Chosen Mates (Beasts of the Bay Bundle)

by Bell, Lilith T.

  He didn’t look especially pleased, but he didn’t protest either. “Watch out. They took three shifters and those women weren’t lightweights.”

  “I’ll be careful,” I promised, then watched as he went inside. Once I could no longer see him through the glass in the doors, I turned back to Frankie. “They’re werewolves, led by an alpha male named Marcus. They’re feeding like vampires off of humans and shifters and wolves. It’s giving them more power than they should have and so they’re pretty scary.”

  Frankie went a shade paler, her eyes widening. “These really aren’t people anybody could hope to arrest, then?”

  I shook my head. “I’m afraid not. I want to give them a chance, in case any of them are willing to stop what they’re doing, but I think we’re going to have to kill them to stop them.”

  Though I had said it quietly, Frankie looked around as if I had shouted it at the top of my lungs. There was no one near us. “I don’t know if you should be telling me about murdering people.”

  “Okay,” I said, just barely above a whisper this time. While I was horrified by the idea of having to kill other sapient beings, I knew that Frankie’s reaction likely had more to do with the law than the sanctity of life. “We’re going to give them a Care Bear Stare and then send them on their way with lollipops and a firm talking to. Does that make you feel better?”

  Frankie narrowed her eyes slightly. “You know what I mean. This whole situation involves far too much of me not reporting what I know and I don’t like it.”

  “Then don’t ask if you don’t want to know,” I snapped, before I took a step back from her. “You’re the one who pulled me into this in the first place.”

  “I know, I know.” She held up a hand to ward off my words, turning her face away as if she could barely stand to meet my eyes now. “This is just so much more than sitting around burning incense and communing with the elements.”

  “It’s messy,” I agreed. “There are bad people everywhere. Some of them have a little something extra like us and when they do...it gets messy. Somebody has to clean that up.”

  “I know.” Her shoulders sagged with defeat as she dropped her hand. “I’ve been lucky enough to not have anything paranormal come up since I made detective.”

  “That is lucky.” I wrapped my arms tight around myself and glanced up toward the sky, noting that it was starting to lighten up with hints of the morning sun. “I know my dad had to deal with some messy stuff. Hunter’s birth pack was hunting humans and he had to take them out.”

  “Jesus.” Frankie glanced toward the doors as if Hunter would appear there on cue, then back to me. “So what’s the deal with this guy? You’ve never mentioned having a mate before and now he’s everywhere.”

  “We grew up together, got involved in college, and things got complicated. It’s been years since we had anything to do with one another.”

  The paranormal chat done, Frankie moved to get the door and held it open for me. I walked in ahead of her, pausing just inside since I wasn’t sure where to go and she had already been in to see Hunter’s employees.

  “Are things any less complicated now?” she asked.

  I thought back to everything Hunter and I had talked about the night before. As much as he had opened up, there still weren’t any promises on my part. I wasn’t sure how far I could trust him and resolving things that had festered for so long with one conversation was the sort of thing that happened in simplistic romantic comedies, not real life.

  “I’m hoping they’re getting there,” I said.

  Frankie took me up to the second floor where Brandon and Jake were. Hunter was in the hall talking to a man with his arm in a cast and it seemed reasonable to assume that was Brandon. Through the open door into the room behind them I could see another man on a bed. His head was bandaged and he didn’t look to be in very good shape at all. Jake, then.

  Hunter paused in his conversation as soon as he noticed me and I saw his face light up, which made me smile tentatively in return. For a brief moment it felt like everything else fell away and it was just the two of us silently communicating through that look. Taking him somewhere quiet and calm where there was no danger and no awful past to haunt us was so tempting. I just knew it wouldn’t be enough.

  Our shared gaze lingered a moment longer before Hunter turned back to Brandon. “Do you need a drive home?”

  Brandon shook his head. “No, my girlfriend’s coming for me as soon as she can drop the kids off with her mom.”

  “Okay, good.” Hunter clapped him on the shoulder of his uninjured arm. “Let me know if there’s anything you do need. Our insurance should cover all your care since it happened on the job.”

  Brandon gave him a dry look. “Am I still going to have a job?”

  “As long as you still want it, yeah. You’re not the first employee of mine to get hurt on duty. We take care of our own.”

  That dealt with, Hunter stepped over closer to me. His arm automatically slid around my shoulders to draw me closer, as if that bit of contact would be enough to protect us both from everything that was happening around us.

  Brandon started to turn away to head back for the waiting room, then paused and turned back to look Hunter and me over for a moment. “You know, you’re a lot less of a prick today. Thanks.”

  To my surprise, Hunter actually blushed, his eyes lowering. “I gained a little perspective. Sorry about that.”

  “Did you learn anything valuable?” I asked once Brandon had left. I noticed there weren’t any other cops around, so they must have finished talking to Hunter already.

  “Their hunting tactics and what some of them looked like, but nothing all that good for our purposes.” Hunter steered me by the arm around my shoulders back toward the elevators. “The places they were attacked were relatively isolated and haven’t had cops swarm all over them, though. We might be able to track them back to their den by scent this time.”

  Frankie sighed. “You guys make me wish we had a werewolf on the force.”

  “I think maybe it’d be a good idea to get more noses on this than just yours and mine,” I pointed out. “We should get the rest of my pack. Especially if they’re taking shifters now.”

  I could feel Hunter tensing at the suggestion, his arm going rigid around my shoulders as his face got that same grim look from the drive over. As I was getting ready to start arguing my case, I heard a voice say, “Hi Hunter!”

  I turned my head just in time to see an attractive female orderly sauntering by and giving Hunter a smile that had far too much meaning behind it for my comfort.

  “Oh. Hey Natalie,” he said back without his expression changing much.

  He would have spoken to other women in the past ten years, I reminded myself. There was no reason to jump to conclusions or get jealous, especially when he still wanted to claim me as his mate. I did my best to ignore the brief interaction, then, and looked up into Hunter’s face once more.

  “Jay is the best tracker we have,” I said. “He’ll have a better chance at finding their den than either of us.”

  He visibly winced at his dad’s name before hitting the button for the elevator. “And you need to warn them in case Marcus goes after your pack next.” His voice sounded exhausted as he said the words, but there was no argument in them. “All right. Does your grandma still have all those old books of lore?”

  I brightened, nodding, then turned to Frankie to explain. “My grandma’s family has been keeping books on our history and mythology going back centuries, since one of her earliest maternal ancestors in Jamaica. There might be something in one of the books that could help us.”

  “Do you think your ancestors have fought with...” Frankie gestured vaguely, as if saying the words out loud would be too much. I’d found long ago that people didn’t really pay attention to anything we said in public about the paranormal. They either assumed we were crazy or just geeks who took it a step too far.

  I shrugged. “It’s worth a sho
t.”

  When the elevator doors opened we had to step aside to let the people inside spill out. A nurse paused to give Hunter a knowing smile and look before she continued on her way. When I turned to look at his face again, it was as blank as he could possibly make it.

  I slipped away from his arm around me as I stepped into the elevator, then moved to stand at the back of the car. Hunter stepped in without looking at me and pushed the button for the ground floor. Frankie seemed to be vaguely aware that something had occurred and moved to the far corner of the elevator. The doors slid shut, providing a few moments of privacy.

  “Did you fuck every single woman in this hospital?”

  Hunter’s back was still to me, so I couldn’t see his face. Instead, I saw his head drop forward, his shoulders bunching up irritably. Then he finally turned to face me again.

  “Look, I’ve gotten around a bit. None of them meant anything.”

  “Is that supposed to make me feel better?” I countered. “You’ve been having meaningless sex. Does it mean anything to you when it’s between us?”

  “Yes! Of course it does.”

  In my peripheral vision I could see Frankie doing her best to squeeze into the corner as far from us as possible.

  “How many?” I asked.

  Hunter blinked. “What?”

  “How many other women?”

  His eyes went up toward the ceiling for a moment as he did mental calculations, then he shook his head. “I don’t know. It’s been ten years. Do you know how many people you’ve had sex with?”

  I stared at him in exasperation. “Yes! Just you!”

  “Wow, really?” Frankie’s voice made me pause, having nearly forgotten she was there, and I turned to see her interested expression. “So you haven’t had sex for...what was it? Ten years?” she asked.

  I gave Frankie a dirty look. “That’s not the point.”

  She raised one eyebrow. “Isn’t it? How many years do you expect somebody to stay celibate after you break up?”

  I didn’t have an answer for her that didn’t leave me feeling incredibly stupid, so I remained silent. Maybe it was unrealistic of me to have expected Hunter to never be with anyone else, but that didn’t mean I liked seeing women ogling him with knowing looks.

  Chapter 11

  Hunter

  Sofia hardly spoke to me on the drive back to her house. The silence wasn’t entirely one-sided, though. I wasn’t sure what to say. That she hadn’t been with anyone else since I left was sort of gratifying in a way, but it also made me feel terrible to consider. She was a passionate woman with so much life in her and she hadn’t been enjoying that to its fullest, all while I was sleeping around. We hadn’t been together and she had remained alone.

  Once she had tended her dog and called her grandmother to give her warning that we were coming, we went back to my car. I kept glancing at her as I drove; her eyes were on the window every time I looked.

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  Sofia turned her head slightly to look at me, then shook it with a sigh. “No, I’m sorry. It was stupid of me to get that angry. Just seeing those two women looking at you like that so fast one after another made it seem very...excessive.”

  “I can imagine. But the second woman wasn’t somebody I ever slept with. She was friends with Natalie and tried to hook up with me when Natalie and I stopped seeing each other. I wasn’t interested. That’s all.” I said the last two words fervently, hoping that Sofia would accept the truth.

  “Okay.”

  I glanced at Sofia again. She had relaxed slightly and was no longer turned toward the window, which was a marked improvement.

  “You’re the only woman I need, Sofia. If I have you, that’s it for me, but I didn’t have you for a long, long time.”

  She smiled a bit reluctantly, then reached over to give my leg a squeeze. “I’m not angry. I was just feeling really overwhelmed, but it’s over now.”

  I hoped that was true, because there was more than enough on our plates to deal with without having jealousy complicating things on top of everything else.

  When we got to the apartment building her grandfather had bought for the pack, I parked the car and got out, but stopped in my tracks as the reality of having to face my parents again struck me. Before Sofia could walk past me I reached out to catch her hand. She paused, turning back to look at me.

  “I need to tell you something before we go in there,” I warned her.

  Her lips pursed in a small frown and she came in closer to me. “What is it?”

  “Your dad told me something when he threw me out of the pack,” I began, speaking slowly as I worked up my courage to keep going. “He said my birth parents were killed by the pack.”

  Sofia nodded slowly and covered our joined hands with her free one, then leaned up to kiss my cheek. “Mama told me.”

  I avoided her eyes, because that made it easier to talk about these sorts of things. “And did she tell you why they were killed?”

  “She did.”

  That cut out having to give awful explanations, at least. “I don’t know how I’m going to react to seeing my dads, knowing that now.” I swallowed hard, my stomach feeling like I was on a roller-coaster. “That’s another big reason I didn’t want to respond to their messages and why I decided to come to you instead.”

  She nodded sympathetically and gave my hand a squeeze. “If it’s too much for you, I can just relay everything you’ve told me and give Jay the addresses of where Brandon and Jake were attacked. You don’t have to see them at all.”

  That was more tempting than I wanted to admit and I felt a little ashamed at just how badly I wanted to take her up on her offer. The shame more than anything else was what brought my resolve back.

  “No. I’ve waited long enough.” I ducked to press a kiss to her forehead, then continued onward with her.

  The building wasn’t much different than it had been the last time I saw it. Sofia’s grandpa Ray had bought it in the 1960s and it had been built in the 1920s. Other than updating the paint, the exterior looked pretty much like it had stepped out of Roarin’ Twenties. There were three stories of apartments—most of them empty—and an open courtyard garden. I knew the interiors of the apartments had all been kept updated at least until ten years ago, despite the somewhat art deco appearance from the outside.

  No one came out as we walked through the courtyard to her grandma’s apartment, but I was sure we were being watched. There was simply no sneaking in an occupied wolf den and regardless of what the apartment complex looked like, it was still just another den.

  Despite the early hour, Mama Marie pulled open her door with a cheerful smile and immediately pulled me into a hug. I blinked, a little taken aback at the gesture, then relaxed into the embrace to hug her back.

  “I’ve missed you,” she said to me, then kissed my cheek before she pulled back to look me over for a moment. “You’ve put on weight. That’s good. You look like a man now instead of just an overgrown pup.”

  In spite of my dread over being there, I could feel one corner of my mouth curling up in a grin. “It’s good to see you, too, Marie.”

  “Come in.” She ushered us inside and gave Sofia a quick squeeze before she headed into her kitchen. “I’m making ackee and saltfish.”

  Sofia sniffed at the air and smiled. “And fried dumplings?”

  “I’m heating up the oil now.”

  “I’ll help.”

  Sofia followed her into the kitchen, leaving me standing there in the living room for a moment feeling lost. With nothing else to be done, I followed after them and found myself quickly put to work with the meal. It had been years since I’d helped anyone cook something like this, but the old habits came back quickly enough. The smells and the hustle and bustle of multiple people busy in a little kitchen made me almost unspeakably homesick.

  “Three shifters who work for Hunter were taken last night. They’re a lion, a leopard and a jackal,” Sofia said, then shot m
e a look for verification.

  I nodded. “All female. Taken by the same wolves who’ve been killing and eating humans.”

  “That’s terrible,” Marie said. “Sofia said on the phone you needed someone to track them?”

  “Yeah, since where they attacked hasn’t had dozens of cops all over the place, the scent trails should still be preserved.”

  Marie considered that as she dropped dumplings into the oil carefully. “You know who the best tracker is.”

  Out in the living room, the door to her apartment was pulled open. I turned to look and my mouth went dry with nerves at the sight of the two of them. It had been so long since I’d last seen my parents that for a moment I could see them as strangers might. Paul was a short Filipino-American in his late fifties, handsome and strong even now. The aura of power around him was enough that he could have been the alpha of the pack if he’d ever had mind to, but he never had. He had always been happy as a beta, supporting Sofia’s grandpa Ray and then her father Ric after him. Jay was Black, taller and more powerfully built, but didn’t have the same metaphysical power to him. He wasn’t dominant in any way and had always seemed happy with that. He had shaved all of his hair off since the last time I saw him, while Paul’s hair was streaked with grey and still thick. They both had new lines at the corners of their eyes, but otherwise the years hadn’t been too hard on them.

  “Hunter,” Jay said and I could feel the weight of ten years of loss in the way he said my name.

  I wanted to remain aloof, to continue punishing them for the secrets they had kept from me, but I couldn’t do it. “Dad,” I greeted him with an uncertain smile as I walked out of the kitchen. As soon as I was close enough, he pulled me into a fierce hug. I hugged him back tightly and when Paul came closer I threw an arm around him as well. “Papa. God, I’ve missed you. I’m...I’m sorry.”

  “We’re sorry, too,” Jay said, his eyes tearing up when he pulled away.

  “We’re just so glad you’re okay,” Paul rushed to add.

  The kitchen behind me had gone quiet, so I knew Sofia and Marie were watching the reunion. Anyone else and I would have wanted privacy from them, but my mate and her grandmother were acceptable people to let my guard down in front of. I was still reeling in part because I had apologized. I hadn’t planned it, hadn’t thought it was necessary either. The sight of my parents and knowing just how much suffering I’d inflicted on them had made the guilt unbearable.