by Abby Knox
Penny sighed and reached out her hand. “Come on, time to say goodbye to the happy couple and then we can get out of here and take a break from each other.”
Bobby took her hand, and electricity shot through him at her touch.
They joined the long lineup to wish Ash and Rosemary safe travels on their honeymoon. Without warning, and probably because he was slightly plastered, Ash picked up Rosemary and slung her over his shoulder, caveman style. His signature move. Everyone laughed. Bobby was so bound up with frustration and angst and jealousy, he was on the verge of tossing Penny over his shoulder, too.
Chapter 5
Penny
She felt her heart pang a little bit. She was far too tall to be carried around like that by most men. And besides, she would never let herself be so undignified in public…but just one time, she might like Bobby to sweep her off her feet without notice. To put all of their baggage aside and just grab her up in his arms and take her to bed.
Maybe it would ruin their friendship. But it probably wouldn’t.
As Penny instinctively scanned the crowd, she noticed something was wrong. Wrong in the air, in the scents that were present. Her wolf senses took over and she set aside her melancholy feelings for the moment. GiGi and Vann were missing, but their scents were still on board. Word around the boat was those two were holed up below deck, making up for lost time with each other as Vann had recently returned from a television shoot overseas.
But then, also missing were Chastity and Gavin, the other remaining members of the bridal party. Chastity was Rosemary’s cousin from Baton Rouge who had gotten so drunk at the bachelorette party, she was dancing on Bobby’s bar. Gavin had paired up with her at the end of that night and that’s as much as Penny knew or cared to know about it. But Chastity and Gavin were not just missing from the human tunnel and shirking their bridal party responsibilities.
Their scent is not even on this boat, she thought.
Penny sniffed the air again. Something else canine was in the air though. Actually, full canine, not shapeshifter canine.
Has someone brought their service dog to this wedding?
But no, that wasn’t it. It was a disturbed, determined energy.
After Rosemary and Ash had disembarked the riverboat and hopped into the classic car to speed off to the hotel, Penny turned to Bobby. “Take a whiff. Gavin’s not here on the boat. He left.”
Bobby looked around and sniffed. “You’re right. Think he sneaked away with that chick from Baton Rouge?”
Penny shook her head. “I don’t know, but I think we’d better find out.”
Again Bobby took Penny’s hand and sparks seared into her.
His stare warmed her soul. Bobby’s eyes came to life again, now that he didn’t have to talk about himself.
And then, looking down at the dock, they watched as a stray Labrador retriever was running toward them. Its eyes were locked on to the two of them and then it stopped short of the gangway and started barking right at Bobby and Penny. And it looked filthy and its fur was matted. It was clearly a stray dog off the street.
“What the hell?” Bobby muttered.
Penny turned to her friend. “I think he wants us to follow him.”
Her paws were light on the earth, her eyes trained on the stray Lab, as they all ran full tilt, like they’d never run before.
Penny’s coppery fur stood on end, knowing she was headed straight into trouble. The air in New Orleans on that June day was virtually pea soup, but the matter at hand had the wolf friends speeding along as if the wind was at their back. As if they were together on a hunt in the woods, carefree and fierce.
The wolves were anything but carefree at the moment—she was certain she and Bobby were not going to like what they would find at the end of this scent trail—but part of her was happy to be running beside her dearest friend again.
The wild, boisterous hunts in the woods, lakes and swamps had taken a backseat these last few months. A lot of wedding drama had taken over their lives. The normally life-giving hunts had become a quick inconvenience every full moon, only to be squeezed in between dress fittings and endless wedding-related parties. There was another inconvenience: with all the pairings-off lately between wolf shifters and feline shifters—that would be Rosemary’s people—the monthly hunts were including more and more participants. Outsiders were working their way into the pack. Penny was trying to keep an open mind, but it was hard.
She loved Rosemary, so she had to keep an open mind. Last January she had become a client at Penny’s design studio, and the two of them hit it off immediately. They liked each other so much they even worked through their differences in their packs. Rosemary was a shape-shifting panther, and Penny was a shapeshifting wolf. But Penny figured if her pack mate, Ash, could overcome the fact that his true love was a shifter of an entirely different species, so could Penny.
She had even grown to accept Rosemary’s cousin GiGi, grudgingly, after she’d morphed into a panther and accidentally injured Penny’s wolf pack member Vann.
Penny had told herself to just deal. Because why bother living in New Orleans if you could not be free to love who you loved, or could not throw a party at every turn for no reason?
But the wedding was over now. There would be no more chatter about flowers or dresses or place settings. Penny was simply running beside her best friend Bobby and not talking.
It was primal and perfect.
She had discarded her gigantic silver bridesmaid’s dress in a lonely, crumbling cemetery on the edge of downtown. She and Bobby had hidden there to quickly shift from their human to wolf forms. Funnily enough, Penny noticed before they sprinted away that her dress was entangled with Bobby’s custom-tailored morning suit on the ground among the tombs. The two garments looked like they were getting the kind of action Penny and Bobby should have been enjoying.
But for now, she put the thought of bedding down with Bobby out of her head. Chas and Gavin were missing and likely in trouble.
When this was over and all her friends were safe, Penny decided, she was not going to waste any more time wondering when Bobby was going to come around.
She was done watching everyone else fall in love. She was going to fix this thing between them, once and for all.
Chapter 6
Bobby
He should be nailing Penny right now, he thought, as they ran toward danger.
But he had blown it. At the reception, he’d had his chance to ask Penny to dance to her favorite song, and he hadn’t. When the band had struck up “No Woman, No Cry,” Bobby had looked up from his glass of straight-up aged Kentucky bourbon and thought he saw Penny glance briefly in his direction.
He should have taken that as a signal right there.
Instead, he had sat and brooded. And then got sidelined completely by old man DuChamps.
Wasting time. It was what he was good at. Bobby was the ring leader, chief party thrower, the least serious of all of them, but it was all a diversion. He had been in love with Penny LeFleur since middle school, and now literally everyone else in the pack was paired off with somebody, except them.
As he and Penny ran, led by the stray yellow Lab up Bourbon Street, he knew exactly what was holding him back. But he had no time for the therapy he needed to get past their childhood trauma. He was too busy spending his life making sure everyone’s drinks were full and the music was turned up.
It seemed neither Penny nor Bobby had remembered to care about all the gasps and screams and stares from humans watching the two wolves barreling through the streets of New Orleans. As far as Bobby was concerned, it was kind of a relief to have a mission to focus on other than kicking himself over romance.
Just when he thought maybe that filthy stray Lab had lost the scent, it turned down an alleyway and stopped.
Bobby looked up and realized they were in the alley behind Gavin’s shop, Howlin’ G’s tattoo parlor.
He recalled Gavin mentioning he was leaving his employee, Manny, in
charge of the shop for a few days while the wedding activities were ramping up.
From the alley, Bobby heard muffled whines. His fur stood on end, this time in a very bad way.
He went to the door, but it was shut. Without opposable thumbs, there was no way he could open the door. But if he shifted back into human form, he would risk being too sapped of energy to shift back, and if there was real danger in there, then he would need to be at full strength. As a wolf, he was more powerful than three ’roid-raging body-builders.
He looked at Penny, and she understood. She checked the entry points to the alley; there was nobody around but the two of them and the Lab. She shifted back into human form and opened the back door, slowly and silently. Stark naked, of course.
Yep. There was the object of his lust, his best friend, the love of his life, the person he thought about when he woke up and last thing before he slept, standing right there, naked. Bobby being Bobby, he had to kick himself to stay focused. He would not be Bobby if he didn’t sneak a peek. He could still see the indentations in her skin from her corset contraption that she’d worn under that ridiculous dress all day. The sight of those tender red lines made Bobby want to shift, scoop Penny up and softly, slowly run his tongue over her aches, tracing kisses down her rib cage, across her sweet belly and reminding her she never had the need for a corset.
“No female of mine is allowed to wear a medieval torture device to hide her perfect body ever again,” he would say, just before diving into her folds with his tongue while stroking her long, soft thighs. He couldn’t help it. The sight of her naked made his pulse pound and his skin crackle with life. How could it not?
Bobby grudgingly led Penny and the stray Lab into the back room of the tattoo parlor.
There was an open box of promotional tee-shirts in the small storage room, so Penny helped herself. Bobby was not thrilled to see her cover herself up.
Soon enough, he’d get her naked again. And hopefully their sordid history wouldn’t crop up to ruin the moment.
Looking around the nooks and crannies of the storage room, Bobby and Penny found something extremely strange. There was an altar to some unfamiliar idol, with flowers and candles. There was a jar of moonshine. There was a weird, dusty old book laid open next to the altar. Its pages had strange diagrams and pictures that Bobby did not recognize. Not that he was much of a book person. Penny whispered, “Nobody leaves a grimoire lying open unless they’re in the process of spell-casting.”
If Bobby were in his human form, he would have asked what the hell she was talking about.
As Penny was perusing the contents of the open pages, Bobby heard another noise. It sounded like people talking. He froze. Then, if he was not mistaken, some muffled cries and growls. Whimpers.
It was coming from the main room.
It sounded like Gavin.
Bobby felt the fur on his neck stand up. He looked up at Penny, who locked eyes with him. She had heard it, too. Something was very deeply wrong here. The beast inside told him to remain perfectly quiet. Move in to get a better look but to not make a goddamn sound. With his eyes, he told her to stay still. Penny moved over to put her hand on the neck of the stray Lab and nodded. All they needed was for an overexcited dog to ruin the element of surprise.
Bobby peeked around the corner, and his beast nearly began to growl. He was using every fiber of restraint he had in his being. First, he saw Gavin, sitting in a chair, kicking and snarling at some invisible force holding him still. More alarmingly, there was Manny, standing next to Chastity, who was helplessly rooted to another chair. Bobby could see no visible ropes holding them in place, so there was obviously some dark magic going on here. Manny was holding a pistol in his hand, angling it down Chastity’s hairline and toward the back of her skull.
Manny was speechifying in true Disney villain fashion. He was talking about the purity of the wolf race.
What the hell is going on here?
“Gavin, man, your mind has been poisoned by the DuChamps clan,” he heard Manny saying. “Just because they own your friend Boudreaux doesn’t mean we all have to fall in line. I’m surprised your clan are so agreeable to mixing the blood of the wolves with humans, let alone another species of shifter.”
So. Manny’s got some weird blood purity fixation.
While watching their scene play out, Bobby had been holding himself back tenuously. The emotions and the alcohol, and now terror at this voodoo-practicing lunatic, were all working against his self-control. He needed just the right moment to strike.
And then, he made the mistake of locking eyes with Chas.
The terror had been gripping her as Manny traced lines around her face with the barrel of his handgun, like a psychopath. Truth be told, Bobby hadn’t much cared for that chick’s behavior the other night, sloppy drunk and dancing on his bar. And he didn’t much like the idea of her hooking up casually with one of his best buddies. But they would deal with that later. For now, Bobby’s first priority was disabling Manny.
Bobby was ready to lay waste to this asshole.
Manny’s back was to him, and so was Gavin’s. But Chastity’s whole demeanor changed when she saw the wolf emerge from the back of the shop. She smiled. Manny saw the change in her face and turned.
That’s when Bobby lost the element of surprise. Manny’s eyes narrowed as the wolf bounded at him, and then he did the unthinkable. Pointed his .32 semi-automatic and fired.
Chas screamed. Gavin howled as he watched the wolf get hit.
But it wasn’t Bobby the wolf who got shot.
It was Penny.
Chapter 7
Penny
She knew Bobby had signaled her to stay in the back and not to wolf out again.
But to hell with that plan. All her wolf senses were firing in full flight-or-fight mode. Penny never backed down from a fight before and she wasn’t about to start now.
When she inched around the corner behind Bobby, she saw in a split second that Chas was smiling up at Bobby. Who could blame her? Penny imagined that Chas was relieved, no doubt, that the cavalry had arrived.
Penny wolfed out without a second thought and dove with all her might at Manny.
The shot rang out. Bobby and Penny both hit Manny at full force and knocked him to the floor. The gun went skittering. Bobby loomed over top of Manny, whose eyes now were wide and filled with terror. Penny fell to the floor, howling in pain.
She tried to catch Bobby’s eye to let him know she was OK. But it didn’t matter if she had not been hit at all. She saw the primal rage in her wolf friend. His massive canine jaw was locked on to Manny’s neck like a rabid dog.
Manny screamed and struggled. Doubtless, he was trying to shift into his full wolf as well, to make it a fair fight. But Bobby had him and he was not going to let go. Manny was helpless. A bleeding Penny ran at Bobby and tried to nudge him off of Manny. It was enough, they could restrain him until they called the police. But even at her strongest effort, she bounced right off of Bobby’s massive body. She was already weak from all the shifting back and forth; she had no power over him as a wolf.
Penny shifted back into human form and felt the side of her face, felt the blood dripping. The pain was blinding and the blood was surging from her ear.
“I’m OK, Bobby! Let go!” she cried, but it was too late.
Bobby instinctively jerked Manny’s neck in his grip, as a wolf does with its prey, and in that moment everyone in the room heard the snap. Manny exhaled his last.
Chapter 8
Bobby
Bobby, now in human form, stood over Manny’s lifeless body. Manny’s blood was all over his face and down his chest.
This was bad.
Things were supposed to go way differently today. He should be in Penny’s bed right now, or heading out of town to let her live her life. Instead, he had let the wolf take over—outside of the safety of a full-moon hunt under the cover of night and trees—and now someone was dead.
Again.
; “Baby?”
Bobby looked up and turned. Penny was standing behind him in the long tee-shirt down to her thighs, looking sexy as hell, even with a minor flesh wound, but there was just one problem. She was staring at him in horror.
“Bobby, are you OK?”
And then, Bobby did what he did best. He panicked and ran away.
And knowing he was leaving behind an injured Penny, he hated himself all the more. Because the wound had occurred while she was in wolf form, it would heal quickly, but still he felt like an asshole.
He could never go back now.
He would have to leave New Orleans for good and let Penny move on without him.
It was for the best.
Chapter 9
Penny
They had never talked in depth about their past, and now the past had come to bite them all in the ass. Except now, it was worse than the last time.
Gavin and Chas were freed of the voodoo spell as soon as Manny had died. Chas sat with Penny in the back office and applied first aid to her ear while Gavin went to fetch her something to wear from his apartment up the street. Chas explained to her what was going on, why they hadn’t been able to move. Manny had trapped them with a voodoo binding spell and was planning to murder Chastity over the fact that she was a feline shifter intruding on the wolf clan.
“What did he care? He’s not even a part of our particular pack,” Penny said when Gavin returned with a pair of his board shorts and a belt.
“I should’ve kept a closer eye on him. All this wedding bullshit—I mean, wedding activities—got me so distracted, I hired the first wolf shifter to walk in the door. Some of them are pretty hardcore, I guess. I feel like such an idiot.”
