Touch a Dark Wolf (The Shadowmen Book 1) Read online

  Shashur’s only endearing quality was that he was dependent on Cinatas’s genius, unless, of course, the man wanted to abandon his refined, leisurely life to feed like a ravenous beast—to spend his every night groveling in the filth of the masses, desperately searching for Chosen blood.

  Cinatas shuddered at the vision, thankful that he was above the squalor of having to feed like an animal. By the time his life on Earth ended, he’d have the key to immortality without having to be dependent on a frequent infusion of Chosen blood. But until he held that key, he’d play the Vladarian Order’s game, feed their hunger, and take their money until he could take them over.

  There was satisfaction in having the Vladarians dependent on him, even if they didn’t realize he was their god. After one transfusion of Chosen blood, Shashur had returned to vigor from death’s door, and by the end of the treatment regimen on Sunday, the man’s forceful energy would be virtually unstoppable for the next three months.

  Cinatas would never forget his own brush with death on a dark night six years ago. The bridge his car had plunged over, the icy waters, his bursting lungs. The sudden peace and floating toward a brilliant light as he watched the incompetent idiots who’d pulled him from the water resuscitate him. They’d somehow managed.

  And that night, in an isolated Appalachian hospital, a creature had made Cinatas’s rebirth complete. In one excruciatingly painful bite from a Tsara, Cinatas was set on the path to discovering his greatness. Led by Pathos, the Vladarian Order tapped into his genius and paid Cinatas well for their transfusions of Chosen blood.

  It wasn’t until the Vladarian Order’s cloaked “research grants” had made Cinatas rich that the world stopped treating him as a bloodthirsty Frankenstein and saw his value. As a hematologist/oncologist, his experiments in using blood proteins to treat diseases were at the cutting edge of the bioscience frontier. There was power in blood, and someday his Sno-Med Corporation would be all-powerful. Cure a handful of people from cancer, and you became a god. Erin Morgan couldn’t touch him, but she was a messy detail that needed cleaning up.

  Cinatas tightened his grasp on the gold goblet. He shifted his gaze to the screen on the far wall showing a video of a gutted building, the smoke and ash remnants of the damage Erin Morgan had forced him to do.

  Why did people always choose to make things difficult and messy?

  Today was but a minor setback. A special Chosen or not, Erin Morgan had bought herself a one-way ticket to his private—pleasurable for him, painful for her— hell, just as soon as his men, and not Shashur’s, caught her.

  Cinatas’s neck still throbbed from the damage she’d caused with her syringe, and his body was just recovering from the aftereffects of the drug she’d plunged into his carotid. But the damage to his pride and reputation was worse.

  “The wrong word from her to the wrong people, and I’ll have to beat back the cursed Irmans again to reestablish my power. It’ll cost me another year or two. I can’t believe you let this happen,” Shashur said, his dark eyes full of fire as he stabbed his finger in the air.

  “My fault?” Cinatas merely smiled. Wine and the dregs of morphine made a heady and almost fearless cocktail in his bloodstream. “You’re blaming me for a woman you and the rest of your kind personally requested to have service your transfusions? I warned you at the time that it wasn’t smart to let someone besides me administer your treatments.”

  “Had you not left four bodies to be found, she wouldn’t have become a problem.”

  “Your insistence upon fresh, unfrozen blood, warm from the vein, necessitates the donors be brought here. They refused to come and had to be forced to do their duty. If a man cannot keep order among those who serve him, then he deserves to die.”

  “It doesn’t matter why. Pathos will be displeased when he arrives for the Vladarians’ Gathering. Your purpose in serving us is to minimize, if not eliminate, the body count, not add to it.”

  Cinatas paused mid-sip. Serve them? Wine spilled down his shirt, sending a stab of rage though him so sharp that he barely restrained himself from tossing the wine into Shashur’s face or shoving the glass down his throat. The transfusions were to keep beasts like Shashur from having to live like an animal, constantly searching through the masses for Chosen blood and feeding in violence. Transfusions were so much more aesthetic, like a trip to the spa. Pathos had been the one to realize that to gain more power, the Vladarians had to spend less time scavenging for food and direct their energies toward building influential empires. They needed to stay longer in the mortal realm. They needed to establish themselves among mortals to expand Heldon’s reach.

  Chosen blood was very hard to find among the millions populating the world, and the hundreds of people Sno-Med Corporation screened every day for blood donations made that task easy. It had taken Cinatas an entire year to isolate and identify the special protein that made Chosen blood different from that of other people. The rest was . . . glorious history. Cinatas established Sno-Med, and the Vladarian Order went to work. Identities were bought, corporations established, and regimes overthrown.

  Shashur had taken over the oil-rich Kassim in a quick and brutal military coup, replacing a despot who wasn’t near the beast Shashur was. Shashur just knew how to conceal it better. The Vladarians were very adept at concealment.

  But still stupid. Didn’t the beast realize that Cinatas held its existence in his hand? One little additive to a transfusion and . . . well, who knows what could happen.

  “Why bother Pathos with today’s trivial events?” Cinatas said. “I’ve already taken care of any problems.”

  “Pathos considers it an offense to be uninformed of any matter. He will also be the one to determine Erin Morgan’s fate once we’ve captured her.”

  “Why?” Cinatas asked, feigning indifference. “What makes her so different from any other Chosen? Why was it necessary for her to administer the transfusions?”

  Shashur frowned, clearly disgusted. “There’s no satisfaction in a meal if all you can smell is trash. Your Chosen blood is polluted, my friend. And Erin’s blood is the sweetest on earth.”

  Cinatas refrained from commenting on Shashur’s insult, but he put another mental mark against the man. One day Cinatas would be in a position to decide who from the Vladarian Order would be allowed to stay on earth, and who had to stay in hell.

  Ordinary human blood bought Vladarians very little time in the mortal realm. For once a Vladarian passed through the spirit barrier to walk among mortal men, his vitality waned, and his body eventually decayed, feeding off itself like a cancer unless it got more mortal blood. The longer a Vladarian was upon the earth, the more frequently he had to feed. Eventually, the Vladarians had to constantly kill to sustain life, a problem that rendered them useless to aid in Heldon’s battle for the Earth. However, the purity and power in the proteins of Chosen blood changed all of that.

  One transfusion of Chosen blood sustained a Vladarian for three months.

  Cinatas smiled at Shashur. One day the ass would be serving Cinatas, and Cinatas would force the Vladarian to reveal why Erin Morgan was special. Meanwhile, he’d personally examine her blood this time instead of relying on a lab tech. There had to be a reason why Shashur considered Erin’s blood sweeter than any other.

  Perhaps Erin’s blood had a higher concentration of proteins. Cinatas kept samples from everyone, blood and pieces of their tissue as well as other body fluids. There was power in knowledge, and it would seem he was about to get a payoff from his. “If she is so succulent, why hasn’t one of your kind just devoured her before?”

  “Erin Morgan is under the protection of the Vladarian Order.”

  A mortal under the protection of the damned? Very interesting. He wondered why, but didn’t ask, didn’t call attention to the oddity. Her blood would tell him what he wanted to know or she would. GPS tracking would soon put her into the palm of his hand.

  His cell phone vibrated. Looking at the digital display, he inwardly smiled
as he excused himself from the room.

  There was one thing he’d learned about evil over the past few years. Evil was, to coin a famous quote, “essentially stupid.” His Chosen blood might smell like trash to Shashur, but it gave him an edge over the Fallen.

  Erin awoke feeling as if she’d been drugged or beaten or both; every muscle of her body ached, and her head hurt as if a sledgehammer pounded between her eyes. Awareness of something besides pain came slowly. A sense of heat. Stuffy air. Bright sunlight. She tried to move, but couldn’t. Straining against her binding, she realized she was buckled in and sitting upright—in her car.

  Danger tingled through her as her memory rushed back.

  She snapped her gaze around, searching for the creatures. Daylight streamed through her cracked windshield, revealing a fractured blue sky, a grassy field, and a naked man on the hood of her car. She blinked twice, but the vision didn’t disappear. Last night’s nightmare had morphed into pure fantasy. The silver werewolf and demonic black thing were no more to be seen and a dark-haired, naked Adonis had appeared. She shut her eyes sure she had to be hallucinating.

  “Mmmnn.” The groan, deeply male and filled with pain, did not come from her.

  She opened her eyes. The man was still there, still naked, and now moving restlessly. She had hit something last night. Her windshield was cracked. Surely she hadn’t hit him. Right?

  Hell!

  Even if she was delusional, she couldn’t just sit there. Unbuckling her seat belt, she opened the door, sucking in the mountain air, a freshness she hadn’t realized she’d missed by living in the city. As best as she could tell, she’d landed in a narrow green pasture near a sprawling lush oak. Between her and a rushing creek were grazing cows that looked too normal to be part of a nightmare.

  Moving like a rusty hinge, she slid her legs out of the car, startled to see dried blood staining the front of her nurse’s whites. Her stomach clenched. It had to be her blood. She tentatively touched her face, feeling dried blood and a gash on her left temple.

  Behind her, ten feet up an embankment, past barbed-wire fencing and thick brush, sat State Road 44. The road she’d been on last night. She had a vague recollection of the thick fog, of missing a curve and plowing through bushes. Then the feeling of plunging downward, hitting hard, and bouncing over rough terrain until she came to an abrupt stop when the engine stalled. She’d sat shaken and alone in the middle of swirling mists, afraid to open her door or move at all. She remembered squeezing her eyes against the pounding pain in her head, thinking to rest for just a few moments before trying to find her way back to the road.

  That was the last she could remember. The night had apparently passed, and, judging by the height of the sun, most of the morning, too. She must have passed out, for her moment’s rest had stretched for hours.

  The man groaned again, and she stood, grabbing the car door for balance as dizziness swamped her. The world about her slowly came back into focus, an oddly bucolic contrast to the roller-coaster ride she’d been on and the naked man before her. She knew she had to have a mild concussion, which made everything more surreal.

  She moved slowly to the hood of her Tahoe, her gaze scanning the man’s body for trauma. She saw no apparent signs of injury. No blood. No bruising. No limbs twisted at an unnatural angle. He appeared almost too perfect.

  Was he real or not? Either way, it wasn’t good. If he wasn’t real, then her mind had gone off the deep end. If he was real, then she’d hit him with her car last night—which meant he’d been walking naked in the dark, something only a person in trouble or mentally ill would do.

  He lay on his stomach, one arm cradling his head, the other at his side. Longish, coal-black hair, with a shocking streak of silver at the crown, moved in the breeze.

  She’d give her imagination a lot of credit, but was it really this good? She needed a Starbucks IV stat.

  The man was broad shouldered and perfectly sculpted, his muscular back tapering to a trim waist and hips. Strong thighs led to long legs that hung off the edge of her car. The only oddity was the paleness of his skin didn’t match up to his athletic built. He didn’t look as if he’d ever been out in the sun, which meant he had to be feeling the UV rays bombarding his backside.

  She touched his shoulder, encountering burning hot skin backed by hard muscle. She wasn’t imagining this, and the man was ill. Fevered. Concern gripped her. “Mister. Can you hear me?”

  He groaned, but didn’t answer. Moving closer, she slid her fingers into his hair, feeling the silkiness and the wild luxurious length of it as she searched his scalp for injury. Finding none, she pressed her palm to his burning brow. Never had she felt anyone so hot. “Hey,” she said gently. “Can you hear me? You’re ill.”

  Still no response. She had to turn him over. Hiking up her dress, she climbed onto the hood and grasped his shoulder and his hip to roll him her way, praying he wasn’t badly wounded anywhere she’d yet to see. They were a long way from a hospital. When she pulled, he reared up, groaning sharply with pain and knocking her backward.

  She tumbled to the ground, smacking her knee on the bumper hard enough to bring a sting of tears to her eyes. The man had moved faster than she had imagined possible. That sent a fissure of fear through her. She was out in the middle of nowhere. Alone.

  Rolling to her feet, she crouched, prepared to spring up and run, but found herself nearly eye-level with impressive male anatomy that was starkly enhanced by black hair, hard muscled thighs, and washboard abs. He’d crossed his thick arms over a chest that rivaled Atlas for broadness and strength. She lifted her gaze higher.

  He sat with his heels propped on her bumper, knees bent and legs spread—not extra wide, but he sure wasn’t trying to hide anything. Seeming thoroughly comfortable with his nakedness, he stared at her with bloodshot eyes the startling color of iridescent blue topaz.

  She pressed her fingers to her head, searching through the throbbing mass of her mind as she studied his gaze. There was something familiar about his eyes, but she couldn’t say what or from where, maybe one of those magazine ads where you just get a partial shot of a man’s face that grabs you. She did know she’d never met him before. That would have been unforgettable.

  Sweat beaded his flushed face, and she noticed that he held his left arm protectively against his chest. Dark stubble covered his chin, framing lips that had to have been fashioned by Eros—or Satan. He had the most erotically seductive mouth she’d ever seen, the only soft spot amid his warrior’s features—chiseled nose, sharp cheeks, and brooding brow. His dark hair flowed past his shoulders, layered back from his face like the wings of a predator. He looked like a deadly warrior, with an odd gold-colored pagan amulet hanging on a chunky chain about his neck

  If she had hit him with her car, he hadn’t suffered injury. She shook her head. No. If she’d hit him, there would be evidence of it on him and on her car besides the windshield. This just wasn’t real. He resembled an actor she’d once seen in a mini-series on Attila the Hun. This had to be a dream. A woman would have to be out of her mind to imagine waking up in a cow pasture with a naked man.

  She managed a weak smile. “Hello, Attila the hunk,” she said, her voice scratchy and unsure. What else could it be but a dream?

  “You can see me?” the man asked in a deep voice. “You are mistaken. Attila the Hun died well over a millennium ago, and I bear no resemblance to that cursed scourge. I am Jared.”

  She narrowed her eyes, and a pang cut through her temple. That wasn’t a very romantic, dreamlike response. At least, none that she could imagine fantasizing, which meant this was real. What did he mean, could she see him? How could she not?

  Shaking her head, she wondered if she could just start over again. Last night’s creature battle never happened. Yesterday’s hell in the Sno-Med lab didn’t exist. In just a moment, she would wake to her alarm clock in her apartment after the wildest dream/nightmare of her life. All she had to do was open her eyes, throw back her leopard-pri
nt spread, and flip on her Victorian feather lamp. Better yet, why not tuck her new hood ornament into bed with her?

  “Jared what?” she asked, giving the dream option one last try. Hopefully the man would now speak in a Scottish accent, fulfilling her fantasy.

  He stared at her another moment, scowled, then looked around him as if she hadn’t spoken. Too typically male to ever be a dream.

  Erin set her hands on her hips, wishing that at least one thing in a million would go right. “If you won’t tell me who you are, can you at least tell me how in the hell you ended up on my car? And where are your clothes?”

  He flexed the fingers of his left hand as if to see how it worked. When he moved his left arm, he groaned and pulled it tighter against himself.

  She winced at her own insensitivity and softened her voice as she touched his arm lightly. “Hey, you’re hurt and fevered. Let me help.”

  “I’m damned,” he said harshly; his eyes were stark and desolated.

  He was delirious. “Jared,” she said softly. “Let me see your wound. I’m a nurse—I can help.” She moved closer to him. Oddly, she grew warmer inside, as if his nearness affected her. The heat, she told herself. She had to be feeling the heat of his fever.

  “Nothing can cure a Tsara infection.” Still, he unfolded his arm and shifted it to the side.

  She moved his hair back and then sucked in a sharp breath at the sight of the deep burn that slashed his chest just above his left breast. Charred and angry, his wound oozed, looking as though someone had burned him badly only minutes ago.

  “How in God’s name did that happen?” she asked, forcing back a shudder.

  “You say much to know so little,” he said cryptically, then slid off the hood. From the sudden clenching of his arm and the deep furrowing of his brow as he tentatively gained his balance, she knew he was in great pain. Yet he stoically braced himself and straightened to his full height.