Obsession Untamed (Feral Warriors #2)(2)

Tighe slowly struggled back to his controlled, human, form. As his claws and fangs retracted, Wulfe balled up his fist and hit Jag in the jaw with a hard right hook.

Jag went sprawling. “What’d you do that for?”

“You can be such an ass,” Wulfe snarled. “Do you want to see him locked up? Now? Would it be too much to ask you to not hasten the destruction of one of our strongest warriors?”

Jag scowled and pushed to his feet. “Fuck you.”

“I’m not heading for destruction,” Tighe growled, standing and adjusting his ripped shirt so that it continued to hang, barely, from his body. He wouldn’t let it happen. He refused to let it happen.

But he couldn’t deny he was shaken.

“Let’s kill some draden, then,” Wulfe said.

Tighe compressed his mouth and nodded. They hunted draden by waiting for the little fiends to smell their Therian energy, energy the Ferals emitted in their human forms. It wasn’t much longer before a faint dark cloud appeared over the cliffs across the river.

“Incoming,” Wulfe said quietly. The draden had found them.

Wulfe yanked off his tee shirt and unzipped his jeans, tossing his clothes onto the rocks. Jag stripped out of his camouflage pants and army green tee. Tighe did nothing. He was one of the Ferals who possessed the ability to retain his clothes when he shifted. A handy trick, especially when he hunted among humans.

The dark cloud of draden moved quickly toward them over the gleaming river, a smudge against the stars and the shadowy distant cliffs. A huge smudge.

“Holy shit.” Jag whistled low. “Is it just me, or is that five times the usual number?”

There had to be hundreds coming at them. Maybe more than a thousand. Holy shit was right. They’d known the draden were multiplying faster than usual, but the evidence was alarming. If they didn’t get them under control, there wouldn’t be enough Therian energy for them to feed on. They’d turn on the humans.

And if that happened, they’d decimate the population in no time, without the humans ever knowing what hit them.

“Then let’s get ’em, boys,” Jag said.

“I’ll take first bait.” Tighe pulled his knives. One of them had to remain in his human, or Therian form, or the draden would fly off. But as first bait, he would absolutely be fighting for his life.

In a sudden, heart-jarring instant, a veil of darkness dropped over his eyes, swallowing everything. Tighe’s blood went cold.

He couldn’t see. “What the hell?”

“What’s the matter?” Wulfe asked beside him, as if nothing were wrong.

Shit. His pulse began to pound in his ears. This must only be happening to him. His vision was gone. Totally. Was this the first step to losing his sanity?

As quickly as his sight vanished, it reappeared, but his relief lifted and plummeted in the same instant. He wasn’t actually seeing. Like a movie lighting a dark screen, a scene appeared before his sightless eyes.

A harsh, bright light lit a rough room, nothing but half a dozen washers and dryers on a cement floor. A public laundry room. Two heavyset women worked, one shoving wet laundry from the washer into the dryer, the other standing before a nearby table, folding clothes. The standing one glanced toward him, her expression at once appreciative and wary.

“Hi,” she said cautiously.

Suddenly, her face grew in his vision as if a camera lens were pulling in close. Her eyes widened with terror as the room lurched dizzily. As if he’d attacked her and taken her to the ground.

Was this a premonition, heaven help him, of what he was to become?

Behind him, the other woman screamed, piercing his eardrums.

“No!” His victim threw up her hands, the terror in her eyes churning up rancid memories buried deep in his mind.

Memories of another time, another place.

His gut knotted until he thought he’d be sick. But he couldn’t deny the evidence. It seemed he was finally doomed to become the very thing he’d been accused of being all those long, miserable years ago.

A monster.

FBI Agent Delaney Randall strode up the front walk of the Potomac Side Apartments in southwest D.C., her hand fisted tight around her notebook, her gut burning with a need to find the bastard who’d killed more than a dozen women and children in the past three days.

To stop him before he killed again.

It was late, nearly 10:00 P.M. The last three murders had taken place in that general neighborhood, and she’d spent all day canvassing the nearby apartments, interviewing residents, searching for clues. Someone had to know something. She was bone tired, but she wasn’t quitting until her body refused to move another inch.

Not while the murderer was still on the loose.

And, unfortunately, that could be a while. Even with more than a dozen victims, there was no real evidence. So far, there had been no witnesses and no DNA left at the scenes despite the teeth marks on the victims’ throats. Even the cause of the deaths was a mystery. It was as if God had pointed His divine finger at each of them, and said, “Time’s up.”

The breeze blew loose tendrils of hair into her face as she strode up the front walk of the apartment building. A man in a polo and khakis walked toward her, the streetlight illuminating a nice-looking face. White male, late twenties, not visibly armed. Her brain clicked a mental picture, filing him away as yet one more suspect.