Wolf Slayer

by Linda Thomas-Sundstrom

  “Tess,” he sent to the newest, if reluctant, she-wolf on the block. “Heads up. We’re coming. Don’t shoot.”

  Chapter 26

  The sun would chase the moon away soon, and for once, Tess was happy about that. Sleep was a nonissue. Tea didn’t help either her nerves or her anxious state. How did a person comb back through a life, looking for clues that might suggest their life had been built upon a shaky foundation when she didn’t even truly believe the reasoning behind such a search?

  This was the Lycan’s fault. Jonas had infected her with more chilling ideas than she could handle all at once. He had also taken advantage of her detestable state, although she had to share the blame for their session on the hood of her car.

  She had mated with a Lycan. His word, mated.

  They were forever linked, he had told her.

  “Bullshit.” Allowing that to happen had been a slipup, nothing more.

  The tea in her mug had grown cold and she was too tired to reheat it. Tess couldn’t be concerned about the last time she’d had a meal since there were more important issues on the table. The silver infusion hadn’t worn off yet and it was easy for her to see the shapes of furniture and other objects in the dark room. She wished the silver had properties that would make thinking easier, too. That would have been a neat trick.

  Her head still hurt. The ache between her thighs hadn’t quite already dissipated the way other aches and pains usually did. Seems that what she felt on the inside wasn’t open to negotiation. Even when measured by the leftover aches of their lovemaking, the damn Lycan scored high.

  Tess set her mug down when Jonas’s message arrived to break up her thoughts about inventing a way to turn off those messages.

  “We’re coming,” he sent.

  We.

  He was coming here? So soon? And he might bring along the girl with the unusual talent for shape-shifting into an animal. Shifts like that fell into the category of myth for wolf hunters. Legend. Hearsay.

  This information was yet another loose end adding to the discomfort building up behind Tess’s eyes. Still, it was obvious to her that Jonas was protecting that girl, and that the thing inside the black mist was the dreaded enemy. Not the hunter. Not this time.

  “Don’t,” Tess said aloud. “Don’t come.”

  She hadn’t sent that message over the ether so that Jonas would get it faster. Why? Because her sense of justice had been tampered with and she needed to figure out how that had happened. She had to understand Jonas and get to the bottom of his reasons for suggesting she might be like him when that was so obviously untrue.

  Why was she even thinking about this? She had growled. So what? Plenty of people probably had no idea what kind of sounds resulted from an orgasm like the one she’d had tonight. The orgasm Jonas had given her. The act itself, as well as the memories and lingering physical aches associated with it, was a sacrilege.

  But Tess felt him getting closer. His oncoming presence was like a desert wind heading her way. There was no way for her to escape.

  If that Lycan bastard assumed she would cower and bend to his will, he had another think coming.

  Tess found herself at the door, mindless about how she got there. She was opening the door when she didn’t want to. She had a knife in her hand, but no weapon she could have chosen to defend herself against Jonas would have had any leverage when facing him again.

  She stepped out of the cabin, hoping to cut through the bullshit if that knife found no other use.

  He was there—Jonas, in all his wildly beautiful sculpted glory. He had donned a blue shirt in honor of this visit and the soft fabric hugged his perfectly muscled torso. Absurdly, the ache between her thighs seemed to recognize the male who had caused them. Her insides were quaking again. Lust for this Lycan was making a swift comeback.

  Tess warned herself to keep her wits intact and her eyes off the well-honed body she had been intimate with. Jonas’s looks were nothing but a distraction now.

  “I thought you were leaving,” she said.

  “I can’t seem to make up my mind about that, and I think you know why,” he returned, his voice low and like the brush of a warm hand across her private parts.

  Refusing to let Jonas see the effect he had on her and despite the fact that her heart was in her throat, making speech difficult, she said, “Is this where we spill our guts about our various jobs and attempt to comprehend our feelings?”

  Beat after beat of her racing pulse slammed against her neck. Jonas, tall, broad-shouldered, and looking in that moment like some kind of werewolf god, stood near the gate with one of his arms draped across Gwen’s shoulders. His shaggy hair fell becomingly across his brow. The jeans he wore were torn in several places, exposing stripes of his smooth, bronze skin.

  Beside him, Gwen looked like the ghost of a teen from some unknown distant gene pool.

  “Coming here like this is unprecedented and dangerous,” Jonas said.

  “Yet you’re here. So I have to wonder how dangerous this meeting could be, and for whom.”

  Okay. She had lied about not knowing how dangerous it was and what might be out there beyond the trees. Tess swung her gaze to Gwen and kept it there, sensing the girl Were’s desire to advance. She-wolf was the term used to describe a female werewolf, but at the moment, this one looked like a strong wind could have knocked her over.

  The danger they were in also had to do with appearances. To say that looks could be deceiving was a massive understatement on both accounts when staring at Jonas and his ward.

  Another kind of danger lay in their submerged strength and in the way their eyes were fastened on her. Hunger was there, in those blue eyes. Need was there. As if that same kind of need mirrored her own tumultuous emotions, Tess fought the impulse to invite them inside.

  She said, “The dark bastard is still out there.”

  Jonas nodded. “Yes. It could be anywhere.”

  “Will it follow you wherever you go?”

  He nodded again. “Relentlessly. Until tonight, Gwen didn’t know that. I have attempted to keep things from her so that she could heal. Since she has now seen what’s out there, there’s no sense in holding things back.”

  Tess spoke to Gwen. “You’re ill?”

  The girl said nothing, just stared.

  Tess had heard the white wolf’s haunting howl, but the girl hadn’t uttered a sound. That silence wasn’t broken now. In the girl’s big eyes, seen from a distance, Tess saw more emotion than she was prepared to handle. This delicate she-wolf was after something and that had to be part of the reason she and Jonas were here.

  “What do you want?” Tess asked, getting right to the point.

  “We’re not going away. This was a joint decision between Gwen and me. We’d rather stay and fight than continue to hide,” Jonas said.

  Those words added to the buildup of Tess’s internal quakes. He wasn’t going anywhere...

  “I think you will give us the leeway we need to stay and face that dark thing again. Am I right, Tess?” he asked.

  “How stupid is this entity if it doesn’t always know how to find what it’s after?” she asked.

  “Oh it’s not stupid or mindless. It isn’t as savvy as its master, perhaps, in dealing with Weres, and we might have been able to trick the abomination so far, but it will find the shape it’s been missing any time now and it will come calling.”

  “Does this entity have a name?”

  “It does.”

  “And that name is...?”

  Jonas first looked to his sister, then back to Tess. “Reaper.”

  Hearing his answer made Tess’s stomach churn. Grim Reapers were supposed to be strange creatures that came to collect the souls of the departed. Neither ghosts or gods, they were synonymous with Death.

  Were they real? Was one of them here?

 
So many mysteries surrounded Jonas, it boggled the mind. Tess processed this news, looking for a loophole but sensing that Jonas was telling the truth. That truth pointed to this Reaper having come here for the girl standing by Jonas’s side. Gwen. A dark shadow had fallen over this young Were and Jonas had been hoping to postpone a final showdown by coming to South Dakota.

  Bad luck there.

  Tess looked up from the ground, where her focus had slipped. She spoke to Jonas while looking with fresh eyes at Gwen. “Is she family?”

  “My sister,” he replied warily.

  More chills piled up. Tess saw no resemblance between the two Weres across from her. Gwen was so much smaller and years younger. If Gwen was Jonas’s sister, this girl with the ability to become a real wolf also was a full-blooded Lycan.

  Jonas’s transformation had been strange, too, Tess now recalled. He didn’t turn furry when the full moon bloomed. Jonas merely became more of everything that faced her now.

  She had to speak. Her upbringing demanded it.

  “I will let you get on with whatever it is you need to do,” she said.

  Jonas nodded, but none of the tension she had sensed left him. When Gwen stepped forward, he stopped her with a light tug of his arm. The fact that the white wolf had come to her after being injured, coupled with the way this girl who wasn’t really a girl at all had looked at Jonas’s cabin and was looking at her now, caused more chills to drip down Tess’s back.

  What was this she-wolf trying to say, and why couldn’t she say it?

  Why wouldn’t Gwen shun a wolf hunter the way most werewolves did?

  Had Tess Owens lost her edge?

  “I’ve never met anyone like either of you,” Tess said, shaking off her own internal reactions to this pair. “You have set the art of wolf hunting back a hundred or more years.”

  Jonas nodded. “We will leave you now and will remain next door until Death comes.”

  “Comes for her. For Gwen,” Tess said.

  “Yes.”

  “I have to know why. I won’t rest until I do.”

  “Some things aren’t meant for the ears of old enemies,” Jonas returned.

  “I thought maybe we were beyond the whole old-enemies scenario,” Tess said. “What does Gwen want here?”

  Gwen’s movement stole Tess’s attention again. Jonas’s hold was successful in keeping his sister from getting closer to the front steps.

  Jonas said, “I would have thought that was obvious by now. She wants you.”

  Tess swallowed hard. Flashes of recent memory again brought images of the white wolf attacking the Were that had been intending to come after Tess near the rocks, as well as images of the white wolf on Tess’s hallway floor, and the blue eyes so intent upon her now.

  This she-wolf didn’t plan to harm her. Gwen desired to be close to her for other reasons that Tess couldn’t fathom.

  Unless...

  “I’m not like you,” Tess said. “Don’t you get that?”

  Jonas smiled sadly as Gwen tried to take another step. He said, “You keep believing that, Tess. Believe it for as long as you can and for however long you need to.”

  Damn right she would.

  However, Tess wondered what would happen if Jonas let Gwen go. Would Gwen curl up on Tess’s floor, with no fire to warm her delicate bones? Could Jonas’s condemnation of Tess’s human status have incited Gwen’s behavior?

  “Time is ticking away,” Tess said. “Will that Reaper return in the minutes left between darkness and dawn?”

  “I don’t think so,” Jonas replied. “It needs darkness to travel in and blend with.”

  “You’ve met one of them before?”

  “No. Only this one.”

  “Before this?” Tess pressed.

  “Once before.”

  “When, Jonas?”

  He said solemnly, “On the night my sister nearly died.”

  The news startled Tess into a kind of information-saturated silence. Gwen had been hurt at one time or another, and that’s why she looked so ill in human form. As a wolf, though, Gwen had showed no hint of weakness.

  Ideas began to coagulate into a more cohesive whole, and went like this: in a wolf’s shape, Gwen was better able to tolerate the weaknesses that might otherwise plague her. The wolf was stronger than its other half, and Tess had witnessed this.

  Hell, as far as anomalies went, she was staring at one of them now.

  She had just one more question to ask as she looked out and saw it growing lighter. “What about the silver?”

  Unexpectedly, Jonas replied, “Silver doesn’t give you added strength and power, Tess, contrary to what you might think and what you’ve been told. It actually has the exact opposite effect.”

  “Sorry I asked if all I’m going to get from you is a bunch of cryptic gibberish,” Tess snapped.

  “What it does,” Jonas said slowly and with the kind of precision it took to get his point across. “What it does is keep your wolf—the wolf curled up inside you—in check. Tamped down. Hidden not only from others, but from you.”

  Before Tess could shout the expletives that remark deserved, Jonas and his sister had disappeared...much like the wraith that was chasing them.

  Chapter 27

  So now she knew, Jonas told himself. Tess had information that no one else had been privy to, minus a few key specifics. What she did with that information would determine her character and whether she would test his hypothesis about her. He had just blown the wolf hunter issue to smithereens. She just had to trust in what he had said.

  They were walking back to the cabin. He and Gwen. Side by side. Once in a while, Gwen glanced back in the direction of Tess’s home. Jonas kept a tight leash on himself to keep from doing the same thing. “I’ve won this game before and can do it again,” he said to Gwen. “There has to be a more permanent way to keep that misty bastard off our asses, and if given the time, I’ll find it.”

  His insides fluttered when Gwen tucked her hand inside his the way she used to do. She didn’t give off any of the vibes of fear and frustration he was experiencing. This last panic attack was behind her, and it appeared to him that tonight’s episode had little to do with a Reaper.

  “It has been weeks, hun,” he said to her. “Isn’t it time to tell me what’s on your mind and what you’re feeling? We used to talk. I miss that.”

  He squeezed her hand, found it so very frail and unlike her wolf’s paws.

  “Tess can’t be involved any more than she already is,” he continued. “She has her own issues to deal with. We have to leave her alone and hope she honors my request for distance.”

  After sliding a sideways glance at him, Gwen again stared straight ahead.

  “You do understand, right?” he asked.

  When Gwen nodded her head, providing a direct acknowledgment of his question, Jonas’s world suddenly changed for the better in spite of what else the future might bring. Gwen was healing. She was getting better and she was listening. If there was nothing more, he’d have been happy with that.

  Or he would have been happy with that if his senses hadn’t sent up a silent warning about having company.

  “Prove it.”

  That statement hadn’t come from Gwen and wasn’t in his mind. Every cell in his body reacted riotously, the way they did each time he faced this same problem. Tess had followed them. Jonas turned around to find her standing a few paces away.

  Gwen’s fingers slid from his.

  “Prove it, if there’s any way to actually do that. Prove to me that I’m more like you than the people in town,” Tess said.

  “I believe we’ve already done that tonight.”

  “What we did proves nothing other than we have the hots for each other.”

  “That isn’t good enough to shake your foundation of beliefs?”r />
  “Not nearly enough,” she said.

  “Then stop.”

  “Stop what?” she asked.

  “Stop using the silver.”

  “I only use it when...”

  Jonas finished that sentence for her. “When there are werewolves around.”

  Through tight lips, Tess said, “Yes.”

  He had to be careful now and choose his words wisely. “You know that silver messes with our systems, shutting down certain functions. If you’ve had twenty doses over your lifetime, in measured amounts, your tolerance to the stuff would be similar to mine.”

  “It makes me feel...” She didn’t complete that thought.

  “No,” he said. “That’s just it. Those infusions keep you from feeling what you’re supposed to be feeling. They don’t tie you to Weres, they merely tone down your natural reactions to your own kind.”

  “BS. Prove it,” she repeated, showing signs of restless agitation.

  Jonas shook his head. “You need time to come to terms with this. I have provided you with a way to test the truth.”

  “My mother and father were human. Therefore, I’m human,” she said.

  “I can’t explain that, unless you were scratched badly enough to cause the change.”

  “My parents would have disowned me.”

  “Would they? Would they have turned you out for the price you might have paid for doing your job?” Jonas asked.

  He raised his hand and traced a pattern in the air, as if he were touching the side of her face. “So many old wounds, Tess.”

  She put a hand to her scars.

  “You might have lost those if you hadn’t taken your silver pills. We heal quickly, you know, with little or no intervention.”

  He observed how Tess’s eyes landed warily on Gwen. “Then why hasn’t your sister healed?” she demanded without the kind of inflection that might have made her question sound offensive or mean.