PLAY OF PASSION

Sharp. Iron. Blood.

Indigo swore low under her breath. Joshua would catch her scent if she wasn’t careful. Turning her face up to the rain, she let it wash away the blood from the cut. But it was still too bright, too unmistakable a scent. Wincing—their healer would strip her hide for this—she went to the earth and slathered mud over the superficial injury. The scent dulled, became sodden with earth.

It would do. Joshua was so far gone that he wouldn’t detect the subtle undertone that remained.

“Where are you?” It was a soundless whisper as she stalked through the rain-lashed night. Joshua hadn’t taken a life yet, hadn’t killed or maimed. He could be brought back—if his pain, the vivid, overwhelming pain of a young male on the cusp of adulthood, allowed him to return.

A slashing wind … bringing with it the scent of her prey. Indigo stepped up her pace, trusting the eyes of the wolf that was her other half, its vision stronger in the dark. She was gaining on the scent when a wolf’s enraged howl split the air.

Growls, the sickening clash of teeth, more iron in the air.

“No!” Pushing her speed to dangerous levels, she jumped over fallen logs and new-made streams of mud and water without really seeing them, heading toward the scene of the fight. It took her maybe twenty seconds and a lifetime.

Lightning flashed the instant she reached the small clearing where they fought, and she saw them framed against the electric-dark sky, two changelings in full wolf form, locked in combat. They fell to earth as the lightning died, but she could still see them, her eyes tracking with lethal purpose.

The tracker, the hunter, was bigger, his normally stunning silver-colored fur sodden almost black, but it was the smaller wolf, his pelt a reddish hue, who was winning—because the hunter was holding back, trying not to kill. Aware her drenched clothing would make stripping difficult, Indigo shifted as she was. It was a searing pain and an agonizing joy, her clothes disintegrating off her, her body turning into a shower of light before forming into a sleek wolf with a body built for running.

She jumped into the fight just as the red wolf—Joshua—slashed a line into his opponent’s side. The bigger wolf gripped the teenager’s neck. He could’ve killed then, as he could have earlier, but he was attempting only to subdue. Joshua was too far gone to listen; he reached out, trying to go for the hunter’s belly. Teeth bared, Indigo leaped. Her paws came down on the smaller wolf, holding his struggling, snarling body to the earth.

She didn’t know how long they stood there, holding the violent wolf down, refusing to let him go over that final destructive edge. The hunter’s eyes met hers. A brilliant copper in his wolf form, they were so unusual she’d never seen the like in any other wolf, changeling or feral. She glimpsed a piercing intelligence in that gaze, one that many people missed because he laughed so easily, charmed with such open wickedness.

Most in the SnowDancer pack didn’t even realize he was their tracker, able to trace rogue wolves through snow, wind, and, tonight, endless rain. And though it was not their practice to call him Hunter, he was that, too, charged with executing those they could not save. But Joshua understood who it was he faced. Because he went silent at long last, his body limp beneath theirs.

Indigo released her grip with care, but he didn’t spring up, even when the larger wolf let go. Worried, she shifted back into human form, her hair plastered to her naked back between one instant and the next. The tracker stood guard next to her, his fur rubbing wet against her skin.

“Joshua,” she said, leaning down to speak to the boy, determined to bring him back from his wolf. “Your sister is alive. We got her to the infirmary in time.”

No recognition in those dark yellow eyes, but Indigo wasn’t a SnowDancer lieutenant because she gave up easily. “She’s asking for you, so you better snap out of it and get up.” She put every ounce of her dominance in her next command. “Right now.”

A blink from the wolf, a cocked head. As Indigo watched, he rose shakily to his feet. When she reached for him, he lowered his head, whimpering. “Shh,” she said, gripping his muzzle and staring straight into those wolf-bright eyes. His gaze slid away. Joshua was too young, too submissive in comparison to her strength, to challenge her in that way.

“I’m not angry,” Indigo said, ensuring he heard the truth in her words, in the way she held him—firm, but not in a grip that would cause pain. “But I need you to become human.”

Still no eye contact. But he heard her. Because the next instant, the air filled with sparks of light, and a split second after that, a young male barely past his fourteenth birthday was kneeling naked on the earth, his face drawn. “Is she really okay?” It was a rasp, the wolf in his voice.

“Have I ever lied to you?”