Wolf Born

by Linda Thomas-Sundstrom

  Strange.

  Although anger flared over his rude rejection of her call, Rosalind’s heart raced as she watched him run. She felt the rhythm of the movement of the brown Were’s legs in her muscles, and heard the harshness of his breathing echo inside her chest. All this made her feel disturbed in a way she’d never experienced before.

  Her fur ruffled.

  Her chin lifted.

  Finding a male of her species hadn’t been the reason she had slipped her father’s net when he wasn’t looking, but suddenly seemed like a bonus.

  She’d been homesick for her bayou property, where she could run unhindered. Here in Miami, where her father had accepted an invitation to visit the Landaus—an ancient Lycan line as old as her own—she had been quarantined on the estate’s grounds. Her father had forbidden her to go past the expansive property’s stone walls.

  Right. Like she’d listen to that, or be chained to a ridiculous confinement, however lovingly the directive had been issued by a father who said he had her best interests in mind.

  Like she had ever met his expectations.

  I’m a woman now.

  Even her father, an elegant, intelligent Lycan, had no idea how elevated her metabolism became on a night like this one.

  Sure, it was dangerous being out here in wulf form. There were plenty of risks in ignoring the rules and restrictions. It was equally dangerous to expose herself to a member of another pack without being properly introduced. Yet her boundless need for freedom resonated in every bone and cell in her body. The moon’s influence blasted through her like some kind of invisible ray, dispersing her humanness almost completely.

  She had too much pent-up energy, and her search for freedom had been interrupted before she’d used it up. Her focus had been riveted to a big brown werewolf sprinting in the opposite direction who hadn’t paid any attention to her at all.

  Didn’t you hear me, Were?

  Shaking her head without taking her eyes off him, she leaned forward, into his scent. A series of disgruntled growls rumbled in her chest, registering her displeasure. Maybe Miami Weres held contempt for those outside of their packs, and that’s why he had turned from her.

  His loss. She was lithe, smart, fast and strong—a worthy mate for a purebred male. In spite of that, she had been shielded from all eligible partners and kept from pursuing any outside company at all, leaving her to wonder what everyone had been waiting for.

  She was sick of the tight ring of supervision surrounding her, and ready for her first close-up with a prime example of her species.

  Like you, pretty, brown-pelted wulf.

  Wasn’t finding a mate what she was eventually supposed to do?

  Had the brown Were considered her unworthy, when the whispers behind her back at the Landaus’ place had described her as special?

  Special...

  The dreaded Blackout phase wired into her family’s line had come upon her at thirteen, instead of the usual age of twenty-one. Surviving her body’s internal rewiring at so young an age had caused her to acquire a stellar repertoire of abilities.

  Special...

  At fifteen, she outdistanced her father in races. By sixteen, she could painlessly shape-shift in seconds whenever she chose to, with or without the moon. Even her father couldn’t do that.

  Tonight, at the matronly age of twenty, eight-foot-tall stone walls hadn’t stood a chance of containing her. One agile leap was all it took to escape the Landaus’ boundaries.

  Piece of cake.

  In her defense, she hadn’t planned on being outside those walls for very long. Merely one good sprint to calm her had been the justification...

  Until she felt the ongoing song of this male’s Lycan blood as if that song had been written for her. Until she had sensed him in the shadows as clearly as if he’d stood five feet away.

  Even now, his earthy, alluring scent pulled her like some sort of unavoidable undertow.

  Unsure of what to do next, because she actually was socially inept, and had been more or less a prisoner in her own home all of her life, Rosalind didn’t completely understand the feelings of wanting to catch up with the brown wulf in spite of his rebuff.

  Seconds ticked past as she stood there, longing to give chase. Her legs trembled with the desire to move. Her dark muzzle quirked at the thought of werewolves having one-night stands in public spaces, and how that would go down.

  So, which way to go? Back to her father, or after the rude brown Were?

  With a glance over her shoulder toward the Landaus’ walled border in the distance, Rosalind straightened to her full five-foot-five-inch height. Her black pelt—thick, rich, shining like polished obsidian in the moonlight—reflected the bright look of rebelliousness in her amber-green eyes as she made her decision.

  * * *

  As Colton had feared, the five-hundred block of Baker Street crawled with people. Too many people gumming up a crime scene always made a bad situation worse.

  He hit the side of a building hard with his left shoulder to shock his wulf side back to reality. Closing his eyes, blowing out a breath, he willed his beast into the background and corralled it with a word of promise. Later.

  The reversal of his shift was equally as hard on his body, but one hell of a lot quicker. Everything rearranged with a soft snapping of ligament and bone. On human legs, Colton cut a path through the hordes of neighbors out in full force behind fluttering expanses of yellow crime tape. But after those few moments of letting the beast out, the sensory bombardment of being near to all these human bodies weighed him down. Fresh from his run, his thermostat had yet to settle. He was damp with perspiration and needed about ten more deep breaths in a quiet place where he could fully recover before showing himself—a luxury he didn’t have.

  In spite of the distraction in the park, he had beat Davidson to the scene. Six other cruisers were parked along the street. Two emergency vehicles were in attendance with their back doors wide-open. Uniforms moved like an army of ants up and down sidewalks in the dark.

  Colton grabbed hold of a blue uniform whose name tag said EMT Smith. “What happened here?”

  “Homicide,” Smith said after checking out Colton’s badge.

  “Where? Who?” Colton’s voice cracked with emotion.

  “Name’s Connelly. And one officer was shot after arriving at the scene.”

  “Connelly.” Colton processed the news. “Which Connelly?”

  “All of them.”

  “What?”

  “The whole family was killed. Two adults and two kids. It’s one of the worst scenes I’ve been to. Blood and body parts are spewed all over the place. The house looks like a freaking horror movie set. No offense or disrespect, Officer, but I need some air. I’ve only been on this job for three weeks.”

  Colton felt a rush of adrenaline returning in a bad way. He knew the Connellys. His parents had socialized with that family on occasion. A year ago he had helped to build their kids’ swing set.

  But the arctic adrenaline dump jarring him was also an indication that he needed to chill out in public. EMT Smith was still looking at him as if the guy awaited permission to be dismissed, so that he could slink away and hurl his dinner.

  “Thanks,” Colton said. Staring at what Smith had called a house of horror, he added, “The injured officer? How is he?”

  “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.

  “Premed
itated 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.