by Coyote Starr
But there was something else to that scent.
Something he knew well.
The scent of a gravid male—this one overlaid with Jamal’s own scent.
What the hell?
Ethan was pregnant?
It wasn’t unusual for an Omega to start showing signs of pregnancy this quickly. After all, a wolf in the wild had a gestation period of less than three months. It was no wonder that wolf shifters’ pregnancies were shorter than humans’ by several months. Add in the mystical element that allowed Omega pregnancies, and little about the timeline followed either a human or a wolf pregnancy.
No. What was unusual was that Jamal hadn’t realized that Ethan was an Omega at all, much less a fertile one.
And he was absolutely sure that Ethan didn’t know it, either.
Did the blond man even know what was happening to him?
I need to get to him. Protect him.
The almost irresistible urge to track his mate, keep him from any harm, rose up in Jamal.
Mate?
Oh, hell. I’m in trouble.
He could interrupt the summit, but doing so might ruin whatever finely tuned plans Kamau had in place.
What would he tell his lead Alpha, anyway? That he had scented the Beta he had brought back to the hotel the night before? Only he wasn’t a Beta at all?
That I knocked up a Beta playmate who wasn’t a Beta and now I know, all the way to my bones, that he’s my life-mate?
Jamal was pretty sure Kamau planned to find a mate for him among the other pack’s Omegas.
A string of blue curses flowed through Jamal’s mind, but he managed to maintain an outward calm.
No. He would have to wait, see if he could follow the trail later, when the summit talks had ended.
And then one clear, unmuddled thought crossed his mind.
A baby. My mate is having a baby.
He needed to pay attention to the negotiations, in case they went awry. Kamau might need him to help keep the peace.
But that scent kept teasing his senses, drawing his attention away from the parley. Scenes from the night before unfurled before his eyes, and his beast all but laughed in delight. The wolf across from him curled a lip up to show a fang, assuming Jamal was laughing at him again. He wasn’t—but he couldn’t stop grinning, either, even though he knew that finding that scent here was not a good thing.
The way that muted smell kept teasing at him, drifting in and out of range, kept him half-distracted through most of the summit. He knew it for a pregnant Ethan’s scent, but he couldn’t pinpoint its location.
He did have a direction for it, though. At least, he thought he did. No matter how carefully he tilted his ears in that direction, though, he couldn’t make out anything unusual, nothing beyond the general shifting and rustling that came with any large group of wolf-shifters, in any form.
By the time the leaders began wrapping up their discussion, it was all he could do not to go bounding off in the direction of the scent.
Kamau was summarizing the final agreement as it would be presented to the Alpha-Council, Jamal realized. It sounded like the Alphas were agreeing to an even exchange of Omegas. At the end of six months, any Omegas who hadn’t mated would return to their home pack.
Excellent.
The need to mate was deeply encoded in both their culture and their biology.
Our animal sides control our actions more than we like to admit.
There were other elements to the agreement, but the trade was the one that Kamau had been most concerned about. It meant that his pack would have the chance to survive. To thrive.
Thank all that was good.
As the parley began to break up, Jamal couldn’t help but aim a few yips at the wolf who had been snarling at him. The other wolves would recognize his voice, know that he was the one taunting their adversaries, but he didn’t care. His mate was having a baby, and it made him feel like laughing.
* * *
Ethan had understood only about half of what the deviant wolves in the center were saying—something about trading Omega wolves?
In his own pack, Omegas were the least of the wolves, the last to eat in a group setting, the first to suffer taunts and gibes at the hands of their packmates. Among the deviants, they seemed to hold value as … mate? Had he heard that right?
God. Were those the pregnant males? Was there something about them that made them more able to be impregnated?
The churning in his stomach reached new heights, and it was all he could do to keep from spewing on the ground.
At any rate, he’d heard enough to know that the deviants were planning to make a trade right here in Charleston in three days.
That would have to be his next move, then—take down the monsters during the trade. If he was right, if these Omegas were the ones who bore the babies, then eliminating them would eventually wipe out the whole pack.
Assuming Adrian agrees.
Sometimes, they butted heads over what direction Ethan’s monster-hunting should take. Adrian was about half-likely to tell him not to take on one of the bigger packs.
But Ethan was good at hunting around the edges, taking down the stragglers, the outliers, then striking at the heart of the monsters—usually their leader. But in this case, their Omegas.
He just had to figure out who they were.
That would leave the packs in disarray, fighting among themselves.
And if I time it right, I can have them battling one another, as well.
He was certain that he was ready to take down a whole pack. He knew Adrian had done it more than once, back in his heyday, by combining with other Hunters.
Just because we prefer to work alone doesn’t mean we’re required to.
If there were two big packs of abomination wolves, then they needed to be put down.
As the discussion in the clearing began winding down, Ethan stepped silently backward, extricating himself from the foliage, moving carefully despite muscles that ached from remaining perfectly still for so long.
At the edge of the square, Ethan paused, still hidden by the leaves, to make sure no one saw him emerge from the vegetation. Covering up one hand with the sleeve of his hoodie, he swiped at the dark makeup on his face. As he prepared to step out onto the sidewalk, an odd yip stopped him.
Wolf, he realized. I know that voice. But whose was it? Something about it called out to him, as if pulling him back toward the clearing. That’s someone I know. I’m sure of it.
He didn’t have to leave. Technically, he didn’t even need Adrian’s approval to take out a pack. Having it helped, certainly, as he relied on the older Hunter for information and knowledge and even connections to his clean-up teams, half the time. But Ethan was a Hunter in his own right, trusted to make decisions in the field.
Instead of moving out of the foliage as he had originally planned, he turned around and made his way back to his viewing spot, where he crouched down and peered through the leaves again.
There. At the edge of the group, a white wolf looked back over its shoulder at its wolf counterpart from the other pack, its tongue lolling in an open-mouth grin, right before it let out another familiar, unnerving, barking laugh.
One of the men who had been involved in the negotiations fell back from his place in the middle of the group and put one hand on the wolf’s back. It was enough to act as some sort of reprimand, or maybe just a reminder, as the wolf faced forward again and began trotting next to him as the man strode back to join the rest of the moving pack—but not without licking his hand, first.
Ethan shivered at the thought of the tongue on his own skin and had to shake off the response.
Tamping down his visceral reaction took a few additional moments. Any kind of emotional response could increase his scent and make him more easily detected by the deviants.
He felt compelled to follow that laughing wolf. Before he did so, though, he opened the package of baking soda he kept in the front pocket of his hoodie and
sprinkled it over his hands, then patted it across his face, and inside his shirt. Finally, he dusted it across his hair and rubbed it into his scalp.
That should help keep him invisible, at least in terms of scent, as he followed the boisterous company.
The wolf-shifter pack didn’t stay in a large group.
That was a smart move, Ethan had to acknowledge. The animals peeled off almost immediately after leaving the park, loping off into the darkness in ones and twos. Except the one he wanted. It stayed next to the man who led the group.
Soon, the men began splitting off, too—not a bad move, either. A large group of rowdy black men in the historic district of a city in the Deep South could look like a problem to some kinds of people.
If only they knew.
Race issues. Race was nothing. It didn’t matter if people were black or white or goddamn green, as far as Ethan was concerned.
And any kind of wolf-shifter would have been fine with Ethan—as long as they reproduced in any normal kind of way.
He shook it off.
His goal was to put down one wolf shifter tonight, test their skills and strengths, and see if he could learn anything about them from it. Then he would make a plan to deal with the rest of them.
* * *
Jamal kept his senses focused on his surroundings, determined to protect Kamau and the other Alphas of the clan as they walked back to their hotel. When they turned onto King Street, he allowed Kamau to slide around him so that he walked on the building-side of the sidewalk, but only because sixteen-year-old Hawa walked on the other side of their lead Alpha, and he had aspirations of becoming an Enforcer himself.
Jamal had finally decided that Ethan must be gone—either that, or the scent he’d caught earlier was the product of wishful thinking—when a sudden gust of wind brought the smell to him again, this time clearly from somewhere behind them.
And just as clearly pregnant.
In the darkness, anyone who passed their group was likely to think him a dog, and although the thought of it galled him a little, he knew it was necessary to participate in the deception. At least stopping to sniff the air wouldn’t seem particularly odd.
He couldn’t help but revel in the scent of his mate.
After Kamau is safely returned to the hotel, he promised himself. Then he would go back out and track down the source of the scent that he found so distracting and alluring.
They were still several blocks from the hotel when Kamau stopped and pointed to a dark space between two houses. “Go. Change.” He held out his hand to one of the Alphas, who pulled clothing out of a bag he carried and placed it over Kamau’s outstretched arm. In turn, Kamau draped it across Jamal’s back.
Jamal whined and pawed the ground, wanting to explain his need to track later and his desire to conserve the energy that an additional shift would expend, but his lead Alpha shook his head and pointed.
“Now. We will wait here.”
Jamal didn’t think Kamau would yield, even if he could explain.
Shifting this far from the land of his birth always hurt more than it had back in Africa. He couldn’t explain it, or know why that should be so, but the other wolves had mentioned it, as well.
It left him feeling drained, as well, and ravenous.
Before he could go back out to track the elusive pregnant-Ethan-scent, he would need to eat.
And perhaps take additional food to his mate and unborn pup.
Even the thought made him grin again, even as his stomach growled.
From the sidewalk, Kamau laughed. “I heard that. Kopano just texted me. The other Alphas have gone to the hotel restaurant with the Omegas. You may join them.”
Still buttoning his pants, Jamal stepped out onto the sidewalk, where he took a pair of leather sandals from Kamau and stepped into them. “After I see you safely back to your room,” he said.
Kamau patted his cheek. “You are a good boy.” Turning away, he headed back toward the river. “But the Betas are no threat tonight, and even if they were, I can take care of myself. We all can.” With a wave of his hand, he encompassed all the Alphas surrounding him.
“But this is my job, and I will do it.” Jamal knew he sounded petulant, but he had worked hard to gain the title of Enforcer, and he would not allow his lead Alpha to come to any harm—or even go out in public without a guard.
Chapter 6
Ethan slipped out of the shrubbery where he had hidden when the group had stopped, presumably for the wolf to change into its human form. He couldn’t hear what they were saying or even see them clearly—they stood in shadows when they stopped, and moved swiftly and almost silently. But he could tell that the wolf had been replaced with a man.
Once, he had seen one of the deviants in the process of giving birth. The sight had horrified him—the man had dropped to his knees and twisted into impossible shapes as his body reconfigured itself to accommodate what never should have been—but it was the sound that stayed with him. Every time he thought of it, he remembered the grinding, crunching, cracking sound of bones and tendons popping.
If he’d had any sympathy for the beasts at all, it would have made his eyes water. As it was, his stomach turned whenever he considered it.
Tonight, with the odd churning in his belly, he couldn’t help it—he finally gave into the urge and, as the wolves he tracked moved off, he leaned into the bushes and vomited.
I must have picked up something. Maybe from the guy last night?
It was weird, though—wolf-shifters were immune to most viruses.
No. He simply refused to allow himself to be sick.
With a snarl, he determined to follow this shifter group until he could either take one out tonight, or at least figure out how to do so soon.
The more they walked, the more he realized that he had been on this sidewalk before. Glancing up, he realized they were almost to the Hyatt. As the group ducked inside, he caught a glimpse of them in the light shining out through the glass doors from the lobby.
The man with them looked like Jamal.
He shook his head in an attempt to dispel the notion.
Ethan had killed dozens of deviants. He knew what they looked like, how they acted, how they smelled.
He knew how to recognize them.
He would never have sex with one.
By the time he reached the lobby door and stood just outside, peering in, the group was already halfway to the elevator. Scattered throughout the open area of the lobby, young black men stood in smaller groups, laughing and talking.
Oh, crap. He knew what this reminded him of.
The bar the night before.
The leader of the beasts glanced up, and his eyes caught the light, flashing it back toward Ethan in a glow that managed to be both yellow and brown.
As he pulled open the door, one of the men laughed. Another laugh answered it. That second laugh was bright and happy, and he had heard it before.
An involuntary gasp escaped him.
The beast really was Jamal.
He ran his gaze quickly over them, seeking him out.
Yes. There he was. Jamal was one of them.
"Oh, motherfucker," he breathed.
His stomach contracted and heaved again, as if he'd been sucker-punched.
Jesus mother-lovin’ Christ.
I fucked one of the deviants.
His mind scrabbled away from the thought, instantly trying to find some way to justify it.
“Sir? May I help you?” One of the hotel’s doormen leaned in to look at him from one side.
Crap. I’m blocking the entrance.
And worse than that, he was drawing attention to himself. Any second now, the monsters might take notice of him.
Jamal might notice him.
And he was going to need to stay hidden—to remain truly a shadow—if he was going to deal with this latest …
Development? Event? Horror?
Fucking nightmare.
“No, thank you,” he murmured
, backing out of the door and letting it swing shut. He turned and walked purposely away, crossing the street to stand in the shadows cast by a tall tree.
He stared up at the hotel for a long moment, trying to gather his disordered thoughts. After a minute, he began pacing back and forth along the sidewalk across the street from the entrance, until he noticed the doorman watching him with too much interest.
“Dammit,” he muttered, crossing the street again and cutting through what looked at first glance to be some kind of alleyway.
Ethan was half-tempted to turn around and present himself at Jamal’s hotel room, demanding to know who and what he was.
That would give away his own identity as a Hunter, however.
But he wasn’t going to follow his original plan of take out a deviant to learn their strengths and weaknesses, either.
No. He was going to take one of those monsters prisoner and make it talk. Force it to tell him everything it knew about their packs—their Alphas and Omegas—and why one would want to have sex with a man he couldn’t impregnate.
Still fuming, he stomped back toward the hotel, grinding his teeth in combined anger and horror.
How dare he act like a … a person? A regular wolf-shifter?
And to think Ethan had actually liked the deviant.
Liked him.
Oh, dear God. I let it fuck me. Cum inside me.
Ethan’s stomach clenched, and he doubled over, retching. By the time he stood up, wiping the back of his hand across his mouth, he felt calmer. More certain of himself.
I can’t waste any more time on emotions.
I have a job to do.
Step one of that job was to re-acquire his target.
It had been a mistake to let the group he had been following out of his sight. Ethan was willing to forgive himself the lapse, as he had been taken by surprise and allowed his feelings to overwhelm him.
That wouldn’t happen again.
I wish I had my broadsword with me, though. I could work through a lot of emotional angst with it.
Perhaps he would shift to his own wolf form, after all.
