Crave: A Paranormal Shifter Romance (Blood Moon, Texas Shifters Series Book 2)

by Kat Kinney

  Tossing back the faded quilt, I tried to stand. The room spun. I clawed for the wall, instinctually drawing on the wolf’s sharpened sight and hearing to steady myself. Nothing happened. Panic roared in my ears. My muted human ears.

  I screamed.

  The door burst open.

  1) Sudden movements really weren’t the best idea when you’ve nearly had your arm chewed off by one of the fanged and undead.

  2) Ordinarily werewolves burned through painkillers like they were candy. So the fact that I was having visions of bright pink unicorns getting into my latest batch of raspberry lemonade cupcakes? So not good. The unicorns, that is. My cupcakes were amazing.

  3) Speaking of cupcakes. Never, ever wear pink cupcake-print panties on the day you plan to be attacked by vampires. Especially not if you belong to a pack of dudes willing to steal your pants under the guise of medical care, then charge into the room like a werewolf SWAT team.

  Seriously. I was going to kill them.

  “What the hell?” Dallas growled. “I leave you alone for one minute—”

  His eyes zeroed in on my barely-there panties, which, ugh, cupcakes, and his mouth came open.

  “Hey.” Brody, our Alpha, slapped his younger brother upside the head. “Eyes front, soldier.”

  Even West, who had zero interest in my lady-parts, coughed. Major, Brody’s golden retriever, bounded across the room and immediately began sniffing situation cupcake with great interest.

  “Major,” Brody barked, ears reddening.

  To be fair, I probably smelled like a giant box of cookies. Major was Blair’s secret taste-tester despite the fact that his training regimen this month as per Brody included a super intensive organic, low-sugar, preservative-free, dye-free diet designed to see if impurities in his system were triggering hyperactive outbursts. Rather than, say, being a golden retriever. Just yesterday he’d given his bark of approval for the special bone-shaped vanilla-peanut butter cookies we’d be selling this week for our four-legged clientele. Which were delicious. Not that I’d sampled them in wolf form. Really.

  With one more tail wag, Major bounded happily back to one of his cushions in the corner. The room immediately spun like a Tilt-o-whirl. Dallas caught me before I could faceplant on the floor.

  “Okay, killer. Back to bed.”

  “Not. A. Word.” I clawed at the hem of my waffle shirt, pulling it down over the offending cupcake situation. Because this day just kept getting better and better.

  Dallas smirked, managing to look both annoying and unfairly hot. “I can be a gentleman.”

  “That’s debatable.”

  He carried me back to bed. I swallowed, trying not to breathe in the intoxicating, spicy scent of his cologne as he tucked the quilt back around me.

  “You okay?” he asked, voice low. A dark blond strand of hair fell loose from the knot at the back of his head, swaying between us. I clenched my fingers, fighting the urge to tuck it back behind his ear.

  “Your shoulder—"

  “It’s fine. Nearly healed.” He worried the scar at the edge of his lip. “Scared the hell out of me, sweetheart.”

  I studied Dallas’s profile, willing him to meet my eyes, the memory of us frozen yards apart in the final seconds just before the vampire crashed into me from behind causing my gut to clench.

  “Council’s on the way to bag the dead vamp.” Brody propped his hands on his service belt. “We’re lucky this didn’t turn out a whole lot worse.”

  Which was pretty much Brody-speak for, You scared the crap out of me and don’t do it again. At least someone was treating me normally.

  Dallas held my eyes. “You sure you’re okay?”

  I looked away rather than answer.

  “Start from the beginning,” Brody ordered. “I want to know everything that happened out there.”

  Briefly, I recounted patrolling the five miles on the north side of the Caldwell ranch between my car and the highway, then took them through the details of the fight.

  “I can barely feel my wolf. Can’t shift. Everything sounds and smells muted, like I’m trapped underwater. It’s almost as if I’m… this is going to sound crazy.”

  “Human.” Dallas uttered it like a swear word.

  Not that I hadn’t been thinking the same thing. But still.

  Brody rubbed his jaw, staring out the window for a long moment. He was in uniform, had probably been out on patrol when Dallas called. “You didn’t smell anything, get any hint something was off?”

  “They flashed in right on top of me. It was like they knew exactly where I’d be. I barely had time to shift and grab my knives. Dallas and I managed to take the female out, but her partner ghosted me out of there, then punched me in the head the moment we reformed. That’s the last thing I remember.”

  “They hit you with anything—some kind of aerosol? Needles? Wolfsbane?”

  “Not that I remember.”

  Major whined and West crouched down to scratch his tummy. “The vamps look sick to you?”

  “Same as always. Strung out on shifter blood and who knows what else their handlers amped them up on before sending them out into the field.”

  “They’re losing entire cities to blood and drug addiction. It’s a wonder they haven’t made themselves extinct by now.”

  Vampire social hierarchy operated on a complicated system of castes. Those who’d maintained power for centuries within the covens used the youngest members as their servants and foot soldiers, forcing them to drink from captured shifters and attack rival covens for territory. The covens were constantly plagued by revolts, infighting and sickness. Drink from a shifter once, twice, maybe even ten times, and you might be okay. But repeated exposure to a protein in our blood triggered an immune response that ate away at the myelin sheath protecting nervous tissue, causing acute lycanthropic degenerative disease in vampires. Over time, victims lost muscle coordination, experienced dissociative episodes, lost the ability to swallow and breathe, and eventually died.

  “Something about today’s attack felt off.” Dallas rose from beside my bed to pace over to the window. “They want Topher. And they want us to think he knows why.”

  “They’re screwing with us,” West said sharply. “Convince us he can’t be trusted, then separate him out from the pack. It’s classic reverse psychology.”

  While they argued, I tucked the quilt around my middle, rose unsteadily and made my way to the mirror above the room’s antique wooden bureau. I cursed the moment I caught sight of my reflection. Dark purple bruises circled my neck, an ugly lump rising just over my right temple. There weren’t many ways to leave permanent marks on a shifter. The lycan virus caused us to regenerate too quickly for scar tissue to form except when toxins like silver or wolfsbane were introduced.

  “I’m not healing.”

  “We don’t know why,” Dallas said from behind me.

  But it made sense. I couldn’t shift. Couldn’t feel the presence of the pack in the back of my mind. Now this, too.

  “Naomi’s best guess is this is some sort of infectious agent, a biological weapon designed to take out shifters. But I was exposed, got knocked around, too, and I’m not showing any symptoms. Naomi stitched up your arm the best she could, but if it’s not better in twenty-four hours, you’re gonna need to go to one of the hospitals down in Houston for more tests. She left some antibiotics for you to start on in the meantime.”

  I cursed.

  Dr. Naomi Jennings was the local vet, a certified medic, and our first line of defense as far as health care went. She was scary smart, as in, had-gone-through-most-of-the-coursework-for-your-standard-medical-degree-for-fun smart, wore her hair in gorgeous Fulani braids, and loved to go rock climbing on the weekends when she wasn’t tied up at the animal clinic in town. Enhanced self-healing made showing up in the ER with a gushing knife wound problematic when all traces of scarring would be gone within hours. Both of the Austin packs had physicians, but the closest major medical facilities for shifters
were four hours away.

  “So a bloodborne pathogen?” I wiggled my fingers at Major. Tail wagging, he came over to lay his big square head in my lap. “Some sort of vampire sickness I contracted when the second one tried to drain me?”

  “Maybe. Best theory we’ve got at the moment. Naomi took samples of your blood. We’ll send it off when the Council gets here.” Brody shot West a look. “We gotta get Topher to talk.”

  “No shit.”

  That earned him a middle finger salute.

  Dallas held out both hands. “Hear me out. I get that you’re his sire. You’re just trying to protect him, but Topher spent a year as their prisoner. He has to know why they’re after him. And I’m guessing he could take a pretty good stab at what they did to Lacey, too. Keeping silent is putting us and him in danger.”

  “Okay. Good talk. And, oh yeah. No.”

  “West,” Brody warned.

  But West wasn’t done. “I’ve talked with Cal. River, too. From what they’ve said, the best course is to give Topher space and let him come around on his own. The Council had Tracers force their way into his mind last month at the hearing. And I get it. I do. All those disappearances they couldn’t trace, the vamps being involved, not knowing why they’ve been mostly targeting females—”

  “Which we still don’t know the reasons behind,” Dallas cut in.

  “—but there’s a danger any time they have to use neural manipulation. He still has huge blank spaces in his memory, weeks—months even where he has no idea what happened to him. Go in there again before he’s had a chance to recover and it could cause permanent damage.”

  I stiffened. Dallas threw his brother a look.

  “Sorry.” West had the grace to look ashamed.

  “You’re going to be staying with Dallas for a night or two until we know what we’re dealing with,” Brody said. “Naomi’s putting a rush on the blood work. And until we get the results back, you two are in quarantine.”

  I made a face. “Why don’t we just feed Dallas to a basilisk now and save my mother the trouble of finding him?”

  “Um, right here?”

  “Please. You might scream like a girl at the sight of rubber spiders. But basilisks are so in your wheelhouse.”

  “Okay, one, those were very manly screams. And two—"

  Brody’s eyes flared wolf gold, voice infused with Alpha power. “Naomi has no idea what we’re dealing with. Not really. This thing could start an outbreak if we’re not careful. So until we get a preliminary all clear, go home and stay home.”

  Dallas let his head fall back.

  West groaned. “Fuck. There goes Thanksgiving.”

  “We’re out of options,” Brody continued, ignoring them both. “You’re not healing, which means even once you can shift, chances are you won’t be able to do it fast enough to get away if vampires show up. And since I don’t know what they did to you, I’m not real comfortable excluding the possibility they’re planning on coming back to finish the job.”

  Crap. He was right.

  “I don’t have any reason to think you’re a danger to the human population, but until we have time to observe and see how this thing plays out, you don’t go anywhere alone. We’ll see how things look once we have your test results. You and Dallas were together before. No one will question you staying over there. It’s a good cover, at least until we can get that blood sample to the Council and get some answers.” He turned to West. “Send out word to the pack. I want patrols beefed up around the clock, and then in between, we’re going to have to work double time convincing Tall-Dark-and-Sullen to trust us. Someone pulls him out of that room three times a day. Take him running. Throw him in front of the TV in the game room and kick his ass at Fortnite. I’ll even sign off on taking him into town as long as it’s daytime and we’re not in the transmission window. I don’t care if he likes it or not. Sooner or later, he’ll decide we aren’t the enemy.”

  * * *

  “I don’t need a bodyguard.”

  “I prefer boytoy. And like we both don’t know you’re really here to guard my ass.”

  Letting the screen door bang shut, I growled at Dallas’s back. Chuckling, he dropped my go-bag on his leather sectional and led the way down the hall to the kitchen.

  Located on the corner two blocks from the old pink granite courthouse downtown, Dallas’s three-story home in the historic district had wide wraparound porches and old white columns. Its big green lawn went on for miles, tickling between your toes on hot summer nights as the fireflies and bullfrogs were just starting to come out. There were even two lovely old live oaks that shaded the front walk out to the street.

  He’d bought the property as a foreclosure and started renovations on the weekends with the help of Brody, West and Cal. And of course, yours truly. Frosting cupcakes taught you a thing or two about handling a caulking gun. Several walls had been knocked out, opening up a spacious front entryway and living area with soft cream walls. The original staircase and hardwood floors had been restored and stained a warm rosewood, with plump cushions placed in the lovely bay windows facing out over the street. While most of the upstairs was still a mess, the kitchen had been refinished in stainless and white quartz with warm cherrywood cabinets and a window over the farmhouse sink overlooking a little back garden.

  “I still don’t see why we couldn’t hang out at my place.”

  Yanking open the refrigerator, Dallas tossed me a bottle of water. I caught it one-handed. “Okay, first? Fifty-five-inch flat screen.”

  “Yeah, last time we watched CSI, I was really feeling those up close and personal morgue scenes.”

  “Two. Just got the first floor wired for security.”

  “My apartment has security.”

  “Your creepy landlord shooting at rats from his balcony doesn’t count.”

  “Pretty sure it does in Texas.”

  “Point for the lady.” He twisted the cap off a sweet tea. “Three. I just stocked up on groceries.”

  “Ha!” I leaned across the counter, tapping him on the end of the nose. “Bet you don’t have—”

  “Dr. Pepper, marshmallow crème, graham crackers—”

  “Stalker, much?”

  “Um, prepared. No way are we making another 3 a.m. hangry-run to the gas station because we’ve both got the post-shift shakes and someone’s wolf has to eat her weight in s’mores.”

  “Once. I did that once.”

  He held my gaze, eyes the sparkling cerulean blue of the sky on a perfect summer day. My stomach did a flip.

  When I swayed in place, Dallas came around the island and felt my forehead. “Sit. I’ll put together the lasagna. We can start with a big salad and some fresh bread while it bakes. Carbs will do you good.”

  Mouth watering, I propped my elbows on the counter, watching while he lined a flat glass baking dish with noodles, layered on creamy ricotta, basil and parmesan, and topped everything with a savory homemade tomato beef sauce. There was something beautiful about seeing Dallas move around a kitchen, about watching the flex of his forearms as he chopped lettuce and thick tomato wedges, cracked pepper and tossed in sage, oregano and thyme without ever needing to measure a thing. It was maybe the only time he ever seemed calm, the rare stolen moment the voices of doubt quieted and I saw the man he’d spent nine years struggling to become peeking out from cracks in his armor. When Dallas Caldwell cared, he showed it with food.

  After a few minutes, the smell of Italian cheese and tomatoes began to drift from the oven. The sun was sinking down behind the row of century old trees lining Pecan Street, buttery yellow and orange rays warming the kitchen walls. Dallas dished up two bowls of salad with croutons and Ranch dressing.

  We clinked forks. I poked at an olive. “I’m not staying locked up.”

  “You and me both.”

  “We need answers.”

  “Something’s bothering me. We know when vampires drink from werewolves, it causes irreparable tissue damage. They can’t tolerate the
lycan virus the way we can.”

  “Right.” I sipped my iced tea.

  “So do you really believe a pathogen that could sicken one of them could cross over to one of us?”

  “Why not? You hear about viruses making the jump across species all the time. And they could have been developing some superbug in their labs. They’ve been abducting shifters off the streets of Austin for over a year now. Maybe that’s what they’ve been working on.”

  “They’ve been taking females. That’s not what you do if your goal is biological warfare.” He paused. “You don’t think—”

  “They can’t reproduce with us. We have a century and a half of evidence saying so. Even human-vampire offspring doesn’t survive.”

  After a moment, Dallas’s eyes flicked to my face. “The swelling’s gone down. Any change?”

  “Maybe. It’s hard to explain. Some of my senses are starting to come back, but it still feels like my wolf is trapped in an isolation tank, unable to claw its way out.”

  “Let’s hope that means whatever they hit you with isn’t permanent.” A beat passed. “Before I forget, Ethan texted. He and Hayden are bringing over your car.”

  “They came by the bakery last week to put in an order for a custom cake for the mating ceremony this Thursday.”

  Dallas stabbed a tomato wedge. “You cool with that?”

  Shrugging, I reached over and speared one of his olives, tempted to tell him Hayden had texted weeks before, asking if I would meet her for coffee. I hadn’t responded. Inevitably we would have to see each other. The pack was too small to avoid it. Still, I was about as eager to see whatever skull and crossbones number Ethan would come up with for the top of my latte as I was to watch them eye-fuck each other across the counter at Dark.