Creature Comforts

by Creature Comforts (lit)

  “I was hoping to find a suitable mate for Tamara.” Adam confessed. “Don’t tell Diana.”

  “She’ll skin you alive.” Chase frowned. “No disrespect, boss. But Tam needs to find someone on her own. I know the other packs arrange marriages, she needs to feel like she’s wanted for herself.” And Chase needed to shut up about something he knew nothing about. He snapped his mouth closed before he dug himself even deeper. “Just sayin’.” He shrugged, not able to decipher Adam’s thoughtful scrutiny.

  “You could be Beta or Alpha. Somewhere,” Adam didn’t have to clarify. No Alpha offered up his spot.

  “Nah. I’m too selfish. The human does a good job. ” The human psychic, Mack Spencer, did a super job. “ Just don’t tell him I said so.”

  “You don’t give yourself enough credit. You have good empathy and you try to do what’s good for the whole. Besides, Mack knows you respect him and his position.”

  “He’d make a better Beta if you bit him.” Chase knew he’d stepped over the line before he spoke the words. Adam’s eyes narrowed. The blue freezing to chips of ice as a growl rumbled in the Alpha’s chest.

  “You know how I feel about Changing humans.” Chase nodded. Adam’s stand was that supernaturals didn’t have a right to take a person’s humanity away. Mack had been taunting Chase for years, trying to get him to bite. Literally. The human hated seeing how people were to die. More than a voyeur, Mack lived the moment of death. Fate was a bitch that gave him small window to change the outcome. As a wolven, his psychic powers would be gone forever.

  Just as fast, the Alpha’s displeasure faded. He patted Chase as he would one of the pups, his concern turned inward. Chase fought the weight of his exhaustion dragging at him. Sleep was the last thing he wanted. “You need rest,” Adam said gently. No, Chase shifted, telling himself that he needed to get up. Patrol Packhome. Anything to get him up and moving to stave away the nightmares.

  Adam patted him again. “Shhh. Sleep.” Too late, Chase recognized the magical push from his Alpha, shoving him into a deep sleep. “You won’t be alone.”

  * * * *

  The lingering comfortable weight on his chest made Chase open his eyes. Adam watched him carefully, as if he were one of the needy pups. Deciding that it wouldn’t challenge the Alpha’s authority, Chase surged up and slipped out of the bed. The clock on Tank’s desk said it was two in the morning. Chase stretched and looked over his shoulder. “You need to go to bed, boss.”

  Adam nodded. “Go bunk with Rick or Seth until morning.”

  Chase shook his head. “Nah. I’m fine.” He’d already been babied enough and had a decent nap thanks to the Alpha’s high-handedness. Immediately he felt bad for the thought. Adam had only done what he felt his packmember needed.

  Adam considered him with such careful evaluation that Chase avoided his eyes. The Alpha nodded. “See you at breakfast.” Slipping out on silent feet, he went to his own waiting bed at the other end of the rambling house.

  Alone again, Chase passed a hand over his eyes. For some reason, his footsteps took him to the neat and tidy desk across the room. The top drawer slid open easily. This was Tank’s domain. He hesitated a moment, hand hovering over the slim hinged and latched double frame. It wasn’t locked. Sentimental bastard. He meant that for both of them.

  There was no picture of Lissie Knight. Tank had a special antipathy for the woman he’d married. Not even her death had erased that. Chase would like to have seen one of his first love, even after all she’d done. In his mind’s eyes, time had blurred her beautiful features. Had his love made her more beautiful than she’d really been? How much of a masochist did that make him?

  Opening the frame, his heart contracted at the contents. Charlie’s yellowed baby picture filled one side of the frame and another of the elder Knights, holding the baby. The Knights may not have approved of the child’s conception, but they’d loved Charlie like a true grandson. Had they lived, Chase liked to think that Knights would have eventually forgiven him. Both his parents and the Reddings had pretty much disowned him for getting Lissie pregnant. Funny, Chase missed the Knights far more than he had his own parents. The frame snapped shut with a click and Chase put it back where it belonged. Breakfast was at six. He had just enough time to Change and check Packhome’s perimeter for anything off. He had plenty of time to run off the funk riding him.

  Chapter Six

  Carter Hunter waited. A part of him waited in shocked excitement at his own ballsy, and possibly moronic, decision to wait for the remainder of the Orange County werewolves in the most dangerous territory of the most infamous werewolf pack to terrorize the supernatural world. Using his psychic gifts, Carter wrapped the night around him. To eyes and nose of the casual observer, he’d be invisible. For those with more perceptive senses, he hoped that his perch thirty-five feet off the ground kept him out of sight and mind. This deep inside their home territory, Carter could almost guarantee the Anderson County werewolves to be nice and relaxed. Now to pick up some sign of his quarry.

  True, werewolves usually refused to accept strays into their close-knit structured packs, but that rule wasn’t set in stone. Exceptions can and did happen. They were highly social creatures who might be persuaded to take mercy on one of their own in need. Or kill of a potential trouble maker. Either scenario worked.

  In any other area, Carter would start listening for reports of unusually large dog sightings near outlying population areas. Without the support of a pack, the female would try to integrate into the more relaxed rural human population. As long as she followed that mindset, the female werewolf had been fairly easy to track as she skirted populated areas, if not actually locate long enough to put a silver bullet in her heart.

  First, they’d taken to howling, knowing he’d probably hear. He’d taken the wolf’s chorus as an anomaly. Then, the werewolves began running day and night. Carter’s gut told him she’d changed tactics. She’d come here because the Anderson County werewolves, if they didn’t kill her first, were the only ones with a ferocious enough reputation to make a Hunter think twice about stepping foot within their borders. Seeing as how Anderson County might be the only safe place for the female to take the remainder of her pack, Carter planned to park his butt here.

  Soon, his patience paid off. A light colored wolf ambled into his better than average sight. Combined with what star and moonlight filtered through the trees, he decided that the wolf was too large and too healthy to be his quarry. Carter silently eased the barrel of his tranq rifle to the sky. He didn’t have plans to repeat Pete’s mistake, no matter how much the bastard werewolf deserved a hide full of silver. He pushed down the simmering anger before the emotion pushed out through his pores. Carter knew better than most that a werewolf listened to its nose and ears more than its eyes.

  The emotion never went away. Even asleep, he revisited the horrors that the monsters inflicted on mankind. Being here, in Anderson County, Texas brought every shred of animosity towards the supernaturals, these werewolves in particular, to the fore. He took a steadying breath as the beast paused to sniff the base of a tree. From his vantage, Carter could see that huge ass wolf was male. The golden blond found in humans, not canines, the creature took careful stock of its surroundings with a very self-aware pair of blue eyes. A tingle rose on his skin, the same rush of goose bumps that heralded a particularly powerful psychic or supernatural. If Victoria had an inkling how close he sat to these monsters in particular, his mother would have heart failure.

  God, how he hated them. The lives they had taken. The families these things destroyed haunted him. The werewolf stopped, sniffing the air, as if it had caught the faintest whiff of his scent. Carter waited, aware that his personal grudge against this pack could be his undoing. His hand itched for his backup ankle piece. A real gun with real silver bullets coated with a thin membrane that dissolved on impact. Easy, he told himself. Stick with the tranq rifle. Werewolves could scent silver. He didn’t want to kill the creature. Yet.

/>   The werewolf’s ears flattened. Its dark blond fur seemed to ruffle as the creature’s hackles rose. A thin growl barely made it to the hunter’s ears. At that moment, Carter’s cell phone vibrated at his hip, shooting adrenaline through his system. The werewolf jerked his nose in the direction of the sound. Carter dropped the muzzle of the rifle. With a pfft of compressed air, the dart hit the werewolf. Carter waited, his breath held with one hand on the still vibrating phone.

  The werewolf grunted and dropped to the ground. Carter sighed a huge relief. By his calculations, he had about twenty minutes to beat a hasty retreat before the thing regained consciousness. Carter’s phone vibrated again. His teeth ground in response. Goddamn that Chowder. The pudgy prick was going to get him killed.

  He eased out of the tree, careful to make sure to neutralize the molecules of his body odor. It was a trick his father had taught him, disassembling the molecules of sweat and dispersing them over a large area so that things that tracked by scent could not follow him. The skill was a difficult one. Only the best hunters mastered the delicate touch that working on such a minute scale demanded. The need to move spurred him forward. He had to get out of range of the downed werewolf and find a new place to set up to watch for the female and her pack.

  His feet carried him to where the werewolf lay in drugged slumber. The tiny dart, strong enough to lay out an elephant in seconds, would dissolve, leaving no evidence behind. The creature’s own super healing would take care of the wound and the drug in short order.

  This wasn’t the first time Carter had been up close and personal with a werewolf. It probably wouldn’t be the last either. Hunting supernaturals was often a delicate balance of culling out those marked for death without rousing the rest of them to action. Anderson County put itself on the map in the supernatural world years before Weis’s unorthodox rise to Alpha.

  Back then, an all out war with the werewolf that killed Garrick Moser, the most infamous werewolf in history, would have been suicide. Now, their damn Wolven Council kept a close eye on Anderson County and maintained a hands-off approach to the territory. Hunters and smart psychics avoided this place because some sleeping dogs were best left alone.

  Speaking of dogs, that was one freaking huge canine. It didn’t look like the kind of monster that carried small children off into the night. It looked like a big wolf-dog mix. Possibly, someone’s pet that had gotten loose. Mostly that was because the color of the thing’s fur wasn’t the norm for a regular wolf. The creature had the pretty color of a golden retriever.

  Carter’s trigger finger itched to plug a couple of rounds of silver into the werewolf’s heart, followed up by a clip of the less expensive non-silver kind. Unlike Pete’s old-fashioned slugs, Carter’s silver rounds shattered at impact. The silver shards would dissolve into the bloodstream, disabling the monsters healing ability. That and the pain from the toxic metal maximized the damage potential of his other ammunition. Carter was in the monster killing business. Pain and torture? Not so much. He tried hard to put the creatures down as fast as possible.

  Carter shook his head. Not in disbelief that he was about to toss this fish back. No, a major case of Murphy’s Law that had been dogging him since Chowder became his assistant. Carter’s cover was blown big time. His main hope was that by not killing one of the werewolves, the rest of them would just be pissed and wary of a Hunter hanging around, instead of frothing at the mouth, hell-bent on revenge.

  The werewolf twitched hard, much too soon for the dosage that dart was supposed to carry. Carter took a couple of steps backward mentally prepping himself for the task of erasing his presence from the area. The werewolf twitched again, looking more like a convulsion than pre-waking movements. After a second of deliberation, he decided to leave the creature be. With his luck, he’d tagged the only werewolf ever to have an allergic reaction and die from the suped up tranquilizer. Right now, he needed to find a hotel. He had to rip Chowder a new one for calling him in the field. Then he needed a report from Victoria to get the feel of the area and what the local psychic communities were up to. It would all work out, Carter assured himself. He just needed to prioritize. One, clean up Pete’s mess, and two, head off on his next mission to keep the monsters from causing murder and mayhem. Saving the world just got harder and trickier every day. No pressure at all.

  Chapter Seven

  India looked around and realized she was dreaming again. She was doing that a lot lately, but never seemed to get enough rest. Not that she didn’t like her dream forest. It was pretty, peaceful, and she could always find Tag here. Earlier, she’d heard the lonely wolf-song and it had touched a chord deep inside.

  Darrell and Gail were fascinated with this place. They’d wanted to play in a clear stream. Since it was a dream and it looked and felt innocent enough, India let them have their game of jump and splash. Her father would never have approved of such nonsense. The dead Alpha had always been so serious, grounded in the present. Having experienced the other two wolves rejections at the point of sharp teeth, Reggie stuck close beside India. As pack leader, she didn’t mind his company or get impatient with Reggie’s lagging as her father might have.

  Orange County had been a pack of serious minded business professionals. They’d worked hard and earned their playtime. Gin Demos had demanded the same of his people. No slackers, had been her father's credo. Now they were all dead. She could hardly imagine herself locked in her stuffy office keeping someone else’s accounting records. Inhaling the sweet forest air, India felt free. Alive. Part of the world in a way she’d never been before. Ducking into the leafy underbrush, she went to investigate the wolf-song. Picking her way over the soft forest floor, she opened her senses. Looking…and found Tag, sad and in need of some cheering up. A delicious wickedness danced across her consciousness. The memory of the last time she’d played hide and seek with her Tag. Oh, he’d been plenty cheered when he’d finally caught her and they’d almost…. Heat and the familiar feeling of frustration spiraled through her. She wanted, needed to mate. With a real, live protector not a dream wolf.

  Her mood turned dark as she realized the danger in going feral. She was beginning forget the difference between reality and dreams. She needed to wake up and start searching again for the normal wolf she’d been trying to entice. They were trailing one another now in the real world. India had seen the wolf, staying just out of distance.

  He was smaller than the strong males of her dead pack. About the same size as Reggie. Healthy, where her packbrother was sick and weak. The brown and gray variation of her would-be suitor’s coat marked him as true wolf, not wolven. Sensing the difference between them, the wolf warily had stayed back. Not that he didn’t want to mate with her. His interest was clear in the way he stood watching her. His scent tinged with an almost human lust. He was also very careful of what he didn’t understand. So now, they circled one another with her edging more to the East, hoping he would follow and make contact. She sighed. Really, she should get back. The forest lulled her with its inherent peacefulness. Maybe she’d wait a bit and let the others play longer.

  God-damn! Stupid! Stupid! Stupid!

  India whirled and growled at the intrusion. Beside her, Reggie crouched and whined. A very surprised Tag strolled into sight. Amusement flickered in his eyes at Reggie’s tail tucked retreat. India’s noise of disapproved had Tag focusing back on her. He ducked his head. She could feel the sentiment of embarrassment like words spoken.

  Sorry, ma’am. Didn’t know you were there. Reggie’s departure made him inconsequential in the way of things. Poor little guy. She made a mental note to check up on him as soon as she could.

  Since this was a dream and she was probably losing her mind anyway, India sauntered over, adding an extra twitch to her tail. All thought of Reggie disappeared. Even without the heat riding her, she imagined her blood would surge anytime. Tag showed up in her dreams. Her lips pulled wide in a wolfish grin. What harm could come from a dream? There was no commitment in a dream. You c
ouldn’t get pregnant in a fantasy. She rubbed down the length of his larger wolf body in invitation. Why not indulge a little in her desires? What harm could it do?

  In reality, her own brazenness would shock her. A forbidden thrill unfurled inside her. She’d never been known as loose or even open to casual sex in her own pack. The Alpha’s daughter, Gin had had plans to negotiate a mate for her. For the betterment of the pack. Now there was no Alpha, no pack, just her and Tag. Beautiful, strong, golden Tag.

  He growled and crowded her, butting his head gently against her shoulder. Ah, Cleo. What you do to me.

  Who is Cleo?

  Tag chuckled. The sound vibrated through her mind and body. You are Cleo. Cleopatra, Queen of the Nile. Goddess made flesh.

  You are a poet.

  Nah. I’m just a guy who thinks you are hot.

  So, you are just trying to get in my pants?

  You’re not wearing any pants, Cleo.

  She felt the devil of a smile in his words. His charm made her want him more. She nipped at his flank, hard enough to make him jump. My name is India Demos.

  The mood turned more serious as Tag studied her with his gold-coined eyes.

  Be careful of who and where you announce that sweetheart. There is power in names, especially in places like this.

  India snorted. This is a dream, Tag. And you are my dream-lover.

  Dreams? I like the dream-lover part. Call me Chase.

  India laughed. Her dream-wolf was too funny. Chase, Tag it’s all the same, isn’t it.

  In a quick move, he shoved one shoulder into her. One paw slipped between hers to knock her off balance. Tag/Chase stood over her, slightly menacing. It heated her blood even more. Parts of her ached and wept to join with him.