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  He touched his mouth, his gesture alluding to her fangs. “Don’t those make your father’s fear reasonable?”

  “Yes.” Her voice was faint.

  “Vampires are the children of the night, Rosalind. Perhaps we only need to worry about that.”

  “Night has always been our time, too. Wolf time. Are we to ignore what we are?”

  “For a while, we’ll have to fight our nature. In the meantime, it isn’t a good idea for you to be out here after sundown.”

  “But I have only just found you,” she said, taking one more step toward him and changing the subject completely. Or maybe just bringing their attention back to it. “And you’re to stay away from me.”

  “I’m here,” he reiterated, his expression highlighting the dark circles under his eyes. “I’m here for you. Trust me on this.”

  “Maybe never to touch me again?”

  When he didn’t reply to that terrible question, Rosalind shook her head. “Guarding me won’t be an easy job. I’d rather face what’s coming now than let this draw out.”

  “Please, Rosalind. Listen to reason.” His hands were raised, as though he had already forgotten that he wasn’t to touch her.

  She held up a hand. “Your wulf calls to me, and I have to refuse that call. The night also calls to me. If I can’t have one of those two things, I’ll take the other, or go mad.”

  Her anger faded when sadness replaced all other emotion on her ghostly lover’s face. That sadness overwhelmed her, though there was nothing she could do to stop it.

  “You are Lycan,” he said. “As am I. We can withstand this. We face what life brings, and land on our feet.”

  Rosalind looked at him with pangs of regret so deep-seated, it felt to her that her soul was aching. This brave Were had been wounded while trying to avenge his family, and might never be the same. There was no greater show of respect for his family than that kind of sacrifice. And he’d do it again, for her.

  She had tried to help him, and honor his fight. The result had joined them together, and at the same time brought them more pain.

  She could not remain apart from him, and feared to try. Colton was the epitome of what every Were should be. Still, she so very badly wanted him to forget about honor and promises, and pretend they were back at the Landau’s wall, in each other’s passionate embrace.

  The remembered heat of that meeting made her thighs quiver. The ridiculous idea that vampires could possibly experience emotions like regret and sorrow made her feel slightly less frightened as she stared at Colton. And because she felt those emotions, and so much more, she supposed that she couldn’t really be like the creatures her father feared would find her. Her mind was her own. Her lust for Colton was the desire for mating with a Were, wulf to wulf, not for biting him with another species’ teeth.

  Her body thrummed and twitched for the kind of mating that had sealed them together in the first place. She wanted him, now; everything he had to offer. She wanted to kiss him, straddle him, take him into her body and make him howl with delight. She wanted to tell him this.

  If he’d believe in her, she could confess such a thing. If he would meet her halfway, anything was possible.

  Please take that step, she sent silently to him.

  I need you. Can’t you see?

  “Rosalind,” he whispered, as if her name were some kind of magical talisman for retaining his wits. In his voice lay traces of the dilemma he faced with her father’s mandate. This magnificent male was choosing to do the right thing.

  Rosalind backed up, fighting a lump in her throat, sure she’d choke if she spoke again.

  “What is it?” he asked, concerned, striding forward to stand in all his white glory near the base of the steps. Tall, proud, Were, in spite of the visible remnants of his injuries and the draining away of a golden future, the sight of Colton Killion hurt her. They both wanted the same thing. Yet he was unable to throw her to the ground and do to her what they both craved because...

  “You made a promise to the wrong Kirk,” she said to him.

  His interrupted breath moved her lungs. Her pulse matched his, beat for beat. And she couldn’t have him because they were both something other than what they were supposed to be.

  “It’s too much,” she added.

  Cursing the initial rise of rebellion that had gotten her to this point in time, she whispered, “If you can’t touch me, then you can’t stop me.”

  Spinning as if the links attached to her ankle were no more than a nuisance, Rosalind took off at a dead run in the opposite direction, refusing to allow her tears to fall.

  * * *

  “Shit!” Colton shouted. “Are you insane?”

  His words hung in the air, useless. The fanged, feisty Rosalind had already disappeared into the tangle of trees.

  He took off after her. What he would do when he caught up with her was anyone’s guess. If he didn’t touch her, he’d have no way to bring her back. Reasoning hadn’t done the trick.

  Where the hell was her father, anyway?

  The house was dark. No lights lit the porch or yard; just the faint glow of a partial moon behind the trees. Didn’t Kirk believe in electricity? Without lights, anything could hide in the dark.

  His heart rate peaked as he stretched his stride. Rosalind’s special scent saturated the air, and in that scent, he could perceive the state of her emotions. She was angry, nervous and sad. A terrible mix for running through a night that might be populated with monsters.

  He glanced at the trees as he raced by, thinking how bloodless Rosalind’s beautiful face had been, and of the wildness in her eyes.

  “Rosalind! Stop!”

  He was feeling at odds with the world around him.

  Dismissing the pain shooting through his torso, and on legs as heavy as lead, Colton ran. He hoped Rosalind wasn’t actually as nuts as this action made her seem, and prayed that the bloodsuckers actually had no way of tracking what their now doubly dead pals had witnessed in that park.

  It took exactly twenty more big strides for him to find out that his wishes weren’t worth much.

  Chapter 15

  What lay hidden in the dark made the rest of the already strange night seem tame by comparison.

  Colton stumbled to a sudden halt. Hate twisted his gut. The vampires had arrived like a plague of bloodthirsty locusts. A series of eerie, high-pitched signals arising from corpse-like throats rent the croaking, frog-infested night. And then the frog sounds ceased.

  There was no more pain in him, only cold. It felt to Colton as though his life was slipping away from him one chilled inch at a time as he waited for whatever would happen next.

  “You can’t have her. I’ll die first,” he shouted as the weight of the vampires’ presence added to the thickness of the dark’s unsettled atmosphere.

  He cast glances in all directions, whipping his head from side to side, seeing nothing, but sensing the dead gathering someplace not too far away from where he stood.

  Without stopping to wonder why he sensed this connection to them, Colton strode forward, heading for the trees. He knew better than to shout for Rosalind because if she answered and the vamps hadn’t already found her, they certainly would after that.

  Heaven and hell were here, on both sides of him. A succulent lover vied for his attention, as did the plague of blood-drinking creeps.

  “I suppose I’ve already cheated Death once,” he muttered. “Maybe I owe him one.”

  Rolling his shoulders, he moved on, determined to see this through. Damn if he didn’t hear Rosalind’s voice before the protective thoughts had dissipated, though.

  Her voice was raised. She was egging the bloodsuckers on, taunting the monsters, inviting them to find her.

  A horrible thought entered his head that caused hi
m to stagger. What if Rosalind was hoping to die, and in that way set both herself and him free from this ongoing nightmare?

  The thought was so dreadful that Colton shook off his hesitation and sprinted toward the echo of her voice.

  The brush he fought his way through was thick, damp and clingy. His borrowed boots sank into a half inch of mud that slowed him down by tugging at his steps like quicksand would have in some other godforsaken place.

  Pushing through the foliage fiercely, he managed to find a path fragrant with Rosalind’s scent. Out of necessity, he ventured a whisper.

  A reply came in the form of a startled roar of protest.

  Not Rosalind. Someone else. Not vampire, but Were.

  Colton spun in place, sniffing the air. Detecting a Lycan presence behind him, he leaped to one side of the path and vaulted over a fallen tree as the newcomer’s presence grew stronger. No full moon rode the sky tonight, which meant that this Lycan walked in man form. Since this place was so remote, there was only one Were this could be.

  Jared Kirk appeared on the path, wearing dark clothes that blended with the surroundings. A dangerous expression hung on his features. Grasped in his hands was a strange instrument Colton had seen in history books that had been modified with a futuristic flare into a lethal-looking crossbow.

  “I asked you not to touch her,” Kirk said as he approached. “In light of that, I figured you can’t fight this one alone.”

  Colton nodded, relieved.

  “How many monsters are there?” Kirk asked.

  “More than one. Do you have any idea where Rosalind would have gone?”

  “I think I do. How close are they?”

  “Their foul stink is all around us, but they must have gone ahead, after her, alerted by her voice.”

  Kirk nodded. “She wasn’t always so foolish. Not until this.”

  “She’s leading them away from the house,” Colton said, only then realizing that this was true, and that something in her scent had communicated her intentions to him. “Leading them away from you, is my guess, and away from me.”

  Kirk seemed to momentarily slump before regaining height aided by a rigid spine. “All this sacrifice nonsense is for the birds. I don’t want to lose her.”

  “Neither do I,” Colton confessed.

  Their gazes met.

  “So be it,” Kirk concluded with a wave of his hand. “Do you have any more secrets that might help, other than having already survived a vampire attack, and having some inner connection to my daughter?”

  “As a matter of fact, I do,” Colton said. “Small help as it may prove.”

  Calling up his anger, letting the night breeze waft over his tingling skin, Colton tore off his shirt, unbuttoned his pants and kicked off the cumbersome borrowed boots. With a glance to a sky mostly hidden by the tall trees, he envisioned the moon shining there, and opened his eyes wide to let that light in.

  An incendiary heat began to churn in his muscles as he began his transformation. In the blink of an eye, he was a werewolf...big, strapping, white-furred, with an insatiable appetite for kicking vampires back to the hell they had arisen from.

  Facing Jared Kirk with trepidation over what this new kind of confession might bring, and with his razor claws raised, Colton let out an ear-piercing howl.

  “Dear God,” Kirk whispered, letting the oath fade as Colton turned toward the rose scent that he knew would lead him to Rosalind.

  * * *

  The monsters had heard her call, Rosalind thought.

  She should have been scared out of her wits. Instead, her rage for all the changes these creatures had brought to her life gave her the fuel she needed to fight them now.

  The first gaunt, white-skinned spirit appeared as if it had risen from a bog. The second one dropped from a tree in the same way its malevolent brothers had fallen on Colton that other night.

  They didn’t immediately attack; just stood there looking at her as if they were waiting for something or someone else. Rosalind gritted her pointed teeth.

  “I’d rather be truly and completely dead than be like you,” she said when neither of the monsters moved.

  The creatures didn’t respond. When one of them cocked its bony head with a stiff movement more reminiscent of a robot than anything that had once been human, Rosalind remembered how she’d used her claws to tear through the necks of their brothers, and how simple that had seemed at the time.

  “You’re not welcome here,” she said.

  The cold brush of a third vampire came in from her right side. Rosalind ventured a glance. This one was by itself, and had stopped several feet away from where she stood.

  It resembled the other two. Nothing she noticed made this sucker seem different. Yet the way the two vampires on her opposite side focused intently on the newcomer suggested some sort of vampire pecking order.

  “Go away.” She directed this warning to the tall, sinewy creature with frozen, emotionless features. “This is wolf ground and you are trespassing.”

  “Wolf?” the vampire repeated in a dry, mocking voice.

  “I’m still one of them in spite of some recent additions,” Rosalind warned. “Don’t be fooled. I’m more wulf than not.”

  The other two vampires made stunted, grating sounds as if tendons had to move in order for them to use their voice boxes. The ugly noises matched their grim exteriors.

  Rosalind’s claws burst through her fingertips. She hid her hands behind her back. Simultaneously, or at least in rapid succession, her incisors began to lengthen. She didn’t dare cry out against this, sensing that any move, even the slightest visible flutter, would set these creatures off. She had to stand her ground, hide her fear and catch them off guard, if that was at all possible.

  One of the monsters inched forward.

  Rosalind screamed inside at the intrusion. The back of her neck chilled up.

  As if it had heard her feral protest, the vampire who had spoken to her grinned. There was no mistaking this show of exaggerated fangs for anything other than scare factor. Between pasty lips were two sharp, yellow teeth that were much longer than her own.

  “We came for you,” the vampire announced, the weakness of its voice yet another example of deception, and of an untapped hidden agenda.

  “Go back to wherever you came from while you’re still able to,” she shouted.

  “We came for you,” one of the others echoed, confirming for Rosalind that vampire thoughts ran along one thread.

  “Tough luck,” she snapped. “I’m happy where I am. If you get any closer, I’ll show you just how happy being a werewolf makes me, and how good at it I am.”

  A silent alarm went off inside Rosalind seconds before two of the monsters lunged. Chattering fangs came at her as she ducked sideways and raised her claws.

  The first swift strike hit one vampire in the chest and sent it staggering backward with its sorry excuse for flesh torn down to its ribs. Thin blood, black in color with a putrid odor, gushed from the wound.

  Rosalind didn’t have time to see if that freak was out of commission. Another vampire was at her throat, tearing at her shirt as the third bloodsucker looked on. She fought the attack off with a grunt of disgust and a rising rage, moving fast, striking hard.

  The ferocity of her hatred for these creatures caused a dramatic internal burn. Her throat heated up. That heat quickly spread to her shoulders, arms and finally to her chest, where it called up a glimpse of unfamiliar power, a power out of focus and comprised of sizzling crimson sparks.

  When she shoved the monster off her, it flew through the air. Unfazed, it leaped back to its feet and came at her again. Before it reached her, though, the toothy vampire she thought of as the leader of this group had her by the throat in a tight grip. So fast, she hadn’t seen this coming.

 
Its bleached, awful, angular face came close. “Not wolf,” it said with a jaw-shattering snap of fangs. “Not anymore.”

  * * *

  Vampires flowed through the trees as though the night itself had become liquid. Shades of dark on dark. Stealthily creeping shadows.

  Colton jerked to a stop with Kirk at his back. His lure had worked, at least in part. The howl had brought some of the monsters to him, and every one of them attending this little hunting party would be one less to reach Rosalind, wherever she was.

  He sensed five bloodsuckers and smelled another three in the distance. The odor of those distant three had mingled with Rosalind’s scent, which meant that if they hadn’t yet found her, they were close.

  He roared with fury.

  Kirk had the crossbow in position, sited on the path. The elder Were gave an angry grunt as the vampires came on, temporarily setting aside his innate fear about what Colton had turned out to be. Colton matched that grunt with a growl that rolled threateningly through the tangle of trees.

  A pair of vampires materialized together. Eyeing him with red-rimmed eyes as if unsure of how to proceed against some new thing that reeked of power and death, their uneasiness rumbled through them in discordant hisses and squeaks.

  Perhaps they recognized the results of their damage to his face. Maybe they smelled the strangeness in his blood, there because he had survived an attack from their own kind.

  Their hesitation worked to Colton’s advantage. Kirk’s bow sang with a high note, striking one monster in the chest and passing all the way through. The silver-tipped wooden arrow had staked the creature’s withered heart, and shattered the viper into a shower of dust. But such a weapon also had in its makeup the promise of a dual purpose. Its silver tip could just as easily bring down a werewolf, or the ghost of one.

  Had Kirk been late to this gathering because he was adding the silver coating to the arrows, thus hedging his bets?

  There was no time to consider that. More vampires dropped in, their ranks totaling four. This might not have been a problem, once upon a time, but with one Were in man form, and one still wobbly on his legs, it posed a threat.