Page 38 of Bound

“Makes sense, right? Maybe the fang-heads found some sort of high-powered window tint that allows them to go out if it’s cloudy enough.”

“Okay… or maybe there’s a reason your uncle won’t take your calls.”

A beat. “Wait, what? You’re seriously suggesting the Tracers could be involved?”

Topher stepped into my space, eyes flaring gold, and my breath caught. “This is why I didn’t want to tell you. We already know there’s a mole on the Council. Why is it so hard to believe they could have gotten to someone on the Tracers?”

We glared at each other, chests heaving. It wasn’t. And we both knew it.

“Toph—”

The night air crackled with dark energy as the first vampire materialized right on top of us. Topher shouted, shoving me behind the nearest tree and drawing his Glock. My bones shivered and split, fur replacing skin, long, wicked fangs growing from a lean lupine jaw. A second later gunshots slammed into my hypersensitive wolf ears like the roar of a freight train, leaving only a high-pitched scream in their wake. I shook my head, trying to clear the ringing. Without my hearing, it suddenly felt like I was standing on a boat in twenty-foot seas. Fortunately, sensory deprivation training had been my mother’s idea of a fun afterschool activity.

I lunged for the nearest vampire, locking the arm holding a tranquilizer gun in my jaws before he had time to mark me. We slammed into the ground, rolling down a steep embankment. Rocks and gravel rained down on us as I fought not to let go. The tranquilizer discharged, missing me by inches. The fang-head dematerialized. Scrambling up, I dashed for the boulders at the north edge of the clearing. Topher had found cover behind the shipping container, but it was a bad firing position, and we were outnumbered two to one.

A wave of nausea rolled over me. I shivered violently from nose to tail. I had no way to know if my magic would work on vampires. My mother’s power to project into minds could stop an entire field of the undead. My father’s ability to manipulate moon magic only affected other shifters. Even River couldn’t easily read a vampire mind, and almost never without destroying it in the process. I’d never had another Omega wolf to train me, hadn’t ever felt safe testing my limits when the effects of my magic could be irreversible, and certainly not in a combat situation.

I reached for the undead minds, not bothering with subtlety, allowing their emotions to flood me. The ringing in my ears suddenly stilled. I thought back to the day my power had manifested, when I’d been caught in the middle of one of Dallas and Ethan’s epic fights and without meaning to, had been able to tap into their emotions and manipulate the pack bonds to get them to do what I wanted. My magic unfurled, golden tendrils delicate as fern fronds stroking the mind of the nearest vampire. Immediately I encountered resistance, the hard cold wall of mental shields that would be hell to punch through. I’d have to slide beneath them.

Magic glowed in my bones, searing me from the inside out. Gunshots barked overhead. I pushed harder. The vampire’s concentration cracked. Fear, anger and the wild berserker bloodlust of the hunt slammed into me, no doubt heightened by the shifter blood and whatever drugs the undead had been forced to consume before dematerializing here. Picking each thread apart, I unraveled them one by one, tethering the assassin to me instead. I sprinted for the center of the clearing. A lovely magical meal.

“Are you insane?” Topher shouted.

At least my hearing was back.

In my defense, studies had shown moving targets were notoriously hard to hit, even for those with extensive training. Add to that the fact that my wolf was, as Ethan put it, exactly the color of the dust on the side of his truck and could beat the rest of the pack in a dead-on sprint any day (thank you, four years of track team) and I liked my chances.

I sprinted for the junked-out car on the far side of the clearing. The closest vampire was fifteen feet away, a second female only a few yards behind. I poured more power into the connection, drawing them both to me. The male snapped first, materializing practically on top of me, fangs elongated, eyes crazed with hunger as he eyed my throat. With a snarl, the female vampire broke from the trees. And now I was about to be wolf chum in a vampire blood bath. Good strategy, West.

“Down,” my brother shouted.

I shifted to human form and dropped flat on my belly just as gunshots tore through the clearing. August got off seven rounds in quick succession before ducking behind a tree. Both vampires went down. Two more—

Hands seized me by the throat.

“West.” Topher’s fear lanced through me. He couldn’t take the vampire down. Not with me in the line of fire.

Suddenly he was gone, my feet scrabbling for purchase and finding only empty air, the roar of the wind loud as an oncoming train in my ears. I opened my eyes to find myself a mile from the ground, maybe more, the lights from Austin blazing in the distance, the air too cold, the vampire’s clawed fingers a death grip around my throat.

I drew a silver knife from the sheath at my chest and stabbed it into the soft space below his ribs. He released a strangled cough, the ground hurtling closer every second as we plummeted from the sky.

The grip on my throat loosened. I whipped around, seizing the vampire by the front of his shirt and locking our legs together. “I go, you go, too.”

The vampire snarled, clawing at me, unable to get free. My stomach leaped into my throat. I remembered the way Topher’s wrist had felt beneath my cheek the night we’d spent together, the scent of his skin, the warmth of his pulse thrumming against my lips. How I’d wasted so many hours and seconds since. And now I’d never get the chance to tell him—

The stars vanished. I was yanked viciously from the air, my bones snapping like twigs. I tried to scream, only to drown in pain. I came to on the ground, bruised and throwing up. Dimly, I heard August shouting my name, shouting other things, too, but words were fickle, slippery things, their meaning impossible to hold. Hours, maybe minutes later, I blinked again and felt tire treads beneath my cheek. Cedric. We were back at the car. Rolling over, I dragged myself up to lean against the wheel well.

An unfamiliar girl stood over me. She was tall, nearly six feet, with dark hair, fringy bangs and impossibly blue eyes. The skinny jeans, purple Chucks, and t-shirt proclaiming Schrodinger’s cat, wanted dead and alive, weren’t exactly screaming criminal mastermind, so I was about to ask my brother why he was leveling a gun at her, when he answered the question for me.

“You wrote a nasty little piece of code that crashed our system for two days.”

“Oh, that was just the test version. Wait until you see the real thing,” she said airily, causing August to growl. “I also just saved your ass. Pretty sure that makes us even.”

“The leeches back in the clearing,” I slurred. “Are they—”

“Dead,” August confirmed.

“The one who took me?” If I’d used too much power, bonded them to me, they would keep hunting us until they were dead or I was.