Harlequin Nocturne May 2015 Box Set: Wolf Hunter\Possessed by a Wolf (23 page)

Chapter 32

A
bby heard shouts coming from behind her as she landed on the lawn in a crouch, on her werewolf haunches, as the rest of her transition took place.

Electricity sparked across her nerves. Pain streaked through her like well-aimed bolts of lightning come to ground. Her racing heart didn't seem capable of keeping up with the changes, since fear also had it thundering. Pure, unadulterated fear.

Cameron landed beside her, having climbed down from the second floor by using the trellis. Others were coming, rounding the house as if her change had tripped some sort of silent alarm. Six people, all of them in their human cocoons, all of them concerned, headed her way. Abby felt their hearts and their pulses alongside hers, though Cameron's heartbeat was dominant, hammering at her as if she had swallowed his heart whole.

“Abby!” Dana Delmonico called to her.

This was, she supposed, a freaky party, where she had become the central theme.

“Here,” Cameron answered in her place, because she had lost the ability to speak, along with her outer shell of humanity.

Dylan Landau reached her first, gliding to a stop a few feet away. Dressed in a gray suit and matching tie, his expression was thoughtful.

Without saying anything to her, Dylan's gaze moved to Cameron. “You're naked, Mitchell.” Dylan yanked off his jacket.

“I don't think that jacket will do much good,” Delmonico said, pulling up alongside the pair. “Unless he puts his legs in it.”

Abby growled her displeasure over the gathered crowd. The word
freak
became part of her internal buzz.

“I think he's out there, nearby,” Cameron said.

“Sam Stark?” Dylan asked.

Abby didn't recognize the other Weres. The detective who had lent her his leather jacket hadn't shown up. All the Weres present, except for Dana Delmonico, were males. Abby had no idea how many of them possessed the same knack she had for changing without a full moon.

Anxious, she got to her feet and began to back away from the group. Cameron followed, circling around to stand behind her, unconcerned about being naked, his only concern for her. Abby closed her eyes, fearing that if she looked too closely at Cameron, she might completely lose her mind.

Dylan sidestepped the rest of the group, glancing toward the wall and sniffing the air. Then he loosened his tie in a motion reminiscent of the man of steel stripping off his glasses to reveal what lay beneath the disguise.

“Stark's in the park,” Dylan said.

Everyone present looked to the wall as if they possessed the ability to see through the stone.

“He can't possibly know where she is,” Cameron said.

“Maybe not, but he thinks she will find him,” Dylan warned.

And Dylan was right. For Abby, a whiff of Sam is what had brought on the change. She had located him from inside the house. Her wolf had immediately responded, possibly out of self-defense, and possibly out of a need for justice to be served.

She turned. Sighting the wall at the edge of the lawn, and ready to meet Sam once and for all, she figured she might be able to dodge a silver bullet in her new wolf form, and a medication-tipped dart, but she couldn't ask Sam the questions still in need of answers unless she changed back in his presence.

Okay. That was dangerous. Seriously dangerous.

She looked to Cameron longingly, and he seemed to pick up her thought. “No,” he said adamantly. “We'll call it in. Let the cops have him. You can ask anything you want of him after that.”

The suggestion was reasonable, perfect, aside from one small thing. The hatred she felt for Sam had become like a separate being, and that being was chained to her wolf. Revenge was a ravenous parasite that Sam had called forth from its slumber. Sam had tortured her mother. Sam had killed her mother.

If she couldn't have Sam and the answers she needed, she'd have to be put out of her misery. And though she might be strong at the moment, she had never been stupid. The Weres facing her weren't going to let her go to her death alone.

She howled. Cameron returned the sound with a human equivalent.

“Wait,” Dylan said. “Just give me five minutes. Three. All right, two at most. Let me call the others.”

Of course, she had no intention of waiting, or allowing anyone here to fight her battle with Sam.

The silver knife pulsed against her calf as if it, too, wanted satisfaction, as if parts of the moon itself had been caught up in the blade. Abby touched the handle of the knife and felt the power of its burn. Her palm sizzled, branded by the touch, but she rode those things out, conquering the pain as deftly as she had in Sam's death cage.

She would fight silver with silver, if she had to. She'd pit a werewolf hunter against the one thing he despised most. She'd set a wounded daughter against a false father, and use her mother's ghost to do so. And if she survived...

Leaving the thought unfinished, Abby spun on both heels and raced for the wall.

* * *

She ran, heading for Sam's scent in the deepening dark. The beast she carried infused her with a fair amount of courage, but her pulse beat mercilessly in her throat. Sam had always instilled fear in those around him, and she was no exception. He alone had the ability to frighten her. She had no doubt that he'd try to use that fear against her again.

Maybe, though, that fear now worked both ways.

Sam had scuttled from the torture room before she'd gotten clear of the cage. All he'd had was the dart; at least, that was the only weapon she'd seen. Against the sheer force of her anger, a dart might have been more of a nuisance than a worry.

But Sam hadn't been quick enough to use the dart on her thick werewolf hide. When he'd seen her escape route, he had run away. He'd been a coward in the face of possible defeat.

What about tonight? Would he run? Would he surround himself with hunters to bolster his courage?

Sam wouldn't come after her unprepared, not after seeing her stretch the metal bars out of shape. Strength came with the fur suit, along with a hefty dose of intimidation factor. Her muscles sang with newly found power. Surges of strength flickered in every muscle and cell, producing massive amounts of energy. But she couldn't use these things to take Sam down. And if she killed Sam, she also would be a murderer.

Sam's mantra rattled around inside her head.

The only good werewolf was a dead werewolf.

Growls of protest bubbled up as Abby slowed. Sam's scent grew stronger as she neared his hiding place, but the night itself seemed another kind of enemy, tempting her with a bombardment of scents and smells.

Each fresh scent existed as a trail she wanted to follow. Each led somewhere else. She had to close them all out, ignore all but the trail she needed to take to stick with the goal. Her life, her soul, depended on this meeting.

A life force hit her sight radar, appearing suddenly in the form of a wavy infrared outline. Her wolf gave an inward roar. She let that roar out. She had tracked her prey, and found it.

She headed toward the outline, unable to think about how she'd get Sam to talk. Pin him to the ground or against a tree? Roar in his face. Use her claws to put more fear into him, before she changed back to Abby? Once she shifted back, Sam would again have the upper hand.

Years of living in close proximity to Sam Stark left no leeway for doubt. She smelled his clothes, his hair, his skin and the distinct odor of gun metal. Rifle, she guessed.

And there he stood, with his legs apart and his body braced, near the intersection of two merging walls. She hadn't gone far to find him, and had not misjudged the voracity of the emotions radiating off him in waves. Sam was filled with red-tinted hatred and blackened disgust. His steely determination was very much like a slap in her face.

If Sam hadn't seen her, she had the advantage of surprise. With that flash of insight, Abby realized that wolves had always possessed that kind of advantage. Given the sensitivity to smell and the heat-seeking radar, it made no sense that hunters had been able to take down so many Weres, so easily—unless those Weres had believed themselves to be invincible.

Sam waited for her, soaked with the aura of an executioner. His calmness made him doubly dangerous. She hadn't considered that he might have a night scope on the rifle, but it didn't matter now. The end had come.

Abby paused a few yards away and waited to see what he'd do. His image filled in. She now saw the scope that allowed him to view her, as well, and that pretty much evened things out.

“Abby,” Sam said. Not a question. He had his sights on her.

She growled in reply, and the sound carried.

“You had to come,” he said. “Beast blood makes all of you do stupid things.”

Did you shoot my mother? Hunt her down?

She didn't have the ability to demand answers for those questions, and had an eerie feeling that those answers really weren't something she wanted to hear. The image of her mother running in the dark, being chased, hunted and about to lose her life made her sick. Sam had silver bullets in the rifle. She stood very still, wondering why he didn't just pull the trigger and get this over with.

Another growl rose, scary but insufficient in getting to the heart of the matter of her mother, and of what Sam might do next.

“She was Lycan,” Sam said, continuing to aim. “Not bitten, though that wouldn't have mattered much, either. She had a ring of scar tissue on her left arm in the shape of a set of teeth. I found out that's a sure sign of the moon's wolf cult. So I had to take care of that.”

Abby's hatred, pent-up and boiling, leveled out. Sam was talking about his wife, not her. At the moment, he didn't believe they were one and the same. He had just filled in some of the missing information she'd been searching for, but she wanted to understand the rest.

Go on, Sam.

“I took you both in,” he said. “Imagine my surprise when the full moon arrived.”

This didn't sound good. Abby growled again, unable to hold her sadness back.

“In the end, she faced me just like you are. If she had run away, she might have had a chance. If she had stayed a monster, she might have lived. But she wanted to be assured of your survival. She said if indoctrinated into my cult, instead of hers, you might never change. If kept from the moon after puberty, you might never realize what you are. I made sure of that on all counts, for as long as it lasted, and your inner awareness of monsters came in handy.”

Yes. I only hunted for you the nights before a full moon, supposedly to see who was around. To see what wolves prowled the park grounds.

Hell...you almost had me. If I hadn't met Cameron, I might have remained ignorant of my birthright.

Her hands fisted. The claws brought up blood.

“So, here we are, Abby. You have destroyed my livelihood and brought cops to my door. I don't lose much if I pull the trigger. You, on the other hand, lose a lot.”

Sam was a crack shot. No way he'd miss at this range. She'd have a chance of surviving the silver bullet, as Cameron had, if help arrived quickly. But she could not maintain the shape that might save her. More gaps had to be filled in, and she needed a voice.

Abby wasn't sure how to go about that reversal in this situation. Outside of the bar, at Cameron's urging, the shift had happened on its own, without any real conscious thought. Did she have the power to will one shape into another? If hatred kept her in fur, that hatred hadn't dimmed by much.

She opened her hands, pictured the claws retracting. Nothing happened.

Why not shoot, damn you!

What are you waiting for?

“I prefer shooting monsters in the back,” Sam said. “It's less personal that way. Any time you want to run, I'll do the honors. You can't possibly want to live like that. Look at you, Abby. You are a beast. You're one of them. Now that you've changed, you'll always be a freak.”

One claw pulled back into a fingertip with a painful sting. A second claw followed. At that rate, a reversal might take all damn night, and she had only seconds before Sam's patience gave out and his madness took over.

“Run,” he advised. “I can't stand the sight of you. Never could actually.”

At last, more confession. Sam had despised her from the start.

A whiff of heat-filled air reached her as Abby stood her ground. The earth moved beneath her feet. She didn't dare turn her head or turn around to see who was coming. Weres. She didn't have to guess who.

Waves of adrenaline coursed, drawn from the stagnant pool of her motionlessness. The oncoming Weres were nearing, fast. In another minute they'd find her.

Must. Change. Back.

No matter how close that silver bullet was, Abby closed her eyes and reissued the demand.

Change back.

A third claw retreated, then three more. Her face began to feel soft and gummy, as if the bones had started to melt.

“Haven't I said enough?” Sam asked. “Run, Sonja. I command you to run. I can't look at you. I can't stand the sight. You tricked me, and that happens only once to a Stark.”

Sonja.

Sam's madness had prevailed, maybe so that he didn't have to face murdering another family member that had disappointed him to the point of desperation. In Sam's crazy mind, he might imagine himself to be reliving what had gone down before.

Abby's chin shifted without sound. Bones at the base of her neck began to realign. Pain echoed internally with a series of metallic sounds. Patches of red-brown fur sucked back into her pores.

She refused to double over or shut her eyes again. She watched Sam, counting the seconds.
Three...four...

Leaves overhead rustled. She heard the sounds of running feet, mixed with the crackle of her rib cage decompressing.

“Sam Stark?” someone shouted. But his aim remained locked to Abby.