Desert Wolf

by Linda Thomas-Sundstrom

  *

  Paxton was so white and dazed, Grant shook her gently to regain her focus, determined to carry her back to town, if necessary.

  There was a faraway look in her eyes that he didn’t like. She swayed slightly on her feet. Paxton had turned inward.

  He wondered if fear caused her glassy-eyed state, or if it was due to the shock of her first shape-shift. She had retreated, and all he could do was try to make her understand the danger they might be in if they dallied too long in the open.

  “Talk to me,” he said to her.

  “Grant,” Ben warned. “Pressure is building out there.”

  “Go on,” Grant directed. “Get to town.”

  “Not without you,” Ben said.

  With a firm hold of Paxton’s shoulders, Grant said, “Damn it, Paxton. Where have you gone? Tell me what you see.”

  Her large amber eyes didn’t meet his or show any indication that she’d heard him. Shifting again in order to carry Paxton the rest of the way to Desperado at a sprint wasn’t a trick he’d like to perform with his body already quaking from the inside out, but he was game to attempt that if he had to. Still, saving strength was necessary, and he figured he had only one more good shift in him tonight before his body gave out.

  “I can take Paxton,” Ben said.

  The jealousy Ben’s offer induced was vastly out of proportion with the situation they found themselves in. Grant couldn’t stand the thought of anyone else laying hands on his she-wolf. He wasn’t going to allow that. Could not allow it.

  “No one will touch you,” he sent to her, adding aloud, “You were right when you said that no one could possibly understand what you’re going through. You didn’t know. No one told you what to expect.”

  Her skin would be supersensitive and feverish. She would feel like she had been through hell and back. Paxton’s insides would feel like they had turned to jelly, and he could see she was having trouble regulating her breathing, due to the extreme distress of the shock to her system. Grant had a feeling Paxton was also fighting something unrelated to that shift, and as new to the game as she was, had found a way to cordon that other thing off from him.

  “Grant,” Ben said in a low tone meant to get them moving.

  “Yes,” Grant returned with his gaze steady on Paxton. “Time to go.”

  But, by then, it was already too late.

  Chapter 27

  The night began to roll toward them. That was the only way Grant could have described the sensation of being trapped inside a moving pressure cooker.

  Ben and the other Weres beside him circled their alpha and the newest she-wolf, hands raised, wooden clubs ready to do some damage to whatever was using the darkness for cover. They didn’t wait long before their belief that this was a lone rogue attack was shot down. This was no wolf attack, and vampire was a term no one wanted to accept.

  Sections of the landscape around them grew darker with a black mist that blotted out scenery beyond their small circle. From the mist came high-pitched chattering, the kind of sounds made by old telephone wires. The strangeness of those sounds brought a terror that Grant quickly shook off.

  “Who are you and what do you want here?” he called out, realizing that any attempt to run back to Desperado now would be futile.

  Bracing himself, Grant gathered Paxton closer, feeling the warmth and temporary comfort of having her body pressed to his. He withheld the impulse to shift, waiting for the right moment when his strength would be needed most.

  Everyone with him understood that this new dilemma facing them was evil and were at a loss to conceptualize it. When a white face appeared like a glow light in the middle of the traveling black mist, they all took an involuntary step back.

  Gaunt to the point of being skeletal, with red-rimmed black eyes in deep sockets and malice in its emaciated expression, the white-faced creature that appeared before them brought a whole new meaning to the word monster. Freak was the description Grant’s mind dug up. Combined with the term death, the existence of vampires became a terrible reality.

  There was to be no discourse. Grant supposed the abomination facing them couldn’t talk. He had no idea what animated the dead or the kinds of characteristics vampires possessed. But he could sense the thing’s raging, insatiable need for blood.

  As the black mist floated closer, more faces appeared. Two. Three. The pressure these walking corpses caused on Grant’s system was outrageous, squeezing his lungs, compressing the rest of him. Tight against his side, Paxton chose that moment to move. She shivered and tensed as if only then becoming aware of where she was.

  She looked up at him with beguiling amber eyes, and he could not comfort her or tell her things were all right. He couldn’t allow himself to think of her at all when the situation was grim and his promise to protect her was about to be tested.

  The black tide swept forward. Those awful chattering noises filled Grant’s ears until he wanted to cover them with his hands.

  “That’s right. Come and get us,” he snapped. “Try.”

  Beside him, wooden clubs swung at the creeping blackness with powerful strokes. Grant heard Ben swear. Someone else groaned as the clubs, singing their own kind of violent song, connected with an enemy’s arm or shoulder. The time had come for him to jump in, but in order to fight he’d have to let go of Paxton, which was his worst fear.

  In the end, she instigated the separation by stepping back. Her shaking turned convulsive. Her mind buzzed with jolts of wayward electricity that Grant felt as if they were his own. There was a sudden rise of temperature in air that had gone icy. Grant fought the cold front facing him by merging with the heat of his wolf.

  Yes. Let’s get this over with, freaks!

  The vampires arrived too fast to track their movements, the first appallingly ugly face inches away from Grant before he could blink. Its mouth opened to show off a pair of sharp yellow fangs. Its breath was beyond fetid.

  Swathed in black, the rest of this creature’s body was difficult to see, even for a Were with exceptional abilities. Grant willed his wolf into existence with the human equivalent of a growl and a snap of mounding muscles. The energy accessed for this latest transition from man to werewolf threw off enough heat to prevent the vampire from immediately traversing the rest of those inches.

  Duly noted. You don’t like heat.

  Grant filed that fact away as he raised claws sharper than the vamp’s treacherous teeth and planted his feet in preparation for this meeting. Roaring a dangerous warning to the fanged aggressors, he opened his arms wide in invitation.

  Undeterred, the vampires circled the Were party, snapping their fangs, seeming to float like the mist that had at first hidden them.

  I have no time for games.

  Tired of waiting, Grant sprang toward one pasty-faced freak with his own fangs bared. Their bodies met with a thud. The damn vampire’s body felt like ice. As bony as the freak was, Grant’s lunge hadn’t sent it stumbling in the opposite direction.

  Ben and the others were silent now, which added to the eerie sensation of having been swallowed by the dark.

  With terrible insight, Grant realized his packmates wouldn’t be able to fight off these vampires, and that he, being the only Lycan here and able to fight at full strength, would have to take the brunt of this attack.

  “Hang tight,” he sent to his pack as the tips of two razor-sharp fangs grazed first his arm, then his left shoulder, in a blur of movement.

  Anger rising, Grant narrowed his focus and tuned in. With wolf energy flowing through him, he again met the white-faced freak. One good shove, followed by a fast misdirection, and Grant had a hand around the vampire’s neck. The creature fought like a madman, with hatred in its dull black eyes. Hatred for the living. For warmth. For werewolves, who were the epitome of warm-blooded life.

  Grant had never met a creature like this one, or knew anyone who had. Except for that rogue Lycan, who seemed to know a lot of things no one else did.

  Th
e vampire got free, ducked and parried with a series of actions almost too fast to see. Darting in and back, sideways and forward in an endless battering, the creature seemed frighteningly tireless. Grant fought the bloodsucker with an as-yet untested skill set, whirling, lunging to keep the fangs away from his neck. Those fangs would have sliced through the hide of a steer with no effort at all, and nearly reached Grant’s jugular more times than Grant cared to count.

  In what had to look like a bizarre danse macabre, Grant renewed his efforts. At last, by calling upon every last bit of his strength, he managed to get his claws into the speedy abomination’s ragged clothes and spin it around.

  Should have tried this naked, freak.

  A sharp keening wail came from the throat of the vampire. The sound was magnified by the other vampires moving inside scattering mist. Two more wails echoed that one, which meant that Ben and the others truly hadn’t taken any vampires down.

  It was at that moment, as Grant looked into the creature’s sallow face, that he saw who the damn vampire’s focus was actually trained on and who that vampire wanted to get to so badly. The surprise nearly made him loosen his hold on the creature. His anger went red-hot and felt like a living thing. Paxton stood where he had left her, and the vampire’s gaze was riveted to her.

  As the bloodsucker struggled and worked its canines, Grant realized with horror that the vampires might not have come to face off with the Weres at all.

  It seemed that everybody wanted a piece of Paxton Hall.

  The only real question now was why.

  *

  With a volcanic heat overtaking her, Paxton watched the fight as if separated from it by a mile. The edges of her thoughts were blurring, just like the landscape was.

  Deep, murky blackness cloaked the remnants of the memory that had been shoved aside by events taking place around her. But the epiphany had been to remember she had seen werewolves before, long ago. And she had seen vampires. What she couldn’t recall were the specifics.

  Paxton closed her eyes. Desperado held the key to all of this—the attack tonight, the rogue on the loose in the area and her father’s wish to close the ghost town the same year he had sent her away.

  How many times had she gone over this, searching for reasons for that separation? The questions had become fixtures in her nightmares. Why had she been sent away? Why had her dad never made contact with her? Why had Andrew Hall recruited an alpha wolf of Grant Wade’s stature to protect the place? Because, in bringing Grant here, her father had to have known about werewolves, just as Grant had told her. And if he was up on werewolves, her dad must also have known she was one of them.

  She had a sense of pieces starting to fall into place too slowly, and that everyone here had to live long enough to help her with that.

  Desperado. What other secrets do you hold for me?

  Paxton reopened her eyes with a start. Spectral forms were attacking and regrouping with astonishing dexterity. Only the white faces of these attackers were visible. Their death masks. She was awake enough to see them now, and that the Weres were holding them off.

  As the cold these monsters brought with them met with the fire of her anger, sparks of energy imploded inside her, waking her beast, kicking into motion another shape-shift. Paxton dropped to the dirt, dizzy with a fresh rush of adrenaline. Hands in the sand, she gasped for air and rode out what she knew was the second birthing of her wolf.

  It didn’t take long this time, from start to finish. In less than a minute she was on her feet. She didn’t run the other way to save herself, wasn’t about to let others fight to protect what was rightfully hers. The town. The ranch. Her heritage. That’s the way Grant had put it. Heritage. She had been slow to realize he hadn’t been talking about anything tangible. Grant had been alluding to her species and how she had come to be one of them.

  She was not going to allow Grant or anyone else to be harmed because of her. Losing Grant Wade would be the worst thing since she had long ago lost everything else.

  For several seconds more, she watched him fight. Grant the werewolf was fast and fluid. His muscles were spectacularly sculpted. His back was a thing of real beauty. He moved as if he was a principal dancer in a choreographed routine, darting here and there to keep his hold on the monster captured in his claws. In silhouette, Grant’s chiseled man-wolf profile gave him the look of a pagan god.

  He was fighting for Desperado. He was fighting to protect Ben, Shirleen and the others in his desert pack. And he was fighting for her.

  God, how she loved him for that.

  When the vampire’s eyes moved to her—those terrible, empty, red-rimmed eyes—Paxton’s fear levels did not escalate. Instead, she experienced a thrilling sense of rightness and of being in the right place at the right time to discover another clue to this mystery. Suddenly she felt incredibly strong. The power sparking inside her made her willing to use her new strength to stop those ghastly eyes from turning her way.

  One step was all it took to channel her anger about this attack on her lover and his friends. Without thinking twice, she rushed in to join Grant. He tossed her a worried look, but her wolf ruled her actions now. Whirling, she undercut the vampire’s spindly legs with her own. The monster was too wily to go down, so she jumped on its back, going for its face with both clawed hands.

  Someone pulled her off. Paxton growled as she was lifted by the waist and tossed off-balance, but she jumped back to Grant to help with the sucker in his grasp.

  She was too late. Another furred-up werewolf had replaced her efforts—this one far larger, much stronger, with superior fighting skills.

  Grant had told her very few werewolves had the ability to shape-shift without the presence of a full moon, so who was this? Which one of his pack members also possessed this trick?

  Night overlapped night. Frenzied activity created clouds of dirt. Grant’s packmates were fighting for their lives now, and though she was tired, she wasn’t helpless.

  Paxton moved back in again with the fury of a lioness whose cubs had been taken away. She couldn’t allow Grant to be hurt, to be harmed, not only because he was needed here, but because he was hers.

  He was hers body and soul.

  And both of them knew it.

  Thawed by the energy she radiated, and not particularly adept at fighting, Paxton clawed and kicked her way back into the deadly skirmish. White faces, gaunt faces, spun inside their black camouflage until the sound of a muted explosion reached her, and the vampire that had been wrestling with Grant disintegrated in a freaky shower of dark gray ash.

  Terrible shrieking wails rent the night before the white-faced fang bearers receded back into the hovering mist and the mist retreated suddenly, as if blown away by an invisible wind, taking the horror and reality of the vampire attack with it.

  The night again went quiet. No one moved. Paxton’s heart beat as hard and as steady as any of theirs.

  Ben and the other two Weres had been left standing and were looking at each other in disbelief. A fine layer of falling gray ash coated their shoulders. More of it swirled in the air like a drift of discolored snow.

  “Grant?”

  No reply to her call came, and Paxton saw why. Grant stood a good distance to her left in his werewolf form, his eyes and attention fixed on a large male werewolf she didn’t recognize.

  He was a big sucker with a lethally powerful appearance. He had dark brown hair and mounds of muscle similar to Grant’s, but was both taller and broader. Nothing else, either in his looks or his demeanor, resembled her lover. Paxton’s first impression was that this Were had been a werewolf much longer than anyone else present and was far more experienced.

  The newcomer must have been the Were who had pulled her off the vampire. In helping to fight off the vampires, this guy had turned the tide.

  Neither of the large males spoke through their thoughts, as far as Paxton could tell. Grant didn’t appear to be pleased to see this guy. He was tense, antsy. His claws dug into the sides
of his jeans.

  The two Weres faced each other like this was some kind of new showdown, without a ripple of movement from either of them. Then the larger Were’s eyes drifted to her, pinning Paxton with the bright intensity of their interest and sending her stomach into free fall.

  Chapter 28

  Grant gritted his teeth as the rogue faced him—the elusive Lycan, in the flesh, larger than life, intimidating as hell and covered with scars that should have healed the way most wounds did for their kind.

  Streaks of gray-peppered hair hung past a pair of massive shoulders. He wore no shirt, and Grant supposed no human-made shirt would have fit this guy all wolfed-up like he was now. They had chased this Lycan for months, and here he stood, dangerously powerful and open to their inspection.

  The idea of the Were they had called a beast and a monster coming to aid this pack was curious, as was the warning the Were had given about their attention needing to be turned elsewhere. Putting two and two together, it was obvious the big wolf had known about the vampires. More of a heads-up would have been nice.

  The big wolf had pale eyes that shone like lanterns in an unrecognizable face stretched to an abnormal length by his transformation from man to his wolfish state. As those eyes landed on Paxton, Grant strained against the urge to grab that wolf by the throat if he so much as inched in Paxton’s direction. Luckily, that didn’t happen, and the big wolf’s disconcertingly rapt attention returned to Grant.

  “Those creatures are gone, and yet you remain,” Grant sent. “No running away. No hiding this time. Could it be you’re waiting for something else to happen? Maybe you think those fanged bastards will return.”

  Taking a chance backed by intuition, Grant tucked his wolf back inside. The pain accompanying this latest shape-shift was staggering in scope, hinting that it would do him in if he tried another one anytime soon. More beats of time passed before he got his human act together. His voice wavered when he spoke.