Then he found his mother on the back porch step, half in the house, half out, as if she’d been reaching for the moon. The brutality that had been dealt to her washed over him like an icy wave. Nausea threatened. She also had been beheaded.
“Damn those filthy bloodsuckers!” he cried.
Two members of one of the oldest Lycan families in existence had been taken out. And the stench of the undead hung over the tidy backyard like an insidious vapor.
Despite the gnawing ache growing by bounds in Colton’s chest, he’d have to invent a way to cover this up. His pain, great enough to be nearly intolerable, had to be internalized. In order to go on, he’d have to focus elsewhere.
“Vengeance.” His whisper fell flat. Vengeance was an emotional state Lycans had tried to outdistance as human populations began to rise and the sheer number of humans forced Weres into hiding. Revenge was a reaction Weres had learned to tamp down in favor of more peaceful aspirations and acceptable coexistence.
Contrary to all that, rage was overtaking him. He felt sick, shaky, pissed off and ready to do something about it.
As Colton lifted his mother’s limp, desecrated body in his arms, his beast, tucked inside him, trembled with rage.
* * *
Aware of the disturbed emotions surfing the air, Rosalind had to move. She ran past the hordes of cops and stopped when she spotted a house that radiated the familiar scent of Were. Silently, she crept up the steps and through the open doorway.
The front room was dark and empty, but it reeked of both sadness and Lycan damage.
Not just Were. Lycan.
The reality of that turned her stomach. Chills covered every inch of her body. Did the brown Were live here? What had happened in this place?
She rolled a series of throaty growls meant as a warning that if someone was in this house, they now had company.
No reply came.
Exploring on bare, padding feet, she found two bodies on a bed in a small room, and choked back a cry. These were dead Lycans. Someone had placed them there.
The scene seemed insanely surreal, but the room also gave off the scent of the male she had followed. He had been here mere seconds before she arrived. She hadn’t missed him by much.
Leaping over the furniture, feeling her anger sift to the surface of her skin, Rosalind raced for the back door. Then she was out again, in the moonlight, back in the relative comfort of the cover of darkness.
Vampire tracks weren’t easy to follow. Nevertheless, Colton knew a trail of rot when he smelled one.
The alley behind the houses snaked through the neighborhood, eventually leading back to the park. Colton started that way without getting far. An icy prickle at the base of his neck made him spin around. He scanned the dark. This section of the alley seemed too quiet. No one was out. Not one dog barked.
Standing in the open, he allowed moonlight to caress his human hands and forearms as he waited for his senses to skip past the tragedy and delve into the arena of hunter and prey. Red flags waving in his mind told him the vampires had been this way not long before. More than one of them, by the intensity of the odor.
It was no wonder that the neighborhood dogs had run.
Rolling his shoulders helped him to gain control of his tension, but his nerves felt like long threads of fire. Inching sideways, closer to a fence, he cocked his head to listen for clues. All the while, his beast pummeled at him, wanting to be free, its desire to take over the hunt stirred by a cop’s ingrained need to catch some killers.
But freeing his animal side was not doable at the moment with uniforms swarming around a short distance behind. He had to fight the moon and the wulf for the time being and hope he’d win.
“No movement. No sound.”
Gazing through the shadows of the alley, Colton felt his knuckles ache from holding back his claws. The sinister stink of these particular blood-drinking intruders was especially bothersome to his beast.
Colton had never seen a vampire up close, yet his soul seemed to recognize them. The wolf particles embedded in his long-term memory knew the smell and taste and feel of an ancient enemy.
“Burned toast,” he said, picking a valid description of the sum of all those parts. “Disgusting.”
The beast gave a rattle that shook Colton to his boots. The closeness of monsters was luring his animal instincts to a riotous state that messed with his hard-won self-control.
He flinched as the ligaments in his shoulders and knees began to stretch, and exhaled some air as the skin covering his biceps began to bubble. The whooshing sound he heard was a claw bursting through his skin. Another claw appeared. Then more, until all ten fingers were lethal.
Did this minimorph mean that the wulf knew something he didn’t? He was willing to bet that it did.
A shout came from behind, untimely as hell because it came from a cop who had no doubt seen something in the alley. Colton was in uniform, but his body was half in transition and burning badly with the need to chuck the binding accoutrements tying him to a human’s sense of justice.
“Hey! You!” the uniform said from the other end of the alley; a cop who couldn’t help here or offer moral support. A human, either in or out of uniform, would in fact be easy pickings for any walking undead hanging around.
He had to remove the cop from this equation.
“Killion,” he shouted back to the officer, his voice gruff. He coughed, unlocked his throat and added, “Metro PD. I’m on it. All is clear. No sign of anything back here.”
“Okay,” the cop shouted back.
“Killion?” Davidson’s familiar shout followed the other one.
“Yeah. It’s me,” he said.
“You’re one fast son of a bitch. You actually beat me here?”
“Pays to be in shape.”
“Not if that doesn’t include pizza.”
More footfalls, then Davidson’s final remark. “We’ll go around the other way. The bastards had to come and go from somewhere.”
After agonizing seconds spent waiting for the men to disappear, Colton’s internal heat finally overwhelmed him, and his clothes ripped apart at the seams.
* * *
Rosalind watched the brown-furred werewolf hurdle the wooden fence as if it were nothing as soon as the humans at the head of the alley had gone. She covered the length of that alley in twelve huge strides. One good leap after that, and she, too, was over the fence.
She had seen the beautiful Lycan before and after his shift, but this time she had been close enough to take stock—a second rare occurrence in the highly personal world of werewolves and only, she supposed, because he had been distracted to the point of not recognizing the presence of another wulf in the area.
Her brown wulf had been incredibly handsome as a man. His face was angular. Tanned skin stretched over high cheekbones. His mouth was wide, his eyes deep-set. Dark, slightly wavy hair framed those features, long enough to cover the tops of his ears. Each strand glinted like gold in the moonlight.
The man side of the Were was tall, his physique leanly muscular, with broad shoulders and a narrow waist. He had spectacularly molded thighs that hinted at a Were’s hidden strengths. Rosalind guessed him to be in his late twenties, though it was hard to gauge werewolves, especially since she had met so few of them.
This