Kiss of midnight a wolfg.., p.1
Kiss of Midnight: A Wolfguard Protectors Novel, page 1
Kiss of Midnight
A Wolfguard Protectors Novel
Kimber White
Nokay Press LLC
Copyright © 2019 by Kimber White/Nokay Press LLC
All Rights Reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the written permission of the author or publisher, except where permitted by law or for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Up Next from Kimber White
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About the Author
Chapter One
Milo
A red file. I hadn’t done one of these in over a year. Catch or kill.
I stayed hidden among the trees and underbrush, quick steps. My paws dug into the ground as I neared the clearing.
The scent of a dozen campfires hit my nose all at once. Roasting meat and marshmallows. Hot dogs. Laughter rose. To the east, I scented a family. The dad was telling light-hearted ghost stories to a group of kids. They were easy. Happy. Completely unaware there was a wolf among them.
But I wasn’t here for them.
My prey was further west, downhill. She had her own campfire going and as I approached, her scent grew stronger. Dark magic swirled around her. It had a thick, charred aroma mixed with something else, like incense in a church.
I sat back on my haunches as I got her in my sights. She’d just gone back into the green tent she’d set up thirty feet from the fire. She was the only one here without an RV parked beside her lot. I just saw a beat-up red pick-up truck parked at an angle, blocking any other vehicles from getting too close to her set-up.
She was singing. I couldn’t make out the tune, but she was good. She hit a trill that sent a shiver down my spine and made my fur stand up.
I waited. Watched. I heard her rustling around in the tent. The embers of her fire sparked and danced, almost in time with the melody she sang. I wondered if that too was part of her magic.
“You need to be careful with this one,” my boss Payne had said. The head of Wolfguard Security, he’d trusted me with some of the firm’s most dangerous assignments.
I had a knack for bounty hunting. My cousins preferred what they thought were more sophisticated jobs worthy of members of the Kalenkov wolf pack. Well, we were family, not exactly pack. But my father led the largest, most powerful Russian wolf pack and the name carried weight. He hated that I’d chosen my own path at first, but understood it.
I wasn’t born to lead the way he was. I was born to hunt. Alone. Rogue if I had to.
Yes. This job was perfect for me and exactly what I needed to get my head back in the game.
I’d been restless of late. Unsettled. Payne and my cousins worried I’d taken too many chances, got myself needlessly close to danger. My sister piled on. I knew what she thought. She wasn’t a shifter herself, but she knew me better than anyone. She wouldn’t say it out loud but she worried I had some sort of danger junkie death wish.
“I’m always careful,” I’d told Payne when he handed me the red file.
Payne pursed his lips. “She’s going to be tricky,” he said, gesturing toward the file. “Her own coven couldn’t bring her back in.”
I’d tucked the file under my arm, not bothering to read it. It didn’t matter. Payne paid me to bring my quarry in. I’d never once failed him or the firm.
“You ever come up against a wind mage?” he asked.
I shrugged. “A witch is a witch. What’s a little hot air?”
Payne steepled his fingers under his chin. “Your family has had a long history with some of the covens in Russia, haven’t they?”
“I haven’t lived in Russia since I was a kid,” I said. “And there’s never been a witch dumb enough to go against the Kalenkovs who lived to brag about it.”
Payne regarded me with a cool eye. There was more to the story I wasn’t telling, but Payne was shrewd enough not to ask. Plus, with his connections, there’s no way he hadn’t heard the rumors. Decades ago, a rival wolf pack had ousted my father as pack leader. We’d barely escaped with our lives. We’d only survived at all because my father managed to smuggle my sister, me, my uncle, and two of my cousins out of the country and all the way to Chicago. For twenty years we lived in exile and under the constant threat of assassination. Until my father changed all of that and took back his birthright and power.
But we’d paid the price. The rival pack had hired witches to help them get to us. My mother died trying to protect me all those years ago.
“I need you to keep your head clear on this one,” Payne had said. He didn’t bring up my family tragedy but I knew it was in the back of his mind. He thought I couldn’t be objective, that maybe I was too close to this.
“I know the job, Payne,” I said. “And I know how to keep my personal biases out of it.”
He nodded. “Good. Like I said, this witch might be tricky. Her name is Nadia Bach. She’s caused some trouble within her coven. They’re based in Michigan City, along the lake.”
“I know the area,” I said.
“Right. They believe she’s turned dark. So she’ll be unpredictable. Her coven believes she murdered one of their elders.”
“I don’t care about their coven politics,” I said. “Just point me in the right direction and I’ll do what you pay me to.”
Payne’s eyes narrowed. I felt his wolf brimming just below the surface like mine.
“She’s used dark magic to kill another witch from her own coven, Milo,” he said. “You don’t come back from that, they tell me. It’s like a drug. If she’s tasted that kind of power, she’ll be hungry for more. So she’ll be unpredictable. Consider her armed and extremely dangerous. Don’t take unnecessary risks. They want to question her. I guess there’s value to them in finding out who hooked her up to the dark Source.”
I shook my head. “Yeah, I don’t get the distinction. Dark Source. Light Source. It all comes from the same place. And it was so-called light witches who cursed shifters, Payne. I think it’s all just made up to keep us from killing them all on sight.”
A thousand years ago, witches and shifters engaged in an all-out war. They’d tried to wipe us out by cursing our kind. It didn’t work out how they planned. But the curse succeeded in making female shifters of any kind all but extinct. I could count on one hand the ones I knew of, including my own niece. There was a cure now, but I couldn’t even openly discuss that with Payne.
“I get it,’ I said, opening the file for the first time. Nadia Bach. It was a grainy shot taken from a distance. She was pumping gas into a partially rusted red pick-up truck.
Pretty, I guess. Long black hair, dark eyes. Small. I tilted my head to the side and studied her.
“Evil wears cut-off jeans, cowboy boots, and a Red Wings jersey, apparently.”
“Do not underestimate her,” Payne said. “Don’t get cocky. Who knows what this chick will do if she feels cornered. And Milo, you know what the red file means.”
Catch ... or kill. There was no in-between.
That was a week ago. It took longer to catch up with the witch than I expected. But now I had.
I hunkered down, pressing my belly to the ground. With the sun long since set, I would blend into the shadows. I was invisible.
Still singing, she came out of the tent. For half a second, I thought she was naked.
My blood stirred. Not naked. But she’d slipped out of her jeans and top and wore only a light pink bra and matching panties. She was thin but toned, with ample tits and a nice round ass. She squatted beside the fire and warmed her hands. She reached up and pulled a tie from her hair, letting it spill over her shoulders in a dark curtain.
Then she started to chant. Latin, maybe?
Two seconds earlier, there hadn’t been so much as a light breeze. Now though, her hair lifted in a swirling cyclone and the fire rose up in a column. Yet, the air around me remained perfectly still.
Magic.
I bared my fangs, feeling the air thicken. The stench of her magic made it hard to breathe. I nearly bit through my own tongue to hold back the growl.
Saliva dripped from my fangs. I found myself craving the taste of her. A vision flashed before me. This woman. Her hips thrust up as she went down on all fours for me, beckoning me, begging me to take her.
I would devour her. I would snuff out her black magic and bring it into me. The wind around her sounded like a gasp of pleasure as I slipped inside of her.
Shuddering, I side-stepped. The vision cleared and there was only her. She was lying on her side in front of the fire, her eyelids hooded. She was falling asleep. Whatever magic she’d used had faded away. I scented only the woods, the fire, and the normal, almost human, feminine aroma around her.
Her breasts heaved as she let out a sigh. My eyes lingered there for a moment. I drew closer.
She was prettier than I first thought with full, pink lips, the lower more plump than the upper. She had thick, straight brows and a fine dusting of tiny freckles on her chest. She had a birthmark on her shoulder.
So it would be a catch.
I bared my teeth and let out a sigh. She’d fight me, but I was way too strong. Once I tied her hands and blindfolded her, she wouldn’t be able to easily cast. And I had a secret weapon.
Tied around my neck, I kept a vial of venom we procured from a cobra shifter. The stuff was potent, but not deadly. One stick of the needle and Nadia Bach would sleep for a day. End of story. Then her coven could deal with her and Wolfguard would get paid.
I stepped out from the shadows, feeling the heat of her fire against my fur.
Nadia’s lips parted. Her tongue darted out as she sighed in her sleep.
I took a step toward her and dropped my head to let the rope around my neck fall. The syringe I carried hit the ground and I leaned back, ready to shift. It would only take a second. Nadia would never know what hit her.
I took another step and a tornado rose up from the ground. Dirt and dust choked me and sent me reeling backward. The vial got caught up on the maelstrom and disappeared.
Nadia stood in the center of it, arms raised, eyes flashing then dissolving to purest black. The blast hit me squarely in the chest and knocked me backward.
As I struggled to breathe, Nadia stood over me as the tornado changed course and headed straight for me.
Chapter Two
Nadia
“Crap!”
My booby trap hit the animal squarely in the chest. I’d set up a perimeter around the entire campsite. So far, nothing bigger than a squirrel had tried to get in.
Now, a large gray wolf lay writhing on the ground, his golden eyes fixed in shock.
I scrambled to my feet and lunged toward him, ready to call the wind and take his breath away if I had to. Doing that was risky. Any witch in a hundred-mile radius would sense me. The protection spell was nothing more than a party trick. It would barely register to anyone but me.
And now the wolf.
As I got closer, his back arched and his tongue lolled to the side. He couldn’t see me. His central nervous system was rendered momentarily haywire. I had about sixty seconds to figure out what to do.
Ten seconds later, my problem got a hundred times more complicated. He wasn’t a regular wolf at all.
As he finally succumbed to the spell and lost consciousness, the wolf’s fur bristled then shrank. His claws retracted. Bones and muscles snapped and reformed. The wolf was gone. In its place, I found myself staring down at a well-built, dark-haired, fully naked grown man.
I sank to my knees as my pulse raced. This was bad. A disaster.
“A wolf shifter,” I muttered. “Why did you have to be a wolf shifter?”
I reached for him, my fingers trembling; they hovered an inch above his forehead. I had the urge to smooth his dark hair away from his eyes.
He was good-looking. Rugged with a square jaw, full lips, and dark stubble framing his face. He lay on his left side in a fetal position. His calves and quads were massive. I took in every inch, every detail. He had broad hands with rough pads on his fingers. A hard worker. He had ink swirling across his right bicep and more on his chest. A wolf’s head with a shield beneath it. The mark was familiar, but I couldn’t place it.
“Who the hell are you?” I whispered, then prayed he didn’t answer.
I scanned the woods. I wasn’t blessed with extra-sensitive hearing like this guy was. I could sense another magic-user well enough, but shifters were something else. And this kind usually traveled in packs.
My pulse skipped. If his buddies were close by, it wouldn’t take long for them to figure out something happened to this guy. I knew wolf packs could communicate telepathically. I didn’t know if they could sense what happened to him, but if he woke up, he could probably call to them in a second.
“No,” I whispered. “No, no, no, no, no.”
I ran to the tent and rummaged through my supplies. What I wouldn’t give for a little Dragonsteel chain right about now. It was the only surefire way to contain a shifter. Though I’d never had occasion to test it out, I heard it could even keep them from calling to other pack members.
I had nothing that strong here. I’d deemed it far too risky to travel with anything that might draw attention from another witch.
Zip ties. I had plain, plastic zip ties. Without any special ingredient, that wolf could bust through these like paper.
It was better than nothing. I raced back outside. He was still out cold on the ground. I closed my eyes and listened to the wind. Just a little nudge. I couldn’t call on too much magic without it acting like a homing beacon to my coven. If I could just use a tiny bit …
My eyes snapped open. I couldn’t be sure, but I didn’t hear anything moving in my direction yet.
I grabbed the guy by the heels and started to drag him toward the tent.
“Ooof!” He had to weigh close to two hundred pounds. Dead weight. I was sweating before I moved him even six inches.
With great effort, I got him inside the tent and out of view. I’d picked this particular campsite because it was so far away from all the others. There wasn’t much foot traffic out this way and the other renters pretty much left me alone. For the past couple of weeks, I’d just been the crazy hipster lady who hung out at the end of the row.
I zipped the tent flap and started binding the guy’s hands and feet. That alone wasn’t going to do anything, but I had the germ of an idea.
It wasn’t Dragonsteel, but I’d seen the stuff used a couple of times in my life. It gave off a warm glow, a distinct smell, and the weird sensation of having ash in your mouth. I could work with that.
As the shifter started to snore, I set about casting my spell. Luckily, I wouldn’t need to connect to The Source for this. I just needed a simple incantation if I remembered the words from the last time I’d read it.
I said them. I think.
The zip ties started to shimmer. For a second, I worried I’d only succeeded in melting the damn things. Then they slowly reformed, thickening. It took about twenty seconds, but at the end of it, they looked just like metal.
I touched one. It was hard and cold beneath my fingertips. The smell was right. I just needed to buy myself a little bit of time.
If I was lucky, I could pack up and disappear before he came to. If I wasn’t, maybe I could fool him into thinking his pack was out of reach.
Ten minutes. That’s all I needed. I started to stuff my things into my backpack. I’d have to leave the tent behind.
If I were lucky …
As I turned my back, I felt his eyes staring right through me and knew my luck had just run out.
He was human now, but his growl came through fierce and strong, vibrating through me. I slung my backpack over my shoulder. My jeans and tee-shirt lay in a heap on the floor on the other side of him. I realized how decidedly non-threatening I might look to him sporting nothing but my bra and panties. Plus, there was the fact that he was still completely naked.
“Witch,” he hissed. He struggled into a sitting position and his eyes went down to the zip ties.
His lips curled in a snarl as he tilted his head and inspected them.
Please work. Please work. Please work.
It was all an illusion. Barely more than a parlor trick. The bonds would seem strong the first time he tested them. I prayed the look and smell of them would do the rest. If he believed they were Dragonsteel, it might be as good as the real thing. At least for now.
