The Midnight Hunt

by L. L. Raand

  “Harder, oh God, I am so close and I can’t…”

  “Massage your clit,” Niki growled. Anya’s hand flew between her legs. Niki fondled Anya’s breasts. “That’s right. That’s good. Keep doing that.” Sweat matted Niki’s hair and her stomach muscles spasmed. Her glands were about to burst. She spread her legs and crushed her clitoris against Anya’s tight ass. Groaning, she pounded them both to the edge.

  Her sex glands throbbed viciously. They’d empty soon.

  “It’s coming,” Niki gasped. “It’s coming.”

  Anya drove herself up and down on Niki’s hand and frantically manipulated her clitoris. “Help me. Help me. Make me come.”

  Niki wrapped her arm around Anya, jerked her up against her chest, and sank her teeth into Anya’s shoulder. The dominant bite flooded Anya with pheromones and spiked her release. Niki spent when Anya cried out, pleasure pain ripping her apart.

  Long moments later, they collapsed. Niki shuddered as she lay protectively over Anya’s back. Anya made contented sounds when Niki stroked her arms and turned her face for Niki’s kisses.

  “All right now?” Niki nibbled gently on Anya’s swollen lower lip, then licked the spot.

  “Mmm.” Obviously struggling to stay awake, Anya flicked her tongue over Niki’s neck. “You need more?”

  Niki chuckled. “If I do, I’ll be back.”

  “Good.” Anya’s lids fluttered closed.

  Moving carefully, Niki eased from the bed and let herself out.

  Dawn was not far off. The summer heat had given way during the night to mountain coolness, and the chill felt good on her heated skin. Her craving had been eased, but want still rippled under her skin. Fortunately, she was close to her own quarters. She needed a cold shower and a few hours’ sleep. But first, she needed to check on the Alpha. Sylvan had remained at the Compound instead of returning to her own den after their run, and Max and Lara were standing guard.

  She retrieved her clothes, along with her phone clipped to the waistband of her cargo pants, from the bench where she’d left them earlier and hastily dressed. If Sylvan had needed her, she would have reached her mind-to-mind. And if the Alpha had been in danger, she would have sensed that no matter where she was. The only thing that could have pulled her from her sex frenzy would have been Sylvan’s call.

  The Compound was waking, and Niki nodded to sentries heading to their stations, adolescents making their noisy way to the mess hall, and a number of mated pairs emerging naked from the forest after an early morning run. Niki acknowledged the mates in passing but was careful not to let her gaze linger. Skin was as natural a covering to the Weres as their pelts, and nudity was ignored other than for the appreciative glance of one healthy animal to another—providing the Were being “appreciated” was unmated. Mated pairs were sexually exclusive, aggressively territorial, and violently possessive. Even a nondominant Were would attack a dominant if he or she felt the mate bond was threatened. And a dominant Were in mating frenzy could not be contained short of death—logic and reason giving way to the far more powerful and primitive instinct to preserve the mate bond.

  Niki vaulted up the steps to the main lodge and crossed the broad porch. The entrance opened into a grand hall, with the library and Pack archives on one side and the gathering room with a huge stone fireplace, sofas, and chairs on the other. Sylvan could often be found there when she wasn’t in her office on the second floor. Lara stood guard at the top of the sweeping, central wooden staircase. Max was just outside the closed, carved double doors of Sylvan’s office. When Niki reached the second-floor balcony that circled the grand hall below, she motioned for them to follow down the hall and away from Sylvan’s door.

  “Has she slept?” Niki asked.

  “No,” Max grumbled. His eyes narrowed and his nostrils flared as he surveyed Niki. “Looks like you didn’t either.”

  “Jealous?” Niki grinned, knowing both Max and Lara could scent her pheromones and traces of Anya’s. Because she and Anya weren’t mate bonded, she didn’t carry the unique third scent—the chemical fusion of two Weres’ hormonal signatures that branded them as a pair for life.

  “Damn right,” Max snarled. Lara grimaced in agreement.

  Niki looked them both over, picking up on something other than the usual sexual rivalry that was natural among unmated dominants.

  She remembered how she’d felt after the run with Sylvan, a craving so intense she’d been nearly mindless. Max and Lara would have borne the full force of Sylvan’s pheromones while they guarded her, since there were no other Weres around to help absorb it. Lara’s whiskey brown eyes were wolf-flecked and her skin was sex-sheened. Max had an admirable bulge in his jeans.

  “I’ll get Andrew over here,” Niki said. “We’ll stand guard. You two go find someone to tangle with.”

  “I’m fine,” Lara snapped, clearly insulted that Niki was relieving her from her post.

  “So am I.” Max’s canines lengthened.

  Niki growled, pushing into their space, making them both back up. They were compatriots, but there could be only one leader where Sylvan’s safety was concerned, and she was Sylvan’s second. “I need your heads clear or you won’t be fit to guard the Alpha. Now go before I make you go.”

  Silence fell while Niki stared them down.

  “You’re right.” Max shrugged and grinned, his grin the only concession to Niki’s supremacy. “The craving is riding me harder than usual.”

  Lara shivered. “I thought it was just me. I’m so hungry Max is starting to look good.”

  Max laughed. They were close friends but both too dominant to tangle. He tried to put her in a headlock. Lara blocked his arm and punched him in the stomach. Max laughed again and the tension broke.

  Niki’s warning bells were ringing even louder. Anya had said the same thing. The craving’s been riding me so hard for two days. She threw her arms around their shoulders. Max brushed his cheek over hers. Lara leaned her head on Niki’s chest. “Take a few hours to settle your wolves. Sylvan isn’t going anywhere today. I’ll call you if I need you.”

  Max and Lara reluctantly left and Niki called Andrew to stand guard. Then she knocked on Sylvan’s door.

  “Alpha?”

  “Come.”

  Sylvan’s office was lined with bookshelves on one side, another stone fireplace taking up the entire opposite wall, and a bay of floor-to-ceiling windows behind her desk on the far side of the room. The roughhewn plank floors were covered with thick earth-toned rugs, and a pair of forest green leather chairs sat in front of her dark cherrywood desk.

  Sylvan leaned back in a heavy wood and leather desk chair, a laptop computer in front of her. She’d donned a plain white cotton shirt and rolled the sleeves up, but hadn’t bothered to button it. The sweeping muscles of her chest and soft inner curves of her breasts glowed with a fine pheromone mist in the dim lamplight. Her eyes were more wolf-gold than blue. A rush of sex and power hit Niki so hard her sex contracted painfully. Sylvan’s tussle with her earlier, the run, the hunt, might have been enough to blunt Sylvan’s needs, but she was Alpha, and required more than just that vigorous physical release to vent the hormones cascading through her. No wonder Max and Lara had been suffering. Niki had been well satisfied with Anya, but Sylvan’s call had her in desperate need of more. She couldn’t believe the Alpha wasn’t close to feral with frenzy.

  “How’s Misha?” Niki asked, her throat dry and raspy.

  “She’s not awake yet,” Sylvan grated.

  “Fever?”

  “Not the last time I checked.”

  “That’s good.” Niki considered diplomacy and then decided that was last thing Sylvan needed from her. “You either need to stay in your den or take someone to bed.”

  Sylvan stood abruptly. The top button of her low-cut jeans was open, the etched muscles in her stomach tense and tight. A line of silver glinted in the cleft between her rigid abdominals. “I don’t remember asking your counsel, Imperator.”

&nbs
p; Niki’s pulse spiked at the edge in her Alpha’s voice, but she stood her ground. “You’re broadcasting to everyone in scent distance. The guards can’t concentrate. I’m concerned for your safety.” At Sylvan’s furious expression, Niki spread her arms. “I just walked in the room and the only thing I can think about is finding a female.”

  “Assign mated guards, then.”

  “None of the centuri are mated, you know that, Alpha.” Niki sucked in a breath, forcing down the craving beginning to blur the edges of her reason. “Even you won’t be able to function efficiently much longer without release. If you don’t want any of the Pack, I will—”

  “No.” Sylvan cleared the desk in one fluid leap, barely restraining her urge to take Niki to the floor as she landed inches from her. After her run with Niki, she’d headed directly to her office because it was the closest place to sequester herself. Her helplessness over Misha had left her with an uncontrollable need to dominate, an instinctive need to reestablish her claim as protector and assert her leadership over the Pack. She craved a female under her, submitting to her will. Her system was primed, broadcasting her dominance, and any unmated Were who crossed her path would attempt to submit to her. She wasn’t certain she could resist, and she did not want to tangle out of frustration and anger.

  She was the Alpha. She had to have enough control to lead the Pack no matter how great the pressure, how unrelenting the stress. She owed it to them. “You play a dangerous game, Niki.”

  “You call, Alpha.” Niki pressed her open mouth to Sylvan’s neck and licked her, tasting the primal forest thick with sweet pine and dark passions. She quivered, her instinct to submit warring with her natural dominance. Her sex pulsed with readiness, and she moaned, rubbing against Sylvan’s bare torso. She pressed her palm to Sylva’s abdomen, claws extruded. “I answer. I am not playing.”

  Sylvan closed her eyes, shivering with the heat of Niki’s mouth gliding over her throat. Niki’s claws pricked her skin and her nipples tightened. Her sex flooded, her clitoris swelled, and in another second, she would take Niki. They would both regret it, not because what they might do would be unnatural, but because it would destroy their natural order. She skimmed both hands over Niki’s shoulders and down her arms, then gently pushed Niki away. “Leave me. Now. Go.”

  Niki’s hunter green eyes were glazed, her skin flushed and sexshimmering.

  “I willingly submit. Please.”

  “No, you don’t,” Sylvan snarled. “Leave me.”

  Sylvan reached around Niki, yanked open the heavy doors, and shoved her out into the hall. After slamming and locking the door, she leapt to the lead-paned windows behind her desk, flung them open, and threw herself through. Her wolf landed soundlessly and in an instant had left the Compound, and temptation, behind.

  ———

  “Dr. McKennan?” The ER charge nurse knocked softly on Drake’s call room door. “Are you awake?”

  “Yes,” Drake replied gruffly. They’d cleared the board of patients shortly after four a.m. and she’d retreated to her on-call room. She didn’t expect to sleep, but she needed the solitude to sort through her riotous feelings. She couldn’t get the episode with Sylvan Mir out of her mind.

  Whenever she recalled the ferocious way Sylvan had attacked Misha’s wound, as if she could defeat the injury through sheer force of will, Drake shuddered with excitement. She understood the physiology of an adrenaline high—she’d experienced it frequently after an intense life-and-death struggle. And those few moments in that cubicle surrounded by the unbridled aggression of the Weres, particularly the Were Alpha, had been some of the most exhilarating moments of her life. What she couldn’t so easily explain was how sexually aroused the episode had left her.

  Hours later, the image of Sylvan’s eyes glowing wolf-gold and the gleam of lethal canines against her sensuous lips made Drake’s clit quicken. Lying alone in the dark, she couldn’t deny her arousal and she couldn’t pretend ignorance of the source. Sylvan Mir fascinated her—beautiful, powerful, viciously aggressive, exquisitely tender. Drake shifted restlessly, so agitated even her skin was hypersensitive.

  “Drake?” the nurse asked again.

  Drake bolted upright. God, she needed to get control of herself.

  “Yes. I’m sorry. I’m coming.” Running her hands quickly through her hair and checking to be sure that her scrub shirt was tucked into her jeans, she pulled open the door. “Problem?”

  Pam Liu glanced worriedly down the hall. “A Detective Gates is asking for you. I told her you weren’t available, but she insisted on speaking to you now. Said it couldn’t wait until end of shift. I’m sorry.”

  “That’s all right,” Drake said. “Where is she? I’ll talk to her.”

  “I put her in the private waiting room.”

  “Okay. If you need me, come and get me.” Drake stopped in the small kitchen to pour herself a cup of coffee, then walked to the far end of the L-shaped ER to the family consultation room. It was nothing more than an exam room that had been converted, by adding a round table and a few chairs, into a place where staff could speak with families of seriously ill patients. The walls were still institutional gray, the floors a nondescript patterned tile, the lights inset square fluorescents. Harsh, bare, and barren. Definitely not a warm and cheery place. The woman waiting for her looked right at home. Her face—though flawlessly featured with delicately arched black brows over midnight eyes, narrow nose, and elegantly refined bones—appeared as cold and emotionless as a magnificently carved marble statue.

  “Drake McKennan,” Drake said, extending her hand. “I’m one of the ER attendings.”

  “Detective Jody Gates,” the woman said, rising to return the handshake. She was dressed in tight, tailored black pants that shimmered with some kind of metallic thread woven into the fabric, a body-hugging dark silk shirt, and black leather blazer. A round gold shield glinted at her narrow waist. Her fingers were long, strong, and cool.

  “Coffee?” Drake lifted an eyebrow toward the cup she held in her hand. “I have to say, it’s pretty bad.”

  “No, thank you.”

  Drake pulled out a straight-backed plain wooden chair and sat down across from the detective. She spoke to hundreds of people every week and considered herself very good at reading nonverbal cues. She couldn’t get a thing from this woman who sat absolutely still, appraising her. She might have been looking at a painting. She sipped her coffee and waited.

  “I’m investigating a report of a stabbing in Washington Park around ten p.m. last evening,” the detective finally said. “I understand you treated a girl for a stab wound about that time.”

  “Your information isn’t quite correct, Detective,” Drake replied, thinking furiously. She hadn’t filled out any paperwork because she hadn’t actually treated Misha. She wasn’t certain why the police were involved, but instinctively, she wanted to protect not only Misha, but Sylvan Mir. The reaction didn’t make any sense, but she trusted her gut feelings. “I did not treat anyone with a stab wound earlier. What’s this all about?”

  The detective leaned forward, resting her arms on the table and folding her hands. Her voice was perfectly modulated, calm, and seemingly unperturbed. “What’s your relationship with Sylvan Mir?”

  “I’m sorry. If I had a relationship with Ms. Mir, I don’t think it would be anyone’s business. But I’m afraid I don’t know her.”

  “You’re not acquainted?”

  “Not personally, no.”

  Detective Gates pushed a folded newspaper that had been lying next to her right arm across the table. With one efficient flip of her finger, she opened it to the front page. “This says otherwise.”

  The photo above the fold on the front page of the Albany Star, the local version of the National Enquirer, showed Misha lying on a stretcher in the examining room with Drake holding her down. In profile, Sylvan Mir, with canines gleaming, snarled in rage at Drake.

  The headline in 50-point block letters read: WERE COUNCILOR
LOSES COOL—ANIMAL REGULATION, NOT RIGHTS?

  “Jesus,” Drake muttered.

  “Would you like to amend your story?” the detective asked in her preternaturally calm voice.

  Preternaturally calm. Classically beautiful. Emotionally enigmatic.

  Cool. Literally.

  Drake took her time studying the detective, who stared back at her with a faint smile, her eyes fathomless obsidian pools. Finally, Drake said, “Gates. You hear that name in the news a lot these days. I don’t suppose by any wild chance you’re related to…”

  “Councilor Zachary Gates is my father,” Jody said.

  Zachary Gates was the U.S. Special Councilor on Vampire Affairs.

  Sylvan Mir’s counterpart in the Praetern Coalition.

  “Does that make you a friend or foe?” Drake asked, nodding to the newspaper.

  “That makes me a detective. Did the girl have Were fever?”

  Drake glanced at her watch. 5:50. The sun was up. She didn’t know this detective and had no reason to trust her, but she couldn’t control her automatic surge of concern. “Shouldn’t you…uh…be somewhere safer?”

  Detective Gates smiled, a full smile that turned her from simply beautiful into breathtakingly spectacular. “I’m not dead, Dr. McKennan. Exposure to direct sunlight gives me a headache and occasionally makes me nauseous. But it doesn’t kill me within a matter of minutes. It won’t—not until I animate.”

  “So you’re—forgive me if I use the wrong term—a living Vampire?”

  “We prefer the term pre-animate, but basically, yes.” Jody tapped the newspaper. “The adolescent in the photograph. She’s a Were, correct?”

  “Yes,” Drake said. “Look, I really didn’t treat her. I don’t know what’s wrong with her.”

  “Have you seen any other adolescents with Were fever within the last few months?”