Darkness Bound

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Darkness Bred

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For Mango and Grendel

Somewhere over the rainbow—fly free.

W
E’RE GOING TO
highjack this woman, body and soul,”
Niles Latimer said.
“I feel like crap about it but we don’t have a choice—unless we give up and wait to die, one by one.”

Standing in the bed of his truck beside a small stone cottage, he spoke telepathically to his second in command, Sean Black, who was several miles away, leaping through great, dark trees on agile feet. Sean was in his werehound form and at the speed he moved would arrive momentarily.

Niles paused, flexed his shoulders. From behind him he heard the familiar sounds of the powerful animal grazing past branches, using the dense forest as cover to allow him to move freely, hidden from any inconvenient and curious eyes. Even in his human form, Niles wasn’t tempted to turn around when Sean arrived—werehounds recognized each other instinctively.

“We appear to have no choice about the decision we’ve
made,”
Sean mind-tracked.
“Unless, as you say, we scrap this plan completely and accept the inevitable. There’s still time for you to leave before she gets here. She doesn’t know you, doesn’t expect you to be here, so if you pass her on the way out you can say you took a wrong turn.”

Niles understood reverse psychology when he heard it.
“Accept that our numbers will continue to shrink while we cling to the fringes of human society, never allowed to live among them openly, you mean? I’m not ready to do that.”
Okay, so he had cold feet about the woman, but they wouldn’t get the better of him.

“We’re living among them now,”
Sean said.

“Carefully,”
Niles said. He looked over the waters of Saratoga Passage sweeping in beneath the bluff where the cottage stood. Wind spun dead leaves and grit into the cold air. He sighed, loving this place, hating that he and his kind could not find peace there.
“We consider every move we make. If they knew what we are we would be forced to leave.”

“Or stand and fight.”

Niles swallowed a curse.
“Fight the human world we want to be part of? Back to reality, Sean. We are sworn never to harm a human unless they threaten us. Without them we have no hope of getting back our own humanity. We are not like the werewolves—they are animals and they like it that way. We’re not the men we were meant to be either, dammit, but we’re not giving up, not now. Not ever.”

“They are too quiet,”
Sean said.
“The wolves. I keep expecting them to interfere with our plans somehow.”
On these occasions he wished hounds could hear wolves’ thoughts, but they couldn’t, just as the wolves couldn’t hear them.

“If they knew our plans, Brande and his pack would have every reason to stop us. We know too much about them. He knows we could make their lives hell.”

“It’s getting late,”
Sean said.
“Are you sure Gabriel gave you the right day for her arrival at Two Chimneys?”
Two Chimneys was the name of the cottage the woman had inherited from her dead husband. She was about to come back for the first time since that death.

Niles rarely noticed fading light. He preferred the darkness and had perfect dark-sight, but he glanced around and wondered if Sean might have a point.
“Gabriel ought to know. He’s going to be her new boss. She’s supposed to start in his office in the next couple of days and she’ll need to settle in here first. Gabriel said she’d come today.”

“This thing you’re doing could blow everything apart,”
Sean said.
“It could totally backfire. What if she goes running for the nearest cop the minute she finds out what you are?”

“I’ll feel my way. If she isn’t receptive to me, we’ll forget it—for now. We’d have to anyway.”

“How will you know if she’s receptive?”
There was laughter in Sean’s thoughts.
“When she arrives, you say, ‘Hi, I’m gonna be your new mate. All the females of my species have died giving birth. I need you—’ ”

“Knock it off, Sean.”

Sean wasn’t done yet.
“I need you to have my offspring, and find more females to do the same thing with other members of my team. We want to restock our ranks. Oh, and we can’t be sure you won’t die the same way our own females did.”

“Get back to the rest of the team and bring them up to
date,”
Niles said sharply.
“They’ve got to be on edge. I’ll check in later.”

Niles felt Sean close his mind, and heard him go on his way.

A flash of silver caught Niles’s attention. A small car passing the cottage on the far side. Leigh Kelly had arrived. He stood absolutely still, his eyes narrowed.

He had waited a long time for this day, this meeting. If this woman knew his plans she wouldn’t even get out of her car.

The thought of what lay ahead scared the hell out of him.

Leigh left the front door of the cottage open to let in fresh air. The little house had been closed up for eighteen months since her husband, Chris, died, and a musty smell inside made her eyes sting.

Or she told herself it was the smell that caused the start of tears.

Can I do this?
She had thought she could, thought she was ready.

She glanced at the open steps leading up to the sleeping loft and nearly lost it completely. A recollection shouldn’t be so clear you could see it. But she could see Chris climbing down those stairs early in the morning, his dark blond hair mussed, beard shadow clinging to the grooves in his cheeks and the sharp angle of his jaw—and that half-sleepy, half-sexy and all impish smile on his lips.

Leigh shivered and hunched her shoulders. No matter how hard this was at first, she would get past the waves of hurt, even disbelief. She had come too far not to make it all the way back to a full life.

For a few moments she leaned on the doorjamb and made herself take in the main room of the cottage, and the two fireplaces, one on either side. This would be a happy place again. Sure it would take time, but Chris would want her to make it and she would, for both of them.

They had almost two years of wonderful time together before their marriage—only days together after they had married. But she wouldn’t wipe out a moment of that time, except for losing him.

Shaking away the memory, Leigh walked inside, dropped her bag, and had started shrugging out of her green down coat when a thud, followed by another, and another, froze her in place. Her dog, Jazzy, still sat on the edge of the cottage porch, unperturbed, even though his head was turned toward the noise. Nothing moved beyond the big front window.

The thudding continued.

Carrying her coat, her heart thundering, Leigh tiptoed into the kitchen to peer through the window over the sink, then the one in the door, covered by a piece of lace curtain held tight at the top and bottom of the glass by lengths of springy wire.

Her stomach made a great revolution. Late afternoon had turned the light muzzy but in front of a wall of firs that was acres deep in places stood a shiny gray truck with a long cab and a businesslike bed piled high with chunks of wood. In that truck bed stood a tall, muscular man in a red plaid shirt who tossed the logs to the ground beside the lean-to woodshed as easily as if they were matchsticks.

Leigh put her coat back on and crossed her arms tightly.

What was he doing here?

The door stuck and it took several wrenches to get it open. The ground was muddy from recent rainfall. Crossing her arms again, she kicked off her shoes and stuffed her feet into a pair of green rubber boots by the wall, where they were always kept—beside a larger pair.

Leigh glanced away from Chris’s boots at once.

“Afternoon,” the man called.

Leigh shaded her eyes with a cold hand and squinted to see him. He was very powerfully built, with dark wavy hair, long and a bit shaggy. The sleeves of the red wool shirt were rolled up. His Levis clung to strong legs, a dark T-shirt showed at the neck of his shirt. She couldn’t make out much more.

“What are you doing here?” she said. And she felt vulnerable since he could probably throw her as easily as one of the chunks of wood.

“Well—”

“Are you planning to squat here?” she asked, keeping her voice steady and sharp. “Because if you are you can forget it. This is my place. Get on your way.”

She wished she weren’t alone and kept herself ready to rush back the way she had come if he threatened her somehow.

“Hey, sorry. I’m just delivering wood like I told Gabriel Jones I would. I meant to do all this before you got here.” He had one of those male voices you don’t forget. Low, quiet, and confident. And now that he had stopped moving wood an absolute stillness had come over him, a watchfulness. He was taking her measure. “I must have my days mixed up,” he added.

That explained it, right? Gabriel had asked this man
to bring the wood. “I see.” She felt like an idiot, but she couldn’t be sure he wasn’t trouble and likely to turn on her.

“The shed was full when… the last time I was here.” The day she and Chris had left, never to come back together.