Master of Wolves

by Angela Knight

  Someone was attacking Celestine!

  Reynolds transformed and raced toward the ballroom, his clawed feet clicking on the marble. In the doorway to the huge room, he skidded to a halt, with a mix of irritation and relief.

  Celestine wore a suit of gleaming iridescent plate armor as she stood before a hole in the air—one of those dimensional gates of hers. She’d evidently managed to make it invisible on the other side, because no one there seemed to notice it.

  Then again, they might be too busy to care. Armored figures battled with swords or hurled bolts of shimmering energy at each other. Judging from the familiar red and black stone, they fought in the same magical temple he and Celestine had visited before.

  “What the hell is going on?” Reynolds demanded.

  Celestine looked around. Her eyes were almost glowing in her excitement. “Good, you’re just in time. We need to go steal Korbal’s Grail.”

  He relaxed fractionally. She’d planned all this after all.

  Assuming they managed to pull off the theft, Celestine would be in such a good mood, not even the cops’ failure to capture Weston would bother her. “Who’s fighting?”

  “Arthur and his knights have attacked Korbal, just as I intended. But they haven’t found the grail yet.” She clenched her fists, all but dancing on her armored feet. “This is our chance!”

  Reynolds felt a feral grin twist his long muzzle. “Let’s go get it then.”

  As she’d done before, Celestine cast another invisibility spell around them, then closed the dimensional gate and opened another.

  They stepped through into a surprisingly empty corridor. They must be on one of the lower floors; Reynolds’s acute werewolf hearing detected the clash and scream of battle somewhere overhead. “Where are we?” he murmured.

  “My spell directed them to a point two floors above the grail chamber. It’s going to take them time to find it.”

  Obeying her insistent tug, he followed the invisible vampire down the marble corridor until she stopped him with a short, sharp pull.

  “What do…?” he began, until a savage dig in his ribs shut him up.

  The scent of magical decay rose as Celestine cast another spell, shimmering the air in front of him like a disturbed pool of water.

  When the shimmer cleared, he was staring into the startled faces of ten vampire guards. They must have surrounded themselves with a cloaking spell of their own when Arthur’s people attacked, but Celestine had just broken it.

  Before anyone else could recover, Reynolds roared and struck out with his claws, ripping one vampire’s face open from forehead to chin. The man fell with a shriek of agony, as Reynolds leaped to attack his comrades with claws and teeth.

  They recovered fast and fought back with a flurry of swinging swords and magical blasts. Celestine must have dropped the invisibility shield around him as a distraction, though she herself didn’t appear. Reynolds was too busy fighting for his life to care.

  Five bloody moments later, somebody grabbed his shoulder with invisible hands. “Come on!” Celestine’s voice screamed. “This way!”

  He whirled and charged after her, ignoring the stench and sting of death spells splashing against his furred back. A gateway opened in the air, and they leaped through, Celestine hurling a last spell of her own before it closed.

  Panting, bleeding, he stood in the center of the ballroom, his knees shaking from adrenalin.

  Suddenly Celeste appeared in front of him as she dropped her invisibility shield. A triumphant grin stretched across her face, and her eyes gleamed.

  In her hand was a heavily engraved golden cup. “Look what I’ve got,” she purred.

  Jim cast a wary glance at Faith as she worked in the kitchen cooking up a couple of thick rib eyes. Her expression was fierce with a concentration that seemed to far exceed the demands of the task.

  “Okay,” he asked suspiciously, “What are you plotting?”

  Faith blinked. “What?”

  “That’s your thinking-about-catching-bad-guys look. You’ve got something in mind. What?”

  She gave him a look so wary, his instincts instantly howled. “Nothing you’ll like.”

  “Yeah, I figured as much.” Jim folded his arms. “Tell me anyway.”

  She sighed and opened the oven, then forked the steaks onto plates. “I’ve been thinking about these pheromones. They’re pretty powerful, right? I mean, even the Sidhe reacted to them, and they’re not even human.”

  “Right.” He liked this less every time she opened her mouth.

  “So why don’t we use them to trap Reynolds?”

  “Absolutely not.”

  Faith propped her fists on her hip, a stubborn expression on her pretty face. “Not so fast, think about it. Once he scents me, he’s going to want to come after me.”

  “Along with half the Clarkston police department, all armed with TASERs.”

  “What if I was in dog form, though? What if he just smells me, and he thinks I’m alone? He’s not going to want all those cops in on this if he’s got sex in mind. He’ll come after me all by himself. And then we could nail him.”

  Jim felt his hackles raise in primitive male outrage. “He’d have to be an idiot.”

  She gave him a long look. “Pheromones don’t exactly encourage cool, logical thought. And Reynolds has never encountered them before, because he’s never encountered a female werewolf. He’s going to want to investigate. Plus, he’s an arrogant bastard. He’ll assume that even if it is a trap, he can turn the tables on me.”

  Jim frowned. “I don’t like this, Faith. It sounds like a big risk.”

  “It’s all a big risk. Besides, aren’t you the one who said Reynolds didn’t know how to fight like a werewolf?”

  “Yeah, but—”

  “Look, we need to take him out, right? We know he’s on first shift, so we can be pretty sure he’ll be leaving the department at 3 P.M. We can ambush him then, but if we tried to do that in human form, we’d be ass-deep in cops. But if we did it as dogs…”

  “Or better yet, if I was a wolf…” Reluctantly, Jim considered the idea. He still didn’t like it, but he saw how it could work.

  “Everybody would simply think it was a dog fight. I don’t think even the cops would realize something else was going on until it’s too late.”

  Jim raked a hand through his hair as his alpha male protectiveness warred with his common sense. “All right,” he said finally. “But you can be damned sure I’m going to be right there.”

  Faith gave him a warm smile. “I’m counting on it.”

  They made love with a hot, desperate ardor, fueled as much by fear of the future as the Burning Moon. Afterward, Jim pulled Faith into his arms and quickly drifted off to sleep.

  Faith, on the other hand, lay wide awake, staring at the ceiling.

  Tomorrow, if all went well, she’d kill another cop. And she’d just planned out the whole thing, cooly, logically. With what a prosecutor would have described as “malice aforethought.”

  True, it wasn’t as if they’d be shooting Reynolds in the back. In fact, his death would probably look a lot like self-defense. But the fact was, they were setting him up.

  Yet what choice did they have? Reynolds had been killing people, and would probably go right on killing people until he was stopped.

  Still, Faith had the nagging feeling she’d crossed a significant line tonight. She’d stopped thinking like a cop to become what amounted to a vigilante.

  And she very much feared there would be no going back.

  Where the hell was the Black Grail?

  Blinking blood from her eyes, Guinevere hurried down the corridor, her husband and four of his knights at her back. Her right arm was numb from shoulder to elbow from a death spell she’d barely managed to block, and Arthur himself was limping. She badly wanted to peel his armor off and check the wound she could feel throbbing through their psychic Truebond, but there wasn’t time.

  They had to find the grail and
destroy it.

  The six of them had managed to break away from the mob battling in the upper floors to search for the Black Grail, but time was running out. When dawn came, they’d have to break off the search. Mageverse magic barely worked on Mortal Earth during the day, and the vampires couldn’t function at all once the sun came up.

  At dawn, the Magekind would have to return to the Mageverse, while their enemies retreated to whatever burrows they could create.

  “Do you think we’ve been suckered?” Gawain asked. The Dragon Sword shimmered in his hand, light rippling up and down its enchanted length. “Maybe the Black Grail isn’t here.”

  “It’s here,” Gwen said grimly. “I sensed it, and Llyr confirmed its presence. I doubt any spell could have fooled us both.” Still, it should have been on the floor they’d gated to. Apparently they had been diverted, which raised all kinds of uncomfortable questions.

  “Hold.” Arthur threw up a mailed fist even as the knights tensed and stopped.

  “Something’s dead up there,” Kay said, scenting the air like a wolf.

  He was right. The reek of spilled blood was obvious even to Guinevere, whose sense of smell was no better than that of a human.

  Arthur nodded, his expression tense, and gently pushed her behind him with one hand. Her husband in the lead, the six of them moved up the corridor, silent as tigers in their enchanted armor. But when they rounded the corner, they found a scene even more gruesome than they’d expected.

  The hallway was stacked with gutted, dismembered bodies.

  “Merlin’s beard,” Gawain breathed. “What the hell did that?”

  Exchanging a hard look, the other knights started searching the corridor and adjoining rooms for the killer.

  Gwen barely noticed as she and her husband concentrated on the bodies. They were obviously Geirolf’s vampires, but they hadn’t been the victims of a Magekind attack. “No sword did that,” she told Arthur quietly, pointing at a ragged, gaping wound.

  He frowned, crouching over the corpse. “Looks like an animal attack. I don’t understand—Geirolf’s vampires are like us. They heal any wound not inflicted by a magical blade.”

  Guinevere leaned over the body and sent a quick probing spell into it. An image flashed through her mind—a horrific wolflike creature lunging for her throat, knifelike teeth gleaming. It had been the last thing the vampire had seen. She shrank back in horror. “Merlin’s beard!”

  “What?”

  Shaken, she looked up at him. “Some kind of magical creature attacked him. I almost hesitate to say it, but it looked like a werewolf.”

  Arthur frowned and stroked his dark beard with an armored hand. “I’ve lived on Mageverse Earth for sixteen hundred years, but I’ve never seen anything like that.”

  “Perhaps it’s some kind of alien demon, like Geirolf.”

  Gawain stepped back out into the hall, having finished his search of a nearby room. His expression was grim. “Well, whatever it was, I think it took the Black Grail. There’s a pedestal like the one you described in one of the rooms ahead, but there’s nothing on it.”

  Arthur growled a quiet curse. He and Gwen followed Gawain back into the room he’d just emerged from.

  Just as Gawain said, there was the red stone pedestal she’d seen in her dream, but it was indeed empty. The golden cup was gone.

  With her Maja senses, Gwen detected the lingering black glitter of death magic. “Somebody gated out of here not fifteen minutes ago,” she told Arthur, moving toward the altar.

  He cursed. “What do you want to bet it was the same person who sent you that vision?”

  She turned toward him as everything became far too clear. “They used us as a distraction. While we were fighting the cultists, they gated in and took the grail.”

  “Can you track them?”

  “I can try.” But when she sent a magical probe into the lingering energy from the gate, it led nowhere. The vampire that had created it had done a very good job of erasing his tracks. Silently, Gwen caught Arthur’s gaze and shook her head.

  “Perfect,” he snarled, throwing up his hands. “Just perfect!”

  “Don’t give up just yet.” Narrow-eyed, she studied the fading glitter. “Our friend may have outsmarted himself.”

  A slow smile spread across her husband’s face. “What do you have in mind?”

  “He gave me a link with the grail to lure us here. Maybe I can use it.”

  Gawain shook his head. “He’ll block your probes.”

  “Oh, yes.” She gave them all a feral smile. “And death magic is very strong. Luckily it doesn’t have a lot of staying power. I’ll wager that if I pour enough Mageverse magic at it, it’ll pop like a balloon.”

  A wolfish grin spread over Arthur’s face. “We’ll see how our furry friend likes having a thousand or so of Avalon’s best leaping down his throat.”

  “Unfortunately, a spell like that is going to take time, and dawn is much too close,” she told him. “I won’t have time to work it before the sun’s radiation begins blocking my magic.”

  A prickle of Mageverse fire spread over her skin, warring with the building weight of the sun as it began to beat on the earth overhead. Gwen looked up. “Our people are beginning to gate out. We’d better go.”

  Arthur frowned, looking unhappy. “At least the Geirolf vampires will have to den up, too. I only hope they don’t get to the thief before we do.”

  As the afternoon sunlight streamed over downtown Clarkston, Faith and Jim drove into town. The convertible’s top was firmly up, and she wore a ball cap and sunglasses with her red hair down around her shoulders instead of tied up in its usual bun. Even so, her instincts howled as they cruised past the Clarkston police department. Dread clenched her belly in a cold fist, just as it had since she’d woken that morning.

  Her dreams had been bloody and confused—nightmares of Reynolds jerking her off her feet and ripping into her with claws and teeth. After fidgeting her way through the afternoon, all she wanted now was to get it over with.

  Jim seemed to share her tension. He’d been quiet all morning, but it reminded her of the silence of a volcano on the verge of eruption.

  They drove up and down Main Street until they found a parking place a block from the station. A convenient alley stood nearby with a dumpster that looked as if it would provide good cover for a shape-shift. Turning off the engine, Jim studied her, his pale gaze searching. “You sure you’re up to this?”

  Faith shrugged, despite the sickly fist kneading her belly. “Doesn’t matter whether I am or not. It’s got to be done.”

  “No, actually, it doesn’t. I could play decoy just as well.”

  “Not when it comes to pheromone production. He’d be expecting a fight the minute he got a whiff of you. With me…” She shrugged. “Hopefully his big head won’t be doing the thinking.”

  “That’s what worries me.” A muscle flexed in Jim’s jaw.

  Despite her own tension, something about his obvious worry made Faith feel oddly warmed. “Hey, you’ll be right there, right? Knowing you, you’re not going to let him anywhere close.”

  Some of the worry lifted from his eyes, replaced by pleasure at her confidence in him. He smiled. “You’ve got that right.”

  “Damn straight.” She reached for the door and swung it open. “Now let’s go do this thing.”

  Reynolds watched as Ayers stared out the window at the afternoon sunlight. “So you think it’ll be tonight?”

  He shrugged. “With Celestine, you never know. But I’d think so. She wants that army of vampires pretty badly, so I’d imagine she’ll trot the grail out for you boys as soon as she can get her hands on a sacrifice to power the spell.”

  A speculative light flared in Ayers’s eyes. “That brings up an interesting point. The grail won’t work on you, will it?”

  “Magic in general doesn’t seem to do much to me, other than my own. So I guess not.”

  Ayers leaned a hip on his desk. “So what are y
ou going to do once we’re all vampires?” His eyes glinted with a hint of malice. “Sounds like you’ll be outnumbered.”

  Reynolds stiffened. “I can take care of myself, Chief.” He bared his teeth. “Believe me.”

  The chief looked at him for a long, cool moment. Then he smiled easily. “Of course.”

  Bastard!

  Reynolds stormed from the building and across the parking lot toward his patrol car. With every stride, he found himself struggling with an unaccustomed emotion: worry.

  Once the entire department had vampire powers, where would that leave him? Over the past couple of months, he’d grown to enjoy the authority he wielded as Celestine’s right-hand man. Just as heady was the physical intimidation he could command as a werewolf.

  But once all the other cops were vampires, much of that advantage would be gone. He…

  Sex!

  Reynolds stopped dead as the scent filled his nose. Blinking in surprise, he drew in a deep, astonished breath. The smell of raw eroticism surrounded him, so intense and overwhelming his dick instantly hardened.

  What the hell was that? Cautiously he inhaled again, but the smell hadn’t faded. There was something familiar about it, a scent he knew…

  Weston.

  He sniffed again, surprised. She’d been hanging around his police car. Just recently, too. But why? What the fuck was she up to?

  And when had she turned into sex on the hoof?

  Unable to resist the temptation, he dropped to one knee, the better to breathe in her deliciously tempting scent. He’d always thought she was reasonably hot, but this was something else again. It was as if somebody had dipped her in raw sex.

  He wanted her. Even Celestine had never turned him on like this, even with her all magic and perverse sexuality.

  Reynolds took a deeper sniff, drinking in the impossibly tempting aroma. He frowned, noticing a strong canine overlay.

  Weston must be in dog form, he realized. Which made sense, considering the entire department was gunning for her. Becoming a mutt would make a very effective disguise. Plus, he’d never be able to catch her on two legs, not without assuming werewolf form. Something he damned well wasn’t going to do at three in the afternoon with half of Clarkston looking on. Celestine would kill him.