He laughed again. “You have no need for jealousy. Sex with Isabelle meant no more to me than a good belly scratch and rather less to her, I think. Nothing worth repeating for either of us.” There was a whisper of sound outside the room and he took her hand. “Time for us to go.”
He paid polite compliments to the meal as he handed over a credit card to a young-looking man who called him “sir” and smelled of werewolf. The owner of the restaurant, Anna supposed.
“So where would you like to go next?” she asked as she stepped out onto the busy sidewalk.
He pulled his jacket on the rest of the way and dodged a woman in high heels who carried a leather briefcase. “Somewhere with fewer people.”
“We could go to the zoo,” she suggested. “This time of year it’s pretty deserted, even with the kids out of school for Thanksgiving.”
He turned his head and started to speak when something in a window caught his attention. He grabbed her and threw her on the ground, falling on top of her. There was a loud bang, like a backfiring car, and he jerked once, then lay still on top of her.
CHAPTER 3
IT had been a long time since he’d been shot, but the sizzling burn of the silver bullet was still familiar. He hadn’t been quite fast enough—and the crowd of people made sure that he couldn’t go after the car that had taken off as soon as the gun had fired. He hadn’t even gotten a good look at the shooter, just an impression.
“Charles?” Beneath him, Anna’s eyes were black with shock and she patted his shoulders. “Was someone shooting at us? Are you all right?”
“Yes,” he said, though he couldn’t really assess the damage until he moved, which he didn’t want to much.
“Stay where you are until I can get a look,” said a firm voice. “I’m an EMT.”
The command in the EMT’s voice forced Charles to move—he didn’t take orders from anyone except his father. He pushed himself off of Anna and got to his feet, then leaned down and grabbed her hand to pull her up from the frozen sidewalk.
“Damn it, man, you’re bleeding. Don’t be stupid,” snapped the stranger. “Sit down.”
Being shot had enraged the wolf in him, and Charles turned to snarl at the EMT, a competent-looking middle-aged man with sandy hair and a graying red moustache.
Then Anna squeezed his hand, which she still held, and said, “Thank you,” to the EMT and then to Charles “Let him take a look”—and he was able to hold back the snarl.
He did growl low in his throat, though, when the stranger looked at his wound: never show weakness to a possible enemy. He felt too exposed on the sidewalk, too many people were looking at him—they had acquired quite an audience.
“Ignore him,” Anna told the EMT. “He gets grumpy when he’s hurt.”
George, the werewolf who owned the restaurant, brought out a chair for him to sit on. Someone had called the police; two cars came with flashing lights and sirens that hurt his ears, followed by an ambulance.
The bullet had cut through skin and a fine layer of muscle across the back of his shoulders without doing a lot of damage, he was told. Did he have any enemies? It was Anna who told them that he’d just flown in from Montana, that it must have been just a drive-by shooting, though this wasn’t the usual neighborhood for that kind of crime.
If the cop had had a werewolf’s nose, he would never have let her lie pass. He was a seasoned cop, however, and her answer made him a little uneasy. But when Charles showed him his Montana driver’s license, he relaxed.
Anna’s presence allowed Charles to submit to cleaning and bandaging and questioning, but nothing would make him get into an ambulance and be dragged to a hospital, even though silver-bullet wounds healed human-slow. Even now he could feel the hot ache of the silver as it seeped into his muscles.
While he sat beneath the hands of strangers and fought not to loose control, he couldn’t get the image of the shooter out of his head. He’d looked in the window and saw the reflection of the gun, then the face of the person who held it, wrapped in a winter scarf and wearing dark glasses. Not enough to identify the gunman, just a glimpse—but he would swear that the man had not been looking at him when his gloved finger pulled the trigger. He’d been looking at Anna.
Which didn’t make much sense. Why would someone be trying to kill Anna?
They didn’t go to the zoo.
While he used the restaurant bathroom to clean up, George procured a jacket to cover the bandages so Charles wouldn’t have to advertise his weakness to everyone who saw him. This time Anna didn’t object when he asked her to call a taxi.
His phone rang on the way back to Anna’s apartment, but he silenced it without looking at it. It might have been his father, Bran, who had an uncanny knack for knowing when he’d been hurt. But he had no desire to talk with the Marrok while the taxi driver could hear every word. More probably it was Jaimie. George would have called his Alpha as soon as Charles was shot. In either case, they would wait until he was someplace more private.
He made Anna wait in the taxi when they got to her apartment building until he had a chance to take a good look around. No one had followed them from the Loop, but the most likely assailants were Leo’s people—and they all knew where Anna lived. He hadn’t recognized the shooter, but then he didn’t know every werewolf in Chicago.
Anna was patient with him. She didn’t argue about waiting but the cabdriver looked at him as though he were crazy.
Her patience helped his control—which was shakier than it had been in a long time. He wondered how he’d be behaving if his Anna hadn’t been an Omega whose soothing effect was almost good enough to override the protective rage roused by the attempt on her life. The painful burn of his shoulders, worsening as silver-caused wounds always did for a while, didn’t help his temperament, nor did the knowledge that his ability to fight was impaired.
Someone was trying to kill Anna. It didn’t make sense, but somewhere during the trip back to Oak Park, he’d accepted that it was so.
Satisfied there was no immediate threat in or around the apartment building, he held out his hand to Anna to help her out of the taxi and then paid the fare, all the while letting his eyes roam, looking for anything out of place. But there was nothing.
Just inside the front door of the lobby, a man who was getting his mail smiled and greeted Anna. They exchanged a sentence or two, but after a good look at Charles’s face, she started up the stairs.
Charles had not been able to parse a word she’d said, which was a very bad sign. Grimly he followed her up the stairs, shoulders throbbing with the beat of his heart. He flexed his fingers as she unlocked her door. His joints ached with the need to change, but he held off—only just. If he was this bad in human form, the wolf would be in control if he shifted.
He sat on the futon and watched her open her fridge and then her freezer. Finally she dug in the depths of a cabinet and came out with a large can. She opened it and dumped the unappealing contents into a pot, which she set on the stove.
Then she knelt on the floor in front of him. She touched his face and said, very clearly, “Change,” and a number of other things that brushed by his ears like a flight of butter-flies.
He closed his eyes against her.
There was some urgent reason he shouldn’t change, but he’d forgotten it while he’d been watching her.
“You have five hours before the meeting,” she said slowly, her voice making more sense once his eyes were shut. “If you can change to the wolf and back, it will help you heal.”
“I have no control,” he told her. That was it. That was the reason. “The wound’s not that bad—it’s the silver. My changing will be too dangerous for you. I can’t.”
There was a pause and then she said, “If I am your mate, your wolf won’t harm me no matter how much control you lack, right?” She sounded more hopeful than certain, and he couldn’t think clearly enough to know if she was correct.
DOMINANTS were touchy about taking suggestions fro
m lesser wolves, so she left Charles to make up his own mind while she stirred the beef stew to keep it from burning. Not that burning would make it taste any worse. She’d bought it on sale about six months ago, and had never been hungry enough to eat it. But it had protein, which he needed after being wounded, and it was the only meat in the house.
The wound had looked painful, but not unmanageable to her, and none of the EMTs had seemed overly concerned.
She took the metal ball out of the pocket of her jeans and felt it burn her skin. While the EMTs had been working on his back, Charles had caught her eye and then looked at the small, bloody slug on the sidewalk.
At his silent direction, she’d pocketed it. Now she set it on her counter. Silver was bad. It meant that it really hadn’t been a random shooting. She hadn’t seen who fired the shot, but she could only assume that it had been one of her pack mates, probably Justin.
Silver injuries wouldn’t heal in minutes or hours, and Charles would have to go wounded to Leo’s house.
Claws clicked on the hardwood floor and the fox-colored wolf who was Charles walked over and collapsed on the floor, near enough to rest his head on one of her feet. There were bits and pieces of torn cloth caught here and there on his body. A glance at the futon told her he hadn’t bothered to strip out of his clothes, and the bandages hadn’t survived the change. The cut across his shoulder blades was deep and oozing blood.
He seemed more weary than wild and ravenous, though, so she assumed his fears about how much control he’d have had not been borne out. An out-of-control werewolf, in her experience, would be growling and pacing, not lying quietly at her feet. She put the stew in a bowl and set it in front of him.
He took a bite and then paused after the first mouthful.
“I know,” she told him apologetically, “it’s not haute cuisine. I could go downstairs and see if Kara has any steaks or roasts I could borrow.”
He went back to eating, but she knew from healing her own wounds that he’d be better off with more meat. Kara wouldn’t be home, but Anna had a key, and she knew Kara wouldn’t mind if she borrowed a roast as long as she replaced it.
Charles seemed to be engrossed in his meal so she started for the door. Before she was halfway there, he’d abandoned the food and stalked at her heels. It hurt him to move—she wasn’t quite sure how she knew that, since he neither limped nor slowed visibly.
“You need to stay here,” she told him. “I’ll be right back.”
But when she tried to open the door, he stepped in front of it.
“Charles,” she said and then she saw his eyes and swallowed hard. There was nothing of Charles left in the wolf’s yellow gaze.
Leaving the apartment wasn’t an option.
She walked back to the kitchen and stopped by the food bowl she’d left him. He stayed at the door for a moment before following her. When he had finished eating she sat down on the futon. He jumped up beside her, put his head in her lap, and closed his eyes with a heavy sigh.
He opened one eye and then closed it again. She ran her fingers through his pelt, carefully avoiding the wound.
Were they mated? She thought not. Wouldn’t something like that have a more formal ceremony? She hadn’t actually told him that she accepted him—no more than he had really asked her.
Still…she closed her eyes and let his scent flow through her and her hand closed possessively in a handful of fur. When she opened her eyes, she found herself staring into his clear gold ones.
His phone rang from somewhere underneath her. She reached down to the floor and snagged the remnant of his pants and pulled the phone out and checked the number. She turned it so he could see the display.
“It says father,” she told him. But evidently the wolf was still in control, because he didn’t even look at the phone. “I guess you can call him back when you’re back to yourself.” She hoped that would be soon. Even with silver poisoning, he ought to be better in a few hours, she hoped.
The phone quit ringing for a moment. Then started again. It rang three times. Stopped. Then rang three more times. Stopped. When it rang again she answered it reluctantly.
“Hello?”
“Is he all right?”
She remembered the werewolf who had brought out a chair for Charles to sit on while the EMTs worked on him. He must have called the Marrok.
“I think so. The wound wasn’t so bad, pretty much a deep cut across his shoulder blades, but the bullet was silver and he seems to be having a bad reaction to it.”
There was a little pause. “Can I speak to him?”
“He’s in wolf form,” she told him, “but he is listening to you now.” One of his ears was cocked toward the phone.
“Do you need help with Charles? His reaction to silver can be a little extreme.”
“No. He’s not causing any problems.”
“Silver leaves Charles’s wolf uncontrolled,” crooned the Marrok softly. “But he’s giving you no problems? Why would that be?”
She’d never met the Marrok, but she wasn’t dumb. That croon was dangerous. Did he think she had something to do with Charles being shot and was now holding him prisoner somewhere? She tried to answer his question, despite the possible embarrassment.
“Um. Charles thinks that his wolf has chosen me as a mate.”
“In less than one full day?” It did sound dumb when he said it that way.
“Yes.” She couldn’t keep the uncertainty out of her voice, though, and it bothered Charles. He rolled to his feet and growled softly.
“Charles also said I was an Omega wolf,” she told his father. “That might have something to do with it as well.”
Silence lengthened and she began to think that the cell phone might have dropped the connection. Then the Marrok laughed softly. “Oh, his brother is going to tease him unmercifully about this. Why don’t you tell me everything that has happened. Start with picking Charles up at the airport please.”
HER knuckles were white on the steering wheel, but Charles was in no mood to ease Anna’s fears.
He’d tried to leave her behind. He had no desire to have Anna in the middle of the fight that was probable tonight. He didn’t want her hurt—and he didn’t want her to see him in the role that had been chosen for him so long ago.
“I know where Leo lives,” she told him. “If you don’t take me with you, I’ll just hire a taxi and follow you. You are not going in there alone. You still smell of your wounds—and they’ll take that as a sign of weakness.”
The truth of her words had almost made him cruel. It had been on the tip of his tongue to ask her what she thought she, an Omega female, could do to help him in a fight—but his brother wolf had frozen his tongue. She had been wounded enough, and the wolf wouldn’t allow any more. It was the only time he could ever remember that the wolf put the restraints on his human half rather than the reverse. The words would have been wrong, too. He remembered her holding that marble rolling pin. She might not be aggressive, but she had a limit to how far she could be pushed.
He found himself meekly agreeing to her company, though as they got closer to Leo’s house in Naperville, his repentance hadn’t been up to making him happy with her presence.
“Leo’s house is on fifteen acres,” she told him. “Big enough for the pack to hunt on, but we still have to be pretty quiet.”
Her voice was tight. He thought she was trying to make conversation with him to keep her anxiety in check. Angry as he was, he couldn’t help but come to her aid.
“It’s hard to hunt in the big cities,” he agreed. Then, to check her reaction because they’d never had a chance to really finish their discussion about what she was to him, he said, “I’ll take you for a real hunt in Montana. You’ll never want to live near a big city again. We usually hunt deer or elk, but the moose populations are up high enough that we hunt them sometimes, too. Moose are a real challenge.”
“I think I’d rather stick to rabbits, if it’s all the same to you,” she said. �
�Mostly I just trail behind the hunt.” She gave him a little smile. “I think I watched Bambi one too many times.”
He laughed. Yes, he was going to keep her. She was giving up without a fight. A challenge, perhaps—he thought about her telling him that she wasn’t much interested in sex—but not a fight. “Hunting is part of what we are. We aren’t cats to prolong the kill, and the animals we hunt need thinning to keep their herds strong and healthy. But if it bothers you, you can follow behind the hunt in Montana, too. You’ll still enjoy the run.”
She drove up to a keypad on a post in front of a graying cedar gate and pushed in four numbers. After a pause the chain on the top of the gate began to move and the gate slid back along the wall.
He’d been here twice before. The first time had been more than a century ago and the house had been little more than a cabin. There had been fifty acres then and the Alpha had been a little Irish Catholic named Willie O’Shaughnessy who had fit in surprisingly well with his mostly German and Lutheran neighbors. The second time had been in the early twentieth century for Willie’s funeral. Willie had been old, nearly as old as the Marrok. There was a madness that came sometimes to those who live too long. When the first signs of it had manifested in him, Willie had quit eating—a display of the willpower that had made him an Alpha. Charles remembered his father’s grief at Willie’s passing. They—Charles and his brother, Samuel—had been worried for months afterward that their father would decide to follow Willie.
Willie’s house and lands had passed on to the next Alpha, a German werewolf who was married to O’Shaughnessy’s daughter. Charles couldn’t remember what had happened to that one or even his name. There had been several Alphas here after him, though, before Leo took over.
Willie and a handful of fine German stonemasons had built the house with a craftsmanship that would have been prohibitively expensive to replace now. Several of the windows were thickened on the bottom with age. He remembered when those windows had been new.
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