He watched over her. As strong as he was, however, Rafe would be vulnerable without a full moon overhead to shift him. Against so many abominations, he’d have little chance of surviving an attack.
She ran, plowing through the haze of vamps, wielding her claws like the weapons they were originally intended to be, slashing at everything in her way and swallowing growls of anger and the sudden fear of losing what she had only recently found. Rafe Landau.
Her claws went through vamp bodies as if they were composed of air instead of strings of decaying flesh and bone. Although the vampires shrieked with terrible, unnatural voices, none of them noticed her. Not one of them fell.
The shock of her inability to stop them tripped her up. Cara stared at the dark moving tide with wide wolfish eyes, seeing clearly, shocked by the sight in front of her and how she wasn’t able to do anything about it.
Then her system was jolted with a new awareness. The gaunt creatures were attacking a fully wolfed-up werewolf, brown-furred and massive in size. Not Rafe. Someone else.
The werewolf fought the oncoming horde like a pro, swinging his arms, using his legs, snapping his jaws. He fought hard, though he had to realize all that energy was useless against so many sharp teeth.
Cara couldn’t stand to watch. She started again toward the rapidly tiring werewolf in the center of the fray and heard a voice in the distance say, “I’m here.”
Or...had she uttered those words?
She flew to the middle of the fight, whirled, lashed out and made no headway. The big brown Were, now tiring, didn’t once look her way. He looked past her at something she would have had to turn around to see.
Another sound broke through the grunts and growls she and the brown werewolf were making. At first, Cara thought it was a howl of distress or a warning call going up about the fight taking place. But that wasn’t it. She recognized what it was. She had heard this sound before.
The shrieking noise seemed to split the darkness into multiple shadows. The power in it sucked the fight out of Cara. She stilled, frozen in place as the scene continued to unfold in front of her.
Helpless to do anything but observe, Cara witnessed the downfall of the beautiful brown wolf as it forfeited its life. Fighting on wouldn’t have helped the Were, she realized, because this scene wasn’t actually taking place in her current reality.
The brown wolf wasn’t here. There were no vampires. What she was seeing was an image projected on the spot where this battle had happened in the past.
Cold gripped her. Energy that had been white-hot now turned icy. She panted with the effort to understand what was being shown to her as her limbs trembled and spasms threatened to drive her to her knees.
The Banshee spirit inside her hadn’t predicted death here. The shriek had been a Banshee’s cry, yes, but her Banshee hadn’t made that sound. Someone else had used the Banshee’s voice, but in a different way—maybe not to predict this brown werewolf’s death, but to save his life.
And that just wasn’t the way things worked.
Banshee spirits predicted death, and this one hadn’t. There were no other dark, death-bringing spirits in the area, except the one sharing space in Cara’s soul. And yet she had heard that wail.
She stared hard at the scene that she now knew to be unfolding in a different time. Her claws had been useless against the monsters because they were ghosts, like the rest of the images she had been shown. She was experiencing a memory, a projection, an imprint of what had happened in the past, in this spot. And that meant the sound she had heard had to have been made by her mother...long ago.
Others were coming, rushing toward the fight in this alternate reality. She watched with fascination as several Weres flooded the area. They had come to the brown wolf’s rescue nearly too late, drawn by the Banshee’s wail.
Once the Were pack took up the fight, it became even more fierce and bloody. But Cara couldn’t be a participant, since this was a dream. She had seen this battle, had lived it, had experienced the horror of an event that took place long ago...all through her mother’s eyes. Rosalind Kirk had been here then and had made the call that had ultimately saved Colton Killion from death.
The park had shown her another piece of the puzzle. What had happened here all those years ago had been so awful that it still resonated in this space.
Witnessing the attack that had made her father what he was today made Cara’s knees buckle. Colton Killion. Ghost wolf. Outcast. Survivor.
But how could he possibly have survived this?
She closed her eyes to shut out the rest of the fight her parents had endured. It was a gruesome thing that made that sickness inside her grow.
Releasing the breath she had been holding, unable to fight the wobble in her limbs, Cara slipped toward the ground without hitting the grass...saved from falling by the strong grip of two powerful hands that had come out of nowhere.
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