by Jade Allen
But the war between the two groups is more complicated than either of them know. As they begin to unravel the two Alphas' motivations in attacking each other, Raul and Keira's rivalry develops into a hot, heavy, and forbidden romance, sparking further reprisals and deeper battles between their people.
With threats of death—or discovery—hanging over their heads, Raul and Keira must find a way to bring their communities together, or risk losing each other in the chaotic war.
“Raul, we’ve got another one,” the voice on the other end of the line began as soon as the call connected. Raul groaned, scrubbing at his face. It was still dark outside—but it was nearly four in the morning, and he had been looking forward to finally going to sleep.
“Bastards keep slinking off before one of our guys can catch them in the act,” Raul said bitterly. He could feel the frustration of his pack-mate on the other end of the line, sense it as an extension of his own irritation.
For weeks, he, Gary, Cameron, and Adeline had been tracking a group of vandals; their scent marks at the scenes of the crimes were easy enough to read, but all traces of the assholes responsible for the graffiti and broken windows—not to mention a few petty thefts—disappeared within a half mile of the site. It was just like a bunch of sneaky panthers, Raul thought bitterly. The town of Spring Lake had fewer than five thousand residents; and yet, Raul and the other enforcers for the Pack hadn’t been able to track down what they’d counted as five panthers. The other members of the Pack had started looking at him doubtfully, and the Alpha—Reginald—had put more and more pressure on Raul as the Pack’s number one enforcer to get the job done.
“Someone was asleep at the wheel,” Cameron said, his voice full of brittle irritation. Raul growled low in his throat; he had asked for the Pack’s participation in staking out the various businesses that might come under attack. He, Cam, Gary, and Adeline simply couldn’t watch over all of the businesses that the members of the Pack owned in the town. They needed people to be vigilant, and they had needed to have a way to track the shifty, good-for-nothing panthers to their den, wherever it was.
There were just enough people in the town for it to be impossible for any of the members of even the large wolf pack to know everyone, to know all of the addresses. Spring Lake was home to a thriving supernatural community—and even Raul, in his position of relative authority within the Pack, didn’t know all of the shifters in the area. There were even some, he was fairly certain, who lived outside of the town proper—in the woods that surrounded the town, closing it off superficially at least from the rest of the country. He had done what he could, asked who he could, about the whereabouts of a group of panthers and had come up empty.
“Which business was it?” Raul put his phone on speaker and set it down, standing up from his seated position on the couch to get ready to leave the house. If another one of the Pack-owned businesses had been vandalized, the Pack would expect him to be there before daybreak, working the scene, trying to find a clue that might not have been at the other raids. Eventually those fucking panthers are going to get sloppy, he thought. And when they do, we’ll track them down and put the bastards on trial.
Even with scent marks at the scene, there wasn’t a whole lot of information to be gleaned about the vandals. Raul knew that one of the panthers involved in the crimes was a fertile female—he could smell it in the rich honey-moss smell of her scent mark, buried in the deeper, sharper musk of big cat that the males left behind. He knew that there were five of them. He knew what they were. But until I know who they are, I am going to have this goddamned albatross around my neck, pulling me down.
He had been a natural successor to the Pack’s previous lead enforcer; Reginald had groomed Raul for the position for years, even mentoring him through the Navy when Raul had enlisted. Reginald had told Raul more than once that the best thing he could cultivate beyond ruthlessness was the ability to lead, and Raul had taken that seriously. If Reginald retired—or if he fell in a challenge, or met with an accident that cut short his time as Alpha of the Pack—then Raul would be the first in contention for the Alpha position within the Pack. He would need to have the skills that it required, whether or not he ever took on the job.
“Alicia’s bakery,” Cameron confirmed on the other end of the line. “And get this: they’re escalating, the fucking cats.” Raul felt Cameron’s barely-controlled rage and reveled in it, breathing in and out slowly. The low-level telepathy that members of the same Pack shared was sometimes a joy—but more often a pain. He didn’t want to feel heartbroken just because one of the younger members of the Pack had been rebuffed in his romantic advances to some girl or guy. But when it came to hunting down prey—or even fellow predators—it came in handy.
“Escalating how?” Raul pulled a shirt over his head and glanced at himself in the mirror, smoothing his hair down against his skull. As soon as he had left the military, he’d let it grow out into a full, dark-brown mane, in defiance of the strict military grooming standards he’d subjected himself to for years. No one in the Pack thought that a man with long hair was anything to be laughed at, and members of the town who weren’t of the supernatural persuasion learned quickly that to laugh at his long hair was to court almost certain disaster.
“There was a fire,” Cam said. “We managed to put it out with minimal damage, but someone still called 9-1-1, so there’s going to be an official investigation if we don’t sort this out quickly.”
Raul groaned, throwing his head back and cursing long and fluently. “The last fucking thing we need is the cops on this,” he said. He took a quick breath. “Who’s coming to the scene?”
“We’re trying to get ahold of Tanya and Jeremy, see if we can’t get them to take the case, keep it quiet.” Tanya and Jeremy weren’t Pack, but they were shifters—were-foxes. They could be trusted to a certain extent to slow up the investigation if they could get themselves on it, give the Pack a chance to handle it.
Everyone in Spring Lake knew and didn’t know that there were supernatural humans living in the area; there was plenty of local lore about not going into the woods and scrublands surrounding the town during the week of the full moon, with vague implications of what happened to people who did. But nobody directly said that there were shifters, even elementals living amongst perfectly normal humans.
Whenever possible, the two-natured community tried to police themselves, along with the other supernatural elements of the town. The elementals intervened only when they had to; otherwise they kept to themselves, and Raul preferred it that way. “Text me the address, and I’ll be there in fifteen,” he told Cam after a moment’s thought. “Maybe they’re getting sloppy. Maybe we’ll luck out this time.” Raul checked his pockets to make sure he had his wallet, and when Cam said goodbye, he slipped his phone into another pocket, checked for his keys. He could feel the animal nature—the part of his brain that was always the wolf—shifting, fidgeting inside of him. He wanted to be on the hunt. He wanted to track down the assholes who thought it was a good idea to harass the wolves. He growled low in his throat and headed for the door, picturing the panthers in their animal forms, slinking away from a burning building. Raul stepped out of his house and strode towards his car, the hairs on the back of his neck standing up. I am going to catch them this time, even if it kills me.
****
Keira’s heart pounded as she, Lachlan, William, Blake, and Floyd sped away from the scene of their most recent raid in the scent-blocked car that Noelle had contrived. She smiled to herself, worried and exhilarated, terrified and proud of what she and her clan-mates had done. “The fire was a stupid fucking idea,” Blake told Will as they put distance between themselves and the scene of their crime.
“It wasn’t exactly an idea,” Will said defensively, shifting in his seat. “It just kind of happened.”
“We can’t have things ‘just kind of happen,’” Lachlan told the others, glancing at them each in turn. His gaze lingered on Keira’s face and she looke
d back blandly, keeping her expression neutral until he looked away. There was an uneasy power dynamic going on between the members of their clan, and while Keira was not by any stretch interested in going for the Alpha, she wasn’t about to let Lachlan—or any of her clan-mates—push her to submit when she had no reason to. “We have to be more careful,” Lachlan added, turning his attention back onto the others.
“How can something like that be an accident, anyway?” Keira looked at Will. “I mean, you don’t accidentally light a match. You don’t accidentally drop it on the ground.” She crossed her arms over her chest as Floyd navigated the darkness. Keira could feel the tendrils of almost-thoughts from the rest of the members of her clan in the car with her; she could feel their excitement, the adrenaline pumping in their veins.
“It wasn’t a match or anything,” Will said sullenly. “I tried to do something with the breakers and the fire started that way.” Keira watched her clan-mate intently for a few moments in silence, trying her best to take in as much information from him as she could from the slightly telepathic bond they shared. From what she could tell, Will was being honest; at the very least, he believed what he was saying. It had been an accident.
“Then yeah, we need to be more careful,” Keira said, glancing at Lachlan. “It’s one thing to raid these assholes’ businesses, it’s another to get sloppy about it.” Keira hadn’t been entirely in favor of the raids herself—but once the clan had voted on it, she and the other four were the natural candidates for the job. All five of them were fast, difficult to trace—especially with the car that Noelle had worked over, masking the usual scent marks—and skilled.
“The wolves will keep the police out of it if they can,” Lachlan said thoughtfully. “But we can’t have any more fuckups like this. The goal is for them to know who’s raiding their businesses and that we’re serious about keeping them in check.” Keira pressed her lips together, looking around the car. She wasn’t actually sure what the true goal of the raids was; in the clan debate where it had been decided, it seemed to her that for the most part people just wanted to get back at the wolves, to get some kind of revenge.
The wolf pack and the panthers had been rivals since long before Keira had been born; she had grown up knowing that the wolves were untrustworthy, and that they looked out for their own—proud, overambitious and exclusionary. She had known by the time she had made her first transformation that if she encountered a wolf in the woods, she was likely going to be in for a fight—and that she should never be alone in the woods during the full moon, lest she find herself surrounded by the vicious jackals.
But why they had chosen to begin raiding the wolves’ businesses in the past few months, Keira had no idea; she had heard vague reports that one of the panthers’ homes had been raided by some of the wolves—but nobody in the clan seemed to know who it was who had been affected, or who hadn’t been affected. As soon as it starts to be about wolves, everyone has a grievance, Keira thought wryly as the car made its way back to the clan’s headquarters on the outskirts of town. She had to wonder: did the wolves feel the same way about the panthers? Keira knew that the wolves thought that the panthers were little more than scavengers, that they were not good enough to ally with—unlike the foxes or the bears that lived in Spring Lake, the wolves didn’t think anyone was truly good to ally with. But did the wolves have the same tendency to jump at shadows when it came to the topic of the panthers? Or were they so confident that they couldn’t imagine anyone wanting to crowd them out?
“What we need to do is something bigger,” Gary said, looking around the car. His hazel eyes almost glowed in the moonlight coming through the window. “These raids are for shit. All it’s doing is pissing the wolves off—we’re barely even hurting their profits. We need to really take one of them down.”
“Harold hasn’t called for it,” Lachlan said firmly, staring Gary down until the other man shrugged, dismissing his own idea. “If Harold tells us to amp things up, we’ll do it. But the council hasn’t approved anything other than raids.” Lachlan smiled slightly. “Maybe we can convince them to let us snatch a young’un or the Alpha’s wife or something.”
“What good would that do?” Keira rolled her eyes. “It’d just bring them after us harder. It’s enough right now that we’re hitting them back.” But hitting them back for what? Keira knew that it wasn’t—technically—her business to know the specifics. But she had to admit, privately and to herself, that she wasn’t altogether enthused about attacking the wolves when she wasn’t sure what they were attacking them for.
****
Raul stood outside of Betsy Powers’ boutique on Main Street, a few buildings away, watching the back entrance of the shop intently. The air was clammy with the damp, slightly cool feeling that came before a bad day of storms; Raul could smell the ozone in the air.
It had been three days since the last raid by the panthers, and the pressure was on. Raul had met with Reginald after finally managing to get Tanya and Jeremy on the investigation. The two shifters were going to do their best to get the police to forget about the arson and break-in; but there was an official record of the event. There was no way to avoid it at this point.
Reginald, the Alpha, was incensed at the possibility that the event might cast a light on the shifter community in general—and the wolves in particular. “This is what those asshole panthers want,” Reginald had told Raul. “They want to expose us to the one-natured, let the humans hunt us down and drive us out so that they can take over.” Having seen the scene of the crime, Raul wasn’t quite so sure; it looked as though the fire that had started at the bakery was possibly an accident.
Just as before, it was impossible to track the panthers involved in the most recent raid for more than a few blocks away from the scene of the crime. Reginald, the pack’s Alpha, was fed up. As a result, Raul found himself participating in the stakeout himself. “If you don’t catch these assholes the next time they hit one of our own, then you can pick a direction and start walking,” Reginald had told him, the last time Raul had met with the man.
Technically, Reginald had that power. As the pack’s Alpha, he could throw anyone out that he wanted—but he would have to face Raul in a challenge if he did. Don’t think that way, Raul reminded himself, even as his hackles rose at the thought of challenging Reginald. You’re not ready to challenge anyone—you’re definitely not ready to be Alpha of the pack. Better by far to hunt down the panthers, take them in, and let the Pack deal with them. Reginald had made it clear that the elementals wouldn’t be brought in—it would be a tribunal, the pack taking care of its own business, deterring the panthers from any further predation on Pack-owned businesses.
It troubled Raul that he didn’t know why the panthers were doing it. We outnumber them two to one, he thought as he looked around the alley behind the boutique. Why would they pick a fight with us now? What’s changed? Raul knew that thinking like that was possibly dangerous; it was the kind of thinking that led a man to forget the chain of command in the pack, the way things were. But he couldn’t help wondering what it was about the situation in Spring Lake, between the supernatural members of the community, that had led to the raids that had been going on for weeks. Whatever it is, we’ll get to the bottom of it, Raul thought firmly.
He scented the air, reading the smells painted through it; at least fifty people had moved through the alley in the last two days, most of them normal humans. As Raul breathed in more deeply, he caught the faintest traces of shifters: a couple of foxes—not Jeremy and Tanya—a few members of the Pack, and one owl. No scent of panther, which told Raul at least that the reprobates either cased their targets well in advance of their raids, or were going off of information they’d gotten otherwise. They had targeted too many werewolf-owned businesses for it to be simply random—and of course one or two of the attacks had included insulting, inflammatory graffiti: cartoon wolves being eaten by spray-painted panthers, slurs. One or two of the raided businesses had been decked
out with wolf’s bane.
Raul shifted in his spot, looking around the alley impatiently. Assuming that the panthers were going on some kind of schedule, they would strike—somewhere—that night. Raul had taken up a position to watch one of the only pack-owned businesses that hadn’t already been raided; Cam was at another location, and other trusted lieutenants had taken up other positions. Raul didn’t trust any of the lower ranks for anything more than backup anymore. After Reginald’s ultimatum, Raul couldn’t see any other course of action but to stand vigil at the remaining businesses and hope to catch the panthers in the act.
Raul’s phone buzzed in his pocket and he started, reaching down compulsively and taking the device out. Cam’s phone number flashed on the screen and Raul’s heart began beating faster in his chest, adrenaline flowing freely in his veins. “What have you got?”
“Three of them,” Cam said, excitement rippling in his voice. “Two guys and the woman. She’s injured.”
“The other two?” Raul began to smile to himself; even if they hadn’t caught all five of the members of the panther raiding party, three of five was definitely a vast improvement. We can put them before the tribunal. We can ransom them back to their clan and force talks.
“Got away,” Cam said, briefly sounding disappointed. “We’re taking them to the den.”
“I’ll meet you there,” Raul said, smiling more broadly to himself. “Good job, Cam. Good job.”
****
Keira scowled at the wolves hovering around her, Lachlan and Gary, fidgeting and squirming against the chains that bound her. The copper burned against her skin, making her ache all over—beyond anything she had felt ever since she’d been in high school and had spent the night at a friend’s house; the girl’s parents had used copper pots to cook dinner, and Keira hadn’t known until she’d eaten dinner.
