Harlequin Nocturne May 2015 Box Set: Wolf HunterPossessed by a Wolf

by Linda Thomas-Sundstrom

  By leaving with the Weres, the meager tie with her father would be severed for good. His face, and the disgust on it, told her that.

  Abby let the brown wolf lead her away. She didn’t look back. Her wolf had announced itself with evidence of its true nature, and the old Abby Stark had to accept the consequences.

  “I’m not human.” She repeated her new mantra as she picked up her pace to match the werewolves’ long strides, leaving everything she’d known until that moment behind.

  For good.

  Chapter 19

  Cameron lifted his head from the wall to sniff the balmy air coming through the open window. His heart gave one solid thump.

  “I feel you out there, Abby.”

  He still hurt badly, but the edge of the pain had subsided. He could track the progress of the silver with his eyes closed or open. From the bandaged hole in his upper chest, tentacles of the substance spread outward in a design similar to a child’s depiction of rays coming off the sun. Those tentacles had solidified. Some of them were visible through his skin.

  Although the process had been halted somewhat by the bullet having been removed so quickly, added to whatever Mrs. Landau had done to help the matter, he felt each and every ache the spread of silver caused. On the positive side, he was alive and breathing, and able to perceive in the breeze coming from the window the signs of Abby’s distress.

  She was scared, and calling.

  Cameron looked down at himself to estimate his energy level. His body heat had waned, due, he guessed, to the damage caused by the bullet. He was naked, but his pants hung on the back of the chair. With shaky hands, he reached for the jeans. He had to get to Abby. Their bond demanded action and her protection. As mates, she had become his responsibility, though he would have felt responsible for her, anyway. His illness equated to a temporary setback, that was all.

  What might happen when the others found her?

  Chances were slim this wolf pack would bring Abby here, exposing so much of their lives to a person they had long considered an enemy. Maybe they had another place in mind.

  He stepped into his jeans carefully, smelling the small droplets of blood on the denim that had scattered from the wound in his chest, and ignoring the stains.

  The reasoning process would not stop. He’d been a cop for too long, where suppositions and educated guesses often helped in solving cases. But he’d never have guessed what lay behind the Landau walls. Not many people knew about this compound, or what the Landau family did here, he’d be willing to bet. He had been privileged to garner an invitation, and lucky that members of this pack had been willing to help him in a time of duress.

  Hell, he could have died out there tonight.

  Dana Delmonico’s words about Dylan Landau came back to him. The werewolf who saved my ass.

  It seemed to him that the wolves in Landau’s pack saved a lot of asses, so maybe one more rescue wouldn’t break the hospitality bank.

  He glanced to the door, figuring that someone might try to stop him before he reached the house’s ground floor if he’d been listed on the roster as an invalid. Surely they’d try to stop him if his face reflected the way he felt at the moment.

  The door was not an option.

  Cameron winced as he looked to the window. Jumping from the sill was the only way out, though he wasn’t sure he’d survive such a fall in his present state. Somewhere inside his head a hammer struck repeatedly at a steel plate, causing his ears to ring and his teeth to ache. His shaky limbs threatened to fail if he moved too fast in any direction. The last time he’d felt like this was that night, in the beginning, and the events that had kicked this wolf thing off.

  Before that, he’d been just a guy, a cop dedicated to his job. Now, the night called to him. He somehow knew that Abby’s first shift was imminent—if not tonight, then soon. And if that didn’t happen on this night, she had to possess a special ability to ward off her wolf for as long as possible.

  An ability like that would come in handy.

  However, it all came back to how Abby had been infected by the wolf virus, how lethal the strain was and how long she had carried it inside her.

  “Have to get to her,” he said aloud through chattering teeth.

  The whole imprinting thing was a royal pain in the behind.

  “But it is what it is.”

  The shutters retracted fully with a scrape of wood on stucco. Cameron had to lift his dragging left leg onto the sill with both hands in order to climb up.

  Someone had told him that being in wolf form might help the healing process, since the wolf was so much stronger than the human. He hoped to God that was right. Yet there was no telling what the shift itself might do to him in this condition.

  The thought of his wounded chest expanding brought up bile. The idea of his spine stretching made him grimace. But he wasn’t of any use to his mate cooped up in some bedroom on a strange estate with his body out of commission. His thrashed body ached to get to Abby as much as it ached to lie down and recover. Odds were decent that he’d make it.

  Perched on the window ledge, Cameron gauged the distance to the ground. Three stories seemed doable, maybe. He needed the wolf.

  Moonlight found him, caught him in its luminous embrace. The light brought more cold and waves of chills before melting through his top layer of skin. Each layer the light descended lessened the cold. He grew warmer as it worked its way inside, and he offered the moon his face. The pounding in his head ceased abruptly as muscles began their dance. His spine cracked. All ten claws sprung at once.

  Cameron stared at his hands as other features began to morph in slow motion. Inhaling moonlight, his chest broadened, pulling the bandaged bullet hole out of proportion. He growled with pain, and closed his eyes to try to gain a foothold on the objective at hand.

  Find Abby.

  Hearing the door to the room swing open behind him, Cameron turned to look. The gray-haired woman with the kind face stood on the threshold wearing a stern expression.

  “I’ve yet to meet a young wolf with a single shred of common sense,” she said.

  Using what energy he had leftover from the shape-shift in progress, Cameron smiled at Dylan’s mother, thinking the likeness between Dylan and Mrs. Landau a positive ID.

  “Have to,” he said in a grunt of apology for spoiling her healing work.

  “I suppose you do,” she returned.

  Sliding sideways, he found a wrought-iron railing covered by the shingles of the overhanging roof, and from there he climbed down through the shadows with his claws digging into the wood. Racked with pain and sore from the inside out, he descended the floors like a monkey, without the need to jump.

  Waves of pain doubled him over when he reached the grass. It was too much exertion, too soon. Hands on his knees, he shuddered through a few long breaths, still in the shadows of the house, and eyeing the line of moonlight just inches away from him. Then he brought his head up.

  Someone watched him from the dark patch of grass near the front porch. The Were moved forward to the edge of the light coming from a window above its head. Cameron waited without straightening up.

  “It’s about time,” Dana Delmonico said smartly. “I was beginning to wonder if you’d died up there.”

  It took a moment for him to reply. “Nope. Just evading the posse. Aren’t you part of that posse?”

  “Hell, Mitchell, I’m here to help your decrepit carcass over that big wall. And by the way, you look like hell.”

  The situation remained dire. Partly shifted, he did feel like hell. In spite of that, Cameron smiled fully with an emotion resembling honest-to-goodness appreciation for this woman.

  “So what’s stopping you?” he said, shoving himself upright. “Bring it on.”

  * * *

  Abby had no i
dea where these Weres were taking her, though the direction was north. The only things bordering the park on the northern side were Cuban-generated businesses and rows of supermarket warehouses. Beyond those things lay a stretch of suburban homes considered by many people to be on the wrong side of the tracks.

  She began to get worried. Heck, she’d been worried from the get-go. The image of the way Sam had raised the rifle and aimed it at her heart played over and over in her mind. The words he’d used weighed heavily.

  Just like her.

  Right that moment, she understood his dilemma. She had claws.

  But what about being his daughter? Did that count for so little?

  Her mind flashed on who the two wolves guiding her through the night might be. Nice guys? Rescue mission? She hoped for both of those things, and that Cameron sent them.

  Her arm still hurt, but the muscle around it had gone numb. The unwieldy claws she wasn’t used to hadn’t disappeared, and scratched at her thighs as she ran. Each new scratch made the two werewolves beside her growl, as if the scent of her blood incited them in some way that harkened back to wilder times than these, when the blood lure was upon them.

  But really...no way could she imagine wilder times.

  Unfolding events were nerve-racking, and yet she was alive, and according to the female wolf she’d met earlier, Cameron was alive, too. That’s all that mattered at the moment. She had to hang on to the fact that someone waited for her, wanted her, called to her, in a world that had grown increasingly cold and lonely and dangerous.

  It was too late to go back.

  The wolves beside her had incredible strength and speed, contained enough to keep her alongside. When the warehouses came into view, they slowed, circled east and bounded through a series of dark, unpopulated streets and alleys where only people with nefarious businesses dared to show themselves after midnight.

  No one saw them. At least, she didn’t think so.

  “Cameron,” Abby whispered so the sound wouldn’t echo off the walls of the warehouses, sending her thoughts along the connection binding them. “Cameron, can you hear me?”

  They passed the buildings at light speed. The wolves didn’t shift back and forth as they raced in and out of the shadows and the moonlight, proving they had some control over their shapes. Abby kept a tight hold herself, realizing she might slip further from humanness the longer she remained in the presence of these wolves.

  Hindsight couldn’t be avoided. She knew now, from the sensations flowing through her, that wolfishness had been coming on for some time. Capping this were her empathetic reactions to Cameron’s shape-shift that had left her shaken and weak.

  Possibly that event had kicked off the actual physical changes leading to the appearance of her claws. A case of wolf by osmosis, maybe, or by association.

  The farther they got from the park, the sicker she felt. There was too much moonlight, and too much wolf to avoid the pain of the claws. Again Sam’s words came to the fore, as if he had just spoken them. Just like her.

  Her...

  He had been speaking about her mother—meaning that her mother must also have been rebellious or immune to Sam’s continuous demands. Maybe Sam had been a hunter back then, too, and her mother had disapproved.

  How was she going to find any of this out now, when it was obvious she couldn’t go home?

  They entered suburban territory before her wolf guides finally slowed. Neither of these wolves breathed hard, though she had to struggle. They pulled up by the side of a small duplex with a stone fence, and went right up to the door. One of them put a muscled shoulder to the wood, and the door opened wide enough to show a dark room beyond.

  She did not want to go in there. But both wolves waited beside the door until she did.

  Chapter 20

  Cameron huffed as he joined Delmonico on top of the wall. He watched her traverse the narrow ledge with a grace more indicative of a cat than a wolf. Her fur raised and rippled in the moonlight with her excitement. Blood had been spilled in the park beyond the safety of the Landau estate. Wolf blood. Delmonico smelled it, just as he did.

  His shift continued in earnest.

  Excruciating pain arrived in seconds. The sounds he made were blasphemous. Pondering how many times his body might be able to take this kind of torture, Cameron completed his transformation crouched on one knee.

  Delmonico waited patiently. When he finally stood, she nodded her head and preceded him to the ground in an area he hadn’t explored on what had to be the northern side of parkland. Delmonico didn’t stop to show him a map or acknowledge the grunts of leftover pain he coughed up. She started out at a lope on well-honed legs conditioned to chase after things, assuming he’d keep up.

  Damn if he wouldn’t.

  They moved in and out of the trees on the park’s periphery. The hour had to be late. Few cars passed by on the road beyond their sightlines. Residents of this section of the city had long since tucked themselves in.

  And then, before he knew it, they were out of the park, sprinting along white lines in the center of the road. Not long after that, Cameron began to recognize things. When his internal GPS placed him on the outskirts of his own neighborhood, his mind cleared despite the awful lingering sharpness of the pain radiating from behind the gauze taped to his chest.

  His block. His street.

  He glanced at Delmonico questioningly, but she kept running, right past his fence and up the steps of his front porch.

  Cameron had scented wolf presence from halfway around the block. Dead center in the tangle of those smells laid the heady fragrance he had been searching for. Abby’s lush scent mingled with the metallic tang of werewolf blood.

  Abby was here.

  He blew through the wolves manning the door, and into his living room, skidding to a stop on the polished wood floor. Excitement kept his wolf front and center until he beheld the familiar stubborn look of defiance on Abby’s beautiful face.

  Cameron waited for her invitation to approach. I’m here, Abby. You’re all right?

  She didn’t reach for the knife strapped to her leg, and reluctantly met his eyes.

  There it was: the snap of the meeting of their souls. The bond that tied them together with an undeniably intimate connection. Nothing else mattered—not his lousy condition, the presence of his wolf or the fact that others might be observing this reunion. He wanted to touch her, and didn’t dare. Not yet.

  When Abby finally spoke, her voice broke. “Sam tried to kill me.”

  Cameron continued to stare at her without being able to console. Touching her when looking the way he did might be another kind of blasphemy, and scare her to death.

  She looked so damn hurt.

  Closing his eyes, building a wall against the level of the pain sure to come, he began his shift reversal by willing his wolfishness inward. The power of his need to hold Abby, to be with Abby, drove his rugged exterior back to a more manageable shape. It wasn’t easy. Not even close. But the wolf eventually drew back to expose a human configuration.

  Crushing blows of pain hit him, returning from wherever the pain had been hiding with the wolf in charge. He immediately wanted to wolf-up again in order to withstand this kind of trauma, but held out against it. When he opened his eyes, he reached for her with smooth human hands.

  Abby took a step back.

  “It’s what we are,” he said, ignoring the quakes that still rocked him. “You and me, Abby. However it happened, and whatever comes next, we can face this. We have to. And we’re not alone.”

  She looked tired, frail, gaunt, and no wonder. Sam had tried to kill her? Was it even possible to wish harm upon a beautiful soul like hers?

  “I had no idea it was this bad,” he said.

  Abby’s gaze dropped to his chest, to the bandage above his heart.
She came forward tentatively, and rested her fingers lightly on his chest. “How badly does it hurt?”

  “I don’t think I’ll be liking silver anytime soon, or any other kind of flying bullets. I must have missed the class on ducking to avoid this kind of thing.”

  Abby’s fingers presented no painful pressure. She spoke in a low voice. “They think silver is effective because it’s like moonlight molded into metallic form. They believe that a substance mirroring moonlight injected deep into Were tissues can explode a wolf from the inside out, as if it’s too much of a good thing. I never understood that. If it’s like moonlight, which can heal as easily as it can transform, surely that’s a good thing?”

  “Or not,” Delmonico said from the hallway, where she leaned against the wall with her arms crossed, naked as a jaybird and not the least bit self-conscious.

  Abby’s attention transferred to Dana. “I met you in the park.”

  “You did.”

  “You helped Cameron.”

  “The guys by the front door are responsible for that.”

  Abby looked to the door, then again at the bandage on Cameron’s chest. “Silver is supposed to kill Weres when nothing else can.”

  “I’m not sure what it does exactly, or why,” he said. “But it hurts like hell. I was damn lucky to have had experienced help on the spot. Whatever they did was its own form of supernatural.”

  Abby looked up at him from beneath long lashes in a way that gave him a thrill. “I can’t go home,” she said.

  “You’ll stay here.”

  “Sam will find us.”

  “He’d have one hell of a time trying.”

  “I can’t stay.”

  Cameron waited for her to explain herself.

  “I have to do something about them,” she finally said.

  “Them, Abby?”

  “The hunters. Sam’s hunters.”

  She faced Delmonico. “They think you’re all monsters. They will never give up what they do out there. They will never stop.”

  “We know that,” Delmonico said.