Wolf Born. Linda Thomas-Sundstrom

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.

      There were vampires loose in Miami, and this was very bad news. The worst kind of news. And a Lycan’s age-old enemies had found his family.

      Not many humans knew about the presence of werewolves in their communities. If the world wasn’t ready for werewolves, how would people feel about a new breed of enemy that amounted to a plague of murderous bloodsuckers in their neighborhoods?

      “Shackled.” Colton’s voice broke. The awful truth was that he couldn’t warn the world to be on guard. He couldn’t tell anyone what had happened here, or allow this scene to come under public scrutiny. He was therefore virtually shackled to silence.

      “Besides, who would believe it?”

      If this had been a vampire kill, no evidence would have been left for CSI teams to catch. There’d be no fingerprints or footprints or detectable stray hairs for any system to analyze. For all the advances in human technological wizardry, as far as that technology went, the dead were dead.

      Still, other than trained werewolf hunters, only vampires would know exactly how to take a werewolf down. Unlike with human criminals confronting a powerful Were family able to hold their own, vampires couldn’t easily die trying to tackle a wolf-human hybrid, since vampires had the advantage of being dead already.

      And damn it, if the rumors were true, those fanged children of the night were the fastest creatures on the planet. One blink, and they could be on you, then gone before your last breath rattled.

       Reason this out. Why did they strike at us here?

      Reasoning was another important part of the cop game, as was following suppositions with hopes of getting somewhere.

      It was possible that his parents, with the addition of the Connellys as a distraction for the law enforcement system, had died because of a centuries-old vendetta between species. Vampires and Weres hated each other.

      Then again, maybe a vamp had merely stumbled upon his parents somehow and had been hungry.

      “No. That’s not it,” he shouted, because vampires hadn’t been here for a drink. Bloodsuckers couldn’t ingest werewolf blood of any kind. Lycans were poisonous to them.

      “Premeditated strike, then.”

      If his family had been outside tonight, conversing with the full moon, they would have been ten times stronger and able to withstand an attack. But for some reason, they hadn’t made it to the door.

      “Hate crime.”

      The mortal world was filled with such things in this day and age. So was the supernatural one.

      The more Colton thought about it, the more likely it seemed that the Connellys had merely been in the wrong place at the wrong time. After the carnage here, it was possible the pale, dead, fanged bastards had worked up an appetite.

      Besides all the usual gangsters and gangbangers around, vampires were a horrific addition to Miami’s rising crime wave, and what had happened on this block might be an indication of things to come.

      As Colton stared down at his father’s silver-haired head, he felt the rise of a blazing anger at the atrocity committed to a man he dearly loved. He couldn’t stay here to grieve, though.

      “They’re all gone.” He whispered this with a grim finality that made the beast inside him spasm with anger and disgust. He and his wulf shared the agony because they were one, one and the same with the same memories.

      With a brief glance to the door, he remembered that there was a young EMT named Smith outside who had run from a gruesome sight a few houses away. He wondered what the poor guy would think of this.

      “No one will know that two sets of murders have been committed tonight,” he said. For now, he had to manage his pain so that he could find his mother.

      Stepping over the body of his father, he searched the room, then the house. His hopes rose, as hopes always did, despite his inner premonition. Maybe she had been spared. Possibly his mother hadn’t been here, which would have been a rare occasion, since imprinted pairs wouldn’t tolerate separation.

      Colton searched all over again, feeling each agonizing second that hurtled by.

      Then he found his mother on the back porch step, half in the house, half out, as if she’d been reaching for the moon. The brutality that had been dealt to her washed over him like an icy wave. Nausea threatened. She also had been beheaded.

      “Damn those filthy bloodsuckers!” he cried.

      Two members of one of the oldest Lycan families in existence had been taken out. And the stench of the undead hung over the tidy backyard like an insidious vapor.

      Despite the gnawing ache growing by bounds in Colton’s chest, he’d have to invent a way to cover this up. His pain, great enough to be nearly intolerable, had to be internalized. In order to go on, he’d have to focus elsewhere.

      “Vengeance.” His whisper fell flat. Vengeance was an emotional state Lycans had tried to outdistance as human populations began to rise and the sheer number of humans forced Weres into hiding. Revenge was a reaction Weres had learned to tamp down in favor of more peaceful aspirations and acceptable coexistence.

      Contrary to all that, rage was overtaking him. He felt sick, shaky, pissed