Moon Marked Read online

  She wasn’t ready.

  Lust after the wolf, her training had taught her, so that you might see into his soul and predict his next move, but never, never span the species. Except, of course, once every hundred years, when it was expected of you, personally.

  As if to distance herself from the thoughts, Nikki closed her eyes and felt her legs give out.

  Jonathan rushed forward with a blurring speed to catch his hunter when she fell.

  His tattered white shirtsleeve, applied to her injured arm as a bandage, stood out against the darkness like a white flag of truce. Though she wouldn’t see the metaphor.

  He admired her. Both his brain and his groin ached as he held his hunter in the moonlight, knowing she had already began her slip from humanity, as she knew it.

  She was in his arms. He held her tenderly, possessively. Then, they were back to the safety of the overshadowing buildings.

  Her bare arms fell limply from his hold. Her head rested against his chest. Her breath came in great gasps and sputters as her body convulsed. Through the rattle of an incomplete breath, his bundle uttered words that were a play on the sarcastic chant of youth, and also a possible key to her continued future on this planet.

  “Bite me,” she said.

  Meaning it in a whole new way this time around.

  Jonathan would have laughed at some distant time, but not this one. He was concentrating too hard to remain in the moonlight that fed his bulky form, and to keep his passion for this hunter from taking over. The things he wanted to do to her bunched his muscles—all those things he’d fantasized about.

  She smelled like a wolf.

  Hunter, woman and wolf. All at once.

  And she had just suggested the very thing that had been on his own mind as the only option left to save her.

  For lack of a better place, he took his hunter to the abandoned building his organization owned, and ducked inside. As the darkness enveloped him, Jonathan revised his shape, slowly this time, since his beast was as reluctant to set the hunter down as he was.

  She felt so very good in his arms.

  He laid her on a couch he’d hauled there for comfort when he watched the same alley she had staked out that night. Her eyes were closed. Pain etched her features.

  “Rhetorical, or request? Biting you?” he said to her, not trusting his voice. His beast was excited, circling his insides as if he’d swallowed that entity whole.

  Amazingly enough, she nodded. “I’ll be like them if you were telling the truth.”

  “You’ll be like them anyway, in a manner of speaking. A bite from me won’t alter that.”

  “Not like…them.” She threw his earlier words back in his face. “Like you.”

  Jonathan nodded. There was a chance he could help her. A chance his own blood would overpower the diluted rogue virus.

  “There would be pain,” he warned.

  “What else is new?” The hunter opened her eyes. Traces of red shot through the whites. Her pupils were black. She was tiptoeing on the precipice, about to tumble over.

  “You will want to fight me,” Jonathan told her. “In spite of knowing I’m trying to help.”

  “Then hit me first,” she managed. “Knock me out.”

  “It doesn’t work that way. You have to take part.”

  “No wonder you’re savages. All this pain,” she whispered, her voice all but gone.

  “It’s what you want?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then look into my eyes,” Jonathan directed.

  She did as she was told this time, her expression cold, though her insides would be frying.

  He kissed her trembling lips to still them, or so he told himself. Lightly at first, he then added more pressure, more emotion. He felt the moment she gave in to the pain and uncertainty. She was trusting him, devoid of other choices.

  The connection between them was there, all right, and waiting.

  In a replay of their moment against the brick wall, Jonathan dragged his mouth over her face until he reached her throat, leaving a trail of kisses as he worked his way down to her shredded upper arm. He held her down with one hand and untied her bandage with his other.

  Without looking at her, he said, “Are you ready, my love?”

  “Yes. Damn everything to hell and back, yes! Hurry!”

  With a heave, Jonathan lifted her up again, off the couch. Ten rapid steps later, he was back out of the door.

  The moon rode the sky overhead, shining with the intensity of a searchlight, throwing noirish gray shadows everywhere. Jonathan felt the familiar wetness of the moon’s allure.

  Laying his hunter on the concrete steps, he stroked her hair back from her face so that the moon would have full access to every plane and angle of her fine features.

  Darting his tongue along the edge of the raw groove of open flesh marring her upper arm, Jonathan hesitated at the spot that would from this night on mark her as having been turned by a genetic Were. If this worked, that is.

  With bared teeth, he drew his lips back with the taste of her still clinging to them.

  “See you on the other side,” he whispered to her as he began his own shift, loath to leave her as a man, yet needing this transformation in order to help her.

  Fully morphed, he forcefully bit down on her arm, absorbing the fierceness of her sudden struggle—so futile against a werewolf of his size and stature—as he widened her wound.

  With his pointed canines, he next tore a chunk of flesh from his own hand and held that hand over her injury. Four drops of his blood dripped into her, four little crimson splashes against the whiteness of her pallor.

  The hunter screamed. Her arm gave off a hissing sound when confronted with the foreign invasion. A scent of blood filled the night, acrid, like the odor of crushed aluminum.

  Then she went still.

  Jonathan had seconds to think about what he’d done. His oath to his kind and his organization expressly forbade the creation of another werewolf, an act that was tantamount to playing God. But he wasn’t creating a wolf, he reminded himself; he was merely rectifying a wrong by someone else who had. He was saving a woman from the madness of that nasty pack’s unevolved gene pool.

  His hunter moved again in a single convulsion so violent that her head flew backward. Jonathan tugged her close.

  Against his chest, her convulsions continued, one after the other. Maybe the viruses were dueling it out inside of her, each vying for dominance. Jonathan prayed for his side to win, and that he hadn’t been too late.

  She cried out as whatever was happening at her at a microscopic level fought on. Jonathan held her closer, near to the point of suffocation, his anxious arms around her, his face near hers as he waited for the biggest event to strike.

  Conflicted, he howled again, the sound trapped by the closeness of the walls on the empty street around them. As if she’d been connected to that cry, and as if the sound had stolen what was left of her breath, his hunter’s chest stopped rising and falling.

  No!

  Jonathan loosened his hold enough to search her bleached face. He gave her a shake, not willing to face the fact that she might not have made it, in spite of his efforts.

  Hunter, he sent to her demandingly. Open your eyes. Make your heart beat!

  Not knowing what else to do, he bent his head, lowered his mouth to hers and kissed her. He willed life back into her, his lips demanding that she respond.

  The tiniest noise followed his sending, reminiscent of the creak of a swollen door swinging on rusty hinges. Another sound followed, deep in her throat, causing her lips to move.

  It was a growl.

  Her shoulders moved—fluidly. The crack of bones leaving their sockets followed, then came the swish of ligaments stretching. Sounds Jonathan was on intimate terms with.

  He loved all that leather, but she’d be kept from assuming her new shape by the tightness of her clothes. Man! Had all of his dreams about removing them from her, layer by later, been about
this?

  But, he thought, staring down at her wonderingly, certainly this hadn’t been the Blackout phase. A few shakes? A convulsion or two?

  The hunter in his arms was showing all the signs of having skipped over that most dreaded part of a species exchange, and that just wasn’t possible. Was it?

  Her eyes opened, stared back at him, clear, blue and only mildly disturbed by pain. Jonathan knew he must have looked as stunned as he felt, and as he gazed into those eyes, a ravenous, uncontrollable hunger for this she-wolf overtook him.

  He had her back in the building before she had taken a deeper breath. Out of the light. Away from the moon’s influence.

  Immediately, and as if he’d thrown a switch, the hunter’s physical straining ceased. She hadn’t gotten far enough along to avoid an uneasy return. And as Jonathan saw it—and with what he had seen mirrored in her eyes out there—they had some unfinished business to attend to. Business that needed, for this one night, their man-woman forms—so she would know exactly how he felt about her and what was going to happen between them. So that he could tell her all the things he wanted to say.

  Like: They would walk the planet in those humanlike, smooth-skinned forms most days of each month. Many things would remain the same, since werewolves resembled humans in so many ways, not only on the physical plane, but emotionally, as well. Once a werewolf connected, imprinted with another, that bond was for life.

  He might have said this anyway, had she remained human. If she’d been completely human in the first place.

  Because the word human didn’t begin to describe a being who could beat the reach of the Blackout as if nothing much had happened, and keep on breathing.

  Those old legends about hunters must have left out a major detail. Possibly it was this detail that had, all along and through the centuries, connected the hunters to their prey so strongly, so sexually.

  Just maybe, Jonathan reasoned with a sudden bolt of cognition, the people chosen to be hunters had been a variation on werewolves all along. They weren’t wiped out by their body’s rewiring process because they had always carried a piece of the virus within them.

  Hellfire, could that be true?

  Not quite human, after all?

  Not as susceptible to the Blackout, as even genetic Weres were?

  In that case…

  Jonathan grinned warily as he pulled this hunter, this woman, this wolf, closer, and said, “Some explaining needs to be done. But I do believe that talking is sometimes highly overrated.”

  ♥ Uploaded by Coral ♥

  CHAPTER SIX

  Rolling heat lapped at Nikki as the man beside her brushed her cheek with his own. He’d taken that bite and she was alive. She had made it. Done it. Accomplished her task in a roundabout way. No thanks to herself.

  New strength was already flooding her limbs, limbs she reached out to the wolf with, responding to the light in his eyes.

  She would share this new blood with the other nine hunters and they would prosper because of it. Because of him, they’d be infused with a minuscule portion of a drop of pure wolf blood; enough to sharpen their senses, but not enough to turn them.

  This wolf in his man’s skin gave off electric charges. The puff of his breath against her cheek smelled of night, moonlight and desire. She sensed all those things.

  She heard his thoughts.

  Laughing with a mixture of panic, elation and ravenous hunger, Nikki ran her hands over his shoulders—the man who wasn’t a wolf now, save in his needs.

  She parted her lips for him, willed him to take the hint and closed her eyes, testing each new sensation. A touch here, then gone. A kiss on the bridge of her nose that made her dance along the outskirts of an orgasm.

  Could he hear her, as well? Was he doing to her what she wanted him to do?

  Now, she sent to him in the shape of an idea, without speaking the word. We’ve shared danger and blood. It’s time for the rest.

  His soft chuckle filled her with unending joy as she glided her palms downward, across his chest, possessively. His mouth came close to hers, she knew, without having to look.

  “Thank you,” she whispered.

  “You used me,” he charged, his mouth as hot and humid as the air outside, his voice fluctuating as her hands dipped lower, heading for those forbidden places.

  “For your own good,” she mocked.

  His lips moved against hers. “You know my name.”

  “Jonathan.” Even saying his name fanned her flames.

  “You knew who I was, all along.”

  A nip at her lower lip nearly derailed her answer.

  “Yes.”

  “Yet you imagine I don’t know everything?” He rested his mouth on hers, touching the corners of her lips with the tip of his tongue. “What you are and what you’ve done?”

  What Nikki did know, clearly, was that this werewolf beside her was living up to his reputation of being as smart as he was good-looking. A lethal combination for a male of any species.

  “Water under the bridge,” she said. “I’m like you now.”

  “Are you sure?” he countered.

  Quite sure, she confirmed, closing her fingers over the bulge in his jeans, hearing his sigh of pleasure.

  “Then you know what comes next,” he whispered to her.

  “Let me guess. Leather? Peeled off layer by layer?”

  Her wolfman laughed out loud.

  He’d been right about her breasts, her tautness and the extent of her physical beauty, Jonathan discovered as he kissed his way down her rib cage.

  And peeling the leather off her had been every bit as tantalizing as he’d dreamed.

  He had been right about something else, he knew, after shedding the rest of his clothes to stretch out on top of her. His hunter was as hot, wet and willing, as had been rumored.

  He also knew a thing or two about she-wolves, things her teachers couldn’t have passed along. Like where to place his fingers, just so…

  Or hell, maybe she was directing that?

  Laughing, he sent to her, As I said…I know something about she-wolves.

  He entered her wetness, simultaneously pressing her for a deeper kiss. A drowning kiss, all heat, tongue and surrogate sex.

  A growl caught in her throat. She was as excited as he was. Her body moved beneath him sensuously, luxuriantly.

  He found it hard to hold back.

  How many times has she ended a hunt like this? he thought jealously as he drew himself out, pulsing, energy flashing with the need to get back inside of her blistering heat.

  “Never!” she whispered into his mouth. Not like this.

  Well, all right. The rest was up to him.

  And she was now stronger than a woman, and much stronger than a hunter.

  He plunged into her, soaked up her cry and plunged again. She rose to meet each thrust, wrapped her legs around him and called his name as she began to shake, way down deep inside.

  Too quick.

  He hesitated, his body shuddering, until her fingers moved like liquid fire across his back. Until her nails dug in.

  Make that claws. Her claws dug in.

  The knowledge of that sent Jonathan toward a new light. Not toward moon, lamp or candle, but the exquisite light radiating from the face beneath his. A face that seemed to glow from within with secret promise.

  Oh yes, she was dangerous, all right. More so that he’d thought.

  A throb rocked him, driving him deeper into her folds. Her sleekness massaged him, hugged him, opened for him, and Jonathan gave her everything. Every last bit of himself.

  Only round one, he promised.

  They cried out together, locked in a stunned embrace.

  Neither of them moved for a time.

  Then his temptress laughed huskily, enticingly, kicking off another round of pure, unadulterated, time-spanning bliss. Or two. Well, okay, maybe it was three. Jonathan lost count as the hours fled by, but werewolves were nothing, if not up to the task.

>   When the pink of a Miami dawn threw slashes of light across their worn, spent bodies, Jonathan moved at last.

  His hunter stretched. She got to her feet unsteadily, and laughed again, almost proudly, he thought, listening to her inner chatter. She had finally sealed the deal. She’d had sex after a chase and…victory?

  Jonathan saw it all then, all those details in her mind now open to him. Her secret, her status as the chosen one, the bite she had needed from him and the reason for that bite.

  He grinned, in spite of himself, watching her don the sexy leather he’d so carefully removed.

  “All you really had to do was ask,” he told her. “Nicely.”

  Her fingers hesitated on her vest’s zipper.

  He added, “Must you go?”

  “Job to do,” she replied. “It’s important. They’ll be waiting.”

  He could let her go, he decided. The imprinting process had sealed them together. Neither of them would want another as long as they both lived. She was his hunter. His woman. His wolf. Just as he was hers.

  “So, he said, walking her to the door as if they were any normal couple starting a mundane workday, pulling her close for a final kiss that threatened to take them both back inside, to the floor. “Same time tomorrow?”

  His hunter gave him a wide, blue-eyed, swollen-lipped, slightly crooked smile as she felt for the silky scar tissue already forming on her upper right arm.

  Then she left him standing on the concrete steps. Only fifteen hours to go, she sent to him.

  With everything she had to face, and all the work they both had to do to clean up the streets and the city in the ongoing war between the species…

  With all the explaining he’d have to do to his organization about making a hunter not only a werewolf, but his mate…

  Jonathan got hard just knowing that she was already counting the minutes until they’d meet again.

  In February 2010, don’t miss RED WOLF by Linda Thomas-Sundstrom, a paranormal romance which starts her WOLF MOONS series. Then, in March 2010, the series continues with WOLF TRAP by Linda Thomas-Sundstrom. Both books have a bonus story added in—the first in-print version of Linda’s initial Nocturne Bite stories. Don’t miss these Silhouette Nocturne books!