vampires came on, each of them fighting with ungodly speed and an unearthly agility of jaws that housed far too many gnashing, needle-sharp teeth.
The new, crazed kind of energy fueled Rosalind’s fury. An unrecognizable thrill for battle made her fight on without thinking of the consequences. She was fast, strong and good at fighting. She felt as if she were made for this.
She wanted to kill them all.
Driven by that objective, she whirled, bit and clawed at the corpselike flesh around her. As she took another vampire down, Rosalind howled.
The air trembled with her silent battle cry.
Death comes to all who oppose me!
* * *
Colton fought with all his might. To the right. To the left. Coming from behind. Dropping down from above his head.
He barely heard the sounds over his own rattled breathing. He was moving so fast, he’d lost some control over his actions. His arms were tiring. He’d lost count of how many vampires he’d taken down, but had taken several vicious blows himself.
He smelled blood, and knew it was his. His face was damp, and it wasn’t sweat. In five years on the police force, he had garnered a reputation for fearlessness, driven by a werewolf’s need to protect innocent citizens and the knowledge of how fast he would heal if he were ever to be injured on the job. But this was no street gang or worrisome mob. This was a nest of particularly bloodthirsty monsters, attacking with intent.
More of them arrived. Each kill was replaced by another set of snapping teeth. Another Were had arrived from who knew where, but he had no idea what was happening to that beast, and had no opportunity to look. He thought he could hear that other Were close by, making growling sounds that mirrored his own. But the fight had gone on for so long, with no end in sight, that Colton wondered if they’d make it out of this one.
He fought with a renewed vigor, bolstered by the thought that someone had come to his aid. He swung his arms, swiped through fetid vampire flesh with his claws, and bit through the bones of several hands and many thin necks. And still the monsters came on; an unending supply of mindless foes animated by something purely evil in design.
God, where did these monsters come from?
I’m sorry, he wanted to say to the Were that was someplace beside him because, too late, he had realized that this may have been a trap.
* * *
Rosalind slashed her way through the flood of fanged monsters, determined to beat her way to the brown Were’s side. But as she finally reached him and saw the wounds he had already taken, she opened her throat again and let out a howl that rose from the depths of her soul.
Her beautiful Were’s face and shoulders had been slashed nearly to pieces. He was covered in blood that seemed to drive the monsters mad. And still, as his limbs moved, weaker now but with whatever determination he had left, the brown Were was a magnificent beast.
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.
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