by Chant, Zoe
“No,” Colby said, still craning his neck to look around, “but I think I’ll come back for one of those tours.... I was hoping I could talk to some old friends of my dad’s. I don’t remember all their names, though. Towards the end, he—wasn’t up for seeing many people. But he mentioned the house. It was, um, easy to find, obviously.”
Aria almost spilled her lemonade upon seeing a snarling wolf carved into the stone of the fireplace.
Obviously.
“I’m sorry for your loss,” Mel said. “Bryan was one of the best men I ever knew. Most of the people he was closest to either passed on before him or not long after, unfortunately. But I knew him a little myself, and I’d be happy to help you and your mate however I can.”
Aria didn’t know how they could have run into any stronger of an example of werewolves are mostly just people. Mel’s combination of self-assurance, bubbly politeness, pack loyalty, and humor made her instantly recognizable as both entirely human and entirely wolf.
This was what she wanted Colby to have.
Well, this minus the unbelievably creepy house.
“Was there something you wanted to know about your dad?” Mel said. “He used to talk about you all the time.”
“No, not about him. I want to know about someone else, and I thought one of his friends might know them.”
“Well, if you still haven’t said who or why, it must be something touchy. Color me intrigued.”
“We’re looking for a kid named Luke. Around eighteen—or so he’d like you to believe. White, brown hair, brown eyes. Skinny, walks with a little bit of a limp.”
Mel’s face looked perfectly innocent. “And he’s supposed to be a wolf?”
“He’s definitely a wolf. Aria’s seen him in his shifted form.”
“Careless of him,” Mel said under her breath.
“Do you know him?”
“That depends. Why are you looking for him?”
“We’re hoping he can help us find his cousin. Eli Hebbert.”
Mel made a face like she’d tasted something foul.
“That’s about how we feel about him too,” Aria said.
“I don’t know much about Eli Hebbert,” Mel said, “but that doesn’t mean I don’t know more than I’d like to.”
“I need to find him,” Colby said. He flipped out his badge. “I’m a US Marshal. Hebbert’s a federal fugitive.”
Mel, to Aria’s surprise, made a kind of scoffing noise at that, like she half-suspected Colby had gotten his badge out of a cereal box.
“I don’t like Eli Hebbert, Marshal. If he fell into a ditch, I don’t know that I’d even bother to help him out of it. But if you’re Bryan Acton’s son, you were raised better than to think that any wolf is going to turn on their own just because someone waves a badge around.”
That sounded a little more like what Aria had been expecting. Most tightly knit groups—and wolf packs would certainly qualify—didn’t like someone coming in from above to interfere with them. They wanted to deal with their own problems.
Sometimes that worked out okay. But this time it meant they’d had a murderer living in their woods and hadn’t said one thing about it. Eli Hebbert and his pack hadn’t been from Sterling, they’d moved there—and by establishing themselves with the local pack leaders, they’d guaranteed that werewolf insularity would protect them from too much reprisal.
At least until Colby had gotten involved.
She could see Colby thinking the same thing. A muscle in his jaw twitched.
“I understand that,” he said, with a calm she could tell was faked. “I even sympathize with it, believe it or not, even though a big part of my job is finding people who don’t want to be found. But Eli Hebbert isn’t some wolf who’s going to be busted for poaching. He’s real trouble. He’s killed people before.”
Mel’s lips parted at that, but she still looked almost the way Luke had looked, back at the werewolf camp: as if as much as she wanted to help him, the pull of loyalty was too strong.
But they had gotten Luke to compromise on that a little, and Aria had no doubt they could get Mel to waver, too.
Mel wasn’t following Eli as her alpha, after all. She was probably something like the “first among equals” of the local alphas, so she was protecting him not as her leader but as a kind of... colleague or weird family member.
Maybe even murder couldn’t break that tie. But Aria had a hunch she knew what would.
It was wolf-to-wolf loyalty that was keeping Mel’s lips sealed, and only a betrayal of wolf principles would unlock them.
“And he’ll kill people again,” Aria said. “We know, because he sent his brother Weston to kill us last night. Weston burst through my front door, and Colby had to fight him. And when Weston thought about running, Eli made sure he stayed there to die—while Eli stayed safely out of the fight. Which means he’s not just a killer. He’s a terrible alpha too.”
“He abandoned his cousin, the runt of the pack, because the kid has a limp,” Colby said. “Luke couldn’t run fast enough for Eli’s tastes, not when Eli had brought the law down on their heads. We even think Eli might have tried to turn an old girlfriend. She was found dead right after he cleared out of his last town. Eli’s got a real pattern of choosing his own skin over his pack’s. And he’s trying to kill my mate. I need to find him and arrest him before he can even get another chance at hurting her. You’re not breaking any kind of faith with him. He doesn’t deserve your faith in the first place.”
Mel studied them, her small, heart-shaped face completely serious. Aria could see the exact moment she made up her mind.
“No,” Mel said. “No, it sounds like he doesn’t. And Luke’s not in any trouble?”
“None. We kind of like the kid.”
Mel sighed, and her perfect composure dissolved into something warmer. For the first time, Aria could see that she was a little tired, like she’d had a sleepless night.
“So do I. He just washes up on my doorstep sometimes to watch movies and use a microwave. And last night he turned up looking for a real human bed too. I gave it to him. I’d say he’s still upstairs asleep.”
“If you could wake him up, we’d appreciate it,” Colby said. “And we’d appreciate anything you could tell us too.”
“The three of them—Eli, Weston, and Luke—came to town in January, I think. That’s when they found me, anyway. Eli sniffed out me and mine and turned up to introduce himself. I never met Weston at all, but Luke came by later.”
“What was your impression of Eli?”
“I won’t lie, he scared me a little. I’m as tough on four legs as I need to be, and I’ve got a wicked bite, but when I’m human, I’m tiny. I didn’t like the way he kept smirking at me. Like I was a fluffy little bunny he was thinking of snapping up.”
Luke had mentioned Eli’s habit of looking for women who felt like rabbits to him.
And Mel looked sort of like a fluffy little bunny, Aria had to admit. But if Eli had missed the aura of concentrated power radiating out of her, he’d made a big mistake.
One he was about to pay for. Hopefully in spades.
“He did that with me too,” Aria volunteered.
Mel nodded. “That doesn’t surprise me. These extreme, ‘more wolf than thou’ kinds of guys—they talk big about following the laws of nature, but for the most part, they don’t even know what those are. Their wolves wind up as dazzled and messed up by their human halves as their human halves are by their wolves. A male wolf, just by nature, wouldn’t disrespect a female one. Wolves have female alphas just like they have male ones, and anybody can be the junior member of a pack. Eli’s all hung up on the idea that he’s holding true to some ‘natural’ idea of men being tougher or more important than women... but that’s not natural at all.”
She sounded incredibly irritated by it, and Aria could understand completely. What was more annoying than someone who ran their mouth off about how capital-R Right they were when they really couldn’t be
more wrong?
Especially when it came to bullshit about a man’s “natural” right to be a dick. You only had to look at Colby to see how a real alpha acted.
Colby leaned forward. “So what did he say? Once he got done being an asshole.”
“Honey, he was never done being an asshole. But what I think might help you, in among all his dick-swinging, is why he said he was hanging around here so long in the first place.”
She paused for dramatic effect, something Aria would have found more relatable if she hadn’t just desperately wanted to cut down on how long she had to think about Eli Hebbert.
“He’d clued in by then that I wasn’t impressed with him, and he knew he was out of his league. I wasn’t going to go off with him, and I wasn’t going to find him charming, so he decided to rub in that he already had his eye on someone anyway. He said she’d make a solid second choice.”
“Aww,” Aria deadpanned. “How sweet. True love.”
“It’s just like Casablanca,” Mel agreed dryly. “I was about to swoon right then and there.”
“So... this wouldn’t be his mate, right?” She looked at Colby.
“If he’s calling her a second choice, she’s not his mate.”
“And if he really cared about her at all,” Mel said, “he wouldn’t have talked about her like he did. I know more about the woman’s bust measurements that I need to. Basically all I know is that she’s substantially gifted in that area.”
Aria had never been so grateful to be comparatively flat-chested. It would have been her worst nightmare to have Eli Hebbert out there lusting after her.
She said, “You don’t know her name?”
“He was the kind of man way more interested in discussing her smell than her thoughts and feelings. Let alone her name. But Luke might know.” She stood. “I’ll go get him. But I have to warn you, he’s going to be a little surly when he’s been pulled out of bed.”
15
It was amazing how much better Luke looked after a single night under Mel Wondery’s roof.
He was in new clothes, ones without obvious holes in them, and some of the fear had bled out of his face. He even smelled like he’d actually grabbed a recent shower.
It was probably a new phenomenon for him, Colby thought, to be able to drag his heels and complain about being forced to wake up before noon. He probably wouldn’t have done it around his cousins, not when they might have responded by pounding him into the dirt.
“Hey, kid,” Colby said. “Glad to see you landed on your feet.”
“Stop calling me kid,” Luke said automatically. Then he shuffled his feet. “Yeah. Mel’s nice.”
“I’m guessing she’s who you didn’t want to tell me about before. The person I shouldn’t bother just because she knew Eli.”
“Yeah. And here you are bothering her.”
“Manners,” Mel said, swatting him on the arm.
“Sorry.” He raised his chin, facing them down defiantly. “But I was right. Eli would never come to Mel for that kind of help. He knows he can’t boss her around.”
“He couldn’t come here, but you could.” Colby understood why Luke had wanted to keep Mel out of the fray. “It’s good to have friends. They’re not part of Eli’s plan, but it looks like they’re part of yours.”
For a second, he thought Luke was going to give him another one of those classically teenaged eyerolls, but it seemed like the kid thought better of it. He stood up a little straighter. It was suddenly possible to see the man he’d grow up to be.
“Yeah,” he said. “They are.”
At least he had some solid ground underneath him. Colby still didn’t know how he would take the news about his cousin. No matter how rough the relationship was, family connections were hard to shake.
He tried to find the right words.
Luke must have seen him looking for them. He cut Colby off.
“I already know West is dead. I felt it.”
It startled him. He’d been lucky enough to have never had one of his Army buddy packmates die overseas, and those bonds had faded when they’d returned home and scattered across the States; he’d been too focused on taking care of his dad to try to maintain them.
He had felt it when his dad had died, of course. But he thought he would have felt that even if he’d been only and purely human.
“I’m sorry,” Colby said. “All I wanted was to take him in.”
“I know.” Luke’s eyes looked a little watery, but he wrapped his arms around himself and carried on. “He wasn’t a good guy. The nicest thing I remember him doing was teaching me how to shoplift so I could get Ding-Dongs and sodas and stuff. Eli just wanted us to eat whatever we could kill.”
He wiped his eyes with his sleeve and took a deep breath.
“Mel said you’re still looking for Eli.”
“He came after us last night,” Aria said. “He and Weston crashed through my front door.”
Luke winced. “Is everybody else okay?”
Colby had already believed he was a good kid, but he thought even better of him for bothering to ask that.
“Yeah,” Colby said. “Everyone else is okay. But we have to find Eli.”
Mel said, “I was telling them about that woman Eli mentioned.”
Luke froze up then, just like he had before.
Back in the woods, the closest he’d been able to come to blurting out his cousin’s secret had been to say that it was rare for them to stay in one spot.
Now, with one more piece of the puzzle from Mel, Colby knew why they’d stuck around. But he still needed Luke to tell him where to look.
“Why do you need to know about her?” Luke finally said. “She never did anything. He never even talked to her. She’s not dating him or anything. He just stared at her like a creep, and one time he dropped a dead deer on her back porch.”
He almost felt Aria’s interest perk up at that. He noticed the change in her emotions even before he saw, from the corner of his eye, that she had involuntarily leaned forward, like she was hanging on every word. Her eyes were even brighter than before.
Something Luke had said had triggered some kind of realization for her.
Well, it hadn’t for him. He was still stuck poking around.
“We don’t think she did anything. We’re worried he might hurt her.” He took a gamble. “Eli talked about wanting to turn her, didn’t he?”
Luke looked down at his feet. “Yeah, but it was just talk. He wouldn’t have done it. He hates humans.”
“I’m sure he does. But we think he tried to do it before, with Amanda.”
He couldn’t know that, of course, but somehow, he’d become pretty sure of it all the same. That was why the medical examiner hadn’t been able to pin down the cause of death. A failed turning was ugly, and it didn’t look like anything that would normally happen to a human. They would have seen a bite-mark—but the rest of the damage would have been too strange to figure out.
He watched that possibility sink into Luke.
Then Colby added, “If he did it before, he could do it again. Especially since he’s short on wolves now. Weston’s dead. Eli let him die—Eli pushed him into it, for that matter. And he ditched you, because he’s an idiot.”
It was possible that Eli would come back for Luke, of course. In a lot of ways, that would make more sense than hoping a human would survive the change and prove to be a capable fighter in her wolf form.
But Colby thought he had a pretty good sense of Eli Hebbert at this point, and he wasn’t a guy who did the smart, sane thing. He’d thrown away all the things and people he should have valued.
And the only part of life that he valued at all was the mindless violence he thought, mistakenly, was the law of nature.
He was absolutely, one hundred percent a guy who would rather attack a woman and risk her life than mend fences with his younger, more vulnerable cousin.
In a dark, twisted way, he and Eli had some things in common. They had both los
t their dads, men they’d admired their whole lives. They’d both narrowed down their identities, focusing mostly on one half of who they were. Colby had sidelined his wolf half and tried to convince himself that as much as he wanted a pack, he didn’t need one. Eli had all but erased the human part of his soul.
And they’d both been hugely, completely wrong.
Wolves weren’t as savage and ruthless as Eli thought.
And humans weren’t as self-sufficient as Colby had imagined. He knew now that he could have told his friends that he considered them his family. They wouldn’t have thought he was weird or weak.
Their lives had mirrored each other’s, with Eli as Colby’s dark, backwards reflection. And now that they’d finally clashed, it was like only one of them could survive.
He could almost hear a clock ticking in his head.
“Eli needs someone to fight alongside him,” Colby said. “He doesn’t want to face me by himself, especially now that he knows I took on him and Weston and came out still standing.” He cast a sideways smile in Aria’s directly. “Of course, you had something to do with that.”
“Only in the sense that I was almost the reason you didn’t come out still standing.” She added to Luke, “I shot at them.”
“Oh, cool,” Luke said.
“Not cool,” Mel said, smacking his arm. “Don’t shoot people. If you’re going to live under my roof—”
“I never said I was going to live here!”
“Of course you’re going to live here,” she said. Her tone was one of purest exasperation, and Luke blossomed under it. “So shooting people—or biting them—is off-limits, you hear me?”
“Yes, Mel,” Luke said. His face had turned slightly pink.
“And we’re getting you some glasses first thing.”
Colby decided to bail the poor kid out of his embarrassment. While Aria had been able to break Mel’s mild loyalty to Eli by appealing to her wolf nature—and Eli’s transgressions against it—he thought the key to cutting Luke’s ties to Eli was right there in front of him.
