by Zoe Winters
He shivered when her tongue ran over his neck to lap up the drops that had spilled. He felt himself heal as she pulled away and got a funny look on her face.
“That doesn’t usually happen,” she said.
“What doesn’t?”
“T-the healing. I can’t heal my umm… meals… after biting like other vampires can.”
It was so adorable the way she struggled for a word as if he didn’t understand she was using him as a food source.
Noah kissed her on the cheek. “That was my healing. I heal fast.” Faster now that he’d come into his full powers.
“Oh.”
He examined the places where she’d been burned again. It was fresh, clean skin, no scars, no evidence it had ever happened. Good.
Sydney looked down at her arms where the marks had been. “I didn’t think they would heal at all. Usually if I don’t feed right after an incident, I can’t heal properly. It’s part of why my dad has been so protective.”
She bent her arm. “Like this place on my elbow…”
“What place on your elbow?”
She twisted to look. “Maybe it’s the other one. It was a long time ago.” She checked the other one. “It’s gone.”
Noah smiled. They should have let her feed from him when they were kids. Who cared what anybody thought? It would have made her healthy and strong. It still might.
She spent the next five minutes twisting and turning, checking for all the scars that had piled up in her existence. “They’re all gone. All of them.”
“I need to go talk to the pack alpha. I’ll be back here before the sun comes up, but lock the door behind me and block it with the chair. Don’t open it for anyone but me. As soon as the sun sets again, we’ll leave.”
She nodded, a serious expression on her face. He was glad she seemed to grasp the danger of being in another pack’s den. But then Sydney’s life had probably been nothing but caution.
When he’d closed the door behind him, he waited to hear the deadbolt snap into place and the sound of the chair jamming against the door handle, then he made his way down the elevator and back into the main lobby.
In the corner was a baby grand piano that had obviously been there when the place was a hotel. To one side was a bar that also looked like it had been there for a while. The bar had been brought back into service, and several of the wolves were in there, tossing back a few. Others sprawled on old sofas and chairs with the stuffing coming out while metal played over the sound system. More than half of them were lying around sans clothing because it was the full moon. They would shift and hunt or run then come back for a while and drink.
It looked like a Bacchanalia down here, and Noah was glad he’d left Sydney in the room. He smelled sex on the air. He worried he wouldn’t have been able to keep Sydney safe in this and was thankful when they’d arrived that most of the wolves were out on their initial full moon run or hadn’t been outside yet.
Piles of clothing littered the floor. Most of the wolves probably wouldn’t dig through the pile to find their clothes until the next morning.
The main doors were constantly opening and shutting as wolves shifted and ran out. A few ran back in, shifted back, and dropped onto one of many sofas, goofy grins on their faces. The blood moon was making everyone high, and the alcohol wasn’t helping. There would be two more nights of this insanity before the moon began to wane. He had to get Sydney out of here before it got too crazy. Tomorrow night would be even worse.
Eyes followed him as he moved through the lobby and toward the bar. They sensed power, and a couple of them seemed ready to throw their fealty at him. It was natural for werewolves. Most weren’t comfortable being outside a strongly organized social order, and most weren’t driven to lead. They wanted to know who to follow, who to answer to, and who would keep them safe. When a stronger wolf came into a pack, there was always a risk that wolf could take over as alpha.
If Noah wanted to take this pack and run it, he could. Easily. He’d have to mark Sydney first, so she’d be safe. The idea of running a pack appealed to him on a deep instinctual level, but he had to get back to his family.
He wasn’t sure if he could go back and be a member of his dad’s pack and not feel that hot feeling under his skin that recoiled at not having his own group to run, but he needed to see them and spend time with them. Maybe a lot of time.
He needed to learn how to re-integrate with normal life on the outside. No matter his strength or instincts, he knew he wasn’t fit to lead, not after being a caged animal for so many long years. Even just being around this many other werewolves without a structured routine and cells to divide them, made him feel unhinged.
Noah wouldn’t show Sydney that side of him. He couldn’t. She had to feel safe and know she was protected. She didn’t need to have to deal with his mental issues on top of everything else. He’d have to work it out privately for himself. He’d figure out what normal was. He’d blend. It would be fine. But right now being anybody’s alpha was the last thing he needed in his life, no matter how many heads seemed to incline the most imperceptible amount when he neared.
Their current alpha sensed it, too, and she was in panic mode. As he moved into the bar, the metal from the lobby faded to make room for smooth jazz, but the two still met at the door and clashed liked fighting siblings.
The wolf behind the bar put a glass in front of him. “What’ll you have?”
Noah wasn’t sure how things worked here. Did they use some form of currency? Was it all on the house because it was pack? He wasn’t sure if he was being treated as a guest or a patron. He held up a hand. “I’m fine.”
He’d never had alcohol, but they didn’t need to know that. They didn’t need to know he’d never drank, never hunted like a real wolf, never had sex even. If they knew any of that, the sycophants among them would go back to their current leader and fawn over her.
“You’re our guest. Try this.”
Noah watched an amber liquid being poured into a small glass. He caught another wolf tossing back a similar drink in one gulp. The other wolf slammed his hand on the bar and let out a howl. “That’s harsh, Rafe. Damn. Did you mix it with battery acid this time?”
The wolf behind the bar chuckled.
Oh great. Noah knew this. He was being tested. It was something he understood. Being watched and studied and tested and measured was familiar. He knew how this worked.
His eyes never left Rafe’s, not even to look at the glass, as he picked it up and drank it down. Holy shit. What the fuck was that? He covered an impending cough with a growl and said. “Another.”
Respect. He passed.
“Nobody can take two shots of Rafe’s home brew whiskey. Trust me on this one,” the wolf Noah had watched pound one back said.
“I’m sure I can handle it,” Noah said.
He tossed the second one back and resisted the urge to melt into hysterics as the alcohol burned down his throat.
He stood from the bar and moved to the back of the lounge and sat in an old overstuffed chair in a corner so he could see the doorway and anyone approaching him. Thankfully no one was. He recalled how his dad had been with the pack. When Cole had been distant, they seemed to hang on to every word he said more.
They interpreted distance and silence as strength and power. But Noah wasn’t trying to give off any of that, he just couldn’t handle that many people crammed around him. The extent of how different he was from the other wolves was only just now becoming clear.
When he’d been imprisoned, the canned mechanical voice had kept order. He didn’t know how the world worked out here, how anything worked without a small glass cell to go back to and spend most of his time in. He’d been surrounded by silence for so long that any amount of raucous noise made him want to crawl under a table and hide, but if he showed that kind of weakness, they’d join together and attack, and soon after they took him out, Sydney would be at their mercy.
He couldn’t let that happen, so he ha
d to fake it. All they knew was that he’d escaped from the city. They had no way to know how long he’d been in there. They couldn’t know that all he knew about how packs worked and how life worked was from fragmented childhood memories, instinct, and the tiny bits of conversation he’d picked up over the years in the yard from his runs.
Many of his fellow prisoners had been taken as adults. They had entire histories to reference back to. He’d listened to them talk and had practiced sounding like them because if he didn’t, he’d known when he broke out of there, he’d sound like some stiff robot and would never be able to successfully blend into life anywhere.
Noah thought back to the escape. In so many ways they’d been lucky. He’d been terrified they wouldn’t make it past the service elevator. And then what would happen to Sydney? He’d long ago stopped caring what happened to him. If his escape wasn’t successful, he’d be happiest dead, but Sydney had given him the will to believe failure wasn’t an option. Failing himself was nothing, but if he failed her…
He’d never killed anyone before. When the guard had grabbed Sydney and took advantage of Noah’s distraction to jerk her free of him, he’d reacted on instinct. And in the lobby, he’d known it was them or Sydney. As he’d scooped her out of the laundry bin and run for the door, he’d glanced back at the macabre tableau he’d created with fangs and clawed hands. Why didn’t he feel anything?
Shouldn’t he have felt guilt, remorse, horror? Something? But he was blank. He wasn’t even sure what he was supposed to feel about it. But if he could just flip like that, fly into a rage and take dozens of people out, was Sydney safe with him?
He’d become too anti-social locked away from the world, isolated even from his fellow prisoners. It was too many years without any socialization. The orders and routines had substituted for pack hierarchy, and for a while it had fooled some part of his brain into going along with it.
He’d spent years repressing everything inside him that screamed to fight, because he’d known it was the wrong time to fight. He would only lose, and he shouldn’t start a fight he couldn’t win. But tonight, all the pent up aggression and rebellion rose up out of him with the power of the moon, and he’d reacted. It was as if an invisible trigger had been pulled. He’d gone from mild-mannered, quiet Noah, to crazy-killing-machine Noah in an eye-blink.
He looked up to find the alpha striding toward him. For whatever reason, she was running this pack alone, and he smelled the fear on her. If he could smell it, just having met her, he knew her pack could smell it. He knew she feared losing her wolves to him, but at this point, she may as well fear losing it to any one of the werewolves in the bar. If there was one thing he remembered from his dad, it was that the alpha couldn’t show fear to anyone.
Even if no one was waiting in the wings to take over, it de-stabilized the pack and introduced petty squabbling among the other wolves, testing boundaries, trying to find a barrier they would bounce off of so they could feel safe and cohesive again.
Shira scanned the room. Noah felt a wall go up around her as she pushed the fear down and tried to cover it. But she wasn’t nearly the expert at covering emotion that Noah had become, and everyone had already seen it.
They watched curiously as she sat in the chair across from him. A small table separated them. He didn’t say anything. He knew everyone in that bar watched him with as much scrutiny as they watched her. He wouldn’t speak first no matter how much he wanted to start figuring out how he’d get back home. Let her set the parameters of their engagement.
“I’m Shira,” she said for the second time that night. “This is my pack. Since you’re my guest, don’t you think you owe me a name?”
Noah considered giving her the number tattooed on his arm. But baiting her would be stupid right now if he still wanted her help. He needed transportation and a plan. If her pack had been holed up here a while—and it looked as if they had—they’d know where he could get the things he needed for the trip.
He watched her discomfort grow as he stared at her. Finally he said, “Noah.”
She still wore the black leather pants her pack had tossed her. But she’d changed into a more revealing top and had added boots and some gold jewelry to the mix. And make-up. Her smokey eyes and bright red lips were an orchestrated seduction, meant to draw him in. She formed her words slowly, and leaned in toward him.
“So, how did you meet the girl?”
Noah stared at Shira, his expression closed. He wasn’t going to play this game. Sydney wasn’t her business, and he wouldn’t give the alpha even the smallest tidbit of information that she could use in whatever her plan was. But he thought he knew. Though he’d been blocked off from the world, there were some things you just knew without knowing how you knew them.
When she saw she wasn’t getting anywhere via that route, she unbuttoned another button on her top. “Wow, it’s hot in here. The desert. You never get used to this heat.”
If that was the case, she shouldn’t be wearing leather pants and boots. Werewolves ran hotter, anyway.
She scooted her chair closer and ran a long red fingernail down the side of Noah’s throat.
He growled. “I told you, Sydney is mine.”
“You haven’t marked her,” Shira said.
“Not yet.”
“And even so, it doesn’t mean you can only have one. You can have whatever you want. Why don’t we move this conversation somewhere more private?”
Someone casually observing might guess that her desire for privacy was rooted in seduction, but Noah sensed it was because she feared he’d shoot her down in front of her pack. After all, he’d already given her a warning growl.
“I’m fine right here,” he said.
She leaned in even closer, her breasts brushing his arm as she whispered, “She’s too weak for you. You and I could run this pack.”
“Why? Because you’re afraid I’ll try to take it from you otherwise? Don’t worry, I have no designs on your pack.”
“A bit presumptuous don’t you think? I run a big pack with several decent fighters. You think they’d submit to my leadership if I weren’t strong enough to lead? This isn’t the human world. I couldn’t have slept my way to the top even if I’d wanted to. You saw me reclaim my human form out there when no one else could.”
Noah turned fully toward her, pinning her to her seat with a glare. “I know we both sized each other up out there under the moon. I was born in my fur. Tonight is my twenty-eighth birth moon. And it’s a blood moon. I escaped a heavily guarded facility, leaving dozens of bodies in my wake. You might be strong enough to lead, but we both know you’re just trying to seduce me because you think I’m going to take your pack from you. Between us, you know I would win in a challenge fight. And I think you’re smart enough to know I wouldn’t pull my punches. After all, it would be disrespect to hold back just because you’re a woman when you’ve proven you can hold a pack on your own.”
Her manipulative pout morphed into a snarl. “I shouldn’t have extended hospitality to you. I should have just let you and your girl die out in the desert. Between the vampires and the human magic users coming from the city, they would have ripped you apart.”
Noah shrugged. “Just turn off the seduction routine. I’m not interested in you or your pack. I just need a mode of transportation, a map, and some supplies.” He still wasn’t clear on what supplies he might need, but if he just said supplies, maybe they would magically come together in a bag for him. Let her lackeys sort out what kind of supplies he needed. They knew the area. There was no reason to show his ignorance. It would be another sign of weakness.
She sighed. “Fine. Truth be told, I want you out of my space.”
He very much doubted that. He’d smelled her when he’d first shifted in the lobby. She wanted to jump on him. If she took a mate, most likely she’d fall back to second in command, and none of the wolves in this pack seemed like someone she’d want to take a ruling backseat to. But someone new, someone with power
? Maybe. Though, despite her desire for Noah, there was also some truth to her words. She wanted to be the alpha, not second string of an alpha pair. And if she’d back the hell off, he would happily get out of her space and let her carry on as the queen or however she saw herself.
“Rafe,” Shira said over the music in the bar. “My room. Now.”
Rafe perked up at that and practically raced out of the bar. They’d all watched Noah turn her down, so now she had to prove she could still make any one of those wolves jump into her bed on cue. And most likely she could. She certainly had her charms.
Noah stayed where he was, irritated that they were no closer to getting the things he needed to get Sydney out of here. He’d wanted to leave the following evening as soon as she rose. They were still far too close to the facility they’d been held captive in for his comfort. But the possibility of getting out at sunset was beginning to seem less realistic.
His nostrils flared when he smelled Sydney in the lobby. He’d told her to stay in their room. He stalked out of the bar, livid that she hadn’t listened to him when he was trying to keep her safe. He could have thrown her down and marked her the second he had her. It would have protected her, but he was trying not to be a monster about it. What could she be thinking in this place with all these strange wolves? This wasn’t his dad’s well-behaved pack.
When he reached the lobby, he stopped dead in his tracks. The heavy metal screaming through the speakers that once were used for train announcements, made it hard for him to concentrate. All he could do was growl.
Two of the male wolves had dragged Sydney down here. He wasn’t sure if she’d left her room on her own, but the smell of fear on her made him somehow doubt it.
“What is the meaning of this?” Shira said, but her act wasn’t fooling Noah. He could tell by the way her body went rigid that she’d orchestrated it. She’d thought things would go a different direction and had forgotten to call off her dogs.
“But Shira, you said…”
“Release her this instant,” the alpha said.
Noah tensed, every instinct telling him to rip them all apart. But even if he thought there was some small chance he could do that, or at least could take out enough of them to intimidate the rest, it was too risky. Maybe this could be diffused another way. Maybe the cheery robotic voice had given him a sense of diplomacy over the years, no matter how artificial. If he’d used it once before to survive, he could use it now.
