Moon Marked

Moon Marked

Linda Thomas-Sundstrom

www.millsandboon.co.uk

In the secret war between humans and werewolves, Jonathan Baird and Nikki Reese were natural enemies. Born with the genetic gifts needed to join the secret society of hunters, Nikki had been raised to see all Lycans as her enemy…even if hunting them brought on a powerful craving for sexual release.

It was that craving that drew werewolf Jonathan to Nikki. Though he also sought the rogue creatures that threatened the secrecy of his people’s existence, his organization sent him to watch her…but he lusted after her, too. When a hunt goes bad and Nikki is infected with the Lycan virus, Jonathan couldn’t resist coming to her aid, igniting an insatiable desire between them. Will their passion bring together the two rivals, or will old loyalties die hard?

CHAPTER ONE

The temperature was somewhere between hot and hell.

Leaning against the sun-soaked brick of an old apartment building, Nikki Reese rolled her shoulders to move the trickle of perspiration from between her shoulder blades, silently cursing the fine folks who proclaimed leather the best choice for protective gear.

Her skin was on fire beneath the tight leather pants and vest. True enough, though, the airy blue hospital scrubs worn for her day job wouldn’t turn away a pair of razor-sharp canines coming her way with intent to do damage. Which made leather her friend, her armor, her ally in the war between humans and Others in Miami, where a full moon brought out the worst in its citizens.

So, what mattered most? Comfort, or life?

“Life, hands down,” she affirmed, flicking her gaze from the dark spaces separating the buildings to the moonlight overhead.

Tonight, the moon was huge, round-faced and bright enough to cause retinal damage since no one had yet invented infrared Ray-Bans. And although the mottled silver disc in the sky provided enough light to see by, there were plenty of dark places left for moon-ruled monsters to drag unsuspecting souls into.

Like the alley across from her.

“Damned if I’ll let that happen.”

She kept her attention narrowed on that alley. Five more minutes, by her honed internal clock, and the moon would be full-bloat and straight up. Falling silver moonbeams would activate the creatures of Miami’s underbelly and draw them into the open. Not just the criminals, thugs, drug lords and other various human bloodsuckers occupying the seedier side of metropolitan neighborhoods, but the moon junkies, howlers, and her special targets, the reason she was here when she could have been sleeping: the human-wolf hybrids. Werewolves.

The word caused a flutter in Nikki’s stomach that was half fear, half thrill, and one hundred percent adrenaline rush.

“Who’s the adventure junkie now?” she muttered, attuned to the same spot where she had last seen one of her Others of choice. Last month. Twenty-eight days ago, when she’d hit a big male Were with a tranquilizer dart and it hadn’t even slowed him down.

Lessons learned? One: It’s always wise to overestimate the pharmaceuticals. Two: Never underestimate the long arm of the Miami P.D., whose street trawling had kept her from tagging her target, virtually ruining three months of planning, watching and waiting. Distracted midshot by flashing red lights, what should have been, given her ability with a gun, a bull’s-eye, had ended up a graze. She’d lost her target. Those pesky cops doing their job of keeping the peace could have gotten her killed.

Plus, if those fine officers had seen her in this sweltering leather getup, they might have found out who else patrolled their streets in the nighttime hours, and maybe even why. A secret agenda kept strictly on a need-to-know basis, as it had been for hundreds of years. Cops not on the invitation list.

“No one said it was going to be easy.”

Erasing the extraneous thoughts from her mind, Nikki felt something brush her consciousness. Wary, she brought her head up, seeing nothing but sensing a subtle shift in the air that her radar suggested was more than just heat rising off the hot pavement.

She knew this feeling seeping into her bones, way down deep, despite the second-skin armor. She had been craving, and at the same time, dreading, this particular oncoming Otherness.

There was no mistaking the signs. The alreadyscorching summer heat built to impossible levels for a short span of time, dispersing scent through the humid air that wasn’t human related. Not sweat, cologne, aftershave or hair gel. Not damp fur or dirty paws. Instead, a diluted mixture of those scents floated toward her like another layer of atmosphere that had been cooked in a furnace and then sent oozing toward the moonlight tipping the toes of her boots.

A tingle of apprehension manifested in the valley between her breasts, then shot downward toward her thighs in an almost sexual manner, high-alerting Nikki to the fact that the sucker somewhere in her immediate vicinity was male. For a hunter, confronting a werewolf of the opposite sex was akin to meeting a lover. The flush of anticipation. Intoxication of being near to something foreign in origin. Fear of the susceptibility of getting caught up in the moment and possibly winding up dead.

But she had been trained well, she reminded herself—fashioned into a fine-tuned mold by a system of checks and balances dating way back. She was one of only ten hunters in Miami. Ten per city was the deal someone had made with the devil, once upon a time, when werewolves and other creatures had been rare finds anywhere, let alone within a city’s limits. And when even human populations had been relatively sparse.

In the beginning, Nikki supposed, ten hunters might have been sufficient to have some control over Were packs, culling out the riffraff, maintaining a decent human-to-Other ratio. Now however, ten hunters seemed an absurdly insignificant number against the extremes of the escalating violence percolating up from the dark spaces. The new breed of werewolves were creating ganglike packs by biting innocent people and passing along several mutated strains of the ancient Lycan virus.

Hunters called this new phenomenon Dilution.

Supersaturation.

That human-to-Other ratio had changed dramatically in just the last twenty years. In a bad way. What was once one hunter per twelve or twenty werewolves was now one per a hundred, maybe more. True numbers were hard to grasp since some of those werewolves had gone underground, but the sheer magnitude of werewolf sightings in Miami alone, by her fellow hunters, had become mind-boggling, and posed a serious threat to the Homo sapiens population. Think very bad guys carrying around polluted Lycan blood that caused their minds to veer off track.

So, here she was. Nikki Reese, E.R. nurse in the daytime, werewolf hunter after hours. She’d taken an oath to help set the ratio straight, and she was hungry to do her part in keeping the peace as well as the secrets.

She might have been fairly new to hunting solo, but she’d been on enough runs to know the routine. Watch. Wait. Tag. Track. Drag. Which was exactly what she intended to do here, near this alley, big male Were, or not.

Slowly, with her eyes trained on the darkest spot, Nikki reached for her weapon, updated since her previous outing.

“Shoot first.” She raised the dart gun, took aim. “And dream about sex later.”

A sensual, steadying sigh passed through her lips. Her heart upped its tempo as the night, like liquid, slid over her, further dampening the space between her thighs.

“That’s right,” she whispered. “Come out, you hairy son-of-a-bitch.”

The blackness across from her seemed either to stretch or fill up and expand, its supernatural content pushing at its edges. Feeling this reconfiguration of the shadow’s boundaries in the pit of her stomach—in the way all genetically enhanced hunters were able to do—and sensing the shape and species of the creature within the nearby pool of darkness, Nikki sucked in a quiet breath.

The shadows moved. Nikki remained motionless.

Like Mom before me, I’ve been born to this chase, she reaffirmed to calm herself further. Mother to daughter was how she had inherited the special sensory elements required for this work. Good old mom had passed along some pretty interesting genes that enabled her to perceive Otherness in its many forms and invest in the desire to do something about it.

She was special, she’d been told. One of very few people privy to the knowledge of the secret society of hunters, and who could actually attempt to take a werewolf down.

And she was right on track in her training. Dangerous, even. If no external distractions got in her way, and if this large male werewolf in the alley proved to be unregistered or unmarked by the moon’s brand, he would be toast. Then she could vent the thrill of the tagging with an orgasm—as soon as she got home, and alone—to ease off of the incredible high and fulfill the cravings that hunting these creatures created. Sexual cravings inherent in the symbiotic relationship of hunter and hunted, male and female.

An age-old game.

More movement in the shadows at the top of the alley made Nikki ready on the trigger. Her body buzzed with live, channeled energy directed toward those shadows. Again, deep down inside of her, a hot, wet longing built up in unmentionable places. The big guy was real close now and smelling strongly of the pheromones his shapeshifting produced. Wolf testosterone was over-the-top, and this guy had already morphed, having been touched by moonlight somewhere within that alley space.

Moonlight on a pelt of werewolf fur had its own distinct, unforgettable odor that drifted to Nikki now. For a hunter attuned to her prey, it was a complete turn-on.

In ten seconds, max, his large carcass would appear. An angry mass of unending muscle, sinew and bone with no purpose at all, really. One of God’s mistakes.

One second.

Two…

“Easy does it, Nik. Wait.”

She heard the lumbering pad of his feet on the pavement and the soft scraping sound of claws on the brick. The longing inside of her began to blaze, in the manner of an internal searchlight trying to burst out of her skin.

“Come to mama, beast.”

Then there he was, emerging from the dark. As tall as the street sign, his head was thrown back and his jaws were open, exposing rows of jagged, lethal, gleaming yellow teeth.

Nikki applied pressure to the trigger without squeezing all the way, halted by the sudden terrible realization that the big guy wasn’t alone.

“Shit.”

Her whispered oath had been soft, but vehement enough for a werewolf’s miraculous hearing to pick up. The big head, shaped nothing like a wolf’s really, and more like a Frankensteinish version, swung her way. A menacing growl pierced the dark, damp air, reaching Nikki with the efficacy of a shout.

Shoulders twitching annoyingly, Nikki stood her ground. Peering down the barrel of the gun, she shouted, “I’m fairly sure you are just one wolf too many.”

She squeezed the trigger, adding as the dart winged its way toward its target with the speed of a lightning bolt cutting through a cloud, “And we just can’t have that, can we?”

She knew she was in trouble the instant the dart hit the werewolf and it roared its displeasure. An impression of the approach of the second Were, too close for comfort, possibly too late to do anything about, arrived hot on the heels of her tag.

Spinning in place, she raised the gun, reached to reload—and felt a set of dagger-sharp claws penetrate her protective layer of clothing as if that leather was…butter.

Jonathan Baird ducked beneath the overhang of a green-and-white-striped awning, his attention fixed on the shapely leather-clad vixen down the block. The one with the gun.

She was intent enough on the alley not to have noticed him yet, though he could see her quite clearly. It would be only a matter of seconds until she became aware of his presence.

He recognized the striking brunette at once, of course—the woman who interfered with his work and wore her hair in a ponytail. Who could miss her? He’d kept his eye on her from his first sighting, liking what he saw, although she was, in essence, his rival. His opposite, if you considered her take on the word species.

The hunter was tall, maybe five-six or -seven. She was young and slim, her arms, abs, and legs toned to tautness and shown off to perfection in that skintight outfit. She held a dart gun professionally steady in both hands.

Jonathan found himself wondering, in spite of the danger of the moment and her preference for donning leather in Miami in the summer, what color her eyes were, and what her voice might sound like. Things he couldn’t use his enhanced senses to find out about from a distance, but were on his mind.

Details don’t matter, he reminded himself. I’m here to watch her, not to bed her.

Yet he would have liked nothing better than to bed her.

Every single part of him agreed with that.

Immediately, his decision about details not mattering aside, he imagined what peeling those leather pants off her would be like, and what he might find beneath. Lightly tanned, creamy skin beaded with moisture? Her own jet-hued triangle of fur between her legs that he could slide into?

“Pure fantasy.” He shook his head. He was here because it was his business to feel his way around the members of the secret society she belonged to, not her body. She actually was a rival, or would have been at one time until the path of her society and his own organization had begun to run with a parallel purpose. The hunters kept an eye on the werewolves, and the werewolves kept an eye on the hunters.

If it got more complex than that, the world would be in serious trouble.

Tonight, however, this shapely hunter, who had been on his mind and in his dreams, wasn’t thinking clearly, he was sorry to note. She showed no signs of realizing the danger she faced by staking out that particular alley a second time. Alone.

She’d been there last month. Same place. Obviously, she hadn’t planned on remaining on that unholy pack’s radar. What kind of handler wouldn’t have taught her about retaliation in lesson one? Werewolves were humanlike most of the time—twenty-eight days out of thirty, give or take a few hours. Even when fully morphed and furry, human minds drove the beasts.

Perhaps this hunter harbors one flaw too many in that luscious body of hers for her to last long at this job…

Possibly she has a tendency toward revenge and a need to pick up the pieces. Would those traits get her killed tonight?

The pack she stalked was nasty and a bane to other Weres, as well, which was the reason he’d returned here, himself, beyond his desire to see her again.

There were werewolves and then there were werewolves. As with any population, a mixture of good and bad. More bad lately, admittedly, which was why he had been roaming the streets every single full-mooned night, keeping both the hunter and the hunted in his sights.

Things had taken a downturn as the Were numbers in Miami continually swelled. He knew that ten hunters couldn’t keep up with what was going on, and that the presence of his own species couldn’t go unnoticed for much longer, given the way things were going. Too many crimes were being committed by wolves who were powerful enough to get away with those crimes and crafty enough to vanish afterward.

This hunter had found a hole, the entrance to an illegal pack’s urban den. The werewolves in there, created from bites and scratches from a surrogate alpha, rather than from being genetically cursed—or gifted, depending on how you looked at it—would make sure this woman wasn’t around long enough to pass on information of their whereabouts.

Rogues had no conscience. A pestilence is what they were. A blight on civilization. Eventually he’d get the goahead to clean them out, in order to keep both the peace and the secrets.

“Where is your backup?” Jonathan whispered to the leather-clad hunter as he considered warning her in spite of being forbidden to interfere in any way with a tag.

Tranquilizing these bad guys so they could be injected with a tracer chip was the first stage in tracking them. Or should have been. The difficulty here was that the hole the hunter had ID’d had been founded by a psychopathic alpha who had created minions by biting innocent people all over town. Rumor had it that this alpha killed each of his own creations unfortunate enough to get tagged.

Jonathan could feel them in there—the bad guys. Their presence riffled up and down the skin covering his arms. The street smelled of sweaty, fetid fur and bad moods.

His attention veered past the hunter, to where wrongness tinted the silvery moonlit air with a reddish haze. A murmur of acknowledgment rose up from deep inside his chest. Two werewolves hovered there in the alley, standing guard. Those two would have pinpointed the presence of a hunter as easily as she had pinpointed them. The game worked both ways.

Hell, he could scent her from where he stood, half a block away. Everything about this hunter disturbed the air, and none too subtly. He tasted on his tongue the gaminess of the leather she covered herself with. He tasted the electric fire of her nerves, as well as the musky sweetness of her anticipation. For her, this dangerous job was akin to forbidden sex, and that startled him, though it shouldn’t have.

There had always been stories about hunters and how they ferreted out their prey by means of a strong, almost feline sexual attraction to them. Their bodies, more refined than the normal, everyday humans they believed themselves to be, got all gummed up with excitement as they took up a chase, he’d heard it said, and urgently needed sexual release after coming into contact with their Were counterparts.

And okay, the thought of that got a rise out of him.

“Another oddity in a long list,” he muttered, because weren’t love and hate said to sometimes reside on the same plane of emotion? Hunter and hunted? Man and woman, of whatever species? It was a fact that opposites attract, so why shouldn’t he have dreams about this particular woman? This hunter?

Jonathan cleared his head of forbidden thoughts because now was not the time to indulge. She wasn’t supposed to know of his existence or his organization’s. It was best to keep the vow he’d taken to remain in the periphery as far as the hunters were concerned.

He beefed up his concentration.

The beat of Miami’s all-consuming, after-hours partying lay in the distance like someone else’s audible heartbeat being broadcast on a citywide public-address system. On this silent stretch of deserted street, he heard his own heartbeat and imagined he heard the hunter draw a breath. Then the silence was broken by a sudden popping sound—the familiar ping of his own vertebrae starting to reclass.

Surprise!

Heat flashed across his skin. The same sort of electrical heat he’d tasted from the hunter. Stick your finger in a socket kind of stuff that happened every time he shifted, and yes, also every time he laid eyes on this particular female.

He had inched forward, out from beneath the awning’s flimsy cover, without realizing he’d done so—led by his stiffened male body parts, he supposed—to find himself standing on the curb.

He looked down, saw his shadow and sighed.

In one gigantic supernatural heave, fueled by the flood of falling moonlight, Jonathan rearranged his outline, taking him from human to beast in the time it took him to turn his head. Changing him from a thirty-two-year-old strapping man to a large, imposing creature, half man and half wolflike entity.

Two shapes, human and wolf, meeting in the middle.

All the better to eat you up, leather-girl.

Tilting his wolfish head, Jonathan felt the closeness of those two other wolves. He perceived their anger. Inhaling again the sticky-sweet fragrance of defiance marring the scene, he then loped in her direction for a closer look, despite the rules.

That sexy young woman planted smack-dab in the thick of danger might be a hunter and all business, but she was also the one. For him.

Every one of his instincts told him this—whether or not hell might freeze over before she ever found out.

CHAPTER TWO

That sudden sting of razor-sharp claws was a shocking development. Nikki knew she had been hurt decently, but her anger over being attacked knocked the pain to the background.

The freak had come at her fast. Now he was stumbling. She’d hit him with enough tranquilizer in that dart to take down an elephant, which meant she only had to deal with the remaining monster, wherever he was.

“One down.”

The burn of her anger felt like being dunked in a volcano. Liquid fire replaced the blood in her veins as she tensed. Her lips went numb.

Vocalizing the oath stuck on her tongue was impossible. She’d already hesitated a few seconds too long. She whirled as the second monster propelled itself forward, slashing wildly at her with its hands and teeth. She dropped to a crouch in time to avoid further injury. The monster roared his defiance over her show of agility with its mouth wide-open.

Opportunity knocked.

Raising the gun, she sprang to her feet and jammed the heavy metal into the advancing werewolf’s mouth, breaking several of his front teeth. Ducking out of the way while he registered that blow, she hit the brick with one shoulder, bounced back and rammed the shocked Were hard with her body.

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