Desert Wolf

by Linda Thomas-Sundstrom

  “Another mystery,” she replied.

  “One too damn many,” he muttered.

  He took Paxton’s hand. “Stay back. Behind me.”

  For once, she did as he asked.

  They walked forward. As they did, the filmy creature moved again, adding more distance. Each time they tried to get close, she created more distance, until they were out of the wash and had reached the pile of rocks marking the way to the old Desperado mine.

  Grant stopped. “Too dangerous.”

  Paxton said, “She wants to show us something.”

  “Could be a trap, and more than likely is,” Grant argued, not liking this at all and ready to turn back toward town.

  Paxton was adamant. “I’m going.”

  “It’s not a good idea,” he insisted, scenting strong Were presence that made his claws slide into place.

  From somewhere nearby a deep voice said, “Not a good idea? When did Paxton Hall ever let that stop her?”

  *

  Paxton refused to let her knees buckle. Recognizing the tone of that remark was another piece of the puzzle. And, well, she’d never had the patience for puzzles.

  She stepped clear of Grant’s protective stance with her hands on her hips and said, “Time is up. Who are you?”

  “You don’t yet know?” The Were in the shadow of the mine’s entrance turned.

  “I’m curiously blank.”

  “We both know that’s not true.”

  “What I’m thinking right now is impossible,” she said.

  “Who the fuck are you?” Grant demanded, looking back and forth from her to the boarded-up mine.

  It was a hell of a time for the memory to return. Young Paxton had been struggling to follow a small group of ranch hands to their trucks. The people were hatless to show respect to someone who had died. Her mother was that person.

  Her father was there to lead the group. Tall, broad, wide-shouldered, he towered over everyone by at least a head, wearing a long black coat that made the dirt at his feet swirl. On the pocket of that coat had been an embroidered crest. Paxton saw this as clearly as if she stood there now. Recognition of that crest made it a toss-up between laughing and crying.

  “Wolf,” she said, raising her face to the shadows. “Our brand was a wolf.”

  Beside her, Grant stirred. She was on a roll and couldn’t afford to look at him.

  “Isn’t that interesting?” she observed, searching the shadows for the rogue she knew was watching her.

  Eyes watching…

  Someone waiting behind old wood walls…

  Those things had haunted her.

  “Especially since someone eventually turned Desperado over to a pack of wolves,” she said.

  Grant’s anxiety underscored her fear, but also made her braver. She was close to figuring out this mystery. So close.

  Voices boomed inside her head. Directions. Demands.

  I forbid you to go there again, Paxton.

  Your mother is no longer here to keep you in line.

  Your wild spirit will get you into trouble here, so you will have to go.

  She would have to go…

  In memory, pale eyes glowed in the dark. In the distance, came the roar of a man who mourned the loss of the love of his life. But, Paxton wanted to shout as the fog continued to share its secrets, she had lost her mother. And then her dad.

  “No.” Grant’s one-word protest could have brought her around if she paid too much attention to the offer of safety in her lover’s voice. There was no way to block her thoughts.

  Back down the hole…

  Her pony had lain dead at her feet, covered in blood. And she had been sent away for disobeying her father’s rules about riding out alone after dark.

  Vampires had been there, in her memory, just as she had recalled earlier, and had chewed the life from her beloved pony. Someone had found her, had fought off the bloodsuckers. That someone had fought like a demon to protect her.

  Wolf logo.

  Werewolf.

  Pale eyes.

  Big as a bear.

  Paxton closed her eyes as the memories faded. When she opened them again, she said wearily, “Hello, Dad. We thought you were dead.”

  Chapter 32

  What the…?

  Grant pressed himself against Paxton’s side, fearing she had gone off the deep end. She believed Andrew Hall was alive. Not only that, she believed Hall was the rogue they had been chasing before knowing about vampires in the area.

  “Paxton,” he said, not ready to go along with her dramatic perceptions.

  The Lycan came forward in the shadows as if he were part of them. And, Christ, he had been part of them, since the rogue had been so damn hard to find. This time, however, the Lycan faced them, still partially in the shade and looking more like a modern-day wizard than a werewolf clothed in a man’s flesh.

  “You can’t be Andrew Hall,” Grant said, trying hard to accept that this could be the same man who had pledged his land in order to protect the future of the werewolf species in this part of Arizona. Paxton’s father. And that Paxton could be right.

  “This is a joke,” Grant added.

  “Sorry, son,” the big man said without revealing his face. “It was best to remain on the sidelines.”

  Paxton, silent now, was free of any hint of warm and cuddly feelings for the man in the hood. Her posture was rigid. Her hands were balled. Grant wasn’t certain she actually believed this, either.

  He would have whisked her away to a safe place where vampires and trouble couldn’t find her, but she’d have had none of that. And, in this case, trouble was looking them straight in the eyes.

  “Why aren’t you dead?” she asked the hooded man.

  Grant didn’t actually expect the Lycan to answer that question and was surprised when he did.

  “It was time to pass the torch,” he replied.

  “What does that mean?” Paxton demanded in a softer voice.

  “I could no longer help the way I wanted to,” the Lycan said.

  “Why not?”

  “I wouldn’t have been accepted by my own species.”

  Uneasy with the Lycan’s confession, Grant watched Paxton flinch at Hall’s use of the word species. Tough as nails, and showing more grit, she confronted the big Were again.

  “What made you think that?”

  The Lycan replied, “I’m no longer one of them. Not completely.”

  Grant interrupted. “You’re either Were or not. There is no middle ground.”

  When the eyes behind the hood turned his way, Grant felt heat without having to see those eyes.

  “Ah, so we all think until the impossible happens. In this case, it happened to me,” the Lycan said.

  Paxton inched forward with her head tilted to one side, as if sniffing for the truth. “What is the middle ground you speak of?”

  “I wouldn’t be telling you now if it wasn’t so important,” the Lycan answered. “And if it wouldn’t save lives.”

  “Go on,” Grant said.

  The Lycan gestured to the boarded-up mine. “They found this place and made it their nest. No one else knew this, or that I had found them. By that time, it was too late.”

  “Nest.” Grant absorbed another chill. “You’re talking about vampires?”

  The Lycan nodded. “They came slowly, at first, and in small numbers. Those numbers quickly grew.”

  Grant glanced to Paxton. She was holding in her mind an image of a dead pony and had told him she had seen vampires before. Putting those things together caused more interest in what this Lycan, who might or might not have been Andrew Hall, had to say.

  “I fought those suckers at night without telling anyone else, thinking I could take care of the problem. As the alpha here, that was my province.”

  Grant nodded for him to go on.

  “Eventually their numbers were out of control. I had to recruit the pack, and together we came calling. The wily bloodsucking bastards separated me from
the others as easily as culling sheep. My wolves were slaughtered, almost to the man, and I…”

  Grant waited without breathing for the Lycan to finish his statement, already fearing what he might say. At his side, Paxton looked to have been carved from stone.

  “Well, I was strong enough, different enough, to live through that massacre. I was strong enough to get my affairs in order and to send Paxton away.”

  Paxton spoke in a small voice. “You sent me away for my protection?”

  The hood bobbed when the Lycan nodded. “Always the rebel. That was my Paxton. Never listening. Always bending or breaking the rules I hoped would keep you from a similar fate.”

  A punch of emotion rocked Paxton back on her feet as she recalled the werewolf who had come to her rescue. That werewolf now had a name. That werewolf had been her father.

  It was Andrew Hall facing them.

  *

  Paxton took two more steps, feeling weightless now and only starting to process what was taking place as all three Lycans faced off.

  It wasn’t really a face-off, though. Even as a man, her father outweighed Grant by at least forty pounds. The hood he wore did nothing to disguise his size and bulk.

  Something so bad had happened to her father that he had faked his own death. He had torn apart every emotion she’d had since she was a kid with his confession of the reason he had sent her away, but that didn’t address his continued silence. She, out of everyone, could have kept his secret, whatever that secret was.

  “Yes,” he said, listening to her thoughts. “You might have kept those secrets if I had been willing to tell them to you.”

  “It was you who downed the tree,” Paxton said.

  “Yes. To keep you inside the fence.”

  “And it was you on the hood of my car.”

  “Hoping to keep you from venturing out in the dark.”

  Paxton tried hard to assimilate this news and could barely breathe beneath the weight of it.

  “Middle ground,” Grant said, stepping up to meet her. “What does that mean? What could be so bad that you’d fake your death and hide out here, without your pack, your daughter or other company?”

  “Oh, I have company. It’s just not the sort you’d expect. They keep me busy. And now, they have their eyes on…Paxton.”

  Grant said, “What are you talking about?”

  “To get to me, their archnemesis, they will go after my daughter, knowing she is my only weak spot.”

  “Who will do this?” Paxton asked.

  “Then why did you arrange to bring her here?” Grant demanded before her father could reply.

  “Who will come after me?” Paxton repeated.

  “Are you talking about vampires?” Grant asked.

  Shadows had receded near the entrance to the mine, and the hooded Lycan, her father, backed into them. He didn’t leave her there with her questions, but seemed to need those shadows the way she needed light.

  “She was buried here, you know,” her father said. “A portion of the mine caved in while she was inside.”

  More emotion struck, tying Paxton’s stomach in knots. “My mother?” She was not sure how much more of this she could take.

  Her father nodded. “You were…”

  “Young,” she said. “And not allowed to see her. Not allowed to visit her grave because I was told there wasn’t a grave.”

  “You couldn’t be allowed to come here, though I think you tried, sensing her soul was here somewhere. Am I right, Paxton?”

  “Yes.”

  “And you were almost killed.”

  “They ate my pony,” she said. “So you sent me away.”

  Her father lifted a hand. “You would have returned here time and time again, until one day I might have lost sight of you, and you would have suffered the same fate your pony did. That outcome would have killed me if they hadn’t.”

  Paxton was aware of Grant’s energy sparking inside him. She put out a hand to stop him from advancing on her father.

  Would have killed me if they hadn’t. Those words rang in her ears with a discordant sound.

  “What happened to you?” she asked again, willing her father to answer the question that had become the heart of this mystery. She sent him that message over and over, bombarding his mind with her Lycan voice. “You said it’s important that we know now, so please tell us the rest.”

  Grant, impatient beside her, said, “The vampires you hunted got to you?”

  Her father nodded.

  “Yet you’re here now,” Paxton protested. “You survived.”

  “I survived, but at great cost. I lost everything.”

  Her voice took on a plaintive quality. “You had me. Could have had me.”

  “No,” her father said flatly, as if he had thought of the possibility so many times since he had sent her away that it no longer had the power over him it once might have. “Not you. Not like this.”

  “But I’m here. You brought me here.”

  “I’m dying, Paxton. My wolf blood wears thin. I arranged for you to come here for two reasons.”

  “Those reasons are?” Grant was quick to ask.

  Ignoring the interruption, her father said, “Grant had to know about the danger facing the area in order to protect not only the pack, but our neighbors.”

  “Vampires,” Grant said.

  “And also because it was time for you, daughter, to come into your heritage. You needed to be here, among your kind. It was time for you to come home.”

  Paxton felt a tear slide down her cheek. More tears pooled in her eyes. “How did you know it was my time?”

  She thought she heard a lightness in her father’s tone when he said, “It was the same with your mother’s line, twenty-six being the year of her wolf’s birth.”

  “But how…?” Her question failed.

  “And because in getting close to me, your wolf would respond to mine,” Grant said to her. “Like calling to like, with a little thing we call imprinting calling the shots. Once you were here it was only a matter of time before we connected. Isn’t that right, Andrew?”

  Her father nodded.

  Paxton turned to face her father again. “Grant was chosen to be a possible mate?”

  “Grant Wade exemplifies the best in us,” her father replied. “Nothing was too good for my daughter.”

  So there it was. Mystery solved. Paxton’s head swam. She felt faint. But instead of feeling angry with her father, she suddenly felt grateful and almost euphoric. Instead of feeling lost and alone, she had found her father alive, and he had sent her into the arms of a potential mate. Grant. Cowboy. Alpha. Werewolf. Her father’s chosen successor.

  She wasn’t sure she liked anyone choosing a partner for her. Then again…

  “All right,” she said to her father, almost afraid she would collapse from fatigue before hearing more. “Now tell us the rest. Tell us about you.”

  *

  Grant strode toward Andrew Hall holding tightly to Paxton’s hand. The elder Lycan waited as they approached without making any move to disappear. This was what Andrew Hall wanted. He had specifically expressed to them how important this reunion with Paxton was.

  “Maybe you can remove the hood, Andrew, and finish this tale, so that we can understand it,” Grant suggested.

  Andrew was silent for several beats before raising his hands. Long fingers grasped the edges of his black hood. As it was drawn back, Grant stared at what that covering had hidden. He tightened his grip on Paxton’s hand when she swayed in reaction to what they were seeing.

  Andrew Hall’s face was unrecognizable as either human or Were. His features were marred by rows of white scars. Eyelids were fused to the skin above them. His mouth was pulled up on one side in a permanent sneer. The rest of his skin was mottled and as pale as his eyes. No color left. Nothing recognizable as human skin.

  The big Lycan looked like an embattled ghost.

  Long gray hair hung down his back. On his neck were rows of bl
ack dots, in pairs. There were so many dots, seeing them made Grant sick to his stomach. Something nasty had been attacking Andrew Hall for some time, and Grant knew what that something nasty was. Vampires.

  “So you see now why I can’t fit in,” Andrew said sadly.

  “You’re Lycan, no matter what,” Grant objected. “Someone could have helped you. We can find help now.”

  Andrew Hall shook his head. “Who would have guarded this place and other places like it, if I had left my post? Which member of your pack could have lived through what I have lived through, for as long as I have? Only you might have taken up my role while unprepared for it, Grant, and then my daughter would truly have been alone.”

  “Lycan,” Paxton intoned.

  “Yes,” her father said. “Lycan, once upon a time. With so much vampire poison in my veins I’m not sure what I have become, and the fear is that I can’t hold out much longer.”

  Grant closed his eyes. Andrew Hall had taken it upon himself to be Desperado’s protector. Their guardian angel. In the background, he battled bloodsucking parasites with no one to help him, so that Weres in this part of the desert could thrive.

  It wasn’t a necessary sacrifice, Grant told himself, when so many Weres would have come to his aid. But the big Lycan had his own demons, and those demons had driven him.

  Perhaps his presence here at the mine where his wife had died was due to his need to keep vampires from finding her remains. But that was a question Grant would never ask. What was done, was done. The rogue had been found.

  He stopped processing that information when he remembered the woman who had led them here. His entire body chilled with the thought of who that woman might have been, and what she was. Andrew’s wife, maybe. Paxton’s mother. It seemed to him that there were two ghosts here at this old mine, and many more layers to this earthly existence than he had thought possible. It also seemed to Grant that some of those things should be left alone.

  Paxton slid her hand from his and pulled away. She was next to her father before Grant blinked, and looking into Andrew Hall’s marred face.

  “How did you know who I was?” Andrew Hall asked her.

  “It was the eyes,” she replied. “I remembered my father’s eyes.”

  Andrew Hall had wanted to see his daughter again, and had held out against all that vampire venom in his system in order to do so. He was handing Grant the torch…so that the desert pack would take over the fight against vampires when Andrew was gone.