Gwen moved in the chair.
“It’s probably nothing,” Jonas said to his sister. But he wasn’t the only one who could feel and sense things. The suddenness of Gwen’s attention was like the snap of a whip on his backside.
“I’d better go out just to make sure,” he added. “Please wait here.”
His skin chilled further when he stepped outside. The sensation of having an ice cube dropped down his shirt was the waving red flag of a premonition. And it was a damn good one.
“Gwen.” Jonas spoke over his shoulder. “You must stay inside in case...”
He couldn’t finish the statement. There was no doubt in his mind that Gwen was aware of his anxiousness. Thankfully, Gwen hadn’t ignored this suggestion. But she was alert. For the first time since she’d been attacked, Jonas could have sworn he heard her silently mumble words that he didn’t quite grasp.
“I’m going to the edge of the driveway,” he told her. “Just need some air.”
It was a lame excuse, but he didn’t have another one handy. He kept hearing those waves of static originating in Tess’s mind. Fully attuned to her and more than a little concerned, Jonas was aware of how close she was getting. She had passed the rocks where he had left her earlier and had paused for a quick look at the body of the rogue Were on the ground.
“What do you see, Tess?” Jonas sent to her. “What’s here?”
This time, she replied, “Black mist.”
She was breathing hard, and the breathlessness affected her thoughts similarly to having spoken those words aloud.
“A face that isn’t a face. You know this thing?”
Jonas didn’t immediately reply since he wasn’t really sure what Tess had seen. However, her fright had been real and she carried it with her as she ran to warn them of a larger danger than the two werewolves they’d encountered earlier.
Jonas closed the door behind him after making sure Gwen hadn’t left the chair. Instead of using the steps, he jumped to the grass and strode toward the driveway, praying that this wasn’t the danger he had been expecting and that his sister would have more time to heal and more time to live before facing everyone’s arch nemesis and life-stealer.
The plan had always been to seeing to that objective, when no one could actually know what to expect from Death’s minions. Not one person he knew of had lived long enough after being tagged by Death to tell their tale.
“Cold.”
Tess had sent another message. Cold? What did it mean?
His senses told him she was in the field, sprinting near the base of the big pines, though he couldn’t see her. There was no sign of anything else. He detected no sensory notification of danger, which would have been strange with Tess so riled up. Even with exceptional Lycan vision, he saw no black mist.
That didn’t mean he couldn’t picture such an creature. On the contrary, Tess’s brief description pulled things from his mental databanks that he had been hoping to avoid. Terrible things. Very bad news.
Behind him, the door opened.
Gwen stood there. Her intent gaze swept past him, but she remained in the open doorway, probably having locked onto his buzzing nerves. Jonas spoke to her in a soft voice reserved for his sister. “Do you sense anything out there?”
Her gaze transferred to him. As usual, she didn’t speak. Only her eyes told the stories that Gwen kept tucked away inside her. Right at that moment, those eyes were shining like the stars overhead...which didn’t help Jonas much since the rest of her was so visibly calm.
Still, no one knew his sister like he did. He had found her that bloody night in Miami and had picked up the pieces. He had carried her to the pack surgeons and held her hand while they went to work. He loved Gwen more than life itself, but she hadn’t come through that event unscathed.
Her wolf had been unleashed that night, as if the monsters had beaten it out of her, and Gwen’s wolf was a truly wild rendition of Lycan four-legged beasts. No one had been able to tame her really. It was a miracle she behaved as well as she had, having been uprooted.
When Gwen advanced one step, Jonas’s nerves fired up. When her gaze again bypassed him, there was little information for him to go by to dissect what she was feeling, other than the far-off look on her face.
“What is it?” he asked, mentally going over how long it had taken to scrub the blood from Gwen’s face.
Blocking her wouldn’t have made any difference, so Jonas didn’t try. It was a beautiful thing he witnessed, and he’d never get used to it. Her abilities were either pure life-altering magic or a descent into madness, depending on how one chose to look at what his sister did next.
From the porch, she jumped to the ground, avoiding the steps like he had. But her leap had Gwen airborne. And in a graceful, soaring arc, Gwen shape-shifted from girl to wolf in the space of a blink, as if she were made of liquid mercury instead of flesh and bone.
Landing on snowy white paws that still held a few leftover traces of the blood of tonight’s victim, Gwen was again on the move.
“Damn it,” Jonas swore.
Some guardian he had turned out to be.
Chapter 18
Tracking her prey was a talent Tess excelled at usually, and yet she had failed to find the misty creature that had stirred up so many self-doubts about the kinds of knowledge she lacked. She had never heard of a thing as abhorrent as the ghostly apparition that had blown icy breaths in her face. Fear still coated her skin with chills.
She couldn’t have stopped running if she had tried. Odd situations were framing her night one after the other, and after a long hiatus, as if Jonas’s presence here had attracted the supernatural.
This last disgusting creature had left a pointer for her as to the reason for its visit. Wolf, it had said, and there just happened to be one nearby. Two of them, if she counted the white-furred animal that sometimes accompanied Jonas and liked to sink its teeth into others.
The red stripe on her hand, left there by that animal, was a strong reminder of Were and wolf ties. Maybe animals often had kindred spirits in species sharing their DNA.
“Tess.”
It was him calling, and her mind was an open book of thoughts and mismatched patterns.
“We’re heading toward you,” Jonas sent through the airwaves. “I don’t see anything abnormal.”
Tess almost told him to look down at himself if he wanted the definition of abnormal but restrained herself. Jonas, she had come to believe, was a different animal altogether. He seemed quite normal at times...which, she supposed, was the secret weapon he wielded.
Then again, beauty wasn’t everything.
That realization tied her stomach into more knots. Knots on top of knots. Jonas had said we, and Tess understood what that meant. Jonas and his vicious pet were coming.
Hell, she could kiss the damn rulebook goodbye and write a new one. The whole wolf-versus-wolf-hunter scenario was being tested here and she felt like a human guinea pig.
“If you come east, toward the rocks, we’ll trap it in the field beyond the trees,” she sent back to Jonas.
In spite of her job, that nasty black misty apparition seemed like the bigger danger here. Beneath her chills, Jonas’s fragrant masculine scent lingered on her clothes, and that had to be what had interested whatever hid in the foggy folds of this black mist.
“Do you see it, Tess?”
“Lost it. But that doesn’t mean it’s not here.”
“Further description of what to look for?”
“I’ve got nothing more to offer you.”
Jonas had more to say. “Keep back if you find it again. It’s likely this thing isn’t after you, and we wouldn’t want it to change its mind.”
“It isn’t after you either, Jonas. I got the impression it might be seeking someone you might know.”
“Explain.”
> “It’s looking for a girl. A young girl.”
The connection filled with a string of raw, emotional curses before Jonas returned. “How do you know this?”
“I saw her. Saw her picture in that thing’s mind.”
Having gained more experience with the inexplicable connection she and Jonas shared, Tess knew when the mind-thought channel between them closed.
She had reached the edge of the field and still saw nothing of the encroaching mist. In the distance, she located Jonas, who had stopped to glance around. From her vantage point, Tess also saw the white animal as it darted into the trees more than half an acre in front of its Lycan master. Jonas had named that wolf Gwen. A better choice might have been to name it Killer.
There was no slithering layer of ground fog in the field between Jonas and where she stood. The moon was out. So were the stars.
Tess couldn’t think of an explanation for why the apparition had disappeared a second time, nor could she see where it had gone. The chills covering every inch of her body suggested that it was still in the area, and could have been watching her and Jonas like an insidious, malignant beast.
Her chills doubled. Her heart thrashed. Something had crept up behind her. Tess whirled around with a tight grip on the handle of the blade to find Jonas’s white wolf crouched on a rock above her.
The sounds the wolf was making made Tess’s head feel light. Growling low in its throat, its muzzle had drawn back to expose a mouthful of needle-sharp teeth.
Tess gestured for the wolf to take its best shot. “Come on then, if you want a piece of me.”
The wolf was trembling as badly as Tess was, but neither of them took the initiative to end the standoff.
“What are you waiting for, Gwen?” Tess taunted. “Take me down, and you can have him all for yourself.”
The wolf lunged forward with a bound that should have tackled Tess and dropped her to the ground. Having anticipated this, Tess would have used the blade. But the wolf soared over her head, growling loudly as it landed beyond Tess and then launched itself at the black entity that had sneaked up from behind.
The creepy bastard hiding in the mist hissed like steam escaping from a tea kettle. With no face or visible entity to hurl herself at, the white wolf went for the center of the wavering black mass, snapping her teeth without finding purchase.
And then Jonas was there, appearing suddenly and swiping at the darkness with claws as lethal as the white wolf’s canines.
In her mind, Tess heard the raspy voice that she now realized had tricked her into bringing Jonas to her and into the open. Because she had been manipulated, this latest round was partially her fault.
“Wolf,” the dark thing whispered as it closed around Jonas.
“You don’t want him,” Tess shouted angrily. “He’s not the one. You as much as told me so.”
Jonas was in a life-and-death situation. He pounded the air with his fist and slashed at the misty creature with the claws he seemed able to call up at will. He used his body like a battering ram.
Uttering more oaths and curses than Tess had known existed in the English language, her Lycan fought like a demon.
The dark mass swirled and regrouped repeatedly, as if nothing remotely solid actually existed at its center. But that didn’t deter Jonas. He came in and out of Tess’s focus, meeting each turn with one of his own. Jonas the fighter. The Lycan with incredible speed and power.
Tess had never seen anything move so fast. Both Jonas’s and the white wolf’s determination to get at this creature transferred to her. She hurled herself at the fog, stabbing at it with her blade, tearing the fog apart only to see the moonlit field beyond it before the foggy apparition began to gather itself together again in another spot.
When Jonas appeared, Tess cried out his name. None of them were making headway against this foe. How did anyone fight a gathering of misty nothingness and hope to wound or vanquish it? The idea struck Tess that this was a situation of diminishing returns, and yet she and Jonas kept fighting until she heard another haunting howl that slowed things to a halt.
The landscape seemed to freeze. Nothing moved during the space of her next few heartbeats.
Beside her, Jonas was tightly strung and taking in deep breaths of air. And then she saw what he held in his arms. Jonas had the white wolf that was struggling to get free in order to re-enter the fight.
“Over my dead body,” Jonas vowed dangerously, speaking to an inky patch of darkness that had gathered between the trees. “And that won’t be so easy.”
Though Tess didn’t have any idea what Jonas meant, she quickly added her two cents. “And over mine.”
She was heartened by the way the fog had backed off, a move she found odd since neither side had won this fight or even made much headway against the opposition. Still, Jonas had captured the white wolf.
The more that wolf struggled, the tighter Jonas held her. The fog remained aloof. Hell, did it even have a brain hidden in there somewhere?
Tess imagined that if it did have a brain, the entity might be considering what it would do next. She also was giving that question some serious thought. If no headway was to be made here and there was to be no real victory, what was the point of a face-off?
She waited, puzzled, while Jonas spoke again.
“You have no right to take her,” he said, directing that speech to the darkness. “She came back and she’s alive. You lost her and there’s no going back, so suck up your loss and float off to wherever you came from.”
Tess glanced sideways, able to feel in every cell in her body that Jonas was serious. Beyond that, what he had just said let her know that he not only knew who the girl was that this formless entity searched for, but that he had a stake in the outcome of that search.
It again crossed Tess’s mind that the Lycan beside her might be hiding someone at the cabin—the same person this dark faceless thing had come here to find.
Jonas and his wolf pet had to be protecting a young girl from this frightful beast. That was the Lycan’s secret and his reason for being here. That was the reason for his brilliantly defiant stand against a creature like the one slithering through the trees.
Jonas was a guardian responsible for someone’s life. He had told her this early on in cryptic ways. Could that have only been two days ago?
Tess dragged those questions through her memory until she dug up a string of his words.
I’m not what you think I am, Tess. I’m here, not to mess with you, but to protect a secret of my own. I’m needed. Someone else’s life depends on what happens here and what I do.
Gutted by that memory, Tess stepped back. Flashes of heat streaked along cheekbones and slipped under the tight black leather when she had been so sure nothing could reach her there. This heat wasn’t anger related. It had to do with Jonas as a protector and what that meant.
Who was the girl he was trying to help? Was that girl a Were or human? Tess had seen a young girl in the image in the monster’s mind and supposed her to be human, but looks could be deceiving. Case in point, Jonas. With all that perfectly packaged brawn and bronzed skin, he was the walking equivalent of a female’s wet dream. Any female.
Fierce and fighting fit, hazardous to his opponents, Jonas, with the talents and abilities of his full-blooded Lycan heritage, was one hell of a male. The human parts of the package he presented only punctuated that point.
He was perfect. He was beside her. But Jonas could never be hers, however much she might want that to be the outcome here.
The result of the admissions she had just made caused Tess to take another step away from him, as if a few more inches of distance between them might help her get back to reality.
It wasn’t really any of her business what he did, as long as he was honest with her about it. And tonight was a further blow to her vow to rid the world of his kind.
> Was it too late to change things?
Could she envision more Weres like him?
The answers to those questions were painfully elusive. Something very serious was at stake here and she was witnessing only the tip of whatever that was. She had only scratched the surface of Jonas’s secrets.
The white wolf in Jonas’s arms kept thrashing. Finally, and in a move so surprising that it made Jonas stumble sideways, the wolf kicked out so forcefully that he lost his grip.
Teeth bared, fur raised, the white wolf barreled forward. As she reached the trees and the darkness between them, the animal Jonas had named Gwen leaped into the air again. And as though that wolf had traveled through a black hole in the universe, the white wolf with her shining coat...vanished.
Chapter 19
“No!”
Jonas froze in place for the few seconds it took for him to fully realize what had just happened. He looked down at his hands in disbelief. Finding them empty, his sluggish synapses began to fire.
White-hot beams of power streaked through his system, rocking his stance on the fine line between human and Were. Prompted by the emotion roiling through him, Jonas’s inner wolf soared to the surface. His two sides began to merge with a terrible impact in a desperate attempt to meet the challenge that sent his pulse skyrocketing. The result was a partial shape-shift that nearly sent him to his knees.
This wasn’t supposed to happen.
Fires ignited inside him and spread so quickly his head snapped back. Anger, frustration and hurt had fueled this impossible piecemeal shift. The snapping sounds when he turned his head caused a chain reaction. His shoulders broadened. Muscles stretched to accommodate an impossible physical transformation.
He rushed after Gwen, lunging toward the core of a blackness that was slowly receding. Dampness clung to his face. The darkness stole his vision. None of that was going to stop him.
Punching with both hands to clear a path through the mist, Jonas made enough headway to see light on the other side. Moonlight. He couldn’t find Gwen.
This unusual shape-shift was flagging in slow-motion, leaving him mostly human, with benefits. His heart was in a state of suspension. He forgot to breathe. His legs were churning on their own, driven by fear and heartbreak. Losing his sister would be like facing the end of the world.
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