Wolf Slayer

by Linda Thomas-Sundstrom

  There would be another full moon next month, and by then she’d be better prepared to deal with her first Lycan. She made a vow to honor that idea as she waited by the rocks, anticipating the time when his scent would disappear, while knowing it wouldn’t. The Were’s musky maleness was in her lungs and on her clothes. It was like a new layer of her skin and clung to several strands of her hair.

  This guy had tainted her with a magnificent presence and had turned her world upside down.

  The worst thing of all was daring to admit to herself how much she had liked it.

  * * *

  Jonas didn’t want to go. Didn’t want to leave Tess. He was torn but not quite as confused as she was by the suddenness of their implausible attraction to each other. Out of everyone around, wolf hunters knew the Were species best, and this kind of intimate knowledge might have been what forced a connection.

  He dealt with humans on a daily basis in his job with the Miami PD. He crossed paths with humans, rubbed shoulders with them and helped them out of situations that sometimes pointed to the bad guys of his own species. He and other Weres had made covering up those inconsistencies an art form.

  Tess Owens wasn’t like any of those humans he had met. And as impossible as it seemed, other than a threat or two with the sharp edge of her blade, she hadn’t pounced.

  Why had she backed off?

  Another question nagging at him had to do with Gwen’s behavior tonight. The noises his sister had made when she got close to Tess suggested Gwen had also connected with the wolf hunter in some strange way.

  Impossible?

  Pure imagination?

  No. Because he got it.

  Tess was tuned in to his kind, and Gwen had also sensed this.

  “You need to trust me,” he sent to Tess as he walked. “But I have other obligations that override any feelings I might have developed for you.”

  Feelings? Jonas repeated that word to himself and shook his head. A brief look behind him let him know that Tess hadn’t moved from the spot where he had left her. He had never been more thankful for his gift of enhanced sight than right now. Tess was an elegant eyeful. She was a fragrant, golden-haired enigma.

  He wanted to run a claw over her, tear those shorts from her body and discover what kind of delights lay beneath. He wanted to force her to explain what this thing between them was and how the night had gone wrong.

  Picturing those long legs of hers stretched on soft white sheets, bare and inviting, left him hungering in ways he had never acknowledged. But there was nothing he could do about it.

  Sunrise wasn’t that far off. At the very least, he could be thankful for what a new day without moons, realigning bones, silver blades and dark shadows might bring. In a calmer state, he’d gain a new perspective on what was going on with this hunter and reason things out. Far away from Tess Owens, he might again be able to fully concentrate on why he had brought Gwen here and how important that objective was.

  Far from Tess.

  Far from you, wolf hunter.

  With those words filling his mind, Jonas took off at a run, heading home, sensing no danger in his surroundings other than the one he had just left behind.

  Really, the only true darkness he felt at the moment was the vortex of emotion rolling through him that didn’t belong there and made him want to turn back.

  Tess was thinking about him. He felt it. Some part of her was reaching out to him in ways she or any other human being had no right to utilize. Her energy charged across his nerve endings. Her voice lingered in the recesses of his mind. And that was never a good thing when he was supposed to be concentrating elsewhere.

  Do you know how badly I want to return, and what I want to do to and with you, wolf hunter...all of which involve a mattress and some sweat?

  Was there the slightest chance that would actually happen if the two of them remained in close proximity?

  Not only could he visualize it happening, he could taste it.

  This, Jonas growled to himself as he picked up speed, can’t possibly end well.

  Then again, whoever said that things had to be easy?

  Chapter 9

  Tess gave up her position by the rocks when it became clear that the wolf and his four-legged sidekick weren’t going to make a return appearance.

  “Now what?” she asked herself over and over as she returned to her cabin. For once she had no clue what the next hours and days might bring.

  She didn’t want to meet this guy in the daylight or face him any other way but in his wolfed-up shape. Seeing him tonight as a human, however brief that appearance had been, caused a major hole in her agenda. She had never encountered a Were in its alternate form. In order for her to believe in the job she was destined to do, she had to meet the beast.

  The fact that he could shape-shift more or less at will showed that this guy’s talents and abilities fell well beyond the norm. Especially since it hadn’t seemed to pose any problem for him at all.

  It was a huge problem for her, though.

  Did he know she wouldn’t be able to hurt a Were who looked and talked like a man? One who appraised her the way a man might and seemed to enjoy making her uncomfortable?

  Tess’s anger flared as she faced those unanswered questions.

  As she stood in the small space that served as a dining room, her home suddenly seemed truly isolated. She felt a separation between herself and the living, breathing world around her...something that hadn’t bothered her until now, and until she had confronted a Were who had made her feel so completely alive.

  Leftover sparks were keeping her energy output in high gear with no sign of a letup.

  If that way-too-alluring Were had been playing with her, hoping for a notch in his own belt and to humiliate her, his methods had worked. Meeting him had been like a dream. She had behaved as though she were in a trance. No one else was to blame for her fumbling. She had to own this one.

  “At least I’m alive. Ego-bruised and confused, but alive.”

  After face-palming on the dining table, Tess sank into a chair by the shuttered window, wondering how she was going to live this down and what kind of information about the Owens hunters the damn werewolf was going to pass along to his friends...if he had any friends that actually spoke in words and sentences.

  The white wolf was another enigma that required careful consideration. Pure wolf? Real wolf? Those haunting blue eyes had seemed to suggest there was more to that animal than met the eye.

  Tess stared at the window. Her sense of the Lycan was acute. Instead of leaving the area, he might have remained relatively close by.

  She got up to rest her hand on the shutter, imagining he might spread his fingers on the other side of the same panel. If that were the case, Tess wondered who might go through that window first.

  Reality came stumbling back with the awareness of another anomaly pressing in.

  She listened hard.

  The house was utterly quiet and yet it felt full, as if she shared the space with someone else. Maybe an uninvited visitor had gotten inside when her attention had been turned elsewhere.

  Whirling to reach for the knife she had left on the table, Tess took a stand near the window and waited for whatever was going to happen, thinking to herself that this was the longest and most complicated night ever.

  * * *

  “Gwen?”

  Jonas called out to his sister as he closed the door behind him. The cabin was quiet, the front room chilly. But he wasn’t alone. His sister was here somewhere in wolf form.

  He couldn’t help thinking that she might have liked to remain on all fours forever, shunning the shift to her other side to avoid the pressure of someday having to deal with the reasons for her withdrawal. This kind of shunning was one thing among so many others that spelled out their differences.

  He liked b
oth man and wolf states equally. Then again, he didn’t have the gene that would allow him to look like a real wolf, like his sister did, so he couldn’t actually begin to think he understood her.

  The uniqueness that had been sealed into Gwen’s genes made sharing parents a radical idea, but who was he to question that or the age difference between himself and his sister?

  He just couldn’t be sure if Gwen’s recent desire to keep her human side at bay and remain in her relatively mindless state was intrinsic or the result of the attack and loss of her friends that Gwen had suffered. He had lost a few friends along the way, both as a cop and a Were.

  “Gwen? You can come out now.”

  Jonas turned toward the sound of claws scraping on the hallway floor. “Why don’t you change back and rest? It’s very late. Or early, depending on how we want to look at it.”

  The white wolf rounded the corner in a slinking posture that showed off the same thinness Gwen’s human-like shape had. For all her genetic glory, Gwen had for a while seemed to be wasting away.

  She expected chastisement for ignoring the directions he had given her, and Jonas couldn’t bring himself to harp when no one on the planet knew what she had gone through in that Miami park. No one except for him, that is, since big city detectives dealt with assaults and other heinous crimes on a weekly basis.

  Gwen padded closer to him with her head down. Although Jonas didn’t want to encourage her present shape, he reached down to give her a loving pat.

  “Please change back,” he said. “I want to see my sister and believe that she will speak to me sometime soon.”

  Huge blue eyes found his, but she didn’t honor his request. Gwen went to the window to press her muzzle against the glass, wanting out again. The moon wasn’t yet down but was invisible from the cabin.

  “Not again,” Jonas said with a stern shake of his head. “We’ve had plenty of excitement for one night, don’t you think?”

  Gwen wasn’t listening. From deep in her chest came a low whine that nearly shattered his heart to pieces. His sister wanted something that lay beyond the confines of the cabin.

  What?

  He looked at Gwen with a sudden flash of insight. Gwen wanted to see Tess again after having gotten a close-up of the young wolf hunter.

  Take a number, hun...

  Jonas rested a hand on Gwen’s fur and closed his eyes. When Gwen whined a second time, Jonas checked the front door to make sure it was bolted. If Gwen wanted out of here, she’d have to change back and grow some fingers to work the lock.

  “Later,” he said. “We’re not going anywhere, though this might strain the reputation of our new neighbor.”

  With a tight hold on Gwen’s fur, he turned her toward him. “You do now understand what Tess is, and that she despises the likes of us? She is what most wolves fear. She hunts wolves, Gwen. She hunts us.”

  Gwen’s eyes were far too bright, Jonas decided, and he was unable to read what was going on behind them.

  “We’ve postponed the showdown with this hunter. God knows why things have turned out this way, but it’s not to our benefit to get close to her again. She will be waiting and watching for a mistake that she can use against us.”

  Gwen’s quake of understanding mimicked the quakes he had felt run through Tess. What caused these quakes, though, in both wolf and wolf hunter alike, lay beyond his pay grade.

  What, exactly, did both females understand about what went on tonight? Had Tess seen the differences that separated him from other Weres she might have encountered? Had she, for a few brief moments, believed what he’d told her?

  There was no way he could allow Gwen a second look at Tess, even when he desired the same thing with every fiber of his being.

  “Tess will be wary. She might expect another visit and not be so lenient this time on the whole ‘destroy all werewolves’ thing,” Jonas said.

  She would also be angry. Who the hell knew what she’d be going through? There were so many unanswered questions, Jonas’s head hurt.

  “No,” he said to his sister. “Not tonight. No going out there. I’ll build a fire and you can curl up beside it if you’d like to. Are you cold?”

  Gwen’s answer was to pull away from him. She turned from the window and jumped up on a chair that was too small for her wolf body, though she made it work and seemed to settle in.

  At least Gwen wanted him to believe she had settled. But then, Jonas recalled with sorrow, he had seen this false sense of security before on the night she had sneaked out to meet her friends in a park that was notorious for after-hours crimes.

  And look where we’ve landed, Gwen, he didn’t say out loud. He could never blame Gwen for any of this when he also had been a rebel in his teens.

  At the window, Jonas gazed out at the night. He wasn’t going to be able to sleep. There was a good probability that Gwen would keep her eyes on him until the sun came up.

  With far too much understanding, Gwen seemed to realize how badly he wanted to go back to the woman who would just as soon hang his pelt on a tree as admit that she was thinking about him that minute.

  Jonas felt Tess’s attention as strongly as if she had been in this room with him. There was no mistake about that.

  Can’t go...was the message Jonas wanted to send to Tess to quell his need to return to the brave and beautiful wolf hunter. Can’t.

  Tess Owens had gotten under his skin. With her lush scent in his lungs and the memory of her taut body pressed tightly to his, he had been thrown off-stride.

  “There is just something about you,” he whispered without meaning to say those things out loud.

  When he turned to Gwen, it was to find that the white wolf had gone, replaced by a frail teenaged girl who no longer appeared to belong to either world, wolf or human, but somewhere in between.

  “It’s just you and me,” he said to his sister.

  That wasn’t the truth, though. Not anymore. Tess was in the room with them, if only in his mind.

  Chapter 10

  “What new menace have you brought here, wolf?”

  Jonas stood up straighter, startled by the voice in his mind and sensing the hidden fears behind those words. Her words.

  Tess had spoken to him and he had heard her, which was impossible. There was no way their connection could have developed that much or that far unless Tess had a special gift that he hadn’t been aware of.

  This confirmation left him feeling uneasy.

  Menace was the word she had used. Had she been referring to him? To Gwen? To the fact that she hadn’t done her job and was trying to reason things out?

  He didn’t like it. Had a bad feeling that something else had underscored her words.

  He wanted to tell Tess he’d be right there and couldn’t. Gwen was napping on the chair. He had made a fire and the warmth had lulled his sister into closing her eyes. There was no way he could leave her alone.

  “Explain,” he silently sent to Tess, testing the strength of their unusual bond.

  He felt her attention turn to him. Though she was quiet and couldn’t understand where that idea had come from, the strangeness of this possible open pathway to Tess’s thoughts made Jonas’s muscles tense. Hunters with an innate ability to connect with Weres would be bad news for his kind.

  “Explain about the menace, Tess.”

  The test worked. After a short time, her reply came. “Another unwelcome visitor was on my doorstep just now.”

  Jonas leaned against the wall by the window, shaking his head. They were talking to each other the way Weres did and having a conversation.

  “Who?” he sent, eyeing Gwen, relieved to see that his sister’s eyes were still closed. “Tell me, Tess.”

  “I thought it was you.”

  “Not me. So who?”

  No reply came. Whether this conversation was real or ima
gined, Jonas was starting to get worried. Why he should have cared about what happened to Tess Owens was as much a mystery to him as his sister’s behavior had been lately. The big surprise was that he did care—even though it felt like he’d known her for about five seconds.

  “Tess?” he sent, hoping to engage with her, struggling to comprehend the reason for this link and how it might have happened. “You do hear me.”

  “I hear you,” she replied after a beat. “And I want you to make this stop.”

  “Who was there?” he repeated, ignoring her request.

  “Get out of my head, wolf.”

  “Who was there?”

  “No one. Someone. Both of those things at once.”

  Jonas kept his eyes on his sister. If he wasn’t with Tess and Gwen was in the chair, whoever it was that had spooked Tess must have been someone unrelated to them. Somebody else might not like wolf hunters. Tess could have other enemies.

  Right after those thoughts, he again remembered Tess’s rolling darkness comments and pushed off the wall with his nerves jangling. As quietly as he could, Jonas went to the door, slid the bolt and stepped outside, tuning in to his surroundings utilizing the full package of his extraordinary senses.

  He found nothing. No new smells. Not one hint of anything out of the ordinary.

  “Tess?”

  He wasn’t surprised when she didn’t reply. This mind link had to be new to her, too. Coming from the kind of being she was used to hunting, it might seem frightening.

  The danger of reading thoughts went both ways and changed the whole process of hunter versus hunted. It threatened the secrets everyone kept.

  “Tess?” he said out loud.

  Whether or not she heard him, Tess had closed down. He wanted to know more about Tess Owens and was determined to see her again.

  “Tomorrow, wolf hunter.” When he turned around to go inside, Gwen was standing in the doorway with her eyes on him.“I know you didn’t hear any of that,” he said to her, hoping the statement might be true. But Gwen merely tilted her head, flashed him her golden-blue gaze, and went back inside the cabin, where waiting had already become a dangerous, but certainly not monotonous, game.