Linda Thomas-Sundstrom - Wolf Born

In spite of the distraction in the park, he had beat Davidson to the scene. Six other cruisers were parked along the street. Two emergency vehicles were in attendance with their back doors wide-open. Uniforms moved like an army of ants up and down sidewalks in the dark.

Colton grabbed hold of a blue uniform whose name tag said EMT Smith. “What happened here?”

“Homicide,” Smith said after checking out Colton’s badge.

“Where? Who?” Colton’s voice cracked with emotion.

“Name’s Connelly. And one officer was shot after arriving at the scene.”

“Connelly.” Colton processed the news. “Which Connelly?”

“All of them.”

“What?”

“The whole family was killed. Two adults and two kids. It’s one of the worst scenes I’ve been to. Blood and body parts are spewed all over the place. The house looks like a freaking horror movie set. No offense or disrespect, Officer, but I need some air. I’ve only been on this job for three weeks.”

Colton felt a rush of adrenaline returning in a bad way. He knew the Connellys. His parents had socialized with that family on occasion. A year ago he had helped to build their kids’ swing set.

But the arctic adrenaline dump jarring him was also an indication that he needed to chill out in public. EMT Smith was still looking at him as if the guy awaited permission to be dismissed, so that he could slink away and hurl his dinner.

“Thanks,” Colton said. Staring at what Smith had called a house of horror, he added, “The injured officer? How is he?”

“He’s been taken to Miami General. Took a bullet in the upper abdomen, but it looks like the gun might have belonged to one of the other victims, perhaps shooting at whatever moved. I heard another EMT say that if he’s in good shape physically, he’ll probably make it.”

“His name?”

“Don’t know. Sorry. Got to go.” Smith hurried back to his truck.

Colton looked down the block to where a city streetlight should have been glowing and wasn’t. The bad feeling in his gut quadrupled in intensity. His parents’ house sat beneath that blown-out bulb. The front windows were dark.

He ran. Ducking under the yellow tape with his eyes locked on his parents’ house, he rushed across the lawn and up the front steps. Forgetting himself and his innate strength, he tore the screen door off its hinges and reached for the knob.

He stepped across the threshold, where the brutal odor of blood and exposed Lycan secrets hit him in a moment of monumental frenzy, and the severed head of his proud Lycan father lay on the carpet at Colton’s feet.

Stunned by the sight, Colton let out a wail of anguish that nearly buckled him at the knees.

Chapter 3

Rosalind heard the sound of a Lycan’s roar and froze midstep. Registering the sounds as pain and loss, the intensity of the emotion in the roar rocked her. Hearing something so personal made her want to run away. Stubbornly, she stayed.

Drifts of a dreadful odor hit her, tearing her from the shadows. Enemy stink. But what kind?

After the darkness of the park, the revolving lights on the police cars hurt her light-sensitive eyes. She was in werewolf form and in danger because of it. She couldn’t be found like this. She didn’t dare follow the big male’s muffled howl of pain. She wasn’t used to crowds. With so many people around, changing back to her human semblance wasn’t an option, since she’d be naked if she did.

Nevertheless, she was drawn to the sound of the brown Were’s pain, and moved through the dark spaces between houses on the opposite side of the street, her black pelt acting as camouflage in the night.

She was stopped by the sight of three human police officers heading toward where she hid.

Time to get away.

She had to leave the wulf and what had happened here, and didn’t want to. That sound. The pain in it. Where are you?

She had been gone for a long time now. Her father would be frantic. Still, she couldn’t dismiss her feelings of connection to this male, or what might have happened here. His pain had become her pain. She hurt, and shared his sorrow.

Hugging the building, she watched the scene with her heart in her throat. Go, or stay? For the second time in so very few minutes, the decision of what to do was a heavy weight on her shoulders.

* * *

Colton’s world began to spin. Walls closed in.

He made himself stand still and forced down another scream, too shocked to regulate his breathing. If this was what was left of his father, he definitely didn’t want to stumble upon what might be left of his mother. He couldn’t pinpoint her life force amid the carnage when he should have been able to. Her amiable presence didn’t call out to him like it always had.

His body wasn’t so frozen by shock that he didn’t feel his heart break. His insides roiled. His mouth was dry. At the same time, a nagging insistence warned that he had to move, had to take care of this. Officers might knock on the door any minute now. Beyond family, there was a secret to protect.

The cop side of his training began to seep through the sickening whirl, perhaps as a defense mechanism for coping with a loss this great. With that training, one thing became perfectly clear: whoever had enacted this rampage of evil deeds not only knew who the werewolves in this neighborhood were, but how to kill them.

Silver bullets in the chest or a full beheading were the only ways to truly rid the world of a strain of very powerful Lycans. The Killions had been around for more years than a human could count. They knew how to defend themselves and should have scented trouble before it arrived.

Why then, how then, had his parents been taken down in their own home? The answer came to him in the form of a jolt that further messed with his head and equilibrium.

No human did this.

What about the Connellys then who, according to the young EMT, had been slaughtered? Not beheaded, but “slaughtered.” Could those poor people have been decoy killings to cover up the murder of his family?

His parents had been down-to-earth in their day-to-day living. His father had been a college professor. His mother had worked in a dress store. They hadn’t concerned themselves with their royal genes or the special Lycan blood in their veins that made them honored within their species. They had raised him in the same down-home way, and instilled in him their values.

The Killions were protectors. Had always been protectors...of Lycan secrets, of their Lycan blood, in their low-key relationships with the humans they lived among.

“Not just paranoia,” Colton snapped. “There’s more here to discover.”

He smelled something beyond the cloying odor of Lycan blood. In order to identify this, Colton made himself breathe. Through the forced intake of air he began to soak up anomalies in the environment, realizing that every minute he stood there in a state of silent agony was a minute wasted in going after the monsters responsible for this heinous crime.

“Who were you?” he demanded angrily of the invisible, murderous fiends, tuning in to clues by opening up his senses up full throttle.

“Help me, wulf.”

The arrival of his beast’s keen awareness came to him like a swift kick in the solar plexus as it melded with his own intuition. Colton glanced up. Hovering near the ceiling lay a subtle scent, hardly there at all, that made him sway on his feet.

“Can’t be,” he objected. “Look again.”

The wulf growled adamantly.

“Christ! Vampires?”

Colton took the sudden weight of his beast pressing against him as confirmation of the deduction being correct. Could it honestly be true, though? “Yes. Hell.” Only the dead would stink like old soil and sour, aged, rotting wood. Nothing else could possibly smell like that.