The man who had given him that piece of information was young, strapping, with an energy that made the room hum. He wore his dark blond, shaggy hair long, to his shoulders. Sorrow surrounded his eyes like dark circles.
“They were friends of yours?” Parker queried.
“Close friends,” the man by the shutters replied.
“I’m sorry,” Parker murmured.
“So are we,” the older man remarked, staring out of the window.
Parker had waited for this—communing with creatures similar to himself. For eight long months the possibility of doing just this had headed his list. Now that he had found a houseful of them, he dreaded asking for help. They were mourning the loss of their friends. Two were down, and two more of their pack were still missing—Delmonico and the judge. Asking these men to shed light on the whole werewolf phenomenon, how it worked, how it had come to be in the first place, would have been a grave imposition.
“What will the authorities say when the murdering bastards talk?” Parker asked instead.
“Talk about what?” the young wolf countered.
A stroke of uneasiness jabbed at Parker, which the man by the window must have noticed.
“The murderers will say nothing,” he clarified. “It isn’t in their best interest to talk. They won’t fear prison half as much as what would be waiting for them on the outside if they did.”
Parker spoke up. “Are you vigilantes, then?”
“No,” a third man replied—medium height, long red hair, cleft in his chin. “Nothing like that. We’d like to be left alone, as a matter of fact. But things have gotten out of control lately, and ignoring what’s going on around here is no longer an option.”
“Meaning the escalating violence in the park?” Parker recalled Detective Wilson’s all too brief explanation about that, and Delmonico’s fill-in about the recent deaths out there. “Does that streak of violence tie in with these gunslingers and the wolves who attacked us tonight?”
“All caused by the same pack,” the man by the window replied, his disgust audible. “The police cleaned them out recently, but a few of the worst offenders got away, including that crazy son of a bitch alpha.”
“That alpha has already gathered new troops, mostly street gangs always up for a turf war if there’s money to be made,” the young man added.
“Why?” Parker felt ignorant. “Why would they go after the men by the wall? Didn’t they know what they—we—are?”
“It was a hit,” the young wolf replied. “A warning for the judge and the rest of us to stay out of their business.”
“What business would that be?” Parker wasn’t catching up fast enough. He felt as if time had slowed to a standstill. He wanted to head back up those stairs and stretch out on the bed, beside her, keep her safe. He’d been on the right track in thinking the Landaus drew darkness to them. If he’d been lured to the wall around this place, why not somebody else with his or her own agenda?
“They dealt in drugs at first,” the young wolf explained, pacing the room like a caged animal. “But the bastard has added kidnapping, torture and murder to his short list. He doesn’t take kindly to people trying to disrupt his illegal operations. He has enough money to bribe half of Miami in order to keep himself out of prison.”
“But why,” Parker asked, “would one wolf want to kill another?”
The man by the window took that one, sounding surprised it had even come up. “Wolves don’t kill each other, as a rule. We have a healthy respect for territory. We try to lead normal lives within those parameters, and keep a low profile. But in came one insane son of a bitch to change the rules.”
“There was more than one wolf out there,” Parker pointed out.
“That filthy alpha has created them all, made them into what they are—Frankenstein versions of Lycans. He creates them and then tortures them in unspeakable ways until they fall all over themselves to please him and stay alive.”
“He creates them?” Parker noticed his drop in tone. “How?”
“He bites,” the young wolf said. Parker wanted to grab him by the shirt and sit him down in a chair. The kid’s agitation was making it hard for Parker to think.
“And when they are ready to turn,” the young wolf continued, “and in the middle of their rebirth phase, he tosses them into a ring. It’s no fight ring that bastard runs, it’s a bite club. His own wicked version. Wolf pitted against wolf, drugged up against the pain of their first transition, crazed, and expected to fight to the death. The winner lives to serve his master.”
“And sometimes,” the red-haired wolf added, with an echo of madness in his own tone, “he throws a man into the ring with them. For fun.”
Parker bit back his horror over the idea of such an atrocity. A man wouldn’t stand a chance against one crazed, tortured werewolf, let alone two, or a warehouse full. It would be murder in its most abysmal sense.
Nothing Parker might say would do justice to the information he’d just garnered. Hearing about those things had brought the darkness closer. He had an urge to button his shirt to keep that darkness away from his skin.
“I thought I might be the only one,” he confessed, running his hand through his hair. “The only man-wolf hybrid.”
“How wrong you were,” a voice remarked from the doorway.
Sick to death of surprises, Parker spun around with his hand still raised. His eyes widened. He felt his brow crease as Detective Wilson strode into the room.
But Wilson’s face belied his benign exterior. His formerly passive cop expression was tight. He wore a black T-shirt that showed off his honed physique. “I just found out,” he said to the men gathered. Addressing Parker directly, he asked, “You were there?”
“Yes.” Wilson hadn’t asked what form he’d been in at the time.
“Who else?” Wilson said to the others.
Those men looked at Parker.
“I guess,” Wilson said, “they’ll want to know who you are before disclosing anything more dealing with their privacy.”
“Understandable,” he agreed, his surprise over seeing the detective wearing off. Wilson was a homicide detective and Landau a judge, so maybe the two had frequent run-ins.
“I can leave the room so you can talk freely, but I won’t leave this house,” Parker said.
Wilson’s expression registered puzzlement.
“She’s here,” Parker explained. “I won’t leave her again.”
The detective’s brow furrowed. Seconds later, the truth dawned on him. “She’s your Jane Doe, Madison? Bless her, I thought she looked familiar, but had no real way to gauge who she was.”
How the hell did Wilson have any idea what he was talking about? Parker wondered. How had the detective possibly made that leap from the patient at Metro to a patient in Sylvia Landau’s care? The girl had been half-covered with bandages, her features hidden. In order to match that bandaged form to the one upstairs, Wilson would have had to have seen her arrive here. But how had she gotten here?
“Jenna,” Wilson said seriously over his shoulder, just as Parker was about to ask that very question. “You’re good at math. What are the odds?”
Jenna? Parker’s eyes traveled down Wilson’s body to his right hand, which was, he saw now, interlaced with a set of paler fingers. With his hopes of making sense out of any of the evening’s events dashed, Parker waited for the woman whose hand Wilson held so possessively to emerge from behind him. And when she did, Parker glanced from the woman to Wilson to the group of gathered werewolves and back to the woman…and felt like laughing. Because the world and everything in it had turned upside down. Or maybe inside out.
The woman by Wilson’s side was, of course, familiar—a stunning, stately beauty with ivory skin and a flurry of tousled auburn hair, Jenna James.
Parker’s mind went into overdrive. He recounted events leading up to this moment, his mind jumping from one thing to another as if he were seeing his life flash before his eyes.
; Officer Delmonico was a dark-pelted wolf with an experienced trigger finger. Judge Landau, an alpha in every sense of the word as Parker understood it, owned a wolf sanctuary. Detective Wilson was in the loop with all of this, and known to all of the wolves in this room. His presence here suggested he might be helping Landau and these wolves in some way. There was a distinct possibility that Wilson had been on the other end of the phone call Delmonico had made from the park.
So, if Wilson knew about werewolves, it was likely he also knew about the drug-running, the bite clubs and the rogue Weres who bit people, not only in order to populate a pack, but for a maniac’s entertainment.
Wilson might in fact be a major player in the hunt for this criminal alpha freak.
“Jenna,” Wilson said, his face back to immovable steel, “meet Daniel, Max, Marcus, Brian…and Parker.”
Jenna’s eyes glowed in the foyer light—bright eyes flecked with amber and cloudy with the aftereffects of sex. If nothing else in the world made sense at the moment, how about the fact that Jenna and Wilson were a couple? And Wilson, Parker realized in that instant, couldn’t have taken Delmonico’s call for backup, because while some of this assembled group had been chasing killers, Wilson and Jenna had engaged in a tryst.
Lucky Wilson.
Whether he liked it or not, Parker’s own repressed libido responded to the thought of sex with a stiff rise that would have been plenty embarrassing had he not been given the jeans. He tore his gaze from the velvety-smooth planes of Jenna’s face, and jerked his attention back to the stairs, able to feel her up there. Able to feel the wolf in her by way of the strange connection they had. Imprinting.
He would have torn the place apart to get to her if the woman with her hadn’t been the soft-spoken, entirely human Sylvia Landau. He considered doing so anyway.
“You’re her Parker,” Jenna said, her voice deep, sexy and serious. “Parker Madison.”
His heart was hammering for no apparent reason at all that he knew of, outside of the conglomeration of really irregular events. But his instincts, bombarded as they were by all this new information, told him suddenly to get up those stairs. His instinct shouted protect her.
He looked back at the gathered faces. Nobody had moved. No one was after the little she-wolf up there. Probably nobody cared, unless Jenna James blamed him for leaving her at Fairview in the first place.
Another hand rested on his arm with an empathetic touch, but he jumped just the same.
“Matt brought her here,” Jenna told him, as if either she knew what he was thinking or could read his face. “I wondered about the signs, but didn’t know for sure until I saw him with her, and how he handled her. I’d never come across a she-wolf. My fear was of being unable to manage what she was going through at Fairview, if that’s what she was to become.”
A sudden disturbance caught his attention and he whirled toward the door. Everyone else in the room had done the same thing. The hair at the nape of his neck bristled. He growled low in his chest, a sound echoed by every one of the present members of Judge Landau’s pack.
The scent of blood drifting through the open doorway was heavy, strong, close. Before Parker knew it, he found himself one of four heading for the yard.
The young man he’d spoken with inside was the first to shift shape, tugging his T-shirt over his head and tossing it to the lawn. The man who had stood by the windows followed, not bothering to remove any clothes. The red-haired fellow stopped just short of the steps, his weight a solid barrier keeping Parker from reaching moonlight. Wilson brought up the rear.
The moon was huge and full, hovering in the sky like an alien spaceship too close to the earth and blotting out most of the stars. Her light cut a wide swath across lawn and flagstone driveway, turning the shiny hoods of two parked cars into mirrors.
Not a sound could be heard.
The Weres on the lawn were as motionless as statues. It was an odd sensation for Parker to be standing on the porch, among the others, wondering about that damned scent of blood.
“Human,” the man blocking Parker announced, his muscles visibly dancing.
“Male,” Parker added, having no idea what made him think so, but knowing this for a fact.
“It’s unacceptable,” the red-haired man stated. “And it’s a trap.”
“No,” Wilson corrected, his voice low, his eyes thoughtful. “It’s a challenge.”
Parker searched the dark, muttered, “Fill me in.”
“Chavez.” When Wilson whispered the name, his mouth twisted with such disgust that Parker felt another chill slip down his back. He had heard that name only once, yet hadn’t forgotten the tightness that had appeared in Dana Delmonico’s shoulders when she’d mouthed it at the hospital. Chavez, the man who had gotten away in the raid on his warehouse. The criminal wanted for an undercover detective’s murder, among other atrocities.
“Rogue wolves and a crazy criminal mastermind, all at once?” Parker said. “Isn’t that a bit much, even for a judge to have to handle?”
Wilson faced him with anger in his eyes. “Not and, Doctor. One and the same.”
Parker examined the two motionless Weres on the lawn, then transferred his attention to the wall beyond the driveway. “What does Chavez want?”
“Miami,” Wilson answered.
“What is he willing to do to get it?” Jenna James asked, stepping out from doorway.
“Anything,” the rust wolf replied.
“And that includes killing every other Were in the city so there will be no one left with the strength to stop him,” Wilson said. “Starting at the top.”
“Every other Were?” Parker got hung up on that particular word. “Oh,” he almost shouted, as enlightenment finally arrived. “Oh, shit.” He again glanced to the wall, thinking that dark didn’t begin to describe the vibe it had taken on in the last two minutes. “Chavez is the crazy werewolf,” he said. One and the same. “And Judge Landau is…”
“The top of the food chain,” Wilson finished.
“And in Chavez’s way,” the red-haired wolf added.
The sound of the red-haired wolf shifting shape next to Parker was like bottled danger suddenly uncorked, and happened so quickly he did a double take.
“How recently was that warehouse where the fights took place cleaned out?” Jenna asked.
“A month ago,” Wilson said.
“If a lot of those Weres were destroyed, how could Chavez repopulate his pack in that amount of time? Is this the first full moon since the raid?” Jenna queried.
“The raid happened during a full phase, so yes, this would be the first full,” Wilson stated.
“Then the wolves he has are the ones who escaped with him,” Jenna reasoned. “Plus the shooters he seems to have acquired, like the two guys caught tonight.”
“Along those lines,” Parker said, “just how many cops and detectives know about…us? The call Delmonico sent out was fairly cryptic. I believe she mentioned the word growling.”
Wilson nodded. “She called Scott.”
“Who the hell is Scott?” Parker snapped, tired of playing catch-up.
“Adam Scott,” he elaborated, “is an officer of the law and recent inductee to the clan. Scott has a personal interest in Chavez and has been searching that park for signs of him for the last two weeks.”
“How personal?” Parker had to ask.
Wilson sighed in obvious frustration over the answer he was about to give. “Scott,” he said, dragging out a beat of time before continuing, “has had the pleasure of being a participant in Chavez’s bite club.”
“You said ‘inductee,’” Parker pointed out, shaking off the image that arrived with this last piece of news.
“Adam Scott was torn to shreds in that underground torturefest, and would have died, but for that raid and the woman who provided the whereabouts on how to get there. She saved him by—”
“Offering just one more bite?” Jenna said, filling in that sentence as much for Parker as fo
r herself. “The woman who pointed the way to Chavez was a wolf?”
Wilson nodded.
“So that makes two Were cops on the force,” Parker said. “Delmonico and Adam Scott. Right?”
Gazing out at the night, Wilson said softly, “More or less.”
Chapter 18
Enough was enough.
Chloe opened her eyes, checked out her surroundings, took a moment to try to recall where she was, and couldn’t.
A face swam in her memory, and it wasn’t the face of the woman sitting in a chair beside the bed that Chloe found herself stretched out on. She remembered something about a car, stars flying by and seeing the man with the serious face again. She saw glimpses of a white room and a padded cot, heard the echo of a ticking clock and felt ghostlike pricks of needles.
“Am I possessed?” she demanded.
The question surprised the woman, who immediately turned her way.
“Why can’t I stop shaking? What’s happening to me?”
“I might ask the same question,” the woman answered in a mild, pleasant voice. “Do you know where you are?”
“Hell?”
“You’re in my home. You were brought here so that we could help you.”
“Those doctors couldn’t help?”
“What’s wrong with you wasn’t in their realm of expertise, I’m afraid.”
“So I am possessed?”
“Yes, in a way. But not how you’re imagining.”
“Then why do you look so stunned?”
“I’m surprised because you’re talking, and coherently, when by all rights you shouldn’t be.” The woman leaned closer. “You’ve been ill. We didn’t expect you to be better for a long time yet. How do you feel?”
“I don’t know.” Chloe waited to estimate the level of the pain she’d been fighting, but didn’t feel anything. She moved her fingers, her head, and felt a dull, lingering soreness in her neck. “You took away the pain?”
“The herbs helped with that. But not enough, surely, to—” Instead of finishing that statement, the woman said, “I’d like to open the window shade.”
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