there isn’t?”
“Not from us. Not from me. Not from her. Not tonight.”
Tess thought back to their earlier encounter. “Is this wolf part of the reason you let me go without a fight? She is one of the things you’re protecting?”
It seemed that no replies to those questions were forthcoming, so she tried again. “Do you hold yourself up as some kind of wolf warden?”
“No,” he replied. “Nothing like that.”
The white muzzle shifted slightly before one silvery leg appeared. Slowly, that wolf left the shadows, and the sight of this animal robbed Tess of more breath.
The largest real wolf Tess had ever seen moved toward her with a growl rolling in its throat.
Jonas lunged forward just as Gwen glided through full moonlight to reach Tess. He barked a command that Gwen ignored. His sister was interested in Tess. Whether that reason was a bad one that involved seriously twisted intentions, Jonas couldn’t tell.
He reached Tess seconds before Gwen did. Gwen butted her head against his thighs as if she would go right through him, but Jonas held steady and barked a stream of protests in return.
The moon was overhead, and he was standing beneath it. His claws popped before he had time to stop them. Neck muscles began to spasm. “No, Gwen,” he said with the last vestiges of a voice everyone here would understand. “Not today.”
He could see that Tess was both fearful and annoyed by his interference. Jonas sensed the silver blade she held without having to see it, remembering the way it had burned into his flesh. That knife would hurt Gwen when she had already suffered enough. He had to keep Tess from using it.
Tess’s hands were like fire on his back when she tried to push him away. Gwen growled again, letting him know that she also wanted him to move. Maybe this is the fight Tess had anticipated tonight...not with a rogue werewolf, but something more. Something priceless to the Were world. His sister.
He could not let that fight happen.
When Gwen hurled herself at him, he caught her by the fur on the back of her neck. Tugging hard, he maneuvered his sister to the side as his Were genes, triggered by the light, fully kicked in.
He heard Tess’s surprised intake of breath as he tightened his grip on Gwen’s fur and spun the white wolf around. Tess sprang forward with her knife in her hand. Gwen panted and growled, showing treacherously sharp teeth as she struggled to get free. But he was far stronger than either of these characters. He proved it now by lifting Gwen’s front paws off the ground until his sister and Tess Owens stood eye-to-eye with a distance of only six inches between them.
Tess froze. Gwen stopped growling. It was a scene straight out of a horror movie and yet as the hunter and the very special white wolf eyed each other, Gwen began to whimper. Hearing that, Tess, who seemed to be equally as stunned, lowered her blade.
Jonas hoped that Tess had seen something human in Gwen’s eyes that wasn’t obvious in the form his sister was able to take. He hoped his sister would accept the temporary truce of Tess’s lowered blade and take the opportunity to disappear.
He could have cut through the tension in the air with that damn blade in Tess’s lowered hand.
With the lull in aggression, however temporary it might have been, Jonas raised his face. He let loose a howl directed at the instigator of this current round of trouble. The moon. Then he hauled his sister back, gave Tess a quick bark of warning to stay back and led Gwen away from the big bad wolf hunter, who for some reason hadn’t been at her best tonight.
Lesson learned, Tess. Some of us truly are different.
He kept hold of Gwen by digging his fingers into the scruff of her neck fur, careful not to let his claws do any real damage. After her initial reluctance, Gwen allowed him to lead her away from the Owenses’ front yard.
Jonas had no idea what his sister might have been thinking by coming here. Lycans of her caliber had thought-blocking techniques probably unknown to every other Were, and that was damnably inconvenient.
On some level, he realized that Gwen had been as surprised as he had been by coming face-to-face with Tess. One close look at the hunter and Gwen had made sounds he’d only recently heard her make—sounds shockingly similar to the groans she’d uttered during the difficulty of her recovery from the injuries she had accrued on the night of her attack.
When standing eye-to-eye, she and Tess both had been privy to a sudden wave of insight that had quelled their urge to fight, at least for the time being. Jonas had no idea what that might have been but was thankful for the respite.
Show-and-tell time was over. Introductions between these two had been made. Tess didn’t know that the white wolf was a Were in wolf form, or that she was his sister. Full-wolf shape-shifts, so rare these days, would be new to Tess, since they were virtually unheard of outside of a sanctioned few elders and the families that lived with these rare beings.
If Tess setting eyes on Gwen wasn’t bad enough, the Owens woman had seen him shape-shift twice in a single night and might be wondering about that as well.
He wanted to know why Gwen had come here and if it could have been nothing more than a desire to meet the neighbor.
Perhaps Gwen had scented the hunter in the same way he had, and her instincts for survival had taken over. Maybe the strange DNA in Gwen’s makeup retained memories of hunters from times in the past.
Those thoughts were legitimate ones. Nevertheless, Jonas had a hunch the reason for Gwen’s visit could be blamed on neither of those things. Warning flags in his mind were waving. Gwen wasn’t struggling half as hard against his hold as he thought she might. He hadn’t even broken a sweat.
“Your big brother is keeping watch, Gwen,” he silently messaged his sister, pulling her along without pausing to address her second act of rebellion as a real issue. Just because he couldn’t hear his sister’s thoughts didn’t mean she couldn’t access his.
“Possibly you need to learn to use more control, hun.”
Jonas let her go in a spot near the rocky overlook and placed his considerable Were bulk between Gwen and the path behind them, daring her to try to get past him.
Gwen waited without moving for a minute or two before turning to focus on that path in a way that made Jonas’s neck chill.
Tess hadn’t been content to let the two Weres go. He should have known the white wolf would pique her interest and get her hunter blood pumping. Could he blame her? In Tess’s place, he probably would have done the same thing by following them. She was coming now.
Unfortunately, there was more at stake here than Tess Owens hoping to do her job. And he was caught between two females on opposite ends of the DNA spectrum that had gotten a good whiff of each other. Two females with the power to mess things up before the real mess began.
Christ, he could feel that other thing he had feared getting closer. The thing he dreaded most. The air was thicker, wetter. He didn’t want to lose Gwen. Besides his own
