Clay's Instinct (BBW Paranormal Romance) (Wolf Call)

  CLAY'S INSTINCT

  Wolf Call #2

  Abbey Polidori

  Copyright © 2013 Abbey Polidori

  All rights reserved.

  For Tabi, who has always believed

  CHAPTER ONE

  Found

  Sheriff Clay Adams came out of the woods above the small town of Faith, Montana warily, cautiously, sniffing the air. Even in his human form he could sense trouble.

  Gathering his clothes from beneath a tree stump where he had left them the previous night wrapped in a plastic waterproof bag, he eyed the road below, the road that led from Faith to the town of Promise in the East.

  He dressed quickly and descended the pine covered hill to the road, sniffing the air.

  Trouble had passed this way.

  He wasn't sure of what had raised his hackles this way but he trusted his senses with his life so he made his way back to his house carefully. He had spent the night in the woods, one of his 'back to nature' times as he liked to call them. Maybe he shouldn't have left the town like that. What if they needed him?

  His deputy, Lassiter, could handle anything that Faith threw at him so Clay shouldn't feel so guilty. The worst things that ever happened here were nothing compared to the big cities. Putting rowdy drunks in the cells overnight was something Lassiter could handle easily.

  But this sense Clay had now, this harbinger of trouble, was like nothing he had felt before.

  It was five thirty in the morning, the sky a cold slate gray as Clay made his way through town and he saw no one. Everything seemed just like normal. Quiet. Sleepy.

  But when he turned off the main street toward his house, the hairs on the back of his neck and arms stood on end.

  A police car sat on the road at the end of his driveway, blocking in his own vehicle. The markings on the car said, 'Promise PD'.

  Clay had never met Sheriff Ronson, his opposite number in the neighboring town, but it looked like the man had reason to visit now, and to Clay's own house instead of the small police station on Main Street.

  How did Ronson even know where he lived and why was he here at this hour, before the town of Faith was awake?

  A saying crept into Clay's mind: evil loves the darkness.

  He had no conscious reason to fear Ronson - after all, the man was a law enforcement colleague - but Clay's subconscious, the part of him that was mostly wild and intuitive, howled into his mind that this visit brought danger. He wished he had his gun with him but he had gone to the woods in his civilian clothes.

  As he approached the house, a dark figure on the porch stepped down onto the driveway. The man wore a tan sheriff's uniform and he looked wiry and tough. He had a black moustache and dark eyes that watched Clay as he approached.

  'Are you Clay Adams?' The voice was gravelly, and the tobacco smell coming from the man confirmed that he was a heavy smoker.

  'Sheriff Clay Adams,' Clay corrected.

  The man stepped forward but didn't offer his hand. 'I'm Sheriff Ronson from Promise. I've come to ask a few questions about some strange sightings in these parts.'

  'At this early hour? And at my house?'

  'I wanted to be sure I found you. I asked around some and it seems you aren't always home.'

  'I take walks sometimes when I'm off duty and the woods around here are as good a place as any to exercise.'

  'The woods.' Ronson said it as if contemplating the meaning of the word. 'I thought it was dangerous in the woods around here. Especially for an unarmed man.' He nodded to Clay's belt, indicating the absence of a sidearm.

  'You don't believe in those old legends, do you?'

  'They're hardly old, Adams. There have been sightings reported recently. It seems to me your office has been keeping them quiet. A family passing through here ended up in my office in Promise and told me what they saw a week ago.'

  'Really? And what did they see?'

  'A wolf-like creature moving fast between the trees.'

  Clay cursed inwardly. He was careful not to be seen when he shifted and went back to nature. This area was too popular with campers and hikers. He would have to go deeper into the woods from now on, further from town. 'And you believed them?'

  Ronson shrugged. 'Should I? I asked around and it seems there have been other similar sightings around here.'

  Now it was Clay's turn to shrug. 'Do you believe in monsters, Ronson?'

  'I've seen some things.' He took a pack of cigarettes from his shirt pocket and stuck one in his mouth. When he lit it and drew on the smoke, Clay took a reflexive step backward. Having heightened senses had its drawbacks and the cigarette smelled like a cloud of foul-smelling poison to him.

  'I've investigated the sightings but they're just people being mistaken about what they saw. There are wolves in these woods but not wolfmen.'

  'Is that what you were doing in the woods this morning? Investigating?' Ronson took another pull on the smoke and his eyes watched Clay closely as he exhaled.

  A coldness crept up Clay's spins and settled at the base of his neck. Ronson knew something. He didn't know how much but it might be enough to mean real trouble for Clay.

  'Like I said, I was just taking a walk.'

  Ronson nodded. 'Well if you hear anything or find anything during your...investigations...be sure to let me know.' He opened the door of his police car and slid inside. Without another word, he pulled away toward Main Street.

  Clay watched him go, the ghostly remnants of the cigarette smoke still hanging in the early morning air, and he felt a queasiness in his gut. He had heard tales when he was younger about how no shifter was safe in the world of men. There were people out there who hated anyone who was different to themselves and they hunted down Clay's kind. Sometimes they killed them but usually shifters were captured and taken away. The stories about what happened to those captured were the ones that had kept Clay awake at night when he was younger. Stories of a shadowy occult group called the Temple of Thul. What they did with shifters was unknown but was rumored to be worse than what the Third Reich did with the Jews during World War 2 when humans were experimented upon.

  Clay had convinced himself long ago that these tales of the Temple of Thul were stories made up to ensure that shifters kept their wild side secret from the world of men but now he wondered if the stories could be true. Ronson's arrival at this hour and his questions about sightings of a wolf-like creature were not normal.

  Clay sighed and sat on the wooden porch. Should he run? That meant the life he had built for himself here - the police work, the friendship of the townsfolk, the sense that he was protecting a community - would be left behind. Gone.

  No, he would not run.

  He would stay.

  And if they came for him, he would be ready.

  *

  Ronson left the Faith town limits and parked his car by the side of the road near the woods. Taking his cell from his pocket, he punched in a number.

  The voice that answered was old, gravelly. 'Ronson.'

  'I found what you sent me to find,' he said into the phone.

  'The shifter?'

  'It's the sheriff, like you said. I don't know what spells your techs were working when they found out there was a shifter in Faith but they were right. His name is...'

  'Clay Adams. We know. We needed someone on the ground to confirm it and you were our closest member to Faith.'

  'Well it's him. He spent last night in the woods.'

  'How vile. His filthy animal days are over. We'll handle it from here.'

  'Sure thing. I...'

  The phone on the other end had been hung up.

  Ronson crank
ed his engine and pulled back onto the the deserted road, heading back to his own town. Whatever the Temple had planned for Adams was no business of his. He had done his part.

  The filthy shifter was about to get what he deserved.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Called

  Lucinda Everett's cell vibrated on the nightstand, waking her from a dream in which she had been swimming in the Pacific Ocean with a dark-haired, muscular man. She had been wearing a black bathing suit that contained her curves and he had been naked. Waking up from her sensuous dreamworld, she sighed and reached for the phone. The screen said 'Killingsworth'. Lucinda suddenly felt much more awake as she pressed the button to answer the call.

  'Hello?'

  'Miss Everett, it's Nigel Killingsworth here.' His clipped British accent reminded her of when she first spoke to him in his New York office over ten years ago.

  'Yes, what is it? Do you have a lead?'

  'Possibly, possibly. We're sending out a team to your neck of the woods, so to speak. One of our members has made a positive identification of a shifter.'

  'Here in Montana?' Her heart hammered in her chest.

  'Yes, in a small town called Faith.'

  'I know that town. It's twenty miles from here.' She had driven through Faith a couple of times and even visited the woods in the area after a reported wolfman sighting. If she had known for sure that a shifter lived there among the decent people, she would have taken her gun.

  'Would you like to be on the team, Miss Everett?'

  'You know I would.'

  'Yes, I do. I also know why you are desperate to come face to face with this shifter and I must warn you that we are taking it alive. No harm is to come to it. You may attend in your capacity as a reporter but you may not harm the target. Is that clear?'

  She nodded, then realized he couldn't see her, and said, 'Yes, that's clear. Do I get the story?'

  'You get the story. Our media department will contact you with the details you must include and the details you must not.'

  'If I can't write my own story and I can't kill the monster, what the hell is the point of my being there?'

  'The point, Miss Everett, is that you will know you are not crazy. After a decade of telling people what killed your parents and what you saw in the woods when you were young, you will get peace of mind. You will know they are real.'

  'But I need to tell the world. This is huge.'

  'You will tell the world what we instruct you to tell the world. Otherwise you will not be part of this team and you will never know for sure if the monster you have been chasing for ten years actually exists. All those news stories you've written over a decade, all those investigations of wolfman sightings across America will be just that...stories.'

  'Okay, okay, I want in.'

  'Very well. The rest of the team will be there to pick you up at seven. Be ready.'

  Before he hung up, she said, 'Killingsworth?'

  'Yes?'

  'Do you think it's the one that killed my parents?'

  'I have no idea. Does it matter? They're all killers of someone's parents.' He hung up.

  Lucinda checked the clock. Half an hour to go before they got here. She had to take a shower and call work and tell them she was working on a story and wouldn't be in the office today. She wouldn't mention werewolves or wolfmen because every time she tried to get a reported sighting into the Montana Bugle, her editor rolled his eyes and shook his head as if Lucinda was crazy.

  She padded across the bedroom and opened her closet. What did one wear to a werewolf hunt? Black was usually the best option for her, as ninety per cent of the clothes on the hangers attested to. All black. Slimming black. Hide those curves from the world.

  She chose a pair of black jeans and a turtle neck sweater and fished a bra and panties from her underwear drawer before heading to the bathroom to turn on the shower. She avoided looking at herself in the mirror as she slipped out of her nightie and into the shower.

  By the time she was showered and dressed, her long auburn hair tied up in a sensible pony tail, she heard a vehicle outside and saw the glare of headlights on the curtains. She grabbed her notebook and handheld video camera and stuffed them into a small duffel bag before leaving the house and heading down the driveway.

  The vehicle was a black Range Rover with dark windows. The rear door opened and she saw men inside. They all wore black the same as her but their choice of color was more to do with stealth than hiding bulges.

  She got in and they closed the door behind her. The vehicle pulled away immediately and they drove for the outskirts of town. There were two of them plus the driver. Lucinda knew better than to ask names of members of the Temple of Thul but the first man, a lean hard man with short black hair offered his. 'I'm Keats and this is Shelley. The driver is Coleridge.'

  So it looked like they had opened a book of twentieth century poets to get their false names.

  'We know who you are and why you're here,' Keats continued, 'so let me lay down the ground rules. Number one: no photos. Number two: let us do our job and don't get in our way. Number three: you can write the story about the werewolf sightings in the area and you can name the target but you can not mention the Temple's involvement in any way. We are a secret organization and we want to stay that way. Your story will simply say that the target left town.'

  'How can I name the target if I don't even know his name?'

  'It's Clay Adams. He's the local sheriff.'

  'Wow, a town with a werewolf as a sheriff. That'll make a great story.'

  Keats nodded. He pulled a gun from his belt and ejected the clip to check the load. The bullets shone silver in the interior of the vehicle.

  'I thought you weren't going to kill him,' Lucinda said.

  'This is just a precaution.'

  Shelley, a fair-haired man who looked like he had made a living as a bare-knuckle brawler at some point in his life, held up a tazer and grinned.

  Keats patted the tazer in his own belt. 'We're going to take him alive, Miss Everett.'

  She sat back and looked out of the window at the woods and the distant mountains. "I'm doing this for you, Mom and Dad," she said inwardly, "The world will know these monsters exist and are living among us."

  *

  Clay stood in his back yard, sniffing the early morning air. He had felt uneasy since Ronson's visit and now he wondered if the sense of foreboding that sat in his gut like a coiled snake was an actual portent of bad things to come or just a lingering reaction to Ronson. In the distance, storm clouds rolled across the sky. The air felt charged with electricity.

  He should change out of his t-shirt and lumberjack shirt and jeans and put on his uniform and get to the station like he did every morning but this morning everything felt different, like he had fallen down a rabbit hole into a different world. But it wasn't Wonderland he stood in now; it felt like hunting season had just started and he was the prey.

  Were they coming for him? Had Ronson's visit been a reconnaissance mission before they sent the troops? What did he even know about the Temple of Thul and how did they know anything about him? They were rumored to have access to old ways of sorcery. Once, Clay would have laughed at such a notion but now he was willing to believe anything. After all, he had been bitten by a lycan and become a werewolf. If the ancient legends of werewolves were true, then why not the ancient legends of sorcery?

  So they could have tracked him down using supernatural methods.

  He looked back at the house where his sheriff's uniform hung in his closet waiting. If he went and put on that uniform and went to work like any other day and these people really were hunting him, they would know where to find him.

  He looked at the mountains sitting beneath the dark storm clouds. Up there, in the trees and among the streams, was a habitat where he felt in control. His inner wolf knew how to survive in that environment.

  He fished his cell out of his pocket and called Lassiter. His deputy answered on the second ring. />
  'Sheriff.'

  'John, I need you to look after the town for a few days.'

  'Okay, sheriff, no problem. You okay?'

  'Yeah, I just need to take a leave of absence for a few days. If anyone comes asking about me, just tell them you don't know where I am. That will be the truth because I'm not telling you where I'm going.'

  'Are you in some kind of trouble, Sheriff? I want to help. Hell, the whole town will help if you let us. You're a good sheriff.'

  'If you want to help me, John, just take care of my town while I'm gone.' He hung up and went inside the house, turning off the phone and placing on the kitchen table. If they were using more conventional methods to track him, like following his cell signal, the trail ended here.

  After locking up the house, he went back outside and prepared himself to leave. As a lone wolf, he had adopted the entire town of Faith as his pack, nurturing it and protecting its citizens. As sheriff, he held the alpha role and it was his responsibility to lead the town and ensure its survival. The best thing he could do now to ensure that survival was leave. If the Temple of Thul really were after him, they were trouble and Faith could do without that kind of problem. His final act as pack leader would be to sacrifice his position as alpha and lead the trouble away from town.

  He hit the sidewalk and hurried toward Main Street. Once he reached the woods there he would be gone, vanished before anyone could find him. There were places he knew in the mountains that would afford him shelter. The old hunter's cabin hidden deep in the pines halfway up the mountain would serve all his needs. A stream ran close to the abandoned cabin and he would have no problem finding food. The wildness within him longed for such an environment.

  But as he reached Main Street, he realized reaching his sanctuary would not be so easy. A black Range Rover with tinted windows turned into the street and the engine growled as it sped toward him. His senses kicked into overdrive, telling him to run for the trees. But the vehicle was between him and freedom and it was approaching fast.