“Eat something,” he said, wanting to keep this news from her, and fighting the necessity of a parting. He wished more than anything to see her smile, and hear her laugh. “Eat for strength,” he said. “And I don’t mean little children.”
He took the fact that her lips upturned as a good omen, sure it would be a terrible thing for them all if Banshees didn’t have a sense of humor.
With a last lingering look at her, a heartfelt glance, he cleared his throat and said in a gravelly tone, “I’ll be close.” Then he headed for the window and passed through it, to the night beyond.
Colton landed on the grass in a crouch, both hands and one knee on the ground, and waited to hear the sound of bones breaking. When that didn’t happen, he stood up.
Daylight had indeed passed. The light at the front of Landau’s house hurt his sensitive eyes when he rounded the corner.
Someone was on the porch. He was glad to see that it was a female, and not Landau or Rosalind’s father. Matt Wilson’s mate got to her feet. “Jenna James, in case you missed my name last night,” she said, holding up a plate covered by a dishcloth. “I saved this for you.”
Colton glanced to the door.
“Some of them are inside, and some are on the walls,” Jenna explained. “Landau can’t leave the place unmanned when we go.”
“We?” he said.
“You can read wulf minds a little, right?” she countered.
“What would make you assume that I can?”
“I’m a doctor trained to read facial expression and body language. I’m also a Were, and a female. We’re better at knowing these things.”
He took the plate gratefully and sat on the step, not sure he’d be able to keep anything down, but aware of the fact that he needed sustenance.
“I can’t read minds,” he said. “Sometimes I hear thoughts if they’re loud enough. The more I heal, the more I hear, if I try.”
“Then you probably know they’re waiting inside to speak to you.”
“Loud and clear,” he said.
The door opened behind him with a crack of its metal bolts. He didn’t whirl or greet the newcomer.
“She’s gone,” Jared Kirk announced angrily. “Rosalind is gone.”
The crash of the plate hitting the step was the only other thing Colton heard as he faced Rosalind’s father.
Chapter 30
Wildness had encompassed her. A violent impulse to surrender to the darkness rose in Rosalind’s chest, throat and mouth. Give up, those impulses commanded. Give in.
She was pure spirit, but also a mixture of several things. At the moment, she felt like a creature of the air as she fled the need for food, for company and the ravenous desire to belong to Colton, body and soul. Once she had let go of those things, she became lighter, freer. As she walked, her feet barely touched the ground.
Without a trailing parade of Weres, she headed toward a foreign place. She veered far from the park and the Landaus, following the bits of information she had gleaned from the mind of one of the she-wulfs present on the lawn the night before.
“Fairview.” That’s what the place was called. It was an odd name for a building that housed mental anomalies, but that’s where she’d call the creatures that had been seeking Colton or herself. That’s where she’d make a stand, and find out what was behind everything that had happened so far.
She hadn’t showered or dressed. The bloodsuckers would smell her lover on her bare skin. Would they come flying out of the shadows? Spring up from hidden fissures underground? Would several more of them mean that hordes of vampires were heading to the city every day, drawn by whatever ruled their nasty appetites?
“Tonight, Death calls to only a few.”
Rosalind hesitated when those words came out, surprised. The thought hadn’t been hers. The Death-caller had spoken through her.
She swallowed an oath and kept going, already feeling the attention of the monsters that likely sensed her just as easily as she had them. After experiencing Colton’s beautiful warmth, the chill of vampires made her stomach turn over.
She flowed through the grounds of estate after estate, silencing hounds with a glare and evading security systems with no setting for spirits. She had outwitted the Weres and had gone off without them, leaving behind the men who were grounded by the heaviness of their beasts that had no full moon to free them.
Those Weres had been chained to the assumption that she’d wait for them because of their offer to help. None of them understood that it was for precisely that reason—their honor and the offer of aid—that she had left them behind.
On the sidelines, Weres did their best to help everyone. They fought secret battles so that humans and decent werewolves could walk openly almost anywhere they chose to. Landau and his pack were prime examples of those selfless few. Colton and Dana Delmonico, as police officers, were exemplary souls among them.
Colton...whose love gave her wings.
Yes, she sent to the monsters in the shadows grabbing hold of her trail. “Come to me,” she beckoned. “Follow.”
The building she had been searching for finally came into view. Fairview Hospital was a tall brick square emanating a faint odor of disinfectant. It sat in the middle of a large expanse of forested acreage, by itself, at the end of a long, winding road.
The building and its small courtyard looked to be immaculately cared for, and was surrounded by a six-foot chain-link fence. Frosted lights on posts near the entrance and farther down the driveway were the only sources of illumination, other than the moon.
There was no doubt about Fairview’s strangeness and the necessity of it being removed from the city proper. Spirits inside the building wanted to answer her calls for monsters to follow. Though most of the beings inside were human, their minds temporarily expanded by trancelike states, a very small percentage were only humanlike, and bothered by demons of their own. And in there somewhere a Were male watched over them all, tending to lost souls with the calmness of a guardian angel.
Fairview wasn’t a bad place, in spite of the pain inside it. Too bad that didn’t make her feel any better.
Rosalind stopped with a hand on the fence to listen before moving on. She took in great gulps of air, processing its components.
Gone now was the salty smell of the ocean, so prevalent at Landau’s house. A musty green odor of uncut grass and old trees took the place of swaying palms and manicured parkland. Aside from those things, and removed from the hospital’s smells, she detected an undercurrent of stale blood.
The vampires had arrived.
Moving clear of the fence, Rosalind turned her face into the sour bloodsucker scent. Her claws and fangs sprung simultaneously as she tossed off a shudder of distaste.
She walked toward the trees, not half as scared as she supposed she should have been when whatever happened here would determine the fate of so many.
The vampires’ closeness rolled over her until her teeth began to chatter. Her heart amped up its rhythm, thundered; that beat as loud as if it were planted inside an echo chamber.
She stopped with a hand on her chest, startled by what felt like a new dual beat, and spun in place, searching the dark for the cause of this phenomenon. She zeroed in on a stretch of grass near the gnarled trees lining an unused dirt road.
No. She shook her head as an intimately familiar scent reached her.
“No!” she shouted, her body quaking as if something inside her was trying to break loose. “Not you!”
There was no time to focus on who else was heading her way. The surface of her skin began to chill. Her throat felt full. It was an all-too-familiar reaction, telling her that the beast and the other thing inside her also recognized the scent.
It was the fragrance of wulf.
The dark thing inside her moved. It w
anted to become lost in that scent as much as she did, and began to heave its way upward, its darkness seeping out of her pores.
Rosalind growled and clenched her teeth. She shook her head to ward off this aggressive spirit’s rise. But it was too late. Darkness had colored her white skin a deep, glossy black.
A cry escaped her, and there was no withholding what she had in the past so forcefully tamped down. The spirit she housed sought freedom, needing that freedom to proceed with whatever it had in mind.
The Banshee, the Death-caller, took her over with a terrible swiftness, forcing Rosalind to open her mouth wide. The sound she made filled the night—an awful wail that was both hers and the Death-caller’s flung outward in unison. That shrill cry went on and on, creating waves in the air that shook the leaves on the trees.
It was a prediction. The Death-caller, long dormant, had come forth to do what it had been created to do...and that was to announce the coming of Death.
Trembling, Rosalind turned in time to watch the first batch of bloodsuckers reach the field. Their gaunt, corpse-pale faces shone like dry bones under a moon that wasn’t theirs to blaspheme.
The walking dead rushed toward her, attracted to the darkness of her freed spirit, ignorant that the call had been an invitation to their final repose by an entity that knew this for a fact.
Rosalind whirled and tried to focus, but her attention was shattered by an intensifying acknowledgment of a wulf closing in.
From beneath the overhanging branches of the nearby trees, a white blur raced toward her, moving so fast, Rosalind couldn’t track it. She knew what it was.
Ghost.
Half wolf, half man, Colton came on in all his silver-white werewolf glory, fully muscled up and growling fiercely.
“I would have saved you from this,” she whispered to him.
He looked like fury personified, and moved like liquid motion—as fluid as mist, and raging silently with an incredible power that made his fur stand up. Like a battering ram, the ghost wulf plowed into the ragged line of oncoming vampires, snapping his teeth, cutting them down.
He kept running as the bloodsuckers he met disappeared in storms of black blood and ash. The sound of his heartbeat filled Rosalind’s ears. His rage burned in her breast. She wasn’t alone. Colton had come here, not because she needed saving, but to stand by her side.
Again, she became buoyant. A rush of heat replaced the ungodly chill. Her bones realigned in one smooth wave. Sinew snapped a new shape into existence. Her skin began to melt away, leaving fur in its place. White fur. And then she was running with a rhythm in her legs that kept pace with the hum of fast-approaching cars.
The white werewolf hit vampire after vampire with incredible force. Cries of rage went up as the vampires were scattered, now aware of the ghost whose presence was like a swinging hammer among them.
Shouts answered their cries, along with the awful sounds of bodies hitting bodies that made Rosalind hesitate in the middle of a vamp-killing strike. The Weres had come, had found her, and were taking up her fight.
Landau’s pack had jumped from their cars, ready to rumble, but she sensed the curiosity that made them turn their eyes to her and to Colton—two white werewolves who had changed without the help of a full moon; ghostly beings, lethal, and weaving through the vampires as if they had been born for fighting.
Rosalind felt the brush of a hand at her throat. That slight touch made her melt again into another shape. A human shape with a fanged mouth, her skin blackened by the Banshee’s second rise as a dominant force.
It was a new bit of insight that the Death-caller inside her wanted no part of the wulf.
She bit at the vampire next to her, ripping the hand from its arm, and moved in time to duck a deadly blow. There was fighting all around her. Without a full moon, the Weres stuck in human form were slashing at vampires with knives and loosing arrows from crossbows that took the place of wooden stakes.
Strike after strike hit home. Vampires went down. But it didn’t matter to her what they did around her. The spirit inside her didn’t see the deaths of those Weres tonight.
Only her own.
Stunned by this realization, Rosalind paused in the center of a vortex of fighting. She felt Colton’s heartbeat tune to hers, then noticed that he’d also stopped moving. He lowered his claws. In slow motion, he turned to face her.
Chapter 31
Rosalind was looking at him with large unblinking eyes, Colton realized. Her outline wavered between wulf, vampire and human, failing to settle on any one thing.
She was confused.
He knew the feeling.
But Rosalind seemed to be lit from within, as if going through so many changes at once had created an energy flux that manifested as electricity. Blue sparks hugged her body in a sparkling aura. Against the darkness surrounding her, Rosalind looked like some sort of supernatural light show.
The only feature that didn’t morph was her face. That face was damp and strained by exertion, and more beautiful than anything he had ever seen. So damn beautiful, he wanted to fall on his knees before her.
She opened her mouth. From her throat came a sound that was low-pitched, unearthly, and it made Colton turn from her. She had wailed moments ago and the vampires had come for her. Now, he realized, she was announcing a newcomer.
A mixture of tastes hit him. As if he’d taken a bite of something nasty, dirt, ash and the fire of what might have been mythical brimstone stuck in this throat; a terrible, poisonous concoction that had no place on earth.
Rustling sounds on the grass beat at his nerve endings. The Weres who had made good headway against the vampires had also noticed the newcomers and were gearing up for a second battle.
But demons had to be infinitely harder to get rid of than a nest of vampires on the rampage, Colton thought. And demons were up next.
“Rosalind,” he said.
She heard him. When he looked, her body was swaying from side to side. Her long hair, reaching to her waist, blew in an unnatural wind caused by the fury of all those sparks she was giving off.
One lone, dark strand, however, had survived the color change to white. Crossing her pale features from her forehead to her chin, the darkness accentuated the line between her wulf’s will and the lure of her other spirit.
She looked strong and courageous, angry and demented. But it wasn’t Rosalind who looked at him with big black eyes.
“Who are you?” Colton asked without closing the distance that lay between them. “What did you do with Rosalind?”
The entity turned her head to glance past him. It...she...closed her eyes, shook her head and shifted shape into the blackest thing he could have imagined. His enemy, and Rosalind’s. The kind of monster that had changed them both in the short span of one bleak night. Vampire.
She didn’t attack, or run. She raised her face to search the night sky. From her fanged mouth came an ear-shattering sound that sent her blue sparks outward, and hurt Colton’s ears.
Only peripherally aware of what was going on around them, Colton noticed that the fighting had slowed. There were less than a handful of vampires left, and all of the Weres who had ventured to stand against them remained. He saw none of the demons he knew slid through the shadows in the periphery. For some reason, they were keeping well back.
The vampires stopped fighting suddenly and without warning. Had Rosalind called them off with the awful sound she’d made?
Would they run to her, if they could? Would they run away, recognizing the hammer about to fall?
In their confused hesitation, those bloodsuckers were felled by the Weres, down to the last bloody fang. Without registering the carnage around her, Rosalind shape-shifted again. In place of the vampire hybrid stood a creature Colton had seen only once before, in his parents’ backyard. Demon.
> It felt to him as though there were only two of them in the field—he and Rosalind in her current incarnation—when in actuality they had an audience. Colton sensed the Weres warily gathering around them. Ragged and bloodstained, they were waiting to see if any other devilish creatures would turn up, and holding their breath.
Rosalind was a sight, and as scary as anything else that hell had spewed up tonight. She looked like one of the absent demonic brood, with skin that was yellow, withered and cracked. A ribbon of blood, black against the sallow face, ran down her chin. Her eyes were bloodred.
“Where are they?” Colton asked, knowing the demons had to be close. Rosalind’s effervescent sparks had turned crimson.
Everyone readied for a new onslaught, though no one actually moved. And then Rosalind did. She lifted an arm in a gesture that invited the demons to join her, and they obeyed, pouring in from every direction at once.
But there were only six scaly, two-legged nightmares. A meager showing. They appeared to be part human, part reptile, and several things that Colton didn’t care to think about. The ugly bastards had no eyes, and seemed to be bound together by the evil purpose they served.
The demons flocked to Rosalind like rats to the Piper, attracted by the voice, the sight of her, and her dark scent. Unable to resist such darkness, and seemingly mindless in their bedazzled state, they were extremely vulnerable. They were fools.
The Weres attacked with a force that filled the silence. Shots were fired; so many gunshots that Colton couldn’t keep count. The demons hadn’t been prepared for sabotage, when evil was their master. They had to have believed that Rosalind was one of them.
Muffled vibrations of leathery flesh being rent in the dark produced the rumble of an oncoming storm system. Colton could not watch. He had eyes for only one entity, and wanted Rosalind back.
Rosalind’s demon spirit’s eyeless gaze rose to meet his. Brilliant scarlet sparks reflected on the surface of skin that again began to morph.
Wolf Born Page 22
