Pack Dynamics

by Julie Frost

  He whimpered for a few moments, before slumping and going still momentarily. Taking a deep breath, he rolled away from her, Changed, and scooped up the rifle. His eyes were blue pits of grief-stricken exhaustion.

  “What are you doing?” she asked, dreading the answer, remembering the gun he’d had the night Janni had met him after the veteran’s dinner.

  “I can’t—” He choked. “She’s dead. And I can’t, Megan. I can’t do this without her.”

  What could she say to that?

  O O O

  Ben knelt there, wracked with guilt. He wanted to die. Literally.

  And he had the means.

  “Ben, please.” Megan held up a hand. “Don’t do something irreversible.”

  “He shot her. In the head. With silver bullets. From my gun. This gun.” The barrel of the rifle moved, seemingly of its own volition, up under his chin, but he managed to keep his finger alongside the trigger instead of on it. It was an effort. The sedative from the pole syringe, while meant for the bunnies, had made his head fuzzy, and he was having a hard time thinking. “Which I was criminally careless with.” He knew that much, though, and the knowledge ripped a hole in his chest that would never be filled again.

  It was Megan’s turn to choke. “Ben—”

  “Go back to the mansion, Megan. Tell them you couldn’t find me.”

  “I can’t do that.”

  “I reached off the end of my rope a long time ago. Janni caught me, but now I’m in free fall, and I’m not—” His finger had apparently curled around the trigger by itself, because he didn’t remember doing it. “I’ve had enough. She was the only thing holding me here. Supposed to protect her and keep her safe. She’s dead. My fault.” He couldn’t look at Megan, because whatever expression she was wearing would destroy him further, and he was running on the fumes of fumes. Bad enough that he could smell her stress hormones, caused by him. “You shouldn’t have followed me.”

  “She told me about the veterans’ dinner.” Megan’s breathing was loud in the stillness of the night. “You had a gun then, too.”

  He wheezed out a pained huff of air as a realization hit him, and that hole in his chest enlarged. “Should’ve just sent her off that night and then used the gun. None of this would have happened.”

  Megan swallowed hard. “And she’d have felt horrible for the rest of her life, reading about it in the news the next morning.” The implication was clear that Megan would feel the same.

  He didn’t have enough left to worry about that. All he could do was what he should have done with Janni two years ago, and make her go away. “She’d still be alive. You ought to leave, Megan. Seriously.” His voice was low. “It’ll be … messy.”

  “You’ve taken more crap just this week than anyone should have to in a dozen lifetimes, Ben. I know, okay?” No, she really didn’t. Then again, no one did. “But Janni wouldn’t want you to do this. Did she waste all that time she spent putting you back together?”

  Ben closed his eyes. The gun didn’t move. “Unfair tactic, Megan. Wouldn’t have thought that of you.”

  “If it keeps you from killing yourself for no good reason, I don’t care how unfair you think I’m being.”

  “No good reason?” He laughed, a bitter, angry bark he hardly recognized as coming from his own throat. “He targeted her because of me and used my gun. My fault. Reason enough. Go. Please.” He was breathing in ragged gasps, but his hand on the gun was rock-steady. He didn’t want to pull the trigger in front of Megan, didn’t want to burden her with witnessing that as his last act on Earth, but he damn well would if she refused to leave. His chest felt as if his heart had been scooped out and replaced with a hunk of ice. He was done, and she needed to understand that.

  “Didn’t you not shoot yourself once because of her? Are you going to violate her memory that way?” Tears were streaming down her face, shit, he’d made her cry, and he stared at the ground instead.

  Ben was beyond crying, himself—wrung Sahara-dry and gritty with sorrow that weighed his shoulders so heavily he could barely move. “Ostheim wanted me dead. Well, he’s killed me, all right. I can’t …”

  “You can. I know you can.” Megan reached out to him, palm up. “You didn’t let the insurgents win, when they killed Prissy, right? Don’t let this guy win, Ben. You’re stronger than you think you are. Janni made you stronger than you think you are, and you can survive this, too.”

  His gun arm relaxed, just a little, and he rubbed his forehead with his free hand as his eyes slid shut again. “Not sure I want to.”

  “I’m your alpha. I’m supposed to take care of you. Is it enough that I want you to?” Her voice was filled with longing and loneliness.

  He breathed for a few moments. “I don’t know.” A light tremor shook his body. “Maybe.” He needed to think instead of just react, he dimly realized. And Megan was right. “Probably.” He moved the gun barrel away, so it pointed at the sky.

  “Then if there’s a doubt, you shouldn’t do it until you’re positive.”

  The reek of blood and fear filled the air around them the same time a shout sounded through the scrub. “Ben!”

  And that was Janni’s voice, which couldn’t be because he’d seen her die. Ben’s head jerked up in time to see his mate stagger onto the scene, blood streaming from her head. She stopped short, and her fingers flew up to her mouth. “Ben?”

  “You have got to be fucking kidding me,” he said. His hand steadied like a switch had been thrown, and just like that, the gun was back under his chin. Hair sprouted on his back as the wolf growled in confusion. Clearly he was experiencing a psychotic break here, because this was impossible. Wish fulfillment.

  “I have to admit that this is the most realistic hallucination I’ve ever had,” he deadpanned. “The PTSD is working overtime today. Bravo.”

  “Janni?” Megan said. Her eyes were huge. “Aren’t you dead?”

  “Bullets just grazed me, I think,” Janni gasped.

  “Wish fulfillment,” Ben said decisively. “Yeah.”

  “Sweetie, no,” Janni said. Wasn’t it funny that this apparition was shaking, and he could see that even in the dark from twenty feet away? What a wonderful thing the human brain was. “Put the gun down. I’m right here, and I’m real.”

  The rifle still didn’t move. “I watched Janni die. Therefore, you’re either a ghost or an illusion, I don’t know which—but you’re not real.”

  “We can’t both be hallucinating the same thing, Ben.” Megan’s voice cracked. “You’re scaring her.”

  “Makes a nice change from my other hallucinations. Most of the time they’re scaring me.” Ben shook his head. “No, really, if she’s popping up randomly like this, it’s not a matter of ‘don’t want to’ anymore. It’s a matter of ‘can’t, under any circumstances.’ Period.”

  “Oh, screw this,” Janni said. She marched up to him and dropped down to straddle his lap. Usually his head phantoms weren’t quite this solid, and he froze with his mouth half-open, dropping the gun from fingers that refused to work anymore.

  Megan dove for it and whisked it away before he could react, and he was peripherally aware of the safety engaging. But most of his attention was on the vision in his lap.

  Janni grabbed him by the face and kissed him, hard. “I’d like to see a friggin’ hallucination do that.”

  His white-knuckled hands grasped Janni by the upper arms so tightly that he might have been leaving bruises. “Megan? Tell me what you just saw.”

  “Janni just kissed the hell out of you,” Megan said frankly.

  He crushed Janni to his chest, making her squeak. “That’s what I thought,” he said. He dropped his face to her shoulder. “You took an awful chance, honey.”

  She wrapped around him, stroking his back. “Oh, Ben.”

  The shakes started in earnest. “I thought you were dead,” he said into Janni’s hair, rocking her, drinking in her scent, her warmth. “There was so much blood and the silver and it w
as point-blank and you just dropped and it was my fault …”

  “And you ran without checking,” she chided, rapping him gently on the forehead with her knuckles. “Then nearly—”

  Ben kissed her, stopping the awful words before they escaped from her mouth. “Sorry,” he gasped. He hadn’t even realized how difficult breathing had gotten until the knot in his chest eased and he could do it again. “Sorry.”

  He couldn’t get enough of her taste, and he kissed her cheeks and eyelids and throat and pulled the tail of her button-up out of her jeans because he couldn’t get enough of her beautiful dark skin either. He needed to be closer to her than this …

  “It’s okay. We’re okay,” she said, kissing him as fervently as he was kissing her. “But if you ever scare me like that again, Ben, it’s on. You don’t get to kill yourself if I die, got me?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” he mumbled against her collarbone, still working at her top, which was bunched up under her armpits now.

  Her eyes fluttered shut, and Megan’s discreet cough brought Ben back to himself before he could pull the shirt off over Janni’s head.

  “And maybe we’re not all the way okay,” Janni continued, “because you’re bleeding and I ran out here with a concussion and I’m really really dizzy right now …”

  “We need to get you back to the house.” He rose, cradling her in his arms, and realized that he was naked and covered in blood that was and wasn’t his. Some of it was Janni’s, and he growled ferociously before getting himself back under control. “You didn’t happen to bring me a pair of pants, did you?”

  Janni smiled, but her words slurred. “So tired.”

  “No. No falling asleep with a concussion. Stay with me, honey.” Ben strode toward the mansion, his fatigue forgotten with the need to get her back to Doc Allen.

  “Megan?” he said over his shoulder, as she scrambled to keep up with him. “Thanks for coming after me. Again.”

  “Pack.” She shrugged, but he could smell her stress as she followed him, carrying the M4 gingerly by the strap. “I’d like it if you’d ease up on the almost-dying, though. It’s getting old.”

  “I’ll keep that in mind.”

  “One big happy,” Janni said sleepily.

  Ben’s arms tightened around her. “Stay awake, honey. You’ve been hit in the head three times this week. That can’t be good for you.”

  “Starting to get used to being dizzy.”

  “We’ll have Doc Allen check you over when we get back. I don’t like the smell of that wound.”

  “It’s okay. We’ll be okay,” she assured him sleepily. Again.

  And he finally thought, as he carried her to the house, that they might be.

  O O O

  Back in the lab, Megan allowed herself to collapse into an office chair with her hand over her face and the M4 in her lap. “Holy cow.”

  Alex approached her carefully, like she was a skittish horse. “Megan?”

  “I’m fine, Alex.” She refrained from throwing the gun across the room and took several deep breaths. She realized that the smell of blood had nearly disappeared, no bodies decorated the floor, and three of their number were missing. “Where are the others?”

  “Michelle went home. And apparently Chambliss’s job description now includes ‘getting rid of dead people.’ I don’t know, and I was afraid to ask. Jeremy went with him.”

  Alex put his hand on her hair, and she not only let him, but she leaned her head into his hip as he continued, “He won’t tell me how he knows how to do that. What about you? Got any deep, dark secrets you’re hiding from me? Hell, nothing would shock me right now.”

  Megan pushed her alarm back—he hadn’t twigged to the wolf; this was just his way of coping. “Other than the love child we have together that the tabloids keep accusing us of hiding in a posh French boarding school, there’s nothing, Mr. Jarrett.”

  “Oh, her. That’s not a secret.”

  Amazing herself, she managed a tired laugh.

  Alex gave her a look of exasperated fondness. “Go to bed, Miss Graham.”

  She hauled herself off the couch with visible effort. “Yes, sir. You should go to bed too. When was the last time you sle—” She slapped her forehead. “Oh, hell, I nearly forgot. I talked with Clarke this morning while you were doing your thing with Ostheim at the office. You have to have a teleconference with the Board tomorrow. No excuses.”

  He opened his mouth to object, but she didn’t let him start. “Clarke has gone to bat for you on the no confidence thing. For now. You dodged them three times last week and skipped today’s meeting too. You can’t put it off forever.”

  “Feh,” he growled, “sometimes I think I’d rather stay interred in my lab and let someone else do all that boring crap.”

  “And then something would happen the very first week to piss you off, and you’d want your company back. Forget it.” She pointed a determined finger at him. “Teleconference. I’m setting one up tomorrow. Be there.”

  “Yes, ma’am. Now, are you going to bed, or do I need to toss you over my shoulder and carry you up the stairs?”

  “Why don’t we both go?”

  “Is that an invitation?”

  “You are incorrigible.”

  “It’s part of my charm.”

  “No, it’s not.” But she trailed a finger across his shoulder on her way to the elevator. Because maybe it was.

  Chapter Twenty-two

  The next morning, Megan followed Alex into the teleconference. He carried a sense of barely-restrained righteous fury and wore a wolfish smile of his own. Along with an actual suit.

  He usually saved his focus for research, not what he called “corporate bullshit.” The board was wholly unused to that focus being turned in their direction, and Megan watched with ill-concealed glee as he easily browbeat them into a face-to-face conference in New York two days hence—on a Sunday. The only reason he didn’t schedule it for the next day was so that Megan would have time to arrange for accommodations for a pair of demon bunnies on the G5. He was bringing Ben too, deeming it only fair, and they needed to be separated on board for obvious reasons.

  Ben found still more damning memos in the meantime, confirming once and for all that many of the calls were, indeed, coming from inside the house. Megan printed them out, sticking the hardcopies in a folder. She packed her highest high heels and her most powerful power suit, and she was as prepared for this thing as she ever would be.

  Alex loved theatrical gestures, and the three of them marched into the boardroom like they owned it, seven minutes late on purpose, with Alex wheeling a cart carrying a pair of silver cages. One contained an enraged nano-lycan-bunny, and the other held a lycan-bunny created by normal means, also enraged. He put the cart against the wall as far from Ben as possible and stood beside his chair at the head of the table. The proximity of the rabbits, along with the tension in the room, was hitting Ben pretty hard, and Megan exchanged glances with him. “Easy,” she mouthed, but his claws were moving in and out and he swallowed.

  The expressions on the faces of the board members were priceless.

  Barnhardt got control of himself first. “What is the meaning of this?”

  Alex tossed his folder on the table. “This, ladies and gentlemen, is the result of people going behind my back and attempting to take this company in a direction that I’ve never supported.”

  Megan had told Clarke to expect something outrageous, and he leaned forward. “Do tell.”

  “No, don’t,” Barnhardt said. “I need to discuss something privately with Miss Graham first.” He stood up and gestured at the door. “Miss Graham, if you please.”

  “Certainly, Mr. Barnhardt.” She twitched her nose at Alex, and he grinned at her with one side of his mouth as they left.

  Barnhardt grasped her elbow when he got her alone. “You need to get control of him. Now.”

  She looked at his hand as if a particularly repulsive insect had landed on her. “You need to stop t
ouching me. Now.” In her heels, she was two inches taller than he was, and he dropped her arm, if not the attitude.

  “I’m going to expose your little werewolf secret if you don’t stop him.”

  “Are you? Well, that’s an interesting threat, Mr. Barnhardt.” She lifted her chin, along with an eyebrow. “First of all, what makes you think I haven’t told anyone, and second of all, what makes you think that Mr. Jarrett would even care?” Actually, she thought he would, but Barnhardt didn’t need to know that. She was taking Alex’s obsessiveness in “fixing” Ben’s problem more personally than, maybe, she should, even though she herself wanted her lycanthropy fixed. But it still stung, a little, and now she had a target to vent at.

  Barnhardt opened his mouth to say something, and she steamrolled over him, because this week had been one of the most stressful of her life, even considering who she worked for. “Not only that, but I’ll quit before I let you use me this way. And good luck finding a replacement that won’t run screaming the first time they have to deal with one of his unique messes.”

  Barnhardt sputtered, but she continued on her roll. She didn’t have the patience to listen to any more threats or excuses. “How many assistants did he have before me? How long did they last?” She stopped and waited a beat.

  “That doesn’t matter—” he started.

  Wrong answer. “That’s what you think. One of the reasons I’m so good at what I do, Mr. Barnhardt, is because I don’t let people control me. Not Mr. Jarrett, and not you. So, let me tell you how this is going to go. You are going to go back to that meeting and keep your mouth shut. In return for that—” She bared her teeth, allowing them to grow slightly larger, and she was sure he noticed because sweat broke out on his brow and his eyes got huge when hers changed color. “I’ll let you keep your throat. Unlike a few other people who have crossed me this week.”

  It was an empty bluff—she had no intention of killing him, and she hadn’t been the one tearing throats out, after all—but an effective one. He fish-mouthed a couple of times and finally gulped in a deep breath. “Is that why we can’t contact Ostheim?”