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On the contrary, the loss of her mother and father last year had energized her need to take care of problems that arose. So here she was, fighting back, fighting hard and willing to go to extremes in order to deal some payback to the creatures that had taken so much from her.
“I will find you. That’s a promise.”
If luck was on her side, the new Were wouldn’t get wind of her before she found it. Out of necessity, she had become good at stealth, but werewolves also had keen, fine-tuned senses that were apt to be better than hers. She bore the scars to prove it and wore those scars like notches in her belt to mark the fights she had not only survived but won.
Would this guy know about her?
“Twelve,” she said. “Twelve half-crazed werewolves have ventured too close to this part of South Dakota for their own good.”
She ran a hand down the left side of her face, tracing a line of lightly raised scar tissue. “Number seven did this to me, and regretted it.”
She raised an arm, showing off ridges on her left wrist. “Number nine.”
If the people in town knew about what she did—about how far she had to go and how much she had sacrificed to protect them from the monsters—her loner status would make sense. But they could never know.
“Can you hear me, wolf?”
Maybe it could hear her. And maybe not. Though the keenness of werewolf hearing was legendary, it wasn’t miraculous. They weren’t gods. Weres were just one of nature’s peculiarities.
Then again, possibly this one’s hearing was better than most.
Straightening up with a sudden jolt of insight that demanded her full attention, Tess focused harder on the trees.
Someone was out there.
Chills arrived before the next rush of heat obliterated them. That familiar flash of warmth, originating in her chest, quickly radiated outward to kick her adrenaline levels through the roof.
The creature was here.
Watching her.
The air around her vibrated with a telling whisper that said, Male werewolf. Big. Strong. Intense.
Tess gritted her teeth in anger. By coming here, that Were had crossed a line.
“I don’t care much for trespassers and haven’t asked for company,” she announced at a reasonable decibel. “Especially yours.”
No reply came.
He was sizing her up.
Tess shifted from foot to foot as a sudden external wave of heat blew in to raise her own rapidly escalating body temp even further. The damn heat wave was like being caught in a lava flow and so hot, her stomach turned over.
Tess widened her stance to meet that heat wave head-on. But it was gone as suddenly as it had come. Just like that, and as if the trespasser had merely called it back...
Leaving Tess breathless.
* * *
Jonas Dale stopped five feet short of the chasm dividing his land from his neighbor’s. Exceptional sight allowed him to peer through the trees.
The air was cool. An acrid odor of woodsmoke left a tang on his tongue. Aside from the normal forest fragrances of pine and scrub, he could detect a human.
He had heard about Tess Owens, of course. Word traveled fast and went something like this: hunter in residence. Wolves beware.
Coming here had been a risk. But he needed to be in the remote hills of South Dakota and about as far from his home in Florida as was geographically possible.
The choice of this location hadn’t been made without careful consideration. Tess’s family’s reputation preceded them. If the thing chasing him knew about the Owens family, surely it wouldn’t imagine he’d come here, so close to one of them.
In this case, he was using Tess Owens as camouflage.
Since word had come of the Owens deaths last year, Jonas figured he might get away with this. Still, extra caution would be needed when dealing with any member of that clan. Cunning and the power of persuasion might be the ticket to keeping Tess off his back if she would listen to reason.
Would she be open to hearing anything he had to say when her family was notoriously unforgiving to his kind?
He had come here today, near her home, for a quick look and to judge for himself about Tess. Finding her had been easy. She was standing in her yard, near enough for an agile werewolf with a grudge to take her on without the benefit of any moon-induced physical changes. He wasn’t that wolf, however. Not today. Not ever, hopefully, since his energy was needed elsewhere and he had little time to spare.
Underscoring the mixture of woodsmoke and wildflowers near the Owens cabin were hints of other scents that only a Were’s imagination would acknowledge. Energy. Anticipation. Blood.
Danger had its own unique fragrance, and this Owens offspring had Were blood on her hands. Her head was lifted, her posture tense. If she was good at what she did, there was no way Tess wouldn’t already have a bead on him.
It was a standoff, from a distance, before they had even gotten to hello.
Looks were fairly deceiving though, Jonas had to admit. Tess Owens didn’t look so formidable in person. She was tall but delicate, small-boned, long-limbed and young. Her shape was sleek and accentuated by tight jeans and a skimpy shirt that showed off too much skin and failed to reflect the current coolness of the afternoon temperature.
She had long, fair hair, most of it twisted into a braid that hung halfway down her back. A few unruly strands blew in the same breeze that had carried her scent to him, and those wayward strands were the only bit of wildness in her that he perceived.
The fair hair was a surprise, though. For some reason, he hadn’t expected this werewolf slayer to be a blonde. Not that the color of her hair made a difference in the long run. It’s just that he had a soft spot for golden-haired beauties. Still, Jonas wished he could see her face to witness firsthand the malice that had to be reflected in her eyes.
There were other curious particular details about her as well. Tess’s skin was paler than any outdoorswoman’s skin should have been. That little discrepancy seemed odd since she had to maintain her shape somehow and the great outdoors was her backyard.
Her shoulders were gracefully curved. Slender arms showed good muscle definition, as if she worked hard at something other than chasing Weres. Tess was visibly lean and fit. Too bad she wasn’t a Were, Jonas mused, because he appreciated her looks and could have made the most of them in other circumstances.
Lean, wiry, fierce females were his preference. Females who could hold their own and give back what they got. Females who didn’t usually bend unless they wanted to. He would have liked to run a palm over all that bare skin. Equally as pleasurable for him would have been to touch those silky golden tendrils currently hiding her face.
Wild was, after all, every werewolf’s middle name. In his twenty-eight years of dealing with his species, he had come to recognize the extremes of Were needs and wants...and tamp them down when he had to.
No such luck here, though.
Shaking his head scattered the impossible images taking shape in his mind. The only way he was going to touch Tess Owens would be in self-defense when she came at him with an intent to kill.
That was a shame because he knew instinctively that Tess Owens was something special and so much more than the reputation that preceded her.
He just couldn’t put a finger on how he knew this.
As his body shuddered with a mixture of appreciation and wariness for this new opponent, Jonas spoke softly so that Tess wouldn’t be able to hear what he had to say.
“Possibly that’s your greatest asset in dealing with my kind? We tend to underestimate you after a first glance? Pretty girl all alone in the woods?”
Inwardly, he also added, I vow not to become one of the suckers overly intrigued by those things. All I have to do is stay out of your way and hope you can determine friend from foe.
He prayed that Tess Owens might turn out to be an ask-questions-first kind of predator, just like he was. But this wasn’t the time for introductions and more wayward thoughts having to do with Tess’s tight jeans. Any hunter with a rep like hers wouldn’t let a full moon go to waste. Tess Owens would make the most of tonight and come knocking at his door fully armed and ready to rumble.
He had to keep her from doing so.
“I’m not what you think I am, Tess. I’m here, not to mess with you, but to protect a secret of my own. I’m needed. Someone else’s life depends on what happens here and what I do, and you just need to stay out of my way for a while.”
Did she get those confidences sent across the distance separating them? Jonas watched her turn her head as if she might have. He also felt a pull from somewhere behind him, an indication that he had to get back to his temporary home.
Having an Owens next door was one strike against him. The other creature that was looking for him was far worse.
Death was coming and would find him eventually. The black-cloaked, soul-catching bastard was the greater opponent, the mightier threat, and the monster he needed to keep at bay. Besides himself, there was only one member of the Dale family left, and his sister’s life depended on his ability to protect her. That had become his goal in life.
The bad news was the wave of aggression coming from Tess Owens and the silent words he swore he heard slip from her lips.
“It’s a date, wolf. Tonight. Don’t be late.”
At this point, so early in their association, probably nothing he could have said in return would have changed her mind.
Chapter 2 (#u17f9a30a-ccc2-5dc6-9c34-e62c478c69a4)
Tess paced the room as night began to descend. Wearing leather pants, a black shirt and black boots, she took a quick look in the mirror to make sure she hadn’t forgotten anything that might make the difference between life and death when dealing with a werewolf.
She looked good enough, Tess thought, though people in town stared at her for other reasons when they met her. More than one of them had probably wondered where she might have gotten so many of the scars that crisscrossed the side of her face.
“Will he keep our date? What do you think, Tess?” she asked herself as she strode down the hallway of the cozy, eight-room, wood-paneled cabin.
Determined to find out the answer to that question, Tess entered the weapons room and chose a knife with a gleaming silver blade. She slung the bow and quiver of arrows over her shoulder, adjusting easily to the added weight, then rolled her neck to ease the tension building there.
Gloves on, weaponed up, she walked out of the front door. After giving the cabin a last glance, she set her sights on the trees and slipped into the dark.
* * *
“It’s okay.”
Jonas spoke softly to his sister, though he wasn’t sure how much of what he said ever sank in. There hadn’t been a verbal response from her since she had been attacked in a Miami park not too far from where they had lived.
Gwendolyn Dale had grown frail and lethargic on the outside—the parts others saw if they looked. He hoped the darkness he now sensed inside his sister would eventually fade away and be replaced by the happy-go-lucky sister he had always loved.
Sometimes, though, he wasn’t so sure about the darkness’s staying power.
Jonas tended to believe the attack in Miami had left Gwen with a black spot on her soul, and that she had been marked by Death in some way. This had to be the reason there seemed to be a specter on her trail. He thought it likely that his sister wasn’t supposed to have survived that attack, and that she had been slated, fated, or whatever the hell happened in the big cosmic scheme of things, to have died that night in Miami.
In the end though, what did he really know about such things? His entire repertoire of ideas was based on nothing more than conjecture and supposition.
“I have to go out, Gwen. Just for a while.”
Jonas laid a hand on his sister’s shoulder and winced at its thinness.
“I’ll be back soon, so take care while I’m gone and don’t do anything I wouldn’t do.”
Gwen would have laughed at the last part of that statement if she had been with him mentally as well as physically. Out of everyone else around them, his younger sister had been the most like him. She had been developing a similar kind of power and strength, even though neither of those things had helped the night she slipped out of the house with her friends without telling anyone and had encountered true darkness.
Gwen had been the only victim left alive out of the four young girls...if the term being alive could describe the state they had found her in. It had taken weeks of seclusion for her to recover enough to move her to this remote location. She hadn’t said a word to anyone since that terrible night.
Gwen was haunted. He knew that. She grew paler day by day and seldom ventured outside. Jonas wanted to believe she understood every word he said now, even as he could see her slipping further and further away.
“Your new companion will be here tomorrow,” he said lightly. “You probably need a female around. I think you’ll like her. She’ll stay for most of the day and go home before sundown. You know why she can’t stay here after dark settles in. That’s my shift. If you like her, we can see about having her spend more time here.”
Gwen’s pale blue eyes stared up at him as if she had heard him this time. She offered nothing in the way of facial expression.
“Right, then,” Jonas said. “I’m off to meet our neighbor. She sent me an invitation.”
In the old days, Gwen would have pleaded to go along. But even before her accident, she hadn’t yet been in full possession of the kind of skills that could have helped against things like experienced wolf hunters. It wouldn’t have been long, though, before his sister would have outshone every other Were in the area.
Gwen was an anomaly within an anomaly. A special being within the Were species. He wasn’t sure if she knew this.
“Wish me luck.” Jonas leaned over to place a kiss on his sister’s forehead and then headed out, knowing his meeting with Tess Owens couldn’t be postponed.
Keeping beneath the shadows of tree cover didn’t isolate him completely from the moon’s effects. Dappled light on his shoulders instigated sparks from nerves that buzzed, snapped and roused the wolf nestled inside him. His claws had appeared. Both shoulders ached. This was all part of the deal when the moon issued a come-hither.
After covering another acre of rocky, forested hillside, he got his first good impression of what was coming his way. Tess’s scent was in the air—that same mixture of smoke and flowers that had led him to her earlier.
The scent grew stronger as he walked. So did the moonlight. Jonas resisted the urge to shape-shift. Tess was here, just ahead, waiting for him. She had met him midway between the two cabins, which probably meant she knew where he was staying.
Tess Owens stood near a large rock pile at the crest of the hill overlooking property lines, surrounded by trees. She was partially camouflaged by shadows. The fact that she wore black would have helped to hide her from human eyes, but not from a werewolf’s. Jonas located her with a complex system of sight, scent and the image presented to him by way of her body heat.
It was showtime.
“Don’t bother to hide,” she called out in a tone that was both combative and dangerously sexy in equal measures. It was a deep voice for someone her size.
Jonas hadn’t counted on her ability to tune in to him so quickly, though. This was yet another detail that added respect and wariness to his initial assessment of her.
She seemed to be looking straight at him when she couldn’t possibly see that far. Night-vision goggles might have helped her to pinpoint him, but she wasn’t wearing them. Maybe she had heard his approach? The snap of a twig? A rustle of branches? He used to be better than this.
She spoke again. “These days I’m fairly good at what I do, and I get better with age and practice.”
Careful not to make a sound, Jonas inched forward with his wolfishness twisting his insides. A human growl stuck in his throat. The claws that had appeared made his human hands ache. His wolf side was willing to take on this threat, but it wasn’t time to let that happen. He doubted if Tess would take aim at a human form with the silver-tipped arrows he could now smell. Hunters rarely did.
“Are you coming out, or should I welcome you with a silver-coated handshake?” she challenged.
All hunters knew about the Were aversion to silver and a few other metals. Tess Owens seemed pretty confident about that aversion.
Blaming his comeback on his reaction to her voice, Jonas decided to oblige her request, at least in part.
He said, “Handshake? I wasn’t aware that you had social skills, Owens. People in town told me you rarely show your face there. To some of them, you’re more of a ghost than a neighbor.”
He wondered what that remark might do to her self-confidence and if it would shake her up in a way that might lead him to find a crack in her admirable armor.
