Tobias raised up on one elbow. “Don’t even think about taking him on, honey. He hasn’t survived as long as he has by fighting fair. Just look what he did to you!”
“I can play dirty, too.” She poked him in the chest. “I am part demon, after all. And now I’m part vampire, too. We can’t just let him run off into the sunset.”
“We won’t.” He settled against the pillows. “But we have obligations here. We need to find out who on the council knows about the device, and find out what their plans are.” He drew her down against his chest. “We’ll be in Scottsdale for a while. You’ll move in with me?” He sounded oddly hesitant.
She put one fist on top of the other on his chest and propped her chin on her fists. “Only if you marry me.” At his startled look she added, “I let you get away from me once, buster. Never again.”
He closed his eyes. “I can live with that.” And with that he fell asleep. She wasn’t quite sure how she knew it, because it wasn’t like his breathing had changed or anything. But she was sure he was dead to the world.
She lay down and rested her head on his shoulder. She knew she had a long road ahead of her, getting used to being a vampire, but she also knew Tobias would be right there with her, helping her. Together they could do anything.
Werewolf Tori Joseph, Council Liaison, knows more about a recent spate of attacks on humans than she can ever let on.
But as she gets closer to her human colleague, Detective Dante Fabrizio, her attraction to him becomes the secret she must hide…
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Secret of the Wolf
Chapter One
Hard muscles rippled beneath skin and fur. Sharp teeth re-formed themselves. Bones crunched, shifted. Realigned. Glossy brown fur receded, leaving behind only silken, tanned skin as the wolf became human.
Became a woman.
Hugging her knees to her chest, Victoria Joseph took several shuddering breaths, fighting her way back from the mind of the wolf. Perspiration dotted her skin. Her bones ached, muscles flexed and quivered, recovering from the shock and pain of transformation. As the last of the wolf retreated inside, giving her one final slash of pain through her midsection, a soft moan escaped her. She took another deep breath, the humidity of the August morning traveling deep into her lungs. The rain overnight had cleared out, but not before it had tamped down the pollen and dust that ordinarily floated in the air. It was monsoon season in the Sonoran desert. Even with the rise in humidity, unbearable with the hundred-degree temperatures, she loved this time of year. Monsoon storms were wild, swift, and could be deadly. They spoke to her soul.
She skirted a saguaro and, with arms that still trembled, shoved aside a large rock to retrieve the plastic bag she’d stashed there earlier. She pulled out a bottle of water and took a long drink, then another and another until she’d downed it all. She’d learned a long time ago to rehydrate as soon as possible after a shift. Otherwise she’d be in real danger of passing out from the strain of the metamorphosis.
Dropping the bottle back into the bag, Tori drew out clean clothing and shoes. Once dressed, she tucked her cell phone into the front pocket of her jeans and plaited her long hair in a French braid. She hiked the mile back through the desert to the trailhead where she’d left her car. Whenever she went wolf, she wanted to go to a place where she’d have some degree of solitude, and the McDowell Sonoran Preserve afforded that, especially when it was still dark.
As she steered the little Mini Cooper into her driveway, the sun was just coming up over the eastern mountains, sending alternating shafts of light and shadow across the valley floor. She shut off the engine and sat there a moment, wondering if her brother was up yet. Randall had shown up four days ago without warning. The last time she’d seen him had been just before they’d been stripped of their bodies. Their souls had then been sent through a rift between dimensions. As incorporeal entities they’d been drawn to Earth, to the bounty of human bodies available for the taking, for instinctively they’d known if they didn’t take a host they’d die. She’d ended up in London in the body of a woman making her living on the streets of the East End.
Randall, she’d found out just recently, had gone into a man in Leeds. Less than two hundred miles away from her at the time, but it may as well have been the other side of the world. In 1866 it had been impossible to even begin to try to find him. She’d been alone, a stranger in a borrowed body, overcoming the guilt at displacing the rightful owner, finding a way to stay alive in a primitive world.
She and her brother hadn’t seen each other in nearly a hundred and fifty years until he’d shown up on her doorstep, a familiar spirit in a stranger’s body. She’d known him instantly. He was the same sweet brother she remembered, yet he was different in some ways. More withdrawn. But even with the newfound secrecy she would take what she could get. He was her family. The only relative she had in this world. She was willing to overlook a few eccentricities to have her family with her again.
Tori just wished she knew what to do to make him more at ease. He’d had some predisposition toward obsessive-compulsive behavior before the Influx of 1866, but those tendencies seemed to be exacerbated here. Perhaps the human he’d ended up inhabiting, Randall Langston, had also had such predilections.
With a sigh she got out of the car and let herself into her small two-bedroom rental. Smells of lavender and vanilla assailed her from the various bowls of potpourri she had around the house. Her job as werewolf liaison to the council was more often than not dark and full of violence, and as a werewolf she was predisposed to be more aggressive in nature than an ordinary human woman. So when she came home she wanted calm and tranquillity. She needed it in order to slough off the stress of the day.
Tori drew in a breath and held it a moment, letting the tranquil setting of her home seep into her spirit. Neutral beige and cream furniture was piled with blue and green pillows, and the same color scheme played out on the walls. The wooden wind chimes on the back patio clinked, the sound coming to her as clearly as if she were standing beside them.
She didn’t need to use her keen werewolf hearing to pick up the snores coming from Randall’s bedroom. He rarely arose much before noon, preferring to stay up until the wee hours of morning and run as a wolf as much as possible.
She kept trying to not let it bother her that he chose to run alone instead of with her. After all, he’d been on his own just like she had, and he was much more of a loner than she’d ever been. But bother her it did. Why had he gone to the trouble of locating her if he didn’t want to spend any wolf time together? It was as natural for werewolves to run as a pack, even a pack of two, as it was to breathe.
Shaking off the feelings, Tori moved quietly through the house, not wanting to wake him. She undressed in her bedroom, putting her cell phone on the nightstand. After she took a quick shower, she slipped into a robe and padded barefoot into the kitchen. She was starving, which wasn’t unusual after a shift. She pulled some raw hamburger meat out of the fridge and gulped down a couple of handfuls—just enough to satisfy her inner wolf. She’d long ago gotten over the gross factor of eating raw meat.
She remembered her first time as if it were only yesterday. She’d been half asleep and had come wide awake when she realized she was chowing down on raw liver. Repulsed by her need for flesh, she’d soon discovered that the longer she denied the wolf its meal, the more violent it became when it finally got out. As long as she fed regularly, she could shift without worrying that she’d brutally murder someone.
Tori dumped some granola into a bowl and added a few diced strawberries. She poured herself a cup of coffee and went into her bedroom, closing the door with a soft click behind her. She placed the cup and bowl on the end table and went over to her bookshelf. Reaching for a well-worn paperback, she pulled it off the shelf and went back to her queen-size bed. She perched on the edge and opened the book in the middle, staring down at the pages before her.
&
nbsp; She spooned cereal into her mouth and slipped a finger inside the book to retrieve the small black device nestled into the area she’d cut out. The size of a cell phone, it was about half an inch thick with a couple of small knobs and two retractable antennae at one end. Tobias Caine, former vampire liaison to the Council of Preternaturals and now a member of the same, had given it to her two weeks prior. Apparently he and his wife, Nix, had acquired it months ago but had held on to it in secret, waiting for a safe opportunity to hand it off to her.
As Tobias had put it, he’d chosen Tori because she had a background in radio communications and the ability to keep her mouth shut. The two things he needed most. She’d been honored that he trusted her with such a task.
He’d also given her the schematics, which hadn’t been very useful in making the thing work. Oh, she’d managed to turn it on, but within minutes a voice had spoken in the standard language of the other dimension, asking for a password. Worried she would set off some kind of alarm by not responding, she’d quickly turned the device off. Now, as she studied the thing, rolling it around in her hands, she tried to figure out how to activate the device without having someone on the other side know about it. The schematics didn’t indicate that. Perhaps it wasn’t possible.
Tori wouldn’t know until she tried. Her assignment, as given by Tobias, was to determine how the device worked as quickly as possible, without letting anyone know she had it. As far as she was aware, only three other people knew about the little doohickey—Tobias, Nix, and Dante MacMillan, a human detective who’d been right in the middle of the action when the device had been confiscated.
Tori finished her cereal and set the bowl back down on the nightstand. Grabbing her coffee, she took a sip and carried the cup as she went to her dresser. She opened her lingerie drawer and lifted her panties out of the way so she could pick up the folded schematics. She shoved the drawer closed with her hip. Going back to the bed, she spread out the plans and stared down at them while she sipped the hot liquid.
There were drawings of gears and lines and sections for a first amplifier and a second amplifier, R-F output, a resonator and at least two doublers. Mostly though it was a lot of letters and numbers that must have meant something to the person who’d drawn them up, but she couldn’t decipher it. Not yet, anyway.
She placed her empty cup on the table and folded the paper up again. Sitting on the edge of the bed, she slid the schematics under her pillow for the time being and stared down at the device. It was hard to believe that something this size could open up a rift—a mini one, but still, a rift nonetheless. The thought chilled her to the bone. What was the purpose? Oh, she knew enough to figure that right now this was used to communicate from one dimension to the other. But there had to be more to it than that. What nefarious plans were being hatched, and by whom? Tobias hadn’t told her from whom he’d gotten the device, just that the person had been mad with ambition.
Tori picked up the apparatus and brought it closer to inspect the small knobs. She couldn’t discern any labels or hatch marks on the casing, nothing to indicate what function each knob had. She needed to get a magnifying glass to tell for sure.
The more she studied the device, the more intrigued she became. It really was an ingenious contraption created by an imaginative and clever inventor. What had been his intention behind building it? Had he meant to make mischief? Or had his plans been more altruistic than that?
A quick rap on her bedroom door was followed by Randall poking his head inside. “Good morning.” He paused, looking at the device, then glanced back at her. “Did you go out early or come in late?” His head tipped to one side as if he were considering a complicated brainteaser. “Oh, well, no matter. What’s that?” he asked, his gaze returning to the device in her hands. Pushing the door open, he came into the room wearing jeans only, his chest and feet bare.
“Rand!” Tori closed her fist around the object in question and fought the urge to hide it behind her back. She wanted to deflect him from the rift device, not call attention to it.
Lifting a hand, he lazily scratched his chest. His mouth opened wide in a huge yawn.
“You can’t just barge in here. You need to wait for me to tell you to come in.” She scowled at him. “What if I’d been getting dressed?”
“Then I’d have seen bits of you I don’t necessarily want to see,” he said. Tori had lost her East End accent long ago, but even after all these decades, Randall’s tones still held the flavor of his British human host. He stuck his fingers into the front pockets of his jeans and hunched his shoulders. “I dare say I’d have recovered from the shock eventually.” He offered a smile, then glanced back at the device. “So, what is that?”
Though she was certain she could trust her brother, she was duty-bound not to divulge the secret. She liked Tobias. More than that, she admired him and wouldn’t betray his trust in her. As nonchalantly as she could, she replied, “It’s just an MP3 player a friend asked me to try to fix for him.”
Randall raised his brows. Skepticism shadowed his eyes. “And why would he think you could fix it?”
“I was a radio communications technician back in the day. I’ve kept up with all the new gadgets as a hobby,” was all she offered. She didn’t want to talk to him about serving as a communications officer in the American army doing World War II. If he was as passive as he’d been before their Influx, he wouldn’t approve. She was sure he’d felt right at home during the sixties. Hell, he probably started the whole “Make Love Not War” movement. He would overlook the nobility of the cause, and right now she didn’t want to get into an argument with him. Not when they’d just found each other again.
It was time to change the subject. “So, what do you think of Arizona?” She kept her eyes on him and her hand wrapped around the rift device. It wouldn’t do for him to get too close a look, or he’d see it wasn’t an MP3 player as she’d previously told him. She kept her voice cheery, hoping she could distract him. “I mean, I know you’ve only been here a few days, but how do you like it so far?”
Her brother looked like he wanted to pursue the other topic, but for now he let it drop, for which she was grateful. While ordinarily she had no problems not discussing her job or, in this case, a special assignment, this was different. He was her brother, and she didn’t like being deceitful with him. She wanted him to feel like he could trust her because maybe, just maybe, he’d be more inclined to stay. But if he thought she was being disingenuous with him, it could be all the encouragement he needed to leave.
“I don’t know,” Randall said. His shoulders hunched further. “I like it well enough, I suppose. I don’t believe I’ll be staying here for the long term, though.” He grimaced. “It’s hotter than hell, for one thing. I mean, who the hell lives where it’s a hundred and ten degrees, for crying out loud?”
“Right now it’s hot, yeah. But it’s perfect in the winter months.” Tori bit back her disappointment. Randall didn’t have to stay in Scottsdale with her, but she’d like him to be close. “And of course I want you to stay here, but wherever you end up, we have to stay in touch.”
“Absolutely.” He walked over to her dresser, making her stiffen for a moment. Not that there was anything he could get into—the schematics to the device were under her pillow. When all he did was stick a finger into the glass bowl of potpourri, she relaxed. He stirred the fragrant mixture around, making the scent of lavender and vanilla permeate the room. “It’s been great to finally find you,” he said without glancing her way, his tone one of a stranger making small talk with her. They might as well go back to discussing the weather.
He sounded less enthused about being with her than she’d like. It befuddled her. What was going on beneath that brush cut? She’d thought they had been on their way toward rebuilding the relationship that had been put on hold by their trip through the rift all those years ago, yet he seemed remarkably disinterested.
Before she could delve into it further, her cell phone rang. With a
murmured apology, she slipped the rift device under her pillow and then grabbed her phone from the nightstand. She noticed her brother’s sharp eyes hadn’t missed the fact that she’d hidden the alleged MP3 player. She’d have to make sure to find a better hiding place than her underwear drawer. She answered her phone on the second ring. “Hello?”
“Got a brouhaha over on Chaparral, just east of Hayden,” the council dispatcher said without any formal greeting. He was an irascible werebear who didn’t put up with a lot of crap, though he sure could dish it out. “Local LEOs have things in hand at the moment, but you need to get your furry self over there now.”
“What happened?” All business, she rose from the bed and headed toward her closet. For the time being the Scottsdale police had things under control. She paused as she reached for a blouse and wondered if Dante MacMillan was already at the scene. A sensual shiver worked its way through her. Though he was human, there was something about the man that called to everything feminine and primal within her.
“Some kind of skirmish between a werewolf and a vamp,” the dispatcher answered her, drawing her back to the conversation, “with a human bystander caught between ’em. Think the human’s okay, though. Well, mostly okay.” The werebear gave a little growl. “As okay as one of ’em can be in the middle of a fight between two prets, I suppose. But you need to get over there pronto.”
“Ten-four.” She grinned at the dispatcher’s disgruntled snarl. He really hated it when she used police codes. Tori hung up and looked at her brother. She shoved her phone into the pocket of her robe. As she pulled the blouse from its hanger, she started, “Rand, I—”
“Let me guess,” Randall said. His voice held a hint of sarcasm that dismayed her. “You have to go.”
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