Half Wolf (7 page)

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

M
ichael 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 werewolves 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.

He shrugged. “It is what it is.”

“Can the rest of this pack fully shape-shift? Become a wolf that looks like a real wolf?”

Michael shook his head. “In this pack, only me.”

“Why?”

“It’s not in their genetics. At least that’s the way it’s explained to those of us who can.”

She tilted her head, examining the moon beyond the treetops. “Since your blood saved me from death at the hand of one of those monsters, will that change the outcome of my own transformation, if and when it starts?”

“No. Hot blood wins out over cold. Because you didn’t die at the hands of that vampire, your human side will have a say in what happens.”

“Will I change? For sure?”

“Yes.”

“How long until I do?”

“During the next full moon would be my guess.”

“You don’t know?”

“Everyone is different. Sometimes it takes longer for the wolf to catch up.”

She went over his statement in her mind before speaking again. “The next full moon comes the day after tomorrow.”

Michael nodded. “Not much time left.”

She bit her lip hard to keep from shouting. “Are you
you
when you shift?” she managed to ask.

Michael obviously knew what she meant. “Weres don’t lose our minds, like in horror movies. We are aware of everything we do. The wolf isn’t another entity taking up space inside us, it is us. The mind still functions properly and remains in charge while in either shape.”

“That’s something,” she muttered.

Michael was close enough to further boost her pulse. Cade’s dark blue shirt was a size too large, but suited Michael perfectly. Then again, so would a towel.

Michael was a werewolf, and she knew next to nothing about the reality of that yet, except that Weres were real. They were also brave, bold, exceptional fighters that seemed to be on the right side of the battle against creatures exemplifying the dark side. At least Michael’s pack fit that description.

“You scare me a little,” she confessed.

“Only a little? I must be losing my touch.”

Michael was smiling when she turned back. After reducing vampires to dust, he appeared to have regained his calm. But mind reading went both ways tonight. Kaitlin also knew he wanted more private, personal time with her in spite of his inner protests against that very thing. His hunger for her was an added pressure that topped the winded sensation she already felt by being in the presence of a werewolf.

Michael wasn’t only fighting vampires tonight. He was fighting his hunger for her.

The kiss in her apartment proved that Michael wanted her to be more to him than a responsibility. The way he looked at her now proved it.

Michael’s undivided attention was hot and untamable. Like his wolf, his needs rode close to the surface of his skin. If he gave in to that hunger, she supposed he’d never stop seeking it. That’s what his expression told her, though he wasn’t easily giving in. Maybe the big bad wolf was a little bit afraid of her, too.

There might also be other reasons he had to maintain a distance. Possibly Lycans were elitist snobs, due to the strict adherence of his species’s undiluted, pure-blood doctrine that Michael had mentioned. No Romeo and Juliet scenario with a half human would be acceptable.

Being off-limits suits me just fine. If I don’t have to see you, I won’t have to live wholeheartedly in another world.