Chapter One
Present Day
Portland, Oregon
ONE HUNDRED AND FIFTY YEARS LATER—AGING ONE
YEAR for every thirty that passed once a lupus garou reached puberty—Bella was the equivalent of a human twenty-one-year-old. She longed more than ever to have Devlyn for her mate, wishing she hadn’t had to hide from the pack all these years. The burning desire for him flooded her veins whenever she came into the wolf’s heat. Her body craved his touch, but her mind had given up hoping to ever have him for her own. If she could find a strong, agreeable human mate, she could change him into a lupus garou, and he would keep her safe from Volan.
She shook her head, trying to rid herself of the image of the brutish fiend, and continued to pack her overnight bag. Any man would be better than he—a good mate who would help her establish her own pack.
She turned to look at Devlyn’s photo sitting on the bedside table, the most recent one that Argos, the old, retired pack leader, had sent her. Taking a deep breath, she threw another pair of jeans into her bag, determined to get her mind off Devlyn.
Knowing she couldn’t put off mating much longer, she realized that one’s second choice far outweighed living alone; even the sound of a dog’s howl on the night’s breeze triggered the gnawing craving to be with a pack.
She stalked into her office and left an email message for Argos, a routine she’d adopted because he insisted she keep him posted whenever she went into the woods. As a loner, she’d have no backup. Off to the cabin for the weekend again, Argos. Give the pack my love, in secret. Yours always, love, Bella
She didn’t have to tell him to keep her correspondence a secret; he knew what would happen if Volan learned where she was. . . .
Turning off her computer, she picked up her phone and called her next-door neighbor—a woman who had partially eased Bella’s loneliness after losing her twin sister in a fire so many years ago. “Chrissie, I’m going to my cabin for the weekend again. Can you keep an eye on my place?”
“Sure thing, Bella. Pick up your mail on Saturday, too, if you’d like. And I’ll water your greenhouse plants. Hey, I don’t want to hold you up, but did you hear about the latest killing?”
“Yeah, the police have got to catch the bastard soon.”
That was one of the reasons she was going to her cabin, to get away, to consider the facts of the murders, to search for clues in the woods. He had to be from Portland or the surrounding area, since it was there he’d killed all the women. And he had to take a jaunt in a forest from time to time. The call of the wild was too strong in them. She hadn’t expected to smell red lupus garou in the place where she ran, as far away as it was from the city. For three years she hadn’t smelled a hint of them. Not until last weekend. Was one of them the killer? She had to know.
Bella tossed a pink sweatshirt into the bag.
“You be careful, honey. The victims are all redheads in their twenties. And the last was killed not far from here.”
“Don’t worry, Chrissie. I’ve got a gun for protection.” Well, two: one at her cabin, and one at home, but who was counting? Silver bullets, too; Bella had them made for Volan. It wasn’t the lupus garou way, but she had no other way to fight him. She would never be his.
“A . . . a gun? Do you know how to shoot it?”
Yep, she’d learned how to shoot a gun a good century and a half ago, ever since the early days when she had lived in the wilderness, trying to survive in the lands west of Colorado.
