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  Loud cracking sounds accompanied the realignment of his shoulders. His spine snapped straight with a shock to the bones. Seconds later, his legs jumped on the bandwagon.

  As Rena reached for the vampire in his grip, Michael butted her away, allowing his wolf the room necessary to deal with a creature that had died once already and now needed a reminder that dead was dead.

  He howled as he completed his shift. After hitting the ground on his paws, Michael bounded back up to lunge for the vampire’s neck. Grabbing hold there with his sharp canine teeth, he shook the bloodsucker so forcefully, the creature shrieked.

  Rena wasn’t to be left out of this party. She came hurtling back, aiming for the monster’s chest with a short, sharp-tipped wooden stake. Putting all her muscle behind the strike, she hit the place in the vamp’s chest where a man’s heart should have been, and drove the stake deep.

  That was all it took to send one unholy bloodsucker back to wherever it went in the hereafter. The creature exploded into a funnel of swirling gray ash.

  “Dust to dust,” Rena said. “One down.”

  “Make that two,” Devlin announced with a fierce guttural growl as a second explosion came from the area between the trees.

  Michael knew they had lucked out with this batch of fledglings.

  Silence returned quickly, and as though nothing had happened to disturb it…which was exactly the way Michael had wanted things to turn out. Until, with his extraordinary connection to Kaitlin, he perceived the trouble she was in and whirled on all fours.

  *

  The guy beside her was blond, built like a brick house and looked capable enough to handle most of the things life might throw his way. Her new guardian, Cade, was the epitome of a modern-day Viking. Attractive. Make that a real heartthrob. And also a werewolf.

  Cade’s green eyes, similar in color to both Michael’s and Rena’s, stared straight ahead, never once veering from the path he led her down. He was concentrating on their surroundings. Kaitlin sensed his reluctance to break their silence.

  “Is something there?” she asked.

  He held up a hand and shook his head, gestures indicating that speaking wouldn’t be a good idea at the moment. There had to be more company up ahead. Dread began to blossom inside Kaitlin over what that company might be.

  With a firm hand on her shoulder, Cade urged her to pause. They stood side by side for a minute, listening, waiting. Then Cade stepped in front of her, acting as a protective shield against whatever was going to show up. Because something was.

  Kaitlin couldn’t see anything past Cade’s powerful shoulders and didn’t need to. Her neck stung with pain that was like having to suffer through her terrible ordeal all over again. In this case, her wound had become a built-in vamp-o-meter.

  Cade spoke to whatever hid in the darkness that lay beyond the meager glow of the closest light pole. “This place isn’t for you. Come to think of it, I don’t know anywhere that is.”

  Sounds reminiscent of radio static caused the back of Kaitlin’s neck to chill. She froze. Cade tensed.

  “I’m sorry.” Cade spoke to one particular spot as if he saw something there. “Was that your reply? Maybe fangs hinder speech?”

  “Now isn’t the time to taunt them.” Kaitlin hated every heart-stopping second of this confrontation and formulated a plan to move to another city if she got out of this with her life and limbs intact. She would take her family with her.

  Not sure if she could handle another vampire sighting, she made a pact with herself to finish her thesis elsewhere. To hell with it. To hell with Michael, werewolves and…

  “Vampires,” Michael said, finishing her internal remark as he, Rena and the other Were in the pack approached.

  Kaitlin spun to look at them with her heart hammering. Cade remained motionless enough to have been turned to stone, his laser-like gaze hovering on that spot in the distance.

  “Didn’t trust me?” he said to Michael over his shoulder.

  “Finished early,” Michael returned. “Nothing else to do, so we thought we’d join you.”

  “Everyone likes company,” Cade said.

  Kaitlin’s attention was on Michael. In human form and completely naked, he was breathtaking. His tarnished bronze skin glowed with a hint of perspiration. He looked like a shaft of moonlight carved into solid form. Without clothes, he seemed not quite as human, and twice as formidable. When confronted with all that pulsing, molded muscle, even she wanted to get out of his way.

  More hissing sounds broke up their reunion. The sounds were close. Kaitlin’s panic bloomed.

  “Five of them,” Cade announced.

  “Five of them and five of us,” Rena noted. “Easy.”

  Kaitlin felt Michael’s attention on her. “Yes, easy,” he said.

  “Better if there was a full moon tonight,” the other male Were added.

  “Hell, who needs a fur coat when we have brains?” Rena quipped, raising her wooden stake. “At least more brains than they have.”

  “Doesn’t even seem like a fair fight, really,” Cade tossed in.

  No one laughed at their restless banter.

  Kaitlin was terrified.

  “Do you want me to take her away?” Cade asked Michael.

  “I’m right here,” Kaitlin said, trying not to stare at Michael. “Don’t talk as if I wasn’t.”

  “She’s not ready for this,” Michael said.

  She met his gaze. “I’m in the way, but I’m no baby.”

  “Well, then, Kaitlin,” Rena said, stepping forward with a testy come-hither gesture of her hand to urge the vampires closer. “Try not to whine. Vamps like that entirely too much.”

  There was no time to change her mind about staying. Kaitlin had never seen anything as terrifying as the things that broke through the dark. The night of her attack, she hadn’t seen her assailant up close. The pain had sealed her eyes closed.

  These creatures were gruesome. Terrifyingly morbid. Their skin was an unhealthy, colorless white. Dark circles ringed black eyes, giving the impression there were no eyes at all, and only deep, empty sockets. They moved like ghosts, hardly touching the ground, their mouths wide-open. They made clicking noises by snapping their fangs together.

  Second only to the shock of seeing a vampire was the surprise of watching four werewolves form a line to welcome the creatures. Tall, feral and so visibly alive that Kaitlin’s skin buzzed with contagious, keyed-up energy, Michael and his pack stood against the oncoming tide of bloodsuckers like superheroes, with Michael, their Alpha in human form, standing at the forefront.

  In place of Rena’s wooden stake and Cade’s intimidating bulk, Michael sported a set of long, curved claws—the only real visual evidence that the group facing the vampires wasn’t entirely human, either.

  There was going to be a fight here, too, and she had to either run away or get with the program. With monsters all around, getting with the program seemed the better option. So Kaitlin didn’t leave the Weres to handle a fight that was also partially hers. She stood her ground a few steps behind the others with her hands fisted and her stance wide, willing to defend herself this time if she had to.

  Inwardly, her new mantra became “If you come at me, I hope to God I can move my feet.”

  Chapter 8

  Michael fought a dark blur, wielding his claws with enough speed and strength to take down two bloodsuckers before the whole fight really got going. Rena toyed with her vampire, faking slashes, feigning to be caught, before finally rallying with a vicious thrust of her wooden stake that struck true and reduced the vamp to ash.

  The vampires were fast, but the Weres, even in human form, were stronger. Cade had a bloodsucker on the ground, with both hands around a brittle, bony neck that was ripe for snapping. Devlin fought like a demon with a steel blade he was able to handle only because its hilt was carved out of bone.

  Because Weres caved physically to the silvery lure of moonlight but could not touch certain metals in any other form,
the glint of Devlin’s knife sent shudders through Michael, who had always secretly supposed Devlin actually had a little demon somewhere in his background. Pict ancestors, maybe. Those Celtic blue-faced guys.

  He rushed to Devlin and tossed a vamp aside, besting it by twenty pounds of hyper-animated Were muscle. He and his pack had fought vampires multiple times—many of those encounters lately—and knew what it took to eliminate the young ones. But he was concerned. Something was happening in this city, something that had kicked off a new flood of monsters. Kaitlin had been the victim of a fledgling like these five, who were probably no more than a few months old.

  Whereas most vamps kept to the fringes of society, where they preyed on the weak and the feeble, this new breed took a bolder tack, slithering through the world as if they belonged there and had every right to hunt. Too many bodies turning up, unexplained, and law enforcement would call in the big dogs of crime fighting. If that happened, everyone Michael knew would be screwed.

  By monitoring this area around the college, his pack was doing its part, but Michael feared that the numbers were slowly shifting in vamp favor. Good werewolves didn’t create other Weres as a rule, either to support a larger pack or make a point. All it took was one good bite and some dribbled blood into a victim’s system, and vampirism could spread like a runaway wildfire.

  If these attacks continued and more and more vampires appeared, including some of the older and wiser versions, he’d have no choice but to call in some help of his own. A few choice words to Miami, and his father’s formidable friends would hit the trail.

  Damn it. He had never seen this many vampires in a single night. Not even in a couple of months.

  “Come on, you bastards.”

  He fought to protect his own secrets, swinging his arms, wielding his claws while in human form. The fighting seemed more personal when meeting these creeps eye to eye. This fight was terribly close to the school. His Weres were growling. The vamps were shrieking. Keeping the Were population out of the limelight was at the highest level of importance, and it suddenly seemed to Michael that the goal was about to get harder.

  Weres everywhere knew that rogue vampires were a threat to Were anonymity, and worked to stay steps ahead of the slippery fanged ghosts. His father’s pack had done a lot to make Miami safe and keep Florida Weres off human radar. That Miami pack was comprised of some of the toughest werewolves and Lycans Michael had ever seen. He had been raised among most of them and wondered if they were fighting their own battles on a night like this one.

  Out of the corner of his eye, he caught sight of Kaitlin. She was leaning over the vampire Cade had trapped on the ground. He found this pretty brave of her, considering…and way too dangerous.

  Cade was waiting for her to take a closer look at his captive, perhaps understanding that one of these bloodsuckers had recently changed her fate. Kaitlin gazed at the vampire with a twisted expression on her face and one of her hands was wrapped around her own neck. Michael saw clearly that even as Kaitlin looked at the vampire, the possibility of their existence wasn’t sinking in. He supposed it had been like that for him, too, in the beginning, and until he’d actually faced the children of the night in a fight.

  “Cade,” he said in a cautionary tone.

  The big Were nodded and pushed Kaitlin aside. Blocking her view from what he was about to do, Cade delivered that vamp its final death blow with a sharp twist to its neck that was backed by angry, keyed-up muscle. The resulting explosion was the only sound left in the night before both Cade and Kaitlin were covered in a falling cyclone of ash.

  Michael sensed how badly Kaitlin wanted to scream, knowing she would do no such thing. Tonight Kaitlin had taken one more step toward that degree in animal she had mentioned, and he guessed that going backward wasn’t in her nature.

  “Maybe not so easy,” Rena observed, dusting herself off and turning to face the last remaining vampire, which was lunging for her. “Yet doable,” she added with a grunt.

  Michael watched Kaitlin’s gaze shift to Rena and her lethal takedown of that vampire before her wide gray gaze landed back on him. His nakedness made her uncomfortable. She looked only at his face. Her heart was thundering.

  For the first time in a very long while, he felt slightly self-conscious.

  And then the world again went silent.

  Kaitlin broke it. “Thank you,” she said to him with a calmness belying the true state of her emotions. She was ready to jump out of her skin if someone said boo.

  “It’s what we do,” Michael said. “Because somebody has to.”

  She kept her gaze level. “They might have made more vampires tonight.”

  “We take one day at a time to eliminate a few of those possibilities.”

  “They can’t change werewolves? Turn wolves into something else?”

  He shook his head. “Our blood is poison to them. They can sense this.”

  Kaitlin turned to Rena in an obvious attempt to elude the picture he presented without his clothes. He read her thoughts on this easily enough. Kaitlin liked his body. She wanted to go to him, touch him, be held by him. She wanted to…

  Hell, he almost blushed, and stopped the mind connection with her in case his body responded to those thoughts of hers and everyone else took note of what his nakedness would not be able to hide.

  She spoke to Rena. “Can you teach me how to do that?”

  Rena lowered her weapon. “Do what?”

  “Fight.”

  As Rena gave him a sideways look, Michael waited to see how she would reply.

  “I guess I could do that,” Rena said with a shrug. “In my spare time, and if spare time comes up.”

  Michael would have smiled if the situation were different. Rena’s acquiescence was proof that Kaitlin was going to win Rena over bit by bit. The fact that Kaitlin hadn’t run away just now went a long way toward earning Rena’s respect. These two females were on the right track, though there was still a long way to go.

  Michael nodded his head, thinking the night had ended well, as ash continued to fall like rain.

  *

  Kaitlin figured it was a miracle she was still standing after again looking into the face of evil.

  Michael’s pack formed a circle around her. She wondered if they were waiting for her to faint. She refused to oblige.

  She was getting used to being the center of attention, and actually felt like the baby they all probably thought she was. Young. Naive. New to this hidden, underground world, and not yet indoctrinated in the language of claws and sharp wooden stakes.

  She hadn’t helped them fight, yet she had been willing. And she’d be damned if she’d let these Weres get a whiff of the terror that gripped her.

  She squeezed words through a constricted throat. “If this is over, I guess I’d better get going. I need to get some work done on my thesis or I’ll never…”

  She didn’t attempt to finish that statement. After what had happened here, the idea of working on a thesis seemed ludicrous. Staring at a computer would be a letdown, as would escaping to her apartment and leaving this pack to roam the park without her.

  More important things than notes and classrooms were happening in the world. People were fighting for their lives and the survival of their species…because there were more types of beings on this planet than anyone would have ever guessed.

  White-hot adrenaline was streaking though her. Her heart rate had not slowed. She wanted to make sense of this, when leaving Michael seemed an impossible task.

  Moonlight dripped over his body, creating valleys of shadows and light. Michael’s eyes were incandescent. His hair, the same color as the darkness around them, gleamed with moon-induced highlights.

  All that beauty, and Michael had claws.

  In her defense, who wouldn’t think themselves idiotic for finding a nonhuman so fascinating? How about for remaining on this spot when vampires were on the loose?

  What about believing in the existence of vampires and were
wolves in the first place, even after witnessing them firsthand?

  Determined to wobble less while in the spotlight, Kaitlin stood straighter. She didn’t feel strong. She didn’t like fighting. Those things alone made it hard for her to imagine being like one of the people before her.

  “I’ll walk you home,” Michael said, as if nothing extraordinary had happened here, and the fine gray dust sifting down was nothing more than out-of-season snow.

  “You’d better not go like that,” Cade warned, unbuttoning his shirt before stepping out of his pants. Handing his clothes to Michael, he added, “We’d have people after us for far more ridiculous charges than for being what we are. Indecent exposure springs to mind.”

  Michael put on the borrowed clothes with a barked “Thanks.”

  Kaitlin didn’t watch him dress. Emotions like lust and fright should have been separated by a vast distance, and weren’t. The emotional roller coaster refused to stop and let her off.

  “I’d lend you some of my stuff in turn, Cade,” Rena said in jest. “But you at least have shorts on. I go commando.”

  The fourth Were, whose name Kaitlin didn’t know, cleared his throat and said with a slight accent she recognized as Irish, “So, we’ll be going now, Michael, unless you need us for chaperones, or to have your back on your promenade back to civilization.”

  Michael sniffed the air before leveling a look at Kaitlin. “Not a vampire around at the moment. I think we’ll be okay on our own. What do you think, Kaitlin? Shall we chance it?”

  Tired of the hot seat, and though she wasn’t sure about letting these werewolves go, Kaitlin nodded. She immediately found herself alone with the handsome shape-shifter, her soul fielding a hunger for Michael that defied rational thought.

  When he stepped toward her, she stepped back.

  “I’m not the enemy,” he said.

  Kaitlin looked up at the moon.

  “Neither is she,” Michael added.

  “How can you not think so after what happens to you and the others in that light?” she asked.