by L. A. Banks
Sweat had created a deep V on Hunter’s army green t-shirt, starting at his heavy silver and amber amulet, and her tank top and jeans clung to her like she’d been poured into them. The thick silver chain around her neck with the etched amber piece dangling from it now felt like it weighed a ton. They’d only been inside about an hour and their guys that had been waiting double-parked in open jeeps looked like they’d been drenched in a sudden downpour.
Clarissa’s plump face was red and damp, and her blond hair was practically plastered to her scalp. Woods, who was behind the wheel of the second vehicle, had a steady stream of sweat rolling down his temples, matting down his normally immaculate brunet hair, while poor Bradley, the eldest on the team and in his forties, had his head back with his eyes closed, apparently deciding to tough out the heat by going semiconscious. Right behind them in another haphazardly parked jeep, Fisher bopped to the radio like a lanky golden retriever that enjoyed the wetness—simply having the time of his life because it involved another adventure. Seeing him in the backseat joking with the baby of the group, Mark Winters, brought a smile to her face despite the circumstances or uncomfortable heat.
However, Hunter’s main enforcer Bear Shadow, a three-hundred-pound Native-American double for an NFL linebacker, as well as Sasha’s half brother Crow Shadow, a shorter, more sinewy, defensive tight-end version of “the Bear,” seemed anything but relaxed and jovial. Sasha held her brother’s gaze for a moment. Looking into Crow Shadow’s face was like looking into a darker version of her own. His expression was tense but unreadable and only offered her a reflection of his exotic biracial elements of Native-American and African-American ancestry.
Still, there was a level of quiet anxiety in both Hunter’s men’s eyes that concerned her. Those two were normally laid back; they didn’t do high anxiety unless something serious had raised their DEFCON levels. What had the two male Shadow Wolves locked in on that she hadn’t seen or that her human squad hadn’t detected?
Clarissa should have picked up something psychically wrong now, just like her Shadow Wolf familiars, Woods and Fisher, should have instinctively detected if something wasn’t right. Their entire system was designed to preempt a threat. Plus, Bradley, their dark arts specialist, was always on guard, just like Winters’s techno-gadgets should have sounded if there was something dangerous closing in on them. But everybody in the Paranormal Containment Unit squad seemed okay and only heat fatigued, except the Shadows . . .
She glanced at Hunter and then watched him take two more steps toward their vehicle, weave, and then catch his balance by grabbing on to a lamppost. Then he slowly turned around, his gaze pure wolf.
“You okay?” she asked, ruffling her hair up off her neck, seeking a breeze from any direction in the still air.
Hunter shook his head slowly. “No. Not at all.”
For a moment she held his gaze and then looked around, stepping in closer. “What’s wrong? What did you see in there that I didn’t?”
Hunter’s hands covered her bare arms, sending searing heat into her flesh. Confusion tore at her mind; was what he had to say so awful that he had to steady her with a touch?
When he angled his face and moved in, the strange action startled her and she pulled back, eyes wide. A kiss? Out in public? In front of their squad? Hunter?
Oh yeah, something was definitely wrong. They didn’t do public displays of affection—ever.
“You okay?” she whispered, staring at him and then nervously glancing at her squad from the corner of her eye.
“I told you before. No,” he said between his teeth, his canines beginning to crest.
“Then what’s the matter?” She’d asked the question without blinking, almost without breathing.
“You.” His grip tightened on her arms. “I can’t explain it . . . but do I need to right now?”
“Yeah . . . Hello . . . We are out on the sidewalk and people are staring at us and a you’re acting weird—”
The kiss was so sudden and feral that it knocked the wind out of her. One moment there was at least a half a foot between them, and the next she was wrapped in a viselike grip, her body crushed against Hunter’s stone-cut chest. Her amulet was pressing into her breasts from the force of its collision with the heavy amber and silver piece he wore. Winters’s joking comments about them getting a room sounded so far away as Hunter’s fingers threaded through her hair and within seconds splayed across her back. She swallowed Hunter’s moan while trying to wrest herself from his grasp, but her legs were becoming rubbery as he devoured her mouth. The second he broke the kiss to gasp in a breath, she pushed his chest with both hands.
“Yo! Time out!” Sasha tried to step back as she wiped her palms down her face. “What just happened in there?”
Woods started up the motor of his jeep. “We’ll catch you guys later tonight,” he called out and put the vehicle in reverse.
Bear Shadow nodded and started his engine.
Fisher jumped out of the backseat of the third jeep and headed toward the jeep Hunter had been driving. “I’ve got you covered, man. Leave it here and you’ll get towed for sure. Throw me your keys.”
Hunter never answered, just dug in his pocket and threw his keys in the direction of Fisher’s voice.
“No, no, no!” Sasha yelled, pure humiliation burning her cheeks. “This isn’t what it looks like!”
Hunter stared at her. “Yes, it is.”
It all happened so quickly that it seemed like a blur. One moment Hunter was staring at her, his eyes transformed to betray his inner wolf, the next second he’d spied the shadow cast by the lamppost, pulling them both into it to tumble into the shadow lands.
He’d landed them in the twilight place, the shadow lands where spirits walked and Shadow Wolves traveled, but that fact seemed completely lost on Hunter. Wide, hot palms covered her backside, pulling her in close as he aggressively sought her mouth with a moan. No matter how fantastic what he was doing felt, his entire demeanor was incongruent with what was going on. Two women had died, they had just been standing over the first victim’s body . . . and that turned him on? Not a good sign.
“Stop!” Sasha said with a snarl and yanked away from Hunter’s grasp. She lowered her head in wolf attack mode, feeling her ears begin to flatten against her skull. “It’s dangerous in the shadow lands to be caught unaware. You of all people know that. How many battles have we fought in here? How many predators have we run from, coming through the zones? Once you start making love, you won’t hear a thing. Never that in here.”
She watched him back up and begin to rub the nape of his neck as though blood flow was returning to the thinking part of his body. Pointing toward the mist in a hard snap, she leveled her gaze at Hunter. “Two women just died, we just examined the bodies . . . now I want you to tell me real slowly and clearly why that just sent you into a mating frenzy.”
“I haven’t a fucking clue,” Hunter said quietly in a far-off voice. His tone was bewildered, as though he’d come out of a bad dream. There was no anger or judgment in his response, only what seemed like pure disbelief. He looked down at his hands, studying them intently as they trembled, and then finally looked up at Sasha. “If one of my own men had gotten out of the jeep, I would have battled him for being too close to my mate while in season . . . but you’re not.”
“No . . . I’m not,” Sasha said more softly, glad that the old Hunter she knew was beginning to return.
“I don’t understand . . . I thought my system had beaten the contagion.”
They stared at each other for what felt like a long time.
“This can’t be the contagion,” she finally said, now wrapping her arms around herself. “You beat it; Doc said you beat it—Silver Hawk saw you beat it in a vision.”
“Then what was this!” Hunter began to walk in a circle, dragging his fingers through his disheveled hair, tearing the leather thong away from his ponytail to fling it on the mist-covered cavern floor. “It’s come back before, lain d
ormant in my system for years, then erupted . . . I’m going back to our pack’s north territory in the Uncompahgre. I need to be as far away from New Orleans as possible. Right now I can’t risk an outbreak that could jeopardize you, my pack brothers, your human team, or even my blood brother Shogun again. He is on his way here; Sir Rodney is counting on us, and I’m unstable?”
He turned to leave and she caught his arm.
“We beat it before down here at Tulane Hospital . . . me, you, Doc, and Silver Hawk. The PCU’s top biochemical expert, ’Rissa, is here—and she and Doc make a solid team. The core clan leadership is here in New Orleans. No one is back home, Max.”
She hated that her voice had become so panicked, but if Hunter left, anything could go wrong, and that simply wasn’t an option.
“Ethan’s wife Margaret even helped sway the critical human physicians that we needed on our side at Tulane.” Sasha bodily blocked Hunter as he shrugged out of her hold. “Max Hunter, listen to me for two seconds—you owe me that much. Think about it. If you’ve got the virus spiking in your system, all of your best enforcers are here—which means innocent women and children from the pack will be at your mercy up north. Do you honestly want that on your conscience? You could spread it up there, where no contagion currently exists, if that’s what it even is. Plus, you’ve also got me and your brother down here, along with Bear and Crow. Alone up there, who can hunt you but us, if you have to be put down?”
It was insane logic, but her argument was what he’d needed to hear. She could feel it as his body relaxed and his eyes held uncertainty. Every fiber of her being knew the last thing that Hunter would be willing to risk would be an outbreak among the innocent, practically defenseless, members of the remaining Shadow Wolf pack.
“And what happens a few nights from now, when the moon waxes full . . . and it’s your birthday, and we’re out at Sir Rodney’s ball? What happens if we are called upon for battle, and I may be an enemy within that you hadn’t anticipated?” Hunter chuckled sadly and stalked away from her. “When are you going to just give up on me, Sasha, and finally put that silver bullet in my temple?”
“No time soon,” she said, folding her arms over her chest and willing the quaver out of her voice. “Answer me this . . . When did you start feeling like you were losing it?”
Hunter let out a long, frustrated breath, keeping his back toward Sasha, and then jammed his hands into his fatigue pants’ pockets. “I don’t know. It just hit me all of a sudden.”
“Think, man! Tell me when you felt the shift!”
“When we went back to Ethan’s, all right!” He spun on her, eyes beginning to glow amber around the edges of his irises.
“Good. Now we’re getting somewhere.” She walked closer to Hunter, holding his gaze. When Hunter shut his eyes and swallowed hard, she stopped speaking.
“I never heard a word the staff was saying this second time we went in there—all I saw was you.”
She hugged herself and turned away. This was definitely worse than she’d thought.
“Couldn’t take my eyes off of you,” he admitted in a deep rasp. “I could only focus on the way each pore leaked the smallest bead of perspiration . . . until your shirt clung . . . every shallow breath you took, trying not to breathe, but your breasts rose and fell. I had to walk away . . . had to go deeper into the room you interviewed them in to find a cool, dark place to stand, away from you. Every now and then the conversations you were having would fade . . . I’d simply hear the tone of your voice, Ethan’s voice—the way a wolf would . . . without understanding the words, simply relying on the tone, then speech would return to me. At points I felt like I was blacking out. Then the pain came.”
“Pain?” Sasha murmured, going to him.
Hunter nodded. “I’ve wanted you before, but never like I felt in there—no offense, just truth. I told you before I was no liar. But standing apart from you felt like an ache that twisted my gut into knots as a blade stabbed . . . Suffice to say, it hurt.”
“It wasn’t like that when you had the demon-infected Werewolf virus . . . was it?”
“No,” Hunter said in a quiet rumble. “There was rage, there was hunt hunger, there was the painful transition and the increased desire, but wanting you was never a physical ache that hurt worse than a gunshot wound.”
“A Phoenix flamed in that cellar in a totally weird way. Ethan can’t hold his Fae glamour, albeit he was terribly upset . . . but still. Then you—and you weren’t all right until we got outside of the normal dimension. Even outside on the street—”
“I was losing my mind.” He looked at her without an apology in his eyes. “Truth.”
“Yeah . . . you were,” she said with a slight half smile.
“It’s still there, you know,” he said without a trace of humor in his expression. “Just not as acute, and requiring a great deal of concentration to keep it at bay.”
“Oh . . . I’m sorry, I just thought . . . Never mind.”
Hunter nodded. “But that does make me feel better, just knowing that in the shadow lands I have some measure of restraint. The more I think about it, before, when the contagion hit, shifting through the borders of dimensions made the virus spike in my system, so perhaps this is something else.”
“In here,” she admitted, “I’m not as angry . . .” Sasha lifted her hair up off her neck. “Did you notice last night, every time we went into the shadows, we might have been fighting, but we seemed to get clear once we came out?”
Hunter just nodded and stared at her.
CHAPTER 6
Clarissa held her cell phone away from her ear as the others in their ragtag, human-wolf combo squad watched her try to calm Ethan down.
“Ethan, Ethan,” Clarissa soothed, “they are investigating, and uh, they will be back soon—you know Sasha and Hunter are on top of it.”
Woods almost spit out his coffee as Bradley slapped his forehead. Winters snickered and just shook his head while both Shadow Wolves sat stone-faced, drinking their coffee and staring out the window. Clarissa gave the guys who were smirking the evil eye, telling them with colorful hand signals to knock it off.
“Why don’t you tell ol’ Ethan the truth, ’Rissa,” Fisher said, shoveling eggs into his mouth with a wide grin. “The big guy got horn—”
Bear Shadow’s grip on the front of Fisher’s t-shirt stopped his comedic banter.
“That’s my sister,” Crow Shadow warned with a growl. “Be cool up in this diner, and any family business stays family business—understood, familiar?”
“You didn’t have to get personal and call me a familiar, man. I was just joking around.” Fisher yanked out of Bear Shadow’s hold and stuffed a piece of bacon into his mouth. “Could everybody just chill out and eat? My bad, all right?” he said, chewing, which made both wolves visibly relax.
Bradley leaned forward, lowering his voice, glancing around the table while Clarissa continued to try to appease Ethan on the phone. “But don’t you think all of this is a little strange?”
“What’s strange?” Bear Shadow said with a low growl. “Ardent affection toward one’s mate in season is natural.” He shoveled a large forkful of sausage into his mouth, followed by a healthy hunk of pancakes. “It is the way of the wolf, human. You wouldn’t understand.”
Ignoring the affront to his human heritage, Bradley pressed on. “You two have not been able to normalize your eyes since Hunter came out of The Fair Lady. That’s not normal. Ethan’s glamour was completely gone when I went back in to get directions to this diner.” Bradley stopped speaking as the waitress came over to refresh everyone’s coffee.
“Pardon me, but can I ask y’all a question?” their waitress said with a bright smile. She tossed her loose blond curls over her shoulder, openly flirting with Woods.
Woods smiled, as did every male at the table. “Shoot . . . but only with a very small-caliber weapon.”
The young woman giggled and poured coffee all around. “I was wondering if there
was one of those conventions in town, you know those science fiction kinds of things where people dress up? I know we get all kinds for Mardi Gras . . . but you fellas have the wolf-eyes contact lenses in, and a little earlier there were some real handsome gentlemen with long hair and bows and arrows and multicolored contact lenses in . . . but I never knew you could get the kind that changed colors depending on how the light hit—and they had the ears, too,” she said laughing, gesturing to her own to describe how the ones she’d seen had been pointed. “I’ve always wanted to go to one of the cons, I guess they’re called . . . Are they fun?”
Stunned silent for an awkward few moments, no one spoke. Finally Bradley piped up to cover for the group. “It’s actually being held in Houston and all of us are just passing through . . . but they are fun. If they have one here next year, you should go.”
“I think I will,” she said brightly. “Thanks, guys!”
Fisher and Crow Shadow got up from the table.
“Reconnaissance,” Fisher said. “Gotta get a visual.”
Crow Shadow nodded. “Definitely.”
Clarissa covered the receiver with her hand, and then quickly got off her cell phone with Ethan. “Call you back.”
No one spoke until the two soldiers returned, shaking their heads.
“Dudes were probably long gone,” Fisher said, sliding into his seat.
Crow Shadow confirmed Fisher’s assessment. “No fresh scent of Fae.”
“But did you hear that?” Bradley hissed in an urgent whisper, looking around five ways.
“The Fae glamour isn’t holding in the streets—normal humans like me and Winters, and, and that waitress saw Fae archers?” Bradley took an agitated slurp of his coffee as Bear Shadow and Crow Shadow leaned in closer. “Now tell me that’s the way of the wolf. Something really freaky is going on and I don’t think we’ve been fully briefed.”