The vampire threw her an incredulous look. “When night is just coming on? Hell, I’m just starting to wake up, babe.”
“Fine, then why don’t you keep going and come back and get me in the morning? It isn’t safe to hike at night. There are a hundred dangers, not the least of which would be falling down a ravine.”
“That’s only if you have human vision. The dark actually makes it easier for me to see, at least until the moon rises.”
“Then you turn into a pumpkin?”
“Wrong fairy tale.”
“Please tell me you’re not going to turn into a bat.”
The corner of his lip twitched with humor. “Nothing so dramatic. The moonlight is just too bright when it’s nearly full and it can give me a migraine same as daylight if I’m out in it too long.”
Raina did some quick calculations in her head. “So maybe another three hours until moonrise. Can we compromise on that and make camp then?”
Slade nodded.
“Shake on it.”
He grasped her hand fully in his much larger one. The contact set off that familiar arc of awareness that had sparkled straight up her arm when she’d touched him at the clan compound, making her whole body tighten with desire and need. Raina gasped at the sensation, knowing her eyes had grown wider. The touch seemed to impact him just as much as it had her. His nostrils flared and his mouth slightly parted, like he wanted to eat her.
“Do you want me to carry that pack for you?”
“No. I’m fine.” Raina quickly pulled her hand from his grasp. She thought the spark between them had been a fluke. Apparently not. Even more reason for her to avoid her natural attraction to the bad-boy vibe he was throwing off. “If you want to make it to Auntie Lee’s, we’d better get going.”
He snapped his mouth shut without another word and whipped her around, yanking the pack off her back and hefting it over his own shoulders. “No point in you carrying this load the whole time.” The weight being lifted from her shoulders and spine made her feel instantly like she was floating and almost weightless.
She tried to thank him, but before her lips could even form the words he stalked up the darkening trail, leaving her to catch up. Raina tried to stick close to the vampire, knowing he could see what she couldn’t in the woods. There was no need for a flashlight. Her eyes adjusted to the growing dimness, but even now the sky was lighter than normal with the first rays of a rising moon.
The shifting shadows brought darker thoughts to mind. What if the legends of her people weren’t just tall tales? She knew plenty about pack dynamics of regular wolves, but what if there was a deeper connection between her tribe and these wolves than she’d ever imagined? Just thinking that somehow this might all rest on her shoulders made her feel as if her hiking pack was once again on her back, weighing down the movement of her feet.
“Are you wearing out on me, Officer?” Slade called out over his shoulder. She suspected he could be miles ahead of her, but he was moderating his pace to accommodate her.
Lord, the man could move fast. And he was strong. He had her hiking pack slung on one shoulder and his black bag in his hand as if each were no more than a plastic grocery sack filled with a bag of potato chips.
Even though she no longer carried the pack, her muscles screamed. Suddenly Slade froze in the path, the line of his back rigid. He put the pack and duffel down soundlessly beside him on the path and, without looking back, motioned with his hand for her to crouch low.
Sensing something was off, she didn’t question him, and instantly sank to her haunches, curving her back to make herself as small as possible. For several minutes she thought that perhaps he was overreacting. Other than the faint rustle of leaves overhead, she couldn’t hear anything other than her own breathing, and the unsteady thump of her heartbeat.
Then she heard it—faintly at first. The husky yips and panting of a pair of wolves up ahead riveted her attention. She and Slade were almost to Auntie Lee’s cabin.
With amazing stealth, Slade inched his way back to her, placing his index finger to his lips, telling her to remain quiet. Since she still couldn’t see what he saw, she focused instead on his mouth. He had firm lips, but they were sensual, made for long, slow kisses by a warm, crackling fire on a blanket-strewn floor. Now whose imagination was running away with them? Raina berated herself. How foolish to indulge in such fantasies when she barely knew him. The snuffling of the creatures faded and only the night sounds of crickets, scuttling mice and an occasional hoot from an owl mixed with the shushing wind in the trees.
“Was it them?” she whispered.
He just glanced at her, the line of his jaw growing rigid, making the dent in his chin seem even deeper. “Just stick close to me and stay quiet.” He moved back to the discarded packs and slung them back over his shoulder, motioning her to follow him with a crook of his finger.
Raina sighed and sauntered up to him.
Stick close. The words were simple enough, but certainly brought to mind a whole host of more carnal thoughts. Slade was a good-looking—oh, who the hell was she kidding?—he was a phenomenally good-looking man. The kind that was just rough enough around the edges, and smoldering hot to make women weak in the knees and wet in the panties. Sticking close to him wasn’t exactly a hardship—unless you didn’t want to be involved with a bad boy on any level. Which described her to a T—for temptation.
The last bad boy she’d tangled with had almost convinced her to walk away from her tribe and never look back. Screw their old legends, Rocky had said. They’re just a bunch of hokey stories. And Lord how she wanted to believe him. It would have made being chosen the Whisperer after Kaycee’s death so much easier to bear if it meant nothing—if she hadn’t had the terrifying scene branded into her memory as a child.
But Raina knew to the tribe it meant everything.
In times of trouble the Wolf Whisperer was the link—the connection—between the worlds of the spirit ancestors and the tribe. Break the link by eliminating a Whisperer who had yet to bear a child, and the link would disappear forever. Her people’s connection to their ancestors would be broken. So she’d left Rocky one night when he’d passed out after a wild party, gotten herself enrolled at the police academy, and never looked back.
Until now.
There was no way someone like Slade would give up his world to become part of hers, was he going to go from bad-boy vampire to respectable normal citizen. Who was she kidding? Good grief, they weren’t even in the same species, if the rumors and news reports going around the scientific community about DNA mutated by viruses were correct.
She was Homo sapiens.
He was Homo lamia.
A different breed altogether. Like gray wolves and red wolves, the same but totally different. They could coexist, but they sure as hell shouldn’t mix.
“Are we close to the wolf territory?” Small bubbles of excitement fizzed in her veins. She’d been over this stretch of mountains before, when Robbie had first gone missing, but hadn’t found anything.
“Yeah.” He hesitated, not sounding excited in the least. “Listen, this sounded like a good plan earlier, but I think it’d be a better idea for you to make camp and in the morning head back down the mountain.”
Raina’s first reaction was to pull her revolver out on him and ask why, but she refrained. “But we’re almost to my aunt’s place.”
“Yeah,” he said as he sniffed the air, “and we’re getting damn close to that pack’s den.”
Wasn’t that just like a guy to do a U-turn right when you thought he could handle the driving? “Don’t be ridiculous. I didn’t climb halfway up a mountainside to turn tail and scurry back to town. I’m a trained professional. I think I can handle it.”
“Trust me, they didn’t train you for this.”
His distinct lack of confidence in her abilities had gone from annoying to pissing her off. “Look, Donovan, I’m not going anywhere. I came to observe them, see if there’s really a valid reason for concern. It’
s unusual for wolves to be up here in the first place. If they’ve migrated over from the packs in Idaho or Montana, it’s important that I know. And besides, people are frightened of something. It’s my job to discover what that is. That hasn’t changed.” She turned on her booted heel and took two steps away from him before he grabbed her.
He held her by the shoulders and forced her to look him in the eye. “They’ve got good reason to be scared. Trust me.”
There was no way she could move without brushing up against the rock-hard body she’d been staring at all evening as they had climbed deeper into the trees.
He wasn’t much of a conversationalist, which left her mind plenty of time to indulge in her healthy imagination. Like what exactly Slade Donovan’s ass looked like underneath those jeans. The color of his eyes almost looked like molten gold in the flash of the moon’s growing light.
“Look, there’s got to be a reason these wolves are approaching humans. It’s atypical behavior for wolves to do so—they’re territorial creatures who tend to stick to their packs and stay away from humans. Maybe Robbie and his friends were hunting them down. Maybe developers are pushing too far in on their territory.”
He closed his eyes tight, little lines of frustration creasing his temples. “No, you don’t get it.”
“Then why don’t you enlighten me, Mr. Expert.”
His eyes opened slowly, and the tawny recesses of them seemed to draw her in, mesmerizing in their intensity. “These wolves aren’t normal.”
Well, duh! “Why do you think I called you out here?” She pulled away from his hold, brushing up against him, the contact making her skin contract. “I know they’re a unique species. They’re huge, super strong—”
This time he pushed her up against a tree, the move surprising and swift. The rough bark dug sharply into his knuckles as he kept her backed against the tree. He shouldn’t have touched her, Slade knew.
The scent of her skin made his hands itch to touch her, while the rapid beat of her heart and the susurrus of her blood beneath her skin, a living tide of heat and life, made his fangs ache. But he tamped down the need threatening to overtake his senses. He waited until she looked fully into his eyes. “Stop going off half-cocked and listen up.”
She gave a heavy sigh.
Damn it. Was she ready for this? Would she understand what he was about to tell her, and if so, how would she react? She’d had a belief system her entire life, and he was about to blow that all to hell. Her eyes narrowed as she looked up at him, annoyance stiffening every line of her body. She was a woman who liked to do things her way. Well, that was all well and good until faced with what she was about to face.
“These wolves aren’t wolves.”
Worry flickered behind her confident stare. “Of course they’re Canis lupus. I’ve seen them. Yeah, they’re big, but what else could they possibly be?”
“They’re shape-shifters…Weres.”
The moonlight painted her feminine profile in a soft pearlescent glow, making her seem almost pale enough to be vampire.
“Wait a second. Weres? As in werewolves, is that what you’re trying to tell me?” Her whole body relaxed and shook beneath his hands as she smothered her laughter. “Werewolves?”
Slade wasn’t laughing. He didn’t even crack a smirk. The cramping pain in his muscles was turning to a smoldering fire under his skin. “Until a year ago people didn’t believe vampires were real, either.”
All Raina’s joviality immediately evaporated. She gasped, her eyes narrowing, shadows shifting over her face as she pulled against his hold on her. “You’re serious, aren’t you? You really think these wolves are half human? And I thought my tribe had some wild tall tales about the ancestors.”
“No. As I said the first time, I think they’re shape-shifters.”
She frowned. “So how can you say they took Robbie?”
“They didn’t take him. They converted him.”
“Into a shape-shifter?”
Slade quirked a brow at her. “Well, they didn’t transform him into a Pomeranian.”
“B-but, how?”
“Same way vampires transform humans into our own kind, by introducing a colonizing virus into their bodies that their immune system can’t override. But it’s a different virus—much more virulent than the vampire variety. The virus that creates vampires takes a much higher quantity and the body has to be almost depleted of its ability to fight it off. The Were virus activates with a single bite. Once the saliva penetrates the skin, that’s all she wrote. Transformation can take place by the next full moon.”
The stunned look on Raina’s face was priceless. He doubted he’d ever see her-know-it-all-ness quiet again. “But they have all the characteristics and habits of wolves. There’s nothing supernatural about them beyond their size.”
Slade shrugged. It wasn’t a question, but he answered it anyway. “How could you even tell? In either their wolf or their human form, they have a very defined hierarchy that follows pack law.”
A light of understanding brightened her eyes. “You vampires don’t like shape-shifters, do you?”
Slade gritted his teeth and deliberately ignored her question as he let go of her. “How far did you say it was to your aunt’s cabin?”
She raised a dark brow, calling his bluff. “Answer the question, Donovan.”
“No. We don’t normally interact with Weres. They stay on their side of the mountains and we stay on ours.”
She bit her bottom lip, making him far too aware of what it might feel like to kiss her.
“That explains why you are jumpy about cruising over their territory.”
“You don’t know the half of it, babe,” he replied. Slade fisted his hands, then relaxed them, trying to control the growing pain centered in his gut. He’d been through the drill enough to know that his moon sickness was worse than normal. If he could get her to the safety of her aunt’s cabin, then perhaps he could transport back to the clan’s medical center for treatment for an hour or two, then transport back before she woke.
Raina took out her backlit GPS and glanced at the reading. “It should be an hour that way. Just at the base of Red Top Mountain.” She pointed up toward the rocks that pushed definitely upward out of the trees dead on in the direction of the Were pack’s den.
“I thought you said we were almost there.”
She glanced back at him. “Out here, that’s just around the block.”
From the smell of things, in one hour they could be at the pack’s front door. She had no idea just what dangers lay up ahead.
Slade did, and even for him, the hair on the back of his neck was lifted. He opened his senses wide and tested the air. But the winds had shifted. Instead of Were he smelled aroused female flesh and sweet blood.
His fangs throbbed so hard the ache made his face feel like it was splitting in two.
“We’d better get moving.” Halfway up the ridge the moon came out in all her pale glory. The cramps moved from his stomach, pulsating out into his arms and legs, making him shake uncontrollably from the pain.
Silently, Slade screamed, No! No! Damn it, no! The moon sickness was taking him over and he’d be unable to protect Raina. She couldn’t sense the Weres like he could. She’d never even know they were coming until it was too late.
He staggered and bit the inside of his mouth, releasing a flood of ichor across his tongue as the pain grew. Son of a bitch. He fell against a tree trunk with his shoulder. If he’d been mortal, he would have passed out long ago or been panting hard. But with no need to breathe, all he could do was focus on putting one foot in front of the other, ignoring the burning pulse of pain, until he got her to the cabin.
An hour away? He doubted he’d be conscious in the next ten minutes.
“Since you’ve been to your aunt’s before, why don’t you lead the way from here,” he suggested.
Raina came up from behind him on the trail and nodded, then took the lead. It was really too bad he couldn’t en
joy the view more. Even through the painfully plain olive-green uniform pants the flair of her hips and the curve of her ass made an enticing display as they swayed from side to side while she walked.
Slade stumbled again and fell to one knee. His fangs, brought out by the pain, descended from his soft gum tissue, just above his teeth, with an audible flick. Raina moved farther away, the dark all but consuming her. He had to get up. He had to make sure she survived. The Weres were too close, and if they caught her they’d either kill her or transform her.
Small explosions popped and seared through his skeletal system, every joint feeling like it had been shot at close range by a revolver.
He collapsed to the forest floor with a groan, his face buried in the prickly needles. Slade convulsed, clutched at the raw hot pain tearing through him as the edges of his vision darkened.
“Slade!” Raina raced back, her footsteps sliding in the leaves, and fell to her knees beside him, turning him over on his back and staring deep into his eyes, her brow creased with worry. “Are you hurt? What’s wrong?”
He tried to speak, but couldn’t. The moon sickness had been bad before, but never this bad. Perhaps he’d gone too long without feeding. Perhaps it had just progressed beyond the point he could manage it anymore. The vamp doctors had said all along it might reach a point where he should be confined to the clan’s medical facilities when it came on. He gritted his teeth hard, his fangs piercing his bottom lip.
“Slade! Answer me!”
The best he could do was groan as fire erupted beneath his skin, burning away reason and rational thought. He fought the pain, fought whatever was happening in his body down to the very last cell until he blacked out.
He woke to find himself in the confines of a small tent shaped like a turtle shell. It was meant for two, but barely stretched shoulder to shoulder for him. The translucent fabric tinted the streaming pale morning light royal blue. He stretched, testing his boundaries, and encountered a soft warm female curled up along his left side.
Sometime between when he’d passed out and when he’d woken she had removed her uniform and bra, changing into a T-shirt and jeans. That left only the thin fabric of her shirt between his chest and the soft globes of her breasts. And when he should have pulled away, that fact alone drove him to pull her closer.
The Half-Breed Vampire Page 5
