Kitabı oku: «Wolf Hunter»

Contents

Cover

Excerpt

About the Author

Title Page

Dedication

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Extract

Copyright

Chapter 1

It was only moonlight. A damn luminous light show...

But Abby Stark stood frozen in a pool of it.

A choice four-letter word slipped through her clenched teeth.

Tonight’s recon should have been routine. It was too late to second-guess what had gone wrong. One move now, no matter how slight, and whatever was out there in the dark, whatever had stopped her in her tracks, would find her. Breaking the silence by talking into her cell phone would mean attracting any number of bad guys roaming the area.

She couldn’t afford to be caught with her pants down in this notorious Miami park. Her mind brought up the words dead meat.

The thing out there in the dark, too close for comfort, didn’t even begin to fit the term bad guy. Its presence left an eerie wave of ripples in the air. Otherness rolled across her skin in waves.

This visitor was not human.

Big freaking surprise.

The thing heading her way was trouble with a bite. A large male, her senses confirmed, and charismatic enough to affect her from a distance. Not just any old monster, either, according to her gut reaction. Something special. Encountering his vibe had been similar to slamming up against a brick wall face-first.

Damn it, had he come close enough to see her?

Was he paying attention?

Don’t move.

Flicking her gaze from right to left brought up nothing out of the ordinary. Then again, most of the planet’s darker things were difficult to catch a glimpse of in the darkness that bred them.

Adding to the problem was the rain of coldhearted moonlight highlighting every move she’d dare to make—like a circus spotlight pointed in her direction when she was supposed to be in stealth mode.

Step right up, folks. See the girl who’s about to have her ass kicked.

Moisture began to gather in the valley between her breasts. Sweat dampened her forehead. Her skin burned beneath her black fatigues because her engine was revved but stuck in neutral.

How screwed was she, on a scale of one to ten?

There was nothing to be done now, Abby supposed, short of wishing for backup, though she couldn’t decide what would be worse—being caught by a monster, or having her father’s team of elite monster hunters know she’d been found by one of those monsters.

That’s what her father called the man-wolf hybrids that had recently claimed this park. Monsters.

Her head came up.

The night rustled as if something had just punched its way through the dark. More nerve endings fired as Abby strained to see what approached. This guy had turned the tables, making the watcher a target, rather than the other way around.

She didn’t like anything about this.

Sensing Others was what she had always been good at, yet she’d been inexcusably late to this particular party. The hot flashes burning through her were a telling sign that she’d found the very thing she’d been seeking tonight. Werewolf. A beast that also might have found her.

Unfortunately, this sucker’s presence seemed strong. It might even be a full-blooded beast, though she’d never come across one in the fourteen years she’d spent scouting for her father’s team. If not one of the mysterious Lycans, this Were’s pedigree had to run parallel to that status. The older the bloodline, the stronger the wolf.

Who are you?

Abby fisted her hands.

To her relief, her watcher wouldn’t be a full-fledged beast tonight, since the moon wouldn’t be full for another twenty-four hours, though he’d be close enough to being a beast to have set off warning signals.

Her nerves were virtually singing.

Show yourself, wolf. I know you’re there.

Abby hoped he wouldn’t actually take her up on the offer. Not a creature this potent. Real toughness, a trait she’d inherited from her father, fell short of the mark when dealing with big male werewolves, a fact brought home by the ribbon of fear weaving its way up her spine over the thought of how excited this Were would be tonight, so near to a full lunar phase. He would be restless.

Hell, she was restless. And puzzled.

Whether werewolves were furred-up or not, her intuitive sense of them remained the same. She could pick Weres out of a crowd. She’d always known they were around. But the intensity of the spark igniting deep in her belly at that moment, when stumbling upon this guy, also resembled some sort of messed-up sexual craving. That was new. Brand-new.

Mixed signals between fear and lust? Had to be, because no way in hell could feelings of lust be right.

I’m no amateur, you beast.

I’ve been around.

In her father’s private and very personal war on werewolves, a war that had started with greed before escalating to be so much more, she had been more than useful.

The going rate for a wolf hide chimed in at five hundred dollars in the European black markets. For a fully morphed werewolf pelt the dollar decibel moved over, altering that sum to a full ten grand. In another category altogether came rare, pure-blooded Lycan pelts, skinned before the wolf shifted back to its humanlike form. The grand total for remnants of the king of beasts was fifty thousand bucks. Enough to build a swimming pool.

But Sam Stark’s war on Weres went deeper than dollar signs. The bigger, darker motivation for werewolf haters like her father outclassed thoughts of money and reaping vengeance on a nasty criminal element that had been feasting on humans in Miami and elsewhere for quite some time. Sam’s motivation came under the classification of genocide. The elimination of beings unlike himself.

The goal of the TTD, an acronym for Take Them Down, was to cull all mutants with moon-tweaked genetics from the population—creatures that could pass for human some of the time, but weren’t really human at all.

Abby didn’t like the bad stuff. She never accompanied the team when they hunted werewolves, and didn’t care to witness what they brought back. Her awareness of Weres had grown more intense as time passed, and now seemed almost personal.

Heck, she was the last person to understand how that intuitive connection to Weres worked, but hoped it didn’t go both ways. All she had ever wanted was for werewolf violence against humans in her own backyard to stop. And here she stood, being stalked by one of those same hybrids from a species doing real damage around town.

So, who is going to show up, and what will you do?

Without a completely full moon, Weres looked like everyone else, with human heads, shoulders, arms and legs. Some of them would speak English.

In human form, wolfmen were tall and tautly muscled, with plenty of supersize capabilities, such as being able to smell her from several yards away.

Like this one must have.

Would he eventually appear in his human skin cocoon? Fake being a jogger? Play at acting like just another guy out for a midnight stroll in a park that no one in their right mind would trespass in alone without an Uzi—unless that mindless sucker happened to be her, with a very special agenda that made dangerous places her job sites of necessity.

This park was a nightmare.

More human bodies were found each year in public parks than anyplace else in Miami, outside of the city center. Bodies turned up without bullet holes or knife wounds, trashed by bite marks and the deep grooves of razor-sharp claws—wounds the Miami PD had no way to explain because not everyone knew about monsters, or that they actually existed.

The Starks knew.

So did handfuls of other people.

Hunters from all over the world came to Miami to join her father’s underground big-game hunting expeditions. Some of those people actually believed they were doing God’s work.

I know what you are, wolf.

I know you’re there.

Reality hit hard. Odds being odds, Abby had figured that someday this kind of accident might happen. In all those years of service to the TTD, she’d never gotten within a couple yards of any big Were. She had never allowed herself to.

Now what?

This one was getting closer by the second—close enough to make her blood simmer. The initial quake of recognition that had rocked her backward splintered into smaller quakes. Her knees felt gummy. Her skin was hot. Weres were often volatile and always dangerous. Right then the sense of danger seemed extreme.

Come out, damn it. Let’s get this over with.

As Abby saw it, she was fresh out of options. It would have been useless to try to outrun a strong male when chasing prey is what they did so well, and this guy’s presence alone had nearly knocked her off her feet. There hadn’t been time to find cover after her initial awareness of him. Currently, she stood in the open, completely exposed.

Why don’t you come out?

Are you toying with me?

At that moment, Abby hated the moonlight that ruled these beasts more than ever. She hated everything about the moon.

Shit. How far was she from help?

She’d been cornered between two of the walls separating one of Miami’s megamansions from the east end of the park. Although she had been in worse places numerous times, being stuck in the open and drenched in moonlight didn’t help her chances.

Attached to her leg, above her right boot, a knife rested in its sheath. Her cell phone was keyed to her father and the rest of his hunters waiting for news at her father’s bar. Short of using the blade, throwing the phone at a beast in man form would be an unconscionably girlie thing to do.

For the record, I haven’t been that kind of girl for some time now, she wanted to shout.

“Damn moon. I hate you.”

“In that case, this is probably the last place you’d want to be tonight,” a deep masculine voice returned from the shadows.

Contact.

He had spoken out loud.

Pulses of pure adrenaline, fierce and feral, skittered through Abby, producing a series of massive electrical jolts. Her stomach twisted into knots. Her teeth slammed together. Staring at what stepped out from under the trees, her hands flew to her neck in an automatic gesture of self-defense, as if in man form or not, her visitor might go for her jugular.

And God help her, part of her untimely inertia was due to the fact that her impression of this guy, from afar, hadn’t been wrong.

This sucker was one hundred percent intimidating.

Chapter 2

Abby stared in shocked silence as the Were in his human incarnation advanced in a balanced combination of hard angles and mounds of lean muscle.

He stood tall enough to tower over her, and was twice as broad. A first glance proved him to be brutally handsome. His energy was electrifying. Looking at him kicked the scalding Miami summer temperature up several notches and turned her shudders seismic. Her heartbeats thundered in a way that any Were worthy of its species would be attracted to.

Searching, she saw nothing wolfish in his outline, though an aura of Otherness radiated from him like visible radio waves. His casual, almost nonchalant stride screamed of combustible energy tightly contained in a human casing. His long limbs and wide shoulders were topped by a tanned sculpted face and thick chin-length hair that fell somewhere on the color spectrum between gold and bronze.

Oh yes. This guy was a breed unto himself, and completely unlike anything she had come across before. He was a magnetic combination of rugged and elegant.

Too gorgeous to be human.

He wore a blue long-sleeved shirt rolled at the cuffs to expose sun-kissed forearms. An open collar showed off more skin. His jeans were faded, and she caught a flash of heavy black boots, though he advanced soundlessly with his gaze riveted to her.

Abby felt color drain from her face. Mesmerizing wasn’t the word to best describe him. Magnificent seemed a better choice. Also deadly. This beast, with his incredibly honed body outlined by the tight, fitted shirt, moved toward her little circle of light with the grace of an animal...because he was an animal, at least in part. And the overtly masculine, almost hypnotic physical details that described him were likely some kind of built-in bait for reeling in prey.

The devil always lay in the details. Her father had warned her about this many times.

Never get close to the enemy.

Hell, she’d just smashed that golden rule to smithereens through no fault of her own.

Beneath her outward quakes, Abby’s insides trembled with a mixture of fear and defiance and something else she didn’t dare address—that new thing that had no business showing up alongside this large golden wolf.

Hunger.

That’s what she felt. Hunger. For knowledge of him. For the chance to get closer to him.

Either she’d gone insane, or this guy had the ability to hypnotize her with his wolf power, because she grappled with a spectacularly idiotic, completely suicidal compulsion to have the itch forming down deep inside her scratched by a razor-sharp claw.

The breath she exhaled after holding it for so long was steamy. Aside from her need for self-preservation, and against her better judgment, this werewolf in his human form affected her in ways that were totally wrong. The highly erotic vibrations he gave off were the epitome of a perilous death trap.

She got that. She knew better. So why did her body want to meet the animal in him? What possible explanation could account for her absurd desire to fold herself into his heat?

“What do you want?” she demanded in frustration.

He replied in a voice like soft, sifted gravel. “I was wondering if perhaps you have a death wish.”

The world went white-hot beneath this Were’s unwavering gaze. Moonlight seemed to amplify every sensation rippling through Abby, all of those sensations pointing to him. No doubt about it, her sexually suggestive reactions were as dangerous as the Were himself.

She’d never been an out-and-out rebel, really, she thought now, though she had lived on the edge, more or less fending for herself since her mother died of a prolonged illness when she was a kid. In the past, she’d had no reason to flaunt her father’s strict authority, since he had provided, if not earnest affection, a roof over her head.

So, was there an actual rule about people having to do the right thing at the right time, or only what was good for them?

Breathlessness made her light-headed, a symptom of anticipating more trouble to come. Needing air, unable to stand the silence, Abby spoke in a voice shakier than she would have liked, given that werewolves, as with other predators, could ferret out fear.

“Death wish?”

He nodded. “Everyone in Miami is familiar with this park’s unfavorable mortality statistics.”

Inner warning signals went off again. Red flags waved. If she couldn’t outrun this sucker and he wished her harm, she’d have to fight.

Keep him talking. Gauge his intent.

Was he a member of the pack killing people out here? The way he rolled his shoulders reminded Abby of how much muscle lay under that cool blue cotton, and how that muscle would soon adapt to a new shape. If not an organic werewolf, known from Sam’s lectures as a Lycan, he’d have to have been bitten by another werewolf, and that bite had injected the wolf virus into his bloodstream. Human and wolf particles had fused to form a freakish new entity.

Did this guy’s raw, undulating maleness stem from the kick of some mystical ancient virus in his bloodstream, or had he always been a heartthrob?

“I know about the park,” she said.

She hadn’t really looked closely at his face. It was bad enough that the bronzed skin beneath his chin, exposed between open buttons, beckoned to her with the lure of the forbidden.

Would his flesh be smooth, so close to becoming a wolf? Abby cursed the urge to press her fingers there to find out—an action that would probably add one more body count to those unfavorable statistics he’d just mentioned.

Keep strong.

Resist the craziness.

Never get close.

“Then you do know this park is probably the last place a woman should visit, alone and at night,” he said quietly.

“Only women?”

“Anyone.”

“Am I alone?”

“That seems to be the case.”

Abby gestured at him with a wave of one hand. “You don’t count?”

Sarcasm didn’t make her feel better about her predicament. The Were’s eyes remained on her in an uncomfortably intense way, giving Abby the impression that he could see through her clothes and down through her skin to the place where the sparks of her crazy curiosity about him glittered.

She hoped to God he couldn’t see that.

Stomach tightening into a ball of uncertainty, and with her body temp soaring to a disgusting degree, she waited for what might come next, facing the Were, whose specialized internal furnace would soon fuel a werewolf’s shape-shift.

“You do know that bad things sometimes hide in the night?” he cautioned with no threatening move in her direction.

“Are you one of those bad things?”

“I could be. How would you know?”

“Well, then, I guess I’d better go before you have a chance to provide the answer.”

“That might be a good idea,” he agreed.

Movement, though, was impossible. Turning her back to this guy would be a bad idea, no matter how friendly his approach had been. Big reminder: though he looked like a human, and talked like one, he wasn’t.

Feeling the weight of the cell phone in her pocket, Abby tried to remember that Weres weren’t the only treacherous faction in town. Her father, Sam Stark, was as deadly as any werewolf and quite possibly twice as lethal, since Sam had no tolerance for anomalies like this one, and his hatred was usually backed by an element of surprise.

She wondered what color this guy’s pelt would be. Bronze, like his hair? Golden, like the rest of him? With moonlight reflected in each strand of his sleek, slightly mussed mane, whatever color of wolf he turned out to be would amount to tons of cash for the Stark accounts if the team found him. He’d bring a small fortune and it shouldn’t be any concern of hers. This wolf and others like him hurt people when the moon was full.

How close to the surface is your wolf tonight? she wanted to ask. Are you a killer?

Any of those things spoken aloud would let him know she had pegged him for a hybrid, taking things from bad to worse in a hurry. The team’s plan had always been to drive Weres like this one into the open, into the moonlight that betrayed what they were, and strike fast, strike hard. No mercy.

But this wasn’t a killing night. Tonight her job had been only to locate some Weres. See who was around.

“And I found you,” she whispered as her interest in the gorgeous Were reached broiling status internally, as if her mind and body were engaged in a war of ethics, while the big fellow on the edge of the light continued to prove how good his acting skills were.

It was a standoff. Checkmate.

Who would make the first move?

Daringly, Abby let her gaze drift upward to his face before immediately wishing she hadn’t. His features were chiseled, with high cheekbones and a full mouth. He had a strong jaw and arched brows. She refused to meet his wide-set eyes.

Daring to speak again in a voice husky with strain, she said, “What are you waiting for?”

After a long pause, he replied, “Why don’t I walk you home?”

Abby shook her head. “Don’t think so, but thanks all the same.”

“There could be others out here, much worse than me.”

“Really? Much worse?”

“I can assure you of that.”

“Then why are you out here?” she asked.

“I like to walk and think.”

“In the dark?”

“Yes.”

“Here?”

He shrugged.

“Maybe you’re some kind of danger junkie,” she suggested.

“It’s a possibility. What about you? Is danger your drug of choice, or were you trying to get somewhere and got lost?”

Unclenching her hands, Abby then fisted them again, rattled by the stilted repartee. The heat, both hers and his, had become suffocating. He had a gaze like a frigging laser beam that wouldn’t let up or miss much. The sixty-four-thousand-dollar question was whether this guy would try to hurt her, or not.

Why don’t you make your move?

“Danger isn’t really my thing,” she said.

“Yet here you are, in a place that attracts it.”

“Not for long.”

Listening hard, Abby separated the layers of city noises. Cars paraded down the boulevards in the distance. The faint buzz of insects reached her from the trees to her right.

The air was filled with the smells of dry, sun-drenched pavement and the bitter odor of crushed grass and leaves. Above those things something else, some other scent, surfed the night air. She tagged it as the not-so-sweet odor of the unseen.

Her scalp pricked. Her racing heart gave an extra thump. This Were’s wolf was close to the surface and getting stronger. Whatever lay inside him that she had easily connected to wasn’t going to go away with a bit of conversation.

Something else bothered her, needled at her. If this guy was an Alpha, he’d have a pack close by.

Her odds in favorably dealing with the situation plummeted. At the same time, her morbid fascination for the wolfman kept Abby focused. She wanted to know so much more about him, and about what went on here. Her appetite for those things grew by the second.

Abby held herself tightly to keep from squirming. If Weres like this one possessed animalistic superpowers, he’d have already noticed that she had become a heat-sensing Geiger counter for the very thing that should have had her screaming. Her fevered flesh and skin-ruffling gyrations were the equivalent of inviting the fiery hand of death to slide between her legs.

Hell with that. Due to his looks and masculine vibe, this Were probably had a harem of women willing to take him in. He didn’t need one more willing supplicant. Besides, wolves and humans did not mix, except when those things in an anomalistic fashion resided within one being.

The situation sucked. All outcomes seemed dire. Whatever outlandish thing was taking place between this werewolf and herself had gummed up logic. He was seducing her without any effort on his part at all. He didn’t have to be blatant about it because the seduction worked. All he had to do was stand there, looking like a sexy hunk.

Stupid girl. Stupid, stupid girl. Get out. Get away.

You, she wanted to shout to the creature across from her, are the very thing my father and his teams despise. There has to be a reason for that.

Lifting her chin defiantly, Abby backed up a step. This is the final test. Will you pounce?

As it turned out, he didn’t do anything of the sort. Instead, he calmly asked her a question.

“Why do you hate the moon, if you don’t mind me asking?”

The question was as unexpected as the earnest ring of curiosity in his voice.

“You said you hate it,” he reminded her.

“I hate what the moon does to people,” Abby said.

Her companion glanced up at the light. “You don’t find the moon beautiful?”

“Its beauty is deceitful, as beauty often is.”

If he got the point and the allusion to himself, he didn’t show it. He took a step toward her, closing some of the distance separating them and setting off another round of sparks that burrowed well below Abby’s waistline. He continued to study her face as if whatever he sought there might be important.

What did he want? An apology for the atrocities her father and his team had inflicted upon his species? Did he want revenge, when he had to know how many humans Weres had killed in Miami in the past year alone?

In hindsight, she should have covered up the logo on her T-shirt that advertised a bar that just happened to also be a field office for Sam Stark’s hunters. She hadn’t taken the time to change, in a hurry to get outside, away from the crowd. Maybe this guy had already made note of it, which would be bad news.

Move, Abby. Hesitation is no longer an option.

No wolf could be allowed to discover where the team kept court, or seek to uncover the source of her own unusual connection to their breed. Those were secrets for keeping behind closed doors, under lock and key, especially when facing a Were male of this caliber.

Damn it, the spell he had put on her had to be broken. Her murky, inexplicable attraction to him had taken her too far off base. She had feared this kind of face to face for a long time.

Use the phone. Make that call.

Yes, and what would she say to her father if he answered the phone? That she’d screwed up this time? That she’d been mesmerized by a wolf? There was no way Sam’s team could find her like this, feverish and out of commission, when so many others expected her to be a chip off the old guy’s block.

Plus, all of a sudden she wasn’t so sure about wanting the team to find the Were across from her who was too damn pretty to be a rug on some billionaire collector’s floor.

“Got to go.”

She needed to hear the urgency in her voice. The muscles of her upper back twitched. Although her heart rate again spiked, she didn’t go anywhere because backward wasn’t the direction she really wanted to take. Every molecule in her body strained to get closer to the wolf in his human skin, while her mind struggled to find a way out of this standoff that made sense.

Do the smart thing. Turn and sprint. Hope he won’t follow.

Why hadn’t she at least tried that?

Was he touching her? No. Yet she felt as if he were.

Could he be holding her there physically with his wolf aura? Yes. Hell, yes.

This wolf was the real deal, times ten. And he was what? Being friendly? They were having a chat, as though the word species didn’t matter?

If this Were internalized her scent, or any other of his cousins trapped her with a purpose the next night, she’d make the obituaries, or worse. One swipe of a claw or a bite that deeply pierced her skin and she might become one of them.

Considering that she survived at all.

Abby’s lips parted for a speech she didn’t make. Without thinking she inched toward this Were like a bug drawn to light, her body, independent of her mind, urging that forbidden touch as if part of her actually wanted to burn. As if the secret guilt she had built up over the years about the whole hunting scene, as well as the lectures from her father, the loneliness she’d endured for so long and the image of werewolf pelts hanging from ceiling beams, would burn with her.

Swallowing the lump in her throat, Abby waited for sanity to intervene, hoping it would hurry.

“Will you let me go?” she asked breathlessly.

“Of course you can go. Though I really would like to make sure you get where you’re going safely.”

An offer of safety from the scariest thing out here?

As if she was supposed to believe him.

“Nights here are always dangerous,” he said. “Tonight feels especially tense. Do you sense that?”

“Why care about me at all? You don’t even know me.”

“It’s what I do.”

“You make a habit of accosting women in dark places, and then woo them with the promise of a compromise?”