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  The dart gun was, if not for him, for herself. If she couldn’t take him down, she would use the gun on herself to numb the pain of being torn apart by savage teeth. A savaging she would welcome, for screwing up.

  She knew what had happened to her. Either that, or she was stalling to await further enlightenment.

  Both options sucked.

  A few minutes ago, it was to have been him or her. Things had changed. She was out of options and knew it. Maybe she had seen this in his expression, comprehended his play on words.

  “Oh, no you don’t,” he told her, taking a step, hoping to keep her together. “I won’t be responsible for anything except that kiss, a kiss no one needs to know about and that will remain our secret.”

  She smiled sadly. “Yeah,” she said. “Trust a werewolf. The lessons did mention plenty about that.”

  “Did those lessons also note that some of us—a lot of us, actually—are on your side?”

  “What side would that be?”

  “Keeping Miami safe.”

  “Not that I recall.”

  “Pity you hunters don’t have all the facts, then,” Jonathan said with a second step toward her. “However, if it’s either to be taking me or destroying yourself and all you stand for, then by all means take me. You don’t even have to waste a dart because I’ll surrender.”

  A third step meant being bathed in moonlight. Jonathan took that step, needing to shift to manage the wolves approaching, no matter what she might make of it.

  Lowering his arms, he continued to hold her gaze—that brilliant blue gaze that mirrored the moon’s directness. He would show her there was nothing to fear, except the strangeness of the term Other.

  The sound of his ligaments rolling over bone followed the cracking of those bones as they formed new connections. His flesh began to stretch like rubber. A moment of dead silence followed as his heart temporarily stopped. The man lost the beat, while the beast gained his.

  Jonathan roared. Standing tall in his new outline, he flexed his massive shoulders, felt the pressure of jeans that were now constricting blood flow but necessary within city limits, and stared down his long, brown, fur covered muzzle.

  With a great paw edged with five gleaming claws, he swiped at his chest, drawing a faint trace of blood. Then he moved forward slowly, waiting for the sting of the dart she’d try to use to take him down.

  He willed her to shoot if it would save her from her shame and make her trust him. Neither shame nor blame belonged to this situation or pinned to her.

  He continued to think along those terms as she raised the gun.

  CHAPTER 4

  Nikki had never heard of a werewolf sacrificing himself for the greater good. Werewolves, on the whole, were wild, moon-crazed creatures in need of culling. She certainly had never encountered anyone, werewolf or otherwise, willing to do something like this for her. Give himself up.

  She did not fire the gun. She stayed frozen, watching the first transformation from man to wolf she’d ever seen take place.

  The shift was fascinating. A grotesque miracle. She felt sick to her stomach, wondering if this is what she’d have to look forward to if the monsters didn’t get her first.

  The man, so handsome before, she had to admit now since she was being honest with herself, had grown taller, wider. His face had lengthened to resemble something of a wolf’s muzzle, while clearly not going for exact. His flesh went from tan to red to black with nearly subliminal speed before settling on brown, the same color as his long, swinging hair.

  Fur quickly sprouted from his pores, though not from all of them. His bare arms were covered, as was his chest and throat. Some fur covered his chilling-featured face, though not much more than a bearded man with some dense follicles. His previously ear-length brown hair now brushed his shoulders, not coarse, but smooth, shiny and looking almost as silky as his shirt, still tied to her arm.

  She felt absurdly turned on. She closed her eyes, swallowed, wanting to touch that hair, feeling as though she’d gone over the deep end of sanity.

  “I had no idea,” she whispered, waiting for him to strike.

  Nothing happened. The Were didn’t attack or knock her to the ground. He didn’t touch her in any threatening way. Not in any way at all. She opened her eyes to find them separated by several inches. She had to look up to find his eyes, which were very like a human’s and still studying her intently. She could have sworn she saw that same gleam of intelligence in those eyes that had captured her attention earlier.

  “All right.” She tripped over the words. “Thank you for helping.”

  The beast nodded in understanding. Did he smile, too, as he waved a hand toward the streetlight, then immediately put more urgency into the gesture?

  “I can feel them in there,” she said, looking to the alley. “They’re angry and assembled at last.”

  The werewolf repeated his gesture, a universal signal of approaching danger and the direction to get out of the area, quickly.

  “Am I to believe you were telling the truth about differences and goals?” she asked him, uncertainly.

  A great hand closed around her own. She felt the sharpness of his claws on her bare wrist. But the van reappeared in that instant, heading toward them, causing this wolf to stall.

  He’d been trying to help her again. Suddenly, Nikki wasn’t sure about anything, especially her special task, the one for which she had been born, and for which she had been chosen. If this wolf fought the dregs of his own kind, he had to remain at large. The other hunters wouldn’t fathom how important that was.

  Looking from the van to the alley to the brown wolf beside her, she said to him, “Go. Go now.”

  When his eyes found hers, her stomach looped uncomfortably. The strange attraction to him nearly swallowed her up.

  “I didn’t call them back,” she said. “I didn’t plan this. It’s in their blood to question.”

  She shoved the big wolf away from the streetlight with all her might, breathless with the effort. “It’s in their blood the same way the virus is in yours.”

  The damned werewolf didn’t budge.

  “You want to help me,” she said in exasperation. “Well, do what I’m asking. Save yourself. If your objectives are the same as mine, and that’s a remnant of Chavez’s pack in there, we need all the help we can get, from whatever direction it comes.”

  He nodded reluctantly. Nikki nearly collapsed with relief when he took off. Again, she raised the gun. As the van swung to the curb beside her, Nikki got off a shot. Purposefully wide, and to the right.

  “Damn!” she shouted as two other hunters leaped from the van’s open door. “I’m decent left-handed, but not good enough to tag a runner. There are more wolves coming. We’ll need to plug up the hole in this alley.”

  Nikki joined the other hunters to form a dangerous semicircle crowning the edge of the alley. When the first of the five stinking, frothy-mouthed monsters arrived, she hit two of them dead-on between their massive collarbones with a rapid fire and reload, despite her injuries and previous excuses.

  “Least I can do,” she told herself, aloud. “Before…”

  Before all hell breaks loose.

  *

  Jonathan skidded to a stop just past that same green-and-white awning, whirled and took in the scene. Calculating the odds—three hunters versus five mad Weres in beast form, with two of those werewolves already down—he figured his hunter might be okay for the time being. But she didn’t have long.

  He kept his sights on her, wondered what she’d do after this sweep had been taken care of, and if she’d make it. If she started the changes now, brought on by her wounds, would she follow up with her plan to do harm to herself for allowing a werewolf to touch her? Would she do herself in for allowing herself to get a dose of the same virus she fought against?

  Something tickled Jonathan’s mind.

  Two of the hunters, the males, were engaged in dealing with the remaining three rogues. His hunter, however, had turned to face him. From deep inside of her, what seemed like an answering call came. Not a growl or howl. Nothing so overt. Her answer was in the form of a cry of anger against the Fates.

  “Damned, f-ing monsters!” she shouted, dropping her gun.

  Sure that her comrades were taking care of business and out of danger, she tossed one more lengthy, almost desperate glance in Jonathan’s direction, then backed away until she blended into the night.

  She knew, all right. She’d jumped species tonight, and must be sensing the first signs of infection. She knew she’d been Turned, and that she carried a terrible strain of the virus.

  Normally, an unwilling inductee into the wolf clan wouldn’t have known about the infection until the next month’s full moon. But this hunter’s bad luck had seen her infected during a full moon phase. What this amounted to was a catheter of virus straight to her heart.

  There would be no reprieve for this hunter, who already knew the score. She’d process her body’s invasion early, quickly. Tonight.

  That’s what he had scented, and was the source of the red haze surrounding her like an aura. It was a damned aura. With no month’s reprieve, she would be hit doubly hard, possibly minutes from now. If she started those changes near the other hunters, odds were that she wouldn’t make it out of the dark.

  The hunter was about to become something she despised. Would she have the skill set to deal with that if she survived?

  Feeling for her, lusting for the thing she’d become if those same damned Fates were kind enough to see her through the ordeal, Jonathan started after her before the sound of her gun hitting the ground had stopped clattering.

  *

  His wounded hunter was fast, but with the fire of his muscles proving superior, Jonathan caught up with her a block later.

  Maintaining no illusions that she would accept his help, he growled loudly to her from several paces behind, and was surprised when she stopped.

  “I have to get to the hospital,” she said over one rigid shoulder. “I’ll get a transfusion. I’m a nurse. I can set it up myself, so that no one knows. Tell me this will help.”

  Jonathan couldn’t tell her that, even if he could have spoken. The wolf virus was already saturating her cells. She was losing her human scent, and shaking badly. Her insides had to be roiling, with the wolf parts beginning their takeover.

  “Oh, I forgot,” she said in his silence, her tone sharp with anger. “You can’t talk. How bloody inconvenient.”

  A second growl bubbled up, which Jonathan stifled. He searched the area for cover—another awning, another alley, any place he could shift back.

  “Is it too late?” she asked. “Is there anything I can do to dilute the virus further, until I have time to think?”

  Surprised by the question, Jonathan shook his head. No. He watched her clench her fists. She was trembling so hard, she could barely stand. Her body would be feverish at this point, and attempting to cool itself down with wave after wave of chills.

  “You’re a genetic Were,” she said. “You have the mark.”

  Jonathan turned his furred upper arm to show her the quarter-sized round indentation of shiny scar tissue that was, for werewolves, a badge of honor. The mark of werewolf royalty.

  “Are you truly so different from those who don’t have the mark that you’d want to see them destroyed?”

  Yes. He nodded. Different.

  “I didn’t know I’d be—” she began but didn’t finish her sentence, her voice completely bereft of its edge. “Or that you would—” She coughed, as though her words had stuck in her throat, then tried again. “The hospital is three blocks away. As I see it, that’s the only option I have to gain the time to set things straight. To put my affairs in order.”

  She had to know she was currently being confronted with the fight of her life, then. She was a nurse as well as a hunter, and would realize the necessary trauma of a body going through its first shape-shift, and also that ninety percent of Weres never made it past that first attempt to change. The so-called Blackout was a torturous survival of the fittest agenda originally designed to insure against pollution of the species. Termed Blackout because so much pain accompanied the body’s rewiring from human to wolf, that the person lost consciousness. Most often forever.

  But the diluted strains of the virus in the heathens running rampant in the city were proof that something else had changed. A diluting of the blood obviously also meant a perversion of the rewiring phase. A kind of reverse evolution. In the old days, those bastard hybrids in the alley never would have seen the light of the moon.

  And in this hunter’s favor, working in a surgery E.R., she’ll be familiar with pain.

  With the dose of blood she received, it was anything goes. He had to get her out of the moonlight in order to slow the spread of the virus. He needed lag time to prepare her. He couldn’t take her to the wolf sanctuary for help. There wasn’t time, and she was, after all, a hunter. It truly was too damn late for that useless transfusion.

  Only one chance remained, as Jonathan saw it. If that thing worked, she might survive, thrive. While he probably would be ousted from his organization.

  He had to bite her.

  He had to sink his teeth into her with hopes that his blood—strong, pure and as old as the ages—would overthrow the pollution and help her retain her balance.

  And if she did make it through, what reason would he use again to justify the action? What would he tell her when she looked into his eyes with those big, bright blues?

  Oh, yeah. It was for her own good.

  CHAPTER 5

  “Let me be.” Nikki faced the wolf, unsure of what she saw in his gaze. Recognition, maybe, of the secret mission she’d tried so diligently to hide from him? “Haven’t you done enough? You and your kind?”

  Her shaking intensified. She had to grit her teeth to keep them from chattering. The buildup of pain had been expected, but not from polluted blood. If she had gotten to the actual part of the plan where the werewolf across from her had provided the bite, and she’d been infected with the purest form of the virus, she would have been right on target and back at headquarters, her mission accomplished. Instead, she’d been mauled by one of the psychopaths in that damned alley.

  The result of her ineptness was that the elder hunters who had devised this mission would have to kill her when they found out she’d been tainted by the wrong blood, and therefore of no further use to their cause.

  She’d screwed up, big-time.

  Won’t make it to the hospital. Too late to get rid of or dull down the bad stuff.

  Feel it…

  Something else disturbed her as much as the kindling of internal fires. She wished that this unusual man-wolf would comfort her. The wolf whose blood she had wanted all along, from the bite she’d been expected to receive.

  How could she possibly have known she wouldn’t want to hurt him when this night was over? That the apes in the alley would get the better of her? How could she possibly have foreseen that this glorious, intelligent werewolf would be kind, and maybe her only salvation in a different way than had been planned? How could she have foreseen that her life would be in his hands?

  Her body was shaking uncontrollably. She was aware of a gnawing need to run, chase, howl, and couple with this big, beautiful brown wolf—the same wolf she’d been sent to use, and to manipulate.

  Quite madly, her treacherous body leaned toward him, as if he might help her somehow.

  She thought of her mission. How this wolf’s blood would have helped the hunters by giving them new strength. This beautiful wolf with the keen green eyes, whose pure blood would have, when mixed with the hunters’ in infinitesimal amounts, fine-tuned their senses. A blood transfer of this kind, between the species, was needed every hundred years to insure that hunters continued as a force.

  Somewhere inside of her, all these years, those minute particles of wolf blood inherited from the hunter who’d had such a bite a hundred years ago, had fueled her own strengths. And also, Nikki supposed, instigated the attraction between hunters and their wolf prey. Wolf calling to wolf on some ridiculously far-off cellular level.

  Ironic.

  She’d been chosen as the receptacle for the transfer.

  She was to have gotten this particular wolf to bite her. That’s what this entire night had been about. That was the plan. Damn it.

  Not only had her blood been polluted by those monsters in the alley, her mind had been, as well. And she had inadvertently become attracted to this pureblooded wolf, had appreciated his beauty both in and out of his alternate form, in the months she’d been waiting for him to meet her.

  Across from her, he scraped his chest again with a claw, then made another disturbing sound. Nikki’s stinging eyes roamed over the glossy brown pelt and the streamlined muscle rippling beneath. She noted how his eyes glinted.

  What are you waiting for? What do you want from me now?

  Would he take her down, since she’d been infected with virus from the wrong side of the tracks?

  Philosophically, and too late, she wondered if all people hated and mistrusted those different from themselves. Wasn’t that the way of the world?

  “Do you want to hurt me?” she asked him.

  His reply was a quick, clipped growl.

  “I can feel it spreading,” she said, her limbs little more than wobbling sticks.

  “I taste iron,” she added. “Reminiscent of sucking on a silver chain.” The same chain that bound the Weres to the moon?

  She felt the pull of the sky, like a sharp tug on her hair. Felt lightning buzz across her skin. Felt sick to her stomach over being chosen for this task in the first place, though it had been her destiny.

  And hell, she was talking to a werewolf, one whose gaze, when it met hers, brought on visions of straddling him in the street. Of letting herself go, stopping the fight, giving in to the inevitable. Of getting on with whatever the outcome was to be.

  The question was whether this wolf across from her would help her now by finishing the deal and killing her; because if he didn’t, she’d have to do it herself.