Wolf Born

“He’s been taken to Miami General. Took a bullet in the upper abdomen, but it looks like the gun might have belonged to one of the other victims, perhaps shooting at whatever moved. I heard another EMT say that if he’s in good shape physically, he’ll probably make it.”

“His name?”

“Don’t know. Sorry. Got to go.” Smith hurried back to his truck.

Colton looked down the block to where a city streetlight should have been glowing and wasn’t. The bad feeling in his gut quadrupled in intensity. His parents’ house sat beneath that blown-out bulb. The front windows were dark.

He ran. Ducking under the yellow tape with his eyes locked on his parents’ house, he rushed across the lawn and up the front steps. Forgetting himself and his innate strength, he tore the screen door off its hinges and reached for the knob.

He stepped across the threshold, where the brutal odor of blood and exposed Lycan secrets hit him in a moment of monumental frenzy, and the severed head of his proud Lycan father lay on the carpet at Colton’s feet.

Stunned by the sight, Colton let out a wail of anguish that nearly buckled him at the knees.

Chapter 3

Rosalind heard the sound of a Lycan’s roar and froze midstep. Registering the sounds as pain and loss, the intensity of the emotion in the roar rocked her. Hearing something so personal made her want to run away. Stubbornly, she stayed.

Drifts of a dreadful odor hit her, tearing her from the shadows. Enemy stink. But what kind?

After the darkness of the park, the revolving lights on the police cars hurt her light-sensitive eyes. She was in werewolf form and in danger because of it. She couldn’t be found like this. She didn’t dare follow the big male’s muffled howl of pain. She wasn’t used to crowds. With so many people around, changing back to her human semblance wasn’t an option, since she’d be naked if she did.

Nevertheless, she was drawn to the sound of the brown Were’s pain, and moved through the dark spaces between houses on the opposite side of the street, her black pelt acting as camouflage in the night.

She was stopped by the sight of three human police officers heading toward where she hid.

Time to get away.

She had to leave the wulf and what had happened here, and didn’t want to. That sound. The pain in it. Where are you?

She had been gone for a long time now. Her father would be frantic. Still, she couldn’t dismiss her feelings of connection to this male, or what might have happened here. His pain had become her pain. She hurt, and shared his sorrow.

Hugging the building, she watched the scene with her heart in her throat. Go, or stay? For the second time in so very few minutes, the decision of what to do was a heavy weight on her shoulders.

* * *

Colton’s world began to spin. Walls closed in.

He made himself stand still and forced down another scream, too shocked to regulate his breathing. If this was what was left of his father, he definitely didn’t want to stumble upon what might be left of his mother. He couldn’t pinpoint her life force amid the carnage when he should have been able to. Her amiable presence didn’t call out to him like it always had.

His body wasn’t so frozen by shock that he didn’t feel his heart break. His insides roiled. His mouth was dry. At the same time, a nagging insistence warned that he had to move, had to take care of this. Officers might knock on the door any minute now. Beyond family, there was a secret to protect.

The cop side of his training began to seep through the sickening whirl, perhaps as a defense mechanism for coping with a loss this great. With that training, one thing became perfectly clear: whoever had enacted this rampage of evil deeds not only knew who the werewolves in this neighborhood were, but how to kill them.

Silver bullets in the chest or a full beheading were the only ways to truly rid the world of a strain of very powerful Lycans. The Killions had been around for more years than a human could count. They knew how to defend themselves and should have scented trouble before it arrived.

Why then, how then, had his parents been taken down in their own home? The answer came to him in the form of a jolt that further messed with his head and equilibrium.

No human did this.

What about the Connellys then who, according to the young EMT, had been slaughtered? Not beheaded, but “slaughtered.” Could those poor people have been decoy killings to cover up the murder of his family?

His parents had been down-to-earth in their day-to-day living. His father had been a college professor. His mother had worked in a dress store. They hadn’t concerned themselves with their royal genes or the special Lycan blood in their veins that made them honored within their species. They had raised him in the same down-home way, and instilled in him their values.

The Killions were protectors. Had always been protectors...of Lycan secrets, of their Lycan blood, in their low-key relationships with the humans they lived among.

“Not just paranoia,” Colton snapped. “There’s more here to discover.”

He smelled something beyond the cloying odor of Lycan blood. In order to identify this, Colton made himself breathe. Through the forced intake of air he began to soak up anomalies in the environment, realizing that every minute he stood there in a state of silent agony was a minute wasted in going after the monsters responsible for this heinous crime.

“Who were you?” he demanded angrily of the invisible, murderous fiends, tuning in to clues by opening up his senses up full throttle.

“Help me, wulf.”

The arrival of his beast’s keen awareness came to him like a swift kick in the solar plexus as it melded with his own intuition. Colton glanced up. Hovering near the ceiling lay a subtle scent, hardly there at all, that made him sway on his feet.

“Can’t be,” he objected. “Look again.”

The wulf growled adamantly.

“Christ! Vampires?”

Colton took the sudden weight of his beast pressing against him as confirmation of the deduction being correct. Could it honestly be true, though? “Yes. Hell.” Only the dead would stink like old soil and sour, aged, rotting wood. Nothing else could possibly smell like that.

There were vampires loose in Miami, and this was very bad news. The worst kind of news. And a Lycan’s age-old enemies had found his family.

Not many humans knew about the presence of werewolves in their communities. If the world wasn’t ready for werewolves, how would people feel about a new breed of enemy that amounted to a plague of murderous bloodsuckers in their neighborhoods?

“Shackled.” Colton’s voice broke. The awful truth was that he couldn’t warn the world to be on guard. He couldn’t tell anyone what had happened here, or allow this scene to come under public scrutiny. He was therefore virtually shackled to silence.

“Besides, who would believe it?”

If this had been a vampire kill, no evidence would have been left for CSI teams to catch. There’d be no fingerprints or footprints or detectable stray hairs for any system to analyze. For all the advances in human technological wizardry, as far as that technology went, the dead were dead.

Still, other than trained werewolf hunters, only vampires would know exactly how to take a werewolf down. Unlike with human criminals confronting a powerful Were family able to hold their own, vampires couldn’t easily die trying to tackle a wolf-human hybrid, since vampires had the advantage of being dead already.

And damn it, if the rumors were true, those fanged children of the night were the fastest creatures on the planet. One blink, and they could be on you, then gone before your last breath rattled.

Reason this out. Why did they strike at us here?

Reasoning was another important part of the cop game, as was following suppositions with hopes of getting somewhere.

It was possible that his parents, with the addition of the Connellys as a distraction for the law enforcement system, had died because of a centuries-old vendetta between species. Vampires and Weres hated each other.

Then again, maybe a vamp had merely stumbled upon his parents somehow and had been hungry.

“No. That’s not it,” he shouted, because vampires hadn’t been here for a drink. Bloodsuckers couldn’t ingest werewolf blood of any kind. Lycans were poisonous to them.

“Premeditated strike, then.”

If his family had been outside tonight, conversing with the full moon, they would have been ten times stronger and able to withstand an attack. But for some reason, they hadn’t made it to the door.

“Hate crime.”

The mortal world was filled with such things in this day and age. So was the supernatural one.

The more Colton thought about it, the more likely it seemed that the Connellys had merely been in the wrong place at the wrong time. After the carnage here, it was possible the pale, dead, fanged bastards had worked up an appetite.

Besides all the usual gangsters and gangbangers around, vampires were a horrific addition to Miami’s rising crime wave, and what had happened on this block might be an indication of things to come.

As Colton stared down at his father’s silver-haired head, he felt the rise of a blazing anger at the atrocity committed to a man he dearly loved. He couldn’t stay here to grieve, though.

“They’re all gone.” He whispered this with a grim finality that made the beast inside him spasm with anger and disgust. He and his wulf shared the agony because they were one, one and the same with the same memories.

With a brief glance to the door, he remembered that there was a young EMT named Smith outside who had run from a gruesome sight a few houses away. He wondered what the poor guy would think of this.

“No one will know that two sets of murders have been committed tonight,” he said. For now, he had to manage his pain so that he could find his mother.

Stepping over the body of his father, he searched the room, then the house. His hopes rose, as hopes always did, despite his inner premonition. Maybe she had been spared. Possibly his mother hadn’t been here, which would have been a rare occasion, since imprinted pairs wouldn’t tolerate separation.

Colton searched all over again, feeling each agonizing second that hurtled by.

Then he found his mother on the back porch step, half in the house, half out, as if she’d been reaching for the moon. The brutality that had been dealt to her washed over him like an icy wave. Nausea threatened. She also had been beheaded.

“Damn those filthy bloodsuckers!” he cried.

Two members of one of the oldest Lycan families in existence had been taken out. And the stench of the undead hung over the tidy backyard like an insidious vapor.

Despite the gnawing ache growing by bounds in Colton’s chest, he’d have to invent a way to cover this up. His pain, great enough to be nearly intolerable, had to be internalized. In order to go on, he’d have to focus elsewhere.

“Vengeance.” His whisper fell flat. Vengeance was an emotional state Lycans had tried to outdistance as human populations began to rise and the sheer number of humans forced Weres into hiding. Revenge was a reaction Weres had learned to tamp down in favor of more peaceful aspirations and acceptable coexistence.

Contrary to all that, rage was overtaking him. He felt sick, shaky, pissed off and ready to do something about it.

As Colton lifted his mother’s limp, desecrated body in his arms, his beast, tucked inside him, trembled with rage.

* * *

Aware of the disturbed emotions surfing the air, Rosalind had to move. She ran past the hordes of cops and stopped when she spotted a house that radiated the familiar scent of Were. Silently, she crept up the steps and through the open doorway.

The front room was dark and empty, but it reeked of both sadness and Lycan damage.

Not just Were. Lycan.

The reality of that turned her stomach. Chills covered every inch of her body. Did the brown Were live here? What had happened in this place?

She rolled a series of throaty growls meant as a warning that if someone was in this house, they now had company.

No reply came.

Exploring on bare, padding feet, she found two bodies on a bed in a small room, and choked back a cry. These were dead Lycans. Someone had placed them there.

The scene seemed insanely surreal, but the room also gave off the scent of the male she had followed. He had been here mere seconds before she arrived. She hadn’t missed him by much.

Leaping over the furniture, feeling her anger sift to the surface of her skin, Rosalind raced for the back door. Then she was out again, in the moonlight, back in the relative comfort of the cover of darkness.

Chapter 4

Vampire tracks weren’t easy to follow. Nevertheless, Colton knew a trail of rot when he smelled one.

The alley behind the houses snaked through the neighborhood, eventually leading back to the park. Colton started that way without getting far. An icy prickle at the base of his neck made him spin around. He scanned the dark. This section of the alley seemed too quiet. No one was out. Not one dog barked.

Standing in the open, he allowed moonlight to caress his human hands and forearms as he waited for his senses to skip past the tragedy and delve into the arena of hunter and prey. Red flags waving in his mind told him the vampires had been this way not long before. More than one of them, by the intensity of the odor.

It was no wonder that the neighborhood dogs had run.

Rolling his shoulders helped him to gain control of his tension, but his nerves felt like long threads of fire. Inching sideways, closer to a fence, he cocked his head to listen for clues. All the while, his beast pummeled at him, wanting to be free, its desire to take over the hunt stirred by a cop’s ingrained need to catch some killers.

But freeing his animal side was not doable at the moment with uniforms swarming around a short distance behind. He had to fight the moon and the wulf for the time being and hope he’d win.

“No movement. No sound.”

Gazing through the shadows of the alley, Colton felt his knuckles ache from holding back his claws. The sinister stink of these particular blood-drinking intruders was especially bothersome to his beast.

Colton had never seen a vampire up close, yet his soul seemed to recognize them. The wolf particles embedded in his long-term memory knew the smell and taste and feel of an ancient enemy.

“Burned toast,” he said, picking a valid description of the sum of all those parts. “Disgusting.”

The beast gave a rattle that shook Colton to his boots. The closeness of monsters was luring his animal instincts to a riotous state that messed with his hard-won self-control.

He flinched as the ligaments in his shoulders and knees began to stretch, and exhaled some air as the skin covering his biceps began to bubble. The whooshing sound he heard was a claw bursting through his skin. Another claw appeared. Then more, until all ten fingers were lethal.

Did this minimorph mean that the wulf knew something he didn’t? He was willing to bet that it did.

A shout came from behind, untimely as hell because it came from a cop who had no doubt seen something in the alley. Colton was in uniform, but his body was half in transition and burning badly with the need to chuck the binding accoutrements tying him to a human’s sense of justice.

“Hey! You!” the uniform said from the other end of the alley; a cop who couldn’t help here or offer moral support. A human, either in or out of uniform, would in fact be easy pickings for any walking undead hanging around.

He had to remove the cop from this equation.

“Killion,” he shouted back to the officer, his voice gruff. He coughed, unlocked his throat and added, “Metro PD. I’m on it. All is clear. No sign of anything back here.”

“Okay,” the cop shouted back.

“Killion?” Davidson’s familiar shout followed the other one.

“Yeah. It’s me,” he said.

“You’re one fast son of a bitch. You actually beat me here?”

“Pays to be in shape.”

“Not if that doesn’t include pizza.”

More footfalls, then Davidson’s final remark. “We’ll go around the other way. The bastards had to come and go from somewhere.”

After agonizing seconds spent waiting for the men to disappear, Colton’s internal heat finally overwhelmed him, and his clothes ripped apart at the seams.

* * *

Rosalind watched the brown-furred werewolf hurdle the wooden fence as if it were nothing as soon as the humans at the head of the alley had gone. She covered the length of that alley in twelve huge strides. One good leap after that, and she, too, was over the fence.

She had seen the beautiful Lycan before and after his shift, but this time she had been close enough to take stock—a second rare occurrence in the highly personal world of werewolves and only, she supposed, because he had been distracted to the point of not recognizing the presence of another wulf in the area.

Her brown wulf had been incredibly handsome as a man. His face was angular. Tanned skin stretched over high cheekbones. His mouth was wide, his eyes deep-set. Dark, slightly wavy hair framed those features, long enough to cover the tops of his ears. Each strand glinted like gold in the moonlight.

The man side of the Were was tall, his physique leanly muscular, with broad shoulders and a narrow waist. He had spectacularly molded thighs that hinted at a Were’s hidden strengths. Rosalind guessed him to be in his late twenties, though it was hard to gauge werewolves, especially since she had met so few of them.

This one had been not only beautiful, but naked. Her first naked male of any kind. And he was definitely a perfect specimen that she imagined most women would call mouthwatering.

The skin of his bare back and buttocks had shined with a tanned tautness that suggested he saw a lot of sun without wearing clothes. No white lines traversed the flowing, golden flesh. Nor did he bear tattoos, other than the ring of scar tissue on one upper arm in the shape of a wolf’s bite that all true Lycans possessed.

Rosalind passed a clawed hand over her own similar mark, taking this as a further sign of an unmistakable bond with whoever he was.

She had held herself back so he couldn’t see her when he’d turned. She had observed how a light drift of masculine hair ran the length of his powerful chest and over his sculpted abs to become even darker as it nestled between his legs. The feature that had been momentarily displayed between those thighs made Rosalind flush.

And then there was the werewolf.

The beast that unfolded from all that glorious humanness had brown-auburn fur the same color as the man’s hair. Denser than his human form, and heavier with tension-loaded muscle, this werewolf was also damn near perfect, and too magnificent to be real.

Rosalind fielded the arrival of a full-fledged hunger for him. Battling sensations that were new, instinctual, primal, she wanted to wrap her arms around him and lick his golden-brown neck.

Her sexual appetite intensified with each ripple of his incredible Lycan muscle. But Rosalind also sensed a pain-filled anger that would prohibit him from shifting in such close proximity to others. His body visibly shook with that anger.

In spite of all the possible repercussions of empathy with a stranger, as well as a fair amount of misplaced erotic hallucinations, Rosalind followed him when he moved, as if she were his shadow.

He had ignored her in the park, not because she was a stranger, she now knew, but because he had been needed elsewhere. He hadn’t rejected her out of choice.

Picking up her speed when he started to run, she raced in his wake, keeping back apace, watchful, careful, realizing that she was going to pay for this in one way or another when she got back to Judge Landau’s place.

Then again, surely her father would understand the situation once he heard about the Lycan killings, and comprehend her need to help this wronged Were. Maybe she could lead this male to the Landau retreat, where he’d be safe and among friends, even if Were packs were private and didn’t usually mingle.

At that moment, she was willing to place her own life and secrets in jeopardy for the chance to offer comfort and support to the first young Lycan she had ever come across, one who made her feel viciously alive.

Silent words tumbled in her throat.

You are not alone.

My strength will come in handy. I give my strength to you.

As Rosalind sprinted after him, she felt the chill of a terrible premonition about what awaited them both in the cover of darkness. The night rippled around them as though tugged by an unseen force.

If werewolves had pockets for cell phones, she’d have sent an SOS to her father. Still, in whatever faced them out there, two Lycans were always better than one.

Pity the poor soul, she growled, who finds this out firsthand.

* * *

Colton ran like a fiend, working with each stride to maintain enough humanity to keep his reasoning powers functioning. He couldn’t afford for Otherness to overtake him completely—or for his pain to overwhelm him.

Once he was through the last of the suburban homes, his vision sharpened. He sped across open ground on the west side of the park, heading for the trees, calculating how many buildings rose in the distance on the eastern and southern sides.

He knew the night creatures hadn’t headed toward those buildings, toward civilization. Rationalization told him that perhaps they hadn’t been randomly hungry, but on a mission. There had been plenty of opportunities in the surrounding neighborhoods between here and his house for a freak’s blood buffet, and yet they had picked his street.

So, where are the murderous vipers headed?

North of the park lay the posh estates of prominent Miami citizens wealthy enough to enjoy the luxury of space and privacy. Big houses protected by security gates. Lycan presence lay in at least one of them. The famous Landaus, head of their own pack. Surely no fanged monsters existed near there.

His knowledge of the habits of vampires was insufficient, and that was a snag. Did they have clans, packs, dens? Did the presence of these few mean, like cockroaches, there were others in the area?

What sort of weapon would de-animate a creature already dead? The mythology listed wooden stakes, exposure to sunlight and beheading. Thinking that holy water could do the trick had, so rumor said, always been a mistake. Garlic as a deterrent was laughable.

The only question remaining was about how many vampires a werewolf could handle at once with his bare hands.

No matter. Have to try.

Finding his rhythm in much the same way that real wolves chased down prey, Colton took in great gulps of night air that were like candy to a beast so hot inside and out. Apprehension was in itself a kind of narcotic.

He ran, driven by what may have been his own kind of bloodlust, able to tell he was getting closer to the vampires. The mood in the park changed, darkened, intensified, along the park’s edge.

Movement.

Rustling in the shadows.

Don’t vampires know that Lycans can hear?

Colton veered to his right with his nerve endings blazing in time to see an outline of whatever was out there coming on exceptionally fast. A fuzzy blur.

His senses all but exploded. He had time for just one more breath and to bare his teeth. Then they were on him.

Too many of them, maybe, Colton acknowledged as his claws began to swing.