Darkness Bound by Stella Cameron Page A

Niles quickly stripped off his clothes. This was the first time he had gone hound in many weeks, but he changed easily and rapidly, and there was little pain.
    Shaking his russet brown fur and stretching his back, he leaped out of the open cabin door and immediately took cover in dense trees. “Sean,” he called mentally. “Which way?”
    No immediate response came, leaving Niles to prowl back and forth, raising his head to catch shifts in atmospheric mood from miles around. What drifted to him was a nerve-scrubbing odor of roiling fury.
    “Niles,” Sean finally slammed into Niles’s mind. “Fully engaged here. Three of Brande’s pack. They’re guarding something they aren’t letting us see, but they drew us here.”
    Niles focused intently. Brande, leader of the renegade werewolf pack on the island, and the hounds’ sworn enemy, usually worked out of sight. For him to emerge, or to have members of the pack emerge, signaled inevitable violent action ahead.
    “I’m coming now,” Niles said, pounding a zigzag track through the trees. “Is Brande with them?”
    “No. There’s Booker, Seven, and Mark. They’re looking for a fight.”
    “Don’t engage them. Stand off.”
    Niles scaled a giant fir and threw himself from tree to tree, staring down, searching for signs that would tell him where his hounds had first encountered Brande’s wolves. With the steady shrinking of safe territory and gradual loss of pack members, inbreeding had weakened the werewolves, but they remained sly and deadly.
    “They’re trying to keep us distracted while they move something,” Sean said. “Innes and Ethan are with me. Should we alert the others?”
    “No. We’ll call them if we need them. Can you make out what they’re hiding? Anything about it at all?” Speeding up, he hurtled his sinuous body in the direction of the others.
    Rain began to fall and quickly turned into a torrent.
    “Niles… ”
    His body prickled. Horror was something he didn’t expect to hear from Sean. “Still coming your way,” Niles said.
    “I’m sure they’ve got a human,” Sean said, very low.
    “Can you see who it is?”
    “No,” Sean said. “But I think they’re using her to pull us into their territory.”
    Her?
It took all Niles had not to check his stride. Who was it? He couldn’t allow the possible answer to get in his way.
    His fear from the moment he had decided to pursue a mate was that Brande would find out and try to stop him.If the wolves knew about Leigh—and it could only be a matter of time before they found out—they would do anything to stop a mating. Anything that made the hounds stronger, or even worse, put them on the road to complete human acceptance, was a deadly threat to Brande’s kind and their plans to control the island.
    “If they’re trying to get us onto their land, they won’t move away unless we follow,” Niles told Sean.
    For a werehound to trespass on werewolf territory was to risk the temporary paralysis the pack could cast on intruders. The wolves routinely used it to capture human prey and make them submit to pack rule.
    Niles felt the proximity of both hound and wolf. “I’m here,” he told Sean. “Innes, Ethan, do whatever I tell Sean to do.”
    Congested, constant movement showed up ahead. Niles scaled a taller tree, launched himself to the next one, and looked down. At least he knew his hounds would do as he told them. In the Middle East they had learned the perils of breaking protocol—the hard way—when they lost Gary.
    All three of Brande’s wolves were visible. Booker’s distinctive white ruff shone in the darkness and the others crowded in beside him. The hounds, always smarter, had ranged themselves behind several big, jagged trunks of fallen trees.
    “Hold it where you are,” Niles ordered and backed down to take a closer look at a twisted little heap behind the wolves. It was obviously a body—a body with light hair.
    His control chipped. Leaping as a hound could and