Moon Marked

“Come to mama, beast.”

Then there he was, emerging from the dark. As tall as the street sign, his head was thrown back and his jaws were open, exposing rows of jagged, lethal, gleaming yellow teeth.

Nikki applied pressure to the trigger without squeezing all the way, halted by the sudden terrible realization that the big guy wasn’t alone.

“Shit.”

Her whispered oath had been soft, but vehement enough for a werewolf’s miraculous hearing to pick up. The big head, shaped nothing like a wolf’s really, and more like a Frankensteinish version, swung her way. A menacing growl pierced the dark, damp air, reaching Nikki with the efficacy of a shout.

Shoulders twitching annoyingly, Nikki stood her ground. Peering down the barrel of the gun, she shouted, “I’m fairly sure you are just one wolf too many.”

She squeezed the trigger, adding as the dart winged its way toward its target with the speed of a lightning bolt cutting through a cloud, “And we just can’t have that, can we?”

She knew she was in trouble the instant the dart hit the werewolf and it roared its displeasure. An impression of the approach of the second Were, too close for comfort, possibly too late to do anything about, arrived hot on the heels of her tag.

Spinning in place, she raised the gun, reached to reload—and felt a set of dagger-sharp claws penetrate her protective layer of clothing as if that leather was…butter.

Jonathan Baird ducked beneath the overhang of a green-and-white-striped awning, his attention fixed on the shapely leather-clad vixen down the block. The one with the gun.

She was intent enough on the alley not to have noticed him yet, though he could see her quite clearly. It would be only a matter of seconds until she became aware of his presence.

He recognized the striking brunette at once, of course—the woman who interfered with his work and wore her hair in a ponytail. Who could miss her? He’d kept his eye on her from his first sighting, liking what he saw, although she was, in essence, his rival. His opposite, if you considered her take on the word species.

The hunter was tall, maybe five-six or -seven. She was young and slim, her arms, abs, and legs toned to tautness and shown off to perfection in that skintight outfit. She held a dart gun professionally steady in both hands.

Jonathan found himself wondering, in spite of the danger of the moment and her preference for donning leather in Miami in the summer, what color her eyes were, and what her voice might sound like. Things he couldn’t use his enhanced senses to find out about from a distance, but were on his mind.

Details don’t matter, he reminded himself. I’m here to watch her, not to bed her.

Yet he would have liked nothing better than to bed her.

Every single part of him agreed with that.

Immediately, his decision about details not mattering aside, he imagined what peeling those leather pants off her would be like, and what he might find beneath. Lightly tanned, creamy skin beaded with moisture? Her own jet-hued triangle of fur between her legs that he could slide into?

“Pure fantasy.” He shook his head. He was here because it was his business to feel his way around the members of the secret society she belonged to, not her body. She actually was a rival, or would have been at one time until the path of her society and his own organization had begun to run with a parallel purpose. The hunters kept an eye on the werewolves, and the werewolves kept an eye on the hunters.

If it got more complex than that, the world would be in serious trouble.

Tonight, however, this shapely hunter, who had been on his mind and in his dreams, wasn’t thinking clearly, he was sorry to note. She showed no signs of realizing the danger she faced by staking out that particular alley a second time. Alone.

She’d been there last month. Same place. Obviously, she hadn’t planned on remaining on that unholy pack’s radar. What kind of handler wouldn’t have taught her about retaliation in lesson one? Werewolves were humanlike most of the time—twenty-eight days out of thirty, give or take a few hours. Even when fully morphed and furry, human minds drove the beasts.

Perhaps this hunter harbors one flaw too many in that luscious body of hers for her to last long at this job…

Possibly she has a tendency toward revenge and a need to pick up the pieces. Would those traits get her killed tonight?

The pack she stalked was nasty and a bane to other Weres, as well, which was the reason he’d returned here, himself, beyond his desire to see her again.

There were werewolves and then there were werewolves. As with any population, a mixture of good and bad. More bad lately, admittedly, which was why he had been roaming the streets every single full-mooned night, keeping both the hunter and the hunted in his sights.

Things had taken a downturn as the Were numbers in Miami continually swelled. He knew that ten hunters couldn’t keep up with what was going on, and that the presence of his own species couldn’t go unnoticed for much longer, given the way things were going. Too many crimes were being committed by wolves who were powerful enough to get away with those crimes and crafty enough to vanish afterward.

This hunter had found a hole, the entrance to an illegal pack’s urban den. The werewolves in there, created from bites and scratches from a surrogate alpha, rather than from being genetically cursed—or gifted, depending on how you looked at it—would make sure this woman wasn’t around long enough to pass on information of their whereabouts.

Rogues had no conscience. A pestilence is what they were. A blight on civilization. Eventually he’d get the goahead to clean them out, in order to keep both the peace and the secrets.

“Where is your backup?” Jonathan whispered to the leather-clad hunter as he considered warning her in spite of being forbidden to interfere in any way with a tag.

Tranquilizing these bad guys so they could be injected with a tracer chip was the first stage in tracking them. Or should have been. The difficulty here was that the hole the hunter had ID’d had been founded by a psychopathic alpha who had created minions by biting innocent people all over town. Rumor had it that this alpha killed each of his own creations unfortunate enough to get tagged.

Jonathan could feel them in there—the bad guys. Their presence riffled up and down the skin covering his arms. The street smelled of sweaty, fetid fur and bad moods.

His attention veered past the hunter, to where wrongness tinted the silvery moonlit air with a reddish haze. A murmur of acknowledgment rose up from deep inside his chest. Two werewolves hovered there in the alley, standing guard. Those two would have pinpointed the presence of a hunter as easily as she had pinpointed them. The game worked both ways.

Hell, he could scent her from where he stood, half a block away. Everything about this hunter disturbed the air, and none too subtly. He tasted on his tongue the gaminess of the leather she covered herself with. He tasted the electric fire of her nerves, as well as the musky sweetness of her anticipation. For her, this dangerous job was akin to forbidden sex, and that startled him, though it shouldn’t have.

There had always been stories about hunters and how they ferreted out their prey by means of a strong, almost feline sexual attraction to them. Their bodies, more refined than the normal, everyday humans they believed themselves to be, got all gummed up with excitement as they took up a chase, he’d heard it said, and urgently needed sexual release after coming into contact with their Were counterparts.

And okay, the thought of that got a rise out of him.

“Another oddity in a long list,” he muttered, because weren’t love and hate said to sometimes reside on the same plane of emotion? Hunter and hunted? Man and woman, of whatever species? It was a fact that opposites attract, so why shouldn’t he have dreams about this particular woman? This hunter?

Jonathan cleared his head of forbidden thoughts because now was not the time to indulge. She wasn’t supposed to know of his existence or his organization’s. It was best to keep the vow he’d taken to remain in the periphery as far as the hunters were concerned.

He beefed up his concentration.

The beat of Miami’s all-consuming, after-hours partying lay in the distance like someone else’s audible heartbeat being broadcast on a citywide public-address system. On this silent stretch of deserted street, he heard his own heartbeat and imagined he heard the hunter draw a breath. Then the silence was broken by a sudden popping sound—the familiar ping of his own vertebrae starting to reclass.

Surprise!

Heat flashed across his skin. The same sort of electrical heat he’d tasted from the hunter. Stick your finger in a socket kind of stuff that happened every time he shifted, and yes, also every time he laid eyes on this particular female.

He had inched forward, out from beneath the awning’s flimsy cover, without realizing he’d done so—led by his stiffened male body parts, he supposed—to find himself standing on the curb.

He looked down, saw his shadow and sighed.

In one gigantic supernatural heave, fueled by the flood of falling moonlight, Jonathan rearranged his outline, taking him from human to beast in the time it took him to turn his head. Changing him from a thirty-two-year-old strapping man to a large, imposing creature, half man and half wolflike entity.

Two shapes, human and wolf, meeting in the middle.

All the better to eat you up, leather-girl.

Tilting his wolfish head, Jonathan felt the closeness of those two other wolves. He perceived their anger. Inhaling again the sticky-sweet fragrance of defiance marring the scene, he then loped in her direction for a closer look, despite the rules.

That sexy young woman planted smack-dab in the thick of danger might be a hunter and all business, but she was also the one. For him.

Every one of his instincts told him this—whether or not hell might freeze over before she ever found out.