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  Rosalind placed the middle-aged voice and where she had heard it before. It was in the alley behind her brown Were’s family’s house. The brown wulf had talked to this man before hell had risen in the park.

  Their scent filed into a reasonable order that began to make sense. These were cops. They were looking for the big Were, who’d gone MIA. She couldn’t help with that unless he came now, hunting for her. If he did come, white and faded and ghostly, there would be trouble with these cops who were looking for him.

  The strange thing was that trouble might have arrived already. Her jaws ached from the sound of these voices. Her body pulsed with the scent of blood. One of the men had cut himself, and the odor of crushed aluminum emanating from that tiny wound had the same effect on her as inhaling an oncoming storm system.

  Her teeth began to chatter. Rosalind felt her lips curl away from her fangs, leaving them wickedly exposed. In horror, she realized that she had stood up, driven to her feet by a faint inner warning suggesting that she could easily hurt these men if she wanted to, and that if she did, no one else would find her mate.

  The thrill of fighting the vampires returned to course through her. The fury of battle, the sound of slashing claws and gnashing fangs came back like distant echoes. So did an imagined sensation of biting into solid flesh, of sinking her teeth into a soft neck. Decent werewolves didn’t bite innocent people. They weren’t supposed to bite anything at all.

  Her teeth were snapping. Her jaws were straining.

  “No. Please, no,” she whispered. “I’m not a monster.”

  In order to escape, she’d have to wait until the men moved off. She couldn’t afford to let them see her. They were good guys, but they carried guns. Although she had been taught that a bullet, unless it was silver, wouldn’t kill her, she’d also been taught that a bullet would hurt like hell and sorely slow her down.

  Dizziness hit her, nearly knocking her sideways. The fur that had stopped halfway into its transition wavered as if a hand had run through it.

  One of the men on the ground beneath her slapped a hand to his ear, glanced at his fingertips and looked up. There was a drop of blood on his hand.

  God, had she shed some of the blood in her mouth without meaning to? Worse, had she bitten a cop without even realizing she had moved, her sinister action hidden in those seconds of brief dizziness?

  “No!”

  She had to take a chance and get away before anything else happened, and before these men found her. She had to get away before she hurt them, or herself, for real.

  With a fluid leap that she hoped would be too fast for human eyes to capture, Rosalind landed soundlessly on the ground in the shadows. Whirling on her bare feet, she called up her wulf, hoping more than anything that the wulf would still listen.

  * * *

  “I think you should go back inside,” Dylan Landau suggested with earnest concern. “It would help if we all knew what’s going on.”

  Colton shook his head. “I told you I’m ill, and that this is the result. There’s no time now for the explanations I need as much or more than you do. Rosalind is out there, alone.”

  “How do you know she’s out there?” Wilson asked.

  Colton patted his chest with a fist, an action reminding him of Tarzan. The pain she was experiencing centered in his chest as if it were his own. He shared that, as well as her anguish.

  “It doesn’t matter what we say?” Dylan queried.

  “It can’t matter. She’s hurting. And I’m...this.”

  There wasn’t going to be much more communication. Colton’s face burned like a son of a gun, unlike the smoother morphing of his clawed hands and furry arms.

  “What about you?” Wilson said. “Maybe there’s a way to—”

  “Reverse the damage?”

  “Heal the worst parts of it,” Wilson finished.

  Colton stared down at himself. White fur now covered his chest, a discovery not all that comforting.

  “You need to get out of my way,” he warned in a deep, guttural tone.

  “And you need to remember where you are, and who you are,” a tense, authoritative voice said from behind Colton.

  Colton spun with his claws raised. That fast, he had shifted and dropped to his haunches in a position of fighting readiness.

  “We are not the enemy, my friend,” a tall, thin man said from the porch steps. “Quite the contrary in fact, if you’ll recall.”

  “Jared. Stay back,” Dylan Landau cautioned.

  Colton cocked his head at the sound of the newcomer’s name. Jared. Jared Kirk. This was Rosalind’s father. Rosalind had told him he’d need to know this name.

  Ignoring Dylan’s warning, the elder Were, dark-haired and dark-eyed, moved closer and spoke again to Colton. “Do you know where Rosalind has gone?”

  Colton rose slowly, hearing the question echo hollowly inside his head.

  “Can you lead me to her?” Jared Kirk asked. “She can’t be loose in the city. It’s imperative that we get her back, then return to our home. It’s crucial. You must trust me on this.”

  By the time Colton stood, he was in man form and as close to being Colton Killion again as he was probably going to get.

  “The questions can wait,” he said gruffly, his vocal cords lagging behind in the latest shift.

  “Yes,” Jared Kirk said with a grateful nod of his head. “They can wait. Finding my daughter can’t.”

  “We’ll go,” Dylan Landau said. “We’ll search for her.”

  Ready to quelch that suggestion, Colton spun around. But Rosalind’s father replied first to the crowd.

  “I’m sorry I don’t have the time to name you all, but please trust me when I say that I appreciate all of your offers of assistance. However, you’re not fully equipped to take on my daughter at the moment. Only this Were can, I believe, if indeed it can be done at all.”

  Jared Kirk had alluded to Colton with a wave of his hand. Dylan fell silent, possibly due to the rebuff that Kirk hadn’t in any way meant as a slight, and only a statement of fact, one that Colton had already started to realize.

  Only this Were could find her, Rosalind’s father had said. Meaning him. Another freak. A ghost. Rosalind’s mate. He and Rosalind were different from the other Weres present and connected by an unbreakable link.

  He scented Rosalind out there, not too far away. He knew she was thinking about him, and that she was scared. Inhaling her lingering fragrance amounted to a directional beacon guiding him to his unusual lover.

  Colton turned his head. Dylan, Wilson and the other boys were staring at him, perhaps hoping to see what tricks he’d perform next. He tuned them out.

  What is she? he wanted desperately to ask Rosalind’s father, when he had just agreed to forgo the questions in lieu of finding the girl.

  He nodded to Jared Kirk. Turning toward the eight-foot wall edging the lawn near the end of the driveway, and bypassing the astonished members of the Landaus’ pack at a lope, Colton parlayed his limping pace into a run.

  Chapter 10

  Colton raced through the park with his hackles raised. Rosalind’s scent had changed again, going from familiar to foreign and then back. She was melting back and forth between forms, just as he was.

  He howled his displeasure over the situation, and the roar carried. No howl answered his.

  Come back to me, my lover.

  His head hurt. Sharp pains pierced his limbs as his injured body adapted to what he was putting it through. He hadn’t healed completely, and the wulf internalized that pain.

  Pure need drove him on.

  Sensations of his own oddness tingled through him, but the act of running calmed his lust for the familiar. Most of the smells in the park were ones he recognized.

  He had to keep focused. The
sound of voices, some of them in the distance and some inside his head, refused to allow him the moments of quiet he needed in order to get his thoughts together.

  He let a second howl rip, and caught a whiff of flowers nearby.

  She’s here.

  Colton slowed when he heard voices.

  “Jesus! What the hell was that?” a man said with fearful agitation.

  “I don’t know. Probably a bird.”

  “Pterodactyls are extinct!”

  “A neighboring dog, then, would be my second guess. What are you doing with your hand? Is that blood?”

  “It isn’t food coloring. Something bit me. And that sound was like no dog I’ve ever heard.”

  “Could have been a big bug that bit you. Who knows what’s in these damn trees? But no dog I know of can fly high enough to nip at your ear, so chalk it up to really hungry mosquitoes. Man, though, this place is creepy. I’ll give you that.”

  “We’ve probably seen enough of this cursed park to know there’s no trace of Killion here. I’m heading back to the boulevard.”

  “You’re not interested in finding out what made that growling noise?”

  “Are you kidding?”

  “Yeah, I guess so.”

  “You don’t sound convincing.”

  “I like the guy, okay? Killion is one of us. I’d like to find him.”

  “He’s not here, Davidson, so we can look someplace else.”

  “All right. Let’s head back.”

  “Wait. What’s that? Hell, I think that big dog is loose!”

  “I’d hate to hurt a dog of any size, them being man’s best friend and all.”

  “Even if it comes after you out here, like a four-legged maniac?”

  “Is that it over there? Come on, I swear I just saw it.”

  “Hell with you, Davidson. I’m not going after that thing. I’m out of here.”

  Colton growled again as he crept toward the spot where his fellow cops had been standing, hearing them kick up dirt and grass as they trotted toward the street. There was no way he could call out to them. Though he wanted to do just that, and his heart hurt, he had to let them go.

  Beneath the tree, he dropped to the ground, able to smell the blood crushed by the officers’ boots.

  Rosalind’s blood. Fresh.

  She had to have heard his call. To call again with the officers so close would be species suicide.

  Colton raised his head, sniffed the air, then took off.

  I might be hurting, he thought, but my wulf knows what has to be done.

  * * *

  Hearing the ghost wulf’s roar, and feeling it rip through her, Rosalind’s steps faltered on a cracked section of a concrete sidewalk. She had reached the street.

  Moving cautiously, Rosalind noted the scent of a particular newcomer too late. Before she had made it to the nearby covered structure, a hand reached out to stop her.

  “Do you really think that’s a good idea?” a female asked, with a grip like a steel trap on Rosalind’s right arm.

  Rosalind turned. The newcomer’s scent was Were, but not Lycan. Not from an ancient bloodline.

  She withheld the desire to knock this wolf to the ground and be on her way. She had to be civil, and keep her damn fangs to herself.

  “Where did you come from?” the woman asked. “Where are the rest of your clothes?”

  Rosalind shivered. When had she again changed form? The full shift to her human shape must have been swift and automatic. It had to have occurred as she’d left the fringes of the park. Without fur-covered legs, she was half-naked, with only the hem of her shirt covering the tops of her thighs.

  This had to be an odd sight. What should she do now?

  The woman beside her was a dark-haired Were of about the same height as Rosalind, and young. She wore a uniform like the one the brown Were had worn until he’d been catapulted onto a divergent path. The name on her chest pocket said Delmonico.

  Another cop.

  Before Rosalind could summon the wits to reply to this female officer’s question, another voice rang out from behind them.

  “It’s okay, Officer,” said her lover, her mate, in a tone that set Rosalind’s teeth on edge. “This is my problem, so I’ll take it from here.”

  Rosalind and the woman holding on to her turned toward the speaker in unison. A ghostly figure stood beneath the branches of the last line of trees. His pale skin was shocking. Long strands of pure white hair fell across a portion of his handsome, hardened face.

  He seemed twice as formidable as he had been before the vampire attack. The red welts crisscrossing his forehead and cheeks, when added to the light skin and dark-ringed eyes, would make him scary to onlookers of any species. The sight of him took Rosalind’s breath away.

  But whatever it was that she had become, the effects of their mating ritual hadn’t been lost, or forgotten. Her cravings for this wulf hadn’t diminished; had in fact grown stronger in her brief absence from him. Even the dark thing taking root inside her wanted to rut with him here, now, without a care for who might be looking.

  She recognized the same cravings in him, and she stole a glance at the Were female cop whose grip hadn’t lessened.

  The cop blinked slowly and sniffed the air. “Don’t know you,” she said to the wulf in the distance.

  “Came from the Landaus’ place a few minutes ago,” he said. “Chasing after an escapee.”

  “You know him?” the cop asked Rosalind.

  “No,” she said, struggling against the idea of shifting into the dark thing with needlelike fangs so that she would scare the hell out of this officer and be able to get away as planned. The emotions inside her were becoming oppressive. Every thought, action, desire, seemed larger than life and potentially overwhelming.

  The Were cop sniffed at the air. “I can smell him on you,” she said. “I also smell something else.”

  Facing the ghost, the officer named Delmonico added, “Different. Wounded. Lycan. Are you Killion, by any chance?”

  Killion. The name brought on another flutter. Rosalind wrapped her tongue around the sound. It was his name. Had to be.

  “I was the man you’re asking about,” her lover replied.

  “Something happened to you after the deaths on Baker,” Delmonico said. “This is the result?”

  “Yes, but I can’t speak of it.”

  “Everyone is looking for you. The force is exploring all avenues. Will you be coming back?”

  “I don’t think so. At least not for a while. Did they find...?”

  “No. Not many know about your parents. We handled it. They’ve been taken away.”

  “We?”

  “Adam Scott and myself.”

  “Thank you,” he said sadly, soberly and with obvious relief.

  The cop named Delmonico nodded and addressed them both. “It’s safe to turn her over to you? You are all right, at least in part? Enough of a part?”

  “No,” Rosalind replied. “Not safe.”

  The emotional turmoil inside her was staging a comeback. She could hardly speak, was afraid to open her mouth and expose what lay inside.

  “It’s the only option,” her ghostly mate named Killion said. “Her father is waiting. So is the Judge.”

  Delmonico nodded again. “Do you know who I am, Killion?”

  “I do,” he said.

  “And why I’m concerned about wolves in this park, and about what I feared might have happened to you?”

  “I know the details of what secret circles call the Red Wolf case, and about the rogue named Chavez. Adam Scott was your partner, and he was hurt. But this—” he alluded to the wounds on his face with a wave of his hand “—wasn’t due to those things.”

  The cop
let go of Rosalind’s arm as if the white-haired Were had uttered a magical sequence of words that rendered him worthy of her trust. She spoke directly to Rosalind. “Best not to have anyone else see you like this. People here wear clothes. Will you go with Killion, or should I accompany you?”

  “Can’t.” Don’t you see why? Can’t you sense the changes?

  Before Rosalind had time to register the expression of surprise on Officer Delmonico’s pert face, her ghost wulf had closed the distance and had swept Rosalind into his arms. With a respectful incline of his head to Officer Delmonico, he left the street behind, carrying Rosalind toward the shadowy spaces where the concept of normal in no way applied.

  “You don’t mean that, about not wanting to come with me,” the ghost said. “I can read you like a book.”

  Carting her as if she weighed little, he ran like the wind in human form toward the Landaus’ walls...where instead of returning her to her father, as promised, he shoved her up against a patched section of the stone barrier, lifted her legs and wrapped them around his waist.

  He pinned her hands above her head with his large, shaky palms, and leaned in. The stone scraped at her flimsy silk shirt and dug grooves into her bare lower back and hips, but that was nothing. The eyes boring into hers weren’t questioning or accusatory. They didn’t seek the truth behind the fangs, or why she had left him so abruptly.

  Killion’s eyes, though pale, were bright with uncontrollable desire. He shook with the attempt to restrain that desire, just as she shook to restrain hers.

  “You bite me,” he whispered in warning with his face an inch from hers, “and I’ll bite you back.”

  “Promise?”

  With an exhaled breath and palpable anxiousness, he said, “Let me in, Rosalind. Now. Here. Take me in before I tear you apart.”

  Rosalind shut her eyes to manage the frightening, rising dark. With a rush of desire, she felt this ghost wulf’s glorious cock sink into her womb possessively, aggressively, in response to the soft sigh of her breath in his mouth.

  Chapter 11

  The ecstasy of being inside Rosalind again was similar to the pain of being torn apart by enemies and then waking up alive, Colton thought.