Dreaming of the Wolf (Heart of the Wolf #8)(55)

Lelandi ran her hand over her arm. “You don’t know how worried I was—well, all of us were—when Jake seemed so depressed. He kept retiring to his bedroom earlier and earlier, and we couldn’t figure out what was wrong.”

Alicia smiled at that. She knew the feeling.

“At first, he’d been so reluctant to drop his pictures off at the art gallery in Breckenridge. Then he didn’t come home until the next night. Darien and I figured he’d met a woman and hung around a while longer. But when he was so disconsolate upon returning and said he was going back to Breckenridge, we didn’t know what to think. Darien was sure Jake was planning on turning a human woman. Not something we do lightly.”

Alicia’s jaw dropped in astonishment. “You weren’t turned?”

“I was born as a lupus garou. Same with most of our people. A few were turned a very long time ago. Every once in a while, the choice has to be made to turn someone who has seen what we are.”

“Or kill them?”

Lelandi nodded. “Not something we want to do, but sometimes it’s our only choice.”

Alicia swallowed hard. “When the woman came to the restroom at the gallery and I had shifted, I was so afraid I’d have to bite her. And then the others. And once the police were summoned, I knew I’d be dead. They’d figure I was a rabid wolf.”

“Until you died,” Lelandi said softly, squeezing Alicia’s hand. “Then you would have turned into a human. And, well, that would have taken some explaining.”

Alicia’s mouth dropped open again. “Ohmigod.”

“Yes. That’s why until you get your shape-shifting abilities under control, you need to stay with only our kind.”

Then Alicia had another horrible thought. “One of the men who planned to kill me—I bit him. What if I turned him?”

Chapter 13

Danny stood before Mario in his Breckenridge condo as Mario forked up another sausage link, trying to keep his temper under control. “What I want to know is why you failed to bring the woman back with you and how two of my men died. Hell, it took seven weeks just to locate her.”

Mario’s voice was low and cold, and he was ready to kill Danny with his bare hands. He hadn’t murdered anyone like that since he was in his teens. For years, he’d had his henchmen doing his dirty work. Looked like he was going to have to get this job done himself, if he wanted it done right.

He still couldn’t believe the woman had given up her chance to earn the bounty on him just to turn him in. He smiled evilly at the thought. Too bad she’d had her information wrong and the police had arrived at his old residence only hours after he and Danny had split.

He shoved his clean plate aside, grabbed his pen, and pulled the newspaper crossword puzzle closer.

Ten across, nine letters: Extremely unpleasant experience.

Danny looked peeved, not at all like a man whose head would be on the chopping block next. “I told you, boss. She shot Smithie and escaped. A vicious dog was in the room, and when me and Cicero tried to storm the place, the dog attacked. I got Cicero to the car and he died. I didn’t know he had a heart condition. But that’s what Doc said. The damned dog crushed Cicero’s arm, and it triggered the heart attack.”

Mario wrote in the word purgatory on the crossword. “Describe this dog to me again.” He lifted his eyes from the newspaper.

“It looked like a German shepherd. The same kind of head. But… not exactly the same kind of colors.”

“Could it have been a wolf?”

Danny stared at Mario as if he was crazy.

“Could it have been?” Mario demanded.

“I guess so. I never seen a wolf up close.” Danny’s face looked drained of all color, the notion that a wolf might have gotten the best of him probably crossing his mind. “Yeah, it could’ve been.”

Mario looked back at his puzzle. Two down, six letters: Vibration.

“When you killed your brother, there wasn’t any sign of a dog in his place, was there?”

Thoughtful-like, Danny’s eyes stared at the floor. “No. I didn’t see any water dishes, dog-food dishes, nothing.”

Mario shook his head. “Just a dog.”

“No. Ferdinand was alone. He wouldn’t have had a dog. He didn’t like kids or animals.”

“Before you killed Jimmy, he said Ferdinand had grabbed a woman. That she’d been following me. Jimmy didn’t know her name, but it had to be Alicia Greiston. So where was she when you located Ferdinand at his place?”

“I swear I looked through the place. She wasn’t there.”

Mario just bet she had been. Damn, if only the henchman he’d sent to murder Ferdinand in the first place hadn’t gotten himself killed instead. And he wondered now if the man had bitten Ferdinand somehow in the process and turned him.

Mario pondered that as he stared at the crossword puzzle, not really seeing it. If the idiot had attacked Ferdinand as a wolf, but Ferdinand had managed to kill the assassin instead, Ferdinand had to have turned into a werewolf later, too. No wonder he’d been so good at tracking Mario.

Mario had turned some of his men himself, thinking they might become better assassins, but the experiment had proved fruitless. Three turned gunmen on his payroll were now dead; all three had had problems with shape-shifting at the most inconvenient times. He’d considered changing his cousin, but Mario didn’t think Danny could handle it any better than his other men had. He thought about Cicero, too. If the man had survived the heart attack, he probably would have been turned when the wolf bit him.