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I reversed the video to where it seemed Justine had truly lost it, panic settling into her tone and stretching her beautiful face into a rictus of escalating fear. My attention jumped between the screen and the current direction of her fearful gaze until I honed in on a male who seemed to be the unwavering focus of her attention.
He was older—well, definitely older than me. I figured he was close to my parents’ age, but it was hard to tell. My father was six years older than my mother, but he was aging at twice the speed from his pure evilness and recreational debauchery. The man on screen looked like he could be a contemporary of either parent—if it wasn’t clear from his bone structure that he was wolf.
A kind of hot wolf—for his age. Lean, with black hair that almost reached his shoulders and plenty of silver mixed in with all the black. A vivid intelligence gleamed in his dark gaze, even if he was little more than a shadowy flash on a screen.
“Your father spoke with Constantine on the phone late last fall,” my mother admitted, name dropping the lion shifter who controlled the smallest of the prides in Champaign. “I remember the name you mentioned. This Onyx she-wolf.”
I shrugged. I didn’t need any confirmation. It had been years ago and Onyx was roughly my age, but I had noticed her on my first trip to her clan’s territory. Seeing how cruel the other wolves were to her, even her own brother and sister, I had wanted to befriend Onyx. Henric wouldn’t have it. She was “damaged goods” and the pity I felt left him furious.
“She was the one hit by the car,” my mother said, her voice low, the words issuing as if directed inward. “That’s right, yes?”
“Yeah, other than it being a semi-truck with a trailer full of heavy farm equipment,” I corrected. “Humans took her to the hospital, pumped her full of human blood. Either the non-shifter blood or the damage of being hit so young kept her from shifting. Her father basically turned her into the family slave.”
Even though several years had passed since I last saw the she-wolf, my heart ached with sympathy. Some people got the dads they deserved, great dads, protective dads. Some got run-of-the-mill sadists like Henric. Life didn’t deal me as rough a hand as Onyx held, but there wasn’t much difference between us when it came to our families.
Pulling back from the memory, from a lot of memories, all of them unpleasant, I looked at my mother. Her entire body vibrated with a slight tremble. Microshifts rippled through her. A thin bristle of hair traveled a line down from each side of her neck to disappear beneath the collar of her silk blouse and re-appear at her wrists. The muscles and bones in her back lightly cracked, reforming over and over as she fought her panther’s escape.
I had never seen her like this. Whatever she might have been feeling, it looked like terror to me.
Hell, I felt sorry for her.
I gently placed a hand on her shoulder and opened my dumb mouth.
“Mom, I know you lived through the pack wars, but—”
She jerked the thumb drive out and sent it surfing across my desk.
“Has your father seen this?”
For a split second, I looked at her like she had lost her damn mind. That question had been asked and answered a couple of minutes earlier.
“Again, Henric was the last one to possess the drive and there’s only one file on it.”
She stared at the opposite side of the room, her gaze focused on the wall behind her desk.
“This is some kind of test…” she started, her voice vibrating with fear as it trailed off.
Not understanding what had triggered her panic, I retrieved the memory stick and backed up to the part of the video that showed the hot old guy. The instant his face appeared onscreen as she watched the video, I had felt and scented an emotional spike in my mother. I couldn’t put a name to the emotion. It was a mix of more than one. But, for a single glorious second, she smelled like I remembered her from childhood. She smelled like love and a safe haven.
And she had been looking at this man.
I tapped a nail against the pixels that comprised his face.
“Who is he?” I asked, not expecting an answer beyond her denying she knew.
“A dead man,” she whispered, her gaze never shifting from the screen.
“Not in this video,” I snapped back, the sudden change that washed over her body scaring me enough to trigger my fight response because I could not deal with seeing my mother truly vulnerable for the first time ever. “Who…is…he?”
At last she looked up, her emerald eyes shiny with an inconceivable threat of tears as she answered.
“He’s your father, Mosa.”
CHAPTER3
DOONE
A cowbell rangfrom inside the one-bedroom cabin I had been staying at since my arrival in Night Falls. With three logs left to split from the massive pile I had started on at daylight, I ignored the sound. Mallory, the old wolf who had sponsored my admission to the motley assortment of shifters who populated this remote section of Wisconsin, was stretching the limits of my gratitude and doing it purely for his own amusement. I had already fixed his roof and shored up two support beams so the house wouldn’t collapse when winter rolled around and the area had its first heavy ice.
