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Wolf Dreams
Karen Whiddon
Contents
“She’s a what?” Lazlo Brennan stared at his fellow detectives. He’d expected a bit of good-natured ribbing on his first day of the job, but this?
“Erika Cenov is a psychic,” Detective Rok Skerkis repeated. “Believe me, I’m telling you the truth.”
Suppressing a sigh, Lazlo glanced at the perfectly serious expressions on the faces of the three men with whom he was sharing a cup of bad coffee in the police department break room.
“Why do you say she’s a psychic?” he asked warily. None of the detectives were shape-shifters or Pack, so he supposed this was their idea of ribbing the new guy. Any minute now, they’d throw out the punch line and have a good laugh at his expense.
Instead, the other men started talking about Erika’s dreams—premonitions of death—and a curse.
This last part was what caused him to finally shake his head. “That’s ridiculous. I dated her in high school. She wasn’t a psychic then, or cursed.”
“You’ve been gone ten years,” Rok pointed out. “She came into her powers when she turned twenty-one.”
Seven years ago. Swallowing a gulp of bitter brew, Lazlo grimaced. He started to wonder if the punch line he was expecting wasn’t going to materialize. “And you know this how?”
“She told us,” another detective, James or Jimmy something, chimed in. “She’s helped us find several missing persons. Unfortunately, they were deceased by the time we located them, but still…”
“Deceased?” Placing his chipped cup on the table, Lazlo scratched his head, uncomfortable now. This had gone too far, even if he had known them all since high school. “Come on, guys. Enough’s enough.”
Rok narrowed his eyes. “We aren’t messing with you. Erika dreams and people die. At first we thought she might be a serial killer or something, but we checked her out.”
“She has the second sight,” another officer put in.
After a decade in New York, he’d forgotten how superstitious the old country could be. Like neighboring Croatia, Teslinko might be a modernized country, but the old ways lingered. Which was why those who were Pack members, like him, had to be very careful not to shape-shift where humans might see. The last time that had happened, several hundred years in the past, the townspeople had panicked. Amid cries of “Werewolves!” they’d armed themselves with pitchforks and tried to burn the shifters out. Fire was one of only two things that could kill a full-blooded shifter, so several Pack members had perished.
Since then, the Pack took stringent measures to ensure humans had no idea shape-shifters lived in their midst. These days, while some shifters mated with humans, resulting in half-shifter offspring known as Halflings, Lazlo’s family did not. They were proud of their pure family line, dating back centuries. His father had often declared that no human would ever learn about shifters from a Brennan.
Considering what Lazlo knew of the supernatural, he considered it ironic that the humans believed in Erika Cenov’s purported abilities and he didn’t. Maybe because he’d grown up with her. The down-to-earth girl he’d spent all of his childhood with was about as far from a clairvoyant as one could get. She’d been serious, even in high school, grounded in her studies and her love of nature. Psychic mumbo-jumbo hadn’t even been a blip on her radar.
When his desk phone rang, Lazlo sat up straight. Finally, his first call as a Teslinko Police Department detective.
Answering, he listened carefully before placing the phone back in its cradle. A missing child. He swore.
“Yeah,” Rok said softly. He stood directly in front of Lazlo’s desk. “I just got the same call. The captain wants us to go to the parents’ house. Someone broke in through the window in the middle of the night and stole the kid. We’ve got to find her.”
The dreams had always been the same. Blood and death and destruction, with little variance. Until now. Erika Cenov moved restlessly, trying to force herself to wake, to open her eyes and break the spell.
At last, she bolted upright, her breathing harsh and heavy. Death dreams, though blessedly rare, always felt identical. Though her grandmother had called this a gift, Erika bore it as a curse, this ability to see someone else’s death. She felt guilty, as if she were to blame. Would the faceless victims have died if she hadn’t dreamed it?
But tonight’s dream had been crazy. She’d seen her old boyfriend, the one who’d gotten away with her heart. Lazlo Brennan. He’d moved from Teslinko to New York right after graduation. And now it appeared his life would come to an end, here in Teslinko. A violent, horrible end. And soon.
Heart pounding, she tried to make sense of her vision. As usual, there’d been blood and terror and…death. Lazlo had been shot, which was not all that remarkable—she’d seen that happen to others in her dreams before.
But a few things had been different from her previous dreams. For the first time, she’d been a bystander in her own dream. And she’d been the cause of Lazlo’s demise. Which didn’t make sense. She hadn’t seen him in a decade. Lazlo was thousands of miles away, on another continent.
And
