by Deanna Chase
He had already shot her once—something that Elise wouldn’t be forgetting any time soon. Three more bullets wouldn’t make a difference.
Howls drifted over the forest. The pack was looking for their Alphas.
“Drop the sword,” Abel said again.
“No,” Elise replied.
“What did you do to Nash?” Rylie asked. “Can you really fix him?”
Elise gave her a steady look without responding.
Abel cocked the guns. It wasn’t necessary to cock a modern pistol, but it produced a distinctive, threatening sound.
“Do it,” he said.
Elise remained silent.
Seth and Abel exchanged glances. She took that instant of opportunity to run.
She bolted across the clearing, toward the tee of the crossroads. Her fists pumped. Boots pounded on pavement. Just a few steps, and she would be in sweet darkness.
A roar shattered the night.
Elise couldn’t resist the urge to look over her shoulder, expecting to see the mighty beast that Abel would have become.
It wasn’t Abel changing.
Rylie’s human flesh exploded away from her. Elise understood that changing into a werewolf typically took several minutes. But Rylie was hiding a lot of power behind the mask of an innocent girl, and the change was nearly instantaneous.
The skin on her face ripped as her muzzle extended. The hair fell from her scalp, scattering on the pavement. Fur exploded over her rippling skin, bones popped, and that cute white sundress fell to scraps at her paws.
Elise couldn’t run fast enough.
The golden wolf leaped in front of Elise, barring her path into the safety of night. Rylie might not have been the biggest of the pack, but she bristled with anger, with power, and the unspoken command: You’re not going anywhere until you fix Nash.
“Out of my way,” Elise said. “Last warning.”
The wolf darted forward, snapping at Elise’s legs. It was meant to drive her back into the circle of lights. Away from safety.
Elise clasped her hands into a single fist and swung, like she was going for a volleyball—except that the ball, in this case, was Rylie’s skull.
Bone cracked against bone. Rylie’s head snapped to the side. She stumbled.
A gunshot.
Elise felt the burn of a bullet enter her back. It probably penetrated her right lung. She ignored it.
Rylie leaped, and Elise jumped out of reach of those snapping jaws. A swipe of a paw sliced through Elise’s boot, from knee to heel, shredding the leather. It barely grazed the skin underneath.
She whirled, snapping a roundhouse kick across Rylie’s face.
Another gunshot—this one a total miss.
Shouts.
“Stop shooting! You’ll hit her!”
“They’re not silver!”
Elise dodged Rylie’s next lunge, and the next, arms raised in front of her face as though boxing. They circled each other. Elise tried to dart toward the darkness again, and Rylie cut into her path.
“Change, for fuck’s sake!” That was Seth, ordering his brother. Elise distantly registered how interesting it was for a human kopis to order an Alpha werewolf around, but only distantly—Rylie had lunged again, and this time, her claws caught Elise’s shirt.
Four parallel gashes opened on her belly from ribs to navel, burning like a brand on Elise’s flesh. Blood gushed into the air. The fluids hissed when they splattered to the spotlit ground.
The wounds didn’t heal.
Elise stared down at her exposed abs in momentary shock.
The wounds aren’t healing.
Rylie bowled into her, sending both of them to the asphalt.
The scent of Elise’s blood must have brought out the beast in a way that their fight hadn’t. There were no scraps of humanity left in the wolf’s gold eyes. Only hunter. Only Alpha.
Jaws swung toward Elise’s face. She shoved her hand deep into the wolf’s mouth, jamming her fist in the air passage, seizing the back of her tongue. The slick, muscular organ thrashed in Elise’s grip, struggling to break free. The wolf’s breath smelled of deer blood.
Elise dug her fingernails in and tried to tear.
Teeth closed on her upper arm, leaving a circle of tooth marks on her bicep. Amber blood streaked the muscle.
Elise didn’t realize that Seth and Abel had closed in until a boot struck her in the side of the head.
Steel toe connected with her temple. The world exploded in light.
The wolf reared back, pulling her tongue out of Elise’s hand.
The men were shouting. More howls, closer than ever. Elise was running out of time. Blood flowed freely. Couldn’t heal, not under the spotlights. Needed to escape.
She wrapped her fingers around the hilt of the falchion and tried to draw it.
Rylie was faster.
The werewolf bit.
Elise felt the needle points of her teeth enter her throat, and the immense, crushing power of the wolf’s jaw muscles. Her ability to breathe was gone instantly. It felt like being smothered in a lake of blood.
If nothing else, Elise was impressed that the wolf-girl had gone for the kill shot. She hadn’t expected her to have the balls.
Her blood pumped into Rylie’s mouth. Elise’s vision blurred.
And then she saw.
A gray moon hung heavy over the peak of the mountain. Rylie stood at the apex, naked and human, steaming in the coolness of the spring air. Her toes dug into the ice. Her arms were spread wide, welcoming the moon’s radiance.
There were people behind her—hunters and werewolves, all locked in the heat of battle. Some had already died. Many more would suffer if Rylie couldn’t stop them. If she couldn’t call down the gods of the moon.
She looked over her shoulder and saw desperation on Seth’s face. He was there. Abel was, too.
The moon wanted them all.
Rylie jumped.
The vision shocked out of Elise as quickly as it had come, and she realized that Rylie’s weight was gone from her chest. The werewolf had thrown herself away. Elise’s blood coated her muzzle. She whined as she pawed at her nose, as if trying to get it off, but there was no wiping away the fluid that ran through Elise’s veins. It was thicker than blood, stickier than molasses, and it was glued to Rylie’s fur.
Rylie’s flesh rippled. Sheets of golden hair fell away.
She was changing back into a human.
Abel was at Rylie’s side. People shouted. Elise was, momentarily, ignored—struggling to breathe through her collapsed throat, air bubbling in her mouth, her bicep and stomach and leg burning as if acid had been dripped on her wounds.
Elise rolled onto her belly and crawled toward the darkness.
She glimpsed Rylie out of the corner of her eye, human and whole, curled into the fetal position. She was having a seizure. Blood matted her human face, stuck her beautiful blond hair to her cheeks, and wildness filled her eyes. Seth and Abel were both holding her. Trying to comfort her. Making sure she was okay. She probably wasn’t—Elise’s blood did strange things to people.
Meanwhile, Elise thought she was dying. Really dying. It shouldn’t have been possible.
She stretched out a hand. Her fingers brushed the darkness.
Let me go, she begged the night.
Her skin unfolded, and Elise flew among the stars.
CHAPTER TEN
Lincoln awoke to the sound of scraping at his front door.
He sat upright in bed, sheets falling to his waist. His chest was slicked with sweat. His heart beat a panicked tattoo inside his ribcage, as if trying to crawl up his throat and escape through his mouth.
Lincoln had been dreaming. He’d had visions of gaping pits, like wounds carved into the earth, and they had bled fire as lost souls writhed inside. The Devil had been waiting for him on the brink of the pits. She had beckoned to him with black fingernails and a blood-red smile.
Be with me, she said. Let me drink you.
He had railed against her, screamed that she needed to stay away. The angel would kill him. He might kill them both.
But she enveloped him in her arms anyway. It was sinful bliss. The kind of ecstasy no man was meant to know. Something had been watching their bodies unite, too—something darker than the night and taller than the deepest canyons.
Another scrape at his door.
Lincoln shoved his hat off of the alarm clock, which he used to dim the glow at night. Three o’clock in the morning—still almost two hours from sunrise.
He had worked into the late hours of the night after Orpheus left the sheriff’s office. He had been trying to look at the case from a new angle—one that didn’t involve werewolves—and kept finding himself arriving at the same conclusions. Those bodies had been eaten. There were tooth marks on the bones. It had to be werewolves, no matter what the angel said.
Lincoln had only surrendered to sleep an hour earlier, and it had been the longest, nightmarish hour of sleep in his life. It felt like he had been in Hell for eternities.
Somehow, he knew that the scraping at his door was the Devil herself again.
He pushed the sheets aside, grabbed his firearm from the safe—he had forgotten to lock it the night before—and loaded it as he approached his front door. His skin burned like the fires of Hell. He paused to jack up his air conditioner, even though it was already sixty-eight degrees. It was hot, too hot.
Easing the curtains aside, he peered through the window.
And then he flung the door open with a curse.
Elise was collapsed on his doorstep. At least, he thought it had to be Elise. He couldn’t think of any other woman with black hair and black eyes that would visit him at three o’clock in the morning. But all of her sensual confidence was absent. She was drenched in blood. Vomit was puddled next to her. She reached for him with black-nailed hands, but not for sex.
“Help,” Elise croaked. Her voice bubbled in her throat.
“Mother of God,” Lincoln said.
Orpheus had said that there would be consequences if Lincoln touched her again. If he’d had an ounce of sense, he would have shut the door. But as grave as Orpheus’s threats had seemed earlier that day, they were meaningless now with an injured woman on his doorstep. Lincoln had joined the sheriff’s department to save people. To help the folks that needed salvation. And here was the neediest soul of all, begging him for help.
He gathered her into his arms. She was even lighter than she looked, as if hollow-boned.
Lincoln glanced around at the other duplexes. There was no motion. That didn’t mean that nobody was watching.
He stepped inside and bumped the door shut with his hip.
Lincoln said a prayer as he ran the bath. The water heater was ancient; it took forever to reach a steaming temperature. He moistened a sponge and offered it to Elise. She shivered when she curled her fingers around it, though the water was scalding.
“What happened to you?” he asked.
Elise tried to respond. He saw her lips and tongue move, but only a croak escaped her mouth. When she tipped her head back, he saw why—her throat was destroyed. It was the kind of injury that he had seen on three of the bodies in the morgue. The kind of injury that nobody should have been able to walk away from.
Lincoln was no pussy. He had experienced multiple compound fractures in his college football days, sustained a concussion, and watched one player knock out all of his teeth during training. But the sight of Elise trying to draw breaths through the flaps of skin at her throat made him feel faint.
“Jesus,” he whispered.
She gave him a hard look, as if to say, Really? Apparently, she didn’t like any of his favorite religious epithets.
“Werewolf?” Lincoln asked.
She nodded.
He knew it. But the surge of victory he felt was bittersweet.
“I’m calling an ambulance,” Lincoln said, standing. Elise caught his pajamas by the waist and tugged him down, shaking her head. “You’re going to die without medical attention.” Frankly, it was shocking that she wasn’t dead already.
She shook her head again. Pointed at the door.
He frowned. “I don’t understand.”
Elise pointed more insistently, and he realized that she was indicating the light switch, not the door. His duplex had been furnished to Mrs. Kitteridge’s taste, which happened to include a large vanity in the bathroom, with five bright bulbs the size of his fist.
She had been trying to avoid sunlight all day. Could the vanity’s lights be hurting her, too?
Lincoln flipped the switch.
It was unsettling to sit on the floor between a bleeding woman and his still-running bathtub without any lights. Her pale flesh gleamed through the streaks of blood, as if she glowed internally.
“Is that better?” he asked.
She nodded. One-handed, she unbuckled her spine sheath, dropped the falchion to the floor, and handed him the sponge.
Lincoln turned to wet it down again. When he turned back, Elise was stripping off her shirt.
He couldn’t see the mess of injuries in the darkness—only the outline of a black bra, the translucent globes of her breasts, the curve of her undamaged face.
He’d been to a strip club for a bachelor party, once. The moron had been marrying at twenty-one years old, and Bud was still so new to legal drinking that he had wanted to get wasted while coked-out whores rubbed against him. The girls had fine bodies, even finer than some of Lincoln’s cheerleader girlfriends. The silicone tits and surgically flattened stomachs had reset Lincoln’s standards for female perfection.
Those standards were getting reset again. There was nothing plastic about Elise’s body. She was silken flesh over tight muscle. She had to be missing ribs to have a waist that tiny. The gashes on her stomach almost looked like a strange gray tattoo that drew his gaze from her navel to her hips.
She dropped her shirt in his trash can. Pale fingers flashed as she popped the button of her jeans open. She had taken off one of her gloves, but left the other in place.
“Bath,” she said. Her voice was already clearer than before. “Help.”
Lincoln shut his eyes and said a prayer, and then another, to be sure. He did it silently. He didn’t want to tolerate Elise’s pitying looks, as if she knew something about his prayers that he didn’t.
He helped her to her feet, letting Elise cling to him as she shimmied out of her damaged jeans. Soon, she stood in front of him wearing nothing but her underwear: black boy shorts and a bandeau bra. Not exactly lingerie. But Lincoln’s blood burned, and he was all too aware of the place that her hands rested on his biceps.
The thought of shoving her bra over her breasts, watching them bounce free of the spandex, was all-consuming. He wanted to taste them. Just thinking about it made him smell sulfur again, the way he had in the dream.
“Camera,” she said. “Quickly.”
He blinked, snapping out of his fantasies. “Miss Kavanagh…”
“Elise.”
It was kind of ridiculous to call a woman by her last name when she was naked in his bathroom. But Lincoln needed every last barrier between them that he could manage. “Why do you want a camera?”
“Jaw radius,” she said, voice breaking on the second word.
Realization dawned over him. She had werewolf bite wounds on her throat and arms. She wanted photographic evidence to compare her injuries to those on the bodies in the morgue.
Lincoln was obsessing over what she would look like without the bra, and she was thinking about the case.
“Quickly,” she said again. “I’m healing.”
He set her on the edge of the tub and grabbed supplies: his long-neglected digital camera, fresh batteries, and a pen. He couldn’t find a ruler, so that would have to do for scaling the wounds.
When he returned to the dark bathroom, Elise had lowered herself into the water, underwear and glove and all, with her arms propped on either side of the tub.
“I have to use flash,” he said, sliding batteries into the camera. “It’s too dark otherwise.”
She nodded, consenting wordlessly.
Elise held the pen beside the bite wound on her bicep as he took pictures from every angle. The blood was quickly washing away, forming billowing clouds in the water, but the wounds looked so much worse in the brief flares of light. She had been shredded. Her skin was like tissue paper. And the blood itself…
“Is that blood?” Lincoln asked.
Elise tipped her jaw back and held the pen beside her neck.
“Kind of,” she croaked.
“How can it be kind of blood?”
“Long story.”
Lincoln took a photo of the damage at her throat. It was already knitting together, but the tooth punctures were still clear.
He sat back on his heels to go through the pictures. From the first photo to the last, there was noticeable healing.
“You didn’t need my help to survive, did you?” he asked.
“No,” Elise said. “But I needed you to take pictures.”
She wiped at her arm with the sponge. The worst of the bite was already healed. Only the imprint of teeth remained.
Lincoln couldn’t help but watch as she sponged off her legs, lifting them from the water one by one to wash away the kind-of-blood. It didn’t tint the water pink. It slicked the surface, more like amber-colored oil.
“Thank you,” she said, drawing his gaze back to her face. Elise was wiping her partially-healed throat clean. There was still the circle of tooth marks on either side of her neck, but everything else had regrown as soon as she washed the wounds.
Lincoln cleared his throat. “I’ll get you a towel.”
He left fresh linens for her on the counter, then returned to his bedroom, pacing from the window to the door and back again.
Elise Kavanagh’s soul was damned. Her body was sin. The angel was right—Lincoln should have stayed far, far away.
His door creaked open.
Elise stood in the hall, toweling off her hair. It didn’t look wet to him. It was the same as always: a silky black sheet that fell straight to her waist, framing pale shoulders. She was still wearing only her underwear, and there was no hint of self-consciousness in her expression. She was aware of her perfection, and without shame.
