Chosen Mates (Beasts of the Bay Bundle)

by Bell, Lilith T.

  “You must be Luke. I’m Sofia and this is Frankie.” I offered him my hand.

  He shook it, then shook Frankie’s hand as well. “It’s great to finally meet you. Dawn has told me a lot about you.” He paused, considering me again. “She did leave some things out, though.”

  “Even best friends don’t share everything,” I told him quietly as we stepped inside.

  Dawn was already coming for us before we were all the way through the doorway. “Hey!” she cried happily, throwing her arms around us both in succession. When she hugged me, I could see Frankie’s eyes widen a bit. Following her gaze, I realized she had seen the healing bite mark on the back of Dawn’s neck. I thought I had told her about that part in the car, so I wasn’t sure why she looked so shocked.

  “I’ll get the wine open while Luke introduces you to everyone,” Dawn said, taking the two bottles of wine from Frankie. I had brought French bread and one of my grandmother’s sauces for dipping, along with gluten free crackers. I had been warned that there were a couple of food allergies at the table tonight.

  “This is Billy and Dan,” Luke said, introducing us to the two men who were already sitting down. One was skinny and short and East Asian while the other was a plump white guy of about average height. I honestly wasn’t sure which one was Billy and which was Dan.

  “And this is Chris and Judy,” Luke went on. Judy looked like she probably had some East Indian ancestry as well. She smiled warmly and shook our hands, saying hi. Chris looked like she had some thoroughly mixed background like mine. Her hair was auburn verging on red while her skin was olive-toned and she had brown, hooded eyes and full lips. She did not smile, but greeted us both with a nod. As Dawn was often a quiet person who took a long time to warm up to people, I could see how she might enjoy a coworker like Chris.

  Once we were seated and Luke was giving a primer on what kind of game campaign they were going to run, Frankie leaned in close to me. “That mark on your neck isn’t a tribal tattoo.”

  Oh. Now I understood. She had seen Dawn’s mating mark and finally made the connection to what mine meant. “It is a tattoo using traditional methods. It just has some meaning to it as well,” I explained quietly.

  “You have a mate?”

  “Had.”

  I said that one word with enough finality that Frankie got the hint and straightened up again.

  It had been years since I role-played and there were a few changes in the edition they were using from how I remembered things, but it was easy enough to fall back into the rhythm of things. Walking Frankie through making a character was a little more difficult since she had no experience with it. Halfway through that the final member of the part arrived. His name was John and he was a little younger than everyone else. It also turned out that the only person who knew him well was Luke, which helped cut down on some the awkwardness of Luke and Dawn’s work friends versus Dawn’s away from work friends.

  During a brief break in the game, Luke went into the kitchen. I decided it was the best opportunity I was going to get and followed him in.

  While he was looking for something to drink, I put a hand on the fridge door and pushed it shut. “Does Dawn know what you are?” I asked, voice hushed.

  He regarded me for a moment, then gave a small nod. “Yes. You?”

  “No. I guess she should now, though. You’re really claiming her as a mate, right? Not just scarring her up because you’re a dickface?”

  Instead of taking offence, he laughed. “She’s my mate. I know it’s fast and you have every right to be concerned and protective, but when you find love like this you can’t let it go.”

  I scoffed. I had thought I’d found the love to end all love once and he ran away and apparently hated me now for not chasing after him fast enough. I didn’t want to begrudge Dawn her happiness, though, because she deserved every little bit of it she could get after all she had been through.

  “Sofia, we’ve got to go.”

  I turned at Frankie’s urgent voice to see her just behind me by the kitchen door, holding her phone up.

  My eyes went to the phone, then back to her grim face. “What is it?”

  “There’s been another attack.” She pressed her lips in a tight line and looked at Luke briefly. “Sorry about this.”

  Luke crossed the kitchen to stop beside me, his brows furrowed in confusion. “Sorry, I thought you were a vet? You’re both cops?”

  We both said “no” at the same time, then I cleared my throat. “She just needs my help on this particular case.” Rather than rush for the door with Frankie, I paused. If this was the work of werewolves aggressively carving out their own territory here, it could potentially be dangerous to Luke and by extension Dawn. My own pack had always ignored the other shifters in the area as far as I knew, but we also didn’t go around slaughtering joggers in public parks. “It could be related to that thing you and I have in common,” I finally said, giving Luke a look full of meaning. “Be careful.”

  His brow smoothed as he processed that and he nodded slowly. “You too.”

  We said our goodbyes and apologized profusely for having to leave, then went back to my VW Beetle. This time the murder was in Lafayette Park, which was across town from Mountain Lake Park and that worried me as much as the fact that they were killing people. It hinted at this Marcus and his pack laying claim to the entire city, rather than just terrorizing one small part of it.

  “I’ll try to get you in with me before the scent trail is obliterated, but you are still just a civilian,” Frankie warned me when we got out.

  Lights flashed garishly off of trees and play equipment as uniformed officers guarded the tape stretched out to mark off the scene. I followed her along, trying to look as much like I belonged there as possible, but I knew it was pointless the second the nearest uniformed cop laid eyes on me. Worse than just a civilian, I was a strange woman of color walking toward a cop at night. Looking all meek and sweet like some little blonde wasn’t an option for me when my very existence was resented.

  “No civilians past this point,” the cop said as he moved to bar me from getting any closer.

  “This is Dr. Leones. She’s an expert on wolves and feral dog populations, with experience identifying breeds by their tracks and bite radius,” Frankie said, spinning bullshit wonderfully on the fly. “She needs to see the scene before evidence we don’t even realize is there gets lost.”

  He crossed his arms with that bored look on his face that I think they had to teach in police academies on the first day. “I have orders, Detective.”

  Frankie rolled her eyes as she turned back to me. “I’ll see what I can do to get you in before the scene is completely contaminated.”

  I gave her a small nod, then went back to my car to sit on the hood and wait. I would have preferred to stay nearer to the evidence to pick up what scents I could, but the guarding cop was watching me with naked suspicion and I didn’t really want to push just how jumpy he could get. While I waited I closed my eyes and turned my head this way and that subtly, catching what hints I could find on the air. The scent from the blood and meat of a woman overwhelmed everything else, but it wasn’t the only scent. There was the stink of adrenaline off the uniform mingling with the bouquet from the rest of the cops swarming around the park, then a hint of exhaust as another vehicle pulled up. I opened my eyes a slit to watch a news team climbing out of a van to rush to the scene like vultures descending on a fresh kill.

  As I watched the news crew get shooed back from the perimeter, movement in the distance beyond them caught my eye. I refocused there to see a good-looking Black man lurking about in the shadows and watching everything. He wore a suit that was too finely tailored for a local news report—he even had a waistcoat—but the scent coming from his direction was purely human. An especially fashion conscious detective, maybe. I wasn’t really sure what to make of him and as I watched him he caught me looking, then gave a little smile and a wave.

  I raised a tentative h
and to wave back just as the wind shifted and I froze in that position. I turned my head in time to catch sight of the reddish furred wolf melting into the shadowy undergrowth. I knew the wolf was male and no one I had met before, but more importantly I knew he had the briney scent of human blood all over him. I hopped off of the hood of my car to follow after him before he was gone entirely. The entire time I picked my way through the underbrush I was aware of how dangerous it was and that I could be stepping into a trap, but walking away from a murderer wasn’t an option and the cops would be useless.

  Having someone like Hunter with me would have been a relief, though.

  Almost as soon as I was outside the view of any of the cops, I caught sight of the wolf again. He had stopped in a small clearing where the light from the nearly full moon fell and I watched as his body twisted with the shift. Soon the form of the wolf was replaced with that of a nude man, one who was so pale that he gleamed in the moonlight like he was made of silver.

  He turned to face me and smiled.

  “Don’t hold back,” he coaxed as he took a step closer to me. I felt the press of his aura against me, as if someone had just opened a blast furnace in my face. Even the least sensitive normal human would have been unnerved by his presence, which troubled me. Showing off our power like this was almost always a dominance display, or else the sign that someone didn’t have sufficient control to hide their power. I sincerely doubted he lacked control.

  “I want to see what you have,” he went on.

  I narrowed my eyes slightly, then let my aura roll outward from my body, opening up like a flower blooming. Our alpha power wasn’t visible to eyes, but it was clear enough to us in other ways that we often interpreted it through analogy with our more mundane senses. Some people smelled auras or tasted them. Most felt them on their skin to some degree, giving them goosebumps. Even though I knew I couldn’t literally see the energy, in my mind’s eye mine was purple with a slightly fuzzy, soft look to it like the petals of a lilac.

  If my aura was purple, this wolf’s aura would have been white. It was the white of death. Burnt to ashes. Frozen solid. Bloodless, dead bodies. Bones bleached in the sun. Dried out old shit.

  “Marcus,” I stated.

  He grinned, showing canines that seemed ever so slightly too large for a human mouth. “You’ve been speaking to Hunter, I take it.”

  “We compared notes.” I watched warily as he came in closer to me, much as I had done when Hunter had circled me the night before at the clinic. I gave a quiet warning growl when I felt that he had come too close, but I didn’t back up, holding my ground defiantly. “You killed those women in the parks?”

  He paused at my growl, looking more amused than chastened. “A couple of my newest recruits took the pair of girls. This one tonight was mine. Humans make such interesting prey. There’s a rush to feeding off of them that can’t be compared to a rabbit or deer.”

  “The shifters here will unite against you to drive you out,” I warned him, praying that it wouldn’t come to the war I’d warned my brother about.

  He continued as if he hadn’t even heard me. “Wolves are better—much more challenging—but so rare these days.” His eyes moved over me in assessment, making my skin crawl, and his lips curled up into something halfway between a smile and a sneer. “When was the last time you even hunted? You’re wasting yourself like this. You should come with me and find out what it really means to be a werewolf.”

  No witty retort came to mind and he had ignored my warning, so I just glared at him in response. If I called for the cops, would they get here in time before he shifted and ran? Even in San Francisco, they’d be concerned about a naked man covered in someone else’s blood. They’d probably be unable to convict him of anything, but it could make him and his pack move on to avoid more trouble.

  And then they’ll just kill more women in another city, I reminded myself guiltily. Driving them off was no kind of moral solution.

  “If you don’t want to join us, that’s fine,” Marcus said, moving forward again. I snarled, but he kept coming. “The best prey is bitches like you anyway.”

  When he got within reach I had to finally move just to avoid him from grabbing me. I danced back out of his reach as we began circling one another. There were sounds of movement around us and I recognized them as the sounds of several sets of four paws picking their way through the underbrush. They were quiet, but his pack was coming.

  “I can tell you what happened to your mother,” Marcus went on, his voice taking on deeper bass tones as fur began prickling up through his skin.

  I could hear that one of them was coming up behind me and if I kept moving to avoid Marcus I’d be pushed right back into the grasp of that one. If I screamed, would anyone even come in time? “What do you know about my mother?”

  “Twelve years ago I ate her.”

  As my mind was still scrambling in panicked horror over what he just said, Marcus lunged.

  Chapter 7

  Hunter

  Tien met me halfway as I was walking toward the latest murder. When I had seen all of the police lights, I’d wisely parked a block away and then walked in the rest of the way. Tien gave me an apologetic shrug. “I wasn’t going to call the cops, ‘cause it’s not like she was getting any deader, but somebody else must have spotted the body before you got here.”

  “The fact that you can only find them when they’ve already killed somebody is a real problem,” I pointed out with a sigh.

  “While they’re killing someone,” Tien corrected me. “They feed as their victim is dying. Once the victim is dead, they leave.”

  That made me stop in my tracks to give him a thousand yard stare. “You’re telling me these people were all alive while they were being eaten.”

  “Yep. That’s how vampires always feed. All that bullshit about vampire victims being completely exsanguinated isn’t true. The person dies of blood loss long before they don’t have any blood left and then the vampire stops.”

  “But these wolves are taking flesh with it.” I couldn’t fathom eating something that was still alive. Something screaming and struggling and capable of speech and tears. I shuddered to drive those thoughts away, then continued on as close as we dared to get to the taped off section of the park.

  I had done the bare minimum of what work I could do without feeling like a lazy asshole, then spent the rest of the afternoon sleeping and trying to make up for my lost night. It had worked to some degree, in that I did catch up on my sleep. Then I’d had one of my reoccurring nightmares about a blonde woman telling me I had to run. I’d woken up from that about fifteen minutes before Tien’s phone call.

  As we walked, I noticed a little yellow VW Beetle parked in the lot. I had watched when Sofia drove up to her office, so I knew what she drove, but I hadn’t noticed the license plates. How many yellow Beetles were likely to be here?

  “Hey, Tien. Did you see who was driving that?” I gestured over to the car.

  “A couple of women. One must have been a cop because they let her right through, but the other one stayed behind and then followed something over into those trees a few minutes ago. I thought about following her to see what she was doing, but didn’t want to risk getting tazed.”

  It had to be her. She had no idea exactly how big all of this was, either. The dead body forgotten, I sprinted toward the trees, as a protesting Tien followed after. As I got closer I could hear the sounds of canines fighting, with snarls and growls and bodies crashing through bushes. A wolf who was solid black save for the white on her front paws and down her throat came barrelling through toward me. I saw her ears perk and eyes widen in surprise before she slowed her run to curve back around and come up alongside me. If she was running, it seemed reasonable to assume that she was outnumbered. Sofia wasn’t one to flee from a fair fight.

  Tien and I shared a quick look just before three members of the other pack came into sight and by the sound of it there were at least half a dozen more of them beh
ind. Without a word, he and I both pulled our guns and fired. Unlike Sofia, the other wolves were much paler in coloring and didn’t blend into the night or undergrowth quite so easily. Their buff coats would have served them well in the long grasses of meadows and prairies, but at the moment it just made them good targets. There were two yelps following our shots, then shouts from the direction of the cops.

  One of the wolves drew himself up short and looked to me with an expression I could only describe as grudging respect. The blue of his eyes was unusual enough for a wolf that I could guess it was Marcus even if I hadn’t seen him shifted before. He gave a yip to the rest of his pack, then turned to lead them away quickly.

  I put my gun back into the holster under my arm as I crouched next to Sofia. “Go back the way she came from,” I told Tien. “Find her clothes and get them. We don’t need the cops thinking she’s involved in this.”

  “You know her?” he asked as he put up his own gun.

  I nodded and pulled a collar out of the pocket in my jacket. “This is Sofia.”

  While I found the idea of it to be just about repugnant, having a collar and a dog license meant that I could go out shifted with slightly less danger. Assuming nobody noted the discrepancy between the Duke on the tags and the female dog wearing them, it would hopefully be all right. Sofia raised her head to make it easier for me to get the collar on her and as she did I noticed she was favoring one of her front legs.

  Tien was already out of sight when the first officer arrived, a plainclothes detective I guessed, and she stared in confused worry at Sofia.

  “What happened here?” she demanded. “We heard gunshots.”