Wolf Hunter

by Linda Thomas-Sundstrom

  “Tell me about that, Sam. It’s why I have come.” She tried to stay calm with her heart hurting so greatly.

  “Then you’ve come here for nothing, and walked right into my hands,” Sam said.

  “So, you’ll kill me, and that’s that? No lingering emotional ties I might not have been aware of, and no explanation to send me off with?”

  “You’ve got to love it when things work out like that,” Sam replied threateningly. He stepped forward a few paces to show her the raised gun. “I would have thought that you, perhaps better than anyone else in this business, know what a Lycan is worth.”

  “More than a wife, I’m guessing. But I doubt you’ll get off so easily in court after murdering your daughter, too.”

  “You let me worry about that.”

  “All right,” Abby said, voice cracking with shock as Sam’s insinuations about her mother kicked up horrible, lurid thoughts about what Sam might have done with her mother’s Lycan pelt, and how pelts were removed from the bodies they covered.

  She opened her mouth to shout, without having time to get anything out. The hallway filled with a clicking noise, like a slide of security bolts, and a trapdoor opened beneath her.

  With a protest on her lips, Abby started to fall.

  Chapter 28

  Fifteen minutes to reach the bar. Too long. An ungodly amount of time wasted when Abby’s life was at stake.

  Cameron angled the Mercedes to the curb without bothering to parallel park, and opened the door forcefully with a crack of bolts. The street was relatively quiet at this time of day, which did nothing for his growing angst. Abby had to have gone in the building beside him.

  He sniffed the air and rolled his shoulders. “She’s here, all right.”

  There truly was something to this imprinting phenomenon. He felt Abby nearby. He inhaled her scent. Abby Stark had become a part of him, and he doubted if anyone knew the exact science behind such a connection.

  Abby’s thoughts infiltrated his at times as if they were his thoughts, making it hard to tell which was which, though she was curiously silent now. The sinking sensation in his gut told him she was in trouble.

  He tried the front door of the bar and found it locked. Anxiously, he looked the place over as he strode to the side, where a wooden staircase spanned the first floor, leading to a second. He took the steps three at a time.

  The door at the top allowed him access to a narrow hallway brimming with Abby’s sweet fragrance. Fear laced that sweetness.

  He pounded on the first door he came to, ready to tear Sam apart with his bare hands. But no one appeared.

  He moved to the second door and repeated the series of knuckle-to-wood blows. No one opened that door, either.

  Running both hands through his hair, Cameron paced the hallway. No mistake. She’d been there minutes before. Scent didn’t lie. He could almost reach out and touch her.

  “Abby? Where are you?”

  His voice sounded dull in the space, and angry.

  “Abby?”

  Nothing. But all that nothingness was a damn lie.

  “Sam, you bastard. Miami PD. Show yourself.”

  The air moved slightly. Cameron whirled with both hands raised, but it was the floor that had moved—old wood settling beneath his weight.

  He didn’t have a warrant or a lawfully sufficient reason to kick down those two doors. Breaking and entering... Destruction of private property... Missing Lycan female...

  He wasn’t in uniform and didn’t have his badge. “Shit.”

  After one more deep breath that produced spasms of anger in his chest, Cameron put a boot to door one and watched it splinter. The noise was deafening in the tight corridor.

  Stale air met him as he stepped across the threshold. Two windows were closed in the small studio room. His eyes methodically searched the place for signs of struggle. This was Abby’s apartment, he knew intuitively. The plain, unadorned room was well cared for. Any other time, he would have relished coming here to look around. This time, it didn’t take long to understand that Abby hadn’t been here lately.

  “Next.”

  Back in the hallway, he raced to door number two and repeated the force of his foot. The door went down in one piece with a jarring thud to show him a larger room. One of a couple. Lots of furniture crammed the space. A separate kitchen lay off to the right. Nothing moved. No Sam, no sleeping hunters, no Abby. Cameron’s wolf gave a whine of disappointment as he turned back to the hall with his hands fisted.

  He was letting Abby down. What had Sam done to her, if, in fact, Abby had found him? Where had everybody else gone? Hunters didn’t just disappear with sunrise. They’d be sleeping the late night off. Maybe they had a hotel nearby.

  It would have been useless to call this in to the department. Nothing he’d say to other cops could remotely begin to explain the turn of events that hounded him. Although he was strong, able-minded and good at his job, he hadn’t helped Abby here, and that realization hurt worse than the damn silver bullet had.

  “Sam, you crazy son of a bitch. Where is she?”

  Again, he ran both hands through his hair and stared at the deserted corridor. He stood motionless a few minutes more, searching with his senses, soaking in the essence of the place. Then, empty-handed and no better off than when he’d arrived, Cameron headed for the stairs.

  * * *

  Abby opened her eyes to darkness made dim by the light of a single bulb in an overhead ceiling fixture. She was on her back, on a big mattress pad that lay on bare concrete. She had fallen through the floor by her apartment, but to where? Her mind appeared to be muddled. Sam’s bar took up the floor below her apartment, and the bar she knew every inch of looked nothing like this. Had she fallen into a basement or alternate storage space that she hadn’t known existed?

  She had hit her head hard enough to see stars. One arm rested painfully behind her, wrenched at the shoulder. Pretty sure she hadn’t broken her back, Abby waited a few beats before attempting to sit up. When she managed, the injured shoulder hurt so severely she nearly blacked out.

  Head in her hands, Abby tried to center her mental faculties, when nothing about the fall made sense. The pain shooting through her was muddying her reasoning skills.

  She felt for the spot on her neck where she’d been hit by a dart the night before. Small prickles came from there that were nothing like the rest of her body’s discomfort. She looked at the forearm she had sliced open with her knife, and felt a remnant of the deep muscle ache. But the wound had begun to miraculously heal, just as Cameron’s bullet wound to the chest had, proving that as extraordinary as it seemed, it was hard to keep a werewolf down.

  “Sam?” Her voice had a new edge. “What have you done?”

  No reply came. Neither did an aspirin.

  Hugging her arm to stabilize her shoulder, Abby looked around. The place did resemble a basement, with a workbench on one side attached to a large washbasin and a small metal counter. There were no windows. Stains marred the wide expanse of gray concrete floor. A wooden staircase stood opposite her that she couldn’t reach because there were several metal bars in the way.

  Hell, she was in a cage, and trapped. As that sank in, recent events began to make a horrible kind of sense.

  “I’m a prisoner,” she said out loud. “That’s unusual, isn’t it, Sam? Instead of killing me outright, you’ll keep me as a pet for a while?”

  The way her words fell flat in the enclosed room caused her heart rate to spike. What did Sam use this room for, if not to torture werewolves?

  What were all those stains on the floor?

  “Is this how it ends? Did you predict this? Plan for it? I know about her, Sam. I know what my mother was, and metal cage or not, I want to know what happened to her. I won’t rest until I do.”

  Nothing. No reply came, and there was no fresh breeze to make talking easier. Abby took a better look around. She cringed and scuttled backward when she saw the chains attached to the wall besid
e her. Darkened by some sort of coating—God, was it dried blood?—the chains hung from huge rings screwed into the wall at a standing person’s shoulder height. They were made of silver.

  The chains didn’t swing. She did, as a whirl of vertigo spun her sideways.

  Odors rushed at her from the floor as her face neared it. Abby tried desperately to get away from those smells, and to swallow the shout arising from the pain of her injured shoulder as she rolled onto her side. Words began to form in the fog to categorize the onslaught of scents. Musk. Urine. Blood. Lots of blood. Enough blood to create a river. Years of odors were here, piled layer upon layer. No amount of cleanup had removed them.

  She covered her nose and fought off a gag reflex. Her throat filled with bile. Fisting her hands in her hair, she tore at the roots.

  Then she brought her head up with a cry of alarm. Centered in those awful odors, she found a surprise—a remembered fragrance that she knew well. The pleasant, rosy scent that had comforted her in those years of loneliness. A ghostly drift of flowers.

  Biting back a scream, Abby struggled to her feet, unable to make herself touch the wall with the chains, and instead using the cage’s bars for support.

  “Sam, what did you do?” she shouted. “You kept my mother here, you sick bastard, and dared to claim self-defense when she died?”

  Anger shot through her, intense enough to pitch her against the bars. There she stayed, head lifted, queasiness roiling in her stomach. “Mother? I feel you here. What has he done?”

  She moved her neck to shift the wave of vertigo and heard bones crack. The sound made her want to vomit. She couldn’t hold back. Up it came...only it wasn’t what she had expected. Not sickness, unless the term Lycan counted.

  The oncoming blackness tossed her helplessly to the mattress as a torrent of pain reshuffled tolerance levels from acute to something far worse and her heart began to pump lava through her veins. The pressure inside her skull intensified until vision blurred. Her shoulders twitched repeatedly, as if testing the water for heaven knew what—some future realignment, maybe—and then muscle began to pull away from bone.

  Abby screamed.

  Sanity faded into the distance as the scream went on and on, leaving emptiness in its wake—a great, yawning emptiness that only one thing had the substance to fill.

  The wolf’s outline tickled hers before expanding. Light from the overhead bulb tortured Abby’s closed eyes. Her arms burned as tendons stretched like taffy. But the really bad thing came from inside her.

  Hatred was an emotion so pure, so hot, it vied with the concept of revenge. Hatred for Sam’s sins and his transgressions against innocent victims, among the rest. Hatred for Sam hurting her mother, and for whatever time her mother had spent in this hellhole. Hatred for Sam not telling her about this, and for shunning her all those years when she felt lost.

  Sam had admitted to feeding this kind of hatred to her, along with the silver, hoping to ward off her changes until she had fully matured. Was this what she had to look forward to now? Silver chains in a basement cell?

  Her disgust had an iron-like taste that coated her tongue. She didn’t want to be a wolf, not like this. Bad thoughts had to translate to bad wolves. But emotion rushed upward from her gut like a living, breathing entity within the entity taking her over, straining to get out, pushing the limits of her stamina. She had nowhere to hide. There was to be no covering up her secrets in this awful place.

  Sweat stung her eyes. Her borrowed clothes tortured her oversensitive skin, and she tore at them with her claws. The fact that she had claws barely registered as Abby pulled up her knees and curled into a ball on the floor, on fire, seeking the coolness of the concrete. But on the ground, with her face turned sideways, the foul odors quickly overwhelmed her senses.

  The concrete carried a vibration. Someone was coming. Someone not wholly unexpected.

  Adrenaline surged. Her injured shoulder exploded with pain as it jumped back in the socket, aided by the expanding musculature around it. Both arms shot out straight from her sides, the skin stretching, thickening. Her stomach twisted. She convulsed. All this happened fast, and automatically.

  Blood, moving within her, took on a rhythm, flowing like a mysterious, underlying melody. It sang through her arteries and weaved through her heart’s chambers, dragging long lines of pain behind that came and went in undulating waves.

  Her lungs expanded as if she’d swallowed several helium balloons filled to capacity. Ribs cracked to accommodate the lungs. Vertebrae detonated at the base of her spine, setting off more explosions that worked their way up.

  Abby’s vision turned red. She panted with her mouth open and raked her face with her claws as her body turned itself inside out and a dark cloud that had to be Death hovered, waiting to see if she’d come through.

  The room turned. Her body lengthened. The bones in her face rearranged as if remolded by the fires inside. New teeth, as sharp as the claws, tore into her lower lip, adding more blood to the foul scene.

  And then the pain stopped suddenly. The whirling darkness ceased as if someone had merely flipped a switch to the Off position. Discomfort receded like thunder rolling into the distance. The lightbulb over her head sparked, flared, dimmed, then winked on and off in the manner of a strobe light with its batteries used up.

  No sound reached her, other than the random pulses of the electricity in that bulb.

  Abby opened her eyes, afraid to move. She lay shaking on the floor, chilled, but saturated in sweat. Thoughts returned with an alarming clarity, though she had no voice to prove their validity. Moonlight had not reached her in this dank place, whether or not the moon was full, and yet...

  I am a werewolf.

  At last.

  Like her.

  The world didn’t give her time to assimilate that fact. A door at the top of the stairs opened on oiled hinges. Abby didn’t bother to get up, not certain she could, and if her legs would hold her. Footsteps on the stairs were loud and jarring to her enhanced hearing system. Whoever approached moved with a limp and smelled of sweat and whiskey.

  “Sonja,” Sam said, his voice low, his tone gruff with hidden innuendo and a hint of madness. “It’s time to play.”

  Abby didn’t know much, and though her body felt as if she’d just circled a drain, the one thing she did know was her name. And it wasn’t Sonja.

  Chapter 29

  Cameron rapped on the door to the bar before pounding on it with both fists. “Not mistaken.” Abby’s scent clung to the place, and he was determined to find her.

  The door had huge metal hinges too sturdy to break through. Although kicking it in would have been nice, Cameron stepped back and shouted, “Abby, do you hear me?”

  Her scent had weakened. He cursed and headed back to the side staircase. Studying the building as he strode toward the steps, he noticed a peculiar anomaly in the building’s structure—a wide gap in spacing between the windows on the first and second floors. He had climbed the equivalent of three flights of stairs minutes ago, and saw this as a viable clue.

  He remembered the creaky floor in the hallway.

  “Hell,” he shouted, heading for the stairs. “Damn it all to hell.”

  Confirming his speculation, Abby’s scent grew stronger when he reached the door leading to the hallway of apartments. But her scent had changed. Abby was alive, and different. Abby had taken on her wolf.

  It was daylight. The sun was up. Had Sam tortured her into shifting? Lycans, Dylan had explained, possessed the ability to change shape at will, no moon necessary. How about according to someone else’s will? What about the Blackout phase she’d have to go through, and might not survive?

  “Abby!”

  He felt along the walls, searching for a lever or other kind of switch. Finding none, he scoured the floor by digging his fingernails into grooves between the boards. One of the boards budged. He shouted, “Yes!” but couldn’t pry up the piece of wood.

  Anxiety was a bitch. Anger ma
de him crazed. Jumping to his feet, Cameron stomped on the floor, letting whoever might be down there know he had discovered their hidey-hole.

  When the cell phone tucked in his pants pocket rang, the hallway filled with the sound of alarm bells going off. He had no intention of answering, and turned for the door, wondering hopefully if Dylan Landau, who was so much more than he seemed at first glance, kept an ax in the trunk of that pretty silver sedan.

  * * *

  Abby sensed Cameron’s nearness with a terrifying certainty. Her cells strained toward him. Her throat hurt with the need to shout. He was here, close. As for finding her, and what waited in Sam’s lair...was that possible?

  Cameron, she sent to him along the connection uniting them. Stay away. It’s a trap.

  Sick to death of this shit, she changed her position. She had swallowed a bomb and it had exploded, but she could deal. She had to open her eyes.

  She saw Sam leaning against the wall with the basin, loading a dart into his weapon’s chamber. The weapon looked similar to the ones she went after rabid dogs with to knock them out. She’d seen it before, the night before, in a hunter’s hand.

  With that recall, she swiped at the spot on her neck where the dart had struck. Last night, she’d had Cameron to help. No one was here to help her now. If she had never found this place, or known about it, Cameron wouldn’t be able to. Cameron might be close, but she was on her own.

  “I’m thinking it’s too long until the next full moon,” Sam said. “But look at you, all decked out and furred-up as if it were here right now.”

  Abby watched him carefully.

  “Then again, we both know that Lycans don’t need the moon to instigate changes. I first tested that theory here, in this spot, if you recall.”

  He set the weapon on the counter. He was, Abby realized without needing all of her senses to determine his status, totally mad.

  “You wouldn’t help me before, back then,” he said. “Not with your kind. Nevertheless, you helped us to bag quite a few pelts. And what did I do in return, Sonja? I promised to take care of your spawn, and treat her like one of my own.”