The Black Wolf. Linda Thomas-Sundstrom

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      Cara couldn’t stand to watch. She started again toward the rapidly tiring werewolf in the center of the fray and heard a voice in the distance say, “I’m here.”

      Or...had she uttered those words?

      She flew to the middle of the fight, whirled, lashed out and made no headway. The big brown Were, now tiring, didn’t once look her way. He looked past her at something she would have had to turn around to see.

      Another sound broke through the grunts and growls she and the brown werewolf were making. At first, Cara thought it was a howl of distress or a warning call going up about the fight taking place. But that wasn’t it. She recognized what it was. She had heard this sound before.

      The shrieking noise seemed to split the darkness into multiple shadows. The power in it sucked the fight out of Cara. She stilled, frozen in place as the scene continued to unfold in front of her.

      Helpless to do anything but observe, Cara witnessed the downfall of the beautiful brown wolf as it forfeited its life. Fighting on wouldn’t have helped the Were, she realized, because this scene wasn’t actually taking place in her current reality.

      The brown wolf wasn’t here. There were no vampires. What she was seeing was an image projected on the spot where this battle had happened in the past.

      Cold gripped her. Energy that had been white-hot now turned icy. She panted with the effort to understand what was being shown to her as her limbs trembled and spasms threatened to drive her to her knees.

      The Banshee spirit inside her hadn’t predicted death here. The shriek had been a Banshee’s cry, yes, but her Banshee hadn’t made that sound. Someone else had used the Banshee’s voice, but in a different way—maybe not to predict this brown werewolf’s death, but to save his life.

      And that just wasn’t the way things worked.

      Banshee spirits predicted death, and this one hadn’t. There were no other dark, death-bringing spirits in the area, except the one sharing space in Cara’s soul. And yet she had heard that wail.

      She stared hard at the scene that she now knew to be unfolding in a different time. Her claws had been useless against the monsters because they were ghosts, like the rest of the images she had been shown. She was experiencing a memory, a projection, an imprint of what had happened in the past, in this spot. And that meant the sound she had heard had to have been made by her mother...long ago.

      Others were coming, rushing toward the fight in this alternate reality. She watched with fascination as several Weres flooded the area. They had come to the brown wolf’s rescue nearly too late, drawn by the Banshee’s wail.

      Once the Were pack took up the fight, it became even more fierce and bloody. But Cara couldn’t be a participant, since this was a dream. She had seen this battle, had lived it, had experienced the horror of an event that took place long ago...all through her mother’s eyes. Rosalind Kirk had been here then and had made the call that had ultimately saved Colton Killion from death.

      The park had shown her another piece of the puzzle. What had happened here all those years ago had been so awful that it still resonated in this space.

      Witnessing the attack that had made her father what he was today made Cara’s knees buckle. Colton Killion. Ghost wolf. Outcast. Survivor.

      But how could he possibly have survived this?

      She closed her eyes to shut out the rest of the fight her parents had endured. It was a gruesome thing that made that sickness inside her grow.

      Releasing the breath she had been holding, unable to fight the wobble in her limbs, Cara slipped toward the ground without hitting the grass...saved from falling by the strong grip of two powerful hands that had come out of nowhere.

       Chapter 8

      What the hell just happened?

      The question echoed inside Rafe’s head as he reached Cara in time to catch her. She was breathless and wolfed up. He had no idea why her heart was racing so fast. There was nothing out here to see. He and Cara were the only two Weres in the area. And yet she, who was supposedly the strongest of them all, had folded up as if life had suddenly become too much for her to bear.

      He held a werewolf in his arms. Cara had shifted without the moon to guide her, and without other external stimulus. There were no furred-up werewolves present to initiate such a change. She had taken werewolf form as quickly as she had adopted the vamp semblance earlier. He’d have believed this was also impossible if he hadn’t seen it with his own eyes.

      She was also incredibly beautiful, and he shouldn’t have noticed. In a shape that was more familiar to him than that of a vampire, Cara looked both feminine and feral. Yet she didn’t exactly look like any werewolf he had known. She retained more of her human features than was normal for Weres. Same light eyes. Same dark, silky hair. There was no hugely elongated face or altered body shape. Upon closer inspection, it was easy for him to see the female he had met on the beach.

      She was taller, thinner, stringier. She had more angles. Sharp bones jutted under her skin, and there were shadows beneath her eyes. Ten curved claws edged her fingertips. Her spine, through the shirt she still wore, felt to him like a string of pearls.

      Maybe she had gotten stuck in a partial shape-shift. It was possible her shift hadn’t been completed before he’d found her, and because he looked human, her changes had hit a pause button. Whatever the cause of the way she looked at the moment, Cara’s uniqueness fell way beyond the scope of his experience.

      Rafe sank to his knees, holding her. Cara’s eyes were closed. Her face was chalky and pale. He wiped away the tears that glistened on her cheeks and listened to the growls rumbling in her throat. She’d had a shock of some kind that he hadn’t been able to share. His eyes had been on her and not their surroundings. Whatever had shocked Cara into her current behavior had been the impetus for this latest version of herself. So, what the hell was it?

      “What did this to you, Cara?”

      His only concern now was to make sure she was all right. While he wanted to point out the consequences of breaking rules put in place to prevent incidents like this, Rafe didn’t speak of those things. He didn’t take the time to search the area again in case he had missed something. All he could do was comfort Cara and encourage her to shift back to the shape that best resembled his in case anyone from the pack came looking for them—which would be any minute now.

      “Change back,” he whispered, his face close to hers as he pressed dark, silky tresses away from her cheeks. “Do it now, Cara. Do it for me.”

      She shuddered once before he heard the soft sucking sounds of her body realigning that meant her wolf was in retreat. Jutting angles melted back into curves as her tautness eased. Her face blurred back into full human mode, though it remained as white as a sheet. The last to go were her claws.

      With them together like this, the moment felt exotic. He was holding a she-wolf in his arms, one he was attracted to in spite of all the warnings and inexplicable phenomena he’d witnessed tonight.

      His inner wolf gave a roar that shook Rafe up. He swallowed back an inappropriate human-voiced growl. Were to Were, wolf to wolf was how attraction among his kind worked.

      Cara СКАЧАТЬ