This Weakness For You (Entangled Select Otherworld) (Taming the Pack)

by Wendy Sparrow

  The unrolled map took up the entire desk, and there were markers of all their property as well as other buildings in different colors.

  “Okay. If we assume they have semitrucks outfitted for surgery as the previous poacher did, they’ll have used these access roads.” Jordan pointed at several roads large enough for semis to use.

  Dane grabbed one of the rolls of clear plastic. “We should see how it compares to our modified routes.” He pulled a rubber band off and then pushed the plastic across to unroll it. “Vanessa said your maps are all the same, and I did this on the one at your work with Ethan’s help.” The clear plastic overlaid perfectly, and routes and notations matched to roads and locations below.

  Jordan stood there blinking.

  Dane had done this. Dane. He’d tried to kill this man. Twice.

  “What’s the other roll?” Jordan asked, nodding at the second roll of plastic.

  “That’s your old patrol routes—Ethan helped me with that, too. Vanessa said sometimes you guys patrol just to get the wolf out of your system, especially if it’s a full moon, but I still thought more efficient, tighter routes could do that and keep our pack safer, but I guess you all know the routes so well there wasn’t a written record—so Ethan had to map it out for me.”

  “He did most of it,” Ethan said, not looking up.

  “Do you want to see the comparison?” Dane asked, smiling.

  Christa had been standing outside the group, seeming nervous, but she’d come closer when the plastic had been overlaid.

  “I want to see,” Christa said, pressing up against Jordan’s side.

  He inhaled, and her scent momentarily distracted him before he nodded at Dane. After the plastic unfurled, he was openly shaking his head. He’d organized their routes better than a five-star general.

  “This was well done,” Jordan said, making eye contact with Dane. Saying more would have to wait until they had fewer listeners. Dane was starting to understand the shaky nature of remaining Alpha, but they owed this man their lives. A sudden thought occurred to him, and Jordan smiled. He was going to have to buy Dane a truck or something. Something that said I’m glad I didn’t kill you without actually saying it.

  “The timing was ideal. I told Travis that their patterns made them predictable. Ross knew all our old routes, so he was expecting those, and I don’t think there’s a single route that matches the old one enough to predict it. And you consolidated it to manage it in a single night. Really well done.”

  “It was brilliant,” Ethan said.

  “After this is over, you should request a second vote of allegiance,” Jeff said, glancing up from the map. He’d been one to vote against Dane, so it was telling that he was asking for a second and unnecessary vote.

  “I will,” Jordan said.

  Dane was too busy studying the map to acknowledge their comments, and he pointed to a heavily forested area. “The routes will need to change farther into the spring. Ethan says this area has a lot of bears that enjoy challenging Lycans, and you can see I took this portion off the revised routes. Also, if we have a colder winter, I think the snowpack might take some areas off also. I did this on plastic so we could make changes, but these are the routes we did last night—we’d made some changes after the first night.” He pointed to a blue line drawn in marker. “Some of the land had changed from the map. Also”—he pointed to a route marked in purple—“this was originally two routes, but Jeff said it should be combined because the terrain was easy—especially compared to what he’d been doing. So we changed it to this, and it seemed to work well. You can see we went by several of those access roads.”

  “I did this one,” Sue said, leaning forward and pointing. “At one a.m., no one had passed through there in a semi in at least several days. It’s too narrow and muddy for most of the lumber trucks to attempt during the rainy season.”

  Jeff pointed to another road. “And this smaller one, Max had on his route, and he said he didn’t have to do much because they’d closed portions of it for avalanche control two weeks ago that they didn’t end up doing.”

  Dane grinned. “Yeah, I think I was supposed to help with that, but Vanessa went into labor, and we had that storm that took down a few trees. It probably got put off, and it’s not used much, anyway.”

  Jeff looked at Dane. “In fact, I was going to tell you today, Dane, that Max said he could take Jack’s route, too, if Jack needed a night off to help with the twins.” Jeff blinked and then turned to Jordan. “I mean…Jordan.”

  Jordan shook his head. “Dane will need to get me up to speed on these routes, but it’ll have to wait, and while we don’t usually follow the hierarchy in the pack for rank—for the next few days, Dane is Beta.” He lifted his head and said a little louder, “Glacier pack, Dane is Beta until we’re out of this emergency, and Alpha if I’m out on four feet.” He nodded at Dane. “Grab those papers off the printers behind you—that’s the information that Ross emailed them on our pack. There’s a chance they didn’t catch us gathering our numbers back in, so we can send out a hunting party to some of their likely targets and swing by these roads on the way to check if semis have passed through.”

  He leaned on the table and stared down at the map. “Now, who in the pack is up for a run?”

  …

  “Sit down,” Dane said.

  She ignored him and continued pacing.

  “Sit down,” he said again.

  She ignored him again.

  “Christa.”

  She whirled and pointed a finger at him. “No, just shut up, shut up, shut up. I never had to wait for a boyfriend to come back from leading a war party after a serial killer, so I’m allowed to pace because if I’m not pacing, I’ll go crazy and start shouting like this.”

  Dane cleared his throat. “Maybe you should keep pacing.”

  She nodded and took a deep breath. “I think I should.” She went back to pacing. Then she stopped. And sat down on the couch in front of the fire. “I mean, Jordan is huge, right? If anyone is going to get their throat ripped out, it’ll be whoever messes with him, right? I mean, he’s ripped people’s throats out before, right? Not that normally that’s a good thing, but, you know, sometimes it is. And he is huge. Just huge.”

  She looked over to see Dane, beside the desk, staring at her. His mouth was puckered in a frown. “I think you should go back to pacing.”

  “Okay, after you agree with me that he’s huge.”

  Dane raised his eyebrows. “Yeah, I’m not going to actually say that out loud—just in case it can be misconstrued.”

  Vanessa rushed into the room, carrying a fussy Nathanial. “Christa, he won’t stop grumbling, and you’re the only one he seems to stop for.”

  “I didn’t hear him before,” Christa said as Nathanial was plopped down on her lap.

  Nathanial stopped immediately and started staring at her face.

  “He’s going to give me a complex,” Christa said. “He just stares at my face like I’m an alien race and if he takes his eyes off me, I’ll mutate and suck out his eyeballs.”

  “I’m sure that’s exactly what he’s thinking,” Dane said wryly.

  Vanessa sighed and then left—without Nathanial.

  “She just left him here.” Christa gestured at the doorway to the study.

  “She does that.”

  “What about your maternal instincts?” Christa called after her.

  “Self-preservation is stronger,” Vanessa called back.

  The phone rang, the sound echoing in the quiet house.

  Nathanial’s lower lip quivered.

  “No, no, no, you’re fine,” she said, bouncing him.

  Dane’s hand paused over the phone for a moment before he picked it up. “Hey, Travis.” He listened.

  A moment later, Vanessa came back and walked right by her child to stare intently at the phone. She was followed by Ethan, and one by one, other pack members wandered in.

  “What’s going on?” she asked Ethan�
��s wife.

  “Travis’s computer hacker friend used Ross’s computer to track down the poachers.” His wife was dressed neatly with all the elegance and grace of Audrey Hepburn. She leaned down and patted Christa’s shoulder without making eye contact—though she was looking at the baby. “Honey, he’s going to be fine. Jordan is the largest, strongest Lycan I’ve ever seen. He’ll rip their throats out first.”

  Heat flushed her face. She really needed to remember not to talk…at all. In this full house, someone would always be awake; someone would always be listening.

  The printer started tossing out papers quickly, and Ethan grabbed them and spread them on the desk on top of the map Dane had been staring down since the hunting pack left.

  “Yeah,” Dane said, nodding in agreement with Travis, even though he was on the phone. “No, still just the one, though seven of the pack are out checking the roads and trying to catch them moving to the next target.”

  Christa swallowed hard. Hopefully the next target wasn’t one of the seven people out there.

  “I wish I could have gone,” Ethan grumbled.

  His wife moved to stand beside him and patted him on the back. “The doctor says your knee needs a few more weeks.” She sighed. “I wish you’d let me go.”

  A few other Lycans nodded. The group present in the study had grown. Apparently all the adults in the house had been drawn to this room.

  Another woman, a few years older than Christa, sat down next to her. “I remember when Max went after his first bear—I sat down in the den the whole time. It’s not weak to be concerned. It’s only weak if you let it overrule the rest of your emotions.” She was looking at the baby, too. It made what was probably deference seem less obvious. “You could always wait down in the den instead of up here—though the others when they shift back won’t be wearing clothes, and I know that bothers the humans among us more than Lycans.”

  Christa frowned even as the woman beside her switched focus to the desk, where everyone had gathered around the printouts. When the Lycan went to rise, Christa touched her arm. “Wait, you mean this isn’t the den everyone keeps talking about?”

  The woman’s nose wrinkled and then she smiled. “No, I forgot that some humans call their study a den. No, it’s like a wolf’s den. We have a downstairs underground lair. It’s where we enter our homes and shed the wolf—though, really, we’re never not a Lycan.”

  Oh, so there definitely wasn’t a cellar wife then. Unless she went down to the cellar…then she’d be the cellar wife. She blinked several times. Okay, the stress was getting to her. Obviously.

  “Seven!” Ethan said, shaking his head. “That’s one against each of them if you don’t count Ross being there.”

  “Seven?” Christa asked, standing up.

  Vanessa was at her side a moment later, taking Nathanial out of her arms.

  “Oh, thanks.” The flare-up might be over, but if she had a weak moment with her nephew in her arms… She’d have killed herself to prevent him from being injured. Most of her worst MS falls had been from trying to save whatever she’d been carrying, and none of her loads had been as valuable as Nathanial. She bent over the desk with the others and pulled one of the printouts under the desk light that only she and Dane needed.

  Jordan had covered the gorgeous windows in this room with plywood shortly after dinner, so that she and Dane could be in here with the lights on at night. Dane had wanted to look over the map while they were out, and she’d wanted someplace to wait for Jordan to return. It had been painful to watch him screwing the plywood into the walls on either side of the windows.

  The printout had a picture of a man—a normal-looking man—as well as all his vital statistics.

  “This is one of the poachers?” she asked.

  “Yeah,” Dane said, hanging up the phone. “These are the seven in North America from what Travis’s hacker discovered.” Dane was speaking directly to her, as all the rest had heard the phone conversation. “Used to be eight, but we got one of their crew two years ago. I guess they’ve been looking for payback, splashing Jordan’s description around—trying to get someone to turn on him. They call themselves mythical acquisitioners.”

  “Bloody murderers,” Ethan grumbled.

  “He looks so normal.” Christa’s eyes skimmed the information on Eric Baier. An army doctor. That would explain his knowledge of weapons and scalpels. He was younger than the veterans she called, but this sheet on him didn’t look much different from the bios she worked from—other than that he’d been dishonorably discharged.

  She glanced at the other sheets the pack members were scanning with dark scowls. One of the men had tattoos on his face, another several piercings, but none of them looked like serial killers. No wonder they’d been so successful. Their neighbors probably said, “He didn’t seem like the type.” Well, maybe that one with the tattoos and the slimy grin…he looked like he’d killed squirrels as a kid. Anyone with skulls on his eyelids had an abnormal fascination with pain.

  Dane moved all the papers into two rows. “They probably go in pairs. We have three with surgical experience and then four with special ops training, or militia, in skull-tattoo guy’s case. We know the guy Jordan killed two years ago was good with a scalpel, so he probably decided to freelance.” Dane dragged a hand through his hair. “I know he couldn’t aim worth a damn.”

  “Which was a good thing if you were the one being fired at,” Vanessa said.

  Nathanial pouted in her arms. He’d open his mouth to complain, and she’d rock him long enough for him to stop. He sure seemed to like being testy—and if that was the case, they had no one to blame but themselves. He’d had that built into his DNA.

  “You’d think someone would recognize this guy.” Ethan pointed at tattoo-face.

  You’d think. And Jordan was out there up against a bunch of freaks good with scalpels and at killing people. “There are seven out there?” Christa asked.

  “We don’t know that.” Dane had always been a stickler about facts. It was annoying. If she were closer, she’d have punched him. That might have undermined her authority as alpha female to be squabbling with her brother, but it’d feel good to punch something. She needed to punch something. “Travis just said they managed to trace everything back to this group. It might be none of them…it might be one of them again.”

  “Not if it’s personal like this. Jordan actually killed one of their guys. They’ll all be here,” she said.

  “Remember, Jordan’s bigger than them,” Vanessa said.

  Dane gave his wife a look.

  She shrugged. “What? No matter how you look at it, that’s gotta be true. These guys all look like they’re on steroids, and you know that doesn’t help with size all over.”

  The rest of the room gave her a look.

  Then Ethan’s wife turned to Christa and said, “And he has already ripped one of their throats out—he’ll hold his own.”

  …

  They’d gathered back together on the way to the next Lycans listed as most vulnerable—Tim and Jenny and their three kids.

  Out of breath from sprinting, they all leaned against trees. For the first time, Jordan felt conscious of being naked on a hunt as they were reporting in. He angled himself away from the females in the group. He’d also paired off with Reilly when previously he’d safeguarded any females on hunts himself, but Sue and Brock were mated and asked to stay together, and he’d trusted Kennedy with Jeff and Blaine. It still stank of being whipped, even if it did make sense. Luckily, no one would ever question the pairings—one of the perks of being Alpha.

  “At least two heavy diesel vehicles on that road,” Jordan said, nodding at Jeff.

  There’d been no sign of heavy trucks on the road he and Reilly had searched.

  “And definitely not logging, fuel, or food trucks,” Blaine added. “They’re somewhere in town or on the forest land. If you’d let us follow the path to the end…”

  “They’d have been waiting there wi
th a cage,” Kennedy said.

  Blaine shrugged.

  They didn’t have the numbers with them to chance that tracking the semis would lead to a trap. This might end up being to get a lay of the land, not necessarily attack.

  Jordan listened for a moment and inhaled, tasting the air for eavesdroppers before lowering his voice. “They’re here—which means we’re dealing with new factors. Guns. Possibly tree stands—that might be how they’ve taken down other Lycans. We’re there below them—our only weapons being a part of our wolf form, which wouldn’t manage to get up the tree without getting shot in the head. If I give the signal to fall back, you fall back. There’s no reason to stay and fight to the death tonight when we can win without casualties another time.”

  They all nodded.

  “Also, stay in form. I don’t want them knowing your identities as more than names on paper.”

  Names on paper—Tim and Jenny. Theirs were the next names on the paper labeled as most vulnerable. Their teen was named Hayden, ten-year-old Kevin—the pack’s newest Lycan, and their young daughter, Annabeth. Complications during Annabeth’s birth had left Jenny with a limp, and she was weak for a female Lycan her age. The younger kids were listed as non-Lycan, but they could be used to trap the others. Seeing it all there on the printout had filled Jordan with white-hot rage that had subsided only when Christa pressed closer to him.

  He wished he hadn’t brought Tim in to represent his family during the discussion—even if the horror on Tim’s face had cemented the fervor of the others. He’d had to turn away several wanting to come. But he’d understood Tim’s dread now that he had a loved one, too. Seven was a good number of Lycans to take on a hunt. Enough to present a strong front without giving too many opportunities for a weaker member to fall behind. Tim would have been a good addition in this pack, but Ross might have been expecting his scent, and leading the prey to a trap was a poor strategy unless you were purposefully using them as bait.