Half Wolf

by Linda Thomas-Sundstrom

  Kaitlin threw Rena another quick glance before replying. “My family was from Kerry, yes. Way back.”

  “Magical place, Kerry.” When Devlin’s lips upturned at the corners, Kaitlin wasn’t sure she liked the wryness of that grin.

  “What is it with the Irish?” Rena snapped without taking her eyes from Michael’s retreating backside. “You act like other Irish people are all long lost friends.”

  Devlin shrugged. “Ireland is a small country.”

  “You can always go back there,” Rena suggested.

  “Why bother, when everyone has come here?” Devlin’s grin widened. His rapt attention made Kaitlin more nervous than she already was. Even though these wolves were protecting her, she felt caged. She felt trapped by the thought of what might happen in two days’ time when the moon was full. She now had vampires and rogue werewolves after her. How unlucky could a girl get?

  Cade wasn’t going to let her go anywhere without a chaperone, and she knew better than to try to shake these Weres again. Doing so might prove to be a suicidal move with so many alternate species hiding in the dark. In this case, werewolves were the safer bet.

  Looking at Michael left her feeling uneasy. Like the physical war going on in her body between fever and ice, she faced another kind of quandary. She wanted to stay away from Michael to avoid the emergence of her wolf, while at the same time she mourned his departure.

  *

  Lycan was a distinct scent that most Weres recognized long before seeing the bearer of that scent. Actually, it was more like blood calling to blood, and a vibration that came off as a smell.

  Michael’s awareness told him this now as he filed details about this newcomer near the trees in his data banks.

  Lycan. Capable. Expensive clothes. Radiating a kind of power that depicts a position of authority.

  “Hello, Michael,” the Were said when Michael got within ten feet.

  This Lycan had a voice that matched his strong Were vibe.

  “You know me?” Michael paused to get a look at the stranger.

  “From a long time ago,” the Lycan said. “Your father told me to look you up when I got here.”

  “You know my father?”

  “I know Anderson Hunter well.”

  “Yet you came here unannounced.”

  The Were nodded. “That couldn’t be helped. We tracked our prey to this location and have just arrived in Clement. When I heard the alarm in the building over there, I came to investigate and saw you. I waited for you to approach so that I could introduce myself and apologize for intruding.”

  Michael said, “And you are?”

  “Dylan.”

  “From?”

  “Miami.”

  Michael’s memory churned up a name. “Judge Landau’s son?”

  “In the flesh, and sorry to have to reintroduce myself in this way.”

  Michael nodded. “I remember you.”

  “I was hoping you would. That makes things a whole hell of a lot easier.”

  The newcomer was tall, fair-complexioned and would be considered incredibly handsome by most of the women on the face of the earth, Michael had to admit after careful scrutiny. Dylan had long blond hair, very light in color, that would have hung to his shoulders if not tied back. Dressed in jeans, a black long-sleeve shirt and black boots, Dylan Landau gave an impression of being human at first glance, while probably not so completely human after a second look from someone who knew better. A hint of wolf was there, etched on Dylan’s face, sculpting his appearance.

  Michael did remember this guy. Dylan Landau was the pure-blooded offspring of the big Miami pack’s Alpha, a Were Michael’s father often associated with. Though Dylan was a few years older than Michael’s twenty-five, Michael recalled visiting the exclusive Landau compound on occasion and watching Dylan and his friends.

  “You chased prey here?” Michael asked.

  Dylan stepped forward. “I’ve been helping some friends track a rogue.”

  Michal wondered if Dylan’s rogue might be the same rogue he’d fought in the library, and waited to ask about that.

  “We’re three hours from Miami. That’s a long chase across many pack lines,” he said.

  Dylan shrugged. “This is personal for my friends, and therefore personal for me. Do you give us permission to be here?”

  Michael nodded. “Do you hunt a werewolf, or a vampire?”

  “Wolf.”

  “You know that wolf is here?” Michael asked.

  “Yes. He’s a fast, slippery sucker,” Dylan said. “This is someone you wouldn’t want to meet face-to-face or have hanging around. That alone warranted trespassing in your territory without advance notice.”

  Damn it, Michael silently swore. This was more bad news on a night already full of it.

  “I might have just seen that rogue. We need this right now about as much as we need a hole in the head, Dylan. We have had sudden vamp problems. They’ve appeared out of nowhere in numbers that, if tonight was an indication, are almost more than we can handle with a small pack like ours. And then a sick Were appears in a room full of people.”

  Dylan said, “Sick Were, you say? Probably wouldn’t be our guy, then.”

  “So we now have two strange Weres loose in Clement? Hell, what are the odds? Have you tracked your rogue to one place in particular?”

  “Somewhere in there.” Dylan waved at the closest buildings.

  “We just cleared out the old brick building. That rogue got away, injured.”

  “It’s as we feared, then,” Dylan said. “Our prey already has made some friends.”

  Michael ran a hand over his hair. “Who is this wolf you’re after?”

  “Name’s Chavez. He’s been caught several times on our home turf, only to manage to get away. The last time he fled, he ate his shirt in the back of a police car to get rid of evidence. He’s so slippery, nothing sticks.”

  Michael tried not to show too much concern with news that was so much worse than bad. “I’ve heard the name. Chavez makes the underground fight rings and creates his own little Were armies that kill cops.”

  “That’s the guy,” Dylan said. “A bad wolf that keeps on ticking.”

  “Who came with you on this hunt? Did you bring your own pack to try to catch the bastard?”

  “I came with two Weres directly connected to one of those fight rings. The first goes by the name of Scott. Adam Scott. Miami cop, and pack-mate. The second is a talented she-wolf whose brother was murdered by one of Chavez’s anti-cop fight-and-bite parties.”

  The news left Michael queasy.

  “Old grudges run deep,” Dylan went on. “The two wolves I travel with have scores to settle, which as we both know makes them twice as dangerous to an adversary, even if it is a notorious killer like Chavez. We got word that Chavez was heading this way and decided to do something to contain the problem.”

  Michael glanced around. Now that students were dispersing from the lawn by the library, he had a clear picture in his mind of the other visiting Weres in Dylan’s group. Besides Dylan, the she-wolf he’d mentioned was also a full-blooded Lycan. Adam Scott wasn’t.

  He caught no hint of Chavez or the rogue that had escaped from the library. If they were hiding, it was in a safe place.

  “Your friends are waiting by the side of the building,” he said.

  “Yes. We’re biding time until the people clear out.”

  “Just so you know, there are plenty of vampires willing to get in the way of anything you might do.”

  “So we trade,” Dylan suggested. “You help us and we help you.”

  Michael considered that suggestion. He wasn’t naive. His pack was comprised of a few strong Weres. Beside Dylan and his big-city friends, however, some of whom were cops and detectives in their day jobs, his own pack-mates were babes. Relative to the world of hardened supernaturally gifted criminals like this Chavez character, his pack would have to be doubly on guard and in top form.

  Then there was K
aitlin, the little rebel who refused to follow directions or stay put. Who knew what kind of trouble Kaitlin would get into with the full moon only two nights away? Chances were good that she’d need help with her transformation, and he wanted to be there for her.

  Luck hadn’t exactly come his way lately. He had thought about calling Miami for help with the onslaught of bloodsuckers, and now he didn’t need to. Help had just dropped into his backyard. The negative here was that the new Weres had brought a couple of bad guys with them. The worst sort of bad guys, as he’d just seen. And Chavez was rumored to be bad wolf number one for the creation of more dangerous rogue werewolves than anyone Michael had ever heard rumor of.

  “Michael?”

  Dylan was waiting for a reply to his question about working together and trading aid, and there was only one answer. For some reason trouble had picked quiet, rural Clement, Florida, for its next stomping ground. And that was just too damn bad for everybody.

  “Deal,” Michael said, seeing no viable alternative.

  *

  “Wolves.”

  Rena had said something but Kaitlin still couldn’t focus properly. The landscape around her had again fuzzed over, blurring her surroundings, needling her awareness with a message she couldn’t grasp. The moon was affecting her, too, though the rules werewolves went by told her that wasn’t possible.

  At least she was no longer the center of attention.

  Most of the students and library staff had gone. Only a handful of people milled around by the old building. The area wasn’t as empty as it seemed, though. Smells were magnified to form solid objects that she remembered from the dreams. The greenery of the trees. The dampness of grass. Everything the wind carried.

  There were ghosts. Things she could sense without seeing. Michael had gone to meet one of these formless entities and Kaitlin restlessly watched.

  The tension of the Weres beside her hadn’t eased. She wondered if they also just sensed the ghosts, or if they knew what was going on. Cade’s hand, on her arm, wasn’t motionless. Rena shifted her weight from foot to foot as if she was trying to make up her mind about what to do.

  The fact that there were no vampires present at the moment seemed like a gift from someone keeping tabs on her ability to handle things. Surely wolves knew how to deal with other wolves? Michael had done so in the library.

  “Good guys have arrived,” Devlin said, as if he knew that for sure.

  “I certainly hope so,” Rena remarked, “since something is going down.”

  Kaitlin’s vision cleared somewhat as a figure walked toward them. Her heart skipped ahead several beats when she saw Michael.

  He wasn’t alone, and even she, new to this game, recognized the power hidden behind the outline of the Were following him.

  Michael didn’t look happy.

  “Dylan,” Michael said when he and the visitor reached the pack, “meet Rena, Devlin, Cade and… Kaitlin.”

  The fair-haired Were nodded to each of them in turn. His gaze hesitated on her a few seconds too long before he acknowledged Kaitlin with a slight inclination of his head.

  Though this new Were’s handsome face registered no reason for the hesitation, Kaitlin felt as though she had set off an internal alarm in the guy’s mind. Could every Were tell she wasn’t quite up to speed? Maybe he was wondering why she’d been included in this evening tête-à-tête. That makes two of us, she wanted to shout.

  “Dylan is from the Miami pack, and therefore to be considered family,” Michael said. “He brought friends.”

  Call her paranoid… Kaitlin felt Dylan’s attention on her when he wasn’t looking her way, as if Dylan possessed the ability to scan her mind without her permission and was seeking something none of the others gathered here had noticed. Possibly he was deciding if she could be trusted. Maybe he didn’t like hybrids.

  Her chills returned as his scrutiny kicked up the detritus of more memory data. From deep in those memories, she heard an issued threat.

  It’s a damn shame that if you live and decide to threaten or expose my kind, it will be my job to kill you. Saving your life tonight would have been for nothing.

  The night she had been attacked, Michael had spoken those words. And Michael was looking at her now because he knew what she was thinking.

  Chapter 12

  Only Kaitlin’s heartbeats, registering inside his own chest, filled the silence inside Michael’s mind.

  She was remembering the threat he should never have spoken aloud while assuming she was in a state that made hearing him impossible. He felt her trust begin to dissipate as if being swept away with the breeze.

  The situation was precarious.

  His thoughts locked on to hers.

  You can trust me, he sent to Kaitlin, careful to put up mental barriers that no one else in their present company could get past. Those words were for her. He offered them sincerely.

  She wouldn’t make eye contact. That kind of rejection felt bad on a night when the term bad had morphed into something inconceivable. His pack was faced with a dire situation, and their Alpha could not tear his thoughts away from the latest addition to the group.

  He shook his head to clear Kaitlin from it.

  The escaped criminal Dylan and his friends hunted was a serious transgressor. It was said that Chavez bit every bad guy in his path. In this wolf’s gruesome underground bite rings, he pitted handcuffed cops against the worst werewolves in his pack, most of those wolves career criminals with no love for law enforcement. Most of them harboring grudges like the ones Dylan had spoken of in his brief explanations about why his traveling companions were on this hunting expedition.

  Many that Chavez had bitten were continuously drugged and half-crazed like the Were in the library, so it was said. New understanding of what he had fought in that building took an ugly shape. He felt bad for letting that one get away.

  Werewolves had far-reaching memories, and grudges were part of that. In his dreams Michael saw himself running through valleys that time had not discovered or named. He wished he could go back to those times now. The future didn’t look quite so rosy with a new caliber of monsters interloping.

  Weres and vampires had always been at war. Their animosity was nothing new. The distaste werewolves had for vampires stemmed from medieval days when knights were somehow transformed into immortal guardians and after that, things went wrong. There had been a slip of the fang from a rogue immortal as far back as that, which created a whole new species living outside the rules in the golden rule book.

  Michael had heard of good vamps, and was almost sure there had to be some, since part of an afterlife personality had to do with the former life and soul, but he had yet to find one. And those original knights hadn’t been heard of for centuries.

  Again, his thoughts turned to Kaitlin, who seemed to attract both vampires and Weres, himself included. He wasn’t so blind as to have missed Dylan’s half-hidden scrutiny of the pack’s new addition. Dylan had been drawn to Kaitlin, perhaps for the same reasons everyone else was, with the exception of the ever-skeptical Rena.

  Something else. Tonight, while in a daze, Kaitlin had spoken of those same hills and valleys he had seen in his mind as if she possessed wolfish memories she had no right to. Only Lycans belonged to the past and the years before the Flood. No other Weres could go back so far, see things so distant or past their own recent initiation into the wolf clan.

  Kaitlin had shared his visions, though. She had felt what he had felt in that moment—the spontaneous wildness, and his desire for the simplicity of an existence long past. For this to happen, their bond had to have been sealed tight, just as he had predicted.

  “Are you going to tell us what’s going on?” Rena, first to break the quiet, asked.

  Michael heard Dylan answer Rena’s question as if the conversation was taking place in the distance and didn’t include him. Kaitlin was tuning in to his thoughts, as he tuned into hers. Her face, so white and beautiful, reflected her unease. How
different was she, and what did that mean? He wondered if he had overlooked something important, due to their closeness.

  You have no choice really but to trust me, trust us, he sent to her. I’m sorry that seems so hard.

  She responded aloud. “There must be someplace you can put me, send me, while I wait to see what the moon will do. Or, hell, why don’t you use me as bait to catch your rogues, since I seem to be the draw for most of the monsters around here?”

  The conversation around them ceased. Michael shook himself back to the present, enough to realize that he had taken several steps forward and now stood nearly chest to chest with Kaitlin. She was the only wolf here who wasn’t looking at him, and hers was the attention Michael wanted the most.

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” he said to her. “We have promised you protection, not to dangle you like a carrot.”

  “What about Michael, Rena?” he heard Devlin ask. “Aren’t you going to make a comment about his libido?”

  “It’s none of our business,” Cade said, quelling that joke.

  Dylan cleared his throat to regain their focus. Although this truly wasn’t any of his business, he said to Michael in a steady voice, “She has Lycan blood.”

  Michael said, “Yes.” So sue me.

  Dylan didn’t need to ask how that happened, or whose blood Kaitlin’s veins contained. That had become obvious from Michael’s behavior so far.

  In a lowered voice, Dylan said, “Was she entirely human to begin with? I hope you realize what you’ve done.”

  Michael tore his attention from Kaitlin as she said to Dylan, “What are you talking about?”

  “I tried to tell you,” Devlin said to him.

  “I hope you’re going to tell us what that other thing is,” Rena said to Devlin. “Otherwise, we’re wasting time by standing here.”

  “The Irish sometimes possess other qualities if their families go back far enough,” Devlin said. “And Kaitlin’s family is Irish.”

  Kaitlin stared at Devlin as if he had suddenly gone mad. Michael knew she wouldn’t show more signs of vulnerability now, in this crowd. She had mentioned hating the limelight and that she never wanted to stand out. This conversation was testing those issues.