Wolf Slayer

Although the situation remained tense, his mind wanted to focus on Tess the woman, rather than as his rival. He was a male after all was said and done, and Tess Owens was young, strong and interesting.

Her tight leather vest cinched in her breasts in a way that made her appear almost boyish with a first glance, and yet pressing against her gave Jonas a good impression of what lay beneath all that leather. Her hips were narrow, but feminine. Prominent hip bones accentuated her leanness. Her legs were shapely and firm.

In her current position, Tess didn’t offer up one good quake. This hunter was all about secrets and the art of camouflage. Wasn’t his life similar in those respects?

Jonas swept a slow glance over Tess’s face, noting that her expression was blank. Though her eyes were intent on him, she didn’t meet his gaze directly. Tess might never have been up close and personal with a werewolf in human form.

In any case, she didn’t cringe, cower or plead for mercy. If she had a plan for getting her edge back, she had seconds to consider how to accomplish it. Barring that, he could see that she’d accept the ramifications of a meeting gone bad with dignity.

Tess Owens hadn’t done her homework regarding Lycans and the abilities that set them apart from other Weres, and he had just offered her a fast track to enlightenment. What she did with that was up to her. After a few more moments of body-hugging closeness, he’d let her go if she promised to behave.

“Get off me,” she said curtly.

“You haven’t spoken the magic words.”

He was angering her further and wasn’t enjoying that, but shattering her old habits would take time he didn’t have. And when she looked up, when her eyes finally met his, what he saw in them shook him up slightly. He saw sadness.

His body reacted with a twitch of understanding that was visceral. Tess had tucked that sadness so deep inside of her, he was witnessing only its tip.

“Go to hell,” she said.

She tried to shove him back, but was trapped.

“Promise me what I’ve asked for, and I’ll let you go,” Jonas said.

“I can’t do that. Won’t.”

“Because you’re too proud to admit what happened here, or because you have a stubborn streak?”

Flashes of defiance raced through her blue eyes, but she unwaveringly held his gaze. He couldn’t look away, couldn’t untangle himself from the sensations rushing over him. Lust, greed and hunger were all there, piling up. But there was also something else nagging at his consciousness that was at the moment misty and ill-defined.

Jonas had to force himself to speak. “Time is what I need. Then I’ll be gone and out of your life.”

Her lips parted as though she was going to challenge that statement, but no words came out. Reluctant to lose the eye contact that made him so interested in what lay behind those eyes, Jonas finally dropped his gaze to her mouth.

What would Tess Owens, werewolf hunter, taste like? He wondered if anyone had tried to find out.

If she rarely showed up in town, what were the odds she’d have a lover? Given what she did for a living and the secrets she kept, what kind of normal man could handle her or her choices? This could be the cause of her sadness. Tess was lonely.

Actually, he decided, a wolf would have been the better choice for someone like her, if the world turned on a different axis. If Gwen hadn’t been waiting for him, and if he hadn’t set himself up as his sister’s protector, he might have desired a lot more time with Tess Owens. As the only person in South Dakota who also knew about him, they might have been friends in some parallel universe. They might even have been lovers.

His body liked that idea. Both man and wolf sincerely appreciated the thought.

Tess’s lips moved again, keeping his attention there. He wasn’t allowing her much room to breathe, so either she was trying to take in air or a new protest had gotten lodged in her throat.

“What issues brought you here?” she eventually asked. “What are you escaping from?”

“That’s personal.”

“Maybe you just made it up to play on my sympathy,” she suggested.

Jonas liked the way her mouth moved. He liked the way Tess smelled. Again though—and a tough reminder here—they were, for all intents and purposes and according to Tess, enemies.

“Still waiting,” he said without easing up on the pressure that pinned her to the rock.

“If it’s a promise for me to turn my back, then you’ll wait a very long time,” she returned.

Jonas swore under his breath. Niceness wasn’t getting him anywhere.

“What you need,” he started to say, almost giving in to the impulse to tell her about Lycans and Miami and about his gig as a cop. But there was an interruption in the form of a sound that didn’t belong to the reasonably intimate moment he and Tess were sharing.

And Jonas knew without a doubt what that sound was, and who had made it.

* * *

Tess was screwed and hated to admit it.

She waited for death, knowing there was no one to mourn her and that not one soul would realize she’d been gone for some time.

This was not okay. It sucked. And yet here she was, pressed tightly to the body of a werewolf who had shown her both sides of himself in a matter of minutes and who had drawn the better hand in this game.

Not necessarily the winning hand, though.

She was a fighter, and not fully onboard with giving up. When the bare-chested werewolf, who was way too human at the moment, lifted his head and tore his attention away from her to tune in to a sound she barely heard, Tess stiffened in reaction. Without his eyes on her, she felt colder and even more alone.

Those reactions made no sense.

She saw that he was irritated by whatever he had heard in the distance. After tossing another glance over his shoulder at the moonlit field behind him, his attention returned to her.

His expression registered his disappointment over the timing of this potential interruption in their strange getting-to-know-each-other session. She, on the other hand, wanted to cheer and would have shouted to whoever was out there if the man pressed against her wasn’t a monster masquerading as a man.

When she felt the urge to speak, the wolf in human skin held up a warning finger. Then he did a strange thing. Leaning closer, he brushed his lips over her cheek—a surprising move that sent her insides skittering. One quick, light touch. The cunning bastard smelled like pine.

He didn’t bite her or break her neck. Nor did he shift to his scarier form. After that touch, he backed up and pulled her forward until she stood on her own. Then he nodded to her. His eyes never left hers. It seemed to Tess as though he was attempting to send her a message and willing her to keep her mouth shut.

What had he seen or heard out there?

Who was coming?

Why am I shaking?

Tess had to gather herself if she had any chance here. She closed her eyes and sent more of her senses outward, hoping to discover what had disturbed the Were because she couldn’t afford to be caught like this any more than he could. Hell, she was in possession of a bloody knife and a quiver of silver-tipped arrows. What kind of picture did that paint?

The Were turned. He took a few steps, daring to keep his back to her, leaving her the opening she had waited for. The knife was in her hand before her next big breath. She readied for the attack.

Before she could make that move, he said, “Trust me, Tess. Leave now. Go home. What’s out there isn’t something you’ll want to face tonight.”

And then he took off running.

Chapter 4

Tess stared after the Were’s retreating form for a few ticks of her internal clock before following him. In the pit of her stomach, she knew he had been upset by whoever this intruder was and that whatever was out there presented another kind of threat.

Since she had detected nothing in the periphery, she had no idea what that might be. Nor could she imagine what could be more dangerous to her, more lethal, than a Lycan with a jump on the human hunting him.

He ran like the wind, covering ground as if he actually was a wolf with four legs, instead of two. Tess knew she couldn’t catch up. Nevertheless, she wasn’t ready to give up. Not after the strange encounter with this Were that had set the hunter’s rulebook on its ass.

The werewolf had let her go. Not only that, he had tried to reason with her. He had issued a warning, presumably in an attempt to save her some future grief over whatever that other thing out there turned out to be.

His thought had been to help. What kind of werewolf wanted to protect the hunters who came after them? This one had told her he wasn’t one of the bad guys, but again, weren’t they all bad? Every last one of them? Weren’t they, by definition, monsters, or was there something she didn’t know, proving that her education was indeed sorely lacking, as this wolf had warned?

No time to ponder that...

She was geared up and anxious to find out what had made that wolf turn his back to her and what had made him turn the tip of the damn knife in his direction. She could have used that knife. If she had, this would have been over. Instead, she was charging after the Were as if she was part of his tag team, bringing up the rear.

Confusion didn’t begin to describe what she felt. Tess couldn’t shake off the memory of the moment she had looked into his eyes, and the feelings that came with that connection. Absurd feelings. Impossible feelings about wayward longings that had made her pulse thunder.

To say she was interested in this guy would have been an understatement when what she actually felt was something else entirely.

“You have to know that I’ll keep coming,” she said as she ran, needing to get those words out and into the open, hoping they might somehow reinforce her need to believe them when she now had doubts.

When a new thought touched her mind—one that wasn’t of her making—Tess nearly tripped over her own feet.

“Please go home, Tess. Do as I ask. Trust me just this once.”

It was him. His thought. She recognized the tone, if not the voice. The damn Were was speaking to her telepathically.

“Ridiculous,” she muttered. “Can’t do that.”

Weres could only link minds telepathically with other Weres, so the stories went. Still, other than the werewolves themselves, no one could possibly know that for sure.

The wind seemed to come alive with this guy’s next utterance.

“Now isn’t the time. We will meet again, I promise.”

Speaking with a tight jaw, Tess shouted, “No way, Lycan. This is my turf!”

But suddenly, unbelievably and as if another creature had simply dropped from the sky, Tess saw two forms running near the base of the hillside. One of them she recognized, having been close to the big Were. The other animal was a real wolf, on all fours, with fur that glowed silver-white in the moonlight as it streaked through the woods at the Lycan’s side.

There had been no warning for her of another wolf in the area, Were or otherwise. She didn’t smell that other wolf now.

What the hell was going on?

Mesmerized by the sight of the pair running in the field, Tess pulled up...and stared.

* * *

The sadness Jonas had seen in Tess’s blue eyes had moved him. Being a werewolf meant keeping company with his own kind mostly, so what about her life? Tess’s life?

Was culling werewolves her only form of excitement? He supposed that doing her job might make up for whatever else she lacked in terms of family and friends sometimes.

Looking into her eyes had left him with a flood of strange sensations. Staring into her eyes had created ribbons of light in the dark recesses of his soul. He had connected to Tess on a level new to him and somehow had been able to tap into her emotions. The depth of that connection, as well as the speed with which it had occurred, was disturbing.

Were to Were was how those rapidly formed internal bonds usually happened. Imprinting was the term used for the union of two souls, a state that only happened between Were couples destined to be mated for life. This sudden bond with Tess felt like a similar version of that, though he hadn’t experienced it for himself before. And she wasn’t a Were, so this had to be something else.

He couldn’t dwell on that now. His attention was needed elsewhere. He was needed elsewhere.

Gwen hadn’t listened to his instructions. In a rare out-in-the-open appearance, she was beside him—this unusual creature in his life who was so special.

Tess would have been even more surprised if she knew that his sister was a Lycan throwback to the earliest form of the werewolf species.

Gwendolyn Dale was a carrier of the original form of Lycan DNA—the only Were he knew of these days who was able to transform into a full wolf, and with no hint of wolf scent. A pure white wolf. Gwen’s presence on this earth made the necessity for secret-keeping all the more imperative.

And she had followed him.

He ran through the shadows of the trees in human shape for several more minutes with Gwen on all fours, dancing at his heels, before the moonlight performed its neat trick of setting his inner wolf free. Yet Jonas’s stomach stayed tight. He had been unprepared for Gwen’s latest streak of rebelliousness.

His sister had possibly just blown their cover, placing them in as much danger here as they had been in Florida. She had left the cabin and shown herself to anyone who might have been looking. If Tess had seen her, there would be a hefty price to pay. If Death’s minion had been here, the final fight for Gwen’s soul would soon be upon them.

They ran in silence, covering ground on legs burning with energy. Gwen’s white coat took on a silvery sheen in the moonlight. Few Weres had white hair or fur. Colorlessness would come from having survived heinous wounds, the way his sister had survived hers. Ghost wolves, these wounded warriors were called. Only one wolf remotely connected to the Miami pack had become a ghost, and that was another cop named Colton Killion.

Within their pack, his sister was to be revered. The unique blood in Gwen’s veins that allowed her to possess these special traits and the ability to avoid detection was going to be cherished. If passed along, the special ancestral particles in her bloodstream could reinvigorate the entire Lycan species.

No pressure there.

So he had to take extra care now to keep her safe and away from Tess Owens, who brandished silver-tipped weapons instead of claws. Blue-eyed Tess, who shouldered so much sadness.

One thing was for sure. Their circumstances had just gotten a hell of a lot more complicated. And if that wasn’t enough, there was the rather startling fact that he couldn’t wait to meet Tess again. The sooner, the better.

* * *

Tess swore out loud.

Unbelievably, she had let those wolves go. Now, she promised herself this was only a temporary setback. The werewolf wasn’t going anywhere anytime soon. He had told her that, though his explanation for why he was here had been missing a few details. Like all of them.

This guy had even seemed reasonable.

Could that be right? Possible?

The fact that she had chosen to believe him might have made her an idiot and a shameful member of her clan.

Another hiccup in a night full of them was that this Were actually ran with real wolves. Rare ones with white pelts. Maybe there was a connection between pure-blooded Lycans and the wolves their species had sprang from. Lycans, who were the equivalent of werewolf royalty, had lineages that went way back.

This guy was a stunner. Up close, he had reeked of enough raw male power to make her feel tingly all over. Still, she wasn’t ready to concede and let this wolf chalk tonight up as a victory. Anger was flooding her with heat. She felt antsy, anxious and ready for a rematch. This time she would be prepared, she told herself.

“I know every inch of these woods and hillsides,” she called out, hoping her voice would carry. “So it won’t take me long to find you.”

Setting off again in the direction the unusual Were had taken, Tess imagined he sent a reply.

“Wait for me, Tess, but give me some time.”

Hell, that couldn’t be right. She could not have heard him. She couldn’t even see him. What she could do, however, was follow the trail of the scent that this big sucker left behind that was now deeply ingrained in her lungs. The scent underscoring the inexplicable tickle at the base of her neck and causing an internal shakeup. Her new target was both unbelievably handsome and monstrously unique. He was a worthy adversary and as powerful as Weres came.

She had met a Lycan, and he had not killed her when he had the chance.

All of those things factored into her renewed desire to find the bastard and put an end to whatever this was, and before she was declared certifiably insane.

“Give you time?” she muttered. “I don’t think so.”

She added a thought, “Got that, wolf?”

She didn’t expect a reply and absorbed another ripple of shock when one came.

“We are more alike than you know, Tess. If you hunt me, I will haunt you in return.”

“BS!” Tess shouted to the otherwise quiet hillside as she stood on another rocky ledge dividing her property from the property that she now knew had to be his. But she didn’t go any farther, bothered by the word haunt and inexplicably willing to give that damn Were one more night to get his act together.

Haunt her in the future?

Hell, he already was.

Chapter 5

Sleep was elusive. Jonas hadn’t stopped pacing since he and Gwen had returned to the safety of the cabin. Chastising her would have been useless and might have driven her further from him, so Jonas kept his fears to himself.

Tonight was the third time he had seen his sister shape-shift. The sight was both a blessing and a curse. He couldn’t foresee what kind of future Gwen might have if they made it back to Miami. The thought of taking her back there made him sick.

He doubted that anyone else in his family had known about how special she was. She would have been too precious to everyone in the Lycan community to be allowed to roam freely among the packs.

When they got back to Miami—and if they did—there would be a highly detailed plan for her to breed and pass along her genes. By bringing Gwen here, he had granted her the gift of more time away from all that, besides the other pressing issue of keeping her alive long enough to see that future.

In any case, his sister hadn’t yet fully healed from her injuries and needed more time to do that.

Jonas stood for a while at the window, searching for any hint of the things that would eventually come their way.

The night was quiet. Tess hadn’t followed them here, and he silently thanked her for that. As for the darker thing on their trail, Jonas hoped they would have a few more days of relative tranquility before that battle took place. He also hoped he’d have time to meet Tess in more reasonable circumstances, though that wish seemed like a stretch.

Already, and from his first sight of Tess, she had become an unshakable fixture in his mind. When Jonas closed his eyes, she was there. Each breath he took seemed to bring her closer. Leather, smoke and flowers were her calling card, and his cabin seemed to be full of those fragrances.

He glanced at Gwen’s door and sighed. Leaning a shoulder against the wall, Jonas sent his mind outward to test his theory about his uncanny connection to this hunter.

“Do you sleep, Tess? Are your dreams peaceful, or are they filled with dark things?”

It was stupid of him to believe she might hear him from this far away, and yet he could swear he felt his thought travel over the distance separating them. He almost felt himself beside her, as if his threat to haunt her had come true.

She would have a small bed in a small room, Jonas envisioned. Her fair hair would be loose and spread like sunshine across a lavender-scented pillow, because Tess Owens was actually a creature of sunlight, like other humans were.

What would you be wearing tonight, hunter?

He pictured her in something comfortable and light, rather than silks or satins. Tess wasn’t a girly girl.

Maybe you’ll rest in leather in case a werewolf comes calling?

After letting her go, she would be doubly on guard. She would have her knife handy. It was obvious that she knew how to wield a blade, as well as what she could have done with one if she had wanted to.

“Expect me, Tess,” he sent to her. “Rest tonight. Sleep in peace. Meet me tomorrow in the sunlight when the dark things are hiding.”

Did he see her open her eyes and turn from her pillow to listen? Was there actually a possibility she had heard him?

What would it mean if you are listening? Am I wrong about a bond forming between us?

He imagined Tess covering her ears in an attempt to ignore his mental invasion. But he also felt her tuning in, as if she were merely in the next room and straining to listen to him speak.

As the images floated away, he realized that Tess probably wouldn’t fall sleep in that bed tonight, and that wishful thinking on his part didn’t ease things for either of them.

“Tomorrow,” he said aloud. “Meet me tomorrow.”

He felt an unusual drag on his thoughts that made his heart pound and sensed that this new bit of awareness carried no hint of Tess Owens in it.

Jonas turned to find his sister in the doorway with a questioning expression on her face.

Had his thoughts been too loud?

* * *

Tess sat up in bed after tossing and turning her way through two hours of thoughts. After checking the corners of her room for werewolves a tenth time, she threw off the covers and walked to the window.

She couldn’t see out. The shutters were closed and locked tight in case he showed up unannounced. Without fresh air, the closeness in the room made her feel claustrophobic.

Tess doubted if she’d be ever able to sleep again until this werewolf issue was settled. She had an intuitive feeling that tonight wouldn’t be the time for a second meeting but had to remain on guard. There was no telling what this unusual Were might do.

“Get out of my head,” she muttered, shaking the shutter to assure herself that it was in place. Wood planks would be easy enough for a strong werewolf to destroy, but there’d be enough noise to alert her if one tried.

Tomorrow...

Since she’d first heard his invitation, the word had floated in and out of her consciousness with the tone of a whispered command.

“Get out,” she whispered again, forgoing the bed in favor of a trip to the front door.

Palming her knife, Tess left the cabin in her shorts and tank top to look up at the moon. Sensing no wolf presence, she sighed with relief and spoke out of frustration. “I accept, in case you’re the one sending this invitation.”

Brush rustled. Night birds sang. Bugs chirped as tree branches swayed in the wind. All this was normal. Usual. Except for one thing: the feeling of dread that invaded her as Tess studied the moon.

She dropped her gaze to search the area. Her skin bristled. Nerves again began to buzz. Something else was out there, and she didn’t know what. She didn’t recognize the sensations hitting her system. This was no wolf. So, what?

The air changed. Night seemed to darken as the overhead stars were erased. The moon disappeared as if a black curtain had descended over them and everything else. Tess looked at her knife. The silver blade had been swallowed by the roaming blackness. Its surface was dull. The shadows in her peripheral vision appeared to be moving.

Feelings of dread brought on a chill. Her knees felt oddly weak. But as quickly as it had arrived, the strange sensations drifted away as though this had been a bad dream.