Moon Marked
Linda Thomas-Sundstrom
In the secret war between humans and werewolves, Jonathan Baird and Nikki Reese were natural enemies. Born with the genetic gifts needed to join the secret society of hunters, Nikki had been raised to see all Lycans as her enemy…even if hunting them brought on a powerful craving for sexual release.
It was that craving that drew werewolf Jonathan to Nikki. Though he also sought the rogue creatures that threatened the secrecy of his people’s existence, his organization sent him to watch her…but he lusted after her, too. When a hunt goes bad and Nikki is infected with the Lycan virus, Jonathan couldn’t resist coming to her aid, igniting an insatiable desire between them. Will their passion bring together the two rivals, or will old loyalties die hard?
CHAPTER ONE
The temperature was somewhere between hot and hell.
Leaning against the sun-soaked brick of an old apartment building, Nikki Reese rolled her shoulders to move the trickle of perspiration from between her shoulder blades, silently cursing the fine folks who proclaimed leather the best choice for protective gear.
Her skin was on fire beneath the tight leather pants and vest. True enough, though, the airy blue hospital scrubs worn for her day job wouldn’t turn away a pair of razor-sharp canines coming her way with intent to do damage. Which made leather her friend, her armor, her ally in the war between humans and Others in Miami, where a full moon brought out the worst in its citizens.
So, what mattered most? Comfort, or life?
“Life, hands down,” she affirmed, flicking her gaze from the dark spaces separating the buildings to the moonlight overhead.
Tonight, the moon was huge, round-faced and bright enough to cause retinal damage since no one had yet invented infrared Ray-Bans. And although the mottled silver disc in the sky provided enough light to see by, there were plenty of dark places left for moon-ruled monsters to drag unsuspecting souls into.
Like the alley across from her.
“Damned if I’ll let that happen.”
She kept her attention narrowed on that alley. Five more minutes, by her honed internal clock, and the moon would be full-bloat and straight up. Falling silver moonbeams would activate the creatures of Miami’s underbelly and draw them into the open. Not just the criminals, thugs, drug lords and other various human bloodsuckers occupying the seedier side of metropolitan neighborhoods, but the moon junkies, howlers, and her special targets, the reason she was here when she could have been sleeping: the human-wolf hybrids. Werewolves.
The word caused a flutter in Nikki’s stomach that was half fear, half thrill, and one hundred percent adrenaline rush.
“Who’s the adventure junkie now?” she muttered, attuned to the same spot where she had last seen one of her Others of choice. Last month. Twenty-eight days ago, when she’d hit a big male Were with a tranquilizer dart and it hadn’t even slowed him down.
Lessons learned? One: It’s always wise to overestimate the pharmaceuticals. Two: Never underestimate the long arm of the Miami P.D., whose street trawling had kept her from tagging her target, virtually ruining three months of planning, watching and waiting. Distracted midshot by flashing red lights, what should have been, given her ability with a gun, a bull’s-eye, had ended up a graze. She’d lost her target. Those pesky cops doing their job of keeping the peace could have gotten her killed.
Plus, if those fine officers had seen her in this sweltering leather getup, they might have found out who else patrolled their streets in the nighttime hours, and maybe even why. A secret agenda kept strictly on a need-to-know basis, as it had been for hundreds of years. Cops not on the invitation list.
“No one said it was going to be easy.”
Erasing the extraneous thoughts from her mind, Nikki felt something brush her consciousness. Wary, she brought her head up, seeing nothing but sensing a subtle shift in the air that her radar suggested was more than just heat rising off the hot pavement.
She knew this feeling seeping into her bones, way down deep, despite the second-skin armor. She had been craving, and at the same time, dreading, this particular oncoming Otherness.
There was no mistaking the signs. The alreadyscorching summer heat built to impossible levels for a short span of time, dispersing scent through the humid air that wasn’t human related. Not sweat, cologne, aftershave or hair gel. Not damp fur or dirty paws. Instead, a diluted mixture of those scents floated toward her like another layer of atmosphere that had been cooked in a furnace and then sent oozing toward the moonlight tipping the toes of her boots.
A tingle of apprehension manifested in the valley between her breasts, then shot downward toward her thighs in an almost sexual manner, high-alerting Nikki to the fact that the sucker somewhere in her immediate vicinity was male. For a hunter, confronting a werewolf of the opposite sex was akin to meeting a lover. The flush of anticipation. Intoxication of being near to something foreign in origin. Fear of the susceptibility of getting caught up in the moment and possibly winding up dead.
But she had been trained well, she reminded herself—fashioned into a fine-tuned mold by a system of checks and balances dating way back. She was one of only ten hunters in Miami. Ten per city was the deal someone had made with the devil, once upon a time, when werewolves and other creatures had been rare finds anywhere, let alone within a city’s limits. And when even human populations had been relatively sparse.
In the beginning, Nikki supposed, ten hunters might have been sufficient to have some control over Were packs, culling out the riffraff, maintaining a decent human-to-Other ratio. Now however, ten hunters seemed an absurdly insignificant number against the extremes of the escalating violence percolating up from the dark spaces. The new breed of werewolves were creating ganglike packs by biting innocent people and passing along several mutated strains of the ancient Lycan virus.
Hunters called this new phenomenon Dilution.
Supersaturation.
That human-to-Other ratio had changed dramatically in just the last twenty years. In a bad way. What was once one hunter per twelve or twenty werewolves was now one per a hundred, maybe more. True numbers were hard to grasp since some of those werewolves had gone underground, but the sheer magnitude of werewolf sightings in Miami alone, by her fellow hunters, had become mind-boggling, and posed a serious threat to the Homo sapiens population. Think very bad guys carrying around polluted Lycan blood that caused their minds to veer off track.
So, here she was. Nikki Reese, E.R. nurse in the daytime, werewolf hunter after hours. She’d taken an oath to help set the ratio straight, and she was hungry to do her part in keeping the peace as well as the secrets.
She might have been fairly new to hunting solo, but she’d been on enough runs to know the routine. Watch. Wait. Tag. Track. Drag. Which was exactly what she intended to do here, near this alley, big male Were, or not.
Slowly, with her eyes trained on the darkest spot, Nikki reached for her weapon, updated since her previous outing.
“Shoot first.” She raised the dart gun, took aim. “And dream about sex later.”
A sensual, steadying sigh passed through her lips. Her heart upped its tempo as the night, like liquid, slid over her, further dampening the space between her thighs.
“That’s right,” she whispered. “Come out, you hairy son-of-a-bitch.”
The blackness across from her seemed either to stretch or fill up and expand, its supernatural content pushing at its edges. Feeling this reconfiguration of the shadow’s boundaries in the pit of her stomach—in the way all genetically