Dreaming of the Wolf (Heart of the Wolf #8)(30)

It had to be sleep paralysis. Except that the only time she’d experienced it, she hadn’t been able to move at all or to yell. She had just whimpered, unable to free herself from sleep. Yet she’d been aware she was trying to escape the sleep paralysis. And when she awoke, she remembered the terror of being paralyzed and unable to break free.

But in this case, everything she smelled and touched with her wet nose, felt under her paw pads, and tasted with her tongue was too real to be a dream.

She meant to laugh at herself for thinking she was a wolf, but a woof erupted from deep within her throat. For a moment, she was too stunned to react.

She struggled to remember what Ferdinand had said to her.

But the assassin gave me a present before I ended his miserable life.

Ferdinand had gotten the best of him and killed him. But the man had given him a present first. A present? A virus? That made Ferdinand capable of biting someone else and infecting that person with the virus? That person being Alicia? Who now was a wolf?

She closed her eyes and tried to think of what else Ferdinand had said that might give her a clue.

The bastard who turned me is dead, but I’m not about to live alone.

The assassin had turned Ferdinand. Turned him. As in… had bitten him and…

She glanced down at her foreleg, which was matted with blood. Had Ferdinand bitten her arm? As a wolf? It had hurt like the devil before when she was lying naked on the bed. Naked. He’d stripped her of her clothes and then bitten her to… to turn her?

She paced across the floor, panting, so confused, so upset that her thoughts were scattered a million miles wide. She had to be dreaming, no, experiencing a night terror.

She swallowed hard and focused her attention on the doorway to the bedroom.

When Ferdinand had undressed her, the room had been pitch-black. She couldn’t see him, couldn’t understand how he could see her. If he… if he was…

She shook her head and began to pace again. The room was dark, the curtains drawn, the lights all off. Yet she could now see in the dark.

And wolves had nocturnal vision for hunting. Which meant? Ferdinand had…

She wanted to laugh out loud, but the sound came out like a garbled woof. Ferdinand had been a werewolf. That was too weird to believe.

She paused and glanced back at the doorway. What had become of him?

Her heart was in her throat, and fear cloaked her with the worry that she still could be discovered. But the need to learn what had happened to Ferdinand overwhelmed her need for self-preservation. She loped out of the bedroom and down the hall, smelling the shampooed carpet, the cologne worn by three different men, whiskey, and lemon wax cleaner. Her ears twisted back and forth, listening to the sounds outside—cars driving by, a siren way off in the distance, the hum of an air-conditioning unit, but otherwise an eerie silence prevailed.

As much as she wanted to see what had happened to Ferdinand, dread bunched in the pit of her stomach. The hall opened into a living room, spacious with high ceilings, richly carved dark wood furniture, and two couches and four chairs—all covered in brown brushed leather. She stopped dead.

Sitting on one of the couches, head lolled back against the top of the cushion, Ferdinand Massaro, her former informant, was staring lifelessly at the ceiling with cold black eyes. She barely breathed, felt her furry legs wobble beneath her, and sat before she collapsed.

Silver duct tape covering his mouth, and with his head tilted at an odd angle, Ferdinand looked as though his neck had been broken. She blinked away tears. The room was dark, no lights on in the recessed fixtures, yet she could see the man’s hefty size, over six feet tall and meaty, with matted black hair covering his chest, and hairy legs. He was naked. Had he raped her before he was murdered?

She didn’t think so. Her front leg still pained her where she’d been bitten, and she wondered if he’d… The notion was too unreal to believe, but what if he’d shape-shifted into a wolf, then bit her and, after that, shifted back into a human form? Then the men had come for him before he could do anything more to her.

Her mouth still agape, she felt chilled all over despite her warm wolf’s fur coat, her brain fuzzy from the knowledge she might have been infected with some weird virus, and the man who undoubtedly had done it to Ferdinand had been murdered. Then Ferdinand himself had met his fate.

I’m not about to live alone like this, Ferdinand had said. Like this, like some cursed being? She had to wake up from this nightmare. She wasn’t a wolf. She couldn’t be.

Trying to get her rapid breathing under control and attempting to banish the light-headedness she was experiencing so she could think more clearly, she finally realized she had to get out of here—now. The realization didn’t mesh well with the notion she was fighting that she was a wolf, consciously sitting in Ferdinand’s living room and staring at his dead body. Smelling his dead body.

What if someone called the cops or one of Ferdinand’s murderers returned to tidy up the place?

She had to get out of there.

Hours passed before Alicia finally managed to shift back to her human self and dress. She left Ferdinand’s townhouse and walked forever until she could call a taxi far from the townhouse where he had lived. Then after picking up her car near the townhouse where Mario had been meeting someone and where Ferdinand had grabbed her, she returned to her hotel on the outskirts of Denver. She intended to get some sleep and leave before dawn and get as far away from there as she possibly could. She couldn’t quit thinking of what she had become, of what that meant for her if she had the horrible urge to shape-shift again—especially if she wasn’t hidden from the eyes of the world if it happened once more.