She found the white wolf at the edge of the yard, not lunging or attacking anything this time but lying on its side. As Tess stood over Jonas’s pet, its big eyes never left her. She saw pain in those eyes. The beautiful white coat was filthy. Tess had a horrible vision of the wolf dragging itself here.
Upon closer inspection, and without getting too close, Tess saw the wounds that had taken this lovely creature down to its current level of pain. The white coat was matted in several places with dark blood that looked nothing like the earlier werewolf kill. One of the wolf’s delicate ears was torn.
The white wolf had come here for something. Was it looking for help? Could wolves know what a human wolf hunter was?
Earlier, this one had left a bloody mark on her hand instead of trying to bite it off. It had shown no attempt to harm her the day before. In that respect, this wolf had acted more like a domesticated dog.
What good was asking this animal anything? Even if it responded to Jonas’s commands, the white wolf was just an animal.
The question Tess had to ask herself was why it had come here instead of returning to the Were who so obviously cared for it. For her, Tess amended. This was the wolf Jonas had lovingly named Gwen, and an animal he loved.
After sheathing the knife, Tess knelt down beside the animal, careful to remember that wounded animals could be overly aggressive. Tentatively, she touched the white wolf’s body. The big eyes that had been trained on her closed.
“Who hurt you?” Tess asked, honestly wanting the answer to that question, along with all of the others, chief among them being how she was supposed to help this creature.
She only knew that she had to help. It was likely that the desire to do so stemmed from the way this wolf had accepted her and then returned here now when help was needed...and also because of the look on Jonas’s face when his pet had disappeared. Loss was the emotion that had rearranged the Lycan’s chiseled features. Pain had flickered in his light blue eyes.
“You’re too large for me to carry,” Tess said. “Can you try to get to the house?”
She didn’t for one second feel stupid for talking to the wolf as if it understood every damn thing she said. Tone of voice could sometimes soothe an injured soul, Tess had often found in the past.
“I’m afraid to touch you, in case I hurt you more.”
Acting as if it did understand, the wolf struggled to get up, managing to get to all fours, barely, with its body shaking hard enough to almost topple the animal again.
“If you can make it to the house, I will do what I can to ease the pain.” Tess inched backward, tapping her thigh the way she had seen Jonas do when he wanted the wolf to follow him. “I won’t purposefully hurt you. I’ll swear to that.”
The wolf took a staggering step and followed it with another.
“That’s right,” Tess encouraged. The front door wasn’t too far away, but she wasn’t sure the animal was going to make it in the shape it was in.
“Do it, Gwen,” she said, backing up again. “I’ve seen what you’re capable of. You can do this.”
This was the same magnificent animal that had growled fiercely a couple of hours ago. It had gone after a werewolf disguised as a human when that Were had threatened Tess, as if this wolf’s intent had been to protect her. Now, it made faint whining sounds with every move it made. Nevertheless, the wolf did move forward.
What was she going to do with the animal once she got it inside?
Tess wondered if Jonas allowed Gwen inside his cabin and if any wolf that had been born in the wild could have been domesticated that much.
It took a while to get the white wolf to the door. Once all four paws were inside, the wolf could go no farther.
“I’ll get some salve and warm towels,” Tess said, used to talking to herself, thinking that more conversation to soak up some of the shock of the situation wouldn’t be so bad here.
The wolf lay on the floor with its head between its paws, seemingly content to be inside, though Tess figured she could have made that part up. Because who the hell knew what a real animal thought, or even if they did think things out?
She went to the room housing medical and silver supplies and turned on the light. She hadn’t yet bothered to clean up the broken glass on the floor but did a quick check to make sure the boards she had nailed to the window were secure.
The cabinet was filled with bottles of concoctions her mother had made from local plants and more secret sources. Tess removed two bottles and returned to the front room. The wolf hadn’t moved from that spot by the door.
“Hot towels first,” Tess said. “We have to clean up those wounds. I’ll be right back.”
The kitchen was a place where she had never spent much time. A kettle was already on the stove from her afternoon cup of tea. She filled the kettle with water from the tap and adjusted the valve that turned on the burner. Then she circled back to the wolf on her floor without glancing at the framed photo of her parents on the table beside it.
Wolf hunters weren’t animal haters. Her mother and father would have approved of helping this wolf, Tess preferred to believe.
“The medicine will sting,” she explained. “I know this because I’ve used it many times and uttered some very bad words right after.”
She returned to the kitchen to fetch the hot water and poured it over a clean hand towel at the sink. The white wolf’s eyes followed her comings and goings. Its whining sounds had ceased.
Tess again knelt down beside her new four-legged guest. “If you try to bite me, I’ll have to kick you out.”
With gentle strokes of the hot towel, she began the process of cleaning blood and matted fur from the wounds she found on Gwen’s neck and back. The wounds were strange and more like deep burn marks than injuries a sharp weapon might have made. They were bright red and raw.
The animal let Tess tend to its wounds and kept the lethal teeth Tess had twice seen in action to itself.
“Gwen, is it?” Tess said as she worked. “Why Gwen, I wonder?”
The minute the question was out of her mouth, Tess felt a foreign thought drop in.
“Gwen.”
The urgency in his tone made Tess rock back. She put a hand to her mouth, able to feel the lingering imprint of Jonas’s mouth there.
Jonas had heard her speak Gwen’s name and, with palpable relief, was already on his way.
Chapter 21
Jonas covered ground that he barely felt beneath him. Tess had seen Gwen and therefore had to know where his sister was. Tess’s thoughts led him to believe his sister was alive. He owed Tess big-time for letting him in on that.
He sprinted through the fields and up to the rocky hillside leading to Tess’s home, going over what he’d say and what he’d do when he got there. Throwing Tess against a wall and kissing her to within an inch of her life was not an option. Finding Gwen was. But man, he wanted to get close to Tess, who could very well be teetering on the cusp of understanding both him and his priorities.
There were lights in her cabin, though the yard around it was dark. The wolf hunter’s scent layered over the place like its own telling fog. Over that hovered the scent he sought.
Without concern, he ran right up to the front door and pushed it open. What he saw inside stopped him in his tracks. Gwen was there, all right. So was Tess. The mighty wolf hunter that so many other Weres feared sat on the floor beside his sister, with Gwen’s white wolfish head on her lap.
Tess looked up at him, showing no surprise over seeing him there. “She’s hurt, but I don’t think her injuries are life-threatening.”
Jonas almost slid to the floor in relief, having been in a similar situation once before when the news about his sister’s outcome wasn’t so positive. In fact, no one had expected Gwen to make it through that night.
“What happened?” he asked.
Te
ss shook her head. “I was going to ask you.”
“I couldn’t find her. Looked everywhere.”
“Everywhere but here,” Tess said.
He squatted down to run a hand over Gwen’s muzzle, glad to have her make the kind of sound that told him she was happy to see him. His gaze slipped to the bottles next to Tess, then to Tess herself. She averted her eyes.
“It’s good medicine,” she said.
As he had expected, Tess was still tightly wrapped in black leather. She had expected the return of some kind of trouble, and here it was, in her lap.
Luckily, Gwen had stayed in wolf form and was the kind of special Lycan she was. Tess had no idea what kind of secrets that white furry form hid. No one other than Jonas did. That was the beauty of Gwen’s uniqueness and one reason why his sister was so important to the future of the Lycan race.
Werewolf hunter talents couldn’t break through Gwendolyn Dale’s defenses to see what the outer shape disguised. To Tess, a talented hunter, his sister was just an unusual wolf. The promise of passing along that particular trait to other Lycans would set wolf hunting back hundreds of years.
And here, now, Tess Owens was coming to the aid of that special being due to the fact that inside Tess’s leather-clad chest, a sentimental heart beat.
Jonas rested both of his hands on Gwen’s neck, careful to avoid his sister’s wounds but wanting a closer look at them.
“I’m doing what I can,” Tess said as his gaze roamed over Gwen’s white coat.
She was doing just that, Jonas saw. Trying to help. Again, though, he wondered why Gwen had come here, and what had made his sister so attracted to Tess when their relationship was anything but symbiotic.
Then again, hadn’t he reacted to this wolf hunter in a similar fashion and been more or less smitten by her from the start? From the first sighting?
What is it about you, Tess Owens?
Jonas kept that thought behind a closed door in his mind, but the question was an intriguing one and the problem was in need of a solution.
He wanted to show his gratitude to this mesmerizing wolf hunter for helping Gwen, and yet with Gwen watching, Jonas kept his hands to himself. His sister missed nothing, it seemed to him. Possibly his feelings for Tess were what drove Gwen to form a similar kind of reaction. Possibly his sister could read him after all and had fooled him completely on that score.
“Will you take her?” Tess asked with her eyes downcast.
Jonas perceived how, inside her chest, Tess’s heart was now revving to chase the same dreams he was running after. The small hands stroking Gwen’s coat had been on him once and had burned him the way the fire in her eyes did.
He could have counted each of the beats of Tess’s pulse by the rise of the smooth skin beneath her ears. By the dappled light of one table lamp, Tess, with her pale skin, her lacing of lavender scars and her big gleaming eyes, looked more like a Were than most of the wolves he had met.
Maybe hunting Weres had over the millennia truly changed hunter chemistry in more ways than anyone could have imagined. All Jonas knew for sure was that in that moment, which was somehow removed from time, she was the thing he desired most in the world and also the one thing he couldn’t have.
And that if he couldn’t have her...
If he could never breach or break down the barriers keeping them apart...
His life would never be the same again, and he’d be left with nothing but years of unrequited longing and loss.
As if she had followed that thought, Tess’s eyes finally met his. The expression on her beautiful face was blank. Her eyes flashed in the lamplight as if inlaid with gold fire.
“I want you, Tess.”
He had confessed this to her before while knowing those kinds of needs were a lost cause.
“Can’t happen,” Tess said aloud. “We both know that, and why.”
Before he could respond to her remark, she fired off a question. “What was that dark entity, and what did it want here?”
On the tail end of that query, she asked another. “Did it do this to Gwen?”
While making an attempt to maintain eye contact with Tess, Jonas felt his sister’s attention snap to him. He had to be extra careful now so as not to frighten Gwen.
She knew nothing about Death being on her trail. As his younger sibling, Gwen had to follow his lead and go wherever he went without question. He had led her to believe, without explicitly saying so, that coming here was so that she could rest and recover from her injuries. Only that, and nothing more. He was her legal guardian, as far as Gwen and the rest of the world were concerned, and as such, would have her best interest in mind.
“I don’t know if it could have done this,” he replied truthfully. “Or how it could have caused these injuries.”
Tess wasn’t appeased. “But you do know what that thing was.”
Glancing at Gwen, Jonas said, “I can make a good guess.”
“And?”
“I’d rather not say until I know for sure.”
“That’s no answer at all, wolf, and gets us nowhere,” Tess said.
Jonas was glad she hadn’t said his name. If she had, he might have closed the short distance whether or not his sister had been watching. Tess’s voice had a certain power over him that was disconcerting. When he looked into her eyes, it was like falling into a bottomless well. Every cell in his body was reaching out to Tess. Instead of acting on that, he alluded to Gwen with another long stroke over her coat and said, “She must really like you, Tess. It took a lot of courage for a wolf to show up on this particular doorstep.”
“Maybe this was the closest place,” Tess suggested. Neither of them really bought that explanation, however. They had lost sight of Gwen quite a distance from here.
Jonas shook his head. “I think there’s more to her coming to you than a matter of distance. What that is escapes me. Perhaps you can explain?”
“A real wolf wouldn’t know about me and what I do. Nor would this wolf or any other animal need to be afraid.”
“Just Weres.”
After a beat, she said, “Yes. Just Weres.”
Gwen’s attention on him felt like hot sparks. His sister was following this conversation in spite of the pain she had to be experiencing. Small quakes rippled her coat.
“Don’t,” he sent to his sister, locking Tess out of the personal message and hoping Gwen actually heard it. “Do not show this woman how the world could be shaped in the future by changing back.”
When he turned to Tess, it was to find that she had more to say.
“Did that dark entity come for you? At least tell me that.”
“I don’t believe it came for me,” Jonas replied.
“If it appeared randomly and was every bit the evil bastard I thought it was, it could have harmed me the first time it came around. But this entity didn’t seem to have me on its radar.” She looked at Gwen. “Your wolf here seemed to believe that entity was a threat.”
“Yes,” was all that Jonas could say without telling Tess everything. Answering her questions would mean letting Gwen know everything, too, when he had avoided that conversation for weeks.
As if sensing his reticence, Tess leaned closer to him. She laid a hand on his arm, causing the muscles under his shirt to dance.
“We’ll get nowhere without the truth,” she said. “And if that thing comes back, who will need the most help, you or me?”
Jonas closed his eyes to absorb the current flowing through him that made him consider taking Tess right here on this floor to end the strained tension standoff. Hell, she might even have let him. Only Gwen, whose injured body lay between him and the realization of his true desires, kept him from taking that kind of liberty.
Tess had gone too damn far down a bumpy road. Without claws, she had snared him in a dangerous, deceitful web of revolv
ing species. This wasn’t her fault or his. They were what they were. However, it all made a mad kind of sense to Jonas and others like him. They got it. Werewolves were not welcome among the human population. So most of the time, Weres successfully blended in with the human population. And yet there were hunters who would put an end to that kind of existence, and one of them sat across from him with the future hope of the Lycan species’ head in her lap.
“I’ll take her home,” Jonas said.
Tess’s eyes again found his. “Which home?”
“This one won’t do us much good for much longer,” he replied.
She wouldn’t let up. “Because the thing you said you came here to avoid found you tonight? Because it’s here now?”
Jonas smiled wearily, feeling so damn tired of the secrets entrusted to him. “I can carry her home, but maybe you’d be kind enough to give us a lift in your car so that Gwen won’t be hurt anymore than she has been?”
“She can stay here,” Tess said.
Jonas shook his head. “That wouldn’t be wise.”
“Are you expecting that dark misty bastard to make a comeback?”
“Tending to an injured wolf will keep you from resting, and Gwen is my responsibility.”
The woman across from him had no right to argue with that. She clearly swallowed back a retort before finally saying, “I’ll get the Jeep.”
“Thank you,” Jonas said. “Thanks for everything you’ve done for Gwen tonight.”
After carefully moving Gwen’s head, Tess got to her feet and reached for the latch on the front door. Halfway outside, she turned back.
“If that thing does return, will you be safe?”
Jonas shrugged.
“When will you leave South Dakota?” she asked.
“Tomorrow.”
He saw Tess sway on her feet. But she nodded to him, took a set of keys from the table near the door and headed into the dark.
Gwen whined. Jonas brought his face close to hers. “I know you like her, but she’s not for us. She isn’t one of us.”
Wolf Slayer Page 15
