand what she needed in a mate.

She was no mere pretty young thing. This was a category of female he had never expected: unique, sensual, animal and almost supernaturally beautiful.

Mine.

Colton’s wulf roared, possessive and protective of Rosalind Kirk in spite of the fact that she had been a freaking lightning-quick fighting machine in that park.

Couldn’t have been her, his mind still argued. The female in his arms had a trembling, succulent mouth. The Were in the park had been lethal, black-pelted and incredibly fast.

Thoughts fled as her lips parted and her tongue, extremely hot and seductively moist, tentatively met his. The action cued something in Colton’s body that had long lain dormant. It was a real need for her, having nothing whatsoever to do with the concept of superficial. He longed for closeness and connection. He wanted to hold in his hands something fine and special and long-term. In the face of those needs, self-control was not an option.

The heat of her presence pushed his pain aside. Colton had a sensation of his strength returning by bounds, as if she were the one pulling it back, inch by agonizing inch, and as if the kiss connecting them was drawing his better parts out.

Her arms encircled his neck. Their hips ground lusciously together. Through the silky cloth of her shirt Rosalind continued to radiate the kind of enticement that he imagined would be similar to getting too close to the sun. Pure, radiant fire.

He groaned when her hands touched the nape of his neck, and he repeated the sound when her fingers moved upward into his hair. She grabbed hold of a handful of strands and tugged, trying to pull him closer. But the only way they could have been closer was for him to be inside her. And there was no way to describe how much he wanted that.

His body responded to hers as if he hadn’t been hurt. His erection was proof that a Were’s ability to heal was indeed nothing short of magical.

Rosalind’s touch made illness seem distant and irrelevant. The swift return of his libido told him that if his body wasn’t fully recovered, he was well enough to oblige the desire to claim her, and to enter the blistering heat he knew would be waiting for him if he did.

“Ties that bind. You and I, Rosalind,” he whispered to her, allowing her only a very small breath.

It seemed to him that the female whose tongue now swept boldly across his had somehow created an energy flux that encompassed them both. Maybe it was only a male-female attraction that had made him get up from that bed, because hell, he didn’t know how he could be standing up when he had only opened his eyes a short time ago. He wasn’t entirely sure what had happened to him out there in the dark.

Nevertheless, there was healing in her fingertips. Her breath rammed a steady stream of energy into him as she willed him to take her, and urged him to hurry.

She was a fast learner, an apt pupil. Already she kissed him back with enough fervor to melt away the doubts.

Oh, yes. One of his dreams lay within his grasp. All he had to do was what came naturally to them both.

But, his mind nagged, they are going to take her away. Away from him. This seemed a ridiculous impossibility, now that he had found her.

Dampness broke out on his forehead. Rationality warned that they were guests in someone else’s house, and that the door might open any minute. Rosalind had mentioned the name Landau.

Still, Rosalind’s fingers moved like little bolts of lightning across his upper back, scorching his tender skin, making him wince from the sheer intensity of the pleasure. She was exploring him, as well as the other way around, and she liked what she found.

He seemed to hear her whispering to him, though his mouth on hers left her no ability to do so. “Now,” she was thinking. “Seal our fate.”

Chapter 6

Reluctantly, Colton pulled his lips from hers to gaze at her flushed face. How far would she go? How far would she let him go? The she-wulf was looking back at him. Their gazes met, held.

He had a sensation of falling, though he was on his feet. His body imploded with the desire to have all of her; every last bit. Wrapped in her heat, he could almost forget the vampires and what they had done. He stood a chance of sidelining his need for vengeance.

When he tore at her jeans, neither of them spoke or moved apart to make access easier. Rosalind’s palms were like burning coals when she placed them on his chest.

With ease, he lifted her from the ground, turned and threw her on the bed where he’d been tended. Rosalind was, he noticed, barefoot, her feet delicate, her toenails unpainted.

Her jeans were discarded in seconds. The blue underwear beneath them was destroyed in less time than that. She lay half-naked on the bed, her hair and her silk shirt glistening in the light from the bedside lamp. Her eyes told him that she anticipated what might come next.

Colton crawled up to arch over her on his hands and knees, so that the only thing between them, below the hem of her shirt, was his thrumming cock—the dusty, unused body part of a werewolf who had been too long without.

“Mate,” she said huskily through pink, swollen lips, her eyes wide and as brilliant as emeralds.

“Yes,” he growled.

Her hips rose to meet him when he slid both hands beneath her slick, bare buttocks, buttocks that were as sleek as her shirt. Her legs were endlessly long, and stretched out beneath him. Her thighs were shaped with lengths of strong, lean muscle.

“Some other time and place,” he told her, “this would take much longer and move much slower. Hours. Days. Weeks.”

“Find me. Promise,” was all she said in return.

Somehow, Colton knew there was no time for foreplay and that the needs driving them ruled out any effort at further restraint. With trembling fingers, he explored the spot he needed for entering her body. Although she might have been kept from this in the past, Rosalind was more than willing. Between her thighs, behind a wedge of dark fur, she had dampened. With his fingers pressed against her, she growled low in her throat.

When her legs opened for him, he forgot everything else. Time, and all that had gone on before, seemed to slip away.

Easing the tip of his cock inside her, Colton closed his eyes. He didn’t want to move, wanted to linger and soak up this wicked heat, but he had to continue. His body demanded satisfaction.

With an agonizing slowness, he began to make tender stroking motions, moving his hips, dipping in and out of her meagerly at first, amazed that he could exert this much will over himself when what he longed for was a singular thrust hard enough to fill her completely.

He shook with the intensity of that desire.

He and this stranger had imprinted. And this sealed the deal. That’s the way this went: eyes, thoughts, body, then soul. They had bonded, and all he knew about her was her name, and that she had pulled him up from unconsciousness, and how extremely hot she was.

Inside, she was tight and beautifully lush. He stroked her gently until that tightness began to relax and a rush of cream surrounded his erection. Even in man form, he nearly howled.

As he pressed himself farther inside her, Rosalind made more encouraging noises in her throat. When he stopped moving, she seemed to stop breathing altogether.

“I will find you,” he said with a pledge that seemed to have been dragged from his heart.

Though she gasped, Rosalind didn’t open her eyes.

“You understand what this means?” he asked gruffly, because her body, and what she was allowing him to do with it, had stolen his own breath away.

Her eyelids fluttered, the long, midnight-hued lashes dark against her flawless ivory skin. As he studied her face, her chin moved up and down once. She understood perfectly.

“All right,” he whispered to her. “God. Okay.”

His plunge into her rich depths brought another, louder, sound from her throat. It was a purr of encouragement. A nod to pleasure.

Colton withdrew, then sank his length into her again and again, building a rhythm that took him deeper and deeper, trying not to burst with the pleasure this gave him. He hung on to his sanity by a thread.

When waiting was no longer an option, he lowered himself to her body and drove himself into her with a force that rocked his body and hers.

Unparalleled gratification careened through him that was as violent as live wires crossing. And when Rosalind bent her knees, grabbed his buttocks with her hands and invited him to partake of the last remaining barrier, he felt the rise of an oncoming orgasm that would truly weld them together for life.

With his scent on her, and imbedded in her, no other Were could hope to gain her interest. That’s also the way this worked. She would be his. Forever. Until death do us part.

And when she drove her hips against his, he tumbled over the rim of an abyss. One more move of his own hips, and he executed just one more powerful thrust; the exact one he had longed to make.

He reached the molten center of the female beneath him, not thinking of taking or claiming her now, but offering himself to her in a union that was tantamount to the binding of their souls.

“Rosalind.”

The rumble started in his back, spread to his torso and careened between his legs. A similar rumble, like an approaching earthquake, tore through Rosalind, hitting and then overtaking them at the same time.

The room exploded with a light that seemed to carry in it all the emotion of the life Colton had lived so far. With their moist bodies pressed together in a rigid few seconds of suspended stillness, and their mouths locked together so that no sensation could go unresolved, the suddenness of the intensity of their mingled ecstasy ripped through them.

But so did something else.

One last peripheral sensation slid through Colton unexpectedly as he reached his peak.

In that moment of heightened awareness, as his body convulsed with pleasure, he was sure that Rosalind tasted not only like wulf, but of metal.

In her feverish mouth, and at her heated core, lay a hint of what he imagined silver to taste like. Silver, a concoction that was the bane of all Weres, purebred or otherwise.

Absurd.

He let the notion go as he rode the crest of a wave of ecstasy prolonged by each tremor that shook her.

And when the storm finally subsided and some time had passed without sound or motion, Colton was afraid to move. Afraid to believe. Opening his eyes, he again found Rosalind’s eyes waiting.

Problem was those eyes were no longer green.

Liquid darkness swam in Rosalind’s irises, drowning the color, turning them black. It was like watching a curtain drop over a verdant landscape. Like a dark veil descending suddenly to cloak something fine.

The sudden strangeness made Colton draw back. The skin on his neck prickled. His jaw tensed.

“What the—”

What had happened to Rosalind? Hell, had he just linked himself to a Were who might be something more than wulf?

He heard the word special in his mind, and knew it came from her thoughts. He didn’t like the questions turning up.

Was the key to Rosalind’s well-guarded seclusion the fact that she might not be just any She after all, but something else? Something far more dangerous?

Was that why she wasn’t allowed out, when Lycan females were so scarce, and why she felt she was different?

Perhaps also sensing this, or seeing the concern in his expression, Rosalind opened her mouth to protest the look on his face. After a brief hesitation, she uttered a strangled cry.

Between her beautiful lips, so swollen and lush and pink, lay a pair of tiny needle-sharp incisors reminiscent of no wulf canines that Colton had ever seen. On her lower lip lay a fine sheen of pooled red droplets where she had bitten herself during their moments of shared passion.

Blood. On her mouth.

Dark blood, red as roses.

Before Colton caught a startled breath, his lover, his she-wulf, the female he had sealed himself to forever, moved from under him with an astonishing speed that was little more than a time-slip of barely disturbed air.

She leaped gracefully onto the sill of the tall, open window, where she paused in a crouch to draw her fingers across her mouth. Glancing at the smear of blood on them, her body visibly shook.

For a moment more she remained there, outlined by the night beyond, her silk shirt shining, her long, loose hair billowing in the breeze.

She looked at Colton with a shocked, pleading glint in her wild black gaze as she held up her hand to show him the red stain on her fingers. Then, uttering one more sound, a sob, Rosalind turned from him and jumped out.

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