The Black Wolf. Linda Thomas-Sundstrom

her the freedom to get away like this.

      He was also an idiot for harboring thoughts of what he’d like to do with all that ivory bareness of hers if the situation were different. And, well...even if it wasn’t.

      * * *

      The disturbing scent Cara had noticed was strongest near the trees. The humid air had filled with whispers.

      Night had a strange feel to it here, too. The darkness was thicker, denser, as if unseen things took up space in the shadows. The pressure in her ears was a warning. Strange odors left a tang on her tongue. Her pulse thundered, though she saw nothing.

      She slammed to a stop beneath an old tree, where her search turned up no one. Ready to shout a warning to some unseen foe, Cara waited a few more seconds to gather what information she could find.

      The bark of the tree she stood beside shimmered like gold in the moonlight. Leaves shuddered and fell at her feet, as if the season were changing. There was movement. Rustling.

      Cara glanced up.

      Her equilibrium wavered. She gave a soft roar of protest. Clinging to the tree’s branches was a kind of darkness she hadn’t seen before. The treetop had become like a black hole in the atmosphere that was filled with chatter.

      She swayed, unsteady on her feet, finally realizing what this was. What it had to be. Vampires were here. Lots of them. The damn bloodsuckers had called to her in a way only they could.

      That realization caused the night to blur. Bloodsuckers unlike any she had seen before began to drop to the ground, one after the other. Five. Ten. More kept coming. Too many to count. The sheer number of them took the air from Cara’s lungs. For the first time in her life, she felt afraid.

      They moved like a monstrous incoming tide of malevolence—a wave of dark disjointed bodies with shockingly gaunt white features and skeletal frames. Things out of nightmares. Throwbacks to ancient times when vampires were nothing more than the walking dead. Their black eyes sank into dark sockets. Mouths were open and hissing, exposing lethally sharp yellow fangs.

      An odd sensation of déjà vu hit Cara and rooted her to the spot. Sickness roiled in her stomach as nasty odors churned up unpleasant things inside her. She was going to be surrounded and vastly outnumbered. She’d be dead if she didn’t act fast.

      Fear of what she was seeing caused her wolf’s energy to blaze. She didn’t want to become like these monsters and had to do something to stave off a transformation she refused to accept. But could she manage to trick the traits built into her system by avoiding the rules?

       Yes...

      Like a caged animal finally freed, Cara let a rush of energy take her over. That energy flowed through her like a river of fire, burning everything in its wake. A new, crazed kind of power fueled her fury. Fangs filled her mouth before disappearing again.

      “Not like you...” she whispered.

      As she raised her hands to fight, Cara felt the sharp pop of claws springing through her fingertips. She called her wolf to the surface and made it obey. The wolf barreled upward and through her with the force of a runaway train.

      Her spine cracked. Muscles seized and began to lengthen as she took her first swipe at the darkness gathered around her with preternaturally curved claws that would be a match for any oncoming pair of fangs. The shift was painful because it went against her nature—she had chosen her wolf, instead of becoming like the fanged parasites breathing down her neck. Cara had never attempted this before, and she had to bravely hold on.

      Breathing became difficult. Her discomfort turned white-hot. Cara rode out the pain until her body finally accepted the shape that ruled most of her genetics. Werewolf. She-wolf. Not just any Were, either, but one with the ancient European designation of wulf that denoted the early masters of the breed who were powerful shamans.

       This is who I am. What I am.

      The urge to fight roared through her. The need to kill the creatures that had nearly killed her father here a long time ago became too difficult to ignore. She was strong, fast and fierce. Her wolf shared its soul with the spirit of a Banshee, just like her mother, and that spirit told her she was not going to die tonight.

      All she had to do was kill every last bloodsucking fiend surrounding her.

      Her blood sang with that goal until her head felt light. But her plan encountered a hitch. The vampires dropping from the trees didn’t come after her. Every one of them suddenly moved en masse in the opposite direction, as though they had been drawn elsewhere by something more appetizing. As though they hadn’t seen her at all.

      There was someone in the distance. Cara turned her head, and the sickness inside her tripled. Rafe?

      A ripple of horror accompanied the idea that Rafe had followed her, though she should have known he would. Rafe was a protector. He watched over her. As strong as he was, however, Rafe would be vulnerable without a full moon overhead to shift him. Against so many abominations, he’d have little chance of surviving an attack.

      She ran, plowing through the haze of vamps, wielding her claws like the weapons they were originally intended to be, slashing at everything in her way and swallowing growls of anger and the sudden fear of losing what she had only recently found. Rafe Landau.

      Her claws went through vamp bodies as if they were composed of air instead of strings of decaying flesh and bone. Although the vampires shrieked with terrible, unnatural voices, none of them noticed her. Not one of them fell.

      The shock of her inability to stop them tripped her up. Cara stared at the dark moving tide with wide wolfish eyes, seeing clearly, shocked by the sight in front of her and how she wasn’t able to do anything about it.

      Then her system was jolted with a new awareness. The gaunt creatures were attacking a fully wolfed-up werewolf, brown-furred and massive in size. Not Rafe. Someone else.

      The werewolf fought the oncoming horde like a pro, swinging his arms, using his legs, snapping his jaws. He fought hard, though he had to realize all that energy was useless against so many sharp teeth.

      Cara couldn’t stand to watch. She started again toward the rapidly tiring werewolf in the center of the fray and heard a voice in the distance say, “I’m here.”

      Or...had she uttered those words?

      She flew to the middle of the fight, whirled, lashed out and made no headway. The big brown Were, now tiring, didn’t once look her way. He looked past her at something she would have had to turn around to see.

      Another sound broke through the grunts and growls she and the brown werewolf were making. At first, Cara thought it was a howl of distress or a warning call going up about the fight taking place. But that wasn’t it. She recognized what it was. She had heard this sound before.

      The shrieking noise seemed to split the darkness into multiple shadows. The power in it sucked the fight out of Cara. She stilled, frozen in place as the scene continued to unfold in front of her.

      Helpless to do anything but observe, Cara witnessed the downfall of the beautiful brown wolf as it forfeited its life. Fighting on wouldn’t have helped the Were, she realized, because this scene wasn’t actually taking place in her current reality.

      The brown wolf wasn’t here. There were no vampires. What she was seeing was an image projected on the spot where this battle had happened in the past.

      Cold gripped her. Energy that had been white-hot now turned icy. She panted with the effort to understand what was being shown to her as her limbs trembled and spasms threatened to drive her to her knees.

      The Banshee spirit inside her hadn’t predicted death here. The shriek had been a Banshee’s cry, yes, but her Banshee hadn’t made that sound. Someone else had used the Banshee’s voice, but in a different way—maybe not to predict this brown werewolf’s death, but to save his life.

      And that just wasn’t the way things worked.

      Banshee