LITMIR.BIZ

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guy had been seriously distressed over the sound they’d heard. There was no way she’d imagined that. And though her body, too, was trying to warn her about this sound, and shudder after shudder rocked her stance in the doorway, Skylar couldn’t let lies and secrets become an integral part of her new reality.

      She was different here. She was letting go of her own secrets, one by one, and open to taking new risks.

      Should she go after the ranger? In the dark?

      What if her father had fallen to his death while chasing figures from his dreams?

      She wasn’t familiar enough with the trails to find footing or have directional cues without proper sightlines. Her cell phone wasn’t good for much because the GPS was almost nonexistent.

      As for wanting to jump into the sack with this guy, maybe she just needed a night with an honorable man for a change. Harris, at least, ran out on her before placing a ring on her finger.

      Backing up, Skylar listened hard to Harris’s fading footsteps. With him went the rest of the evening’s light.

      Her heart refused to slow as she backed from the doorway. Confusion reigned. The room dimmed around her, but Skylar didn’t reach for a lamp. Seconds flew by, then minutes.

      Finally, she shut the door and leaned against it with her eyes closed, picturing Harris’s tight, tanned flesh pressed to her bare skin. Feeling, even now, his breath on her face.

      * * *

      Gavin picked up the trail of the monster much more easily than he could have hoped, almost as if the bloodthirsty beast wanted him to.

      He didn’t know what to make of that, but it was too late to consider anything other than finding his prey. His blood was up. His muscles were seizing. The beast inside him recognized this other beast in an unseemly way.

      I’m not like you, Gavin wanted to shout. I’m no killer.

      But shouting would amount to a calling card and telegraph his presence...if the thing didn’t know already.

      As he jogged up the steep path, the old thoughts returned, though answers to his questions had never been within reach. If he wasn’t like that monster, he had to suppose that the blood passed from beast to beast somehow got diluted in the transfer.

      His wounds made him suffer a change, but until he knew more about what had happened to him, he had to think of his cursed condition as a disease.

      Hell, the differences between him and his maker had to be studied. He couldn’t exact a physical change without a full moon, yet he’d been attacked without one. Feelings inside of him shifted, internal stirrings came and went, but no full transformation happened for him without that commanding silver light. When he did morph, he became a strange mixture of both man and wolf, and not more of one thing than the other.

      This damn beast was wolfish, with a lot of something extra added that had no relation to Homo sapiens. There was no full moon tonight, nor had there been the night before, which solidified the supposition that this monster either remained permanently furry, or could fur-up at will, with or without the moon’s kiss.

       So different. Yet I sense you, beast, as though what I’ve become isn’t too far removed from what you are.

      Part of that beast truly had become part of him.

      Gavin’s thoughts kept churning as he climbed the hillside trying to sift through facts, in search of answers.

      He’d tried locking himself away to avoid the moon’s treacherous call, which only made things worse. Unable to change its form, his body had betrayed him anyway. He’d nearly gone mad with the shakes, unconscious spells, roiling stomach upheavals and bouts of fever. His mind had eventually succumbed to the madness. He’d lost control of his temper, lost his mind to the pain of withholding the transformation and ended up in some godforsaken place on the mountain with no recollection of how he got there or what he might have done while his mind was in a fog.

      Lesson learned. It was a freaking sharp-witted curse that developed immunity to thoughtful manipulation.

      He had to give in to the physical changes in order to remain in charge mentally. Succumbing to the moon’s lure was necessary. As long as he changed shape, he was okay. Keeping as far away from other people as was possible near the full moon had allowed him to weather this out.

      He got that now, and guessed that without the wolfish form there’d be no survival of this monster’s horrific species, hence the absolute need to shift. That furry demon’s teeth and claws had created another similar freak, and so that had to be the way the moon’s cult passed on. If he stayed in these mountains whenever there was a full moon, he’d be safe enough, he hoped. Others would be safe.

      Gavin stopped suddenly, skin chilling, senses wide open.

      The atmosphere around him had changed, creating new pressure that was like a punch to his chest. He heard rustling sounds and thought them ludicrous for a monster excelling in stealth, as though the beast were leaving him a trail of breadcrumbs.

      There was no mistaking the smell. He knew this monster’s scent, having been up close and personal with it. Why was it here? Did it want to finish what it had started two years ago? Finish him off?

       Is that why you stuck around?

      Gavin’s heart rate accelerated. He’d left his weapon in the car before visiting the woman in the cabin. Damn it, he should have borrowed her gun.

      The wolf inside him clawed at his insides with nails like talons, sensing trouble. An icy shiver of anticipation ran up his spine.

      “Come out.”

      He spoke at a normal decibel, feeling the presence of Otherness as if it were a bad rash.

      “You can’t possibly imagine I don’t know you’re there, or what you are.”

      More rustling noises came from his right. Gavin slowly turned toward the sound, saw something. Felt something.

      The creature he’d sought for so long was here, all right, and standing its ground.

      Against the outline of the trees, nearly hidden in the shadow, a huge form took shape. Bigger than anything he could have imagined, the giant specter loomed over the surrounding brush like the main character in a horror movie.

      On that fateful night, the thing had moved so fast, Gavin hadn’t seen what was coming. But he saw something of its outline now and his inner alarms went off like a string of firecrackers.

      This was no mere man-wolf combination. Nor, as he’d guessed, was it anything remotely like him, at all.

      Its massive shape left little for Gavin to appeal to, speak to, reason with. Thoughts of getting close to it with any kind of hand-held weapon were absurd. Killing it with a spray of bullets seemed equally as unlikely. He hadn’t really expected this abomination to allow him another close-up this soon—he had meant to chase it away from the cabin. Hell, seeing it now, he wanted to run the other way.

      No doubt this monster would be faster.

      “So here we are,” he made himself say to ease a small portion of the fear knotting up his insides. “Should I call you family?”

      There couldn’t be more than one of these beasts, he hoped, because where’d be the justice in that?

      “It had to be you who did this to me. Can you recognize another freak?”

      His nemesis didn’t move, making this potentially deadly scenario all the spookier.

      “What are we to do now, since I can’t let you go around killing and maiming people?” he asked, having to talk though this creature could strike at any moment. Talking seemed necessary. He felt like shouting. One more night, and he would have been stronger, at least. He would have had claws and speed and double the muscle. Though his humanness danced on a thin thread of control tonight, there was

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