The way her words fell flat in the enclosed room caused her heart rate to spike. What did Sam use this room for, if not to torture werewolves?
What were all those stains on the floor?
“Is this how it ends? Did you predict this? Plan for it? I know about her, Sam. I know what my mother was, and metal cage or not, I want to know what happened to her. I won’t rest until I do.”
Nothing. No reply came, and there was no fresh breeze to make talking easier. Abby took a better look around. She cringed and scuttled backward when she saw the chains attached to the wall beside her. Darkened by some sort of coating—God, was it dried blood?—the chains hung from huge rings screwed into the wall at a standing person’s shoulder height. They were made of silver.
The chains didn’t swing. She did, as a whirl of vertigo spun her sideways.
Odors rushed at her from the floor as her face neared it. Abby tried desperately to get away from those smells, and to swallow the shout arising from the pain of her injured shoulder as she rolled onto her side. Words began to form in the fog to categorize the onslaught of scents. Musk. Urine. Blood. Lots of blood. Enough blood to create a river. Years of odors were here, piled layer upon layer. No amount of cleanup had removed them.
She covered her nose and fought off a gag reflex. Her throat filled with bile. Fisting her hands in her hair, she tore at the roots.
Then she brought her head up with a cry of alarm. Centered in those awful odors, she found a surprise—a remembered fragrance that she knew well. The pleasant, rosy scent that had comforted her in those years of loneliness. A ghostly drift of flowers.
Biting back a scream, Abby struggled to her feet, unable to make herself touch the wall with the chains, and instead using the cage’s bars for support.
“Sam, what did you do?” she shouted. “You kept my mother here, you sick bastard, and dared to claim self-defense when she died?”
Anger shot through her, intense enough to pitch her against the bars. There she stayed, head lifted, queasiness roiling in her stomach. “Mother? I feel you here. What has he done?”
She moved her neck to shift the wave of vertigo and heard bones crack. The sound made her want to vomit. She couldn’t hold back. Up it came...only it wasn’t what she had expected. Not sickness, unless the term Lycan counted.
The oncoming blackness tossed her helplessly to the mattress as a torrent of pain reshuffled tolerance levels from acute to something far worse and her heart began to pump lava through her veins. The pressure inside her skull intensified until vision blurred. Her shoulders twitched repeatedly, as if testing the water for heaven knew what—some future realignment, maybe—and then muscle began to pull away from bone.
Abby screamed.
Sanity faded into the distance as the scream went on and on, leaving emptiness in its wake—a great, yawning emptiness that only one thing had the substance to fill.
The wolf’s outline tickled hers before expanding. Light from the overhead bulb tortured Abby’s closed eyes. Her arms burned as tendons stretched like taffy. But the really bad thing came from inside her.
Hatred was an emotion so pure, so hot, it vied with the concept of revenge. Hatred for Sam’s sins and his transgressions against innocent victims, among the rest. Hatred for Sam hurting her mother, and for whatever time her mother had spent in this hellhole. Hatred for Sam not telling her about this, and for shunning her all those years when she felt lost.
Sam had admitted to feeding this kind of hatred to her, along with the silver, hoping to ward off her changes until she had fully matured. Was this what she had to look forward to now? Silver chains in a basement cell?
Her disgust had an iron-like taste that coated her tongue. She didn’t want to be a wolf, not like this. Bad thoughts had to translate to bad wolves. But emotion rushed upward from her gut like a living, breathing entity within the entity taking her over, straining to get out, pushing the limits of her stamina. She had nowhere to hide. There was to be no covering up her secrets in this awful place.
Sweat stung her eyes. Her borrowed clothes tortured her oversensitive skin, and she tore at them with her claws. The fact that she had claws barely registered as Abby pulled up her knees and curled into a ball on the floor, on fire, seeking the coolness of the concrete. But on the ground, with her face turned sideways, the foul odors quickly overwhelmed her senses.
The concrete carried a vibration. Someone was coming. Someone not wholly unexpected.
Adrenaline surged. Her injured shoulder exploded with pain as it jumped back in the socket, aided by the expanding musculature around it. Both arms shot out straight from her sides, the skin stretching, thickening. Her stomach twisted. She convulsed. All this happened fast, and automatically.
Blood, moving within her, took on a rhythm, flowing like a mysterious, underlying melody. It sang through her arteries and weaved through her heart’s chambers, dragging long lines of pain behind that came and went in undulating waves.
Her lungs expanded as if she’d swallowed several helium balloons filled to capacity. Ribs cracked to accommodate the lungs. Vertebrae detonated at the base of her spine, setting off more explosions that worked their way up.
Abby’s vision turned red. She panted with her mouth open and raked her face with her claws as her body turned itself inside out and a dark cloud that had to be Death hovered, waiting to see if she’d come through.
The room turned. Her body lengthened. The bones in her face rearranged as if remolded by the fires inside. New teeth, as sharp as the claws, tore into her lower lip, adding more blood to the foul scene.
And then the pain stopped suddenly. The whirling darkness ceased as if someone had merely flipped a switch to the Off position. Discomfort receded like thunder rolling into the distance. The lightbulb over her head sparked, flared, dimmed, then winked on and off in the manner of a strobe light with its batteries used up.
No sound reached her, other than the random pulses of the electricity in that bulb.
Abby opened her eyes, afraid to move. She lay shaking on the floor, chilled, but saturated in sweat. Thoughts returned with an alarming clarity, though she had no voice to prove their validity. Moonlight had not reached her in this dank place, whether or not the moon was full, and yet...
I am a werewolf.
At last.
Like her.
The world didn’t give her time to assimilate that fact. A door at the top of the stairs opened on oiled hinges. Abby didn’t bother to get up, not certain she could, and if her legs would hold her. Footsteps on the stairs were loud and jarring to her enhanced hearing system. Whoever approached moved with a limp and smelled of sweat and whiskey.
“Sonja,” Sam said, his voice low, his tone gruff with hidden innuendo and a hint of madness. “It’s time to play.”
Abby didn’t know much, and though her body felt as if she’d just circled a drain, the one thing she did know was her name. And it wasn’t Sonja.
Chapter 29
Cameron rapped on the door to the bar before pounding on it with both fists. “Not mistaken.” Abby’s scent clung to the place, and he was determined to find her.
The door had huge metal hinges too sturdy to break through. Although kicking it in would have been nice, Cameron stepped back and shouted, “Abby, do you hear me?”
Her scent had weakened. He cursed and headed back to the side staircase. Studying the building as he strode toward the steps, he noticed a peculiar anomaly in the building’s structure—a wide gap in spacing between the windows on the first and second floors. He had climbed the equivalent of three flights of stairs minutes ago, and saw this as a viable clue.
He remembered the creaky floor in the hallway.
“Hell,” he shouted, heading for the stairs. “Damn it all to hell.”
Confirming his speculation, Abby’s scent
grew stronger when he reached the door leading to the hallway of apartments. But her scent had changed. Abby was alive, and different. Abby had taken on her wolf.
It was daylight. The sun was up. Had Sam tortured her into shifting? Lycans, Dylan had explained, possessed the ability to change shape at will, no moon necessary. How about according to someone else’s will? What about the Blackout phase she’d have to go through, and might not survive?
“Abby!”
He felt along the walls, searching for a lever or other kind of switch. Finding none, he scoured the floor by digging his fingernails into grooves between the boards. One of the boards budged. He shouted, “Yes!” but couldn’t pry up the piece of wood.
Anxiety was a bitch. Anger made him crazed. Jumping to his feet, Cameron stomped on the floor, letting whoever might be down there know he had discovered their hidey-hole.
When the cell phone tucked in his pants pocket rang, the hallway filled with the sound of alarm bells going off. He had no intention of answering, and turned for the door, wondering hopefully if Dylan Landau, who was so much more than he seemed at first glance, kept an ax in the trunk of that pretty silver sedan.
* * *
Abby sensed Cameron’s nearness with a terrifying certainty. Her cells strained toward him. Her throat hurt with the need to shout. He was here, close. As for finding her, and what waited in Sam’s lair...was that possible?
Cameron, she sent to him along the connection uniting them. Stay away. It’s a trap.
Sick to death of this shit, she changed her position. She had swallowed a bomb and it had exploded, but she could deal. She had to open her eyes.
She saw Sam leaning against the wall with the basin, loading a dart into his weapon’s chamber. The weapon looked similar to the ones she went after rabid dogs with to knock them out. She’d seen it before, the night before, in a hunter’s hand.
With that recall, she swiped at the spot on her neck where the dart had struck. Last night, she’d had Cameron to help. No one was here to help her now. If she had never found this place, or known about it, Cameron wouldn’t be able to. Cameron might be close, but she was on her own.
“I’m thinking it’s too long until the next full moon,” Sam said. “But look at you, all decked out and furred-up as if it were here right now.”
Abby watched him carefully.
“Then again, we both know that Lycans don’t need the moon to instigate changes. I first tested that theory here, in this spot, if you recall.”
He set the weapon on the counter. He was, Abby realized without needing all of her senses to determine his status, totally mad.
“You wouldn’t help me before, back then,” he said. “Not with your kind. Nevertheless, you helped us to bag quite a few pelts. And what did I do in return, Sonja? I promised to take care of your spawn, and treat her like one of my own.”
Abby glanced behind her at the wall of chains. Her heart pounded. She withheld a growl. Things were becoming clearer. Too terribly clear. Maybe the reason there weren’t any pictures or photos of her mother in the apartments was because Sonja Stark had never set foot there. It was possible that Sam had hidden his madness all along, but how possible was it for him to have kept Abby’s mother here, in this dreadful place, on purpose, and by promising that Sonja’s daughter would enjoy the freedom Sonja never had?
There had been no marriage. That was the answer to the questions of her past. Sam and Sonja’s union had been a sham, no more than a deal with blackmail at its core. Sam had used her mother to catch werewolves, just as Sam had used her.
Tears sprang to Abby’s eyes and spilled over, trickling down her elongated face. How long had her mother been a prisoner, and watched over by this madman, when her daughter had been the cause? She had been the reason her mother complied with Sam’s demands. Her mother had loved her enough to live like this, and to be treated like one of Sam’s monsters.
For how long?
She wanted to know how her mother had lived in chains, and how many darts filled with sedatives had her mother endured.
The world spun around in slow circles, and Abby’s mind went with it as tears continued to fall.
She had found the truth, at last.
“We’ll have to address a new problem,” Sam said as casually as if he were speaking about too many broken glasses in the bar. “Your new friend. What’s his name? Oh yeah. Mitchell. Cameron Mitchell. Did you bite him, I wonder, in a fit of passion, to make him a wolf?” Sam crossed his arms over his chest. “You always were a cheater. After all, you had her.”
Abby looked up at him, her anger rekindling, heat radiating off her in waves. Sam was mixing things up now, going between her mother and herself.
“Well, you’re safe here, for now. Tonight, we’ll go out. Just you and me. There might not be any Weres around, but Lycans are another matter, and when they see what I’m going to do to you, they might come running.”
Again, Abby’s vision turned red. In a swift, unplanned move, she got to her feet. Sam using her against Lycans like Dylan Landau was not in the realm of possibility. She wasn’t Sonja. She didn’t have to protect anyone here, and sure as hell didn’t have to obey the real monster in this room.
Power soared through her. Her muzzle curled back to expose a mouthful of sharp teeth, some of them bloody from biting down too hard. With clawed hands, she took hold of the bars thinking that Sam had made one mistake too many. He hadn’t locked her into those silver chains before taunting her with information she had spent most of her life searching for.
She was Sonja’s daughter. Lycan. Strong.
And Sam was just a big demented bastard.
With Lycan power swimming in her veins and the musculature to back it up, she bent two of the metal bars back, stuck her head through the gap and let loose a growl that echoed in the room and wiped the grin from Sam’s surprised face.
But the bars were too strong to get her body through. She couldn’t reach Sam, or get free. She didn’t want to think about how many times her mother might have tried.
And yet...
She looked up at the ceiling, where the cracks outlining the trapdoor were barely visible but there. Something had gotten stuck in that trapdoor on her way down.
She pulled her head back into the cage. Gathering what she could manage of her new strength, she launched herself at the bars. Using them as leverage to heave herself upward, hearing the ring of her claws against the metal, Abby propelled her newer Were bulk toward that ceiling in a flash of startling energy, hoping that trapdoor would help her escape.
* * *
“No damn ax,” Cameron muttered. But there was a tire iron. He used it to beat at the wall between the two floors, causing some damage to the building’s siding, though he didn’t have to continue for long.
The door above him opened and a werewolf, furred-up in pure daylight, jumped toward him. Startled, he stepped back, but the wolf came right to him and put its face close to his.
“Abby?” he said, blindsided by her appearance.
She pushed past him, leaped from the stairs and took off. Cameron knew she wanted him to follow, but first he had to find Sam Stark, to see what the imbecile had done to make Abby shift.
He ran up the stairs and into the hallway, seeing that there was indeed a trapdoor, and that it was open. Abby had crawled up that way. Scrape marks scarred the floorboards.
He swung himself down into the hole and landed on his feet with his fists raised. No one met him. No one was there.
It took all of ten seconds to see the place, and figure out what had happened. What he saw made him sick. As Cameron headed for the stairs and wherever they’d take him, he flipped open Dylan’s phone and dialed the emergency number. “Mitchell. PD. You might want to send a car to the following location and find the trapdoor.”
He had no
more time for explanations. There were only two places Abby would go, and he had to get to her before she chose.
The keys were in the Mercedes. He cranked the ignition, glanced quickly behind and was about to pull away when he saw her. God, he saw her...
Abby had pressed herself into a space between the building housing the bar and the one next to it, on the opposite side of the vacant lot. She crouched on her haunches with her head on her knees.
He reached her as she looked up, and yanked her to her feet. He pushed her back, out of sight of the street, and ran his hands over the new angles of her face. “Change back, Abby. Do it now. You’re out of there, and I have you.”
She looked at him with red-rimmed eyes that were still a deep emerald green. She panted with shock and the effort to restrain herself from doing as he asked.
“Abby. Listen to me. Do it now. I have a car. We’ll drive away, and you never have to see Sam again.”
Clearly she understood, and yet Cameron felt the power of the Lycan blood coursing through her dictate another direction.
“No,” he said. “Not now. Maybe never. You cannot get to him. End it, Abby. Please. The police will find Sam and haul him in for creating a place like the one I saw in there. He will be out of the way. We can figure out what to do once you’ve rested, and after you let me know you weren’t hurt.”
The tears that ran down her face broke his heart. Cameron put his arms around her shaking body and waited, silently urging her to come back to him, so that he could take her away.
Her skin began to shrink. The fine hair covering the parts of her that were bare disappeared. This was nothing like his own reversal. The snapping of her bones back into place sounded like stepping on bubble wrap, and happened all at once, instead of in pieces. The extra musculature in her arms and legs streamlined, molding into limbs he had been familiar with on more than one occasion.
And there Abby was...in his arms, dressed like a street urchin, her tears falling from thin, pale cheeks to splash on his shirt.
God, he loved her.
Harlequin Nocturne May 2015 Box Set: Wolf HunterPossessed by a Wolf Page 23