No one had seen anything like this before, and anxiety made them tense. Too many secrets were at stake if a Were had a hand in this gruesome deed. Packs thrived on the stories about the past, so the Weres here were thinking of the time when their Elders fought off whole armies of nasty things that went bump in the night.
It was important that they found the spot where this guy had been murdered, and Rafe knew how. He knew who could easily lead them there, though he was loath to suggest such a thing. Two of these cops were pack and two weren’t. No one outside the extended Landau family had been privy to Cara’s visit for reasons that now had been made abundantly clear to Rafe.
Someone was after Cara. Someone, possibly with a gun, planned to hurt her, and the best way to do that was to lure her into the open without backup.
Who would die next, as the damn Banshee had predicted? And when? Death’s next victim could be anyone here, but he couldn’t announce that fact to those standing around him.
Without the others knowing of Cara’s visit and her many talents, predicting another dead body might turn up would incriminate whoever mentioned it when that turned out to be the truth.
Rafe was suddenly very tired of secrets.
News trucks were already circling on the street in the distance. TV personalities would be salivating for gory details worthy of morning headlines. Every cop on the force was familiar with the sound of those engines and what they meant. Tonight, due to the body’s close proximity to Judge Landau’s estate, the news vultures would be held back, at least for a while.
When his father appeared, each of the officers present nodded to the judge. He spoke to them calmly. “Those of us behind this wall will go on record as volunteers to help with this investigation in any way we can. The sooner justice is served, the better we can all rest.”
There would be no rest, of course, not until this crime was solved, one way or another. With sunrise several hours off, members of the Landau pack would race through this park in search of details before anyone else got around to it. If a wolf was involved in this heinous act of violence, Weres would deal with it. Self-policing was the only way to handle problems pertaining to the existence of werewolves.
And if vampires had messed with the scene, as Cara had confirmed, Were secrets in the area were going to be sorely threatened. Smack in the middle of this dilemma was an unpredictable hybrid she-wolf who had not learned how to play well with others. Still, her help might be the key to solving the case.
Rafe’s father wore a worried expression that ran counter to his usual calm outward demeanor. Things had gotten messy since Cara’s arrival, and his father was showing the strain. Tonight had offered a concentrated sample of what they could probably expect as long as she remained in Miami.
Rafe had to be especially careful about messaging his father on Were channels, but he had more to say. “If you were Cara, and not yet grounded in a new city or a new pack, would you choose to go or stay?”
Cara might have heard that, of course. Though he had been cautious, her ability to tap into thought systems came to her as easily as hurdling eight-foot stone walls. Cara was indeed special. So he had to wonder if the reason she had been kept in seclusion was due to the danger that followed in her wake—or because she was the danger.
She had proved to him in one night that she had more secrets than the rest of them put together...
But just when he thought things were hard enough to figure out, he picked a word from his father’s mind that set his hair on end.
That word was demon.
Chapter 18
She’d paced for so long, Cara was afraid she had worn down the carpet. But the lights beyond the wall had dimmed at last, and some of the people had finally dispersed.
It was time to find out if that demon she had encountered had friends, and if one of those hell spawns had murdered a human.
By the looks of things around here and the Landaus’ reaction to tonight’s events, this pack must have avoided real trouble for some time. She couldn’t imagine a long stretch without the kind of problems that followed her around.
Her parents must have realized that by sending her to the Landaus’ she might crave the kind of lives others led. So why send her here? Why put these Weres through a night like tonight when more of the same was a given?
Cara stood at the window her mother had long ago jumped from. She had no clue as to what might have precipitated that leap. Rosalind could have either been running away from something, or to something. That piece of the puzzle was unsolved.
“I’m ready to see this part of the picture,” Cara muttered with a hand on the sill. The sensation of sharing the room with ghosts of the past had grown stronger. The sharp sting in her mouth was also a part of that.
Needle-sharp incisors pricked her lower lip. Cara wiped her fingers across her mouth, and they came away with tiny droplets of blood. Dark blood. With no vampires present. This was the second time tonight she had altered her appearance without the proper motivation. She spun toward the bed with her senses sparking. On the bed was a filmy, reclining figure.
“Rosalind,” it whispered to her.
Dazed, Cara hit the wall next to the window with her shoulder as something blew past her with a speed that was little more than a time slip of barely disturbed air. A second ghostly apparition appeared beside her and gracefully leaped onto the sill, where it paused in a knee-bending crouch.
As Cara stared, more details about this apparition filled in. It was a young female dressed in a glossy black shirt that swirled to stillness as she settled on the sill. The ghostly spirit remained there for a moment more, outlined by the night beyond, long black hair billowing in a nonexistent breeze.
The female glanced at the bed, wiped a hand across her mouth and held up two bloodstained fingers as if to show them to whoever was in the room with her. She uttered a sob of fear and disgust. And then the apparition turned back to the window, pushed off both feet...and jumped.
Cara stood there, frozen beside the window, feeling like she was the one who had jumped. But she hadn’t moved, and there was no one on the bed. She had fangs, like the female apparition, and blood on her fingers...didn’t she? Or had the blood been someone else’s burden?
Her mother’s burden?
A knock at the door shook her, but she ignored it. She’d just received another vision of an event from the past, as if it had answered her request for enlightenment. The ghost at the window had been Rosalind. The figure on the bed must have been her father.
Cara leaned out the window with a sense that time had been suspended. The knocking sounds at the door grew louder and were a distraction she didn’t need. Whatever had happened in this room to her parents remained a mystery that she would have to decipher later when the distractions ceased.
The door opened without her invitation. A deep voice said, “Can we talk?”
Rafe’s powerful presence chased away all remnants of the room’s former occupants and replaced her chills with familiar warmth. But she couldn’t go to him or try to explain what had happened here with a mouthful of fangs.
Avoiding the directness of his gaze, Cara covered her mouth and reined in a shudder, not sure how she was going to get out of this.
* * *
Rafe didn’t cross the threshold into Cara’s room. Her appearance was a warning to stay where he was.
Her face had again lost color. Her dark glinting stare was trained on the window, as if something had happened there.
Clearly, she wasn’t all right.
Why?
He scanned the room to make sure she was alone, rechecking each corner twice. After that, all he could manage to say was her name.
“Cara?”
Her silence wasn’t necessarily anything to worry about. The way she covered her mouth might have been, though. She was hiding something from him.
&n
bsp; “Hey,” he finally said. “I came to tell you that I will take you home in the morning if you still want to go.”
She continued to stare at the window, and that made him curious. She hadn’t dropped her hand from her mouth. He had to get her to talk so that he could see what he was dealing with.
“Are you Cara?” he asked, hoping nothing of her dark side would start wailing. “Is Cara here?”
He was afraid to crowd her by advancing. Putting her in this room might not have been such a good idea after all. She’d probably find no real comfort sharing a space that had long ago been occupied by other spirits in various states of distress.
Why hadn’t anyone here considered that?
Why hadn’t he?
Cara was haunted and in need of help she wouldn’t ask for. At the moment, she was wan and lifeless. Maybe remaining in Miami was going to harm her in ways none of his family could detect.
Worried, Rafe said, “I’ll take you home right now. You can gather your things and I’ll get a car.”
She took one small step toward him as if drawn by the firmness of his tone. Rafe kept his eyes on her. When she again glanced toward the window, anxiousness over what she was thinking made him consider blocking her path to it.
“Tell me,” he said. “Tell me what happened here.”
Cara blinked slowly, as if shaking off the spell she had been under. She dropped the hand that had covered her mouth and looked at him.
“You might go through this all the time and be used to surprises, but it looks to me like you might have had a different kind of shock here. Am I right about that?” he asked.
There were shadows beneath Cara’s eyes that he hadn’t noticed previously. Her green eyes had a dark cast. To be honest, Rafe had had enough uncomfortable silence to last him a lifetime, so he walked toward her with his hands in his pockets to make reaching for her impossible. Cara, however she looked and no matter how haunted she was, remained an ongoing temptation for him. He had to accept that.
“Taking you home won’t solve the problems that are haunting you, but it might be a healthier option,” he said.
Cara shook her head.
Rafe persisted. “If you’re going to stay, I need to understand what’s going on so I can help. Please let me in.”
She spoke at last, repeating what she’d said earlier. “I came here to find the past.”
That’s when Rafe saw the fangs.
He hid the anxiety this caused him. “You’re finding part of that past in this room?” he asked, wanting very badly to hold Cara. “What did you see?”
Speaking slowly, as if she hadn’t yet shaken off her recent shock, Cara said, “I don’t think my mother knew she could be like the vampires before coming here. I think she found that out in this room, and the revelation frightened her.”
Rafe waited for her to go on, sensing she would. Cara was wild-eyed. Her body was rigid. She had to get this out.
“My father almost died by fang, and my mother had developed a pair. Think how that might have gone down with my father, Rafe, if his lover started to look like a vampire.”
He tried to comprehend the meaning of what she had just told him, and spoke carefully. “You’ve connected with another moment in your mother’s past?”
She nodded. “Those fangs might have been the reason she jumped from this window. She needed to hide them from him.”
He was catching on to the importance of that. “Rosalind fled because she developed a new talent for growing fangs? Was there a vampire in this room to instigate such a change?”
Cara’s voice lowered. “No. That’s the significance of this memory. She had changed on her own. She had grown a pair of fangs for the first time, possibly because my father had so much vampire venom in his system and she was near to him here.”
Rafe waited, not sure what to say. What Cara said made sense in a Kirk-Killion kind of way that he wasn’t up on.
“My father was here also,” Cara continued. “He was looking at her, and there was blood on her lips from dealing with those fangs.”
“Your father was here?” Rafe asked.
She nodded. “He was on that bed.”
“Do you think she bit him?”
“I think she was afraid to be around him when the fangs appeared. She was shocked and afraid of what my father would think after he had been so brutally attacked by the kind of being she was starting to become.”
Rafe’s insides twisted with the reminder that this visit to Miami hadn’t been good for Cara. She couldn’t have been paler. He felt her tension from two feet away.
As far as he could see, finding out about her parents’ past wasn’t making Cara feel better. It was only making things worse. If she wanted family history so damn badly, why hadn’t she asked her parents to shed some light on the past? She was so brave in facing monsters, it seemed absurd that she couldn’t face her parents for some answers.
“So Rosalind had discovered a new shape-shift and was terrified,” he said.
“Yes,” Cara replied breathlessly.
“What does that have to do with you? Why was discovering that such a shock?”
“She didn’t understand how it could have happened, I think. Maybe she believed she could no longer control the shape-shifts in the way she had always believed she could.”
“And that might lead to hurting your father? Hurting others?”
Cara’s eyes grew wider. “Something sinister had taken place. In becoming like them, it would mean that vampires had some degree of kinship with her, and that she had become something else again, other than the previous merging of wolf and Banshee.”
Cara took a step toward Rafe. “I think maybe she didn’t actually know about the Banshee until then.”
A light in Rafe’s mind clicked on. He suddenly understood why Rosalind’s jump from the window had been so important to Cara’s understanding of the past. Rosalind had been a rare black wolf before the attack on Colton, but afterward, as a result of the part she had played in rescuing him, Cara’s mother had learned that she housed another entity, along with more abilities that she could have dreamed of.
Speaking was a chore for him after that surprising streak of enlightenment. Cara had just located the moment that her mother’s life, and hers, had been forever changed.
“Do you want to leave?” he asked, cautiously gauging Cara’s emotional state. “Do you need to? You don’t have to be a tortured guest here where so many ghosts roam. Get your things or leave them, and come with me.”
“I’m not going home. Not yet,” she argued. “I have to see this through.”
“See what through, Cara?”
“There is more to come. I wasn’t just sent here to try to assimilate. I’m here for another reason. I’m sure of it.”
“I won’t take you home if you’re not ready for that, but this room is no longer an option. We can go to my place. We can find out how many vampires will catch on to our bait-and-switch routine.”
The darkness faded from Cara’s eyes as though it had simply drained away. Was that because he cared about her and had offered some comfort?
The premonition and shared memory stuff should have scared him off, but a detective who was also a werewolf couldn’t admit to being so easily intimidated. For better or worse, they were now a couple and he had to see this through. He had to help her, protect her, in whatever kind of situation arose next.
“What happens to you also happens to me by proxy, Cara. Together, we’re stronger. You just have to tell me what we’re facing, and why, so that I can prepare.”
She nodded again. “I don’t know what’s next, but I’m going to find out.”
Rafe closed his eyes briefly to assimilate all of this. Imprinting could be a bitch or a boon, but it had rules.
No exit.
No detours.
; Nowhere to run.
And damn it, he had no intention of trying to get out of this relationship, even if that were possible. As difficult as tonight had been—dilated eyes, wolf shapes, vampires, dead bodies and Banshees—he was in for the count. He was all hers, whoever and whatever Cara really was beneath all that black-haired beauty. This just wasn’t the time or the place to tell her so.
She was moving toward the door. The idea of leaving the estate where she should have been safe from the rest of the outside world had been tempting to Cara. He took her bag from her. When they exited the room, he closed the door to seal off those damn ghosts.
They headed down the staircase. The house was quieter than it should have been, given the chaos surrounding the discovery of that body by the wall. Abducting their guest wasn’t going to sit well with his folks, but Rafe had an argument ready in case he and Cara were caught making a quick exit.
He had gone over most of the possible consequences of taking Cara away. Rafe understood that he’d be breaking trust between the Landaus and the Kirk-Killions, and that he might be leaving the way open for more danger. Removing Cara, shielding her from so many watchful eyes, just seemed the right thing to do, if not for Cara’s sanity, then for his.
She might find a few moments’ peace in a smaller space that her parents had never seen or occupied. If they had to stake every damn vampire that found her, so be it.
They made it down all flights of stairs and halfway across the entrance hall before someone got in the way of their reaching the front door.
“Going somewhere?” his mother asked.
Chapter 19
The strange thing, Cara discovered as she studied her hostess, was that Dana Delmonico Landau wasn’t half as put out as she appeared to be. Beneath the stern exterior lay a palpable aura of understanding that led Cara to believe a getaway might have been expected, at least by one member of this pack.
“Too many unwelcome newcomers know she’s here,” Rafe said. “It’s too damn dangerous for Cara to stay right now.”
The Black Wolf Page 13
