by Kat Kinney
Fishtailing across the icy highway, I managed to skid off onto the shoulder. The moment the Escalade came to a stop, I ripped the keys from the ignition and punched in the code on my phone that would send out an emergency alert to the rest of the pack.
A second later my phone exploded with Led Zeppelin. Sprinting for the line of barbed wire fencing out past the weeds, I swiped to answer.
“August, do you have her?"
“I’m tracking her half a mile southeast of your position.” My brother’s keyboard clacked in the background. “Straight shot out towards the lake.”
“Tell Brody to shut down—”
“Already done. He’s on a call west of town. Heading back your way.”
That meant he’d never get here in time.
Not bothering to end the call, I dropped my phone, letting the change rip me from my human skin.
Social media got most of the deets on werewolf transformation wrong. You could thank our massive disinformation campaign for that one. Clothes and other physical objects went with you when you shifted, but only to a point. Everything drew on moon energy. Don’t ask me to explain how it worked. August was the freaking science genius in the family. How much you could take back and forth varied from were to were, but basically, you couldn’t hug a refrigerator, wolf out, and haul all your Thanksgiving leftovers back and forth between forms. Pretty sure some idiot had probably tried and managed to turn himself into a Sloppy Joe on the shift back. Thanks, but no thanks.
River could pack in a whole freaking arsenal. Guns. Knives. Hand grenades. The works. No way did I want to know how they trained recruits to do that in Tracer boot camp. August stripped his gear off one piece at a time first. Pretty sure that had more to do with his inner geek coming out and not wanting to mess up any of his toys. Me? Let’s just say there was a leaderboard at pack meetings for epic reentry fails, and me and my fried iPhone had scored first place more than a few times. Cal, River and Ethan had more piercings than most of your local motorcycle clubs, and they’d never had any trouble. But no way in hell was I going to risk frying the phone I’d just replaced or putting my liver in upside down because werewolf magic couldn’t get all my apps reinstalled on the shift back.
I hit the ground running in wolf form, claws tearing up the frozen November ground. The world around me instantly grayed out and sharpened as my wolf vision took over. Sprawling live oaks, fallow corn fields and dry limestone gullies lost their reds and greens, the Texas winter landscape cast in a palette of harvest gold, loam brown and gunmetal gray. Scents pummeled me from every direction. I catalogued the sickly-sweet whisper of exhaust fumes, sagebrush, and the sharp, clean smell of approaching snow. Clawing up a short rise, I forced my mind blank, trying to grasp onto the hazy images Lacey was projecting into my mind.
Two of them. Maybe more. At the rate they were moving, it was impossible to tell. Through our link, I caught the slash of a knife and a dark blur that reformed too fast to track. Shit. This was bad. One mistake. That was all it would take—
The weather was worsening, cold wet sleet sticking to my ash-white fur and causing my paws to slip as I struggled up a steep embankment. It was coming down harder in the higher elevations wherever Lacey was, the image that came through this time finally clear. Male vamp. Medium height. Gauges in both ears. Dark hair that was long on top and swept off to the side the way West wore his. Dark skinny jeans and a local band tee, like supporting the Austin indie rock scene was a totally chill thing to do in between, you know, killing people. Ten bucks said he probably had one of Daisy Addiction’s stickers on his hipster electric car that he took to hang out at coffee bars on the weekends, too.
Indie Rock feinted left, then dematerialized. Daggers out, Lacey whipped around. His partner was a smaller female with intricate rose tattoos inked up both sides of her neck and enough knives for a cooking competition strapped across her chest. She flipped a slim, ten-inch blade, a smile curving her lips. A second later, Indie Rock reformed, his hand wrapped around Lacey’s throat.
Anticipating the attack, Lacey pivoted with the grace of a dancer, one of her blades arcing back. Releasing her, the vampire leaped away, but not fast enough. A dark stain blossomed on his shirt.
Branches raked at my fur as I struggled up a rocky slope, claws struggling to gain traction in the mud. I was closing on their position fast. Close. So close. I knew exactly where we were. Bluff Point. On a clear day, you could see for miles out across the rolling green hills and sheer limestone bluffs of the Hill Country to the west, and the dark waters of Lake Buchanan to the south.
Through the pack bond, I watched Indie Rock reform directly in Lacey’s path. She sidestepped, a low-arcing blade missing her by millimeters. He held up a hand, waggling his fingers Morpheus-style. Smirking, Lacey ducked to the side instead, which brought him face to face with the day’s arctic wolf special.
I slammed him to the ground, fangs sinking into his arm. Regular wolves weighed in at fifty to one hundred and fifty pounds. Werewolves came in at twice that, more in some cases, with denser muscle mass and a mouth full of teeth you didn’t want to mess with. Indie Rock and I tucked and rolled, tumbling through sagebrush and dirt. A fist slammed into my skull, causing my vision to short out, but not before I heard a bone in his wrist snap. With a shake of my head, I released him. We rose and faced off in the clearing, slowly circling.
Vampire blood tasted like the last thing they’d fed on—only holding a traceable scent for seventy-two hours. This male tasted like human, which wouldn’t ordinarily have been unusual for a vampire. They were the most readily available food source. Except nine times out of ten when the covens sent their lower castes out to fight, it was amped up on shifter blood.
I tried to throw a glance at Lacey, but Mrs. Dracula had flashed around behind her, drawing a length of chain from her black trench coat. Indie Rock used my moment of distraction to get back on his feet and charge towards me. Undeads were hell to fight because of their superior speed and strength. When you tacked on the fact that one of them could bear hug you and flash both of you out a half a mile in any direction just like #DashCamVlad had done to the human cop, outing supernaturals everywhere (because thanks, asshole), they weren’t exactly on our Christmas card list.
My mother, Sofia Montemayor-Caldwell, was one of the deadliest Tracers the Southern Territorial Council had ever known. Her philosophy? Vampires were gonna fight dirty. So you’d sure as hell better have a few dirty tricks up your sleeve.
The length of chain whistled through the air. Lacey leaped back with the grace of an acrobat, not allowing the female undead to get in close. Through the pack bond, I could hear West shouting for me. He was a mile out, closing fast. Just a little longer. I bared my teeth, snapping at the male vampire’s thigh.
And then, with a sharp crack, both vamps ghosted out at once.
Lacey whirled. “Dallas, look out—"
I felt him reform over me a hairsbreadth too late, his knife sinking deep into my shoulder. White hot pain short-circuited my brain, my front leg spasming beneath me, making it impossible to pivot, to twist away. My vision went black. Through a gray haze, I watched Lacey twist at the last second, slashing up and out in a tight arc to slam a dagger through the throat of the female vamp who had just reformed behind her.
Blood sprayed across the snow. The vampire slumped to the ground. Dizzy and shaking from the pain, I bucked beneath Indie Rock in a last-ditch effort, trying to throw him off—
—only to find he wasn’t there.
Biting back a scream, I shifted to human. Hot, pulsing blood soaked the sleeve of my shirt, the knife wedged into my shoulder almost to the bone. Vision spotting, I ripped it free from my arm.
“Lacey,” I gritted out, slumping to the frozen ground. “Get out of here—"
In that instant, Indie Rock reformed, seizing her from behind. I lurched to my feet, his dagger clasped in bloody fingertips. But I couldn’t throw it. Not with my bad hand and not at this distance. Not when an undea
d had a knife pressed to her throat.
“Let her go.” The air sawing in and out of my lungs felt raw as sand. “Take me instead.”
“You’re not exactly my type.”
“If you touch her—”
The knife nicked up, a thin stream of blood trailing down its gleaming silver blade. A weight slammed into my chest, cutting off all available oxygen.
Cal told me once that contrary to what you see on TV, time doesn’t really slow during a traumatic event, just our perception of it. The fear center of the brain goes into overdrive, forming layer upon layer of memory, all those details distorting reality, making time impossible to grasp.
“Please,” I whispered.
And in that eternity that Lacey’s gaze held mine, what I knew was this:
That when she laughed, the world stopped. That if I turned out the pockets of her hoodie, I would find a strawberry chapstick, a receipt for two breakfast tacos from Guillermo’s, and an assortment of homemade dog biscuits from her morning run, which was probably why half the dogs in Lindley County were now on a diet. I knew without a moment’s hesitation that I would have given anything to switch out our places and feel that silver blade against my throat instead of hers. And as those January gray eyes widened, her lips starting to form my name, the only thing I couldn’t have told you was why we had wasted the last five years apart.
And then she and the undead vanished into thin air, carving out part of my soul with them. I collapsed to my knees, screaming to the empty winter sky. But in the answering stillness, there was only the hollow brush of the wind over miles of sage and cedar. Concern from my brothers flared through the bond. West was in wolf form, nearly to me, Brody and Ethan close behind—
Ignoring them, I staggered across the clearing. The female vamp jerked when I yanked the knife free from her throat. The wound was already trying to close, bright pink skin knitting together at the edges. Unlike shifters, vampires had no enhanced regenerative abilities, and could only go out during daylight or heal rapidly if they’d been feeding from one of us. This one, at least, had.
I bared my teeth. “Where did he take her?”
Her pupils dilated at the smell of my blood, dark eyes large and sunken in a bony, wasted skull. Vampires who stuck to a diet of human blood could pass as human much of the time. Their fangs retracted when they weren’t feeding or aroused, and as long as they were careful to stay indoors once the sun rose, no one would suspect they wanted to drain their victims to the point the blood loss caused cognitive impairment, then dump them in an alley somewhere. Vampires in the lower castes like this one, the common soldiers who fueled up on shifter blood and went out in daylight to raid and kill, were often mistaken for your typical meth head. Pale. Twitchy. The more times they drank from one of us, the more their bodies degraded from exposure to the lycan virus. From the looks of this one, she’d taken a hit of shifter one too many times.
Her blood-tinged lips moved, mouthing something I couldn’t make out.
“Tell me where they went and I’ll make sure you aren’t harmed.” I already knew what Brody would say about the idea of offering protection to a leech. Like any answer a vampire gave could be trusted. But I was out of options.
“Give us Topher Greer.”
The hair rose at the back of my neck. “What do you want with him?”
She clawed for me, back arched, fingers grotesquely splayed. The blood staining her lips turned to a pale pink froth. Poison.
I swore, knowing it was already too late. Within seconds, her eyes dimmed.
Gone.
I checked her pockets. Nothing. No surprise there. Vamp teams typically came in clean.
Lacey’s phone was ringing somewhere off in the grass. Tearing off my sleeve, I knotted it around the stab wound in my shoulder and swiped to answer.
“Where the hell are you?” Brody barked. “Give me a status update—”
“Bluff Point. Two undeads. They took her.”
“West and I are nearly to you. Stay there—"
“Yeah. Not happening,” I gritted out, vision blurring.
“That’s an order.”
“They’re after Topher. You need to send someone back to the ranch.”
“Dallas—” my oldest brother started just as I ended the call.
Shifting a second time was out, given the blood loss. With my luck, I’d turn myself into a feral squirrel. Better yet, a pile of squirrel intestines. Lacey’s presence flickered in the pack bond, a candle fighting not to go out in gale-force winds. And she was fading fast. Either she’d been knocked unconscious and the leech was jumping her out a mile at a time, or—
No. I wasn’t going there. She was still alive, and she was going to stay that way. I made my way down to the bottom of the bluff, a sheltered cove where the lake lapped gently at the rocks and the smell of fish and algae was almost enough to overpower the stench of fresh blood.
In twenty-six years, I’d seen some nightmarish things. Fights gone bad. Humans we couldn’t save. Even one time my mom had taken me and Brody to see the aftermath of a vampire raid at a house a few counties over. There hadn’t been much left. But nothing could have prepared me for the raw, visceral rage that exploded through my chest as I emerged from the trees and came upon them, saw that monster fang-head crouched over an unconscious Lacey.
I understood immediately. He’d spent too much energy ghosting in and out, was about to refuel. With a roar, I descended. He started to rise, to back away, the lure of all that fresh blood he hadn’t been able to ingest making him punchy. Lacey’s mangled wrist fell limply across her chest, two deep slashes scoring her flesh. She didn’t stir. I clocked him in the head with my good arm, my momentum sending him flying into the water. I dragged myself to lie over Lacey’s still form. To my surprise, the vampire didn’t follow. Instead, Mr. Fanged-and-Freaky held up both hands, palms out.
“I have information.” He bared fangs that were still elongated from the smell of her blood. My hands started shaking so hard I could barely keep from losing my shit right then and there.
“Like I’d trust anything coming from a prickhead.”
“Your prisoner is not who you think he is.”
“While we’re so busy with introductions, who the hell are you?”
He made a clucking sound with his tongue. “Topher Greer must be returned to us. This doesn’t end until he’s back in our custody.”
“Why do you want him?”
“That’s none of your concern.”
“You said you had information, leech. Enlighten me.”
Another cool smile. “He hasn’t told you?”
I frowned, unable to dismiss the sudden feeling I knew him from somewhere. Which wasn’t possible. Bloodsuckers fed from us. They held us as slaves. You saw one, you killed it, or you ran. And yet—
“Until next time, Dallas Caldwell.”
And with that, the vampire dematerialized.
I cursed.
Lacey was lying pale and far too still, blood streaming from her wrist. I wrapped her in my down vest, making it a few steps only to fall to my knees. The nagging sensation that had been troubling me ever since I’d been sure I’d felt her dying just after the vamp had ghosted out with her slammed into me with the force of a freight train.
“What the hell?” I whispered.
Her breathing and pulse were weak, but steady. She hadn’t regained consciousness, but by every external sign, she was here, solid and alive in my arms—
And invisible as a ghost in the pack bond.
4
Lacey
PICTURE ALMOST GETTING TURNED INTO A BLOOD SMOOTHIE by two vampires, watching your best-friend-slash-secret-Viking-wolf-crush get stabbed in an effort to defend you, then waking up to discover someone had totally made off with your pants.
Worst. Hangover. Ever.
I came to swaddled in a waffle shirt that smelled like smoked meat, laundry detergent and said best-friend-secret-Viking-wolf-crush.
Which was
good. If he was alive, I could so kill him later.
It was close to sunset, the shadows from the lamp someone had switched on in the corner of the room stark against warm taupe walls. The small bedroom was filled with furniture made from heavy oak and soft buttery leather. A painting of a herd of Texas longhorns stood over a large cedar chest by the window. Beside my bed, a clear bag of saline swayed on an IV pole, a thin plastic tube snaking down to my wrist. My other arm was wrapped in bandages. I knew this room. It had been mine for the year I stayed with the Caldwells. Gritting my teeth, I reached over to pull out the IV line. No way was I staying tied down.
That year with the Caldwells, other than a brief stint where August had fallen ill and had to be driven out east to see a battalion of specialists, Sofia Montemayor-Caldwell had served as my sire in Dallas’s absence. Under her tutelage, I learned to track in both human and wolf form. I learned to defend myself with a blade, a firearm, a length of wire, and my bare hands. The world was now full of enemies too terrible to imagine, enemies who would soon be coming for me. At night, I hunted, releasing the wolf’s instinctual drive to kill. I loathed and craved every moonrise. My wolf was addicted to the chemical high, constantly seeking its next fix. And never did I hate myself more than in the seconds when massive teeth descended from my grotesque jaws, my bones snapping one by one while I shivered through the pain of the change. When the sun rose I curled in the corner of the shower to cry, struggling to come to terms with life as a human girl trapped in a monster’s skin.
My training was brutal. Unforgiving. At least twice a week Sofia’s sessions ended with broken bones. Her favorite word was again. I assembled and reloaded a rifle blindfolded. Half a second too slow. Again. Ran the perimeter of the ranch. Did I think she wanted me to smack my feet so loudly it scared off every coyote from here to Llano? Again. I later wondered if her plan had been to keep me so busy, I wouldn’t have time to dwell on everything I had lost. Most days, I preferred the lie. It was easier to compartmentalize my old life, to shut out all thoughts of Dallas, and especially of my mother except on the one day per week I was allowed to call. Someone had taught Sofia to be a survivor, to dominate in a world of shifters ruled by men. And I could never go back to being the small, broken girl who had been dropped upon her doorstep in the night. This much I understood from the moment I glimpsed the fine spiderweb of scars circling her left wrist. Rule one in a wolf pack: everything, on some level, came down to power. Show weakness, and you were dead. But at night, as the moon rose and despair flooded my blood with the sharp, vicious thoughts of the wolf, all I wanted was to feel like me.