Linda Thomas-Sundstrom - Wolf Born

Her howl echoed in the park with the effect of a sonic boom, a throwback to ancient times when like called like, and species survival was paramount. The call was answered.

Sounds rose above the fighting, rolling like thunder over the bloodstained grass. She recognized her father’s voice, alongside the furious vocalization of another wulf. A third howl arrived, and a fourth. From just past the trees, harrowing werewolf voices lifted in an eerily beautiful Lycan symphony, crowding out the grunts of the remaining bloodsuckers. These were low, aged voices—terrible, experienced and deadly to all that would stand against their song.

Rosalind’s big mistake was stopping to listen.

She heard the terrible growling breath that escaped from the brown Were’s throat, knowing with a sudden and overwhelming feeling of horror that she had hesitated a mere minute too long.

Chapter 5

Rosalind couldn’t stop pacing. Her heart continued to race as she moved back and forth in the hallway leading to Judge Landau’s living room. She felt caged, and anxious. The walls were closing in. She needed to be out in the dark, under the moon, where she could breathe...but she couldn’t go anywhere.

Her father faced her, sitting on a step, observing her motions in a quiet manner.

“He will heal?” she asked him.

“Not completely, I’m afraid,” he replied.

“We always heal, miraculously,” she pointed out.

“This is different, Rosalind. He has been torn to pieces by vampires. It’s a miracle that he survived at all.”

Rosalind shook her head, and continued to pace. Her heart was racing. She hadn’t been able to ease the edge of her anxiety since her father and his friends had turned the tide of the fight, and then brought the severely injured brown Were here.

Her brown Were.

“The wounds have ravaged his immune system. If he comes out of this, he will be changed,” her father said.

Rosalind paused, every muscle feeling strained. “How, exactly, will he change?”

“We don’t yet know the full extent.”

“Then how can you predict that he won’t completely recover?”

“You saw him not minutes ago, Rosalind. What did you see?”

“He is alive, and breathing much easier than he did two days ago.”

“What else?”

“His wounds are already better. Less vivid. Closed over.”

“Please state the obvious, Rosalind.”

Her father expected a reply. She didn’t offer him one.

“His color has changed,” her father said. “You saw that. What was he before this happened?”

Her father was in the way. She could have leaped over him, but knew that he was keeping her from going upstairs, to the wounded Were’s side.

“Brown and beautiful,” she said. “He was brown-pelted, and beautiful.”

“And now?” her father pressed.

“His hair is white. His skin is pale. But maybe that will change again.”

Jared Kirk shook his head. “White Weres exist only in legend, or so we thought. No one here has ever seen one, and the minds of the Weres visiting the Landaus go back quite a distance.”

Rosalind noted how her father paused to allow her time to soak that information in.

“He won’t be what he was before this if he heals enough to open his eyes,” he continued. “He’s a ghost, Rosalind. That’s what legend calls a wulf who shouldn’t have survived such horrific trauma, yet somehow did.”

Trauma. Was that the right word for near total destruction? Rosalind didn’t like the description. It left a bitter taste in her mouth.

“If he were to continue to get better,” her father went on, “he will likely choose to walk his own path, because he will have one foot in this world and one in the next. He has straddled the fine line at the end of his own existence.”

Rosalind ignored the fact that her father was eyeing her closely. She held her breath until he spoke again.

“Ghosts see out of the eyes of both worlds. This wulf was strong, and of royal lineage, but who could be the same after what has happened?”

“He is a wulf, and a cop. He will know what to do,” she protested.

“Rosalind. Listen to what I’m telling you. No soul can survive the cost of those kinds of internal damages intact. He wasn’t just wounded, he was mauled by vampires. Their blood has mingled with his. This fight didn’t kill him, but it has changed him. He has been altered. The white hair proves that. The best healers can’t change or reverse the process.”

No , Rosalind silently protested. She had just found her brave, lovely Were, and wasn’t ready to let him go. She was eager to find out why she felt connected to him, and why she wished so fervently for him to heal.

She desperately wanted to be near to this wulf—ghost or otherwise. She could feel him upstairs. She wanted to go to him.

“Maybe those are just stories, about the ghost wulf,” she suggested.

This strapping Were could not have been broken by vampires. Fate couldn’t be so cruel.

“Truth often fans the flames of myth and rumor, as you well know,” her father counseled.

“And some rumors are just rumors.”

“Werewolves, to the human population, are a myth. But we exist. We blend with humans because we choose to. We keep our secrets because it’s better for everyone that we do. A ghost wulf who has had a life here won’t be able to blend so easily. What will his friends think when they see him? How could he go back to work, or explain?”

Rosalind stopped pacing and looked at her father.

“He will leave them behind,” he father said. “He might choose to live in the shadows, on the fringes, not because he will be forced to, but because he will have to make peace with what he has become.”

“Which is?”

“An old legend, made new. A ghost wulf. Part man, part wulf, and for all we know, part vampire.”

Her father sighed, as if these explanations were a chore, and painful for him.

“You don’t know that. You’re not sure of anything,” Rosalind said.

“You’re right. Time will tell. But the elders who have tended to him have noted that something new has entered his bloodstream, and that out of necessity, this new thing will likely change his soul.”

This information didn’t sit well with Rosalind. In spite of everything being told to her, she still felt connected to the Were, oddly enough, now more than ever.

She had rushed to his side when the other Weres had arrived. She had seen him close his eyes, and fall to his knees.

She had pressed her mouth to his while the others finished off the vampires, and breathed into him some of her own chaotic energy.

If he was changed, as her father was saying, theirs would be a sympathetic bond. She had been forced to be a loner, almost held captive by her father for most of her life. She could relate to being apart from others, and living on the fringes. She had been called special. Which also translated to mean different.

They were both different.

A ghost and a loner. She and this injured Lycan were perfect for each other.

Her father’s voice dropped in tone. “You can’t wish him back to normal, Rosalind. You must accept this as fact, just as the Were upstairs will have to accept his fate.”

Rosalind squeezed her eyes shut to avoid her father’s wary expression. But the thought persisted that he had kept her from all Weres in the past, and that maybe this warning was just another example of her father’s overbearing overprotection.

Well, she wanted to say to him, I can’t be kept from this one. I won’t be kept from him. Not this one.

“He’s a ghost because of me,” she said. “The responsibility is mine.”

“Not so,” her father countered vehemently. “A vampire attack caused this. You were brave, but also foolish to have joined in such a fight. It’s a miracle you weren’t hurt equally as badly, and that Landau and the elders were with me, searching for you. You could be lying in a bed upstairs. What would I have done then?”