Dawn Unleashed

She'd given of herself without hesitation in an act of trust that went deeper than physical intimacy. She'd trusted him with her life. Gently, he pressed his lips to the coolness of her forehead. The press of her hip against his groin and her warmth caused other needs to flare to life. He hoped, not like the guy he used to be, but the man he was, that someday, they'd branch off into that unexplored territory too. He wanted to, right now. The urge would have to wait until she was ready and he'd had a nice long talk with his mentor. He had to be sure she'd be safe and that he could keep her that way before they went too far too fast.

The guy part of himself, that selfish bastard who lived with him in his head teased at him for all the caution and care he expended for Maggie. She was just another girl. A notch in his belt he'd forget her once he got her between the sheets. No he wouldn't. Maggie was his first. His first taste of this life had been at her wrist. When it came to her, he was the virgin. He had no experience with his new body and he wanted his first time to be with her. Mine. The male part of his psyche breathed like a command in his mind.

Cole pulled the blankets up tightly around Maggie's shoulders and settled his face against the soft spray of her hair. He had her tucked up nice and tight against him. Warm and cuddly in his arms, she sighed contentedly.

Spasms rocked his body. His limbs contorted in wracking pain. Agony surged through his mind. He pressed his molars tightly together to hold back the scream in his throat. Pain. His body burned as if it were engulfed in flames. He choked on thick black smoke and looked through a dark haze of ash.

Maggie was jerked out of her dream by the hard press of Cole's fingers digging into her hip. His body was drenched in sweat. His breaths came out in shallow, agonized pants. "Cole?" She wiggled out of his embrace and stared down at his pain-contorted face. Panic surged through her mind. "Cole! It isn't real!" Something bad was happening. Not to him, but he was feeling it as if he were actually there. The warriors were suffering and they were dragging Cole along for the ride.

"God, Maggie, God!" Cole cried out. He grabbed onto her as if she were a life raft in a turbulent sea. She was real. The pain in his body and soot in his lungs was not. "Too much pain."

Maggie dragged Cole onto his feet. His weight threatened to topple her over. The encrypted cell phone on her dresser, her connection to the Sons, danced crazily across her nightstand. They were calling everyone in to the compound. This wasn't going to be good. Not at all. She struggled to navigate Cole out of her bedroom and to the door of her apartment. His bulk and the tingling sensation of danger along her spine almost buckled her knees. Somehow she managed to get the door open and haul him toward the stairs.

Ginger scowled up at her daughter, struggling her way down the stairs with the bulky warrior's weight over her shoulders. Damned if her daughter wasn't doing exactly what she'd told her not to do. Maggie was dressed for bed and the warrior in a pair of shorts. The evidence was condemning. But, she didn't have time to deal with it now. The Sons needed them at the compound. She ran for the car, hitting the remote start on the way. "Stuff him in the back seat."

Maggie expected an all out war with her mother. Under normal circumstances, there might have been. Right now, her mom was all business. If there was nothing her mother was best at, it was handling a crisis. Later, there might be hell to pay. But for now, both of their priorities lay with the Sons.

Maggie stared out into the miles of darkness that zipped past the passenger side window. The last time there had been a call out of all of the donors, the Sons had been under attack. She and her mother helped to care for the sick and the injured. They'd spent most of a day and a night in the shelter of the cold, dank mine shafts the Sons now called home. They lost someone that night. Before Dane was their first, there was Lucien. His loss had been a heavy blow to them all. "Mom, do you think its bad?"

Ginger tightened her grip on the wheel and glanced through the rearview mirror at the warrior huddled, half conscious, in the back seat. "I don't know, baby. I don't know."

Chapter 89

Tracker pulled Shayla into the comfort of his arms. The night had lost its sultry haze. A slight damp chill formed on a layer over her skin. She was so beautiful, sated and boneless from hours of lovemaking, wrapped in his arms. Gently, he traced the outline of her cheek, pale against the black night of her hair. When her lips curled up in a soft smile, he trailed his fingertip over her collarbone and along the peaks of her breasts, circling each taught nipple before he continued down to rest his palm on the flat of her stomach. He might have given her more than his love tonight. He could only hope. A baby, a son or a daughter might be growing in her womb right now. He pressed his lips to the dip of her belly button and rested her cheek on the soft, suppleness of her skin.

Shayla ran her hands through the soft, sleekness of Tracker's hair. His breath was hot on the skin of her stomach. A calm settled over her that she hadn't felt in all the long months of her self-imposed loneliness. Tracker chased her demons away and laid them to rest. She didn't believe in casual sex, and there was nothing casual about having Tracker in her bed or wrapped in her arms. She felt her emptiness receding on the wake of warm caresses and sighs of pleasure. "I love you, Tracker."

Tracker lifted his head from Shayla's stomach and rolled over onto his elbow. He grabbed onto those four words and held them in his heart for all they were worth. Her admission burned into the fiber of his soul. He stared down at her, grinning. Not in triumph, but because she'd finally opened her heart to him. They were good together, physically and spiritually. She'd accomplished something that for all the geneticists, calculations and lab experiments never could have. In her he had his home, his heart, and his mate. "Nice to hear you admit it."

"Don't get cocky," Shayla huffed, playfully jabbing Tracker in the ribs. Sometimes it was easy to forget the wolf in the man. Grinning at her the way he was, she could see his wolf, triumphant and happy beneath his skin. She slid out of his arms and fished in the dried, fallen leaves of last autumn for her clothes. Pain grabbed at her limbs and left her panting and fumbling, blinded by the fury of her agony. Tracker grunted and gripped at the ground beneath his powerful body, reeling from the same.

"What's happening?" Shayla panted.

The shift gripped at her limbs and jerked her wolf from her body with such a fury that she thought she'd split in two before it was over. Muscle and bone reformed, lengthening and shortening. Soft, smooth skin was covered in a layer of coarse fur. Her wolf left her behind, reeling in the dark void of her mind.

Tracker grunted with the effort of maintaining his human form. The soulful howl of Shayla's wolf beside him was his undoing. The change was fast, faster than it had ever been. One minute he was a man and the next, an animal. The wolf sat on its haunches and lifted his muzzle into the night, adding his voice to the soulful song of its brothers and sisters. Something was wrong. The pack, united in their strength and bound by their souls sang long and mournfully into the stillness of the night.

Keene lifted his head and focused the blurry vision of his eyes to take in the carnage around him. The night was a blaze of smoke, fire, and confusion. Sirens wailed with an unearthly scream. Blue and red lights flickered, cutting shadowy outlines through the smoke. Bystanders blinked unbelievingly at the chaos on their doorsteps confusedly as police pushed them back behind flimsy borders of yellow tape.

One by one, the brothers dragged their battered bodies up off the ground and took stock of the nightmare made reality around them. Firemen, dressed for a battle of their own dashed about, dragging hoses like the bodies of limp snakes over the charred remains of once neatly manicured lawns. Emergency personnel carted stretchers and equipment to the wounded. This was bad, very bad, the scene was quickly becoming more than a war zone. Something the brothers had speculated about and worried over since their inception was happening. The humans were being thrust head first into their world. Keene pressed the mic on his headset that was somehow miraculously still attached to his ear. "Toby, we've got a situation here."

Toby darted back and forth from keyboard to keyboard. His eyes flicked from screen to screen. He hated that he always got left behind when the heat was on. Someone had to manage the tech end of the operation and he was that person. His talents lay beyond brute strength, lightening fast reflexes, and a warrior's battle hardened skill. He was the maestro behind the scenes. What he could do with the click of a mouse and the press of a key was magic, sheer magic. "I'm working on it," he answered into his mic. "You got local news crews, ambulance, police, fire, and an entire city of eyewitnesses. That's a lot of damage to control. Fuck, I'm trying."

Toby's fingers flew over the keyboards. Sweat plastered a thick shock of long, silky, bangs to his forehead. But, he didn't waste the time to brush them back. The problem with computers was that they didn't process as quickly as his fingers could type. "I'm going to knock out the city's power grid. That ought to buy you time to pull out." He hoped. Damn, he hated the digital age. No doubt some idiot with a cell phone was posting the entire thing on YOU TUBE by now. Within an hour the carnage would go viral. The evidence of the existence of all the things that really did go bump in the night was getting damned hard to cover up.

"Got it," Toby breathed into his mic. In a few seconds, the city was going to get a whole lot darker. "You got blackout?" Knocking out the power wasn't going to be enough to control the damage, only to slow it. Too many things ran on battery these days for his feeble attempt to be of any real value. Anyone with a cell phone and a good WiFi connection still had a front row seat.

Keene eased into the shadows as the night ate up the orange glow of the city skyline. "Power is out, but it isn't helping much." Humans kept fighting the fire and the beast. Bright lights powered by batteries cut through the dark and the smoke.

Toby barely breathed an acknowledgment and kept typing. Hacking into networks, doing his best on his end to fight the battle. The Internet was a handy tool and a fearsome enemy. He had to keep the videos from surfacing on the net. "I know. I know. I'm working on it." He scraped a hand across his jaw. His body ached with the unseen force of agony that wasn't his. Some of his brothers were down, maybe for good. The effort of keeping them out of his head, to keep functioning through their pain, was taxing his already spent mind. "How many?" he rasped.

Keene moved through the shadows. Many of the brothers were on their feet, fighting their way around the humans and keeping out of sight. "I don't know." Fire licked at the unrecognizable heap of rubble that was once a mansion. Clouds of black smoke billowed from the ruins. Somewhere beneath or mixed with the mountains of debris, his brothers were trapped. Until the fire was contained, he was helpless to rescue them.

"Damn," Toby whispered. He spared a moment, the blink of an eye for his fallen brethren and got back to work. In his right ear, he kept tabs on the battle. Chatter filled the inside of his head. The list of survivors was large enough to give him hope that they would bring the bastard responsible to justice. But, there was one voice still silent and the worry that filled him from the silence of that missing voice tore at his heart. Of his Father, there was not so much as a whisper.

Chapter 90

Drew floated in a bubble. Outside the bubble was chaos and pain, light and fear. Inside, there was nothing but darkness and silence, blessed silence, no cold, no heat, no pain, just the bliss of nothingness. He'd been in this dark netherworld once before, long, long ago and he'd never forgotten the absolute perfection of nothing. Only in his dreams had he been able to recreate this one perfect moment. For so long, he'd waited to be back in this place. And now, he finally was.

Dead. It had to be. His body had finally succumbed to the hand of death. Death, his savior and deliverer, was carrying him back to the peaceful shores of his final home. A pang of regret at leaving Tala, his mate, and all the others behind, tainted the sheer bliss of this moment he'd been waiting for over two hundred years. He'd died a warrior's death, good and honorable. Just exactly how he'd always envisioned his end to be.

The sound of his name caressed his face like a cool breeze on a summer's day. His Goddess, her voice rang like the tinkling of a thousand silver bells called to him. How long had it been since anyone had called him by his true name. The bubble that he'd drifted in fell away and he felt the cold press of rock against his back. The gentle sound of rushing water filled his ears. He knew where he was. The place he'd finally arrived at, he called home. The shores of the Great River that separated the land of the living from the land of the dead, at long last, it was his turn to cross.

He rolled up onto his knees and forced his body up to stand. He was weightless and boneless in this place. Light as the air that gently ran its fingers through his hair. He looked down, expecting to find the tattered remnants of his leather battle gear. Instead, he was clad in clothing, dressed as he'd dressed centuries ago, in leggings and breechcloth. Instead of high powered weaponry and daggers, his familiar bow, was strung over his shoulder.

The river called to him. Determined, he waded out in the chilly water. Shadows, glimmering outlines of countless people, urged him to join them on the distant shoreline. A smile, wide and excited, curved his lips. Lucien was there, sparing him a familiar scowl, watching. He met the laughing eyes of his mother and the stoic gaze of his father with giddy anticipation. A white wolf padded along the sand and rock, pinning him with its arctic, ethereal stare. At the sight of the wolf, his brother, Drew sped his pace. The current tugged at the breechcloth on his thighs. The pressure of its resistance slowed his clamoring exodus to the other side.

Laughter, joyous, feminine, laughter, its sound as light as air, floated around him, clinging to his skin. "Are you so sure it is your turn to cross the river?"

Drew froze in his tracks. The voice of his goddess was almost a palpable thing. She called to things deep inside of him. The pull of her voice was stronger than the current. Almost painfully, it drew him back. Jaw set in determination he forced his feet to move toward the distant shore. The current grew stronger, forming an unstoppable wall between him and the shore.

The Goddess dipped her toe in the river's icy chill and gazed at the warrior fighting against the pull of the current and the gentle lull of her voice. He had done her bidding and earned the rest he so desperately sought. But, it wasn't his time to cross. No matter how badly he'd wanted it or the measures he'd taken to earn it. The time simply had not come yet. So much of him was still so human, so innocent and childlike. He'd assumed when he awoke on her distant shores, that his time had come. For some reason, everybody that opened their eyes and found themselves here did. "Come, Tecumseh warm yourself by the fire and let's talk."

The sound of his ancient name on her lips was the cool kiss of breezes on his skin. Drew could not battle the current. He was as weak as a babe against the pull of Kokumthena's dark gaze. "Goddess, please. I've waited so long and suffered so much."

"Stubborn man," Kokumthena muttered. With a wave of her hand Drew felt his body being swept up and deposited with a hard, bone jarring thud, beside the heat of a roaring campfire.

"I am not to die today?" Drew asked. He kept his gaze focused on the lapping tongues of orange flame. The Goddess in her beauty, the glowing white of her flowing hair, the gleaming bronze of her skin, and the dark depths of the wisdom in her eyes was painful to look upon. His heart was heavy. He was torn between two worlds. He longed to join the ranks of his fallen soldiers, feel the softness of his brother's wolf beneath his fingertips, and rest amongst the comfort of his people. While, at the same time, duty, commitment, and love left him longing for all the ones he'd leave behind. Especially, for Tala.

"Sorry," Kokumthena laughed. "Not today." Her feet made no sound as she rounded the warmth of the fire and went to stand by her warrior. She'd made him the father of a great race, an honor, and a heavy burden. He'd served her well, faithfully, and loyally. She felt the pain of the price of her gift running through his veins. For all that he was, the longing and the constant hunger would never leave him. He'd suffered much. For so long. She dropped to her knees beside him and wrapped her arms around his quivering shoulders.

Drew's shoulders sagged. Her arms were fire against his skin. Her breath, a scalding wind across his cheeks. Death taunted and teased him with its promise of an end. He would beg for the cold solace of the grave if he thought it would do him any good. His goddess meant for him to live. To suffer the constant hunger that had been his companion for over two hundred years. "Goddess, all that I am, I owe to you. That I should fall in battle serving you, there is no greater price to pay than my own life. Why do you deny me this final gift? Give me my peace. You taunt me bitterly."

Kokumthena pressed a soft kiss to her warrior's cheek. His skin was salty against her lips. She regretted that she could not deliver him into the hands of his paradise. But, his mission, his destiny was not yet at its end. "Would you sacrifice your mate and hear your brother's mourning cries to stay at my side?"

Drew hazarded a glance up into the brilliance of her eyes. Her fingers were soft and unyielding along his cheeks. "They'd join me here, eventually," he said.

"Yes, they would. But, they'd live, a piece of them missing, torn away too early before the time was right. I did not bring you here to tease you with what you could not have, but to strengthen you. You are the father of a great race, yet of your own line, you have none."

"My line died with my physical body."

"Not so. Through Tala's blood and the life in her body your line will be reborn. She is pregnant, with a son. Your flesh and born son."

Drew lifted his eyes to Kokumthena's gaze. "A son." The goddess didn't play games. She didn't lie. He lifted his head from the cup of her fingers and glanced around the peaceful paradise that surrounded him. Eternity could wait, till his time finally came. He found his strength in her promise of life. "Goddess, I am not worth of such a gift."

Kokumthena kissed her son on the mouth, giggling under her breath at his renewed sense of vigor. "Go, Drew, go and live."

Drew's awareness slammed back into his body. His lungs took breath. Choking on soot and ash, he clawed at the mound of rubble. Strength surged through his limbs. He kicked his way free of tons of debris like a swimmer paddling through mud. The first draughts of clean, fresh air filled his lungs. He sucked greedily at the night air and pulled his body free. He was battered, bloodied, and bruised from head to toe. Beyond the pain of his injuries and the blood that colored the chunks of plaster, brick, and wood of his would be tomb, he was free, and he was alive. No burden was great enough to hold him down.