blood 03 - blood chosen (6 page)

“A dangerous talent, Combatant,” Marcus noted.

“Yeah, internal combustion squared...” Michael added and Scott gave him a look.

“Okay, give it up...” Jason said in exasperation.

“I have the Flame of Blood talent.”

“What the hell?”

“He can make your blood boil inside of your body. Y'know, human torch time.” Michael smiled, pleased with himself.

Jason's face showed shock. “Really?”

“Yes.”

“Can you control it?” he pressed.

Victor gave an amused chuckle. “I have a high degree of finesse.”

“Huh,” Jason said, giving Victor a considering look.

“Maybe you're not so fast... after all, they tell me I'm a red. We're special. Capable... lightning quick.”

“Yes,” Victor agreed, nodding at Jason. He narrowed his eyes. “Do not test me in this.”

Jason's stare didn't drop. “Don't interfere,” he returned.

“Don't think this is a great idea,
Dad
,” Scott said.

“I will moderate,” William added, his pale gray eyes honest.

Julia rolled her eyes. “I think I'll stay in my room.” All eyes went to her. “Just call me after you're done duking it out.”

Brendan looked at Julia with more than a little empathy. Her heart beat faster at that expression. Reading any flavor of grief was second nature to her. “What?”

Brendan hesitated, the least volatile of the siblings and even she could see he didn't want to give further news. “There was another sighting...”

“Who?”

Silence edged in like heavy air, constricting her chest.

Julia strode to him, her heavy hair a swinging weight between her shoulder blades. She felt like she was moving through mud. “Cyn?” Her eyes widened in expectant hope, her breathing quickened.

He nodded.

Julia sighed, tears of relief burning her eyelids. It was nice to have tears that weren't linked with sadness for once.

“And Adrianna... from your pack,” Brendan said, looking at Jason. “Looks like Tony was a part of it. And now a Were from the other den has pursued them all.” He looked at everyone. “The scarred one,” he added.

Julia and Jason looked at each other.

The news just kept getting better and better.

Out of the frying pan and right back into the fire
, Julia thought.

CHAPTER FOUR

Were

Slash watched from his spectator's view on the opposite side as the werewolves came into view with his usual trepidation. However, in moments, aided by the change of the wind's direction he'd be exposed.

There was only one that he didn't know.

His Packmaster and Alan were present but they had been easy to scent.

As were Adi and the newest of Singer ancestry, Cynthia.

He stepped out from the denseness of the trees, like an oasis of fur and wildness, a lone island as Were. The others turned to Slash as one, in his half-wolf form. His nose swung to the newcomer, a soft growl slipping out through his teeth as Slash trotted to where the females stood. The newcomer smelled as he did: red.

His wolf eyes saw all, his nose warned, alerted and simultaneously enlightened him of the genetic makeup that matched his own. Slash took note of the ticking flesh of the females elevated heartbeats underneath the delicate skin of their throats, though he didn't allow his thoughts to dwell on Adi. For in this moment, circling the new Were was primary.

It did not matter that his Packmaster and Alan were in close company.

Slash was autonomous for a reason. There was something thrilling and natural about remaining in the background, coming when needed, not drawing attention to oneself. It had always served him well in the past.

Now he must know if the new Were was a threat.

“Slash,” Alan greeted him in the gravely rumble that all male Were possessed while in between.

Slash gave an awkward nod with his snout. He was not a believer in changing to the lesser shape or his human form when there was an unfamiliar.

“It's okay,” Cynthia said in a low voice. “I know him.”

Slash gave a low growl at her opinion, dismissing her. What could a Singer possibly know with their dulled senses? If she were not a Tracker, her observations and knowledge couldn't help him.

But it was Adi who spoke, “It's okay, Slash,” she said, approaching him warily. The new Were suddenly moved forward and Lawrence gave a shrill half-bark of reprimand. “Don't!” he said but it came out like a hoarse cough, a negative shouted from the guttural depths of a throat no longer human but somewhere in the middle.

Slash was suddenly in front of Adi, his large head low to the ground, every fang in full relief.

Truman backed off, his eyes on the female that stood beside the Were's flank. There was a primal alert that was ringing a warning deep within Karl. He flicked his eyes to Cynthia Adams and knew that she was hanging on by a thread. He backed away and the other Were relaxed infinitesimally. The female Were, who was in human form, had her hand buried in the luxurious multi-colored fur of the one who faced off with him.

Was she his?
Karl's wolf wondered, the thought as alien to him as his new form. It didn't matter, this whole scenario just got stranger and stranger. Days before, a night before, he'd been a cop.

Now he was one of them. Thinking like them. Posturing like them.

The two natures were superimposed in a discordant layering on his psyche and Truman felt almost ill with the vertigo of it. He'd adapt, he always did. Or he hoped he'd adapt. Karl thought there was not a lot of patience from the Were with newcomers. Just a feelin'.

“Slash,” Lawrence said, “Back down... he is a convert.”

Slash straightened, reluctantly drawing away from the hand that offered only friendship and could never be more. He knew that he now matched the form of the two from his pack and... the new one.

A red.

Slash and the new Were gazed at each other from perhaps twenty feet away. “Welcome,” Slash said.

“Some hospitality... thought you were gonna bust my gonads, pal,” Truman said in a light gravely tone.

Slash's sudden grin hung strangely on his in between shape, it never translated the full range of human expressions he would be capable of in full human form. Not that Slash thought much of showing emotion. Ever. It was overrated.

He turned to Adi. Her human form held the bruises of the last several hours. They were many.

“Who's done this...?” he asked her, then his gaze encompassed the female Singer as well, his question now posed to both. He didn't need the answer, he could feel his brows dump above his eyes, narrowing them in anger. The lightning strike of the scar that bisected his face was a red slash across the dusting of fur. “Tony?”

Cynthia nodded. “Yes, king dick Were, that'd be him.”

Slash smirked and it looked like a grimace on a face with a snub snout, the light chestnut fur like reddish-gold fuzz all over his body.

More naked wolf-guys,
Cynthia thought.
Wonderful.

“Anthony Laurent?” Truman offered and Cynthia looked at him curiously.

“Yeah, how'd ya know?” Her eyes searched his, the revolving green warring with whatever his human color was. However, Cynthia realized with a start that the memory she had of him was dim. All she could see was the once fifty-year old Homer detective was now some kind of mondo-Were.

A ripple of contained agony crossed his face as he bled back to human.

So it's not pain-free
, Cynthia noticed. Interesting.

Cynthia couldn't stop the gasp and she covered her mouth.

Truman felt the frown form between his eyes but answered her question regardless of how strangely she reacted. Cynthia Adams would recognize him now, she'd know she was safe. “Laurent was my primary lead. He had a really old conviction. It was floating around in the wrong place; pre-computers.”

“Yeah,” Cynthia said softly.

“What is it?” Adi asked just as quietly.

Cynthia shook her head, her blonde hair floating in strands. “This dude,” she pointed at Karl Truman, “he's a cop from Alaska.”

The two wolfen males, Alan and Lawrence, nodded. “We know...” the rough voice of the Packmaster agreed but she held her hand up for silence and he glowered at her, the fur rippling in an unpleasant stripe down the center of a face that held a snout.

The image gave her pause but she plowed forward at her own peril—the hell with it. “This is
not
the Karl Truman I remember.”

“I wasn't a werewolf, Miss Adams.” It was clear from his expression that it was as surreal to him as it was to her.

Good thing they agreed on something
, she thought. Cynthia folded her arms in exasperation. “Ya think? Brilliant no-shittery there, Truman.”

“Wait a damn minute... sassy-ass.” Truman stepped forward and Adi gave a giggle, slapping her thigh and his gaze slid to her. “What?”

“You get a pass because you're new... but you
do
know you're naked as a jay bird, right?”

Heat flared on Truman's face. Suddenly, all he could think about was his dick hanging out in front of two young women. It was, in a word... awful. If balls could shrivel (and Truman felt that was a certainty) his were walnuts.

Alan moved in front of him and immediately Adi's eyes made contact with his own. “He stepped into the middle of everything and got changed.”

“Sacrilege!” Slash roared. His eyes flashed and the trembling energy of his change to full form lay like heat above his skin, hanging in that precarious balance between forms. Adi gasped, and like sympathy, her own wolf rose up through the mists of her humanity, begging for release, for escape.

“Don't,” she whispered to Slash. He would bring her wolf and she didn't want to change in front of males she didn't know, it was too vulnerable for words.

He quelled the need, his anger and wolf so closely linked they breathed the same air, ate the same food. His wolf and his human were interlocked in a way most Were envied. The speed of his change a mere thought, intent- then it happened.

It was not enviable now.

Adi took a deep trembling breath, stilling that roiling heat that had risen to meet his. She gave him troubled eyes and he confirmed the trouble.

“It is Tony who made these marks on your body.” Slash stated it as fact, ignoring the new Were, his body tense until he got answers. Answers enough to know how to proceed.

“Yeah, it would have been more too if he could have made it longer but the Queen bitch of the east flew in on her broomstick and screwed his plans,” Cynthia said and Adi laughed.

“What she said.” Adi hooked a thumb in Cynthia's direction and Cyn looked at Alan. In the eyes, because the swinging genitalia was kinda distracting. “Hi Boss.”

Alan scooped up a pair of shorts off the ground, an open small pack lay on the forest floor as his form fell like a sliding rain of flesh all around him and he sunk into how she remembered him. It might seem all natural to them but to Cynthia, it was the damn oddity of a lifetime. Cyn knew if she dwelled on it too long, she'd go crazy.

So she didn't. She watched Alan's ass muscles clench and bunch as he threw on athletic shorts over his nakedness. She fought not to cover her eyes. The more she told herself not to look the more she wanted to. Then he faced her. “Hi.”

Cynthia took a deep breath, trying not to glance where she shouldn't, making sense of this as her boss from the restaurant, the dude who’d given her a break, stood as a human, but had just been a werewolf or something. Some break. Cyn wasn't stupid enough to think that Alan hadn't known what she was all along. Who she was.

“You knew, you cheese whiz,” she started in, walking right into the wall of his muscled chest and poking him with the tip of her badly chipped  acrylic nail.

“Yeah,” Alan admitted, looking down into her face. Cynthia was tall, five feet eight-ish, but Alan stood near six feet two. He'd been almost seven feet even, she figured... when he was wolfing it up.

Spanktastic. Yet again.

She hit him with the finger a second time. “You could have,” stab, slap... “effing let me in on the fun.” Cynthia pushed him with the flat of both palms and he didn't move a centimeter. “When I first worked for you!” she yelled, her palms becoming fists and beating on him.

Alan grabbed her small wrists, easily controlling them. “We hoped it wouldn't come to this.”

“Well it fucking did!” Cynthia yelled in his face.

“Cyn!” Adi said, grabbing her shoulder and Alan released her wrists. She fought not to rub them where they ached from his restraint.

Lying prick.

Cynthia backed away, laying her accusation all over the top of him with her gaze.

Alan sighed as Lawrence came to stand beside him and Karl Truman as well.

Lawrence held up a hand that was talon tipped moments before and Cynthia swallowed hard, looking from one to the other of them.

“Karl Truman walked onto land owned by the Southeastern Pack and the decision...”

“Bad decision,” Adi interjected.

“Perhaps...” Lawrence agreed as his eyes slid from Adi's and back to rest on Cynthia. He continued, “At any rate, the decision was made to turn Truman.”

“Why?” Cynthia mourned, her palm sweeping Truman. “He was human before... living his life. Werewolves are nothing but a pack of sadistic manipulators with fur.” She turned to Adi. “There's some exceptions.”

Adi huffed, rolling her eyes. “Yeah, no offense or anything.”

“David of the Southeastern didn't realize the wound would not be a killing one. He thought he was defending his den from an astute interloper.”

Cynthia looked at him. “So...” she began slowly, tapping her bottom lip with her damaged nail, “David, the wolf-whatever, was just gonna do his ass—a cop,” she gave him narrow accusatory eyes, “then, he surprised everyone by turning.”

There were embarrassed looks between Alan and Lawrence but surprisingly, it was Truman who spoke, “I'm glad they did it. For the first time... I feel right in my own skin.”

Cynthia threw up her hands. “When ya have it!” Her eyes were fierce when she met Truman's. “Now you have to follow their weird pack law and crap. This entire supernatural thing blows.” Cynthia ignored Adi snickering in the background.