Dawn's End

Carter chose the window directly across from Shayla's bed. That empty pane of glass would give him the best vantage point from which to view her. The house was silent. He heard the rustle of covers as Shayla turned over in her sleep. A pang of emptiness stabbed his chest as he caught the sound of R.J.'s gentle snores.

Just a look, a reassurance that she was fine, and then he was gone. Mindful of the steep slope of the roof, he crept closer and pressed his nose against the window's frost covered pane. A breath hitched in his throat as he looked in on her. A curtain of sleek, black hair fell over the mound of pillows. His fingers itched to touch its softness. Her mouth was slack in slumber, but he remembered how lush and nourishing those lips had been against his. The covers had been tossed aside, revealing the curve of her waist and the bare skin of her hip. He had taken for granted how gentle and smooth that skin had been beneath his fingertips.

The breath he held caught in his chest. He thought time would have erased most of the details of her from his mind. He had not forgotten a single one. His hand pressed against the frozen pane of glass, straining to stretch across the distance between them and touch her once more. She was so beautiful and full of life and warmth. Seeing her again made him ache with longing.

A shape beside her moved in the bed. Dark eyes narrowed with rage met his. An arm protectively draped over Shayla's waist and pulled the covers up to her chin. Tracker stared at him with menace in his eyes and a determined set of his jaw. Tracker hadn't forgotten him either.

A pang of guilt stabbed Carter in the chest. He should never have forced Shayla into the arms of another man. In the end, what choice had he left her with? That she was in Tracker's arms instead of his was his fault. His choice. He had to deal with the consequences. Tracker was an opportunist. He saw an opening and he took it. Tracker was the better man. Better for Shayla than he could ever hope to be. He'd taken her love for granted. How easily he'd used Tracker's affections for her as a gambling chip. Admitting defeat, he dipped his chin toward the victor and disappeared into the night.

The jiggling of the bed as Tracker moved woke Shayla. Sleepily, she sighed and asked, "What's the matter?"

Tracker watched the blur of white disappear from the window. This round was his and he'd won. Gently, he smoothed his fingers along Shayla's cheek. "Nothing, go back to sleep," he whispered. Pressing his lips against her forehead, he settled back into the soft down of the covers. The rest of the night, his eyes stayed alert and focused on the window where Carter had been.

Chapter 8

Daniel shivered violently. The cold bit into his bare skin. Pain from his rapid shift surged along his straining limbs. Carter drifted silently as a scrap of paper carried on a breeze through the blackness. Their eyes met for a moment and then he turned away. Daniel blinked against the curtain of falling snow. Flakes caught in the fringe of his lashes and then melted into cold tears. His teeth chattered against a wintry gust of arctic air. "So, she's dead?" The question hung between them frozen on white puffs of heated breath.

Carter stopped in his tracks. The snow swirled around his shoulders as the winds tugged on the tatters of his clothes. He turned to face Daniel. The boy quivered violently, like a lone sapling caught in a windstorm. "Yes." He stared into the darkness. He had no fear of the boy turning into his wolf to carry out his vengeance against him. That the wolf could snap his head off his shoulders with those powerful jaws and end the misery of his existence was not lost on him. Instead the boy stood, with his arms crossed, shivering from cold that had nothing to do with the plummeting temperatures and everything to do with the winter deep in his soul.

"Why?" Daniel gritted past the biting cold. His voice carried gently on the wind. The question was hollow and pointless, but he asked it anyway.

"In death, as in life, we all make choices, Daniel," Carter answered. He drew his eyes from the skeletal black arms of the trees that with the zeal of the religious reached into the sky, wildly waving back and forth in worship of the frigid winds. Daniel was so young and fragile in his innocence. He saw love as an absolute and as necessary as air. He didn't understand exactly how variable love could be. "She cared for you, Daniel. Know that. I cannot answer if it was love or not, but you were important to her."

"Not important enough," Daniel said. His body convulsed from the cold. Muscles moaned and trembled on his bones. Naked from the shift, he held his ground, pretending not to notice how numb he was from the chill. "Did you kill her?" Daniel shouted to be heard over the howl of the wind. He had to know. He had to hear it from Carter's lips. How did she die? Did she suffer? Did she have a choice in the end? The answers changed nothing. His wounds were permanent and would leave deep, twisted scars, incapable of ever truly healing.

"Yes." Carter answered.

"Why'd she let you?"

Carter sized up the boy. Daniel was so much like he had been at that age. Innocent, untainted, and so unsure of what life had in store for him, and of course, wounded, so very wounded. "Perhaps, because she cared too much. You mattered more to her than you will ever know. What nobler thing is there than to die for love?"

In the time it took Daniel to blink, Carter was gone. He stared into the woods, searching for a trace of movement. But, Carter had disappeared into the night without so much as a footprint left behind. Daniel hung his head low the tears freezing on his cheeks. He mourned the woman he'd loved. The woman they'd both loved. In the end, Carter had loved her more than he ever could have. Carter had loved her enough to set her free.

Chapter 9

Deep in his darkest hearts Eric was a hunter and a damned good one. He would not have survived so long if he hadn't been. The fates were cruel bitches and this was the life that their hands had delivered him into. In all his centuries, he'd seen things that would make these little people inhabiting the planet today die from sheer terror. They frenzied about gathering and collecting like little ants. Pushing carts overloaded with things, useless things that would neither end nor prolong their miserable lives one second longer. The Super Center was packed thick with the throng of humanity and its endless stench.

His prey was insight. He stalked behind his target, casually taking his time to know his prey. Without their wolves, their noses were practically as useless as any human's. He had to be careful though. The woman and her son appeared to be unguarded. But, things were seldom what they seemed.

In the old days, he simply would have snatched her and the babe and been done with it. The old days were long gone. He'd have to play this game of cat and mouse. Patiently watch and wait for the time to be just right. She took her time examining the produce. Bending over the bin of apples, sniffing and squeezing, weighing each one in her palm before she gently put it in her cart. She was completely oblivious to the danger she was in.

People were strange, perhaps the wolves even stranger. No one expected the boogieman in the bright light of day. As if the daylight would protect them. Over a number of centuries, one develops a tolerance of such things. When he decided to make his move it wouldn't matter if the sun shone or the moon was in full bloom. The boogieman had come to town.

Her long black braid drooped over her shoulder. Shayla, Carter's beloved. Her blood wasn't the strongest, but it would be the sweetest he'd ever tasted. Vengeance added sweetness to even the most bitter of tastes. What of the boy? The child was a mere toddler and so utterly innocent, bendable and shapeable to anyone's whim. With the proper instruction, the boy would forget his mother had ever existed. One way or the other, he was going to father a child. It could take years for the change to revitalize his body. He wasn't known for patiently waiting. Not when what he wanted was so close it was practically within his grasp.

He followed behind at a close distance as Shayla pushed the cart out of the produce section and into the frozen foods department. Quickly, he ducked behind a display as she glanced over her shoulder. Almost as if she knew she was being followed, her pace quickened. No, she wasn't one of the more powerful wolves. Otherwise he'd never gotten as close to her as he had. Her instincts, or rather her wolf's instincts had alerted her to danger though.

Shayla shivered despite the warmth from the bakery's ovens. She'd meant to check out the frozen food section. Her craving for ice cream had driven her to brave the crowds at the Super Center on a Saturday morning. She'd felt safe enough with Tracker. Felt safe among the crowd of people and their carts pushing alongside one another like bumper cars, till now. Nervously, she looked over her shoulder, trying her best for casual and not paranoid. Goose bumps lifted the hairs on her arms to high alert. Her wolf had sensed something she had not. Danger was close by. She scanned the crowd. Shoulder to shoulder housewives and stair-stepped kids, occasionally, a bored father lumbered through the store. No real threat was visible. What had set off her wolf?

The lady at the counter impatiently snapped her gum to get her attention. This was Saturday and there was a long line of people behind her. Embarrassed by her distraction at apparently nothing, Shayla mumbled an apology and quickly pushed her cart out of the way. Her palms were sweaty and her heart raced. Her wolf growled beneath the surface, but she saw nothing worthy of such an alert.

R.J. dribbled a shower of mushy cookie down his shirt. His eyes were big and round, filled with nervousness because of the tension radiating off his mother. Shayla took a crumpled napkin out of her purse and dabbed at the mess. R.J. had years left before he came into his wolf. But, she could see the very first flutter of gold in his otherwise brown eyes. "You're a mess," she scolded softly, hiding the worry in her voice. R.J. grinned up at her. A sleek trail of drool and cookie crumbs oozed out of the corner of his mouth. Her eyes flitted through the crowd. There was absolutely no danger here. Nothing to be worried about visible to her human eyes, yet, her wolf knew differently.

Hurriedly, she pushed her loaded cart through the mass gathered at the border of the bakery. Where in the hell was Tracker? She navigated the cart, careful not to sideswipe an older lady eagerly pawing through the half-off racks. She maneuvered to the only place she could think of where a man dragged unwillingly to the store on a Saturday morning would retreat, the sporting goods section.

Tracker leaned back on his heels with a smirk on his face. At the counter, a pimple faced sales clerk who knew as much about shotguns as Tracker did about frilly pink tutus was giving his best sales pitch to a beer bellied good ol' boy with a neck so red it would have glowed in the dark. Tracker hoped the kid didn't work off commission. The good ol' boy was anything but convinced that he should spend his hard earned money on a double pump action shotgun when he had a perfectly good single action hunting rifle on display in the back window of his pickup truck.

Tracker was about to step up and help the kid out when the hairs on the back of his neck stood on end. Alerted to the danger, he sniffed the air. He smelled the sweet smells of perfume from the cosmetic counter. Droughts of the scent of freshly baked bread wafted into his nostrils and made his stomach growl eagerly. His eyes flicked down the wide aisle to his left and right, scanning the crowds as they mulled about.

Nothing seemed out of the ordinary. Nothing but shoppers wandered the myriad aisles. Casually, almost disinterestedly, he meandered away from the hunting goods section. Something was wrong. He could taste it on the tip of his tongue, like a flavor he could not describe.

Shayla was in this mess of people. Somewhere. She and R.J. could be in danger. It didn't matter that he could not isolate the source of the threat and take it out. His instincts were never wrong. Too many years of disciplined training and protecting set off his inner alarm. He'd be a fool that no matter how innocuous the scene before him seemed to be, to ignore it.

Eric moved through the toy section so gracefully that his feet never seemed to touch the stained white tiles beneath them. He glanced at the rows and rows of brightly colored plastic with their blinking lights and ear splitting shrieks. How any child could survive to adulthood and not be deranged from all the noise and light, he did not know. His child would never have any of these modern torture devices meant to educate and stimulate. There were other ways to raise children. A firm hand and hours of devoted study would serve any child well enough. It was, after all, how he was raised and he'd turned out just fine.

He turned down an aisle and cocked his head to the side in amusement. Vampire dolls? He picked up the box and studied the doll inside. The plastic figurine had fat, pink curls and tiny white fangs peeking out from beneath smiling, ruby colored lips. Was this how the public saw them? As objects to be played with? Innocuously cute and harmless? Well, he could teach the public a thing or two.

Could he really flash his fangs and be adored? Huggable? Him? How far society had come. How low they'd sunk. Humans used to huddle around campfires terrified of the dark and the creatures that dwelled within it. He remembered, all to well, the bleak days of fire and angry mobs. When his kind were feared and terrorized for being what they were.

These days light illuminated every dark corner. There was nothing for humanity to fear anymore. No black shadows in which to hide. Maybe, just maybe, it was time for them to be afraid again. Give them something real to terrify them. Irritated, he shoved the doll back onto the shelf and skulked through the store.

Shayla scanned the hunting goods section in search of Tracker. There wasn't anybody in the aisles except for a pimple faced attendant talking to a mountain of a man in bib overalls from across a glass counter. Her senses were still on alarm. Buckled in the basket of the cart, R.J. shifted nervously. His cookie crumb coated fingers gripped her braid. The front wheel of her cart wobbled wildly as she pushed maximum speed through the aisles. The crowd gathered around the latest and greatest toy known to man slowed her progress to a crawl. She should have cut through house wares and avoided the toy department all together. Christmas time and toys, she should have known better. Stopped by the crowd of onlookers, anxious to find Tracker and get the hell out of this place, she glanced over her shoulder.

The breath she'd inhaled caught in her throat. Around her, the world stopped and narrowed down to the point where it was just the two of them. The sappy strains of Christmas music playing on the store's speaker system drowned out by the pounding of her heart. Her skin prickled beneath his stare. He was dressed in a long, black wool trench coat. Expensive Italian loafers peeked out from the hem of his expertly tailored designer suit of charcoal colored wool. His hair was sleeked back from his face, gathered in a golden clasp at the base of his skull. The locks flowed down his back in a mass of walnut curls. He was beautiful, for a man. Death wrapped up in a glorious package of finery and excess. "O'Sullivan," she breathed out his name in a whisper. She'd only met him once and that had been more than enough for her to grasp the danger she and her son were in.

Evan, her nephew, had called him a bad man. He didn't know how bad Eric O'Sullivan was. Her body tensed, every nerve fiber clamoring with its neighbor. Her hand immediately tightened around R.J.'s tiny arm. From the end of the aisle, O'Sullivan tipped his chin in acknowledgment of her. Grinning knowingly as he lifted his fingers to his lips and blew her a kiss. Faster than she could blink, he was gone, as if he'd never been standing there, merely ten feet away. Shayla's body shivered against her will like a leaf on a tree. O'Sullivan was toying with her, like a cat toys with a mouse before delivering the killing blow. Suddenly, she had a great sympathy for her prey. For once, she knew exactly how it felt to be in a hunter's sights.

Tracker wound through the flow of shoppers and loaded carts. He should be better at his job than this. He should have been able to track Shayla's lush scent. With the throng of people pressed against him. He couldn't. He couldn't smell a damned thing over the scent of humanity. Too many types of fabric softeners and detergents lingered on their clothing. The myriad array of soaps and sprays meant to smell good stank like hell and had clouded his sense of smell. His ears, strained to hear the subtle pulse of her heartbeat. But, he could hear nothing over the din of noise from the shoppers.

Finally, rounding a colorful display creatively designed to pry money from the wallets of desperate holiday shoppers, he saw her. She stood, staring at a blank point, perhaps the only empty space in the store, behind her. The crowd bumped and pressed against her like a stream flowed around a rock. She stood, oblivious to their annoyed grumbles. Her skin pale, fingers trembling, locked around R.J. protectively, staring at nothing. "Shayla?" This close to her, his nose got with the program and he coughed against the pungent scent of her fear.

Shayla jumped as Tracker wrapped his fingers around her bicep. It was foolish of her to be so jumpy. O'Sullivan wanted his presence known. He would never risk an outright attack around this many witnesses. He was subtler than that. He'd wait until he could get her alone and then strike without warning. She forced a smile to her lips. There was no way she was dragging Tracker into her mess. Whatever O'Sullivan wanted with her was her business alone. She would not have Tracker risk his life for her. "You startled me," she giggled nervously. "I didn't expect the crowds to be this bad today."

Tracker lifted a brow at Shayla's nervous chatter. She was covering for something. Something she didn't want him to know about. His senses were calming. The danger, whatever it was, had passed. "It's Saturday, two weeks before Christmas. What did you expect?"

Shayla faked a sigh and looked wistfully into her cart. "All of this for a pint of rocky road." Melted ice cream dripped from under the cardboard lid of the container onto the produce she'd meticulously selected. All of the sudden, fresh apples and ice cream didn't mean as much as they had a half-hour ago.

Tracker played along. Pressing her was no way to get results out of her. He knew this. Blind to whatever danger laid in wait for them. He would protect her as best he could. It was what he did and he was damned good at it. The handgun tucked into the back of his pants pressed against his spine. The hilt of the long blade hidden in the leg of his jeans brushed against the hairs of calf. They weren't his weapons of choice. He did his best work with claws and fang. "Ready to go then?"

Shayla nodded, "Lets."

Eric frowned at the Omega. He had not expected a royal guard to be accompanying his prey on a simple trip to the grocery store. There was a familiarity to the way the Omega handled Shayla. A flair of intimacy shone in their eyes. The casualness of touch as his hand brushed across the small of her back. His little she wolf had been busy. Kindling the home fires with someone else while Carter was away.