The Black Wolf. Linda Thomas-Sundstrom

to his. As she met his eyes, her wet hair brushed against his bare arms, causing alternating heat and chills. Cara, the hybrid shifter he was trying to protect, could adopt a vampire’s form if one were to appear on the beach, but the need to get her to safety was strong enough for him to override his fear of that happening.

      “What is it, Cara?” he asked.

      Her next words shook him up more than touching her had.

      “You smell like them,” she said.

      “What are you talking about?”

      Cara didn’t honor him with a reply. She turned toward the dark remains of a hotel under renovation, taking him with her. That’s when Rafe saw what had attracted her attention. Someone was standing on the sidewalk in front of the hotel. Someone Rafe thought he knew.

      “No way,” he muttered in surprise. But in the time between that remark and his next breath, the figure materialized beside them...and Rafe hadn’t seen anyone move.

      Perfume. He smelled perfume, and it was familiar. Also familiar was the tangle of blond hair and the green shirt that did little to hide an exquisite body.

      Holy hell...it was Brandi. She was a goddamn vampire?

      Shock kept him from moving as fast as he should have. His date from earlier that night was there beside him, hissing through a pair of lethal-looking fangs as she went for his throat.

      In a flash of speed that rivaled the creature in front of him, Cara had Brandi’s hair in her fists. God, it really was Brandi...or whatever the hell Brandi really was.

      “My problem. Not yours,” Cara said to him over her shoulder.

      “The hell you say,” Rafe snapped.

      Cara was already liquefying. That was the only way to describe what happened. Her body just seemed to melt into a kind of being that was Cara, and yet different, as the fight began in earnest without him.

      * * *

      Cara snapped at the vampire with a fresh set of fangs that made the creature in her grip hesitate for a few seconds too long. Uncertainty flashed in its red-rimmed eyes as Cara’s hold on its hair tightened.

      She felt the vampire’s hunger and the incessant throb of its need to feed. Hunger was everything. Starvation meant oblivion. Vampires killed in order to feel alive—otherwise they were merely animated corpses without any real direction. This one was old, and masterful in its ability to disguise itself, at least on the surface. Once the fangs came out, its human semblance began to decay.

      Cara’s fangs, on the other hand, brought on a hunger of another kind—a defensive desire to rid the world of the monsters she was cursed to emulate.

      The Landau wolf joined in the fight. Using his weight to press Cara aside, he struggled to get one of the vampire’s arms behind its back. The harsh sound of a bone breaking was alarmingly loud as the vampire’s arm shattered near the shoulder. Louder still was Rafe Landau’s startled intake of breath.

      Fangs brushed her arm, ripping her sleeve, leaving a long trail of flapping fabric. Cara maneuvered her way between Rafe and the snarling bloodsucker with her own fangs exposed and her hands moving almost subliminally fast.

      Rafe, who was incredibly strong and used to fighting, by the looks of things, wasn’t to be left out of this fray. He also wasn’t going to allow a female to help him do his job, no matter who or what that female was. With great force, he leaned his shoulder into the vampire, and it teetered. The bloodsucker hissed again through its treacherous fangs and spit out his name.

      Hearing that made Rafe Landau hesitate. Cara pushed past him. Even a few seconds of hesitation when facing the walking undead meant certain death, and this abomination whose distant relatives had helped to make Cara like them in so many ways wasn’t going to win tonight. She hated vampires. She hated when they came to find her, sensing kinship. She hated every time her fangs dropped and she became like them.

      Foul black blood spurted from the vampire’s shoulder when Cara’s fangs found purchase. The blood was evidence of the creature’s recent meal. There would have been none otherwise, only a spill of dark gray ash, the same ash vampires dissolved into after being dealt a death blow by a worthy opponent.

      “Let me have her...have it,” Rafe directed. But this was Cara’s own personal war.

      Cara dug into the bloodsucker’s flesh with her fangs. At the same time, Rafe landed a right-handed punch to the vamp’s shoulder, and the fanged parasite shrieked, probably not from pain, but from anger. It lost hold of its feminine disguise as it rallied, and the undead creature whose looks previously could have fooled most humans became the bony, skeletal, red-eyed abomination it really was.

      Cara felt no kinship with this vampire and refused to acknowledge being like it. This was one of the many monsters that ruled her nightmares. Vampires were the enemy, though this one had likely believed at first that Cara Kirk-Killion, with her pale skin and fangs, might help take Rafe down. But vampires like this one had nearly killed her father. To most of the world, her father had died.

      Colton Killion’s DNA had been compromised by too much vampire saliva and too damn many bites, and he’d become a legendary white ghost wolf one fateful night here in this city, an albino whose skin and hair would have stood out anywhere as being freakish.

      The same thing was not going to happen to Rafe. Not tonight.

      Though this bloodsucker was fast, Cara moved faster. She possessed a secret weapon that hadn’t yet been revealed. Her heritage. All of it.

      She snapped her fangs in the creature’s face and made it look at her...made it look into her eyes. A far older spirit than this vampire was beginning to show itself. This was death calling. True and final death. The Banshee inside her had awakened.

      The shriek that came from the vampire’s open mouth when it realized its fate dictated what would happen. One second passed, then two more, and Cara, with her dark spirit’s extra push of power, punched through the vampire’s bony concave chest with both hands. Gripping hard, she squeezed the blackened heart that had not beat in centuries until the useless thing crumbled.

      “Don’t breathe,” Cara shouted to Rafe, who was beside her and struggling to get his hands on the foul creature. Seconds later, the bloodsucker exploded like a bomb had gone off, and its lifeless body disintegrated into a flurry of foul-smelling ash.

       Chapter 5

      A dark, sticky rain was falling. But it wasn’t rain, really, and nothing that resembled water.

      Rafe let out the breath he had been holding and stared at the spot where the vampire had been standing. He was afraid to look at Cara in vampire mode. Shock over witnessing what had happened here made his stomach turn. This was something he would never forget, though the whole event had happened so fast, he hardly believed it had happened at all.

      Finally, he did look at Cara. He had to see her to try to make sense of it all. She hadn’t just exposed a gleaming set of fangs—she’d exposed one of her secrets. And even with her fangs, pale skin and flat black gaze, she had the ability to mesmerize.

      Many features remained of the Cara he had met earlier tonight, only slightly rearranged. She had sharper cheekbones with gaunt hollows beneath. Dark crescents underscored her eyes, contrasting with the whiteness of her skin. The only color she possessed was in the tiny drops of blood speckling her lips, which were half-closed over a daunting pair of unnatural teeth.

      The rumors were true. Cara had transformed into this new version in less time than it had taken for him to catch his breath. Rafe found himself equally fascinated and repelled by her new look and by what he had seen Cara do to the vampire. No stranger to violence himself, he sympathized with Cara, and how her life probably consisted of one fight after another. He wondered if she would ever be able to find the kind of peace she might crave.

      Hell,