The cop stuck his head over Jonathan’s broad shoulder, looked the hunter in the face. “You hear me, miss?”
“Oh, yes,” she replied, the light in her eyes brightening now that she was able to take a breath.
Jonathan acknowledged the sarcasm in her tone and the way she had once again stiffened for a fight. The cop, however, was another breed altogether. Turning toward the boulevard he ambled away, leaving the hunter trapped in the circle of Jonathan’s arms for about ten more seconds. Then, injured or not, she pushed him away with strong, if shaky, arms. “You’ll pay for this,” she said.
The pain of her separation manifested in Jonathan in the form of a sting that left him breathless. Leaving her threat to echo, the hunter ducked from beneath his grasp, winced as she tried to swing her right arm, and cradling that arm with her other hand, took off at a run.
Jonathan’s grin dissolved as soon as she had turned her back. It seemed she hadn’t been kidding about him paying for the interference.
Not all of the pain he’d experienced in being torn from her had been the result of some sort of disconnected soulful bond, after all.
She’d given him a hand job. On their first date.
He glanced down to see the tail end of the dart she’d jammed into him protruding from his right hip.
CHAPTER THREE
“Nice catch. We’ll stake out the alley again tomorrow and every other night those bastards will be prowling. Now, let’s have a look at that arm,” one of her partners said as Nikki hopped into the waiting van.
“It’s nothing,” she told him irritably.
“You’re bleeding.”
Nikki looked the man in the face and repeated soberly, “It’s nothing.”
To her relief, he backed off, moving to tend to the two drugged werewolves, now in restraints. His compliance was appreciated, since she was actually messed up pretty badly and needed time to assimilate what had just happened.
Fact was, she was afraid of just how badly this might go down for her. Her arm and shoulder hurt beyond belief. She’d been sliced open good, and the Lycan virus, if it could be transmitted by claws, had plenty of time to reach her bloodstream.
Supposedly it took a savage bite to pass on that virus. But the wolf’s claws had dug in, creating gouges that had to be more than two inches deep. She’d have to look beneath the bandage.
With a brief glance, she saw that the badly blood-soaked bandage was actually a piece of a white shirt. Soft, ruined, silky white cotton.
Chewing on her lower lip, Nikki mumbled her favorite cussword and fought off an onslaught of chills. If there was a way to land in Wolf City without a bite, this bloody wound would be it. And wouldn’t that be swell? A hunter gone over to the nasty-bastard dark side? Ironic, even?
In the hospital surgery E.R., she had to be careful about protecting herself from contracting the AIDS virus. Now she had to worry about this?
To make matters worse, she noted with a flutter in her stomach, there was a tear in her vest from the monster’s blunted teeth. Probing that spot with her fingers, she discovered he’d broken the skin. Not a deep puncture, thankfully.
Feeling light-headed, Nikki leaned back. She should have been high as a kite by now and needing a private orgy to free her system of all its excess energy. But she didn’t feel like that, so something was wrong. Very wrong.
The others were talking, riding the high of pheromones in celebration of the victory, but Nikki felt ill. She also felt a strong sideways pull on her insides, accompanied by a creeping numbness settling over her soul.
He had done this to her. Distracted her. Messed with her. Now the handsome freak with the broad chest and the gravelly voice, who was actually a player in the most secretive part of her assignment, one these other hunters knew nothing about, was pulling her back toward the street. His actions in helping her, in fixing her shoulder and tying up her injured arm, weren’t in any way usual werewolf behavior, or part of the plan. She hadn’t expected kindness from him. Why had he done those things?
Now, besides being gouged, she was going to be sorry she hadn’t acted according to her instructions with regards to him. She’d be sorry she hadn’t gotten what she’d needed, and that she had left that green-eyed werewolf standing.
As for the numbness creeping over her? No doubt it was due to the fact that this Were, with his disconcerting gaze, his responsive body parts and expensive, silky shirts, had been right. She could very easily have been killed. Killed outright, instead of having to fear what might or might not come next.
He’d had his hands on her, gotten close, dared to kiss her—and instead of doing her job, she had allowed it—an act that now rendered her useless in the field and a danger to the other hunters. A liability. One of them had gotten to her.
How could she tell her handlers what really went on out there? What would they do if they knew she’d been bitten by the wrong wolf, and that all of her training had been wasted?
Worse than anything, she realized with horror, was that in her numbness, hiding behind it, trembling within it, lay the further torment that she had kissed this werewolf back. Heaven forgive her, she had enjoyed it.
She’d have to go back. Fix this. There was no other way to accomplish her task, now that she had probably been infected by a rogue Were. The future of the hunters depended on her next move.
Inhaling the van’s sour air, ignoring the pulse of pain in her wounded limb, Nikki picked up an extra dart gun with her left hand, tapped on the wall of the van and glanced out of the rear window.
Jonathan staggered several steps before noticing the intensifying wolf scent. The deserted street virtually reeked of the presence of unwashed, hyped-up rogues. It reeked of crazed, misplaced energy being channeled in a specific direction. Revenge. Over all of that remained the faint feminine scent of that hunter. As well as the thing that lay beneath it.
He spun back, hurled himself against the wall and waited for his senses to clear. That hunter wasn’t the only one who took precautions against dart guns. He’d been at this game much longer, not to mention his nearly miraculous healing powers.
“Little heathen,” he whispered, rubbing his hip.
Although his heart was racing, he was already coming around. His inner beast, angry with the hunter and at the same time hungering for her, pushed claws outward through his fingernails as if readying for another tussle.
Jonathan craned his neck to see past the alley entrance, aided by another Lycan perk of having twenty-twenty vision in the dark. The hair at the nape of his neck bristled, a signal that something was decidedly off. That red haze in the air lingered, somehow tied to her scent.
His beast pummeled at his insides, urging him to run. “No,” he said adamantly. “Not yet.”
The black van had screeched to a halt. He had watched the doors open and the hunters grab the downed rogues. He had waited until the woman he had touched had climbed inside, figuring at first that she’d be safe there, among her own kind.
She hadn’t sent her companions after him.
But then, he had a brain that wasn’t so hyped that he couldn’t connect the dots. The blood in his veins carried an ancient form of the Lycan virus, pure and untainted. That blood allowed him all sorts of insights. And the fact was…
He knew a werewolf when he kissed one.
“Ah, hell!” he said with a hand to the wall. Either she had already been infected, or—
He didn’t want to reason that far. There were still rogues in this alley without a brain cell to share between them. That’s what initiation to the wolf clan by means of a bite sometimes did—turned weak-minded men into weak-minded monsters.
The hunters had been right in seeking this pack, the remnants of a psychotic Cuban alpha’s group. The hunter, his hunter, would have no idea that her objective in getting to that pack was shared by not only Jonathan himself, but every other Were in Miami with concern for their own well-being. The ultimate plan was to rid the city of the lunatics threat
ening to expose the presence of a culture within a culture that had been around since before biblical times, some of that culture strong enough, intelligent enough and keen enough to try to fit in with the fully human population.
There were too few hunters to make a dent—which was the reason his organization, with the loosely accommodating acronym of W.O.L.F. had jumped in anonymously to help fill in the gaps. Weres Overseeing Lycan Forces. Just another attempt at keeping the human and law-abiding Were populations safe—from each other.
So, had his hunter been infected by one of the bad guys bent on creating more monsters like itself?
“Not so far apart as you might imagine,” he said aloud to her, his soft-lipped hunter, with double meaning, as he skirted the moonlight, heading for the taillights of the idling black van.
What would her own team do to her when they figured out what she was to become? How long did she have until it became clear?
When it did, her own side would be after her. She’d be squeezed between two opposing forces. A sitting duck, in everybody’s sights.
He could feel her inside of that shiny metal cocoon, just as he was able to sense the rogues burrowed somewhere underground and now heading toward the alley.
He knew that she was directing her thoughts his way. It was as if by kissing her, parts of each of them had been transferred to the other, in the manner of a strange contagion.
Of course, it was a contagion. The Lycan virus in all its ball-busting glory.
He should have been glad, greedy bastard that he was, for what was to come. This hunter—so like a shot of pure oxygen to someone struggling for a breath; like a sparkling rainbow, with the promise of a pot of gold between those long, lanky legs—would need his help. Soon.
How badly he had wanted to slide a finger into the damp space between those legs of hers to discover the wet, waiting, gold. How incessantly he had dreamed of peeling that leather off of her, once piece at a time, and rubbing himself against all that soft, smooth human skin.
“Now what? What do I do with this?” he shouted, realizing as the sound boomeranged back to him that sex was only a small part of his desire for her, now that she’d become vulnerable.
As her van pulled away from the curb, Jonathan readied himself to step into the light, preparing to keep the rogues from emerging, preparing for what might happen inside of that van when they threw his hunter out. As if he was, what? Her wolf in shining armor?
Anxiously, he watched the van move off down the street, allowing himself to feel some relief for about two short breaths before his mind registered that someone was standing on the curb in the van’s vacated space.
Hellfire and damnation. It was her.
Was she nuts?
His hunter stood there, head lifted, legs apart, her body almost blending with the night beyond the reach of the far-off streetlamp. With her bandaged arm hanging at her side and her eyes wide, she looked like Catwoman from the comics and, admittedly, pretty darned impressive.
But her face was parchment-white. Her ponytail had been loosened, thanks to his own antics, so that a few shoulder-length tendrils, the color of a starless night, fell across the contours of her face. Those loose strands, coupled with her colorlessness, made her seem even more vulnerable somehow, despite that sly move of jabbing him with the dart.
Jonathan’s gaze traveled downward, taken there by a piece of precognition, to find that another dart gun dangled from her fingers. He wondered if she was as good left-handed, since she usually fought with her right.
She faced him, full-on, alone. As if she had expected him to wait. As if she had read his thoughts.
He silently applauded her guts.
“Truly,” he said to her, “you are not going by the book.”
“Oh,” she replied, her eyes blazing, “I think I’m way beyond that now, don’t you?”
Actually, he was thinking that very same thing.
“Why would you return when the danger has tripled?” he asked her. “You have your sample of who’s in this alley and can bring your friends back later to try to deal with it.”
“Try?” She highlighted that word.
“It might be worse than you think,” Jonathan warned. Again with the double meaning.
“How much worse?” she asked.
“Have you heard the name Chavez?”
She winced, her expression telling him she had.
“These guys are part of that pack. You need to get out of here,” he warned.
She seemed steady enough, despite her pallor. The red haze he’d noticed was draped around her shoulders like a supernatural shawl. A mantle of Otherness.
The virus was already flooding her cells.
“You need to get away now,” he added soberly.
“Can’t,” she said.
“Don’t be an idiot. Call the van back.”
She shook her head.
“Why?” he asked, perplexed.
“I’ve come for you.”
Jonathan experienced another jolt as he warily checked out the dart gun in her hand, still pointed down at the pavement.
“You want to take me, too? My, aren’t we greedy.”
“It’s too late to be greedy,” she said, then added in a lowered tone, “Why are you still here? Why did you stay?”
“I’m just a concerned citizen,” Jonathan replied.
“Like hell. Who do you think you are?”
“Someone who knows what you are, what you do, and considers it a good thing.”
He hated all those hidden meanings. Surely she must know by now what was swimming in her veins.
“You’re a werewolf. I can smell you from here,” she said.
“Is that a compliment?”
Her gun inched upward, but only slightly. Not a fan of cynicism, then, eh? Jonathan thought. God, this was tough. It was impossible for him to come right out and hand her a life sentence if she couldn’t recognize it herself.
“I can’t go with you, if that’s what you hope to accomplish,” he said, alluding to the vanished van. “Sorry.”
“Why is that?” Her voice sounded noticeably shakier.
“Job to do,” Jonathan replied.
“What would that job be? Making sure people like me can’t do our work, take care of business?”
“By ‘people like you,’ you mean hunters. And I believe you just found a hole and bagged two of the mindless wolves in a malicious pack. What other business did you have in mind?”
The words going unsaid lay heavy on the humid, breezeless air, but Jonathan upheld his end of the weighty silence.
She wasn’t telling him something important.
“You aren’t part of that pack,” she charged. “Neither are you innocent.”
“Now,” he said, “I’m insulted. And after helping you out of a jam.” He hated his tone, yet was unable to change it. He wasn’t being greedy at all, at the moment. What he felt for this woman bordered on empathy, in part, though the other feelings—lust, interest, the desire for closeness and to see her naked—were all there, lined up and waiting for whatever her next move might be.
“Which brings up the question of why you helped me,” she said, her words stumbling.
“Maybe I just appreciate your suit, and the way you look in it.”
Okay, that wasn’t at all what he’d wanted to say, but he couldn’t really tell her his own secrets or let on about the organization he worked for when he had been sworn to secrecy.
“And maybe your attempt at being a wolf of another sort doesn’t suit you,” she tossed back, seemingly undaunted, on the surface. Nevertheless, Jonathan could read her. She was upset, hurting, and covering all that with anger. Fact was, she’d been shaken to her core.
“Perhaps,” she continued, “you’re stalling so your buddies can gang up and take a hunter down. What a coup for a pack of freaks.” There was more. “Maybe that’s why you touched me.”
Jonathan lifted both of his hands in the air in a gesture of peace. “N
ope. I’m fairly sure my plan was to do the exact opposite, and in the meantime save your leather-clad behind.”
He was pushing the limits here of decency, he knew, but if anger replaced her hurt, she might regain her slipping equilibrium in a place too dangerous to be without it.
Wincing on the inside, he added, “I didn’t expect a thank-you, but the gun is going a little overboard.”
She blanched visibly, swayed on her feet. “You kissed me!” she snapped.
“Couldn’t be helped. I had to get you away from this alley so the monsters beneath it couldn’t scent you here. By getting close to you, my own scent would cover some of yours. So, are you going to shoot me for that? Get even for the kiss? What?”
“Make one move in my direction and I will do just that,” she promised.
More than likely, she meant what she said, Jonathan decided. But time was wasting. She was standing in the street, in the moonlight. Liquid silver melted over her contours like wax over a mold, darkening half of her ashen face with shadows.
He fended off a growl, wanting to go to her, hold her, whisper things to ease her mind. And that was impossible. If she started her change, here, now—an event that could easily happen—she’d despise him for being part of it.
He didn’t see any way to win this.
“We can’t just stand here waiting for the rest of those maniacs to come out,” he logically pointed out. “I’ll consider the kiss thanks enough for my help.” He glanced down the street. “Your van truly can’t have gotten far.”
Her face was just too serious. Too smooth. Too sober. She was white enough now to be ghostly. Studying her, a blast of sudden insight hit Jonathan like a stray bolt of lightning. He got it, got her, and what she was planning to do.
Holy hell! A shiver rocked him with that realization.
She had returned either to take him down for compromising her status as a hunter, or, barring her ability to do that, to be distracted by him until that ugly pack of rogues arrived.
The dart gun was, if not for him, for herself. If she couldn’t take him down, she would use the gun on herself to numb the pain of being torn apart by savage teeth. A savaging she would welcome, for screwing up.
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