Wolf Hunter

by Linda Thomas-Sundstrom

  The room seemed to darken once she’d gotten that out. Movement slowed. Voices dulled to a background murmur. None of that was real, though, and only the effect of meeting this wolf again so soon, and in less than stellar circumstances.

  Did she want to speak to him of things beyond this terse confession? Yes. In another minute, though, her father would come over to see why she hadn’t filled orders, and who this guy was. If luck was with her, after one look at his daughter—at the pink face and the visible quakes—Sam might merely assume her to be ill, and cut her some slack.

  Or else he might put two and two together and come up with wolf.

  Swiping at the trickle of perspiration sliding down the side of her face, Abby wondered what would happen until then. Possibly another standoff between Cameron Mitchell and herself?

  She felt so damn hot. And the wolf who was a badge-carrying member of the Miami PD had gone mute.

  More than any of that, the thing she feared more than all the guns in Miami lay just past that doorway, up in the sky. Like a giant magnet, the moon whispered to her as though she were one of the moon’s cult, and as though that light ruled what flowed in her veins to some minor degree.

  “Abby.”

  She tossed her hair, unwilling to listen to anything her one-night stand had to say. The dilemma of what to do next was an excruciating one. If she stayed still, the hammer would fall. Being near to this Were made it too difficult to keep herself in line.

  She felt jazzed, wired up—not all of that due to the fact that she had toyed with a wolf and was dealing with the consequences. The bigger fact here was that she had been scouting for Weres for so long, she might have started to feel like a wolf herself.

  “All right,” Cameron said, his voice low, his tone inquisitive. “You know I’m a cop. I should have told you last night. The circumstances were...”

  Abby interrupted, shaking her head, meeting his eyes. “Wolf,” she whispered.

  His eyes widened. A frown creased his brow.

  “You are a goddamn werewolf, Officer Mitchell,” she said. “How’s that for insight?”

  Chapter 8

  The way his expression changed gave Abby no pleasure.

  It made her sicker.

  “You have to get out of here,” she said, following up on her announcement. “Not all of these guys are your friends. This bar also hosts people who hope to be your executioners. Hunters. Werewolf hunters.”

  Cameron didn’t blink, grin or laugh outright. Neither did he protest what might have seemed to ninety-eight percent of the people in Miami like an outlandishly ridiculous statement. Instead, he rested his hand on hers, on the bar, and the shock of his touch ripped through Abby all over again.

  She was going to drown in that touch.

  “Yes. Okay.” She drew her hand away. “Part of this is my fault. You tried to push me away. I know that. My resistance was low because I’d been looking for you for a very long time.”

  “Looking for me?” he said.

  “Someone like you.”

  “What do you think you know, Abby?”

  “Plenty. So do the hunters.”

  He had to know what effect he had on women, and what they would want from him, she thought. Going through life looking the way he did had to attract women in droves. Factor the hidden wolf vibe into the rest of his molded perfection, and no female in heat would stand a chance.

  This cop was trouble, and she had opened her legs to let it in. But she had come to her senses. This, for obvious reasons, would never work out.

  People in the room had shifted position. Meeting her father’s sideways glance, Abby tried to smile back. Her elevated body temperature had become a nuisance. Her sleeveless shirt felt damp. Sam had a keen eye for those kinds of reactions in her. If this continued, she’d have no recourse but to either escape or give this wolf up to the team.

  Yet if she ran, and this particular cop followed her, Cameron Mitchell’s human semblance, his recognizable outline, would burn away—fried to a crisp and turned inside out before coagulating into a new creation. What then? she longed to demand of Cameron. Will you remain a gentleman?

  This was irony at its best. Her will wanted one thing, and her body another. One dangerous dalliance in the night, and this werewolf had rendered her permanently under his spell.

  What could be worse? They were surrounded by officers in this bar who had no idea what went on beyond the realms of their imagination, and were in close proximity to her father, who might have been a hair away from realizing what stood under his roof. For Sam Stark, having a daughter lust after a wolf would be the ultimate sacrilege. Mind-blowing stuff.

  What she needed was a dark hole to crawl into.

  “Officer Cameron Mitchell.” Testing her voice, Abby looked up at him. “Not only one of Miami’s finest, but one of the city’s best-kept secrets.”

  The next sound she made came perilously close to being a gasp of despair.

  “We need that talk, Abby.” His comment seemed devoid of the emotion tearing her apart. “Agree to meet me in an hour. You pick the place.”

  Officer Mitchell, king of beasts, again rested his hand close to the one she used to brace herself against the bar. Abby counted the inches between their fingers. Hers were shaking. Any second now, she’d fail at this terrible calmness game. If he touched her again, it would be over.

  “Abby, look at me. Who knows? Who else knows what you think you know?”

  She couldn’t have answered if she’d wanted to. She was all choked up.

  He persisted. “Which of the men present tonight know about what you called me? Who did you tell?”

  “I can’t say anything else.”

  Cameron was too close, too hot, too wolf. She desired all of those things, all over again. Mostly, though, she wanted him to live.

  Forget him. Escape. Run.

  Those were useless thoughts, since she couldn’t escape from herself and her feelings.

  Sensing her father watching, waves of chills rolled through her heat. Abby sucked in a lungful of the bar’s stale air and blinked to get her bearings. As she saw it, there was only one way out of this.

  Raising her hand, she slapped Cameron’s lovely face hard with her open palm. With the same hand, she shoved aside the glasses lined up in front of her and said loudly, “I don’t think so, but thanks all the same, Officer Mitchell. I’m taking my break.”

  Unable to think about what she was leaving behind, hoping her father would chock this little scene up to a rebuffed attempt for a drunken stranger to get to know her better, Abby rounded the bar, waited until her father had turned away, then ran for the door.

  * * *

  Cameron started after her with his heart in his throat.

  The little idiot had left the pub and had run right into the street. Cars rushed past. Tourists strolled by. She didn’t seem to care.

  A big hand stopped him before he got to the sidewalk. The hand belonged to a detective he didn’t know, one he’d missed in the crowd since he hadn’t been paying attention to anything other than Abby.

  How the hell had he missed this, though?

  “You’re not leaving?”

  Wolf vibe reverberated through his arm from his shoulder on down, and so fiercely, Cameron checked a rising growl. His insides immediately scrambled. Like loaded switchblades, his claws sliced through his balled-up fingertips until he forced his wolf down.

  This detective stopping him was Were.

  Jesus, there were others like him on the force.

  Rather than easing up, the detective kept hold of Cameron’s arm with a grip like steel. Each second that passed as they faced each other transferred a dizzying array of indecipherable wolf messages to Cameron’s confused brain.

  Not only Were, his senses told him; this guy had known the word Were for a while, and wore that species easily.

  The detective was tall, with brown hair that curled over his ears and a pair of intense, deep-set eyes. He had a deceptively l
ean build, and wore a black T-shirt, jeans that had seen better days, a beat-up leather jacket, in spite of the heat, and had a shiny gold badge pinned to his belt.

  A werewolf detective. Cameron hadn’t imagined this. It’s what he had been looking for, hoping for. Like him, there were other good guys.

  He wanted to clap the guy on the back, and shake his hand. A hundred questions needed answers, and this detective probably had some of them. But his attention went to the door Abby had run out of as if she’d left a trail of breadcrumbs impossible for his hunger to resist.

  The compulsion to go after her tore at him, stronger than any bond he needed to make with a like-minded wolf. And though he had no idea why, or what it meant, he knew his need for wolf company had to be put on hold, at least temporarily, until he found Abby again.

  Affixing a wary smile on his face, Cameron shrugged. “I’ve got a date. Something nice after all this.”

  “Ah.” The detective’s eyes brightened as if he understood completely. “Now that is a worthy excuse for leaving the party.”

  “Nothing else could tempt me away.”

  “Well, then go to it, man. And give her a kiss for me.”

  Cameron’s grin had already slipped. The emotions tied to seeing Abby again, right that minute, were making his senses go haywire. Being so close to another male Were doubled the current dilemma.

  “Mitchell,” he said to the detective eyeing him closely. “Name’s Cameron Mitchell.”

  The detective nodded and responded in kind. “Matt Wilson. Homicide.”

  “I have to go,” Cameron said.

  “I can see that,” Matt Wilson remarked. “I assume we will meet again soon. Until then, you will take care? We wouldn’t want any more trouble tonight.”

  “I’ll be sure to do that. And, Detective?”

  “Yes?”

  “Watch yourself in here. I’m told that, besides us, other things in this bar aren’t what they seem.”

  The detective’s eyes reflected his acceptance of that piece of information as Cameron pushed past him.

  On the street, just outside the building’s front door, moonlight hit Cameron in the face, sending shudders of anxiousness through his system. Grimly, he dived for the shade of the awning, fighting the urge to rip off the clothes that would be a hindrance to a much larger shape.

  Catching sight of Abby in the distance, he muttered a choice, official, police-regulation well-accepted four-letter word. Setting off at a brisk pace, weaving in and out of the people lining the sidewalks while keeping beneath overhead cover, he followed Abby, waiting until he reached an old line of trees before daring to unbutton his shirt.

  I know what you are. Her words rang in his mind. I knew last night.

  Moonlight slanted through branches, adhering to his bare chest and burning like gelled fire. After the first loud crack of overstretched sinew, his vision began to narrow. But he held on to his human shape with every ounce of willpower he possessed, knowing this would be what Abby needed to see.

  Half a block ahead and moving west, Abby appeared as no more than a dark outline. Gaining on her, Cameron called out, “Abby. Stop. Wait.”

  By refusing to look back or slow down, she made it quite clear that she wasn’t going to listen. Cameron prayed that he’d be able to hold off on the imminent shift a while longer, but running felt good, and chasing Abby felt even better. Wolf was in the air and in his throat, coating his insides, seeking to be free.

  He tried again to reach Abby. “Talk to me, damn it!”

  She turned a corner. When he reached the old stucco wall near that intersection, Cameron saw a puddle of black draped on an open trash can. It was her shirt. Farther down the alley, he found her shoes—sandals, covered in an animal print.

  Abby, what are you thinking? What are you doing?

  Upping his pace, Cameron’s anger began to simmer. He’d barely had the time to properly handle his own problems, let alone taking on hers, and it was obvious that she not only had her own issues, but didn’t want anything to do with him.

  Well, all right. If she preferred things this way, so be it. He’d leave her alone. He would go back and find that damn detective. Clearly, what she’d said in the bar bothered him in a way he just didn’t get. She had known about him all along...and had been intimate with him, anyway?

  Did that make her nuts? Completely off her rocker?

  Maybe she had made up all that stuff about the other people in the bar.

  Werewolf hunters. There actually were such things? And with two Weres present in the crowd, plus a room full of Miami’s finest?

  It was possible, he supposed, for that place to be a hangout for another kind of criminal, one he hadn’t anticipated. Hell, killing werewolves wasn’t illegal, since hardly anyone knew of their existence.

  “Abby, how are you involved with those kinds of people?”

  Remembering the streak of wildness he’d seen in her, picturing the short-handled silver knife strapped to her leg, Cameron again swore out loud. “You’re a wolf hunter, and that’s why you were in the park.”

  The realization kicked at his stomach, impossibly painful.

  He added aloud, “That’s ridiculous. If you knew about me, for real, you wouldn’t have met me out there. You wouldn’t have dared to...”

  Cameron couldn’t finish that statement. Logical thinking had flown out the window, pushed along by questions that swirled so fast he couldn’t pick one out of the bunch. But it was no wonder that Abby didn’t want him to catch up with her. Having sex with a Were had to be the biggest mistake of her life. A seriously unforgivable faux pas for a hunter.

  “So, why did you do it?”

  Let her go, you idiot. You can smell trouble, and she’s at the epicenter.

  His wolf pressed against him with a fierce rebuttal. One sharp claw sprang from his index finger, and this time Cameron didn’t bother to tuck it back. He wasn’t fooling anyone with the would-should-could-haves. He had to catch Abby. For whatever reason, and despite solid arguments to the contrary, he had to see her again. He had to kiss her again.

  Hearing the first crack of vertebrae, Cameron fought against the impending change. “No freaking time for that!”

  After dealing with Abby and what she might know, he’d find that detective what’s-his-name. Wilson.

  Matt Wilson.

  His alternate world was closing in, but Abby’s scent got stronger, picked up by the wolf parts of him about to take over. She had tossed to the ground a fragile, lacy piece of clothing that she hadn’t worn the night before. A dainty black bra with thin ribbon straps lay curled up near his feet, looking like a line in the sand that he couldn’t afford to cross.

  That lacy thing further messed with his resolve to remain in human form. Every man, he told himself, would have been an animal with a thing like that in his sights.

  “Abby,” he whispered, having a fair idea of where she’d go. He also had an uneasy feeling that perhaps she didn’t shun him at all, and the discarded clothes were indeed a detailed map meant to lure him along. If so, he might have sorely underestimated Abby.

  Then again...

  No. It couldn’t be.

  The other reason for shedding her clothes didn’t need to show itself. The theory suggesting that, like him, Abby needed the room and freedom of being without clothes in order for her wolf to take over.

  Cameron nearly stopped dead. His head swam with thoughts.

  Hellfire, if there was any conceivable way he might have been right about her during their first meeting when he’d called her his little wolf, Abby also had a secret that could get her killed tonight with hunters and wolves on the loose.

  Was that why she had coupled with him in the park? It was a case of like attracted to like? Two animals sniffing around each other?

  Absurd.

  What kind of werewolf hunter had wolf particles in her bloodstream?

  But the more he thought about it, the more viable that theory became, until Cameron wa
nted to hit something, anything—a tree, trash can or the side of a brick building. Still, emotion had to be kept under control in public. It was a sure bet he wasn’t the only beast on Miami’s crowded sidewalks. If he and Wilson could blend in with normal people and go virtually undetected, then werewolves could be anybody and anywhere.

  One of them could be Abby Stark.

  Icy prickles washed over Cameron, producing a gut-wrenching desire to drop his human shape and get on with it. Shafts of moonlight laced the ground everywhere he looked, and he hadn’t completely mastered the ability to manage the beast in taxing situations. He’d only dealt with this fucking problem for a few long months.

  “In the thick of it now, Bud. Welcome to your new life.”

  After reaching to pick up Abby’s underclothes, Cameron jumped the curb. Leaving the relative safety of the shadows of the buildings, he sprinted along the pathway she’d taken that led back to the park, hoping with every fiber of his being that he would find her before the moon truly found him.

  Chapter 9

  “Must. Get. Away.”

  Abby couldn’t get enough air into her lungs, and wondered if she ever would. If she stopped running, she’d have to face Cameron Mitchell again. Tonight, she’d see what the moon did to him. Tonight, her father would be in killing mode.

  The moon seemed closer than usual, but not large enough for the kind of damage it would inflict. Streams of light lit the way from the street to the park, urging her on.

  She ran from tree to tree in a zigzag pattern, hoping to avoid being tracked by others, knowing Cameron could easily catch up, getting away from the hunter-infested bar.

  Because of the diligence of her escape route, he also might be able to beat the lure of cascading moonlight until he had cleared the streets. At the very least, she owed him that for helping her last night to get out of the way of some very bad guys. The horror was that someone else had died in her place.

  The question on the table now was whether she actually wanted him to find her, or if it was enough to have lured him away from danger.