Wolf Born

by Linda Thomas-Sundstrom

  Colton’s mouth was reaffirming his promise as the ground rippled beneath their feet. The earth seemed to be warning them of supernatural trespassers getting closer and closer, of other beasts in the landscape rushing in.

  For a few seconds, though, stolen from time and backed by the exquisite seduction of her lover’s mouth, Rosalind began to believe they could do this, that somehow, it would work out.

  In Colton, there was hope.

  The second his mouth left hers, blackness descended.

  Blinded by the shock of losing what she held so dear, Rosalind tore herself from her lover and spun around to confront whatever was out there preventing this future.

  To confront the advance of five fanged blood seekers that would mess with her for reasons of their own.

  * * *

  Vampire stink flashed like a yellow beacon in the dark.

  Colton watched Rosalind twist away from him, her body already half covered in fur and strung tight with tension. She tore through the brush, toward the awful odor, leaving him standing there, staring. Then, as though he’d been infused with a shot of liquid adrenaline, he called up his wulf.

  His beast came on like thunder rolling down a runway, hard and fast, in a transformation that left him panting. Sinew snapped. Tiny bones broke and realigned as his flesh expanded. His blood began to boil, as if he had swallowed a furnace.

  The whole wulf universe rushed forward to banish what was left of the human. For an indeterminate amount of time, there was nothing but the sound of his pulse accelerating, and then something inside him screamed for him to take a breath.

  An awareness of the position of the moon came to him, as did the direction of the wind that ruffled his white fur. Animal smells crashed in, and the foul odor of evil at its basest.

  The beast’s heat took the edge off his pain. Power replaced it. On legs like steel, he took off after his mate, angry, hungry, with the beast’s undivided attention locked on the path the she-wulf had taken.

  He was fast and incredibly fleet, and caught sight of Rosalind before a full minute had passed. She made audible sounds that reached him like tortured syllables, but if Rosalind was speaking, he didn’t understand the language. The possibility of this being some sort of vamp communication made him angrier.

  There came an answering cry to her jabber. More of a shriek, really. Rosalind had lunged upward on her Night Wulf’s powerful hind legs to dislodge a vampire from a stunted tree, and had the pathetic bag of bones on the ground before he reached her.

  Clawlike hands tore at her. Bottomless black eyes refused to close as she straddled the creature, roaring her displeasure.

  And then another vampire hit the dirt on Colton’s right, followed by a third.

  They were lightning fast. Like wind, Rosalind had told him, but they were more like a blur of dark on dark than a streak of displaced air. The blurs danced and swirled, taunting him, never in one place long enough for him to land a swing. The monsters seemed to suck all the air out of the area, though vampires didn’t breathe.

  He caught one by spinning on one heel, and with a well-placed canine of his own, tore through the skinless flesh. Black blood dribbled down his chin to dampen and discolor his snowy-white fur. A little jolt went through him, as if he had bitten through an electrical cord.

  The wulf knew what to do, and the man inside it went along for the ride with his human thoughts intact. Help Rosalind. Keep my promise.

  Given that, and the powers he and the Night Wulf beside him were seemingly able to access once their bodies were in sync, this attack should have been laughable. Only five vampires, total, against two furred-up creatures that only existed in legends?

  Yet Colton’s attention was divided by the demand to see to Rosalind and the need to watch her back. So when the vamp in his hands exploded into a storm of putrid gray ash, he jumped onto the chest of the freak she had on the ground, tore at the branch above his head and, with the jagged edge of his makeshift stake, went for the spot that would effectively terminate that monster’s useless, lifeless life.

  Rosalind was already on the third. Colton grabbed the fourth, wondering briefly about the location of the other remaining bloodsucker.

  But there was no stopping these wulfs.

  With uncanny speed and a raw, unleashed fury, Rosalind exploded the flailing vampire in her grip. Colton took care of his. When the dust had settled, they stood with their backs pressed together in the small, muddy clearing.

  A slight smoky smell reached them. Colton glanced around, preparing for the next onslaught. But no other vampire arrived to try its hand at boxing with a ghost and a wulf-Banshee-vampire hybrid. In fact, no further sound reached them at all.

  Colton looked to Rosalind.

  Her dark eyes looked back.

  In the distance, a low rumble started up. Quickly, the noise got closer, louder, becoming mixed with the silky sound of brush being trampled.

  Rosalind bolted—not away from the oncoming rumble, but toward it.

  Here we go again, Colton thought, tearing through every curse his Miami PD partners had taught him.

  When he rounded a grove of trees, he saw a dark SUV skidding to a stop. At the same moment Rosalind landed on its roof with a metal-denting clank of her ankle chain.

  “Get in,” Jared Kirk shouted from the driver’s seat. “It’s not what you think. The vampires weren’t alone. There are others here.”

  Colton knocked Rosalind off the roof with a swipe of his left arm. As she dropped to the ground, they both shifted shape. He wrenched the door open. In a chilling replay of their escape from the Landau compound, Rosalind preceded him into the backseat, and then her father, grimacing with pain as his hands yanked at the steering wheel, stepped on the gas.

  Chapter 21

  The SUV swerved on a soggy section of the path, then righted its direction, heading, Colton guessed, back toward the house. Kirk was hunched over the steering wheel. His back was heavily bandaged. His knuckles were white.

  “Others?” Colton demanded. “What the hell do you mean?”

  Before Kirk could answer, Rosalind made a soft sound beneath her breath, as though she had an idea about what her father had meant.

  Her face, colorless before, had gone translucent. Her skin seemed thinner in the light of the dashboard, showing every one of her fine lavender veins. Eyes, dark just moments before, flashed with a hint of their former emerald green.

  “Others?” Colton repeated more forcefully without taking his eyes from her. “Rosalind said there were five vampires. We’re missing one of them. Is that what you mean?”

  “Not vampires,” was Kirk’s slurred reply.

  “Not werewolves, either,” Colton snarled in frustration. “There’s no moon. So what does that leave?”

  “Demons,” Kirk answered in a whisper that no one other than a Were could have heard.

  Colton’s insides churned as if his beast had grabbed hold of him. His claws, an automatic result of that strain, punctured the leather seat.

  “You’re kidding,” he managed to say.

  “You’ll just have to take my word, wulf.”

  Rosalind’s avoided his eyes. Her features were benign, showing no emotion at all. They could have been taking a ride for the enjoyment of taking a ride, for all that look told him.

  “What does everyone bloody-well know that I don’t?” he shouted, so very tired of being the last one to the party. “Demons? What makes you believe that?”

  Kirk didn’t have time to answer. As they spun wheels past the garage, the acrid smell of smoke grew stronger. Something was on fire. It was the house. The roof was blazing with flames, and had partially caved in. The porch was an inferno.

  Beside him, Rosalind made a small sound of regret deep in her chest. Both that sound and her skin’s transluc
ency made her seem terribly vulnerable, young and small.

  He wanted to hold her, now more than ever. For all her former fierceness, his lover’s sudden sadness was like a strike to his own heart.

  “To hell with this,” he said.

  “Don’t,” her father warned. “Colton, listen to me. Do not touch her. Please. For her sake. For yours.”

  The idea that he should listen to her father and go against everything he felt at the moment made him take another swipe at the seat. As the leather tore, Rosalind’s eyes met his.

  She was trembling, and chilled to the bone without her fur. Her slender hands covered part of her face.

  He just could not take much more of this, because he knew that she couldn’t take much more. He didn’t see how things could possibly get worse.

  “Demons did that? Started the fire?” He felt uncommonly winded with the return of the pain that had been pardoned by his wulf.

  Jared Kirk had gone silent, the last of his energy all used up. Nevertheless, the Were had found enough energy to try to remove Rosalind from this new mess.

  Kirk had loved Rosalind’s mother and had guarded her from this sort of thing for years. No doubt he saw reflections of Rosalind’s mother in Rosalind; maybe even in this current replay of events. Hunters after pelts and gators, Rosalind had told him in regard to her mother’s death. But odds were that wasn’t true.

  The stiffness of Kirk’s neck told Colton that the elder Were had been through all of this before.

  Colton faced Rosalind helplessly, hurting for her, for himself and for her father. He pondered where they might go if hell’s doors had been opened for some reason, and why vampires and demons were prolonging this mess.

  His heart shattered into pieces too fine to easily reunite when Rosalind’s hands fell from her face and he saw a tear slide down her frozen, expressionless cheek.

  “I’m sorry. You’ll have to drive,” Kirk suddenly announced. Pulling the car to the side of the road, he slumped forward. “I’m not quite myself.”

  Colton was beside him in a flash. Warning Rosalind to stay back with a guarded glance, he felt for the Were’s pulse. “Weak, but there.”

  After lifting the big Were and placing him in the back of the SUV, Colton got behind the wheel. He allowed himself one comment on the issue facing them all.

  “Damn it to hell and back, where was he taking us?”

  “Back to the Landaus’,” Rosalind replied, keeping vigil over her father. “Who else might know what to do with creatures like us?”

  There was, Colton thought, just no arguing with that.

  * * *

  The lack of scraping sounds meant that Colton was keeping his claws to himself. Rosalind sensed his anger and his frustration.

  Her suggestion to go Judge Landau’s had been met with a grunt of disapproval, though Colton was already driving at breakneck speed in that direction.

  They had gone a good distance before he spoke again. “Why demons, Rosalind? Do you know anything about this?”

  “Sorry,” she said.

  Another span of silence followed that she was afraid to break.

  “I’m not sure Landau will want us,” Colton finally said. “Let alone know what to do about recent circumstances. We will have to tell him everything. You know that.”

  His eyes were bright in the rearview mirror.

  “The judge can call the elders back if they’ve gone,” she said. “One of them has to know what this means.”

  “Demons, Rosalind?”

  “It isn’t your fault. None of it is. If I had an entity inside me all along, it would have eventually come out anyway, in one circumstance or another.”

  “But it was me you followed that night.”

  “Yes. So what if I was supposed to follow you, and there is something at work here other than chance?”

  She could see him thinking about that.

  “I’m changing,” he said. “Without the wulf’s power, I’m barely hanging on. It’s as though I’m growing thinner, losing substance. Strange, isn’t it, when you’re gaining substance? I’d almost tend to think you were finding mine.”

  “I’d release you if I knew how,” she told him, her stomach in knots at the thought of that. “I’d break the bond. You don’t deserve this.”

  “Your father didn’t ask to be released,” he said. “Do you imagine I would want to?”

  “Fathers have to love their daughters, even if they’re different.”

  “He must have loved your mother tremendously.”

  Rosalind considered his remark.

  “Like me,” she said. “My mother was like me. That’s what he told you.”

  The tension in Colton’s tone had been negligible, and meant that he was withholding something. A thought, or another theory?

  “I’m sorry,” Colton repeated.

  She climbed to the seat beside him. The leather felt cold on her bare legs. “What are you thinking?”

  He gave her a sideways glance. “You’re not the only one.”

  She let that settle. “Night Wulf,” she said. “My mother was one.”

  “You did hear what your father told me?”

  She nodded.

  “Then you know there was no way you could have avoided what’s inside you,” he said. “Yet you are blaming yourself.”

  Each time Colton pointed the car in a new direction, Rosalind groped for new meaning. Her mother had been a Death-caller. She was like her mother. In a strange, roundabout way, this brought some comfort. A little, anyway.

  She moved her foot. The chain attached to it jangled against the floorboards. “Just in case, my father said. I suppose he meant to keep me from going after the vampires like the rebellious idiot I have always been, but I took this chain to mean that he thought I was the monster who needed to be shackled.”

  “God, Rosalind...” her white wulf said, without being able to finish the sentiment.

  “Here’s what else he said, at the Landaus’. ‘I conferred with the elders, fearing what your future might hold. They had to know about you, and why I hadn’t presented you to one of their sons.’”

  Banshee. Death-caller. Night Wulf. Shape-shifter. She was all of those things, and had to be watched for the signs of something odd making an unscheduled appearance, in the way her mother probably had to be watched.

  “I am like my mother,” she said, solemnly, swiveling on the seat to get a better view of Colton’s silhouette. “Maybe my mother wasn’t killed by random hunters or by accident.”

  With utter and complete sadness, her lover, her protector, her mate, said, “Maybe not.”

  “Not that it makes me feel a whole lot better,” she remarked, waiting anxiously to see the lights of Miami that would eventually appear in the distance, and hoping demons were really a myth.

  Chapter 22

  By the time they reached Miami, silence had fallen between them. Colton headed for the Landau estate less eagerly than he would have imagined under the circumstances. He had no idea how this freakish little party of tired, filthy, undressed beings would be received by another wulf’s pack. For the Landau family and their elegant associates, the hasty return of a ghost and a Night Wulf might come as a shock.

  Hell, he already owed them more than he could ever pay back.

  When Rosalind finally spoke from the rear of the car, where she again sat with her prone father, he guessed it was because she had seen and recognized the pillars of stone marking the Landau gates.

  “Will you stay near me?” she asked.

  “I won’t let you out of my sight,” he replied. “For any reason short of...”

  “Death?”

  “Yes.”

  The tall iron gates were closed to intruders. As the SUV pulled up to
them a siren went off in a single burst of sound, and more lights came on. Immediately, two men flanked the vehicle, appearing from nowhere and looking as dangerous as the rest of Landau’s Weres had been when in man form.

  Colton wasn’t sure what he’d say or how he would explain his presence here. However, instead of engaging Colton in conversation or asking for identification of any kind—which would have been impossible for Colton to produce anyway—the Were nearest the driver’s-side window nodded his head, said, “Killion, right?” and stepped aside.

  As the massive gates swung open, the overhead lights dimmed back to a wattage more reminiscent of starlight than a prison yard. Reluctantly, Colton pressed on at the slowest pace possible, in the SUV’s lowest gear. With that kind of introduction—the siren and the lights—Judge Landau and everyone else here were sure to know they were coming. It was also obvious that Landau felt he needed this kind of beefed-up protection.

  Colton dreaded this visit. Yet Rosalind’s safety, as well as her father’s, had to outweigh his own discomfort.

  Tonight, after hand-to-hand combat with vampires, finding out that the she-wulf he’d mated with was actually some sort of throwback to a Celtic death spirit, and that a bunch of demons, unseen but felt, had burned Rosalind’s house down...facing the Landau pack in a prettily decorated living room with explanations about their arrival had to circle the bottom of his all-time worst wish list.

  Landau had been left with rabid vampires on the rampage the last time they had met. The guards and the lights were a symptom of Landau’s estimation of more trouble brewing. Smart man, Judge Landau.

  “We’re back,” Colton announced.

  Two more Weres awaited them halfway up the mile-long driveway, wearing dark clothes and carrying weapons. Colton was surprised to see that those weapons were crossbows similar in design to the one Rosalind’s father had carried.

  Vampire trouble, then.

  The Weres didn’t stop him, nodding as he passed them by, but Colton wanted to speak to these guys. Landau’s personal guard force, members of the Landau werewolf pack who were more like himself in his Miami PD gig, were doing their bit to keep the peace in a city that had no idea there were werewolves in their midst. Or vampires.