Chosen Mates (Beasts of the Bay Bundle)

by Bell, Lilith T.

  I wrapped one arm protectively around Sofia, drawing her closer to me. “I was out walking my dog when a bunch of ferals attacked us. Me and my buddy fired on them to get them off my dog, but I think they got her pretty good on her leg.”

  “And where’s your buddy now?” the detective prompted.

  “He went after them. I told him not to, but we think we hit one and he hates turning his back on an injured animal.” I shrugged and gave the cop my best disarming smile, but it didn’t really work. She just kept staring at Sofia, who was staring back at her.

  “What’s going on here?” another voice demanded as several other cops arrived. They were all bristling, ready to shoot anything that moved. I stayed very, very still with my arm still around Sofia. My hold on her tightened a little when I noticed some of the cops giving her suspicious looks.

  The detective went closer to the man who had spoken and began telling him what had happened, trying to keep her voice quiet. Even so, my sensitive ears picked up most of it. Including the part where she referred to me and Tien as “a couple of redneck idiots with guns.”

  Four of the cops went out in the direction that I indicated the pack had run, after I strongly implied that’s where Tien went as well. A few minutes later he came back from a different direction entirely and I caught a disgusted look from the lady detective. He walked very slowly and cautiously, holding his hands up where they could be seen.

  Our concealed carry permits and all the information on my security company were demanded. We were barraged with questions and implied threats. Somebody swabbed Sofia’s mouth for traces of human blood, which worried me. She could have bitten one of the other werewolves before they shifted, which would have put her in a lot of danger. Luckily, she hadn’t and I breathed much easier when the medical examiner on the scene said there were no human specific proteins in the blood on her.

  Just when I was hoping we might be able to get away without things getting even more complicated, the lady detective managed to corner Tien and me without any of the other cops around.

  “Tell me the dog’s real name or I’m going to haul you in for questioning and I promise I will nail everything I can on you,” she hissed.

  I glanced down at Sofia, who bobbed her head in a nod. Well. All right then. “Sofia,” I told the detective.

  She nodded, satisfied with that. “You’re not a family member,” she pointed out, then glanced at Tien. “Are you?”

  “No, ma’am,” Tien said, shaking his head. “Just met her.”

  I had no way of telling who or what the detective was, but she clearly knew what Sofia was, so I wasn’t sure that playing dumb would do me any favors. “She’s my mate,” I murmured, glancing around to be sure no one else was close enough to overhear. “Or she was.”

  The detective gave me a long, hard look, then nodded slightly. “Did you clean up anything that could link her to this? I can’t imagine she had time to stash her clothes if she was attacked.”

  “I got her phone, keys, wallet, and some jewelry. Her clothes were too bulky to stash,” Tien said, then shot a look down at Sofia. “Sorry. Hope you weren’t too attached to that outfit.”

  The detective sighed heavily, rubbing a hand over her face. “So this was werewolves? You guys can confirm that?”

  Sofia and I both nodded. Tien shrugged.

  “All right. Give me her car key so I can take it home. Then get out of here before there’s more of a mess.” Once the detective unhooked Sofia’s house keys off the key chain and gave them back to me, she waved us off. “I’ll do my best to bury anything stupid you did here.”

  The rumbling growl in my chest made her pause as I leaned in closer to her to speak in a quietly lethal voice. “It wasn’t stupid to save Sofia’s life.”

  She lowered her eyes from the weight of my gaze, then spoke softly, “No. Now get her somewhere safe.”

  I didn’t relish the idea of being taken to the station for questioning or having some overzealous cop arrest us for firing our guns at murderers, so the three of us headed away as fast as we could after the detective dismissed us. As we walked, I watched the way that Sofia was limping and wished she could just shift and walk on her apparently unharmed hind legs.

  “I’m going to take Sofia home. Give me her stuff.” Tien handed it over and I tucked it into pockets in my jacket. “Go home yourself and be careful, all right? They got a look at us now and know our scents.”

  Tien frowned. “Think they’ll come after us?”

  “We injured them and saved Sofia from whatever the fuck they planned to do to her. I’m sure of it.”

  ***

  Without clothes for her to change into, there wasn’t much for Sofia to do but remain in her wolf form while I drove. I used the address off of her license to find her house, where a dog that sounded like it was the size of an elephant began howling frantically while I unlocked the door. I braced myself for an overprotective monstrosity to jump on me for invading his territory, but the Wolfhound only had eyes for Sofia. He went up to her and whined and licked her face.

  Once the door was shut behind me, she shifted back to her human form and wrapped her injured arm around the dog’s neck. “It’s okay, Leggy. I’m okay,” she reassured him.

  “You’ve got a pretty nasty bite on your arm,” I pointed out to her as I pulled her things out of my pockets to set down on the little table beside the door. “Do you want me to take a look at it?”

  She turned to give me a wry look over her shoulder. “Did you go to medical school while you were away?”

  “No, but I served as a medic in Afghanistan.”

  She blinked, then looked me over with a thoughtful expression as she got back up to her feet. “That’s what you meant about coming back to the country.”

  It was hard for me to concentrate on pretty much anything but the way that she looked as she stood there, nude and proud and capable. She was beautiful and I’d always known that, but beauty is cheap. Beauty can be bought from a surgeon and half the time all that people really notice is makeup and styling anyway. Sofia had so much more than just beauty.

  “Looks like you got sap in your coat,” I said quietly as I stepped closer to her, reaching up to pick out pine needles that were glued to her hair.

  She reached up to touch her hair, groaning at the mess. “This is why any shifter with sense keeps their hair short.”

  I chuckled, then looked around for a comb to help her. “I was wondering how you managed now that you’d grown it out so much. It’s pretty like that.”

  She must have been styling her hair while watching TV because there was a flat iron, comb, and hair products all on the coffee table. I grabbed the comb, then started picking out the globs of sap and the knots. Usually our hair didn’t get too badly matted while we were shifted, since the consistency of wolf fur doesn’t lend itself to that so long as it’s groomed. Hers would probably be fine, since she hadn’t done any damage to her hair in human form.

  Grooming was a bonding ritual for wolves—for most social mammals, I imagined—but I had to admit that while it might have been easier to comb out her hair if she was shifted, I far preferred grooming her in human form. Her warm, bare skin was a tempting distraction.

  She sighed and leaned into me a little. “Yeah, and I’ve got more vanity than sense.”

  The urge to brush her hair out of the way and kiss her neck was just about overwhelming. I took a deep breath and pushed those thoughts aside, looking for something a bit less intimate to focus on. “The wolves that attacked you are using some kind of vampiric magic. The guy with me, Tien, can track them, but only while they’re using that magic.”

  I could see just enough of the side of Sofia’s face to be able to tell she was frowning. “Marcus said he ate my mother.”

  The comb went still in her hair. “Jesus, Sofia.”

  She nodded a little. “Humans, wolves, and shifters are their prey, from what he said.”

  “So they were hunting you.”

>   She shuddered and nodded again. I figured her hair could survive a little while longer with the sap in it, so set the comb down and wrapped my arms around her, folding my body around hers as if I could protect her from the world. “We’ll kill them all,” I promised her in a whisper.

  Chapter 8

  Sofia

  I spent a long time in the shower scrubbing the stench of the fight off of me while the sound of running water masked the fact that I was crying. There had been so many times since my mother disappeared that I had hoped and prayed for closure. I had told myself it would be better to know that she was dead than to always wonder, but while knowing that she hadn’t just abandoned me and no longer having to torture myself with different scenarios would become a comfort eventually, the grief was too fresh and raw for it to help just yet.

  When I came out, wrapped in a robe and with my hair pulled up so I wouldn’t have to deal with washing and conditioning it just yet, I saw Hunter sitting on the couch with my dog. Leggy was watching him, but seemed to have accepted his presence, which was better than most strangers got. He wasn’t an aggressive dog exactly. He just had a good sense for people and wasn’t going to pretend to like anyone who rubbed him the wrong way. I appreciated that. A dog who was too friendly could get himself into a lot of trouble.

  Hunter tipped his head back and to the side to watch as I circled around from behind the couch. “How’s your arm look?”

  “It could probably use some stitches.” I turned my left arm to look at it. Only one tooth had managed to get deep into my flesh, but it had left a jagged line behind from when I jerked free and it gaped open. “I thought after the cops hassled you so much it might be more trouble than it’s worth to go to a hospital. Think you’re up for sutures? My own arm would be tricky for me.”

  “Yeah, I can do that.” He took my first aid kit from me and shooed Leggy off the couch so I could sit beside him.

  The kit was a bit more thoroughly stocked than most, because I was often called on to tend the wounds of the pack after hunting accidents or skirmishes that would look too suspicious to take to a doctor. Before me that task had usually fallen on Mama Marie, but I had better access to medical materials than she did. That it was for veterinary use wasn’t too insulting either, considering most of our wounds were taken in wolf form.

  I watched as he administered the lidocaine, then began stitching the wound closed in neat, quick movements. My eyes raised from my arm to his face to watch the look of concentration there.

  “So that’s where you disappeared to and why no one could find you? You joined the Army?”

  He nodded, then snipped off the extra suture material before he grabbed some gauze to bandage my arm up. “Yeah. I wanted to remake myself. Get away from everything that I had been before.”

  “I guess it worked,” I said softly. “You’re so different now.”

  He raised his eyes at last to meet mine. “And is that a good thing or a bad thing?”

  “I don’t know.” I shook my head a little, then sighed. “I miss you so much, Hunter, but you were gone for so long.”

  “I was.” He taped the gauze down into place. Once the bite was all covered neatly in white it hardly looked like anything at all. “Why didn’t you come to talk to me once you knew I was in the city?”

  I shrugged, pulling my arm back once he was done. “You didn’t talk to your parents. Why would you talk to me?”

  “Because you were there.” He said it quietly and matter-of-factly, as if his meaning should have been obvious. It wasn’t.

  “Where? In the city?”

  “No. You were there when your dad threw me out.” He set the first aid kit down before flopping into the back cushions of the couch. “My dads weren’t and they’d probably say they loved me and none of it mattered and all that bullshit. You saw me that day. You saw all the blood. You seeking me out would have actually meant something.”

  And I hadn’t, not once since he came back. I’d run after him in the immediate aftermath, but I had known he was in the city for years and hadn’t gone looking. Even now that we were talking again, he had been the one coming to me. Was that fair? Should I have been more proactive? Was it my place to push and beg to be back in his life? I wasn’t sure.

  I settled in against his side and laid one of my hands over his as I looked deeply into those pretty reddish brown eyes of his. “Would you please tell me what happened?”

  For a long moment he just looked at me, then turned his hand under mine to intertwine our fingers. That one small gesture eased some of the tension I was holding and I tipped my head to rest it on his shoulder, then closed my eyes.

  “I’d gone out for a run,” he started. “It was a cool, drizzly night, but I’ve always preferred those for running. You know how we put off so much heat when we really get moving. I was sticking to my human form because I didn’t want to bother finding somewhere private enough to get down on four legs. There was a lot on my mind, mostly because Ric didn’t like us being together.” He paused and I felt him move slightly. I opened my eyes to see him looking down at me. “Did I ever have a chance to tell you about that?”

  I pursed my lips, shaking my head. “No, but after he chased you off he said he’d never wanted us together and this was all for the best.”

  Hunter nodded, then rolled his eyes before settling back against the couch again and tipping his head to stare up at the ceiling. “He’d been hassling me about it since we got back from the Pismo trip and he saw we’d marked one another. I figured things would be better once school started up, but I was worried that he’d try threatening to cut you off financially or something. So I was thinking that getting married and then transferring from Humboldt down to UC Davis with you wouldn’t be a bad idea. Even if he cut you off, us being married would make it easier to work with financial aid without his input.”

  I reached up to comb my fingers through his hair. “I never knew you wanted to get married. That seemed too human for you.”

  He laughed shortly and shrugged before turning to press a kiss into the palm of my hand. “A piece of paper doesn’t mean much to me, but it would have had benefits and that’s what I wanted.

  “Anyway, that’s what I was thinking about that night. When I was almost back home, this guy comes up behind me and presses a butcher knife to my head and says to give him all my money.” Hunter paused, sighing. “Who the hell does that? Mugging a jogger with a giant knife. It was so stupid. Did he really think I had any money on me? He was tweaking so bad, maybe he didn’t even notice I was jogging.”

  “What did you do?” I asked.

  “I was young and pretty stupid myself. I told him I wasn’t going to give him anything and tried acting all tough. Of course, he didn’t know what I was. He just saw some skinny kid acting like an idiot with a knife pointed at him.” Hunter’s face screwed up in agony and he abruptly turned away from me as if he was jerking away from physical pain. “It was just so pointless.”

  I was quiet for a moment, waiting, but he didn’t go long. “What did you do?” I prompted again.

  “He attacked first,” Hunter said with such intensity I was sure those were words he had told himself a thousand times before. “He stabbed me through the shoulder with the knife and I guess I could have tried running; maybe even injured I’d be faster than a human. I wasn’t thinking of things like that, though. I was in pain and in danger. Instinct kicked in, you know?”

  I nodded slowly and combed my fingers through his hair again. “So you attacked him?”

  “I don’t really remember the specifics. I know I partially shifted from how my clothes got torn up, though. Everything just narrowed down to tunnel vision and...” He trailed off, then shook his head a bit. “When I was fully aware of everything again, his body was shredded and I had meat and blood in my mouth. I ran the rest of the way back to the apartment building, threw up once just before I went into the courtyard. I saw the blood in it, so I know I swallowed some.”

  He was
nineteen at the time, I remembered. We had seemed so adult and so sure of life back then, but looking back on it Hunter was barely more than a kid. My heart ached for him as I viewed the story in this new light. It wasn’t just that I had his perspective now, but also that I was able to look at it with the distance of time, instead of the pain and confusion of an eighteen year old girl.

  My arms slipped around him to hug tightly and I nuzzled at his cheek. “You were scared and hurt,” I reminded him softly. “You don’t go hunting humans.”

  His face turned to nuzzle me in return and his arms wrapped around me, drawing me into a close embrace. “That doesn’t bring a man back from the dead, Sofia. There’s no way to make up for that.”

  I didn’t really know what to say, so I just held him. My one hand remained in his hair, combing through those silky strands as I nuzzled him. After a few moments I caught his lips with mine in a soft kiss. I felt his lips respond to mine, returning the gesture, and then he ducked down to kiss along the side of his neck. When I felt the brush of his teeth ever so gently teasing at my throat I hissed inward and pressed closer to him.

  “Stay with me tonight,” I whispered into his ear as I held him to me.

  He went still, then drew back from me to meet my eyes. “I don’t know if I can do this. It about killed me to go home without you last night.”

  I frowned as I listened to him, wondering how it was that we could know each other so well and in so many ways and yet sometimes it felt as if we spoke completely different languages. “You don’t have to go home without me. I want you to stay.”

  “But that’s the thing. I have a home that isn’t with you. That’s my problem.” His hand brushed lightly against my pinned up hair, then settled on my shoulder. “There’s too much history here for me to be able to hold anything back. You’re not my old girlfriend. You’re my mate and I can’t let that go or pretend all we’re going to do is date.”

  I fell quiet, my eyes moving over his face carefully as though I could read all his thoughts there. I couldn’t, though. There was so much going on behind the scenes inside of him that I knew nothing about and I hated that. “Ten years later and you’re still a stupid boy.” My eyes finally left his face, in order to close as I leaned in and brushed a kiss against his lips. “I can’t make promises about the future, but you are my mate. I’m not denying that.”