Colton kept walking.
The house lay cloaked in a darkness he’d grown sick of. He crossed the floorboards to a back room, and laid Kirk on a quilt-covered bed. He then headed outside where the breeze, though humid and filled with strange swampy odors, made him breathe easier.
Rosalind was waiting for him, and so damn beautiful he fielded a spasm of pain separate from what he had so far been tolerating.
His arms were covered in her father’s blood. He looked from her to those slashes of red. “What about the...”
“Blood?” Rosalind finished for him.
She was gazing into the distance, possibly gathering information he couldn’t process.
“There’s hardly a moment that doesn’t include thirst,” she confessed. “I’m not sure if it’s theirs or mine. It comes and goes, but I don’t think the thirst is for blood. Not for me, anyway. It’s more like an urge for something I haven’t yet figured out.”
“What could that be?”
She cocked her head in thought. “This feels a little like lust. And like hate. The feeling contains all of the characteristics of a rising addiction that can’t be escaped no matter how hard I might wish to be free of it.”
She left him with that, floating up the steps effortlessly with her long hair flowing behind her.
He almost caught her hair in his hands to tug her back to him. Watching her go, though it was only into the house, was torture.
Not knowing what else to do, Colton sat on the steps with his head in his hands. He felt ill; worse now that he’d heard Rosalind’s confession. He was confused, but it was imperative that he go over the options for guarding the area, as if he actually had some. This wasn’t Miami. Every direction looked alike. The isolation of the Kirks’ property could either be a boon or one hell of a continuous problem.
He had no inkling of how much time passed, other than noticing how the moon’s path across the sky had progressed. When the smell of food reached him, his stomach roared to life. He got up on shaky legs as the door behind him opened.
“I heard your stomach growling from in there,” Rosalind said, holding a plate in one hand and a glass in the other.
“What?” she added. “Preparing food isn’t a talent you’d expect from a black-pelted vampire-wulf hybrid?”
Colton eyed her curiously in the faint light from the lantern she had looped over one elbow. In spite of the situation, he smiled at her remark. Funny, he thought, how normal some moments could be in the midst of chaos.
In the flickering light, he searched Rosalind’s face for evidence of the black tornado he had once seen. The fighter. The empathizer. The hybrid. All he found were those large eyes looking back at him. Eyes that made his wulf stir restlessly.
“I’ll be back after I finish bandaging my father,” she said.
“Will he be okay?”
The conversation was stilted. Their mouths wanted to be used in other ways that involved a meeting of their lips, hot, moist tongues dancing in tandem, and drowning deep kisses.
“He’ll live, just like we all seem to,” Rosalind said.
Colton stared at her, not with the gaze of a protector, but with the focus of a predator. Although he had Rosalind’s father’s blood on his arms, her addictive scent masked it; that dark floral mixture that was almost feline, highly sexual and impossible to resist.
He finally looked down at the plate in his hand. Temptation, he’d learned the hard way, was one hell of a beast.
Chapter 18
The chain attached to her ankle had become a pain in the ass, but Rosalind no longer felt the burn of the metal.
She moved her foot impatiently, and strained to hear the night sounds. All she came up with was Colton’s quiet breathing, coming from outside, and the slow thump of his heart. He hadn’t moved. He was waiting for her.
Her desire to go to him burned in her like a wind-whipped fire, but she was scared, and didn’t dare act on her urges. She sensed that something darker than her fears was approaching, out there beyond Colton’s heady presence. The oily feel of this encroachment slithered across her skin, dirty, evil, foreign.
The monsters had found her again, and she was on her own. Colton could barely move. Her father was flat on his back. It wasn’t right to involve them, see them hurt again, when this was her fight and her strange destiny.
She’d have to face this alone.
She bit her lip hard, tasting blood, regretting the secrets she hadn’t shared with her lover, and wondering if omissions counted as lies.
She’d told Colton that the sight and scent of her father’s blood didn’t affect her, when it did. She had wanted to rub her face in the bloody rags at first. In the swamp, she’d fought the impulse to suck her father dry for keeping important information from her.
“What if you knew that, my lovely ghost?” she whispered. “And that the growing darkness inside me is like the creep of filthy fingertips up my spine. Insane, and quite inhumane.”
She blinked slowly against the intensity of her regrets.
“When you opened your arms to me, I began to slip away, as if slowly losing my grip on reality.”
She had assumed for a brief time that she might become one of the same shadows she had always despised. Worse yet, something her father feared.
“What would be left of me if I were to give in to that darkness? If I were to fade away, allowing others to dictate my future and how my life would or wouldn’t go after this?”
Blinded by the terror of those thoughts, Rosalind looked to the window. She could use it to sidestep Colton’s watchful gaze. She could go out there and meet her future face-to-face.
Get it over with.
Which choice would hurt her lover the least?
“I wish you could help me,” she whispered to him.
And as fast as that, Colton was in the doorway. She wasn’t really surprised. She should have realized he could hear her whispers, and possibly some of her thoughts.
His troubled eyes met hers. His heart was racing. But he would not touch her again, she heard him thinking, hating that reminder. He didn’t dare hold her, because if he did, some new hell might carry her away.
Always, his thoughts were to protect her.
“I feel the same,” she said, and felt her face drain of all remaining color. Though Colton’s closeness brought a much-needed heat, the disturbance in the distance had grown icy.
“You’re not alone in this,” Colton said.
“Are you afraid of me?” she countered, searching his face.
“No. Other things, but not you.”
“What other things?”
“The silly ones you’re about to embrace.”
Rosalind’s hands fluttered by her sides. The pull in the distance dragged at her soul.
“Tell me what’s out there,” he said.
“Monsters.”
He nodded.
“You’re in pain,” she said.
“Aren’t you?”
“This close to you, I share yours.”
“Then it seems true that your changes might have to do with emotion and feeling. A saturation of empathy.”
“And the vampires? Did I empathize with them?” she said.
“What did you feel out there, the night you followed me and helped me in the park?”
“Hatred.”
“Why hatred?” he asked.
“For what the blood drinkers did to your family. For what they had done to you.”
“You didn’t know me.”
“I wanted to.”
He took a moment to think about that, then said, “What did you feel, Rosalind? Exactly. Can you describe it?”
“I was angry. You had spurned me. That’s why I followed you.”
&
nbsp; “When did that change?”
“After going inside your house. Hearing your howl of grief.”
Colton nodded again, as if this had started to make sense to him. Excitement pitched his voice. “You helped me fight them. You sympathized with what had happened, and fought the bloodsuckers, by my side. You transferred your anger to them.”
“You think that’s why I became like them? Anger did this?”
“Emotion could have done it,” he said. “Maybe hatred was necessary for you to access the strength to fight, but it also allowed whatever is in your blood to manifest against the creatures you fought.”
Rosalind saw how serious he was. “Are you suggesting that I might take on the aspects of the creature producing in me the strongest emotion at any given time?”
“It’s an idea worth considering, isn’t it? Better than nothing? A starting point?”
Rosalind touched her hair. Several streaked strands slid through her fingers. “My feelings for you make me more like you? I transferred my emotion back to you after the attack tonight, and that could have saved me from adopting further vampire traits?”
“And caused the white in your hair,” Colton said. “But I’m still wulf. I truly believe that. I will heal completely. And if I’m right, this could be the reason you remain wulf after we touch.”
Rosalind tuned in to his excitement in the same way she adapted to the way his heart was beating.
“Come here,” he said. “Closer.”
She balked at his invitation. Both of her hands clutched tightly to the windowsill beside her.
“What if,” he began, “you only have so much space in you for changes? What if most of that space is filled with something other than vampire?”
She read his thoughts. He couldn’t remember much about the laws of physics or mathematical averages, but the suggestion about space had a certain rightness to it that spurred him on.
“Who’s to say that if you felt strongly about something other than vampires, you couldn’t lose the fangs and replace them with something else? Something better?”
Rosalind turned. “My father must know about this.” She thought of the metal ring in the wall that had awaited the possibility of a chain attached to her ankle, and the reasons for remaining secluded from other Weres. “He’s the only one who might.”
“Then he will have to enlighten us. In the meantime, we can hope I’m right, can’t we?” Colton said.
She took a second wary step toward him, hungry for his enthusiasm, compelled by their imprinting to further the bond.
“You want to test this theory out on our own?” she asked.
“Don’t you?”
“No.”
“Why?”
“Because if I become more like you, and we’re not sure about what that is, what could be waiting for me, for us, might not be the better thing. If you’re wrong about this theory, and even about feeling like a wulf, it could turn out bad.” She took a breath and added, “I could turn out bad.”
She watched Colton raise his hands as if he couldn’t stop himself from comforting her. Although Rosalind wished he would actually cross that line, she couldn’t let him know that. Her bed was in the corner, just four feet away. Her thighs were quaking for a stroke of his bare hands on her naked flesh. She desired real closeness and a respite from thought. She wanted him inside her, filling her, his actions erasing all the doubts.
But her assessment about his condition had been correct. He was in pain and barely managing to control it. Instead of healing completely right away, as he should have been able to do after his injuries, the visible evidence of how close he had come to death had stayed with him, lingering like a layer of fog.
How much of that pain was due to the injuries he had sustained? Did his theory about Others cover him and his condition, as well? Was he becoming something other than Lycan, with ongoing pain as the symptom of that eventual change? Part of that change? The catalyst for it? What was a ghost, if not merely an awkward color discrepancy?
She was visibly trembling now, and desperate for comfort. Yet she had every right to be afraid. They could not connect without the possibility of further consequences.
Although her lover was hurting, he was hard, swollen with the anticipation of sharing her breath. Again he was reading her thoughts. Just a hand on hers. His mouth on her mouth.
It was at that moment Rosalind felt herself again start to fade. Her spirit flickered in and out of the present as if losing its form.
She dropped to the floor, sat down hard and lifted her face to her lover. Her lips parted. “More of them are on their way.”
He turned to look behind him, then crossed to the window. When he pivoted back, she found herself standing by his side without knowing how she had gotten there.
They were inches apart. The souls of their wulfs were mingling.
“How do you know?” Colton asked, his face tense, his shoulder muscles bunched. “I can’t smell them.”
When she offered him a sad, mirthless smile, he said nothing about the evidence of the sudden enlightenment that protruded from between what she knew were two bloodless lips: fangs. Longer than before. Sharper than ever. A telling sign about exactly who was coming for a rematch.
She watched a thought about the kind of shape he was in at the moment flit across Colton’s features. She felt his heart sink into an uneven rhythm.
“Where are they?” he asked. “How far away?”
She gazed beyond him. “Not far.”
Her white wulf swore under his breath. She thought his face shifted slightly to the vague outline of his wulf. “How many are there? Can you tell?”
“Let me go to them,” she said.
When her eyes met his, her stomach clenched. Colton’s wulf was burning hotter than ever, and a kind of sweet oblivion rested in the acknowledgment.
“And do what?” he demanded, his eyes not leaving hers. “Surrender? Give in to them? We don’t know what they want with you, or what might happen. We can’t know that without some guidance.”
The spike in his pulse spiked hers. He’d wanted to bed her, protect her, be her mate, and all those needs were becoming tangled, mired in mystery.
“I can find out what they want,” she said. Her voice quavered.
“At the risk of placing your life in peril? Forget it, Rosalind. Whatever they want, they want badly enough to come here in waves. I don’t like the notion of that, and what it might mean. Master plans, as part of a vampire’s vocabulary? Strategy? It’s unheard-of.”
Rosalind made herself turn to the window. If she maintained eye contact, her heart would break. No matter how determined Colton was, if she closed the distance, he would cave to his beast’s superior urges.
“I don’t see that we have another choice,” she objected. “I started this. Me. I won’t see you or my father harmed any more than you’ve been harmed already.”
“Then it’s a good thing you have no say in the matter.”
Though they had bonded, he wasn’t her captor or keeper. He was older, and maybe wiser in the ways the world worked, but she also was fluent in wulf. She knew these woods. This was her playground. And out there, tonight, she hadn’t even begun to fight.
“We have to bring your father back to consciousness,” he said. “He’ll have to provide some answers, quickly. Can we wake him up? Do we have time?”
“Not much time.”
Again, she watched Colton search the night beyond the glass. Though his skin was feverish, he was riddled with chills. Still, at that moment, when confronted with an immediate problem, Colton Killion looked every bit of the strong, virile Were she had first seen.
His head was lifted. His eyes were wide. She took a step that brought her closer to him, fighting the instinct to rest a hand on his rigid back.
“Do it,” he said with the gravel of pain in his voice. “Wake your father now. Wait this out. Give me more time.”
It took a gigantic effort to back away from him and turn for the door. Only then, when an unuttered sob of distress closed her throat, did Rosalind realize how long she had been holding her breath, and that the monsters in the trees had stolen it.
Chapter 19
“Kirk,” Colton said to the Were on the bed in a tiny room no larger than Colton’s room in the shed.
Green eyes met his.
“The vampires are staging a comeback.”
Kirk’s eyes closed.
Colton spoke again. “You told me Rosalind will attract others now that she’s reached a certain age. Why vampires? What others, and why? How would anyone know about her, so far out here?”
“She’s more than Lycan,” Kirk said softly. Speaking was obviously difficult for him.
“Yes, you mentioned that. I’ve seen her change, and I think those changes might be due to a state of heightened emotion. Am I right?”
Jared Kirk turned his head and opened his eyes. “What did you say?”
“Emotion. Rosalind may be reacting to emotion, to strong feelings in others and in herself.”
“That isn’t what a Banshee does,” Kirk said.
Banshee? Colton was blown backward by the term. He found himself on his feet, with his jaw tight, sure he’d heard that term somewhere.
“Explain,” he said, not sure Kirk would be able to utter ten more words in his present state. “Quickly.”
“A Banshee is a feminine spirit.” Kirk’s voice was faint, but accommodating.
Colton leaned closer to the bed. “And?”
“Said to be an omen of impending death, or doom.”
“What?”
“They are spirits often associated with families and bloodlines. Rosalind’s mother’s family had one, though that kind of spirit had never come to rest in the blood of the family it had attached itself to until...”
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