The other shifter swore but didn’t retreat. Instead, he groped around at the small of his own back and drew forth something far more dangerous than my own throwing knives—the cold, hard weight of a gun.
Auntie Fen was right after all, I thought with a shiver. Because my aunt had tried to hand over a highly-illegal pistol rather than the three mostly-legal knives I’d ultimately accepted. She’d told me that toeing the line of human laws might not work out in my favor outside Haven’s walls, that guns hadn’t been illegal long enough to have dropped off the average criminal’s radar.
“But what if a human cop stops me and demands a body search? What then?” I’d asked her.
“So don’t do something stupid enough to get on their radar,” Auntie Fen had countered.
Now I regretted brushing off advice from someone older and wiser than myself. I’d been leery of carrying a handgun when possession alone was sufficient to send non-military personnel straight to jail. But getting shot by a shifter suddenly seemed like a much worse alternative...and significantly more likely too.
The shock of staring down the barrel of a pistol, in fact, sent words tumbling out of my mouth before I could weigh them against the requirements of good sense. “What do you think you’re doing?” I demanded. “Are you trying to get the human police involved?”
Unsurprisingly, my opponent didn’t answer. Instead, he widened his stance, bringing his second arm around to steady the first as he sighted along the top of the gun. The easy familiarity with which he held the pose suggested that this wasn’t any stolen weapon. Instead, my opponent had likely practiced with and experimented upon this pistol until he wielded it like an extension of his own skin. Bad news.
“Drop the knife and go inside,” my opponent told me after one long moment, backing up his command with a jerky gesture of his shallow chin. But he didn’t speed me along my way with an alpha compulsion like the one he’d slapped onto me the night before. Was the oversight merely due to confidence that I’d already been beaten, I wondered, or was there another reason behind eschewing his own werewolf strength this morning?
Either way, I wasn’t about to walk into what was bound to be an ambush. So, taking care to slump my shoulders and keep my eyes averted in a show of submission, I nonetheless refused to budge. “I can’t drop a blood-stained knife on the grass on a human campus. Think for a minute about where we are and who’s around. Chief Greenbriar will gut us both if we’re responsible for cluing in one-bodies to our presence.”
Rather than reasoning with me, my opponent growled and took a single step closer, prompting hairs to rise along the back of my neck. My mind raced as I assessed options, finding each one less palatable than the last. Because every potential solution I dreamed up ended in the exact same way—with shifter blood analyzed in a human hospital where doctors were bound to notice the oddities of werewolf metabolism and DNA. The potential for discovery was more daunting than the current risk to my own skin.
“Don’t...” I started. Then a cool, feminine hand landed on my left shoulder blade and cut into my desperate plea.
“Enough,” Andrea Greenbriar intoned, her word encompassing us both and pushing all air out of my lungs in the process. Rather than looking in my direction, though, she chided the male werewolf for his overstep. “I merely asked you to ensure Ember wasn’t armed,” she said, her words quiet but their intensity nonetheless prompting her underling to look away submissively while tucking the gun back underneath his clothes.
Then the female’s piercing gaze turned on me, cold air spiraling around my face as her displeasure made itself known. “And you,” Andrea murmured, “you should know better than to come to a meeting with knife in hand.”
It was patently unfair to accuse me of being armed when her own bodyguard boasted the more dangerous weapon and had been the first to attack. Still, I kept my mouth shut and instead tried to figure out how much of today’s kerfuffle was coincidental...and how much pointed at another, deeper game.
Had Andrea’s bodyguard really acted against her wishes, both today and last night? Was there a reason the male had been able to use an alpha compulsion on me then but not now?
Puzzles pieces clicked together in my mind, but gaping holes continued to mar my understanding of the situation. However, since the female before me was obviously powerful enough to force me to jump off the top of a building if she so desired, I figured there was only one truly important issue to deal with at the present moment.
My companion needed that apple turnover sooner rather than later.
So, flipping my knife around until I gripped the bloody blade instead of the handle, I extended the hilt in her general direction. “My apologies, alpha. I only came to talk.”
Andrea had been willing to tear out the throat of an elk with her own lupine fangs two nights earlier, but her lip curled in disdain now as she took in the red smears and greasy sweat that streaked the recently handled hilt. “Keep it,” she told me. Then, speaking to her underling as if to a dog, she intoned an unnecessary compulsion: “Stay.” Finally, turning on her heel, Andrea Greenbriar strode back into my shop, allowing the glass door to settle closed behind her with a whoosh of displaced air.
For a moment, the bodyguard and I eyed each other with stark distrust coloring both of our faces. Then, with a shrug, I wiped the sullied blade on the inside of my shirt where the stain wouldn’t show before slipping the weapon back into its holster.
It took an effort of will to turn my back on an armed werewolf who had attempted to maul me only eighteen hours earlier and had considered shooting me today. But I clenched my jaw and raised my chin. Then, ignoring my own trepidation, I followed the alpha’s mate into my own chocolate-scented shop.
“I’LL TAKE A LARGE COFFEE, cream and no sugar,” Andrea informed me the moment I entered the space. She was seated at a corner booth where she could watch all activity both outside and inside while being largely hidden in shadows herself. Despite the less-than-adequate lighting, though, my lupine eyes could pick my opponent out quite admirably.
And as I filled the female’s order, my surreptitious glances proved that she wasn’t nearly as poised as she wanted to appear. Instead, one shoe tapped repeatedly against the floor tiles even as her fingernails drummed against the table top three feet above. Meanwhile, Andrea’s gaze slid in my direction far too frequently to maintain her pretense of aloof boredom.
No, the conclusion was obvious—despite her heavy-handed tactics, my current companion was a devoted mama worried about her adult pup. I couldn’t let her off the hook entirely, but I still slid a pastry onto a plate and carried it over along with the requested coffee. “I hope you like apple turnovers,” I murmured as I took my own seat on the other side of the scuffed tabletop.
For a split second, my companion’s face softened as the scent of cinnamon rose between us. But rather than digging in, Andrea ignored the treat and got right down to business.
“If you threaten my son, you threaten me,” she intoned, eyes boring into mine so dangerously they sent my inner wolf whimpering for cover. And between the lines, I read the rest of the threat as easily as if it had been voiced aloud. Being mugged in a public setting isn’t the worst that can happen, Andrea’s eyes informed me. Last night and this morning were warnings. Don’t force my hand.
Growling very faintly under my breath, I accepted her words for the admission of guilt they were. And I was very tempted to reply in kind, maybe offering up a verbal slap that reminded Andrea of my own pack’s power.
But that would have been counterproductive...especially since I was currently acting under my own volition and without any nearby relatives to back me up. So I merely shrugged and pointed at her turnover. “If you don’t want that, I can get you something else.”
Closing her eyes in momentary frustration, human politeness eventually won out over Andrea’s lupine urge to dominate. The alpha werewolf raised the pastry to her lips with the daintiness of a debutante...and, ever so gradually, the power of spicy apple
s began relaxing her tensed muscles.
Here’s the thing about apple turnovers. They don’t look like much compared to a triple-chocolate-chunk cupcake with a drizzle of syrup across the top. And yet, the treat’s melding of apple, sugar, and cinnamon proves that a chef doesn’t need dozens of complicated ingredients to create something truly divine.
At her core, Andrea was similarly simple. She was a hunter, a mother, and a mate. And while I’d brought the female here as a mother, it was the hunter I wanted to tap into now.
So I waited until the sugared fruit had sweetened my companion’s temperament, then I let her parental instincts off the hook. “I’m not going to say anything about Aaron,” I informed her. “That’s his own personal business...although, if I was sticking my nose in, I think he and Roger make a pretty good match.”
For a moment, Andrea’s eyes flashed with anger. I’d brought the city’s second most powerful werewolf here under false pretenses and we both knew it. Still, it was hard for a mother to fight against open-armed acceptance of her pup, so after a moment her inner wolf stood down.
“Then what do you want?” Andrea asked carefully, sipping at her coffee and forgetting to scan for danger this time as she nibbled another bite out of her rapidly disappearing turnover. Not that there was likely to be anything worth guarding against on this college campus...well, except for the barely leashed bodyguard she herself had brought along.
“I want protection for a family of humans,” I answered once Andrea’s eyes returned to my face, only to be interrupted before I could get another word out.
“The Garcias?” my companion asked, eyebrows rising. “Arnold told me you were concerned about them. He’ll send a few men to look over the situation this afternoon. But I have to say, it’s already under control.” And not worth blackmailing me about, my companion’s accusing eyes added.
“Well, here’s the thing,” I answered. “I don’t want him to send out any men. As you well know, the males in this city are having trouble keeping their paws to themselves.”
Because I didn’t entirely buy Andrea’s implication that her bodyguard had attacked me the previous evening under her own overt orders. Sure, the female had learned about her underling’s lapse and had used that knowledge to intimidate me today...but I suspected she’d neither commanded nor approved of his actions at the time.
I’d yet to figure out exactly why the bodyguard attacked me yesterday, and I had similar questions about Roger’s actions the night before. But I was close to tracking down answers. And in the meantime, I couldn’t afford any loose cannons sniffing around Harmony’s apartment, nor did I want Chief Greenbriar sussing out Rosie’s connection to my missing sibling if the toddler happened to step outside and into the jaws of a supposedly protective wolf.
So I ignored Andrea’s glare and barreled right into the solution I’d come up with the night before. “I won’t tell anyone about Aaron and I’ll continue pretending like he’s mate material. But you have a problem within your own clan. After setting a female guard on my landlady, I recommend you track down the source of your pack’s rotten core.”
Chapter 19
Despite the drama of the morning, the rest of my work day proved surprisingly uneventful. The brownie-eating professor brought in his wife...who was plump and cheerful and didn’t complain one bit about her husband’s dietary preferences. Meanwhile, yesterday’s female students returned with three friends in tow, and the shop gradually began to feel more like a cheerful meeting place and less like the cold, silent corner of campus it had initially appeared.
Feeding the masses warmed the cockles of my heart...but I still grew increasingly jittery as the day progressed. It was hard to remain in one place while my mind ran in several different directions at once, none of which involved pastries and all of which reeked of potential danger. So, at 3 pm, I dialed the same number I’d called far too often throughout the day, hoping for yet another status report on my absent sister.
“Still no trouble,” Lissa answered, not bothering to wait for my question this time around. The female shifter and her partner had been stationed outside Harmony’s apartment building within fifteen minutes of Andrea leaving my own premises, and their calm assurance should have dismissed all worries about my sister-in-law’s safety. And yet...I still harbored a sinking suspicion that something was going wrong out in the city while I whipped up frosting and poured cream into coffee cups within my insulated bubble here on campus.
“Are you positive?” I asked for the sixth time that day. Then racking my brain in an effort to guess what the stationed guards might have missed, I added: “What about the side entrance?”
“Marcia is standing right in front of it. And before you ask, neither of us has seen or smelled a hint of fur since we got here. This isn’t the shifter side of town. You can relax.”
Lissa’s frustration was evident in her clipped sentences, and I couldn’t really blame her. Staking out a human apartment building was a pretty low-level chore, and it wasn’t fair of me to suggest the shifters in question weren’t up to the job. Still....
“What about the roof? Would you be able to see if anyone took an aerial approach?”
“Have you even been here?” Lissa snapped back, her politeness finally wearing thin. “There’s no way to access the roof short of a helicopter. And I can promise you, I would hear a chopper if hypothetical miscreants tried to fly in and nab a human out from under my nose.”
“Okay,” I answered, dropping my head into one hand and letting the issue drop. The other shifter was right—I was being overprotective and a total pain in the butt.
So, after a much-needed apology, I forced myself to hang up the phone. I didn’t call to check in for the next two hours. And when quitting time rolled around, I didn’t take advantage of my spare hour between work and mandatory Greenbriar dinner to rush home and check on Harmony’s defenses as I’d initially intended.
Instead, I accepted the fact that the Garcia family was being guarded by pack. Since I’d also run out of avenues to explore with regard to Derek’s disappearance, I chose not to spin my wheels and instead headed in the one direction bound to soothe my tattered temperament.
I’d take Sebastien up on his invitation and drop by his office. The decision had nothing to do with the molten chocolate coloration of the human’s eyes, nor with his absence from the shop today. Instead, I told myself I was merely looking forward to talking about something other than werewolves for a change.
LIKE THE REST OF CAMPUS, the college’s psychology building was nearly empty at quitting time on a summer evening. So I wandered down dimly lit corridors for several minutes, searching for the room number from Sebastien’s card. And as I skimmed research posters lining the endless hallways, my eye snagged upon the long list of funders who had supported even the simplest of experiments.
Dad would have laughed at all the ten-dollar names, and I couldn’t resist perusing them now as I ambled past. I was vaguely familiar with the National Institute of Science and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (or DARPA for short), but even the private scholarship funds seemed to require listings up to a dozen words long.
“Dorothy E. and Kenneth C. Upton Foundation,” I read aloud, trying to decide whether the couple had been clowning around by creating an acronym that turned into an invective when read backwards...or whether they’d just missed out on the joke. Humor aside, Derek—with his lone wolf’s obsession for making ends meet—might have been attracted to the seemingly endless funds made available by well-heeled college alums. Was my brother’s obsession with the campus merely an attempt to support his lavish lifestyle without having to sign on with an established pack?
The idea made intuitive sense...yet it still didn’t quite ring true. Maybe I just didn’t want to turn my brother into either a desperate loner or a money-grubbing scam artist, but my gut told me there was more to Derek’s interest in the college than the mere need for easy financing.
The answer, I sus
pected, lay with the key tucked away in my pocket. Fingering the cool metal, I considered trying it in every knob I passed. Surely the answer to Derek’s disappearance lay here on the campus he’d talked so much about.
And yet...how many doors existed in this building alone? And how many other parts of the city had Derek mentioned in passing during our dozens of chats? No, I needed to come up with a more structured approach to the current investigation or I’d continue getting nowhere fast.
Meanwhile, I turned a corner and discovered that the room numbers lining the hallway were finally heading in the proper direction. The clack of fingers on a keyboard drew me yet deeper into the complex, then I forgot all about my brother as I peeked through an open doorway and caught sight of the back of Sebastien’s enticing head.
I knew the professor could never be anything more to me than an intriguing acquaintance, but my breath still caught as I took in the sunlight glinting through my companion’s short yet tangled locks. My muscles relaxed for the first time all day as his scent wafted into my nostrils. And for an instant, my lupine half closed its eyes and sighed in contentment, as if we’d returned from a lone hunt to snuggle into the heart of our chosen pack.
Focus, Ember, I reminded myself. I wasn’t here to be sucked in by masculine beauty and I definitely wasn’t here to find a mate. I was hunting for my brother, and to that end I forced myself to tear my eyes away from Sebastien’s muscular form and peruse his workspace instead.
Unfortunately, what I saw made the human more intriguing rather than less so. Because the room was awash with plants. A well-trained ficus arched around the side of one large window while spider plants spawned babies in hanging baskets above his head. Along the opposite wall, a fish tank burbled with life, colorful swimmers darting out from amid the fronds of pond plants while colorful snails slimed their way up the insides of the glass surfaces.
Shifter Origins (Series-Starter Shifter Variety Packs Book 1) Page 44
