Stain of Midnight

by Cassandra Moore

  Something yelped and hit the ground. She hauled ass around the sedan between her and her stalker, sunglasses sliding down her nose so she could see over them. And was abruptly very glad she hadn’t waited to ask questions until she’d shot first.

  “Derek?”

  He lay on the ground, curled fetal with his arms over his head. Black fur covered his forearms and clawed hands. His clothes looked clean but rumpled. Threads stuck out of the shoulder seams where strain had popped the stitches. Holes gaped in the fronts of his sneakers, and the laces had seen better days.

  At some point, he had lost control of his wolf. Always before, he’d had disciplined control over his shifts, with willpower and solid military training to fall back on. Yet Sonja could see his skin rippling even now, a struggle between a man and his inner beast.

  One of his arms moved. A glowing purple eye stared out at her from behind its shelter. The pupils and iris did not look human at all. When he spoke, his voice came out in a strangled growl.

  “Sonja. You have to stop me. Shoot me before I hurt you. Or anyone else.”

  From behind the car, Charlie whined to remind her she’d left him there. “Come on, Charlie,” she said, without shifting her gaze from the man on the ground. “Derek, what’s going on? I’m not going to shoot you.” They were in a public parking lot. Law enforcement wouldn’t understand. Derek had been her first lover.

  “The shadow,” he gasped. “Tearing at me from inside. Last night, it was bad. Tonight— Nngh. Can’t control it, Sonja... I can hear it. I can hear the shadow.”

  Charlie growled as Derek’s arm rippled, added mass. His wolf fought toward the surface again.

  “Hang on, Derek. Keep hold of it.” Sonja took three long steps to the back door of her vehicle. “What’s it saying? Do you know who it is?” Is it Kiplinger? she wanted to ask, but didn’t. It might bias his answer.

  “No.” His voice had dropped an octave. “But I can hear him. Speaking into my mind. Giving orders. I try to shut it out. Can’t. Every word burns cold.”

  Beneath the seat waited a black case. She pulled it out and flipped it open. A collection of pipes and basic stock parts nestled into the foam, along with a handful of specialized darts. She pulled them out to fit them together one by one. “What’s he telling you to do?”

  “Find the rest of the pack. Kill them. Sonja, help me—” Derek convulsed. His back bowed violently backward. Human cheekbones and jaw elongated. When he snarled, sharp white teeth gleamed in the low light.

  She twisted the barrel into place and jammed a dart into the action. “I lied, Derek. Looks like I’m going to shoot you after all.”

  He lunged up. She fired. The dart stuck in his chest. He pulled it out with a growl. It slowed him long enough for her to chamber another dart and shoot it, too. Then a third. And a fourth. By the fifth, he had keeled over onto his side. At the sixth, he closed his eyes.

  Sonja stared at the unconscious werewolf on the pavement. His features should have reverted to his human shape. They hadn’t. I don’t know what that means, but it can’t be good. None of this can be good.

  Three out-of-town wolves looking for suspicious information. Then a shadow wolf had come to her begging for death. “I was going to let the pack handle the whole Kiplinger thing, Charlie,” she said, as she dug into the trunk for her pair of runed handcuffs. “That’s what packs are for. They take down the big prey together. I’m just a lone wolf trying to get by. They might hire me to get them information, but that’s not involved-involved. That’s offering some help for a modest fee.”

  Charlie snorted.

  “But it’s showing up at my door, now. It’s personal.” She nudged Derek with her toe to verify he’d stayed out before she pulled the darts free. “I just shot my ex with tranquilizer darts in a parking lot. That makes it personal, right?”

  The dog jumped into the vehicle to lay down in the front seat where he could ignore her rationalizing more effectively.

  “That’s got to be in a rulebook somewhere. ‘When your half-shifted, shadow-tainted werewolf ex-boyfriend is lying unconscious next to your car, it’s personal.’ That means I have to get involved.” The last word came out a grunt as she rolled Derek onto his belly to cuff his arms behind his back. His partial shift had swelled his wrists, not to mention added a good fifty pounds onto his weight, but she’d designed the cuffs with werewolves in mind. “No damn choice, am I right? Dog, are you even listening to me?”

  He wasn’t.

  “You’re a dick, Charlie. Once I figure out how to get Derek into the car, we’re going to make a call to Noah and—”

  With the immediate threat down and her adrenaline fading, Sonja could process the rest of what Derek had said. Find the rest of the pack. Kill them. If Derek had gotten orders to kill, the other shadow wolves might have as well. Noah would be home alone with Kayla. Sonja crammed a Bluetooth earpiece into her ear. “Call Noah Craig.”

  The phone dialed. “Hi, this is Noah. Leave a message.”

  Shit. “End call.” The back end of the Humvee lurched downward as she got Derek’s torso in. “Call Noah Craig.”

  Ring. Ring. “Hi, this is Noah. Leave a message.”

  “Noah, this is Sonja Carter. It’s extremely important you call me as soon as you get this. End call.” She levered Derek’s legs in and slammed the door behind him.

  She picked up the darts and tossed them into a bucket she had in the back. The gun, she didn’t even bother to break down. Instead, she pitched it between the front seats. A nagging intuition said she’d need it soon enough.

  On another night, she’d drive home and secure Derek. Once she had him safe, she could pass out information or give warnings. Tonight, she had no time. She climbed into the driver’s seat and jammed the key into the ignition. The one call she had to make was to the man in the Tacoma pack who distrusted her the most. Won’t the enforcer be thrilled.

  “Call Cameron Roswell.”

  Chapter Two

  When Cameron sat down on the couch, the dream was waiting for him.

  He hadn’t intended to sleep at all, just to pretend to watch an insipid sitcom rerun until he’d stayed up to a respectable hour. He didn’t even like sitcoms. The last couple nights had come with shitty sleep and muddled dreams that left him more tired than before he’d slept. Dani, one of the pack guards, had suggested Cameron should watch a light program on the television before bed, so as to fill his mind with happier imagery for his brain to dream about. Yet the moment his ass hit the cushion, gravity weighed his eyelids down, no matter how he fought.

  Sleep pulled him under. It threatened to drown him until he surrendered to it, let it carry him deeper, as if he had a choice. The vision filled him as lungs filled with air beneath the surface of a river. He ran through the woods, paws digging into the leaf-strewn ground, dodging the boles of trees as the smells of the forest filled his nose. To the right, he could smell a rabbit, but the animal didn’t hold his interest. Run, he needed to run, faster and faster up the slope beneath the boughs.

  Power trickled in luminous rivers over the ground. Energy turned to liquid light and flowed over the soil in streams both broad and narrow. Some flowed down over the rocks, but some flowed up, against the pull of gravity. The ebbs of energy had a rhythm, a pulse, driven by an unseen heart deep below the ground. He could not hear it, not with his ears, but he could feel it course through him. His own heartbeat matched the steady cadence.

  His instincts impelled him to run up the hill, along the edge of an upward-flowing river of energy. The glow of the rill illuminated the land around him with a peaceful but vibrant radiance. As he ran, he realized he knew these woods. The feel of the soil, the stance of the trees. The mountain. Rainier. His pack’s spiritual territory, where they celebrated their full moons together. But he had never seen this place, this slope where the trees thinned and gave way to bare soil and stone. A sharp incline led up to an outcropping of rock he had never visited awake. Yet in the dream, he knew it as we
ll as he knew his own heartbeat. He yearned for it, for the cave he knew hid within the embrace of the mountainside.

  As he ran, the ground changed beneath his paws. Acidic slime seeped up from beneath the soil to burn the pads of his feet. It reeked of too-ripe flesh, of blood run sour and black. The further he ran, the thicker it gathered, until he ran through a dark morass that clung to the slope against all laws of physics. A smart wolf, he knew, would turn his tail without a backward glance.

  Cameron dug in and charged up the crest of the hill.

  Suddenly, the black liquid squirmed up, contorting like a living thing. It writhed, twisted back on itself until two legs took shape. The mountain shuddered as if in a restless, fevered sleep. The terrible shadow legs reached up until they met, joined in an unholy union. Up and up it twisted, until it became a torso with arms stretched too wide as they reach for the moon in the sky. A bulbous mass erupted from atop that horrible form, a head that leaned back as if in laughter.

  Indigo-black tendrils spun off from the man shape. They dripped down his legs and crawled over the ground. Cameron tried to watch the writhing mass, but it became difficult to look at, as if it defied his mind’s ability to comprehend what his eyes saw. Buried in his mind, he could hear a scream so deep that it shook his bones, although whether it belonged to him or some other frightened sentience he couldn’t say.

  “The guardian has come.” The hissing voice rose like the roar of storm winds to lash Cameron’s ears. “Bring him, pry open his mind until he is no more than a whimpering pup eager to obey...”

  A tentacle lashed towards him. He tried to dodge, but the sludge on the ground fouled his steps. As his leg slid out from under him, he knew he could never move in time, and the writhing shadow would have him. He bunched himself to spring as the tendril lashed down hard and fast—

  —and awoke to the abrupt buzz-and-trill of his cellphone as it vibrated on the coffee table. Wired by leftover adrenaline from the dream but muddled by the remnants of his unexpected nap, he fumbled after it. The chirpy ringtone, he decided, would have to go. “Hello?” he growled into it, without a glance at the caller identification.

  “Roswell, meet me outside. I’ll be pulling up to your house within five minutes. Jump into the truck and I’ll explain on the way.” Over all the road noise generated by an ancient vehicle, Cameron had a difficult time pegging the voice’s owner.

  “But I’m not wearing any pants,” he mumbled, still not quite awake.

  The laugh track on the television sitcom flared.

  “I don’t care if you’re dick to the breeze, but you might at least put on a sock. It’s chilly.” Not socks, he noted. Sock. Singular. “Get your shit together, Roswell. You have four minutes.”

  He took the phone away from his ear to look at the screen. Sonja Carter. He mashed it back to his head. “Carter? What the hell are you talking about?” Even as he said it, he wondered if he knew. The dream.

  “I’m doing sixty in a residential. Explaining while I drive is not safe. Pants, then explanations.” The call disconnected.

  Cameron cursed as he lurched off the couch. “Just what I needed tonight,” he told the television, which paid him no attention at all. “Sonja fucking Carter.”

  Sonja Carter. Lone wolf who had flaunted pack control of the area, turned down every invitation to join up and share the community, then did errands for the biters when they made the right offer. Tensions between the werewolves and vampires had existed since before Cameron’s birth, and he’d long ago decided that hatred endured for a reason. Sure, maybe they didn’t need open, constant war between werewolves and vampires raging through the streets, but they didn’t need to cozy up and take long, hot showers together, either.

  Carter danced across established boundaries for the right price and didn’t give a hang for her own kind. For a die-hard pack man like Cameron, that way of life didn’t go down easily at all.

  But she got shit done right. Never backed down, never surrendered, and knew what the hell she was talking about whether she discussed weapons, wars, or herbs. She didn’t just live, she thrived, and Cameron wondered if he didn’t resent that. The beast in him said lone wolves shouldn’t do more than survive on the fringes if they wouldn’t join the pack. The man who took pride in those he called his own huffed while he wondered why she thought herself too good for them.

  Cameron didn’t like Sonja Carter, and he didn’t understand her. Yet he respected her without question. Which was, he reflected, why he was pulling on his pants at her say-so. That, and his dream. He couldn’t shake the sense of connection between it and Carter’s unexpected call.

  He’d just finished tying his second hiking boot when he heard Sonja’s Humvee slide to a stop outside his house. She really was doing sixty in a residential. He nabbed his jacket off the hook by the door, turned the lock on the knob, and headed out. A furry face watched him through the car window, ears up in alert, as he strode down the front walk. Charlie, Sonja’s ever-present canine sidekick.

  The woman herself twisted to look into the back of the vehicle, then between the seats, with the classic expression of a driver clearing space for their passengers. She shoved a couple things backwards, lifted one up so she could settle it with more care – a rifle? Why does she have one of those between her seats, and why hasn’t she just slid it into the back? – then pointed for Charlie to sit in the middle where she’d just made room.

  Charlie hopped down to sit where she told him to as Cameron opened the door. “My mother always told me not to go out with girls who wouldn’t come to the door like polite people,” he said. The door’s slam provided fine punctuation.

  “I’m the girl your mother warned you about,” she said. She didn’t wait for him to buckle his seatbelt before she took off. “I’m a shitty date. Hold onto that dartgun down there. If our friend in the back starts to wake up, shoot him again.”

  Cameron blinked. “You really are a shitty date, aren’t you?” he asked, and turned around to get a look in the rear compartment. An unconscious shadow wolf slept, trussed up like a Thanksgiving turkey. “What the fuck, Carter? Is that Derek Anderson?”

  “It is. He’s having a rough night.” She rolled through a stop sign on the way out of the neighborhood. “Earlier, some of the Seattle pack showed up at my studio. They asked a whole lot of questions about Kiplinger, and the ritual that made the shadow wolves. ‘Information gathering for their alpha’ they called it. But then they made noise about the local pack not handling their problems, and oh by the way Miss Carter, other packs won’t put up with lone wolves in their territory.”

  A sour taste spread through Cameron’s mouth. “That sounds like prepping for a move on our turf. Which ones?”

  “Bunch of cowboys. Their leader had a belt buckle the size of my fender.”

  “Curtis Levitt. Their enforcer.” Cameron snorted. Wolves like that one didn’t deserve the title, and it offended Cameron to attach it to the likes of Curtiss Levitt. “He talks a big game, but I don’t think he’s strong enough to take the pack. Enforcer’s as close as he’ll get. He’s a dickhead.”

  “So I noticed. They left, I taught my classes, then went to my car. And I found him.” She jerked her head towards the shadow wolf behind them. “Or he found me. He said the shadow was giving him orders to find the rest of the pack and kill them. Then he lost control. So I put him down for a nap.”

  Find the rest of the pack. Kill them. The shadow took control of a shadow wolf, and— “Kayla.”

  Sonja nodded, looking grim. “I’ve been trying to call Noah. No answer. Kayla’s not picking up, either.”

  Cameron dug his phone out of his pocket. Noah might have decided not to answer anyone outside the pack at this time of night, but he wouldn’t ignore Cameron. The line rang too many times. “Hi, this is Noah. Leave a message.”

  “Noah, call me back when you get this,” he said, then disconnected the call. “Still no answer. Fuck, I hope we’re being paranoid.”

  “Me,
too.” She took her eyes off the road long enough to glance at him. The nighttime gloom made her brown eyes all the darker. “But you don’t think we are.”

  “No.” He reached a hand down between them to stroke Charlie’s ears. The big dog lifted his head to provide more convenient access for attention. “I’ve slept like shit lately. My dreams were pretty muddled, but I woke up knowing they weren’t good. Tonight, the dream was pretty fucking clear. There was some kind of shadow— Shadow thing shaped like a person up on the mountain. It attacked me, and I woke up.”

  By her expression, Sonja could tell he’d left out most of what happened. She didn’t push, and he didn’t feel like sharing. Already tonight he’d felt like an idiot, what with telling her he didn’t have pants on. No need to invite further mockery by mucking through a nightmare that had scared the daylights out of him. “That doesn’t sound like a coincidence. You sensed whatever happened,” she said.

  “Yeah.” He hit the speed dial again, this time to a different number.

  “Cam?”

  “Dani, call the others and start making the rounds. Check with everyone in the pack. You can’t reach someone by phone, you go to their house. Don’t take any chances.”

  “Roger. What’s up?”

  “Someone’s going after the pack. And they’re using the shadow wolves to do it.”

  “Fuck. Kiplinger?”

  “I think it’s a good possibility.”

  “Anyone told the alpha?”

  “I’m on that.”

  “You need a pick-up?”

  “No. I’m in the car with Sonja Carter.”

  A pause. “Is that a good idea?”

  “It’s fine.”

  “Whatever you say, boss. I’ll call back when I know more.”

  “Thanks, Dani.” He killed the connection. “Not sure if she’s more surprised that someone’s after the pack tonight, or that we haven’t killed each other yet.”