Luckily, now that the full depth of her aroma was muffled by my human nose, the woman was no longer quite so attractive. Meaning that the urge to hump every nearby tree was fading. Making progress.
Instead, I was able to pay attention to the factors I'd come here to discover. Yes, this pack princess was the correct age, her facial structure and coloration in the right ball park to be the werewolf who I'd spent the last three weeks tracking down.
"I, Wolf Young, swear to obey you, Chief Wilder, once for a favor of your choosing."
Those words, torn from my lips the previous winter, were the precise reason why I was now hunting pack princesses through a mountain wilderness. Against my better judgment, I'd promised this woman's father an undetermined future service, but I didn't plan to sit on my hands and wait for him to collect at his leisure. Instead, I was spending every spare moment seeking out the chinks in Chief Wilder's armor.
Chinks like his two estranged daughters, both living a dangerous but independent life style hidden in plain sight within the human world. One daughter down, one daughter to go.
Because when Chief Wilder called in his debts, I planned to have two aces up my sleeve. For the sake of my own pack, I'd be ready.
Chapter 2
Victor: You there or just drooling on your keyboard?
The words popped onto my screen unbidden and I rolled my eyes. Trust a hacker to think that text messaging and emails were for losers. Instead, my closest cyber buddy Victor considered it a challenge to hack into my private laptop and send write-messages directly to the command line. Never mind that the words' location messed with the coding work that paid my pack's bills.
Wolf: Here but busy. Gotta make a buck.
Despite my curt reply, I was actually glad to hear from the unruly hacker. He'd been a staple in my life ever since I'd traded an afternoon of yard work for this ancient laptop last year and entered the twenty-first century.
From our first virtual meeting, I'd gotten the impression that Victor was lonely. So I'd shrugged and mentally enfolded him into my pack. Not that the other programmer knew that was how I thought of him. Victor was a typical young human male who pretty much considered only his own best interests at all times. I'd never mentioned my fur and claws, and he'd never picked up on the not-so-subtle hints I tossed in his direction to clue him in to my otherness.
Victor's non-pack-centric worldview also made it tough for him to understand why I found it so imperative to take some of the financial strain off Tia's shoulders. But, despite not grokking my work ethic, my friend had come through by providing several leads that brought in a trickle of income and helped keep us all in gas money. In return, I'd performed a few random favors to keep his overly concerned parents at bay.
Unfortunately, minor website-design jobs weren't going to be enough to fund the project I was currently envisioning. So I typed a quick addition to my initial reply.
Wolf: Any leads on bigger jobs?
The deal was, I was still obsessed with my promise to the Chief. I'd learned the hard way that daughter number one was okay on her own. Plus, she rattled my lupine nature way too much to be incorporated into any future strategies.
On the other hand, a visit to daughter number two's residence had given me a firm plan of action for getting out from under Chief Wilder's thumb. The second pack princess was dead and had left behind a son being raised in the human world with no knowledge of his werewolf heritage. The potential for debt reduction was huge...as long as I could come up with two hundred grand to purchase the abandoned trailer park on the other side of the mountain and enfold the pup into my new territory.
But, as I waited for Victor's reply, I held out little hope that my cyber buddy would help me accumulate the much-needed down payment. He usually typed a mile a minute, and I'd expected two or three messages to be waiting impatiently once I shook the current brain fart out of my head. Instead, the terminal before me remained blank, cursor blinking elusively.
Which could mean only one thing. Victor did have a lead on something big, but he wasn't particularly keen on sharing it. Time to play on his competitive streak.
Wolf: Scared to share, huh? Think I'll pull the rug out from under your ass and leave you hungry?
Victor wouldn't be literally hungry without his coding, of course, or I wouldn't have prodded his pride. The young male still lived at home with two doting parents who paid for everything except his video-game addiction. Which is why Victor was usually so generous about sending job opportunities my way. Why work when he'd rather be playing?
Luckily for me, Victor's lazy streak won out over greed once again. Because a message hit my screen at last.
Victor: If you need dough, I'm on the trail of a whole bakery.
Rolling my eyes, I input a single question mark. Yes, Victor tended to type in complete sentences...but not necessarily in complete thoughts.
Victor: Gonna run with the big dogs.
I couldn't help laughing at the hacker's words, wondering what he'd think if he stumbled across my pack during one of our hunts. Half a dozen huge wolves bounding through the midnight forest. Splashes of blood brilliantly red in the moonlight. Sharp teeth and bone-rattling howls. The human would probably shit his pants.
Still, I followed the link my friend had provided at the end of his message and found I was viewing a wanted ad on the website of a podunk bank from small-town Ohio. First Ohio Bank and Trust was seeking a computer-security firm to upgrade their online banking portal and applicants were invited to speak with the bank manager in person at a convention this coming weekend. The salary wasn't exorbitant. But considering my pack lived mostly on poached deer and rabbit fur, it would be enough.
I could've checked my calendar like a pro, but there was no point. I was free. I was nearly always free.
Wolf: You going for the job? Wouldn't that mean getting out of your jammies five days a week?
Victor: Fuck you, dude. It's work-from-home. And the 'rents are starting to whinge about employment AGAIN.
Wolf: LOL. Well, then it's yours. You'll be the world's best anti-hacker.
I didn't want to cede what looked like a lucrative gig. But I considered Victor my friend even though I wasn't so sure he would have said the same about me. At least he'd given me an idea for another direction where I could look for pack-friendly employment. Surely First Ohio wasn't the only bank out there in need of a security analyst to revamp their online safety net....
I moved the mouse to click on a new browser tab. But before I could follow that thought trail, my gaze was drawn back to new words popping into existence on my terminal.
Victor: Hey, I'm up for a challenge if you are. No one's going to pick baby hacker over me.
I smiled. Seemed like human males responded to taunting just as predictably as shifter males. Next we'd embark on a dick-measuring contest.
But, meanwhile, my friend had a valid point—I'd only learned how to turn on a computer twelve months ago. Could I really handle online security for even a small-town bank?
Of course, unlike Victor, I hadn't wasted the last eight thousand hours playing video games. Instead, I'd fallen down the digital rabbit hole with a vengeance and was already proficient at multiple programming languages.
And, in the end, I knew I worked best under pressure. So I had a feeling Victor would come to regret his chivalry.
Wolf: You sure?
Victor: You scared?
It was decided. I would see Victor—and his bank manager—at MavCon.
Chapter 3
"We can come into the hotel with you if you want."
Chase—my milk brother, my best friend—sometimes felt annoyingly like a nanny. What was this, the first day of kindergarten?
It was bad enough that my entire pack had banded together and refused to allow me behind the wheel of a car on the way to MavCon. But I quickly got over that frustration when I realized my trip doubled as a chance for Wade and Chase to shake off their usual responsibilities and spend the weekend in the big city.
My companions had managed to line up a concert to attend while I was glad-handing bank managers, and I particularly enjoyed seeing a spark of joy come into the eyes of the young shifter who had been a half-starved, whipped puppy only a few months before.
But the trip made much less sense if Chase was going to insist on walking me to my hotel room as if I were incompetent. Heck, I was supposed to be the pack leader around here. So why did I get the impression no one trusted me to keep fur and fangs in check in a hotel full of humans?
Which wasn't to say my milk brother was wrong. Proving Chase's point, I found myself incapable of voicing my current combination of annoyance and appreciation in words. So I simply raised one eyebrow, knowing Chase could read every thought that ran through my mind with the ease of long practice.
I'm going in alone, I thought, flaring my nostrils. Don't forget that I'm the alpha, not you.
In response, Wade cringed back against his seat proving that he, at least, understood that I could rip the pair of them apart without skipping a beat. Unfortunately, my potential for mayhem was the precise image I was trying to work out of the kid's head after his traumatic experience at my brother's hands last winter. So I was much less heartened by his reaction than another pack leader might have been.
Beside me, Chase's mouth quirked up into a smug smile. The bastard probably provoked my show of anger on purpose to remind me what was at stake if I screwed up.
Fuck. That's so totally fighting unfair.
Still, I couldn't leave Wade cowering in the backseat. So I made sure my voice was calm enough to soothe the young shifter at the same time as I whipped out my cell phone and laid my best friend's worries at rest.
"You're on autodial." As if in reaction to my words, Chase's phone rang from his hip pocket, my finger having hit the proper buttons without even looking. I really wasn't incompetent with human ways...just not very practiced at them. "And I promise to call you, Mom, if I need you."
I read the good humor in Chase's face just as easily as he'd read the annoyance in mine. "Sorry," he said softly, clapping one hand on my shoulder. "I didn't mean to hover. It's just the rules about outing ourselves to humans are so strict...."
"Yeah, I know."
I did know. And as Chase so ably read in my stiffened shoulders, I was scared shitless of this building full of unwitting humans. What if I messed up and let myself shift into my more proper form in a moment of weakness? What if I got angry and scared the living daylights out of a hundred two-leggers with a single look?
No what-ifs. I've been learning to act human for eight years. If I pay close attention, I can pass for forty-eight hours.
"Day after tomorrow at five pm?" Chase asked at last, ceding the point.
"Five pm," I confirmed.
Then I hopped out of the car and strode into the sea of swirling humanity.
***
Sniffing my way through the hotel lobby that first evening, I hunted Victor. We'd set up a meet in the bar for seven pm, but it appeared half of the conference attendees had done the same. Still, I was confident my lupine nose would pick my cyber buddy out of the crowd of geeks despite never having smelled him before. He'd reek of potato chips and old sweat and would also be easy to discern based on his stained t-shirt and rumpled jeans. Or so I assumed from the conversations we'd held online over the last twelve months.
Unfortunately everyone resembled the picture I'd built up in my imagination of the introverted brainiac. In fact, it wasn't until I forced my eyes to focus on the name tags that I found my friend.
"Victor" read the sticker carefully aligned on my friend's jacket pocket, and the word felt more like a description than a name. Because my cyber buddy had clearly decided to lead with his best foot forward, having arrived in a stylish suit that put my own attempt at respectability to shame.
Meanwhile, I could see from the gazes of the attendees around him that Victor had already made half a dozen friends this evening. He seemed to be the human equivalent of an alpha werewolf, drawing in weaker humans with a magnetic personality that made it easy for bystanders to overlook his flaws.
And here I thought I only had to compete with a computer geek tomorrow morning. Instead, Victor turned out to be that epitome of human perfection that I'd long ago stopped even bothering to envy, let alone emulate. Suddenly, my chances of getting the First Ohio gig looked like the white flag of a doe tail as the alarmed animal bounded away into a laurel thicket. Barely glimpsed and soon gone.
The truth was that I'd spent the better part of a decade learning to pass for human, and I was now moderately proficient at the task...on a good day. But non-shifters still tended to consider even my most valiant efforts menacing and odd despite the careful veil I layered between my wolf and the human world. No way could I pretend to be the golden boy that Victor so effortlessly portrayed. No way would my computer skills be sufficient to nab the coveted job when my cyber buddy's charisma was around to blow the bank manager out of the water.
Still, Victor was pack—in my eyes at least. So I shrugged off concern for the future and stepped forward to introduce myself.
"You're late," my friend greeted me as I tapped him on the shoulder, but his eyes shone with enthusiasm. I hadn't been wrong about that part, at least—my cyber buddy was lonely in the human world and glad of my companionship despite his ability to attract mere mortals with his charisma's enticing spark. "Here," he continued, sliding a glass down the bar, "I ordered you a drink."
I cocked my head as I accepted the vessel and the vacant seat, assessing the amber liquid in the tall glass in front of me. Yet another human rite of passage that I hadn't the foggiest clue how to participate in.
Shifters tended to have plenty to deal with in our teens and early twenties between managing new physical forms and carving out an adult place in the pack. So we seldom drank or experimented with drugs. As a result, I couldn't guess what Victor's offered glass contained.
Still, it was clear the beverage was a human test of strength much like a shifter eye-lock. So I quirked one eyebrow playfully and downed the vessel's contents in one long gulp.
"Not bad," I said aloud, even as I felt the burn of something powerful racing down my gullet. So, not just a beer then. Still, the sensation felt good, dulling my senses enough that the rush of sounds, scents, and sights around me weren't quite so overwhelming.
Every nearby eye was trained on my face, waiting for further reaction. So I gestured at the other human males whose body language suggested they were somehow allied with Victor. "Are you going to introduce me to your p...I mean, your friends?"
And I appeared to have passed the test. Because hands reached around Victor's to grasp mine and a medley of voices offered up their names.
Pack or not, it felt good to be accepted into Victor's world for one night at least.
Chapter 4
I woke with a pounding headache and blurry vision, feeling worse than the last time I'd gone in for the kill on a six-point buck and been pummeled by his antlers. Whoa. Despite my silent admonition, the room refused to stop spinning until I closed my eyes and squeezed some sense back into my brain. Perhaps matching Victor drink for drink the night before hadn't been such a bright idea after all.
Luckily, my lupine nature made it relatively easy to compartmentalize what had initially felt like unbearable agony. Stumbling across the room, I turned on the sink full blast and soaked my head beneath the cold water until I felt capable of opening my eyes. Then my gaze settled on the glowing numbers on the alarm clock.
Shit. I was late for my breakfast meeting with First Ohio's manager. Not a good start.
Pulling on pants—now wrinkled—and buttoning up the shirt Chase's mother Tia had so lovingly ironed the day before, I felt more like a child than I had in a long time. In fact, ever since tracking down the Chief's younger daughter, I'd been off my game. The woman's brown eyes and sweet scent kept drifting across my thoughts at the oddest moments...like right now, when I should have been focusing on how to apol
ogize for tardiness without entirely shooting myself in the foot.
An intriguing pack princess was so much more interesting than a male human I'd never met, though. So as I headed downstairs on autopilot, I allowed her name to roll off my tongue slowly, like a seductively rich morsel of chocolate melting in my mouth. "Terra," I murmured to myself.
Before leaving the pack, I'd caught Tia in a talkative mood and the older woman had been quite willing to tell the story of the Chief's tomboy daughter and her great escape from the Wilder clan two years prior. Unfortunately for my mental health, the tale had only made the pack princess more enticing in my eyes...and that much more dangerous to the good of my pack. Because we were on precarious enough footing already. We didn't need to get involved in Chief Wilder's family any more than necessary to resolve my debt.
Dangerous. I sucked in another deep breath through open mouth, almost expecting the woman's aroma to fill the air. But all I smelled was stale human sweat, old cat hairs, and a hint of gasoline as the elevator doors sprang open before me. At least my human feet had been moving forward while my brain was lost in the forest with Terra.
Focus, I reminded myself one last time as my eyes locked on the dapper, gray-haired gentleman seated at the bar. This would be Bob Pendleton, the man who I hoped to wow with my knowledge of Java and ASP. Unwillingly, my imaginary pack princess turned and waved farewell before evaporating into mist.
And as my senses sharpened, I saw that danger had snuck into even this human meeting. Because even though I was supposed to interview alone, there on the stool next to my potential boss sat Victor.
With almost lupine awareness of his surroundings, the back-stabber met my eyes while I was still twenty feet away. His name tag, now absent, rose in my vision to replace the more scintillating image of Chief Wilder's younger daughter. Victor. That's precisely what my cyber buddy planned to be.
In fact, the smirk on his face proved that my hangover was just the first foray in his march toward victory.
The Complete Bloodling Serial: Episodes 1-5 Page 7
