Page 4 of Wind with a Chance of Wolfsbane

His brows met.

She glanced at the night sky. “Something is in the air. Something not quite right. Something that can bring out the beast in all of us.”

Her warning hung between them.

Jonathan stiffened. Was she simply superstitious, or did she know about the troubles affecting the Detroit area? For the reason, Jonathan had flown in to start with? “Come again?”

She didn’t say anything else before going to the red car. Her grandson opened the door for her, and she got in, never once glancing back at Jonathan.

Unnerved, Jonathan set his suitcase on the sidewalk and took a second to collect his thoughts as he waited for his ride. The woman’s warning ate at him. Maybe it was nothing, but his gut said there was more to it than that. Did she know the truth about supernaturals? Most humans didn’t, and she hadn’t smelled like anything more than human.

Was the stench of the city blocking his ability to pick up the smell of other supernaturals? If so, that could prove to be an issue.

He checked his watch once more, noting his ride was late.

An older white van with a dented front bumper drove by slowly. Jonathan seriously hoped that wasn’t his ride from the airport. The driver’s gaze slid toward Jonathan, and the moment they locked gazes, Jonathan’s wolf reacted, rising quickly as if being challenged.

The man, who had a head of light brown hair that hung just past his ears and an unkempt beard, narrowed his eyes.

A snarl nearly ripped free from Jonathan. The wolf’s response wasn’t proportional. The man in the van presented no clear or present danger to the wolf, yet the beast wanted to face off. It wanted to go at the man and sink its teeth into his neck.

Enough, he scolded, fearful the wolf would win out and cause him to shift shapes there for all to see. It had little to no concern about the repercussions of such an act. All it cared about was getting to kill the man who was driving the van.

No more.

The wolf listened, for now.

He tucked his watch back into his pocket and lifted his suitcase. Jonathan held his suitcase handle tighter, stopping just shy of breaking it. His wolf was not a fan of flying and had already been in a sour mood before disembarking from the plane. Finding itself in yet another large city hadn’t soothed the beast at all. It loathed concrete, tall buildings, and traffic. It liked nature—which was nowhere in sight.

Tonight was not the night to test the wolf’s patience, as the driver of the van would learn soon enough if he kept trying to maintain continuous eye contact with Jonathan. It was a direct challenge. One the wolf would not permit to go unanswered should it continue.

The van driver wised up and averted his gaze, but not before Jonathan caught movement coming from behind the man. There were others in the van, and for some reason, that set Jonathan’s hackles up. Instead of having his wolf take the win and run with it, the wolf pushed at him, seeking permission to attack. When Jonathan refused to give in to its demands, it made new ones—wanting him to strip naked and run as far and as fast as he could from all the cement, tall buildings, and chaos. It wanted him to seek out nature and run free.

He didn’t want to be in Detroit, but circumstances left him needing to fly in at the last minute. His job for the last hundred-plus years was helping to run Van Helsing Industries that, at its core, remained the same—an organization dedicated to hunting supernaturals. It spanned the globe, with offices in nearly every major city in the world. Over the centuries, it had seen a number of name changes.

The head of the Detroit branch of Van Helsing Industries, along with his second-in-command, had been killed in action only days prior. They’d been randomly attacked while responding to a distress call. Four other Van Helsing slayers had been critically wounded and were still in the hospital. Their prognosis wasn’t great.

The Detroit office was in a state of chaos, their numbers cut, their focus split. The deaths of their comrades were too fresh still even to begin the healing process. Jonathan was no stranger to loss. He’d had a front-row seat to the fight against evil for over a hundred years. He’d lost friends, family, and loved ones to it.

Initial reports pointed to a group of wolf-shifters being responsible for the attack, but something in Jonathan’s gut said that wasn’t the case. He’d read over all the reports that had come in and had been getting real-time updates along the way. They were missing something, and he had voiced as much.

He knew more than one Van Helsing slayer thought Jonathan was biased. That he didn’t want it to be wolf-shifters who had been responsible because he, himself, was one.

If shifters were to blame, Jonathan would be the first person out there bringing them to justice. It didn’t matter that he technically wasn’t blood kin to the Van Helsings. They were family to him. But he was, for all intents and purposes, an outsider who had been let into their inner circle. And with him came his line of wolf-shifters. Men who were direct descendants of his brothers.

Both of his brothers had contracted yellow fever, and neither had been expected to live. Jonathan had done the unthinkable. What he’d sworn he’d never do. He’d taken it upon himself to decide another’s fate. He’d passed his curse on to them to spare their lives, condemning them to the same hell he endured. Digby and Myron had survived yellow fever, which had been his goal, but in the end, his act took their lives all the same. They’d each started families and had sons of their own—born with the curse. But neither brother had lived to see their children grow into men.

The curse had taken its toll on them, leaving them mentally broken—fractured shells of themselves. It started with control issues. With angry outbursts. Paranoid delusions were next, followed quickly by hallucinations. The spiral had continued, dragging them into the dark abyss. There had been nothing Jonathan could do to slow or halt their descent.

He’d been forced to watch as they slipped away. Digby had taken the path of evil, much like the wolf-shifter who was Jonathan’s maker. He’d given in to the base desires of the monster within, living only for the next kill and taking the lives of innocents. He’d done the unthinkable and joined a secret society of supernaturals who had a singular mission—to come out of hiding and be at the top of the food chain. The Order of the Dragon didn’t value human life or want to keep the truth about supernaturals from humans.

A piece of Jonathan’s soul had fractured the day he learned what Digby had done and whom he’d decided to call friends. Jonathan had been the one to have to hunt and kill his brother to protect innocents from his wrath.

Myron, the youngest of the Harker boys, had seen the ordeal unfold, and at the first signs of hallucinations, he’d taken his leave. It had been Jonathan who had found Myron’s body and the letter he’d left behind. One that placed blame where it was due—squarely on Jonathan. The letter faulted him for converting them in the first place, especially without having talked to them first and explaining what they would become and what their lives would entail. It blamed him for failing to guide them through the conversion process properly and for condemning them to live their lives as monsters controlled by vampires.

And it was all true.

Jonathan had done all those things and more. And Jonathan and his line, which was different from other wolf-shifters because it had trace elements of vampire blood in it as well, did have to answer to a master vampire.

---