“Until what?” Colton asked impatiently.
“Until one did.”
Colton felt like a Were with a one-word vocabulary. Harsher this time, he said, “Explain.”
Kirk gasped to draw in more air. “The MacAirlie clan’s Banshee, what they called a Death-caller, was to warn of the death of one of them, but had grown too close to the woman she was to have given over to Death. Maybe that Death-caller craved the kind of life others around her had. No one knows for sure. That Lycan female lived to mate with the Were who found her alive at Death’s door.”
“Yes.” Colton’s skin had grown colder. “Go on.”
“The result of this Lycan union was a Night Wulf. A black Were that carried the moon mark on her arm, but had other abilities, as well.”
Night Wulf. This was the source of Rosalind’s unique black fur. She carried something else in her blood that came from long ago. Could this be true?
“Who was that child the Banshee saved?” he asked.
“Rosalind’s great-great-grandmother.”
Colton had to take a minute to process that information. He wished he could calm down. “Does this explanation imply that a Banshee’s spirit might have become housed in the Lycan she saved? That’s how the unusual characteristics and black pelt come in? It reflects the Death-caller’s presence? Jesus. How does something that happened so long ago affect Rosalind now?”
“I don’t know. Maybe part of that Banshee’s spirit has been handed down to Rosalind, and she’s showing herself. Maybe, as you say, emotion calls that spirit closer to the surface. Possibly, a threat of imminent death is what a Death-caller would recognize. God knows what resides inside Rosalind. I prayed that nothing would show up at all.”
The expression on Kirk’s face made Colton’s throat seize. He barely got the next question out. “But you know about it. About that spirit. How do you know? Has it shown up before this?”
Kirk turned his head on the pillow and said with a reluctant sincerity, “I’m afraid I’ve seen it before.”
“When?” Colton’s cop voice had taken over. He was the interrogator who demanded answers.
Kirk’s voice sputtered, as if the words were painful. “In Rosalind’s mother.”
Colton didn’t remember getting to his feet or placing his hands on the mattress. His face was close to the elder Were’s when he spoke again. “Her mother was a Night Wulf?”
Kirk tried to nod his head. “Rosalind doesn’t know. I didn’t tell her. I was sure it couldn’t happen again, so close in time. After her Blackout phase had passed, I saw that it could.”
Colton pushed off to pace the room, again thinking about Rosalind’s shiny black pelt, and recalling Lycan legend about how impossible a pure black pelt was supposed to be.
“Bullshit,” he said, glancing at Kirk. “Right? Are you putting me on, hoping to chase me away?”
He’d mated with a creature that also had the ability to herald death? Could that be true?
Another memory returned, throwing him back in time to the night in the park when he’d heard Rosalind’s howl—the sound that had started all of this by alerting him to the presence of a she-wulf.
“Hell,” he whispered. “Had she been calling me or keening for the death of other Lycans?” Which turned out to be the slaughter of his family.
Had the events that transpired that night been enough to have kicked a latent spirit into action?
Or...God, had a wulf with a Banshee inside her been howling for his death?
Impossible.
This wasn’t Ireland or Scotland, for Christ’s sake. It was Florida. He was alive. Changed, but breathing. So, what did any of it mean?
Unless...some of her spirit had been passed to him that night, so that he would survive.
Colton considered that possibility now. Had Rosalind saved him in order to become his mate, just as the other spirit had done one hell of a long time ago? Could a dormant spirit in her blood have manifested that night in the park?
It was crazy. Far-fetched.
“Okay,” he said, out of shocked frustration. “Tell me how we help her.”
“Keep her safe.”
“Surely,” Colton said, “you knew better than to think she would remain here forever, or even be willing to?”
“Here, she was Lycan, like me.”
“It was an artificial life, Kirk. A kind of forced stasis. She wasn’t who she was destined to be. If what you say is true, part of her soul was sleeping.”
“Yet she remained Lycan. The longer she did, the better.”
“Yes, and look at her now.” Colton leaned down again. “You do know how to help her in some way, if you were with her mother?”
“It was her mother’s wish to live here and to segregate ourselves from the others. My mate never set foot outside of these grounds. She never went through this. I came here by invitation from my wife’s father, and I stayed.”
“Knowing what she was, you stayed?”
“Yes.” Sadness lowered Kirk’s voice. “And I never regretted it. Not for one single second.”
“Yet you would scorn me for wanting the same thing?”
“I would have saved you, or any other suitor, from the isolation that both I and my daughter have endured.”
Colton put a hand to his forehead, then ran his fingers through his hair. “Well, it’s too late to worry about that. I’m bound to Rosalind, as she is to me. I want to help her, now more than ever, and I’d like you to tell me how to do that.” He faced the closed window. “Emotion has to be the key to her unwilling transformations. She loved you and was therefore like you all this time. She wanted me, and...” The white in her hair. The lightened skin.
He returned to Kirk’s bed. “None of that explains why vampires might want her. Why would they come here? Bloodsuckers are already dead. How could a Death-caller be of use to them?”
“I don’t know.” Kirk cleared his throat, and grimaced at the effort it took. “Vampires could be attracted to the dark spirit in her. They might sense the likeness of a Death-caller. On the one hand, she would know how to find death because she feels it approach. With that ability, she could easily alert them to the location of their next meal.”
“And on the other hand?” Colton pressed.
“She can alert mortals, or any other species, to the approach of monsters.”
Kirk tried to sit up, and made it to his elbows. It sounded to Colton as if the Were said, “There’s more.” But when he looked, Kirk had fallen back, his energy spent.
“One thing is for certain. It’s no longer safe for her here,” Colton mused. “Vampires know where she is, and want something. The bastards have arrived.”
“Then we must take her away,” Kirk said.
“Where? To a more populated place where there are far more emotions running rampant than in these woods?”
The question hung in the air as another sound reached Colton, drifting in through the windowpanes. Rather, the lack of sound is what caught his attention. Outside, at that moment, there was no noise at all.
“As I said, it’s too damn late now,” he said regretfully, heading for the door.
* * *
Rosalind dropped to a crouch on the porch. She snapped her head from side to side, searching the night.
A wave of palpable tension ran through the trees, leaves shuddering in its wake. The air felt dense. In the distance, she perceived the stench of death and destruction.
Without turning to look, she was aware of Colton’s approach. She didn’t acknowledge him, unable to speak and afraid to try.
He came close, but she was beyond fear and running on instinct. Straightening, she backed up and away. “Can’t touch,” she said. “Not now. Not yet.”
She tried to make some sense out of i
t for him, perceiving his distress. “If I’m like them, I can feel them. It’s best that I do feel them because I’ll know where they are.”
“Do you know a way around this next confrontation?” he asked.
“There’s no way around it.”
“What are you feeling when you say you can sense them?”
“A rising blackness, bleak and dreadful, unfurls inside me, almost as if they’re pulling that darkness to the surface.”
“God, Rosalind, I —”
By the time Colton had stopped whatever he had been about to say, she was already at the bottom of the steps, facing the trees on the south side of the house and the path leading to the swamp.
“There are five.” She glanced at Colton over her shoulder.
“Is that all?” he said drily, following her gaze.
Her big Were didn’t look frightened, though Rosalind observed how his body had stiffened with this news. His anxiety had mostly manifested in his rigid arms and back. He rolled his shoulders and clenched his hands.
“Please don’t imagine that I’ll allow you to run off by yourself in order to meet them face-to-face, because that’s not happening,” he said. “There’s a chance you can control what happens to you.”
She swayed slightly. “How?”
“I have no idea, really, but what if it’s like controlling your wulf? You learn to stifle the urges and tuck them inside. You start to appreciate the changes and what they mean.”
Rosalind studied him, reading the truth of this statement in his face, and sensing that he believed it.
When she turned her head, he jumped down to meet her.
“What? What is it?”
“They’re moving,” she said. “Heading toward the place where my mother was killed.”
“Tell me how you know this.”
“The ripples in the night are the wake of their movement. See it in the trees? Vampires run like a dark wind, like nothing else on earth that I’ve seen. It’s as if they don’t possess bodies at all, and are some kind of misty substance that can defy the laws of nature.”
She added, “Scratch that last part. We already have seen evidence of lapsed laws of nature, haven’t we?”
Colton said nothing. She heard his heart thundering.
“Also, it’s like I have a homing beacon inside me,” she went on. “My inner darkness is attracted to their darkness, like mercury coagulating or drops of liquid merging with a larger pool. I see them clearly in my mind. I can nearly make out every detail.”
This statement was met by more silence. She guessed he didn’t even know where to start in tackling that.
“I have to go there, Colton. They’re defiling my mother’s memory. They won’t stop harassing me unless I do something to make them stop.”
“Maybe that’s their point,” he said. “They zero in on that particular spot because it has the most emotional ties for you, hoping to lure you to them. Otherwise, why wouldn’t they just come here?”
She met Colton’s gaze and could tell he was assessing the situation, determining what to do. In a gleam of moonlight, she saw his claws spring forth.
“It’s me they want,” she said.
“Over my dead body.”
Oh, yes. God, how she loved him, right then, right there. She loved this ghost with all of her tormented, black-tainted heart. Colton Killion was willing to lay down his life for her. She had observed the signs of this kind of selflessness in him before.
Were. Cop. Gentleman. Lover. Fighter. Protector. He was all of those things, rolled into one...
And that was the reason she couldn’t allow him to fight her battle. The world couldn’t afford to lose him. Lovers didn’t lead their soul mates to their deaths.
That thought brought her out of a trancelike state. Excitement began to simmer in her nerves. She looked at Colton and almost smiled because she didn’t see his death here. She didn’t sense it. Didn’t feel it. If she housed a creature that announced death, as her father had inadvertently told her, through Colton, then surely Colton was not going to die tonight. She was closer to him than to anyone. She would know this.
In a flash, she was off and running. For the first time in a while she felt ready for whatever these monsters were going to dish out. If instinct was all she had, it was conceivable that she and Colton would come out of this alive.
Black fur, soft and familiar, sprang from her pores to cover her legs. Her arms looked thin, pale and human before they began to shift shape. She ran her tongue over her slowly descending fangs and howled passionately with a Lycan call that sounded like the cry of an exotic bird.
Death to them all. Save my own.
There was a scrambling noise behind her, and nothing she could do about it. “If you’re determined to follow,” she shouted to Colton before her wulf completed the takeover, “you’ll have to keep up.”
Chapter 20
Rosalind’s life passed before her eyes as she ran. The stink of vampires wound itself around those memories, becoming more intense with every stride.
Not long now, and I will find you.
Back again into the past she went, sliding down memory’s tunnel with the hope of discovery.
Her Blackout phase, her father had told her tonight, had been the start of his recognition that she was different. But she didn’t remember much about it. She’d heard that few females survived the process of the human body rewiring itself to become Were. Yet she had embraced that new life with her arms open, relishing her wulf’s powers and constantly gaining more.
Her early rebelliousness now seemed to have been a selfish, frivolous trait, and highly dangerous. Then again, what was the point of lingering on that time when she’d moved so far past it?
Besides, that same stubborn streak is what had brought her to Colton. In no way could she ever regret that. The ghost behind her understood that she was different, and still wanted in.
She wished she had known her mother. There had been no women or she-wulfs in her life. She had always felt empty, despite her raw strength. And all that time, the empty space inside her had been nothing more than a sleeping Death-caller waiting for a chance to awaken and declare itself.
Yes, she wanted to shout back to Colton, she had heard every word her father had told him.
A branch hit her in the face. Rosalind growled, and heard that same branch hit Colton. Her lover was here. He was close.
It took real effort not to turn around and jump into his arms. She knew that once she was in his embrace she would feel only Colton’s love, both physical and spiritual, pouring in.
Her mother had had her father to care for her, until Analise MacAirlie Kirk had been cut down by hunters who had either been after the pelts of mammals or out to bag a gator.
Had her father tried hard to protect his wife? She had no doubt about that. The question was how a bunch of bloodsucking fiends from hell knew about the sacred location of her mother’s grave.
Along the lines of Colton’s theory, could vampires also read and crave the highs of emotion?
Another growl bubbled up from her throat.
“Rosalind.” Colton’s voice was gruff, but he hadn’t shifted.
Of course he read her. Their souls were entwined.
I have done this to you, she longed to say to him, knowing he wouldn’t turn back no matter what excuses she flung his way.
I’m not worthy of your love.
She dared a glance behind her.
Colton’s chiseled angles produced their own shadows. He wore her father’s blood on his left shoulder, and on both arms. The welts of his wounds were now a pinkish-white, crossing his cheeks in raised parallel lines of scar tissue. More lines encircled his neck, at the base of his throat, looking like a necklace of lace.
He had me
ant to say something else. Speak meaningful words that would equal a different kind of sentence, trapping her in a world that wouldn’t allow for the smallest, slightest touch between lovers.
How much more distance could she stand? A lifetime’s worth? Sixty seconds?
She wished for just one more kiss.
Yet if his lips were to feather over hers, it wouldn’t be enough. There would be no holding back the advancing degree of her needs. Even in her wulf’s shape, her arms tingled and twitched. Her breasts strained with the memory of his hands on her. Phantom fingers seemed to cup the private place between her churning thighs, calling up the fires she had to tamp down.
Her fur was mottled now. Black and white. The ghost’s spirit was spreading through her as she moved on, ignoring the impulse to turn back and face Colton instead of the vampires.
Please. Save yourself from what hides in the night, my love.
Wishful thinking was bad, and a distraction. The place was crawling with vampires, and all she wanted was to end this and have Colton for herself.
She was brought to a staggering halt by his hand on her arm. Guilt flowed through her. Had she driven him mad by telegraphing her own desires?
A snap of his arm turned her around. “Shift,” he said in a voice as ragged as she felt.
She looked into his eyes.
“Shift back,” he repeated. “Please, Rosalind.”
It took her seconds to comply, despite the danger around them.
“This is what we have to look forward to,” he said. “This is what’s in store for us. Danger and mystery and monsters. But let’s not lose sight of the end result, whatever turns up between now and then.”
“Promise,” she said. “Promise me that will be true.”
The lips she had stared at, wishing they would meet hers, did just that. Colton’s mouth closed over hers savagely, as if he needed to prove something to her. As if he would be the only one to devour her.
He didn’t touch her in any other way. His body remained apart from hers. Just lips on lips. His mouth on hers. And the fire that raged in that kiss seared the air between them, turning the chill of a monstrous night to a molten red-hot.
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