The Wolf Marshal's Pack

by Chant, Zoe

  So she tried to keep her voice light. “You’re poaching naked in a rainstorm? I think you need to get better hobbies.”

  The werewolf tilted his head. “You’re scared.”

  “No. I’m used to the woods. I’ve seen scarier things than you.”

  “Is that so? Like what?”

  She said the first thing she could think of. “Centipedes.”

  “Centipedes?”

  “I hate them. Too many legs.”

  “You’re scared,” the werewolf repeated. His smile seemed to savor her. “You don’t want to show it, but I can smell it on you.”

  He was sniffing at her, his nostrils flared. He looked at her camera bag.

  “What’s that?”

  Aria tightened her hand on the strap. “It’s my camera.”

  The werewolf’s lips actually wrinkled back as he growled. “Give it to me!”

  His breath smelled like blood and meat.

  “I didn’t see anything!” Aria said, her panic getting the better of her. “All I took pictures of were the wolves!”

  She realized immediately, with a freezing cold dart of fear down her spine, that she had just messed up. He hadn’t known that she had seen him change. He might have been satisfied with just breaking her camera.

  But now he knew for sure.

  She stayed quiet now, keeping her eyes on his hands. She was used to watching animals’ body language. It couldn’t be that different with humans. She just had to pay attention to the way he moved.

  “You shouldn’t have come into my territory,” the werewolf said, his voice a low rumble.

  His smile wasn’t a smile after all, Aria realized. His teeth were bared. He wasn’t smiling, he was snarling.

  And his mouth was changing. It was elongating into a snout.

  Couldn’t get much clearer body language than that.

  Aria put all of her strength into her arm and swung her camera bag towards him.

  It hit his head with a hard clunk that was immediately drowned out by him howling in pain.

  Aria didn’t stick around to hear about how much it had hurt. She took off running as fast as she could, tearing through the trees and ignoring the branches snapping against her face. She skidded in the mud, her arms pinwheeling as she tried to keep her balance. Falling could cost her her life.

  There was a burning stitch in her side. She was panting like crazy.

  And he was gaining on her. She could hear the soft gallop of wolf paws on the forest floor. She had delayed him and maybe dizzied him, but he was still faster than she was, and he was getting closer and closer by the second.

  One of her feet smashed into a rock, and she went careening forward, falling face-first onto the damp ground. She caught herself just in time to keep from smashing her head on a log. She tried to stand, but her feet kept slip-sliding in the mud. She was still in a half-crouch when the wolf barreled into her from behind.

  Aria rolled over. She looked deep into the wolf’s sickly yellow eyes.

  She couldn’t see anything human there at all.

  She knew there was no point to begging for her life. He wouldn’t listen. He wasn’t hesitating now, he was just savoring the moment, drinking in her smell and the sensation of having her pinned to the ground. He was just gloating over his fallen prey.

  The other two wolves flanked him but stayed farther back. The rust-colored one let out a little whimper.

  But it was just a normal day, Aria thought as she looked her death in the face. Everything was fine. A couple of nice pictures of rabbits, Mattie’s flower crown, Mom’s deviled—

  Her mom’s deviled eggs. With their smoked paprika.

  The wolf didn’t have her arms pinned down. In a flash, Aria dug into her knapsack and came up with a squishy handful of wax paper and deviled eggs.

  She shoved it in the wolf’s face as hard as she could, feeling the bundle burst open on his snout. Egg and mustard and mayonnaise smeared everywhere, but more importantly, so did the spicy, peppery smoked paprika. It went straight into his eyes and his nose.

  The wolf recoiled, his eyes suddenly wet and bloodshot. He let out several explosive sneezes and clawed miserably at his snout.

  The pepper had burned out his nose and left him temporarily blind—and left Aria temporarily free. She was never going to get a better shot than this.

  Aria scrambled up and raced away.

  She didn’t stop running until she flung herself into her car.

  Her parents and daughter both gaped at her.

  “Aria, baby, what’s—”

  “Drive!” she said, panting and shaking. “Just drive!”

  2

  At first it seemed like it was going to be a slow day.

  Sterling was far from Batman’s crime-ridden Gotham, but it wasn’t exactly sleepy, either. Most of the time, Colby Acton and his fellow US Marshals found plenty to do. They handled all the usual Marshal business—courthouse security, witness protection, asset seizure, fugitive hunting, and prisoner transport—and, on top of all that, they sorted out any shifter-related crime that popped up in the area and needed some quiet attention. They were one of the few secret shifter teams stashed in federal law enforcement. Combined with all their regular responsibilities, that usually meant that they had plenty to do.

  But not on this particular July morning, apparently.

  “Garbage can basketball?” Colby said hopefully.

  Their chief, Martin, shook his head. “We all already know you’d win.”

  “Nobody can beat a werewolf at basketball,” Gretchen said. “That’s why Michael J. Fox is so good at it in Teen Wolf.”

  Colby nodded. “It’s true. Genetics are on my side.” He tilted his head, considering what athletic advantages his boss’s pegasus identity might give him. “You’re probably really good at polo?”

  “I don’t make enough money to play polo,” Martin said dryly. “That’s a rich people sport. Try Theo.”

  Their resident dragon looked up from his phone. Colby had no doubt that he’d been in the middle of composing a passionate, perfectly worded love text to his mate, Jillian, but Theo would never be rude enough to ignore them completely. Manners were as much of a part of dragon culture as hoards of gold.

  And Theo, who had grown up in an elite, snobby, all-dragon enclave, knew a lot about both.

  “Polo is very popular back home,” Theo agreed. “And rugby, golf, lacrosse, billiards, cricket...”

  “You play cricket,” Colby said. He couldn’t believe it. “You know we’re in America, right?”

  “I do, but my hometown is a little confused on the concept. Anyway, I’m not that good at it, but I like the part where the game stops and everyone has tea.”

  Colby was afraid to ask if he was joking.

  “I’d rather play garbage can cricket than garbage can basketball,” Gretchen said.

  “We have a glass-fronted office and we work on the taxpayers’ dime,” Martin said. “None of you are playing garbage can anything.”

  Colby’s cell phone rang.

  At this point, he would have cheerfully talked all day to a telemarketer just to rescue himself from boredom.

  Luckily for him, he didn’t have to. The caller was Detective Wilson Wynette, a buddy of Colby’s and a local cop who sometimes fed them cases down the pipeline. Wilson liked to play dumb, but he was sharp enough to have realized a long time ago that there was something different about Colby’s office. He didn’t know the truth about shifters. But he knew that his local Marshals dealt with what he called “weird shit.”

  “And this,” Wilson said, “is weird shit.”

  “What kind of weird shit?”

  “We have a woman named Aria Clarke who was picnicking out at the nature preserve.”

  Colby felt like there were two puzzle pieces in his head that were trying to fit themselves together. “That name sounds familiar.”

  “She’s local. Maybe you met her.”

  “Maybe,” Colby said. But for
some reason he didn’t think so. “Sorry, keep going.”

  “Ms. Clarke brought her parents and her eight-year-old daughter along, but they stayed in the clearing while she went off into the woods to take some pictures.”

  The puzzle pieces came together with an almost audible snap.

  “Aria Clarke the nature photographer?”

  There was the sound of rustling papers. “Um, yeah, I guess that’s what she does for a living. Acton, how do you know the names of nature photographers? If you’re that much of a nerd, why are we even friends?”

  “I like nature,” Colby said stubbornly. “She’s an incredible photographer. Keep going.”

  “Okay, incredible photographer Aria Clarke goes off to take some incredible pictures, and when she’s on her way back to meet up with her family again, she runs into a naked man who tries to smash her camera.”

  Yeah, Colby guessed that qualified as weird shit.

  “Why?”

  “No clue. Maybe he thought she’d snapped a full-frontal pic of him, and he doesn’t have a lot to be proud of in that department. Anyway, he threatened her, she clocked him on the head with her camera—”

  “I knew I liked her.”

  “—and ran. We showed Ms. Clarke some possible matches based on her description, and she IDed the dude as trouble with a capital T. Eli Hebbert, a federal fugitive wanted for robbery and murder. This guy crashes into towns and takes what he wants from them, and he leaves a lot of bodies behind him.”

  “Does he kill just as part of the robbery, or does he do it on its own?”

  “Mostly the former. He’s straightforward, I’ll give him that: come in, bang-bang, grab, out the door again. But he tends to get a girlfriend—he likes them sweet, blonde, and a little silly. One of them died.”

  Colby had been on the job a long time, and he’d heard about a lot of ugly things, but guys hurting the people who had trusted them always struck him hard.

  He managed to unclench his jaw. “How?”

  “Believe it or not, apparently the medical examiner there couldn’t tell. Podunk little town—the M.E. is probably the part-time barber too. Anyway, we’re lucky Ms. Clarke ran into him before he could do any of that here. He’s all yours. Enjoy tracking down the bare-assed backwoods wonder. I hope the numbnuts gets a splinter in his dick.”

  Colby winced. “Ouch. But agreed. Can you ask the Clarkes to hang out at the station for another hour or so? I can come over and do an in-person interview before I head out to chase Hebbert.”

  “Sure. They’re pretty rattled. I think they’d be happy to have an excuse to stay anywhere they already know Hebbert isn’t. I’ll tell them you’re on the way.”

  Colby thanked him and hung up.

  “Fugitive hunt, boss,” he said to Martin. “This one’s mine, right?”

  They’d been joking about the basketball, but there really were certain genetic advantages to different shifter types. They all recognized that and gave way when necessary.

  Which meant that if Colby was free, he always did the fugitive-hunting. He was too good on a trail for Martin to choose anyone else.

  “This one’s yours,” Martin confirmed.

  Gretchen sighed. “When is it going to come in handy that I’m human? Just asking.”

  “You being you comes in handy all the time,” Colby said honestly.

  Gretchen was an amazing Marshal: tough, fair, smart, funny, and dogged. Colby had no doubt she’d be the one elevated to the boss’s chair when Martin someday retired. But she had been surrounded by shifters her whole life, first with her lynx-shifter family and now with their team, and he knew that it sometimes wore on her to always be the odd girl out.

  Colby had never asked her about the strange circular scar he’d noticed on her shoulder, but he knew what it was. At some point in her life, she’d persuaded some unscrupulous shifter to bite her in the hope of turning into what she’d somehow been robbed of being at birth. Whatever had happened, the transformation hadn’t taken. All she’d been left with was the scar—and a good, cheerful front that sometimes collapsed.

  Colby had tried to get her to talk to him about it, but she always just blew him off. No big deal, she always said. It was just the way things were.

  Now, Gretchen just smiled at him. “Thanks. You want some company on this one?”

  “Fine by me.” Secretly, he never liked working on his own as much as working with a partner or, better still, a team. “Boss? Can I steal Gretchen?”

  Martin was about to answer, but then his phone buzzed. When he looked down at it, a bemused grin crossed his face.

  “No, you can’t, because I need her here. You too, Theo. It never rains but it pours.”

  “What’s up?” Gretchen said.

  “We’re getting a high-profile witness on our doorstep tomorrow afternoon, and he’s going to need a new identity and the whole works. It sounds like there’s an entire East Coast crime syndicate chasing after him, so we need to make his new life strong and we need to make it fast. And we need to keep a full-time guard on him while we do it. Colby, will you be okay on your own?”

  “Sure.” He tried to inject enough cheerfulness into his voice.

  He would be okay on his own. He just wished—

  But his loneliness since his dad had died wasn’t even remotely his team’s problem. It wasn’t their fault that wolves were meant to have packs. Other shifters weren’t, and he had to respect that.

  It had been a couple of years now. He was getting used to it.

  Then he thought of a legitimate bright side.

  “Besides,” he said, “it’ll give me a chance to get my favorite photographer’s autograph.”

  “You have a favorite photographer,” Gretchen said. “Why does that not surprise me?”

  “Because I look cool, but you know I’m just a nerd like the rest of you?”

  “Stay out of trouble,” Martin said.

  Colby snorted. “Trouble is my middle name.”

  “Your middle name is Ignatius,” Gretchen said.

  “I regret telling you that.”

  “I have a cousin named Ignatius,” Theo offered as consolation.

  That didn’t help. Theo’s cousins all had weird draconian names like Romulus or Alistair the Undying. Colby knew Theo and Jillian were trying to get pregnant; he had his fingers crossed for them to have a son named Bob or a daughter named Sally. That would stick it to the hoity-toity side of Theo’s hometown.

  “Once more without all the jokes,” Martin said. “Colby, don’t get into trouble.”

  We will not get into trouble, Colby’s wolf growled. Its fur was standing on end, a spiky bristle that Colby could feel at the bottom of his subconscious. We will be the trouble. Find. Kill. Protect.

  That was a little more savage than his wolf tended to get, but at the moment, Colby agreed.

  NOW.

  He agreed with that too. He felt strangely antsy.

  “This is my territory,” Colby said simply, meeting Martin’s eyes. “I’ll play it as safe as I can, but I have to make sure Ms. Clarke and her family are okay.”

  PROTECT, his wolf growled, this time so loudly that Colby flinched even though he knew the noise was coming from inside his own head.

  “What’s wrong?” Martin said instantly.

  “Nothing.” He rubbed his forehead. “The mutt’s just freaking out. It’s weird.”

  “I’ve said this before,” Theo said, “but your wolf isn’t a mutt. It’s one hundred percent pure-bred wolf. I’ve seen you shift. You’re being inaccurate.”

  “I know. I do it to bother you. And the mutt, for that matter.”

  “You should pay attention to your wolf,” Martin said. “Especially in a case like this. Maybe he knows something you don’t.”

  3

  Colby felt bad for the Clarkes being stuck at the police station so long.

  He felt bad for their having run into a buck-naked psycho in the woods, too, but that probably went without saying.
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  The particular glumness of sitting for hours in uncomfortable plastic chairs in the city’s ugliest and gloomiest concrete blob, however, was like the equivalent of one of those bad, nagging colds that dragged out for weeks. It wasn’t dramatic, but in Colby’s experience, it could really knock a person on their ass. It wore you down.

  In particular, he thought it might wear a kid down. Take an already scared little girl and dump her in a gloomy police station? Colby couldn’t imagine that going well.

  Colby liked kids a lot, but he usually only ran into them in the form of their cranky, sullen, and troubled teenage offenders. (Usually he did his best to steer them to Theo’s mate, Jillian, and her thriving community center.) He wasn’t sure what he could do at short notice to cheer up an eight-year-old girl. What had he liked at that age?

  Correction. What had he liked as an eight-year-old that he might plausibly have on his desk as a thirty-three-year-old?

  Bingo. His White Elephant gifts from last year’s holiday party.

  “I knew I lucked out on these,” he said, snatching up the Slinky and Rubik’s Cube.

  Gretchen was combing through their property listings for the right place to stash their new witness, but this made her look up.

  “You’re taking a Slinky with you to track a fugitive?”

  “If he’s running down a flight of stairs, I can set the Slinky up at the top and trip him,” Colby said. “Or I could throw the Rubik’s Cube at him, and then he’d have to stop to try to figure it out.”

  “I want to believe you’re joking, but—”

  “I’m joking. Aria Clarke has her daughter with her, I thought these might cheer her up.”

  “That’s really nice,” Gretchen said, her furrowed brow smoothing out as she smiled. “If you want to pitch in my White Elephant from last year, I still have that fuzzy pink Christmas sweater in my car.”

  “Pass.”

  She went back to the property listings. “It was worth a try.”

  “You’ll unload it someday. You think I should swing by Starbucks on my way and get them a bunch of venti whatevers? You know what police station coffee is like.”