Wolf Slayer

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It seemed that no replies to those questions were forthcoming, so she tried again. “Do you hold yourself up as some kind of wolf warden?”

“No,” he replied. “Nothing like that.”

The white muzzle shifted slightly before one silvery leg appeared. Slowly, that wolf left the shadows, and the sight of this animal robbed Tess of more breath.

The largest real wolf Tess had ever seen moved toward her with a growl rolling in its throat.

Chapter 7 (#u17f9a30a-ccc2-5dc6-9c34-e62c478c69a4)

Jonas lunged forward just as Gwen glided through full moonlight to reach Tess. He barked a command that Gwen ignored. His sister was interested in Tess. Whether that reason was a bad one that involved seriously twisted intentions, Jonas couldn’t tell.

He reached Tess seconds before Gwen did. Gwen butted her head against his thighs as if she would go right through him, but Jonas held steady and barked a stream of protests in return.

The moon was overhead, and he was standing beneath it. His claws popped before he had time to stop them. Neck muscles began to spasm. “No, Gwen,” he said with the last vestiges of a voice everyone here would understand. “Not today.”

He could see that Tess was both fearful and annoyed by his interference. Jonas sensed the silver blade she held without having to see it, remembering the way it had burned into his flesh. That knife would hurt Gwen when she had already suffered enough. He had to keep Tess from using it.

Tess’s hands were like fire on his back when she tried to push him away. Gwen growled again, letting him know that she also wanted him to move. Maybe this is the fight Tess had anticipated tonight...not with a rogue werewolf, but something more. Something priceless to the Were world. His sister.

He could not let that fight happen.

When Gwen hurled herself at him, he caught her by the fur on the back of her neck. Tugging hard, he maneuvered his sister to the side as his Were genes, triggered by the light, fully kicked in.

He heard Tess’s surprised intake of breath as he tightened his grip on Gwen’s fur and spun the white wolf around. Tess sprang forward with her knife in her hand. Gwen panted and growled, showing treacherously sharp teeth as she struggled to get free. But he was far stronger than either of these characters. He proved it now by lifting Gwen’s front paws off the ground until his sister and Tess Owens stood eye-to-eye with a distance of only six inches between them.

Tess froze. Gwen stopped growling. It was a scene straight out of a horror movie and yet as the hunter and the very special white wolf eyed each other, Gwen began to whimper. Hearing that, Tess, who seemed to be equally as stunned, lowered her blade.

Jonas hoped that Tess had seen something human in Gwen’s eyes that wasn’t obvious in the form his sister was able to take. He hoped his sister would accept the temporary truce of Tess’s lowered blade and take the opportunity to disappear.

He could have cut through the tension in the air with that damn blade in Tess’s lowered hand.

With the lull in aggression, however temporary it might have been, Jonas raised his face. He let loose a howl directed at the instigator of this current round of trouble. The moon. Then he hauled his sister back, gave Tess a quick bark of warning to stay back and led Gwen away from the big bad wolf hunter, who for some reason hadn’t been at her best tonight.

Lesson learned, Tess. Some of us truly are different.

He kept hold of Gwen by digging his fingers into the scruff of her neck fur, careful not to let his claws do any real damage. After her initial reluctance, Gwen allowed him to lead her away from the Owenses’ front yard.

Jonas had no idea what his sister might have been thinking by coming here. Lycans of her caliber had thought-blocking techniques probably unknown to every other Were, and that was damnably inconvenient.

On some level, he realized that Gwen had been as surprised as he had been by coming face-to-face with Tess. One close look at the hunter and Gwen had made sounds he’d only recently heard her make—sounds shockingly similar to the groans she’d uttered during the difficulty of her recovery from the injuries she had accrued on the night of her attack.

When standing eye-to-eye, she and Tess both had been privy to a sudden wave of insight that had quelled their urge to fight, at least for the time being. Jonas had no idea what that might have been but was thankful for the respite.

Show-and-tell time was over. Introductions between these two had been made. Tess didn’t know that the white wolf was a Were in wolf form, or that she was his sister. Full-wolf shape-shifts, so rare these days, would be new to Tess, since they were virtually unheard of outside of a sanctioned few elders and the families that lived with these rare beings.

If Tess setting eyes on Gwen wasn’t bad enough, the Owens woman had seen him shape-shift twice in a single night and might be wondering about that as well.

He wanted to know why Gwen had come here and if it could have been nothing more than a desire to meet the neighbor.

Perhaps Gwen had scented the hunter in the same way he had, and her instincts for survival had taken over. Maybe the strange DNA in Gwen’s makeup retained memories of hunters from times in the past.

Those thoughts were legitimate ones. Nevertheless, Jonas had a hunch the reason for Gwen’s visit could be blamed on neither of those things. Warning flags in his mind were waving. Gwen wasn’t struggling half as hard against his hold as he thought she might. He hadn’t even broken a sweat.

“Your big brother is keeping watch, Gwen,” he silently messaged his sister, pulling her along without pausing to address her second act of rebellion as a real issue. Just because he couldn’t hear his sister’s thoughts didn’t mean she couldn’t access his.

“Possibly you need to learn to use more control, hun.”

Jonas let her go in a spot near the rocky overlook and placed his considerable Were bulk between Gwen and the path behind them, daring her to try to get past him.

Gwen waited without moving for a minute or two before turning to focus on that path in a way that made Jonas’s neck chill.

Tess hadn’t been content to let the two Weres go. He should have known the white wolf would pique her interest and get her hunter blood pumping. Could he blame her? In Tess’s place, he probably would have done the same thing by following them. She was coming now.

Unfortunately, there was more at stake here than Tess Owens hoping to do her job. And he was caught between two females on opposite ends of the DNA spectrum that had gotten a good whiff of each other. Two females with the power to mess things up before the real mess began.

Christ, he could feel that other thing he had feared getting closer. The thing he dreaded most. The air was thicker, wetter. He didn’t want to lose Gwen. Besides his own feelings, the future of his species might hang on her survival.

In Jonas’s mind, the woodsy fragrance of the wolf hunter’s cottage was suddenly blotted out by the odor of impending doom. He now had Tess and Death to worry about, and it seemed that his worst nightmare was about to come true.

“Run,” he sent to Gwen, giving her a gentle shove.

For once, his sister did as she was told. She took off, heading west like a bullet shot from a rifle, leaving him standing on the rocks with his claws raised.

* * *

To Tess, this felt wrong—not only for the fact that she had let her family down, but because of the entire night and the way things had gone.

She had never seen a wolf like the one the Lycan had tamed into submission, and that brought the tally to two firsts in one night. It had been two wolves against one hunter in her front yard, and yet the handsome Were hadn’t allowed the white wolf to take her on when that would have served him better.

Uttering a string of curses and oaths, Tess again sprinted through the trees and brush. There was still time to put things to rights, she told herself...at least there would have been time for that if she hadn’t become so interested in this Lycan and what he was up to by showing her a sensitive side.

Not only had he not gone after her tonight, he had kept the white wolf from doing the same. Why?

What was his connection to that white wolf? Had his hesitancy to fight been due to his desire to see that real wolf unharmed?

She wasn’t dressed for this. Her feet hurt like hell and there was a good possibility she wasn’t thinking straight. The only weapon she had was the blade. One damn blade against that Lycan’s cunning and mounds of muscle. She was going after a werewolf in an outfit that amounted to little more than sleepy-time underwear.

What a pretty picture that presented.

But it was okay, Tess supposed, since it wasn’t in the Lycan’s favor to let her catch up with him. Additionally, he had no reason to want to see what she’d do next since he had gotten the better of her twice already without lifting a claw.

The differences between this Were and other werewolves she had dealt with were major and lent an air of fantasy to the craziness of this night.

If she could only get him out of her mind...

If only her wits would return and warn her that a strange attraction to this guy was surely going to be her downfall...

But she was fighting those what-ifs and in need of other answers. Tess wanted to stop the madness that had been caused by meeting this guy, no matter how interested she was in his behavior. She didn’t have to admit to anyone, including herself, that she was curious about him for more reasons than his actions alone.

That face.

The sculpted physique.

His deep voice.

It was strictly forbidden and an unforgiveable sin for wolf hunters to cozy up to their prey. They were two different species. Leniency showed weakness. If word about her inability to do her job were to spread, other monsters would arrive.

Still, deep down in Tess’s mind lay another reason for her interest in this guy that scared her more than anything else.

Having been tight up against him had caused her well-tuned willpower to backfire. In man form, he was mesmerizing. In the other shape, he was forbidding, but with an intelligent gleam in his eyes.

She wasn’t caving on the job. She just wasn’t sure what had happened tonight.

“There is something about you...” she said aloud. “And I will probably regret finding out about whatever that actually is.”

Against all inner warnings, though, Tess didn’t turn back. Sensing a change in the atmosphere, as if the moonlight had somehow suddenly grown brighter, denser, she slowed, then stopped to look up at the rocky ledge above her with her blade ready and her heart in her throat.

He was there. Contrary to everything she had just thought about the situation, he stood in the open—this tall, muscled, wickedly formidable and one hundred percent Lycan werewolf. He seemed larger than life and looked to have been carved from the surrounding stones.

Even in this setting where animals prowled, this guy with his bronze skin and light brown hair stood out as another kind of being entirely. Her new nemesis was a crazy anomaly within his species. Something new and exciting.

Maybe that’s why her heart was beating so rapidly she could barely draw a breath. Maybe it was also the realization that running wasn’t what had winded her. She was breathless because she found this Lycan so fascinating.

He had seen her. The growl he issued was soft, low, and did things to her that Tess refused to acknowledge. She didn’t speak, didn’t reply. Couldn’t do either of those things.

Though he was motionless, the werewolf wasn’t at ease. Tess sensed the tension flowing through him, and like an airborne contagion, that tension quickly transferred to her.

He was looking at her, not as if she might be his plaything, but as though he wanted to say something to her that his shape-shift had prevented him from saying several minutes ago.

Having witnessed his ability to manipulate his shifts so quickly, Tess observed him carefully, fully on guard. When she could draw a full breath, she said, “I don’t think I like whatever kind of game it is that we’re playing.”

He sank to a crouch. In other werewolves, this would have meant he was ready to spring. This guy didn’t translate that kind of intention to her. It was as if he didn’t want to appear too large or menacing.

He was still bare from the waist up and wearing faded jeans. The guy was a magnificent example of this species, and only by looking at him through narrowed eyes did Tess see the more wolfish parts. The harder she tried to zero in on those things—the extra layer of muscle and the claws—the less she saw. The wolf aura surrounding him hinted at the term werewolf, rather than anything pertaining to the purely physical aspects of his countenance.

Tess had seen him run. She didn’t take her eyes from him now. Man and wolf were such an unlikely combination, who else but the few people in the know would have believed anything like this possible?

She showed him the blade. “This is all I have at the moment. Will you challenge?”

When their gazes connected, heat streaked through Tess that was akin to having gotten too close to the sun. Her pulse thundered in her neck, pounding out beat after merciless beat that lifted the skin beneath her ears.

Her interest in him would be her death.

“So tell me,” she said, pitching her voice low to hide any telltale signs of quavering. “Is the neat trick of attracting the hunters who are hunting you some special kind of power you possess?”

The beast perched on the rocks above her couldn’t answer that question unless he used more of his magic Lycan voodoo to transform himself into a more vocal version of the one he presented to her at the moment. It was entirely possible that he wouldn’t change back, so that he could avoid answering her altogether.

His tension had become like a separate living thing. Swallowing back a lick of fear and determined to ride this out, Tess asked, “Do you also have the ability to call real wolves? I’m wondering if they realize what you are and that you might at one time have been related.”

The Lycan’s shoulders twitched briefly before quickly settling back to stillness.

“Why don’t you jump? I’m standing here like an idiot, breaking every rule I’ve ever had pounded into me about dealing with the likes of you,” Tess said.

The Lycan’s next growl was more like a touch than a sound and caused Tess to lean toward him. “Stop it,” she commanded. “I came here to ask you about another thing as well. That veil of darkness that blew in and passed over before you and your four-legged friend appeared on my doorstep.”

Breaking eye contact, he turned his attention to the distance.

“It rolled west, toward you,” Tess continued. “I liked it about as much as I like you. Still...”

Her voice trailed off.

The werewolf on the ledge above her took that jump and landed beside her. The blade in Tess’s hand was useless. Her lungs were useless, and so were her legs. She found herself in the Lycan’s arms, being swept off her bare feet.