by Moira Rogers
“Fighting’s the only thing I’m good at.”
“That’s not true.” Jay motioned him around the low brick wall. “Come on back here so I can talk to you. The smoke’s stinging my eyes.”
Still agitated, Colin obeyed. The sounds of kids shrieking with laughter drifted on the evening air, combining with the scratchy country music pouring out of half a dozen speakers. The whole damn festival was a picture-perfect postcard waiting to happen, which made the edgy danger inside him that much more out of place.
He didn’t fit here, even though he wanted to.
Jay pointed to a heavy iron smoker beside the grill. “Help me with the wood chips, huh?”
It wasn’t a glamorous task, but it was productive and easily defined. Problem, plan, action, results. That had been his life before Clover. “Maybe you should ask Eden to check on Lorelei. I know they get along.”
“Check on her yourself.” Jay picked up a soda and grinned. “They’ll have dancing ’til ten, you know.”
Colin winced. “She’s mad at me.”
“For what?”
Colin rubbed the back of his neck and looked away. “She kinda came on to me last night. I wasn’t sure what it was, so I just reminded her that’s not how the pack works now.”
Jay grimaced. “Sorry, man.”
“It wasn’t right. It wasn’t real.” Colin couldn’t banish the memory of her eyes in the moonlight, haunted and sad. “She would have screwed me, but it wouldn’t have been because she wanted me.”
“In Memphis…” The words trailed off, and Jay heaved a sigh. “Lorelei spent a lot of time deflecting interest from the other women. Maybe it’s habit.”
“Maybe.” Not that Colin needed his interest deflected. Kaley was a wobbly-legged baby deer, all adorable awkwardness until something brought her deadly alpha nature to the surface. And Mae might have a sleek sort of sensuality hidden under Shane’s sweatshirts, but she cringed when Colin got too close to her, and that wasn’t hot under any circumstances.
“If it bothers you, Eden can talk to her. Unless…” Jay arched an eyebrow. “Unless it bothers you for another reason?”
Colin sidestepped the question. “No, don’t have Eden talk to her. Lorelei already feels like I blew her off. It’ll make it worse if she thinks we’re all talking about it.”
Jay let it go with a shrug. “Okay. Your call.”
His alpha had given him a pass, but Colin felt edgy, dangerous. Someone needed to step on him—hard. “I didn’t take advantage of her.”
Jay paused with his soda halfway to his lips. “I didn’t say you did. The opposite, actually. Sounds like you took a lot of care with her.”
“I still managed to hurt her,” he muttered.
“That’s not always avoidable.”
“Well it fucking well should be.” There was the anger, the grating frustration at being not enough, and Jay was a safe target. “After everything she’s been through, I should be able to make her safe.”
An older man walked up to the pit, and Jay smiled and clapped Colin on the shoulder. “Mr. Thompson, have you met my oldest friend? I don’t think you have.”
Colin was left choking back emotion, forcing a pleasant expression onto his face as he extended a hand. He hated touching strangers, but the pack had enough trouble without him acting as antisocial as Shane. “Nice to meet you.”
Jay made small talk, asking after the man’s chickens and talking about the weather, while Colin fidgeted beside him, wanting more than anything else to be gone. Away from the crowds, which were too small to lose himself in. There was solitude in the wilderness, and anonymity in the city. Small towns offered nothing but strangers who wanted to know your business and nowhere to hide from them.
Chapter Three
One thing about Patsy Cline—she always filled the dance floor.
Lorelei finished her lemonade and looked around for a trash receptacle. What she saw instead was Colin, approaching her with a decidedly determined look on his face.
He held out one hand. “Do you like to dance?”
“I don’t hate it.” She set her empty cup on a picnic table and eyed his hand for a moment before taking it.
“I’m out of practice.” He tugged her close enough to rest a hand on her hip but keep a respectful space between their bodies. “It’s probably been fifteen years since I danced. Maybe twenty.”
He didn’t move like he was out of practice at anything. “You have a funny way of sweet-talking the women, Colin.”
“I leave the sweet-talk to Fletcher.” His lips curved up a little.
Yeah, he knew he was hot. Lorelei found herself smiling in return. “I guess you don’t really need it.”
His grin widened. “Neither does he, but teasing him about his busted face makes him shine his manners all nice and pretty.”
“Where have these mythical manners been over the last month, hmm? He hasn’t said three words to me.”
“Between you and me?” Colin leaned closer. “I think he’s been using them on Eden, just to annoy Jay. He can’t help himself.”
One more turn, and another couple on the dance floor caught Lorelei’s eye. “You mean the way he’s using them on Kaley right now?”
Colin swung her around until he was facing Kaley and Fletcher. His eyes widened, but he laughed. “He’s got a weakness for alpha women.” Almost as soon as the words were out, Colin’s smile faded and his gaze jerked to hers. “Not that he’d cross any lines.”
“I didn’t think he would.” If anything, she wanted to thank the man. Kaley was smiling, something she did only rarely these days.
“He’s a good man.” Colin seemed to be picking his words carefully. “We all just want to help. This is an opportunity for us, too.”
That got her attention. “An opportunity for what?” she asked.
He guided her in a slow, swaying circle before replying. “To belong somewhere. We haven’t really, any of us. Not since we left our pack in Texas.”
“You plan on staying?”
“If I can. If it works. It doesn’t always. Too many strong personalities in one area…” He hesitated. “Maybe you know that. I don’t know how long you’ve been…one of us.”
No, he didn’t know anything about her—by her design. Conscience pricked at her. “Six years, but I spent some of that time alone.”
His brow furrowed. “As a lone wolf?”
The truth was too complicated and painful for a moment like this. “Something to that effect.”
“Then you understand.” He stroked his thumb over her knuckles. “Being around others… We need it more than we admit.”
She did understand—usually. “We’re social creatures, Colin, no matter how you look at us.”
“We are. But being alone can be habit forming.”
“So you’d rather stay,” she murmured. “Why this time? Why here?”
“Jay,” he replied without hesitation. “I can follow him. There can’t be more than one leader in a pack.”
The simplest way, the only natural one. They’d all seen the havoc wrought in Memphis, where no clear alpha had emerged. “I’m glad this feels like a safe place for you too.”
Something sparked in his eyes. “So you feel safe?”
So that was why he’d spent so much time with her, been so careful. It made sense, and it made her chest ache. “Yes, Colin. You don’t have to worry about me.”
“Yeah, I do.” Smiling, he spun her playfully, twirling her in a dizzy circle before pulling her back to his body. Closer this time, with only a whisper of space between them. “But when you know me better, maybe you’ll yell at me when I’m annoying you. Kaley already does.”
Lorelei clucked her tongue. “That’s not you. She does that to everyone.”
“Why am I not surprised?”
“Because you’re a smart man?”
“I’m trying to be, darling. God knows I’m trying.”
It felt easier than anything had in a while, smiling u
p at him as he led her around the floor. “Tell me about yourself.”
His hand drifted from her hip to the small of her back as he tucked her hand against his shoulder. “What have you heard?”
That he was a fighter. That he was dark. “Does it matter?”
“I’ve wondered a little if my reputation preceded me in a bad way.”
She bit her lip. “Is this payback for calling you Batman?”
“You like to poke at a man’s ego, don’t you?” The song drifted into another one, and he guided her between two other couples without releasing her.
“I wasn’t poking,” she protested. “But I do find it interesting that you took it that way. Most men wouldn’t mind being called a hero.”
He snorted softly. “If they took it seriously.”
“Who says I wasn’t being serious?”
“I’m not a hero, Lorelei. I’m the farthest thing from it.”
She’d eased closer somehow, practically pressed against him now. “So tell me why.”
“Monsters.” He rested his chin atop of her head, slowing their movements to a gentle sway. “You spend too much time chasing them, and they’re all you can see anymore.”
He needed a break, then. To find himself again in a place where the only monsters were the ones chasing you in your dreams. “Not many people would consider founding a sanctuary to be much of a vacation.”
“So far it’s too much of one. I need to do something.” This time, his laugh sounded forced. “Got any dragons I can slay for you?”
Her answer was far from reassuring, but all she could give him. “Only the ones in my head.”
Only the ones in my head.
Colin killed the engine on his bike and watched Lorelei climb out of Eden’s car. Plenty of other vehicles were scattered across the scuffed grass at the end of Green Pines’s twisting drive—Jay’s beat-up old truck, Fletcher’s pristine ’66 Corvette and the junker the other Memphis refugees had arrived in. When Jay rolled up in his police-department SUV and Shane on his bike, the front yard would look like a party. A perpetual, never-ending party.
Looks could be deceiving.
Only the ones in my head. The moonlight glinted off Lorelei’s hair and silvered her features. Standing next to Eden, with both of them painted in light and shadow, they looked like the cousins Eden had told the town they were. Like sisters, even, but while Colin could appreciate Eden’s girl-next-door good looks, Lorelei possessed an elegant, glamorous beauty, like a starlet from the golden age of Hollywood. Especially when she smiled.
He wanted to make her smile all the time.
Kaley walked up beside him and nudged him with her shoulder. “You look broody. Didn’t you have fun at the festival?”
“Sure I did.” Colin swung his leg over his bike and managed a smile. “Ate my weight in junk food.”
“So…you have indigestion?”
“Brat.” He resisted the urge to tease her about dancing with Fletcher. The last thing anyone needed to do was chase her back to moping over Zack. “Do you and Mae need help putting up supplies?”
“No, we’ll manage.” Mischief glinted in her eyes. “Besides, you—”
A terrified scream pierced the night, and Tammy ran from behind the smaller farmhouse toward the cars. “Phillip! It’s Phillip.”
Instinct had Colin moving before he made the conscious decision to cross the intervening space. The refugees from Memphis who lived in the little farmhouse weren’t members of Zack’s original pack. They had belonged instead to the corrupt wolf who’d caused Zack and his people so much pain. That Christian had abused his own pack every bit as brutally was a truth no one at Green Pines questioned, but awkwardness still lingered between the two groups after a month together on the farm.
Tammy was the most bruised one of all. Colin was pretty sure the only reason she kept putting one foot in front of the other was the need to protect her young son. She looked wild-eyed now, terrified, and Colin caught her by the shoulders as she stumbled. “What is it? What happened?”
“I was looking,” she babbled. “I finally found him. I think he’s dead.”
Kaley’s breath came in shallow puffs. “In the backyard?”
“Out by the…” Tammy dissolved into tears. “They’re back. They came back for us.”
“Eden—” Colin bit off the rest of his words as Jay’s mate appeared by his side. He wordlessly handed the sobbing woman over to Eden’s care before loping past the crowd, his long strides carrying him over the lawn.
Behind the house, a sandy-haired man lay face down in the grass. Phillip, Tammy had said, and she couldn’t have been wrong. No one got that sort of thing wrong.
Despite Colin’s best efforts, Kaley had reached the fallen man first, rolled him over and recoiled from the sight of his fixed, half-open stare. “Oh, Jesus.”
Recoiling was the normal response. Colin couldn’t even summon the urge to flinch as he crouched beside the body. Hell, he wished the sight appalled him, but Phillip’s face was slack and empty, his body seemingly untouched. Colin had lived too many years where death without evidence of prolonged suffering was the closest thing to good news he ever saw.
But not here. It shouldn’t happen here. “We need Stella,” he said numbly, studying Phillip’s open, unseeing eyes. He wasn’t old—in his forties, maybe. Fifty at most. Werewolves could die of natural causes, same as anyone else, but Colin had never seen anyone without a century or more of life give in to a quiet death. Only the lucky ones lived long enough for it to be an option.
“They’ll bring her,” Kaley murmured. “He doesn’t have a mark on him. You’re thinking magic?”
“There aren’t many other things it could be.” Phillip’s arm was cool but not cold, and rigor hadn’t set in yet, which only told Colin what they already knew—the wolf had died sometime after everyone else had left for the festival. “Did you know him well in Memphis?”
She wrapped her arms around her body. “Lorelei kept us away from Christian’s pack, not just the enforcers.”
“Would Lorelei know more about him?”
“I don’t know.”
Jay strode across the lawn with Stella hurrying beside him. “What’s it look like?” he demanded.
“Magic, most likely.” Colin rose to meet his alpha with a shake of his head. “The only other thing I can think of that could do this are some heavy-duty drugs. Not something you can get over the counter at the pharmacy in Clover.”
Stella dragged a handful of herbs from the leather bag slung over her shoulder. “I knew a wolf once who died of a brain aneurysm. The natural stuff can take you if it’s sudden or persistent enough. It’s not common, but it’s not impossible, either.”
“Close enough to be damn unlikely,” Colin replied, watching her with a hint of unease. Shane might be friends with the witch, but Colin had dealt with too many practitioners of darker magic to feel comfortable around any witch or wizard.
Stella met his gaze evenly as she tore curling strips of bark off a small twig. “Keep looking at me like that and I’m gonna get ideas, Knox.”
Colin bared his teeth at her in a feral smile, unconcerned about scaring her. “Get any ideas you want, darling, as long as you get some answers for us too.”
“If they’re there to be had.” She bent down and used a tiny knife to nick the vein standing out against the thin, grayish skin of Phillip’s inner wrist. When she’d squeezed a few drops of blood onto the shredded bark, she closed it all in her fist and began to whisper.
Jay stood, one hand braced on his opposite arm and the other pressed to his mouth. When her whispers died away, he raised a questioning brow.
Stella grimaced and shook her head. “Silent. If there was magic here, it’s already faded completely.”
“Shit.” Colin glanced at the body. He could search for an injection site, but imagining that someone had gone to the trouble to obtain the sort of paralytics it took to neutralize a werewolf just to leave a dead body in the backy
ard…
Of course, who’d go to the trouble to use magic to do the same thing, unless it was a message?
Jay heaved a sigh. “We’ll bury him near Quinn. How sure was Tammy that this had to be someone from Memphis?”
“Pretty damn sure,” Kaley said. “Is there a chance—?”
He cut her off. “I don’t know. You and Stella go break it to the others, okay? And keep them away from here.”
As the women backed away, Colin raked his hands through his hair and bit back a snarl. “I should have stayed here.”
“You couldn’t have seen this coming.” Jay swore softly. “Feel up to taking a trip?”
He didn’t want to admit how much, because the itch under his skin might be proof that he wasn’t made to stay in one place. “To Memphis? Someone needs to, and it might as well be me.”
“You can’t go alone. Where would you start?”
Colin shrugged. “Same place I always do, I guess. Hit my contacts, try to make a connection.” Even as he said the words, he knew they were wrong. They didn’t have time for him to crisscross Memphis, sniffing after clues in a town with a dozen packs and just as many sticky political situations. “Who the hell could I take, man? Zack’s not up to it, but he’d follow me just to slit my throat if I took Kaley back there.”
Jay glanced at the larger farmhouse. “He said Lorelei handled a lot of shit when Christian Peters had him locked up.”
Every muscle in Colin’s body tightened at the thought of Lorelei in Memphis. Lorelei in danger. “She’s a good leader. Smart. That doesn’t mean she needs to be wandering around in dangerous fucking territory again.”
“I wouldn’t call it wandering around. I’d call it recon.”
Colin ground his teeth. “Still dangerous.”
Jay shrugged out of his jacket and draped it over Phillip’s head and shoulders. “More dangerous than people dropping dead on our farm?”
Sighing, Colin forced himself to relax. “We can ask her, but I won’t pressure her into going back to the place where all this horrible shit happened to her. If I have to, I’ll do it the hard way.” Hell, he’d beat answers out of someone to keep Lorelei from hurting.
