Wolf Hunter. Linda Thomas-Sundstrom
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was nothing to be done now, Abby supposed, short of wishing for backup, though she couldn’t decide what would be worse—being caught by a monster, or having her father’s team of elite monster hunters know she’d been found by one of those monsters.
That’s what her father called the man-wolf hybrids that had recently claimed this park. Monsters.
Her head came up.
The night rustled as if something had just punched its way through the dark. More nerve endings fired as Abby strained to see what approached. This guy had turned the tables, making the watcher a target, rather than the other way around.
She didn’t like anything about this.
Sensing Others was what she had always been good at, yet she’d been inexcusably late to this particular party. The hot flashes burning through her were a telling sign that she’d found the very thing she’d been seeking tonight. Werewolf. A beast that also might have found her.
Unfortunately, this sucker’s presence seemed strong. It might even be a full-blooded beast, though she’d never come across one in the fourteen years she’d spent scouting for her father’s team. If not one of the mysterious Lycans, this Were’s pedigree had to run parallel to that status. The older the bloodline, the stronger the wolf.
Who are you?
Abby fisted her hands.
To her relief, her watcher wouldn’t be a full-fledged beast tonight, since the moon wouldn’t be full for another twenty-four hours, though he’d be close enough to being a beast to have set off warning signals.
Her nerves were virtually singing.
Show yourself, wolf. I know you’re there.
Abby hoped he wouldn’t actually take her up on the offer. Not a creature this potent. Real toughness, a trait she’d inherited from her father, fell short of the mark when dealing with big male werewolves, a fact brought home by the ribbon of fear weaving its way up her spine over the thought of how excited this Were would be tonight, so near to a full lunar phase. He would be restless.
Hell, she was restless. And puzzled.
Whether werewolves were furred-up or not, her intuitive sense of them remained the same. She could pick Weres out of a crowd. She’d always known they were around. But the intensity of the spark igniting deep in her belly at that moment, when stumbling upon this guy, also resembled some sort of messed-up sexual craving. That was new. Brand-new.
Mixed signals between fear and lust? Had to be, because no way in hell could feelings of lust be right.
I’m no amateur, you beast.
I’ve been around.
In her father’s private and very personal war on werewolves, a war that had started with greed before escalating to be so much more, she had been more than useful.
The going rate for a wolf hide chimed in at five hundred dollars in the European black markets. For a fully morphed werewolf pelt the dollar decibel moved over, altering that sum to a full ten grand. In another category altogether came rare, pure-blooded Lycan pelts, skinned before the wolf shifted back to its humanlike form. The grand total for remnants of the king of beasts was fifty thousand bucks. Enough to build a swimming pool.
But Sam Stark’s war on Weres went deeper than dollar signs. The bigger, darker motivation for werewolf haters like her father outclassed thoughts of money and reaping vengeance on a nasty criminal element that had been feasting on humans in Miami and elsewhere for quite some time. Sam’s motivation came under the classification of genocide. The elimination of beings unlike himself.
The goal of the TTD, an acronym for Take Them Down, was to cull all mutants with moon-tweaked genetics from the population—creatures that could pass for human some of the time, but weren’t really human at all.
Abby didn’t like the bad stuff. She never accompanied the team when they hunted werewolves, and didn’t care to witness what they brought back. Her awareness of Weres had grown more intense as time passed, and now seemed almost personal.
Heck, she was the last person to understand how that intuitive connection to Weres worked, but hoped it didn’t go both ways. All she had ever wanted was for werewolf violence against humans in her own backyard to stop. And here she stood, being stalked by one of those same hybrids from a species doing real damage around town.
So, who is going to show up, and what will you do?
Without a completely full moon, Weres looked like everyone else, with human heads, shoulders, arms and legs. Some of them would speak English.
In human form, wolfmen were tall and tautly muscled, with plenty of supersize capabilities, such as being able to smell her from several yards away.
Like this one must have.
Would he eventually appear in his human skin cocoon? Fake being a jogger? Play at acting like just another guy out for a midnight stroll in a park that no one in their right mind would trespass in alone without an Uzi—unless that mindless sucker happened to be her, with a very special agenda that made dangerous places her job sites of necessity.
This park was a nightmare.
More human bodies were found each year in public parks than anyplace else in Miami, outside of the city center. Bodies turned up without bullet holes or knife wounds, trashed by bite marks and the deep grooves of razor-sharp claws—wounds the Miami PD had no way to explain because not everyone knew about monsters, or that they actually existed.
The Starks knew.
So did handfuls of other people.
Hunters from all over the world came to Miami to join her father’s underground big-game hunting expeditions. Some of those people actually believed they were doing God’s work.
I know what you are, wolf.
I know you’re there.
Reality hit hard. Odds being odds, Abby had figured that someday this kind of accident might happen. In all those years of service to the TTD, she’d never gotten within a couple yards of any big Were. She had never allowed herself to.
Now what?
This one was getting closer by the second—close enough to make her blood simmer. The initial quake of recognition that had rocked her backward splintered into smaller quakes. Her knees felt gummy. Her skin was hot. Weres were often volatile and always dangerous. Right then the sense of danger seemed extreme.
Come out, damn it. Let’s get this over with.
As Abby saw it, she was fresh out of options. It would have been useless to try to outrun a strong male when chasing prey is what they did so well, and this guy’s presence alone had nearly knocked her off her feet. There hadn’t been time to find cover after her initial awareness of him. Currently, she stood in the open, completely exposed.
Why don’t you come out?
Are you toying with me?
At that moment, Abby hated the moonlight that ruled these beasts more than ever. She hated everything about the moon.
Shit. How far was she from help?
She’d been cornered between two of the walls separating one of Miami’s megamansions from the east end of the park. Although she had been in worse places numerous times, being stuck in the open and drenched in moonlight didn’t help her chances.
Attached to her leg, above her right boot, a knife rested in its sheath. Her cell phone was keyed to her father and the rest of his hunters waiting for news at her father’s bar. Short of using the blade, throwing the phone at a beast in man form would be an unconscionably girlie thing to do.
For the record, I haven’t been that kind of girl for