“If they tried it they’d enjoy it.”
“Thanks for sharing,” said Uncle Farley with a rueful smile. “Maybe you’re right. But what about the money? Where’s that coming from? Quasi-religious zealots aren’t usually that well-funded.”
That was true and my father and I looked at each other. Werewolves are, by nature, direct – we do not think things through or puzzle things out. We see things as they are and act. That was one reason my father kept Farley around as his advisor – humans are better at scheming and at discovering the schemes of others.
Farley shifted forward in his seat. “Do you know what I might do if I was a Pack Leader looking to expand my power and takeover another territory?”
My father shook his head. “I never know what you might do, Farley. The human mind is a tangled mystery.”
“Thank you,” Farley smiled. “I might – might – fund a popular organization like The Brotherhood and push them into angering another Pack Leader. That Pack Leader would then be on the wrong side of an unpopular war, and when his own people are about ready to turn on him, I would step in. And his people would welcome me as a savior.”
My father scratched his chin. “That’s a very devious plan, Farley. I have no idea how you come up with this stuff.”
“No werewolf would do something like that,” I put in.
“I’m not the only Pack Leader who takes advice from humans,” said Dad. He looked at his friend. “So, no castrations. Then, what? What’s my next step?”
Uncle Farley shrugged. “Find out the truth. I’m just guessing here, what I gave you is one possible scenario. For all we know, this could just be The Brotherhood acting alone. Or it could be another group who’ve adopted similar ideals and are better funded. Don’t act without knowledge. Start an investigation. And keep your daughter safe.”
Dad nodded. “I’ve been thinking about that. We need to get you new bodyguards. And yes – before you say anything – I did say bodyguardsss, plural, and I don’t expect to hear a word about it from you.”
I’d been expecting that, and even with my dislike of having other people up in my business, I was willing to admit that it sounded like a good call. Anything that allowed me to keep living my life with a bit of safety had to be a good thing, didn’t it?
At first sight, the three guys were exactly what you wanted in bodyguards, they were massive in a way that was comfortably intimidating, muscles rippling when they did something as innocent as cross their arms, but did not look like the dumb slabs of brainless muscle you sometimes get – I wanted my bodyguards to be able to out-think any potential assassins, as well as punch them through a wall, and these guys looked like they could. They were also something that I personally liked in a bodyguard, even if it wasn’t strictly necessary and even if I didn’t take personal advantage of it – they were all very handsome. Like I said, they were exactly what you wanted in bodyguards. But also a little bit more.
“Excuse us a minute.” I grabbed my father by the arm and pulled him out of earshot. “They’re human,” I hissed.
Dad nodded, with a smile on his face. “You noticed?”
“I’ve spent enough time with humans to be able to smell one.”
“Thanks for the reminder.”
“I don’t want human bodyguards.”
“Oh, I see; you’re happy to fuck them but don’t want to socialize.” My dad, who was enjoying this way more than I thought necessary, shook his head. “Prejudice.”
“I’m quite happy to socialize with them,” I replied, tartly. “But they’re human. They’re weak. They’re supposed to be protecting me and I could kick their asses.”
“They’re Wolf Takers.”
My jaw dropped. “They’re what?”
“Come meet them.”
Before I could get over this shock, my father had ushered me back towards the three human beefcakes. “This is Jackson, Clarke and Colt. Men, this is my daughter, Hokkai Bailey. I’d prefer you to keep it professional, so please call her Miss or some variation on that. She is in charge, you do as she says. Unless she is looking to contravene one of the rules I explained to you earlier, in which case; lock her in her room.”
“Wait, what?” Today was getting away from me fast in a direction I didn’t much like.
The three humans nodded civilly at me with murmurs of ‘Miss’, by way of greeting. I took a closer look at each of them and I had to admit that, from an objective standpoint, I liked what I saw. If I had seen them in a bar when I was out then I would have been spoiled for choice. The one named Jackson was the tallest and stood in the middle of the trio with an air of command. He had dark hair and eyes, and a jawline you could have used as a set square. His body, crammed into a T-shirt that could have split at the seams any moment, looked to have been carved out of granite, by a sculptor who had decided not to waste an inch. There was a strength and solidity to him, and yet also a sense that he could leap into action at a moment’s notice.
To Jackson’s left stood Clarke, who looked a few years younger and was not quite as tall, but still an imposing figure and with a body equally to die for. There was an unmistakable athleticism in Clarke’s build. He looked like someone who went for a ten-mile run each morning, his muscles ripped and proud. His skin was the color of coffee with a drop of milk – if that’s something I was allowed to say. Race was no issue amongst wolves – we’re all werewolves, nothing else mattered – species was more important. Like Jackson, Clarke seemed ready for action, like a coiled spring.
Colt completed the line up; blonde, blue eyed and desperately handsome in a more boyish way. He was the shortest of the three, though still a minimum of six feet, but more than made up for it with a chest as broad as all outdoors, threatening to pop off the buttons of the neat blue shirt he wore. He had more of a bodybuilder’s physique than his comrades, but I had a strong hunch that it was for more than show. Unlike Jackson and Clarke, Colt did not feel the need to suppress his energy, constantly bouncing on the balls of his feet, crossing and uncrossing his arms, looking from side to side like an eager puppy.
Like I said, I had no problem with how these males looked, and if I’d met them on a night out, I’d be looking to wake up the next morning embedded in one of their mattresses. But these were the three humans to whose care I had been trusted. I didn’t trust humans to be able to look after me against attack by wolves, and I didn’t trust Wolf Takers not to kill me themselves.
“I know what you’re thinking,” said my father, as we left the room.
“You wouldn’t have to be psychic.”
Dad stopped and turned to me, and I suddenly saw the genuine concern in his eye. “Who can I trust, Bailey? Tell me the alternative. You don’t make friends in my position and I’m afraid my enemies are yours. Point me out the werewolf you trust to be your bodyguard.”
He was right, of course, but I still wasn’t happy. “Okay, maybe a human is the right call. But, Dad; Wolf Takers?”
Dad shrugged. “What other humans are going to be any use if someone tries something?”
It was during the First World War that the General Amnesty between humans and werewolves was signed. At the time, it had been to get more and more dangerous soldiers to fight in the Great War, and it had been a major success, leading to similar amnesties in other countries. Prior to 1917, however, werewolves and humans were enemies. Wolves killed humans or turned them – which humans considered a fate worse than death. Humans hunted wolves for protection, for sport and, in some cultures, to grind up parts of their anatomy to make into folk remedies for everything from baldness to impotence. Humans feared wolves and with reason; werewolves are stronger, faster, and better fighters. So, at some point in the mists of time, someone decided to start breeding the strongest and fastest humans to create a clan of Wolf Takers, men and women bred to protect villages from wolves. The clan grew as they sought better and more diverse breeding stock, until there were branches on every continent. Time was when every city would have had a pl
atoon of Wolf Takers and every village would save up money to hire one to live with them.
Then came the Amnesty and the Wolf Takers ceased to have a purpose in the world. But they were stoic, as they had been bred to be, and they decided it was only a matter of time before the werewolves revealed their true nature once more. They decided to play the long game, settling down in rural communities throughout the world, breeding almost exclusively amongst their own kind, continuing their regimes of exercise, diet and training, keeping the old ways alive in preparation for the time when we wolves started eating humans again.
“They’re the only humans who would even have a chance against a wolf attack,” my father explained. “Let’s face it, city living has made a lot of werewolves soft while the Wolf Takers just keep on quietly training.”
“But they hate us.” I rather felt this was a pertinent point that my dad was ignoring.
“That’s true,” Dad admitted. “But they don’t hate us like they used to. They don’t have a reason to hate us anymore, it’s more out of habit. Like a Mafia Vendetta.”
“And they always end well.”
“They’re very well paid,” my father said the magic words, then added his own personal spin on them. “And they know that if they cross me, I will personally cut off their wangs and use them to beat them to death. And not with their own; with each other’s, so it’s weird as well as agonizing.”
“But…” The word hung in the air, waiting for me to back it up with something else, but I couldn’t think of anything. Frustratingly, Dad was absolutely right. This was a good plan and I couldn’t think of any better way to give me the protection I needed.
Heading back into the room, I found my three bodyguards waiting for me.
“Okay, I feel like there’s something to get off my chest, clear the air, as it were. I’m a werewolf, you’re Wolf Takers, the idea of having you three as my bodyguards actually makes me feel a little sick. I don’t like being babysat by anyone, let alone by humans, and certainly not by Wolf Takers.”
I paused to let these home truths sink in and to give the guys a chance to respond. The three of them looked at each other before Jackson spoke. “That’s okay, Miss Hokkai, we’re not wild about this either. We don’t want to babysit anyone, let alone a werewolf, and certainly not the spoiled daughter of a Pack Leader.”
I nodded. “Cool. But someone is trying to kill me…”
“And we’ve got to get paid.”
“So, we’ll all suck it up.” I smiled. “I don’t see any reason we shouldn’t be able to make this work.”
Which didn’t mean that I was going to just accept it; I already had other ideas of my own on how to proceed, and none of them involved these three lunkheads.
Chapter 3
Skipping out on my protection was something I first did by accident when I was six. I had run off after a ball or something while my bodyguard was looking the other way. When I got the ball, I found I was on my own. I liked it. It didn’t last long, of course, but that brief period of freedom made a definite mark and I determined that free was the way to be. From then on, I ditched my bodyguards whenever I could, which was not very often at the age of six, but as I got older, I got better at it and found more fun things to do with my freedom. By the time of my mother’s death when I was twelve, I had perfected the art, and the loss of a parent pushed me off the rails a little, especially as my father, in his grief, lost interest in me for a few years. It was during these all important formative years when I discovered boys and associated activities that I became the person I am today, for better and worse.
I may have drifted from the subject a little there – point is; I knew how to skip out on my protection. For all that I understood that I needed more protection and was grateful to my dad for arranging it and coming up with this clever plan of using the human Wolf Takers, I had also meant what I said earlier about not changing my life for these people.
“I’m going to take a shower,” I called back into my apartment to the three guys, closing the bathroom door behind me. Once I was inside and the shower was going, I shed the bathrobe that hid my partying clothes and fished my heels out of the airing cupboard. Wolf Takers may be strong and quick and great at fighting werewolves, but they are not bred to be bodyguards, and the brain of a 20-year-old party girl is more than a match for them if they try to stand between her and a good time. I opened the window and climbed down the drainpipe like I’d been doing since I was fifteen. Sooner or later they would notice how long I had been in the shower, but by then I would be in a bar. It was a big city with a lot of bars and they couldn’t search them all. If they had been werewolves they could have picked up my scent, but they were just humans.
Naturally, I wound up in a human bar, chatting to a group of guys who had no idea what I was – maybe I would tell them in the morning.
“Can I buy you a drink?” the second hottest one asked.
I pulled a face. “If I let you buy me a drink then all your friends will want to and it’d be like you’re all competing for me. So yeah, JD and Coke.”
The third hottest guy put up his hand. “I’ve got next.”
I grinned. “Keep up that attitude and this is going to be a great night for me.”
Usually, when you play guys off each other like this then they start to drop out one by one, the secret is to pick one - at least - before all the ones you want have lost interest. It’s a good way of getting to know which one you might want without picking, and, frankly, it’s a lot of fun. Also a cheap way to get blasted.
It was a fun evening, I danced, I drank, I made out with the guys a little and I narrowed my field of interest to the tall handsome Mark, who had clearly spent some time in the gym polishing his guns. He might even have given my bodyguards a run for their money. Not wanting to get too drunk to enjoy myself – and definitely not wanting Mark to get too drunk for me to enjoy myself – I dragged his handsome head down to my level and whispered in his ear, “Take me home.”
Mark grinned and I saw him give a smug look at his friends; he had won and they had lost.
We headed out of the heat and crowd of the bar into the cool night air, arms about each other, kissing as we went. In all honesty, Mark had seemed pretty dumb to me in the bar, but tonight I wasn’t looking for intellectual conversation. As we turned into a side-street, our kissing became more intense and it began to seem like we wouldn’t make it back to Mark’s bed. He pushed me back against the wall and I ran my hands through his hair as our tongues danced in each other’s mouths.
Then, suddenly, Mark was gone, ripped away from me by an unseen hand and flung to the ground. For a split-second, I thought my bodyguards had somehow caught up with me but then that same hand shot forwards out of the darkness, grabbing me by the throat and pinning me against the wall. Three men stood in front of me, deep hoods covering their heads and masking their features. From their scent, I knew they were werewolves, though in human form, for now. One of them turned to Mark, still on the ground.
“Run away, little man.”
Mark didn’t even hesitate, didn’t even stop to look at me, he sprang to his feet and ran away as fast as his cowardly legs would carry him. I guess I couldn’t blame him. This had never been anything but a casual hook up; why should he die for me? But I liked to think that if our roles had been reversed, I would have had more balls.
“You escaped us once, man-bitch,” the leader of the hoodies now addressed me. “This time you die.”
I changed into wolf form on the instant, my skirt splitting, my top stretching wide, my shoes bursting from my feet. But my attackers had had the same thought, and as I roared my lupine defiance, I found I was facing down three hulking werewolves. I struggled against the leader but he backhanded me viciously across my snout and I tasted blood in my mouth.
One of the others produced an axe – I was going to be executed.
Then, everything seemed to happen at once. There was a dark blur in front of my eyes, as something dro
pped from the building behind me, landing on the outstretched arm that held me about the throat. The lead wolf screamed in pain as his arm snapped and he let me go. The other two wolves seemed temporarily stunned by what had happened, giving the dark blur, which I now recognized as a man, time to throw a left like a sledgehammer into the face of the one with the axe. The force of the blow nearly took the wolf off his feet and the axe went up in the air to be deftly caught by the man. It was a human man – no question – and as shock receded and I could see clearly again, I realized it was Jackson. As he caught the axe, he brought it around in a sinuous wheel, burying it in the skull of the third wolf, then brought it sharply back into the chest of the one from whom he had taken the weapon.
The broken armed leader had regained his feet and decided he no longer liked these odds. Nursing his fractured arm, he took off, still in wolf form, leaving the carnage of the side-street behind him.
The whole fight had unfurled in a matter of seconds. Whatever else I thought about Jackson and his kind, he fought like a wolf and moved like a panther. I couldn’t help admiring the strength and speed. I’d never known a human like that. A human who could take on a wolf? That could really be something. For a wicked moment, my brain trespassed into areas I was not comfortable with.
As the final wolf’s echoing footsteps died away, Jackson cast aside the bloody axe and turned to look at me.
“You stupid little kid!”
He could have called me a bitch – although, as I said, that’s not really a big deal to a wolf. He could have called me any number of far more offensive names, but I don’t think any of them would have stung or angered me like ‘little kid’. Who the hell did he think he was?
I roared my rage into his face before remembering to change back so I could berate him in a way he would understand.
“What do you mean ‘little kid’?”
“I mean, that no grown up – by which, I mean, no one over the age of eighteen – would have done something as self-indulgent, as stupid and as dangerous as what you did tonight.” Jackson wasn’t bothered by my roaring as a wolf or shouting as a human, to him I remained a little kid, and I was to be told off as such. “You knew that there were people trying to kill you and you still sneaked out. You knew they were trying to kill you because you hook up with humans and what’s the first thing you do? You hook up with a human. Do you have a death wish or something? Or are you just so self-involved that you genuinely think you can’t be killed?”
Her Forbidden Harem Page 2
