The Hunt

by Heather Killough-Walden

  The Hunt, A Big Bad Wolf Romance: Book Four by Heather Killough-Walden

  With special thanks to my daughter, for not crying all of those times I couldn’t play Heroes of Might and Magic with her.

  With thanks to my husband, who did play Heroes of Might and Magic with her.

  With thanks to Mary Moritz, for her critical eye.

  And of course, with heart felt thanks to all of my precious readers, for their continued support and priceless friendship.

  - Heather

  The Hunt©

  by Heather Killough-Walden

  Prologue

  The bruises will go away, he told himself. They always did. But he was so tired. She’d drained him to the point of breaking him this time – or, at least that had been her goal. She was relentless.

  This was never ending.

  He’d been in this hell for so long….

  Light shafted through the chamber and onto the bed, piercing his eyes. He blinked against it and rose as far as the chains would allow him to. He recognized her curves in the doorway at once.

  “Little wolf,” she purred, striding across the chamber toward him. He tensed; he always did. No matter how many times she manipulated him and used him, he would never grow used to it. He would always fight her.

  She tsked him for his reaction and cocked her head to one side. “Relax,” she said, smiling so that he could see the fangs she used on him again and again. “No need to struggle right now. I know you’re weak. I have a surprise for you,” she told him. Then she turned toward the open doorway and nodded to a guard. The guard nodded back and left. “Father found him dead in a field, but fortunately for him, he had only just been killed,” she said, turning back to face him.

  He watched as the guard came back, accompanied by another. Between them, they dragged a bound man dressed in black. There was the smell of black magic upon the prisoner so potent, he couldn’t believe the man had actually allowed himself to be captured.

  “Oh, he didn’t allow us to do it,” the vampire said, obviously having been reading his mind. “He put up quite a fight once we raised him, didn’t you, Jason?” She laughed when the man speared her with his cold green eyes. “He wasn’t thinking straight. After all, he should know that as long as I possess this,” she held up her hand and a crystal on a leather string dangled from her forefinger, “I possess him.” She glanced over at the warlock again. “The poor thing is lovelorn. But I’m going to make him forget all about it.”

  Then she turned back to the bed and he felt her power pour over him. No, he thought. His inner voice growled, Get the fuck out of my head.

  Her only response was to smile wearily and shake her head. “It hurts me how little you trust me, even after all of this time, Byron.” She sat on the edge of the bed, and he tried to move back, but the infernal chains held him tight. No man-made chains could hold him. But this woman and her power and her family and their chains had held him for fifty years.

  “Then let me go,” he told her, his deep voice filling the chamber. It should. He’d been very strong once. Very strong. “The last thing I want to do is cause you pain,” he told her, flashing his own fangs.

  “Now, now,” she said, shaking her head reprimandingly. “You know I could never let you go.” She leaned over and he tried not to flinch when her fingers brushed a lock of his long black hair from his forehead. “You’re perfection. I wanted you the moment I laid eyes on you.” She smiled. “And Daddy got you for me.”

  Byron wanted to vomit.

  “Now, you should know,” she told him then, leaning back as if she could sense his disgust and was hurt by it. “I brought Jason here for you. You see, the woman he loves happens to be your brother’s mate.”

  Byron froze at the mention of his little brother.

  “And Lucas wouldn’t be enjoying her right now if he hadn’t put a silver bullet through Jason’s heart.” She seemed to consider something a moment and her gaze became distant. “He’s very smart, your brother. Very resourceful.” Her expression took on a longing cast and Byron’s gut clenched.

  “Leave him alone,” he told her. It was a warning. It was a desperate plea.

  The vampire princess turned back to him, her cold violet eyes taking him in from head to toe. “Oh I will, my love,” she promised him, licking her red, plump lips. “On one condition.”

  Chapter One

  “The Kill”

  The night was thick with the smell of fog. It was like inhaling snow that hadn’t yet fallen, and it smothered her as she raced down the Embarcadero to some unknown destination. It didn’t matter where she was headed, only how fast she got there. Her long legs carried her at a quick pace; she’d always been a fast runner. Her training ensured that she never lost that talent.

  But dreams were dreams and when they went south, they were never fair. The white wall of pea soup around her clung to her legs, pulling at her and slowing her down. Her heart was racing, pounding hard against the inside of her rib cage. It felt as if it bruised her as she ran. But she couldn’t stop. She couldn’t give in, no matter how heavy her limbs were growing or how much her chest was aching.

  He was behind her. The demon with the gray eyes.

  In the waking world, he was the hunted, the prey, the one who had eluded her and evaded her and taunted her with his very existence for nearly twenty years. But here, in the twisted confines of her deepest, darkest imaginings, he was the Hunter. And she was doomed.

  The sound of her footfalls echoed hollowly, despite the cotton-like quality of the fog around her. She was in so much pain… he was coming closer. It was inevitable that he would catch her.

  Wake up, wake up, wake up! her mind screamed. Any second now, she would sit up in bed, covered in sweat, her long hair fanning out around her face like a billowing curtain. She would be gasping for air. It was always the same.

  But she could hear him now, hear the deep rumble of his breath as he closed in on her. She’d never been able to hear him before.

  No, she thought. What would happen if he caught her? Would she die? Would she ever wake again? In her dreamscape, there was no reason. There was no room for logic. It was constructed of fear, built on a platform of stark uncertainty.

  Somewhere in the mist behind her, the sound of padded paws scraping along the ground changed. He was a man now. His boots set a quick pace, their hard, warning sound echoing so much more loudly than her own. He was running, but as she slowed, drawn down by the weight of her wicked, unfair dream, so did he.

  Unhurried. Stalking.

  It was too cruel.

  With a start so vicious, her heart felt as if it had been torn from her chest, Katherine Dare awoke in a mass of soaked sheets and gasped for air. Her hair had come loose of the braid she’d put it in the night before and she inhaled several strands as she gulped in what oxygen she could get.

  She coughed violently, shoved her hair out of her face, and rolled over. The room was stifling. Her head was instantly pounding, nausea roiling in her belly. Thick, humid air clung to her like plastic wrap. She moaned and swallowed down a throat full of rising bile.

  The air conditioner in the apartment had obviously shut off again. Through blurred vision, Kat glanced up at the alarm clock on the bed table on the other side of the bed. It was dark. No power. Thunder rumbled outside. Kat waited, pinching the bridge of her nose. Now she could make out the receding flashes of lightning as the storm that had taken her electricity moved on and out of town. She fisted the covers over her body. With a hard thrust, she shoved them off of her and forced herself to stand.

  The nausea was receding, but her head pounded with a rising fury. It was too hot. Her muscles were bunched in ebbing fear and the heat was forcing blood up her neck and in
to her brain.

  Kat made her way to the dark bathroom down the hall, stripped off her tank top and underwear, and located the shower’s controls by memory. She shoved the water on the shower’s tap to the full blast position and then stepped in, not bothering to wait for it to warm up.

  The cold blast hit her like a slap across the face. It was jarring in the extreme, but it was just what she needed – just what she wanted. Kat gritted her teeth and let the water wash away the cloying remnants of her dream. She wouldn’t normally close her eyes again so soon after waking from the recurring nightmare, but the darkness around her made it a moot point to attempt to avoid it.

  She closed her eyes and, as usual, she saw his. They were filled with thunderstorms, turbulent and deep and powerful. They should be. They had to be. They belonged to the demon who had taken her happiness. They belonged to the werewolf who had killed her father.

  She had been hunting the monster for nearly twenty years – since the day she had rounded a corner, her little feet skidding and slipping, in time to find the black-furred beast standing over the body of her fallen best friend.

  Her father had been everything to her; a kind man – a good man. He’d been a doctor unable to save his only love from the agonizing death of disease. Katherine’s mother had died two weeks after her sixth birthday. Her father had fallen two days after her tenth.

  And now, nineteen and a half years after she’d become a ward of the court, Kat stood stock still beneath the frozen waterfall of the shower and remembered.

  At thirteen, she’d begun researching the demons. She wanted to know what it was she had actually seen that night three years before, when she’d watched what appeared to be a wolf turn into a man.

  She and her father had just finished grocery shopping. He’d unlocked the front door of the apartment complex and sent her ahead to their front door. But then her father bellowed in pain. It was the most terrifying sound she had ever heard. There was nothing quite so frightening as being forced to face the prospect that those you looked up to for protection and safety and survival should come to harm themselves.

  Kat dropped the grocery bag she’d been holding and raced down the hall of the ten story apartment complex. The carpet beneath her feet ran out to be replaced with ceramic tiles. Her Mary Jane's had leather soles and they slid on the tiles, their edges scraping at the mortar between the squares as she tried to find purchase. She ran as fast as she could, but it wasn’t fast enough.

  By the time she finally made it to the corner and out into the lobby area, her father had been silent for several long, fateful seconds. She skidded to a stunned halt and stared at the figures before her. A massive black-furred wolf stood over the prone body of her father. She couldn’t see her father’s face; it was turned away from her. The back of his jacket was marked with red, and thick red liquid pooled beneath his chest. It found the tributaries of cracks between the tiles and followed them out, painting the lobby in a red and white pattern.

  And then the wolf looked up. Gray eyes speared the distance between them. She gazed at the wolf, seeing God. The devil. An end to everything that was.

  The wolf lowered its head, sniffing at her father’s body. And then it stepped back, putting space between them. There was a flash that temporarily blinded Katherine. When she was able to blink past the fading brightness, it was to find a man standing where the wolf had been a moment before.

  The man looked from her father’s body back to her a final time. His eyes were like storms brewing; she would never forget them. And then there was another flash and Katherine caught the smell of a church. That was what occurred to her as the man disappeared and she found herself walking the red and white tiles to her father’s side. It smelled like church pews.

  The ambulances came after that. There were police and people everywhere. They didn’t let her stay with her father. They tore her little hand from his. It was all she’d wanted to do; he was all that was solid and real in her life. And he’d been taken from her.

  That was twenty years ago. The image had remained so clear in her mind, it was as if it lingered merely to torture her. She’d been forced to therapist after therapist, psychiatrist after psychiatrist, until she’d learned at a tender age to keep her thoughts to herself. No one would believe her anyway. All she’d been doing was hurting herself.

  What she needed was more information.

  So, she’d gone to the library – and then the bookstore – and then she’d logged on to the internet. It was easy to find a connection if you were a ward of the court. People everywhere were willing to share what they had with a cute, bright-eyed little girl with perfect teeth and a nearly unnatural wealth of white blond hair. She was a walking tragedy, beautiful and intelligent and kind. And she used it to her advantage.

  It was when she was sixteen that she was approached by the Hunter. They’d been watching her. Apparently they’d done their homework – and found out that she had been doing hers. The Hunter told her he could help her find what she was looking for… if she was willing to listen.

  One thing led to another and Katherine Elizabeth Dare had been a Hunter for going on thirteen years.

  Kat opened her eyes and lowered her head to keep from filling them with water. The temperature of the shower was beginning to warm up, so she reached behind her and twisted the nozzle, purposely keeping it cool. It helped clear her head. She needed a clear head. Times were tough for Hunters these days.

  You couldn’t be too careful. In the three months since the Leader had been taken down, every Hunter in and out of the country had been scrambling to take his place. They’d chosen the old fashioned way of doing this by trying to “prove” they had what it took to claim such a position. And the best way to prove such a thing was to kill the most demons.

  If she’d wanted the position, Kat could have taken it. But she didn’t want it.

  Katherine Dare didn’t like the killing. In fact, when she’d first joined the Hunters, she’d done so under the outspoken oath that, with the exception of the gray-eyed wolf – wherever he was – Kat would never take a life unless it threatened her own. Unfortunately, it soon became very clear that she wouldn’t have a problem sticking to that rule and yet claiming plenty of werewolf lives. There was something about her that drew the demons to her. She found herself alone with them in elevators, watching in horror as they turned toward her in surprise and their eyes began to glow. She found herself face to face with them in darkened dance clubs, alley ways, and warehouses.

  Rumor through the Hunter grapevine was that werewolves were a dying breed. They were going extinct. Kat never would have guessed as much. To her, the terribly handsome, dangerously deceptive demons were everywhere.

  As a result, she had more kills under her belt than she wanted to contemplate. When she thought about it – when she really stopped and allowed the bloodshed of the acts she’d committed to sink in and be known – she felt sick inside.

  Her nights were often sleepless due to the sounds of death that echoed through her mind. Images of taken lives played like a movie reel through her head. She closed her eyes and saw red. Always the red and the darkness.

  She’d given up long ago on having any kind of normal life. So many women her age had not only dated but were married. They had kids and car payments and houses with white picket fences. Kat was simply a killer. Some days she wondered whether there was any more to her than that.

  There was something so deeply wrong about it, so unfair. The dichotomy of her unmitigated need for revenge and gut-wrenching guilt of what she’d done was too painful for her. In fact, it was so agonizing that when the Hunter elders had come to her and asked her to take over as the leader of the organization, she had turned away without a word. She wanted no part in it.

  She’d become a Hunter in order to learn more about the creatures that had claimed her father’s life. She’d joined them to learn how to fight, how to protect herself, and ultimately how to one day exact the
vengeance she thought she so desperately needed.

  She didn’t care who the Leader was.

  As the other Hunters buzz-sawed their way through the enemy in order to take the Leader’s place, Kat tried her best to stay out of their way. They weren’t taking chances; once they made a claim on a kill, they went to great extents to make certain that no other Hunter attempted to make the same claim. A few Hunters had been killed. It was a blood bath.

  Kat wondered whether there would be any Hunters left to lead by the time one of them claimed the Leader’s throne.

  “Not my problem,” she muttered now as she shut off the water and stepped out of the shower. A series of clicks out in the hall followed by a whoosh powerful enough to shake the walls signaled that the power was back on and the air conditioner had kicked in again. Storms in Louisiana were forever taking out the transformers on power poles along the streets. But the discomfort she suffered because of it was temporary. She had come to Baton Rouge on the rumor that its chief of police was no other than one of the most powerful demons alive. She’d been hoping that she could play the inside game and learn a little more about the gray-eyed wolf. However, she wasn’t going to stick around after all. She’d be heading back to the West Coast at once.

  That was where she’d grown up. It was where the gray-eyed monster had taken everything from her and ruined her life. And it was where the dreams she’d been having lately took place. Kat could take a hint.

  It was time to go home.

  Chapter Two

  “The Cage”

  He’d done it once. Twenty years ago, Byron had managed to make it past the chains and gates and wards of his captors’ estate. He’d even managed to make it into the city. But that was where his escape attempt had come to a screeching halt.

  Byron rubbed the bruises over his wrists and leaned his head back against the lip of the deep tub in which he sat. The ultra hot water soaked into his sore muscles and the steam cleared his lungs. He closed his eyes and tried to ignore the four guards posted inside of the massive bathroom. There were four more outside in the hall. Not that it mattered; he never would have made it past the wards; the guards were there for the fear factor more than anything.