Wolf Trap

by Linda Thomas-Sundstrom

  “Where would we take her?”

  “I’m taking her,” Matt corrected. “You’ll stay here.”

  Jenna got to her feet, shook her head. “She’s my responsibility.”

  “Not anymore. This one is out of your reach. It happens.”

  “Are you saying I’m incompetent?”

  “Not saying anything of the kind. Just that there are people better equipped to help her.”

  “And they can help you?”

  He met her eyes, wanting to drown himself in their icy, baby-blue depths. “They are trying to help me, yes.”

  Her eyes maintained their defiant shine. “I can’t meet these people? Know about them?”

  “I’ve been sworn to secrecy.”

  “That’s a bit vague, even for you, a bona fide detective.”

  “I know how it sounds. I just don’t have time to talk now or beg. Night is coming. There’s a full moon. If you thought what happened to us a while ago was strange and you press me for answers much longer, you’ll be in for the ride of your life outside these walls. And not in a good way.”

  “Threats, Matt? Maybe you’ve gone off the deep end. Maybe you belong here, after all. For a while.”

  “Maybe I do,” he agreed. “But I can’t take you up on the offer just now. Not today.”

  Man, he wanted Jenna back. At least, she should be given a chance to understand. Without her, none of it mattered to him, anyway, or would ever matter to him again. Not the job, the research he had been doing since his own first Change, or the workings of the world outside, the one in which Jenna lived and breathed.

  Thing was, he just couldn’t tell her. He couldn’t make himself say the words that would prove how life truly was at times stranger than fiction. Or that this was one of those times.

  As he gazed at Jenna, willing her to help, to trust him, just this once…

  As he saw himself running out of options and excuses…

  As he inwardly vowed never to hurt her, leave her or hide anything from her again, ever, as long as he lived, if she would just give him this one chance…

  She nodded her head.

  Excitement rode the air like barely contained rage. Panic was in there, too, along with dread and the urge to hyperventilate.

  Thank heaven, Jenna thought, Jim hadn’t questioned her orders.

  Matt had been out the door in a flash, motioning for the she-creature’s cell to be unlocked. They had hit the woman up again with an injection, and she, as director here, had okayed all of this. Because it was the right thing to do? Jenna no longer knew. Maybe she’d done this for Matt as a last farewell. A parting favor. It was obvious he cared for the woman in that cell more than he cared for her. He would risk everything to help someone else.

  End of story? Merely a really bad dream? Fact. Matt had become more than Matt in her presence. A blackness had slid behind his eyes when he’d pinned her to the wall, chasing out the green. She could hardly function thinking about it, vowed to get to the bottom of this, no matter what.

  She watched Matt lift the woman, now nearly covered in hair that was clumped and matted with sweat, and whose breath came in great chest-rattling rasps, though she’d been given enough tranquilizer to knock out a horse.

  It was downright freaky.

  Matt cannot be like her.

  Not my Matt.

  A genetic mutation? A cluster of cells gone awry that had hidden behind Matt’s flawless exterior until now? An illness carried in his lineage? Age-related, maybe? Drug-related?

  Why hadn’t I known?

  Matt was all but running down the hallway, the creature’s listless body held tightly in his arms. He anxiously waited while she unlocked the iron door.

  His body was fending off a series of visible shudders that made her grimace each time she watched one hit. She heard him swear, suck in air, swear again.

  His angular features were tight, but the same ones she had always craved. He looked the same. He just didn’t feel the same. She’d noticed it the moment he’d entered the hospital, but had been too preoccupied with her inner thoughts and hopes.

  If he was ill, seriously ill, she wanted to help.

  Love him. In spite of everything.

  In sickness and in health.

  Just one more favor. She motioned for Jim to take the creature. Arms free of his burden, Matt reached out to her, silently, a whole lot of unspoken things in an action that did nothing to bring them closer together and only caused her heart to break.

  Standing a good three feet away, he dropped his hands, tried to say something, but didn’t. Couldn’t, she supposed.

  “Go,” she said.

  Just that.

  Go.

  Chapter 5

  As soon as they had rounded the corner, Jenna was after them. Down the stairs she raced on foot. Around a sharp corner. Down more stairs as she observed the elevator’s lights.

  Into her office she ran, ignoring the stares of the staff, needing her purse, her car keys; stopping only long enough to type on her keyboard the prompts “Full moon. Hair growth. Howl.”

  Two more seconds to stare at the answer on the screen, one silent inward shout that should have shaken the rafters, and she was out the side door to the building, fleeing over the grass.

  She fumbled with the lock to her car, banging her knees on the steering wheel as she dived inside. The sun was an orange blip on the horizon, then gone. In the oncoming darkness, she took a deep breath—one that would probably have to last her a while—and started the engine.

  In her mind the word she’d seen on the monitor flashed blue, then red, then a blinding silver metallic, the color of the moon in tonight’s sky. Werewolf. That was the word the computer had spit out. Again. As if she hadn’t already hit that same key a hundred times since she’d first dared to look, always anticipating another answer.

  Jamming the car into gear, she stepped on the gas, kicking up loose gravel. Time to face facts. There just wasn’t going to be another explanation.

  Now Matt was up ahead in a police-generic beige car, wearing a badge and maybe even carrying a gun these days—when he wasn’t rescuing other…werewolves.

  Her laugh sounded somewhat hysterical, she thought. If werewolves were possible, if a human could become a wolf, then the opposite surely could happen? A devolve process? A cure? Somewhere? Somehow?

  Having never fainted in her life, Jenna tried really hard not to now.

  Matt gripped the wheel tighter, to the point of ligament strain, and swore by moving his aching jaw.

  Night had fallen. Behind the clouds, the moon was round and phosphorescent and calling to him. Using his first name.

  Cold silver light bounced off the hood of the car as he screeched around a corner in a quiet old neighborhood where houses were double the size of his entire precinct. He felt the wetness of a lunar kiss on his left arm, soaking through his sweater and into his flesh, and yanked his arm off the dinged-up tan metal.

  “Just a few more miles to go. We can make it.”

  There weren’t many other cars on the old road. He’d passed twoheading in the opposite direction. Another set of headlights remained in the distance behind him. If he had to pull over, get himself and the she-wolf out of the car, he could manage in relative safety. After that, though, if she were to waken, as startled as he was sure she would be, it might be bad news.

  “Two more miles, max,” he confirmed out loud.

  The Landaus lived in a mansion on gated property. They wouldn’t leave the estate with the moon like this, being what they were. The trick would be getting in if they didn’t answer the intercom.

  “Timing is everything.” Matt checked out the backseat in the rearview mirror. No hairy face looked back. No strong, wolfish hands tried to choke him.

  He gazed into the mirror at himself, opened his lips a crack, lips that were already drawing back to make way for a new structure of flesh and bone, and whispered, “Jenna,” with the last human sound he would probably be able to
formulate.

  Jenna kept a decent distance behind Matt’s car, until she saw it veer off the road suddenly, hurtling into darkness.

  “No!”

  She floored the gas and surged ahead, turning off the road onto a long, unlit driveway, aiming her headlights between the two tall stone pillars on either side. Once past the pillars, still able to glimpse red taillights, she switched off her high beams and attempted to run dark after him.

  Concentration took everything she had, and then some. The driveway wound around several groves of tall trees, with head-high hedges filling in the gaps. She’d broken into a cold sweat. An ache twanged behind her eyes, doubling when Matt’s lights disappeared.

  Slowing, Jenna held fast to the wheel. There! A big gate. Ten feet high. Still open. Matt had gone through.

  She put the pedal to the floor again, making it inside by inches before the thing swung shut, absentmindedly brushing the hair out of her eyes.

  More trees. Large swaths of lawn, looking as dark as lakes in the nighttime gloom. A giant house appeared, lit up by lights. Though Matt’s car was small in the distance, she watched it nearly hit the front steps as it pulled up.

  The front door of the house opened. Two people, possibly men, came out, tore open the car door, picked up the creature in Matt’s backseat and carried her into the house.

  Jenna rolled to a stop next to what looked like a deserted caretaker’s cottage. Engine off, she watched in silence.

  Where was Matt?

  The people from the house didn’t make a second showing. She hadn’t seen Matt leave the car.

  Her heart drummed irregularly in her chest, leaping when she heard a scratching sound. Had she parked too close to the bushes? She turned to look.

  The sudden crack of her door opening brought a scream from her throat. A huge, fur-covered mass, rippling with muscle, sinew and electrified tension, stood there. Elongated face. Wolfish features. Eyes that reflected the blackness that was all around.

  There was something recognizable in his stance.

  Oh God, oh God.

  “Matt?” she whispered, body heaving up one more irregular heartbeat before her inner world went as dark as the outer one.

  She was being carried. Her shoulder bumped against something wide, something stretched taut and covered in softness. As the surroundings blurred into focus, Jenna saw that she was being carried through an open doorway right next to the car.

  She didn’t look at the face above hers, fearing what she might see. Who she might see.

  Once through the doorway, she felt an immediate sway in the arms cradling her. A jerky motion nearly caused her to fall. The pitch-black space was filled with popping noises and a growl that lengthened into an audible groan.

  Set on the floor, on her feet, she felt her heart careen. Fluid rushed in her ears as more sounds filled the darkness, unfamiliar, freaky, reminiscent of the awful noise of bones breaking.

  Numb, Jenna stayed where she’d been put on legs made of gelatin. If Matt had brought the creature to this estate, surely he considered it safe?

  Matt. Help me.

  A familiar scent floated to her, easily recognizable. Matt’s apartment was filled with that same smell: just a hint of the aftershave he preferred, mixed with his exquisitely potent, all-male pheromones. He’d smelled like this in her hospital, not more than fifteen minutes ago. No mistaking that scent or how it had always turned her on. Now, though, Matt was giving off an additional scent: the unique odor of damp fur.

  Feeling choked, her hands tight up against the stuccoed wall of wherever the heck she was, Jenna said, “Tell me.”

  “That I’m a damned monster, like the thing you had caged?” His voice was gruff and followed by a racking cough.

  “Tell me,” she repeated.

  “Dammit, Jen, what are you doing here?” Matt countered.

  “Following you. Are you okay?”

  Hesitation. Then, “So far from okay as to be in another universe.”

  “Are you…you?”

  “Yes.” Another hesitation. “Most of the time. Tonight, only while I’m inside with a roof over my head.”

  “What is this place?”

  “A haven for people like me.”

  “Why do you need a…haven?”

  No reply.

  Needing to deal, Jenna shook her head, wanted more. “I need to know what happened to you.”

  “You mean, what made me a monster?”

  “Yes.”

  His voice cracked with the dryness of surprise. “So that you can analyze?”

  “So that I can understand.”

  He took a step closer. Jenna resisted the urge to close the distance and pummel Matt with her fists, make him come clean, make him confess that this had all been one big joke, on her. They were on the Landau estate. She’d recognized Judge Landau’s son as one of the two men at the car. She knew the Landaus; everybody in Miami did. But what would such a prominent family have to do with werewolves? Why would they take one in?

  Her nerves starting to fry, she clamped her teeth together until her gums hurt and waited for an explanation.

  Matt spoke at last.

  “There’s a criminal loose in the city with a special talent.” He paused, began again. “Not killing his victims outright, but torturing them in another way, a more permanent way.”

  He had taken another step. His warm breath riffled through the hair at her temple. Automatic reflex; gone was the need to hit Matt. She now wanted to throw her arms around him, wrap her restless legs around him—and would have done that once, in this strange place, not long ago. This was the man she loved. Yet there was enough tension between them at the moment to blow the roof off the place.

  “He bites his victims,” Matt told her in a hushed, pained tone. “And those victims then become like him. No choice in the matter. No comprehension of what is happening to them. They don’t always die from the savagery of his bites, Jenna, but if they survive the incident, many of them die soon afterward. Some of their bodies are found mutilated—by their own teeth.”

  “How could that be?” Jenna’s rational mind made her protest. “Why would anyone kill themselves in such a gruesome manner?”

  “Because what the asshole does is infect them. Infection through saliva. Very old virus. Ancient. Incurable. This infection, once internalized, changes DNA.”

  Horrified to stillness, Jenna sucked in air.

  “The infection also changes the body’s composition,” Matt continued. “Triggered, as inconceivable as it sounds, by the light shed from a full moon. A frigging planetlike sphere. It’s not like we could get away from that, is it?”

  We. He’d said we. Her instincts hadn’t been wrong, after all, no matter how much she’d denied it.

  Again, in her mind, the word on the computer screen flashed with a sickly glow.

  Werewolf.

  Matt had been infected.

  “The girl?” she asked, hands fisted.

  “If you had searched the girl’s body carefully, you would have found a set of teeth marks that might possibly have scarred over by now. A bite did this to her. A bite from either the same freak that bit the other bodies we found, or someone just like him. A bite is how she was infected. It’s the only way a person can be infected if they weren’t born with the genetic mutation.”

  He waited a beat, giving her time to assimilate that. Or try to. Jenna wondered if he could feel her terror.

  “The girl in your care,” he said slowly, “is now half-wolf.”

  Jenna held back a shout by the thinnest of threads.

  And so are you, my love?

  “I believe,” Matt said, “that the girl has been mutating during the day because of the meds, and maybe even her strong reaction to the sterile environment of the hospital. Hell, maybe other things can bring about the Change, other than the moon and a shitload of mind-altering narcotics. What I don’t know could fill a well.”

  Needing support, Jenna braced herself again, rema
ined mute.

  “Tonight, out here in the open, her body will go through the full transition—sort of like a rewiring of her central nervous system. The people who live here will help her with that and maybe even keep her alive.”

  “You have a bite?” Jenna whispered.

  A hot forehead pressed against hers as he nodded. “Right arm. Twelve…twelve weeks ago. The night we were last together.”

  Startled by what this meant, Jenna felt her heart amp up its tempo. There were so many more questions, so much more to discuss. But just now, one thing took precedence over all of it. He hadn’t left her. He hadn’t found someone else. This man had been hiding. Hiding from her. Keeping this secret to himself. Protecting her.

  Matt Wilson hadn’t changed his mind, only his DNA.

  As Jenna reached for her lover now, it was without a thought for how much longer her legs would hold her up.

  Chapter 6

  Soft feminine arms wrapped around him, enfolding him. She was in shock most likely, Matt concluded. Why else would she still be here?

  Jenna’s head was nestled against his bare chest, a bareness that was a necessity for transitioning into a creature twice his normal size.

  Jenna pressed herself close. A lover’s embrace.

  A moment of sympathy before she’d recover her wits and run?

  He looked down at the woman in his arms with enhanced vision, a new development that allowed him to see well in the dark. His heightened sense of smell had also developed to levels that were truly miraculous.

  Jenna smelled like…heaven. But on his sensitive skin, where the pelt of the wolf waited for just the slightest sliver of moonlight, he felt wetness. Tears. Falling from Jenna’s eyes.

  He wanted to cry out against something so simple as a tear. Monster that he might any minute become, and as educated a doctor as he was, Jenna’s tears nearly brought him to his knees. Helpless. Useless. For the moment a man, able to hold a woman. But what woman would want a monster in her life, in her bed?