“Going somewhere?” Wilson asked, wearing only his jeans. No black T-shirt, no shoes, belt or badge. His hair was mussed, as if he had just changed back to this shape in honor of this visit.
“She’s out there,” Cameron replied. “And she’s in trouble.”
“How can you be sure?”
Cameron looked at Wilson directly. “Do you have a mate?”
Wilson nodded.
“Then your question makes no sense.”
“Problem is, my friend, that you aren’t ready to go out there, into a night full of hunters and God knows what else.”
“Then maybe you’ll bring her here,” Cameron said. “Help her like you’ve helped me.”
“Funny. We were just about to do that very thing.”
Cameron waited out a few beats of silence before saying, “Who are those guys in the yard?”
“They’re my pack.”
“Do they mind if I see them?”
“I’m not sure they’ll show you their faces yet, but they’re ready to run up against a hunter or two.”
“Because you asked them to?”
“Nope. Due entirely to Dana’s insistence.”
“Delmonico.”
“Dana seems to believe that your Abby needs protecting from the very people she’s helped in the past.”
Cameron did his best to nod his head. His muscles quaked. “What is it with silver?”
“It hurts like a son of a bitch, doesn’t it?”
“Said from experience?”
“Shot in the forearm a few months ago.”
Cameron took that in.
“We’ve gotten wind of wolf blood being spilled on the east side,” Wilson said.
Cameron stiffened.
“Though that’s not close, we have to check it out.”
“Because you’re cops?”
“Because it’s in our best interest to do so as cops and Weres and decent beings, human or otherwise.”
“I can go along. I can...”
“Stay here and heal up,” Wilson interrupted, “so that you’ll be ready to do your share some other night.”
“I’m no good here.”
“We will find her, Mitchell. Don’t worry too much, or Dylan’s mother will put you to sleep. She’s in charge of this sick bay, you know, and she’s fiercely protective of any wolf that lands in this room. She takes it as her own personal mission to set things right.”
“I need to thank her, Wilson, and all of you.”
“Oh, Mrs. Landau will be back any minute now. You can count on it. She’s too formidable for the use of a first name. Trust me on that. And I didn’t do anything you wouldn’t have done in my place. None of us did.”
Wilson had more to say. “I checked your files. I hope you don’t mind.”
“And?”
“The files told me that you have no immediate living relatives, since your parents died in a car accident a few years ago. You’re a Florida native, and live alone in a place bordering a bad area, probably due to those huge paychecks we’re handed each month.”
“I could have told you all of that.”
“Maybe having no family to worry about is what makes some people better cops and more willing to risk their health and lives for a cause,” Wilson said. “It’s true, then? You’re alone in Miami?”
Cameron nodded. “More or less.”
Wilson turned and said over his shoulder, “I’m here if you ever want to talk. I’ll leave you now. Stay put and take the cure. You were a lucky bastard that the bullet didn’t reach anything vital. We’re pretty sure Sam Stark didn’t take that shot, or you’d be hanging in his basement by a hook instead of enjoying that pretty bedspread beside you.”
Wilson didn’t smile. Cameron didn’t, either. And then Matt Wilson closed the door behind him without waiting for Cameron to formulate how to better word his thanks.
Cameron leaned heavily on the windowsill. He watched Wilson leave the house and join six others on what Wilson had insinuated to be Dylan Landau’s manicured front lawn. He had seen Wilson shift once before, and this transformation was equally as fast. One minute Wilson was there, and the next, he was a werewolf among six other werewolves of varying size and color, all of them tremendously big, strong and dangerous.
Sam Stark would wet his pants if any of these guys caught up with him. These Weres were a beautiful, intelligent, lethal pack comprised of cops and detectives and who knew what else. Cameron’s wolf gave an internal bark of acceptance. His body shook with the desire to be out there with them.
Lucky?
Hell, yes, he was lucky. And he hoped, as he watched the silent, furred-up Weres jump the wall, that Abby would recognize a friend when she saw one. And that it wasn’t too late for them to find her.
He growled his displeasure over the situation, and then growled again. Each rumble in his chest sent shocks of pain through him, but he would make it, and heal miraculously, someone here had said. He’d be out there before he knew it.
Just not right that minute, he thought as he rested his head on the wall.
* * *
Abby smelled wolves before she and Sam had covered three yards. Her body’s response was to cough up an immediate growl that she slapped down with a chokehold on her throat.
What she didn’t know was if these new wolves were on Cameron’s side, or feral animals intent on doing harm wherever they could. They were precariously close to the boulevard, where lines of cars paraded in each direction, and people gathered near several popular nightclubs. All sorts of odors from the city vied for her attention, but wolf remained potent among them.
These wolves smelled like wet dogs.
They weren’t like Cameron. Neither was their scent anything like the smells clinging to the leather jacket loaned to her by the big brown wolf Cameron had followed.
This started to make sense to her. She was now reasonably able to differentiate between types of wolves by scent alone. Plus, good guys probably wouldn’t have trespassed so close to the tourists, and likely geared themselves toward minding their manners in public.
Bad guys were on the move.
Sam’s cell phone vibrated. She heard it, felt that buzz as though the phone had been in her own pocket, though they had paused near a big palm tree that slightly diffused the moonlight.
Between the approach of rogue wolves and the light dappling her face, Abby felt the strangely familiar shock of separating skin. One claw again began to pop, easing its way through her fingertip. She had to squeeze her eyes shut against the immediacy of the pain, and to keep from shouting.
“Here,” Sam said in a decibel above a whisper.
Abby threw him a look. Sam had no idea how sensitive a werewolf’s hearing was. Any of them between the park and the street would have heard Sam’s directional cue.
One did.
“Too late,” she said as Sam whirled to face the oncoming werewolf—a beast with the corded musculature of a bodybuilder on steroids.
Sam now had a rifle. It came up quickly, and calmly, Abby thought as Sam took aim. But the werewolf didn’t seem to notice Sam or the weapon. This monster had eyes only for her.
It came on intently, with its gaze fastened to her face—a huge sucker, a freak and much too large for a normal Were’s range of fast moves.
Sam fired off two rounds in quick succession before the beast got close. The first bullet struck its left shoulder, the second its right knee. The monster kept coming, growling menacingly as it stumbled forward to reach for Abby.
“Damn freak,” she heard Sam say before a third bullet hit the wolf between its eyes and the thing went down.
She’d been holding her breath. When Abby finally looked to Sam, it was to find his rifle pointed at her chest.
“Sam?” she said, only then noticing that all ten of her fingers sported lethal claws, and that her hands shook from the trauma of birthing them.
Sam stared at her in silence, in much the same way as the monster had stared.
>
So this is it.
Abby stood tall as she faced her father and somehow found the ability to speak. “I suppose this will need to be part of the discussion you’ve postponed?”
With her heart in her throat and her knuckles pulsing, Abby heard the well-oiled rifle trigger start to compress.
The wind whistled around her as if alive and urging her to move. Only it wasn’t the wind. It was the slipstream of a werewolf barreling in at top speed.
Furred and fanged, the wolf rammed into Sam, knocking him back a few steps and dislodging his hold on the rifle. A second werewolf rushed in to pick up the weapon. That wolf’s hands slowly rose to show off a set of threatening claws.
These werewolves didn’t hurt Sam. Though he might have killed her tonight, right there where his team had taken down so many others, their concern seemed to center on her.
Abby remained upright, swaying as if Sam had fired the rifle, unable to process what had almost taken place.
Sam knew about her.
Sam had seen the claws.
Having been manhandled by numerous people tonight, she shook off the brown wolf’s sudden grip on her arm, and looked into his eyes. The damn Were inclined his head to her after shifting his gaze to check out her hands and the claws scraping her thighs.
He truly wasn’t going to hurt her. This werewolf smelled like the leather jacket she wanted to draw back and cuddle into.
Acknowledging that, Abby let him lead her a few feet away from Sam and what might have gone down if this wolf and his friend hadn’t arrived in time.
The wolf’s companion, a paler, larger version of werewolf with bright, intelligent eyes, waited with those eyes on Sam, who hadn’t budged from the spot he’d been knocked back to. Sam’s harsh, irregular breaths lent a horror-movie detail to the tense, overheated atmosphere. Sam Stark faced the werewolves he had been hunting, and they were granting him life.
She wondered if that would change anything for Sam. But he shook his head and spoke to her with a terrible slowness. “Just like her.”
There wasn’t time to wonder about that. Everyone present seemed to sense the approach of another hunter—an angry human, and very bad news.
With Sam’s rifle in hand, the paler wolf took off. The brown wolf at her side gave her arm a tug. There wasn’t any point of remaining to find out what Sam had meant by his remark. He had already proved himself an uninterested husband and a lousy father figure. Instinct warned that he actually would have shot her.
By leaving with the Weres, the meager tie with her father would be severed for good. His face, and the disgust on it, told her that.
Abby let the brown wolf lead her away. She didn’t look back. Her wolf had announced itself with evidence of its true nature, and the old Abby Stark had to accept the consequences.
“I’m not human.” She repeated her new mantra as she picked up her pace to match the werewolves’ long strides, leaving everything she’d known until that moment behind.
For good.
Chapter 19
Cameron lifted his head from the wall to sniff the balmy air coming through the open window. His heart gave one solid thump.
“I feel you out there, Abby.”
He still hurt badly, but the edge of the pain had subsided. He could track the progress of the silver with his eyes closed or open. From the bandaged hole in his upper chest, tentacles of the substance spread outward in a design similar to a child’s depiction of rays coming off the sun. Those tentacles had solidified. Some of them were visible through his skin.
Although the process had been halted somewhat by the bullet having been removed so quickly, added to whatever Mrs. Landau had done to help the matter, he felt each and every ache the spread of silver caused. On the positive side, he was alive and breathing, and able to perceive in the breeze coming from the window the signs of Abby’s distress.
She was scared, and calling.
Cameron looked down at himself to estimate his energy level. His body heat had waned, due, he guessed, to the damage caused by the bullet. He was naked, but his pants hung on the back of the chair. With shaky hands, he reached for the jeans. He had to get to Abby. Their bond demanded action and her protection. As mates, she had become his responsibility, though he would have felt responsible for her, anyway. His illness equated to a temporary setback, that was all.
What might happen when the others found her?
Chances were slim this wolf pack would bring Abby here, exposing so much of their lives to a person they had long considered an enemy. Maybe they had another place in mind.
He stepped into his jeans carefully, smelling the small droplets of blood on the denim that had scattered from the wound in his chest, and ignoring the stains.
The reasoning process would not stop. He’d been a cop for too long, where suppositions and educated guesses often helped in solving cases. But he’d never have guessed what lay behind the Landau walls. Not many people knew about this compound, or what the Landau family did here, he’d be willing to bet. He had been privileged to garner an invitation, and lucky that members of this pack had been willing to help him in a time of duress.
Hell, he could have died out there tonight.
Dana Delmonico’s words about Dylan Landau came back to him. The werewolf who saved my ass.
It seemed to him that the wolves in Landau’s pack saved a lot of asses, so maybe one more rescue wouldn’t break the hospitality bank.
He glanced to the door, figuring that someone might try to stop him before he reached the house’s ground floor if he’d been listed on the roster as an invalid. Surely they’d try to stop him if his face reflected the way he felt at the moment.
The door was not an option.
Cameron winced as he looked to the window. Jumping from the sill was the only way out, though he wasn’t sure he’d survive such a fall in his present state. Somewhere inside his head a hammer struck repeatedly at a steel plate, causing his ears to ring and his teeth to ache. His shaky limbs threatened to fail if he moved too fast in any direction. The last time he’d felt like this was that night, in the beginning, and the events that had kicked this wolf thing off.
Before that, he’d been just a guy, a cop dedicated to his job. Now, the night called to him. He somehow knew that Abby’s first shift was imminent—if not tonight, then soon. And if that didn’t happen on this night, she had to possess a special ability to ward off her wolf for as long as possible.
An ability like that would come in handy.
However, it all came back to how Abby had been infected by the wolf virus, how lethal the strain was and how long she had carried it inside her.
“Have to get to her,” he said aloud through chattering teeth.
The whole imprinting thing was a royal pain in the behind.
“But it is what it is.”
The shutters retracted fully with a scrape of wood on stucco. Cameron had to lift his dragging left leg onto the sill with both hands in order to climb up.
Someone had told him that being in wolf form might help the healing process, since the wolf was so much stronger than the human. He hoped to God that was right. Yet there was no telling what the shift itself might do to him in this condition.
The thought of his wounded chest expanding brought up bile. The idea of his spine stretching made him grimace. But he wasn’t of any use to his mate cooped up in some bedroom on a strange estate with his body out of commission. His thrashed body ached to get to Abby as much as it ached to lie down and recover. Odds were decent that he’d make it.
Perched on the window ledge, Cameron gauged the distance to the ground. Three stories seemed doable, maybe. He needed the wolf.
Moonlight found him, caught him in its luminous embrace. The light brought more cold and waves of chills before melting through his top layer of skin. Each layer the light descended lessened the cold. He grew warmer as it worked its way inside, and he offered the moon his face. The pounding in his head ceased abruptly as muscles b
egan their dance. His spine cracked. All ten claws sprung at once.
Cameron stared at his hands as other features began to morph in slow motion. Inhaling moonlight, his chest broadened, pulling the bandaged bullet hole out of proportion. He growled with pain, and closed his eyes to try to gain a foothold on the objective at hand.
Find Abby.
Hearing the door to the room swing open behind him, Cameron turned to look. The gray-haired woman with the kind face stood on the threshold wearing a stern expression.
“I’ve yet to meet a young wolf with a single shred of common sense,” she said.
Using what energy he had leftover from the shape-shift in progress, Cameron smiled at Dylan’s mother, thinking the likeness between Dylan and Mrs. Landau a positive ID.
“Have to,” he said in a grunt of apology for spoiling her healing work.
“I suppose you do,” she returned.
Sliding sideways, he found a wrought-iron railing covered by the shingles of the overhanging roof, and from there he climbed down through the shadows with his claws digging into the wood. Racked with pain and sore from the inside out, he descended the floors like a monkey, without the need to jump.
Waves of pain doubled him over when he reached the grass. It was too much exertion, too soon. Hands on his knees, he shuddered through a few long breaths, still in the shadows of the house, and eyeing the line of moonlight just inches away from him. Then he brought his head up.
Someone watched him from the dark patch of grass near the front porch. The Were moved forward to the edge of the light coming from a window above its head. Cameron waited without straightening up.
“It’s about time,” Dana Delmonico said smartly. “I was beginning to wonder if you’d died up there.”
It took a moment for him to reply. “Nope. Just evading the posse. Aren’t you part of that posse?”
“Hell, Mitchell, I’m here to help your decrepit carcass over that big wall. And by the way, you look like hell.”
The situation remained dire. Partly shifted, he did feel like hell. In spite of that, Cameron smiled fully with an emotion resembling honest-to-goodness appreciation for this woman.
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