“You jerk!” Dawn complained. “You were here last night and you didn’t say a thing to me.”
“We hadn’t really worked things out by then,” Hunter said in my defense. I could almost hear the rest of his thought on the matter. I’m still not sure we’ve worked things out.
I looked at him for a moment, trying to concentrate and see if it was the marks or just my imagination. When I couldn’t pick anything else up, I turned to flash Luke a quick smile. “Luke, this is my mate, Hunter.”
“Mate?” Dawn echoed.
Luke got to his feet to cross the room, holding a hand out to shake Hunter’s. He wasn’t as tall as Hunter, but there was greater bulk to his muscles. Just a glance at both men made it so obvious to me which animals lurked under their skins that it baffled me that humans were blind to this.
“Nice to meet you,” Luke said.
The beat of his aura—a dominant male on his own territory—was carefully muted and I could feel that Hunter was holding his back as well. While they both smiled in a perfectly polite way, both kept their teeth hidden when they did. Nothing to appear a threat, nothing to issue a challenge.
“Likewise,” Hunter said.
“What do you mean by mate?” Dawn asked me, likely straining herself to make it seem a casual question.
I gave her a sad smile, then gestured away from the room. “Why don’t we go talk somewhere private?” Once she nodded reluctantly, I turned back to Hunter. “You stay here and give Luke the nitty-gritties. He’ll understand them better.”
“All right.” Hunter leaned in to brush his cheek against mine in a familiar, very lupine gesture.
My eyes fluttered closed as I leaned in to return it, then pulled myself away to walk out of the room with Dawn. I really didn’t want to tell her all the things I had to, but even if she was going to hate me for all of my secrets I had to warn her to keep her safe.
Even if she hadn’t told me about Luke’s trust fund, I could have guessed that he came from money from the house alone. There was a cozy little breakfast nook off of the kitchen, looking like something off of an antique dealer’s Pinterest wall. I sat down at the table while Dawn got us both a cup of coffee, then came to join me.
I took a deep breath, thinking over how to start. Going with what she was already familiar with seemed like the best bet. I’d braided my hair before we went to the hospital rather than mess with styling it again, so it was easy now to brush a couple of the thick plaits out of the way and show her the mark on my neck. She’d seen it plenty of times before, but I had lied to her about what it meant when Hunter and I first claimed one another.
“Luke marked you like this,” I said.
Dawn pursed her lips in a frown and looked at me silently for a moment before I could see something click into place behind her eyes. “Is Hunter...not normal?” she asked, choosing her words carefully.
I chuckled in spite of the seriousness of what had brought me there on a Saturday morning. “No, he’s not normal,” I agreed. “He’s a werewolf and Luke is a weretiger, right?”
Her fingernails drummed against the side of her cup nervously as she craned her neck to look toward the living room and listen. I could hear the soft rumble of the men’s voices as they spoke to one another, but I was sure that Dawn couldn’t make out any of the words. She looked to me again, then nodded reluctantly.
So far, so good. I reached across the table to cup my hand around hers and stop her fingers from drumming. “I’m a werewolf, too.”
Her hand jerked free from mine so fast that some of her coffee sloshed out. I drew my hand back and wiped off the scalding liquid on the leg of my jeans.
“Geez, I’m sorry, Sofia,” she said reflexively, then paused to look up at me with curious eyes. “Did you know that there are rodent shifters in my family?”
I nodded slowly. “Somewhere pretty far back from the smell of you and you never showed any awareness, so I didn’t say anything.”
She got up from her chair and crossed over by the sink, then came back with a damp cloth to wipe off the spilled coffee from the table. I watched carefully, noting that her body appeared to be operating on autopilot.
“I should have told you sooner, but I thought you’d just assume I was crazy and not want anything more to do with me,” I said.
“That’s what I thought when Luke first told me.” She tossed the cloth into the sink and sank down heavily into her chair again. “I thought it was some cruel joke to make fun of me for trusting him and thinking he could actually like me.”
She hadn’t told me that before and it made me frown. Everything with Luke had been presented to me as though the two were blissfully happy from the start, but what else could she have said? We weren’t sharing all the details of our lives.
“You’ve worked things out by now and believe him, though?” I checked.
Her head bobbed up and down in a jerky nod. “He showed me.”
I tried to imagine what it would be like to see a shifter change for the first time. I’d been shifting since I was a small child and always around the pack, so I’d just always known about it to some degree. Frankie hadn’t known a shifter before me, but she had never actually watched me shift either. From the slightly haunted look in Dawn’s eyes, I guessed it must have been frightening for her.
“I’m sorry I didn’t tell you sooner,” I said. “I really should have. Not just because of our friendship, but because of the kind of guy you might attract.”
“It would have been helpful,” she agreed, then gave me a rueful smile. “What’s important is that you’re being honest with me now, though, right?”
“Yeah.” I smiled back at her and took a sip of my coffee, needing that bit of preparation before I went on.
“I have a pack here in the city. All of my family are part of it. We don’t hurt people and when we hunt animals we go out into a national park or something and stay clear of campers so we don’t frighten them,” I began, wanting to be sure she knew we weren’t terrifying monsters. “But there’s another pack that’s just arrived and they’re killing people. They need women with paranormal gifts for a ritual they’re going to perform tonight and you could be a target.”
“Oh.” Her hand was shaking slightly as she raised her cup to her mouth to sip off of it. “Luke can protect me from that, can’t he?”
I was quiet for a moment, honestly thinking. A tiger was a huge beast and could certainly kill a lone wolf, even one enhanced like Marcus was. An entire pack with similar enhancement, though? “I don’t know,” I admitted. “It might be wise if you get out of town just for the night.”
“What about other women in my family?” she asked.
I blinked, then closed my eyes for a moment as I mentally cursed my own oversight. “Your maternal female relatives would be in danger. It was your mother’s side that has the mouse shifter blood.” I was sure of that, having met most of her family at her wedding.
“I can’t leave them,” Dawn said with conviction. “Especially since they don’t know what’s going on.”
I wanted to argue with her, but there was no way that I could. She was right to worry about them. “Then maybe invite everybody over for dinner so you can keep an eye on one another. This pack has only attacked women who were relatively isolated, either alone or with one other person there.”
“I can do that.” Dawn paused, just looking at me for a moment with a thoughtful expression, then got to her feet and held her arms out. “You were really worried about telling me, weren’t you?”
I hesitated only for a second before I was on my feet and hugging her tightly, squeezing my best friend to me in gratitude. “God, yes. I just thought you’d take it so much worse.”
“Sofia, I’ve met your family. After finding out what Luke is, hearing the truth from you just finally made it all make sense for once.” She drew back and gave me a teasing smile.
I laughed, then pulled her in for another hug.
***
After w
e left Dawn and Luke, I had Hunter drive me back to my car so I could retrieve it. We both stood in Frankie’s apartment complex parking lot beside our cars, about as awkward as high schoolers flirting. We hadn’t even spent a solid twenty-four hours in one another’s company and yet it felt like years had passed since he’d rescued me from the pack the night before. I was reluctant to say goodbye for even a few hours and maybe I only imagined it, but I got the sense he felt the same way.
“I need to take care of my dog. He can go into the backyard on his own, but he’s going to need his food and water and attention,” I said.
Hunter nodded, one corner of his mouth curling up in a faint smile. “You don’t have to justify it to me.”
“I’m just saying. I’m not looking for an excuse or anything. If you really wanted to, you could follow me and hang around the house.” I remembered his reaction in my office, when I had told him I needed to spend the night there. It seemed as though we had finally moved past that, at least for the moment.
“I need to take care of some things at home myself. Call me when you’re free and we can meet up again to work on our plan for Marcus, okay?”
“Okay.” I paused, preparing myself for the harsh question I needed to ask. “Are you going to be okay fighting the wolf who’s most likely your father?”
Hunter scoffed softly. “Biological father. I’ve got two dads. I’ve got you. Blood isn’t what’s built my family.”
My eyes searched his face, but there was no indication that he was lying. No spike in his heart-rate, no tension. I smiled in relief, happy that the lure of long lost family wasn’t tempting him, then leaned in to kiss him.
It was meant to be only a brief brush of my lips against his, but Hunter wasn’t having any of it. One of his hands went to the small of my back to pull me against him as his lips caressed over mine in a slow, thorough onslaught. By the time he was done my mind had gone blank of anything but the pleasure of his touch.
“I’ll see you soon,” he murmured to me.
It was difficult to leave him, but he was right. We’d see one another soon enough. There was a war to plan, against a pack that was likely full of wolves related to him. I got in my car and headed back for home, still unsure of how we would handle all of this without getting ourselves killed. While I was driving I heard my phone ring, but ignored it. A few moments later there was the buzz of a text message.
As soon as I parked at my house I picked my phone up from the passenger seat to check the message. It was from Jay.
Followed their trail to a warehouse. Smelled a couple female feline shifters there. Probably Hunter’s people.
I forwarded the message on to Hunter to let him know. At least we knew where to take the fight.
Chapter 13
Hunter
“How the fuck are we going to fight another pack in a warehouse?” I asked as I unlocked my gun safe. “There’ll be blood and bodies and noise. The police will be called.”
“That’s probably why they picked it,” Sofia pointed out. She crossed the room to come stand just behind my shoulder, looking over it to see what I had. “Our pack was able to attack them at will last time because they weren’t in the city. Now they can just hole up somewhere and going after them is going to be difficult.”
“And they have my people as hostages,” I added softly. That was the worst part. People I had sworn to protect, taken into my fold as employees but also as something like a pack, were being held by these bastards. If I wanted them safe again, I’d most likely have to kill my biological father and even if I did that might not mean we could get them away safely.
Once Sofia was finished tending her dog, I had suggested we meet at my apartment to discuss what to do next. We’d done the same damn thing back at the pack’s building without any progress, of course, but ignoring the problem wouldn’t make it go away. We didn’t know what to do and we had to figure it out. Quickly.
“Did Luke show any interest in helping us when you were talking to him?” Sofia asked.
I shook my head. “He said he’d like to help, but didn’t feel comfortable leaving Dawn and her family unprotected. I can’t blame him.”
“No. I can’t either.”
I pulled out a box of hollow tipped bullets and showed them to Sofia. “Maximized damage to the body, decreased penetration through walls. It’ll be a lot safer to shoot them with these than to try using our claws.”
She took the box from me and opened it up to examine one of the bullets. “But higher chances of someone calling the cops and a lot more forensic evidence that can be traced back to us.”
“And masking it all as a bunch of animals fighting will get us torn to shreds.” I leaned against the side of the gun safe, a deep frown pursing my lips.
“It’s a logistical nightmare,” Sofia agreed as she dropped the box back into my hand.
I turned to put the box away, then picked up one of my tranquilizer guns thoughtfully. It used a CO2 cartridge, but otherwise looked much like a pistol. “What if we didn’t shoot them with bullets?”
She looked confused for a moment before I showed her the tranq darts in explanation of what the gun was.
“Those wouldn’t keep any of us down for long and these wolves are supposed to be hardier than us,” she pointed out. “Unless we loaded them with something else. I don’t know if silver would still work on them, but are any of the stories about vampires reacting to holy water and garlic true?”
I thought for a moment, trying to recall the details of what Tien had told me. “I’m not sure, but I know that dead blood works on them. Except it’ll only work if they’re feeding or in the middle of their ritual, because otherwise they’re immune to vampire weaknesses.”
Sofia looked about as frustrated as I felt. She came over closer, then leaned in against my side to rest her head against my shoulder. “That’s not much of a window of opportunity.”
“No.” I wrapped an arm around her to hug her closer and ducked down to nuzzle into her braids.
The ringtone I used for work numbers started chiming away in my pocket. I drew back from her quickly to pull it out, not wanting to waste a second in case it was anything important. A quick glance told me it was Tien calling.
“Hey. What’s going on?” I said.
“They found me.” His voice was tight and breathless, with the background hum of music playing somewhere. “I’d spent the day out at the farmer’s market, because I figured out in public would be safe, you know? But I got home and they must have figured out where I live somehow. Maybe they just went through the Big Bad employee records or something, I don’t know—”
“What happened?” I interrupted, before he could babble nervously any further.
“Front door busted in,” he blurted out. “My living room has a dead wolf in it.”
“Real wolf or...?”
He paused and I could imagine him doing his spirit fingers bit, trying to pick up messages from the dead. I was dimly aware that Sofia had stepped away to take a phone call of her own.
“I think she’s from the zoo,” Tien said. “I think that’s what I’m picking up from the body and she does look like the black female there. She was in the zoo and then had her neck snapped.”
It was horrifying, but a relief all the same. No one we knew had been murdered to send this message. It did mean that Tien was in even more danger than before. His home had been breached and the message was clear. They knew where he lived and they weren’t afraid to use that information.
“Everything should be over tonight, one way or another,” I told him, wishing that I could sound more reassuring about it all.
Sofia laid her hand on my arm, drawing my attention back to her. Her eyes were wide and horrified, the phone still held to her ear in her other hand. “Dawn’s gone missing. She went to pick up her grandmother for dinner and never came back. Luke can’t even find her car.”
I wondered just how long Marcus had been watching us before he made his presence known.
Did he know everyone whose lives we touched? He must have known about my attachment to Sofia, because he had been hinting about her in specific when he came to me at the parking garage. How much of it was going to be about the ritual he needed to do and how much was just getting revenge on the pack who nearly stopped him before?
“Tien, I’ll call you back. We’ve got another missing person,” I said.
“Shit. Okay. Call me back soon. I have no idea what to do with this wolf. Bye.”
After he had hung up and Sofia was off the phone, we just stood there in stunned silence for several moments.
She was the first to break the silence. “What was that about wolves?”
“Marcus’s pack found Tien’s apartment and broke in. They left a dead wolf from the zoo.”
“God, that’s horrible,” she breathed.
“Yeah,” I said.
“I’m going to call Frankie. If nothing else, burning them should stop them, right?” She selected the number in her contact list, then waited while it rang. I could watch the worried frustration on her face grow as it continued to ring unanswered. Rather than leave a voice mail, she hung up.
She could have been busy with another call, or taking a shower, or a nap, or a million other reasonable reasons not to answer her phone, but reasonable wasn’t the order of the day.
“Do you want to go to her place?” I suggested.
Sofia nodded and started to slide her phone back into her pocket, but it began ringing as she did so. She immediately answered it without checking the number. “Hello?”
As close to her as I was, I could hear enough of the other side of the conversation that it was no surprise when she swayed on her feet, looking like she might faint. Her cousin Ana was missing.
I gently pulled the phone from her hand and put it to my ear. “Damon? Sofia will call you back. Just stay calm. We’ll find some way out of this.”
Chosen Mates (Beasts of the Bay Bundle) Page 17
