On the Prowl

by Patricia Briggs, Eileen Wilks, Karen Chance, Sunny

The waiter shook his head with mock sadness. "Mountains are beautiful, but not as beautiful as our skyline. One of these days I'll take you out for a night on the town and you'll never leave again."

  "Phillip!" A bird-thin woman stepped into the room. "While you are here chatting with Mr. Cornick, our other guests are going hungry."

  The waiter grinned and winked at Anna. He dropped a kiss on the woman's cheek and slipped through the door.

  The woman suppressed a smile and shook her head. "That one. Always talking. He needs a good wife to keep him in line. I am too old." She threw up her hands and then followed the waiter.

  The next twenty minutes brought a series of waiters and waitresses who all looked as though they were related. They carried food on trays and never said anything about it being odd that two people should eat so much food.

  Charles filled his plate, looked at hers, and said, "You should have told me you didn't like lamb."

  She looked at her plate. "I do."

  He frowned at her, took the serving spoon, and added to the amount on her plate. "You should be eating more. A lot more. The change requires a lot of energy. You have to eat more as a werewolf to maintain your weight."

  After that, by mutual consent Anna and Charles confined their conversations to generalities. They talked about Chicago and city living. She took a little of a rice dish and he looked at her until she took a second spoonful. He told her a little about Montana. She found he was very well spoken and the easiest way to stop a conversation cold was to ask him about anything personal. It wasn't that he didn't want to talk about himself, she thought, it was that he didn't find himself very interesting.

  The door swung open one last time, and a girl of about fourteen came in with dessert.

  "Aren't you supposed to be in school?" Charles asked her.

  She signed. "Vacation. Everyone else gets time off. But me? I get to work in the restaurant. It sucks."

  "I see," he said. "Perhaps you should call child welfare and tell them you're being abused?"

  She grinned at him. "Wouldn't that get Papa riled up. I'm tempted to do it just to see his face. If I told him it was your suggestion do ya suppose he'd get mad at you instead of me?" She wrinkled her nose. "Probably not."

  "Tell your mother that the food was perfect."

  She braced the empty tray on her hip and backed out the door. "I'll tell her, but she already told me to tell you that it wasn't. The lamb was a little stringy, but that's all she could get."

  "I gather you come here often," Anna said, unenthusiastically picking at a huge piece of baklava. Not that she had anything against baklava—as long as she hadn't eaten a week's worth of food first.

  "Too often," he said. He was having no trouble eating more, she noticed. "We have some business interests here, so I have to come three or four times a year. The owner of the restaurant is a wolf, one of Jaimie's. I sometimes find it convenient to discuss business here."

  "I thought you were your father's hit man," she said with interest. "You have to hunt down people in Chicago three or four times a year?"

  He laughed out loud. The sound was rusty, as if he didn't do it very often—though he ought to, it looked good on him. Good enough that she ate the forkful of baklava she'd been playing with and then had to figure out how to swallow it when her stomach was telling her that it didn't need any more food sent its way.

  "No, I have other duties as well. I take care of my father's pack's business interests. I am very good at both of my jobs," he said without any hint of modesty.

  "I bet you are." He was a person who would be very good at whatever he decided to do. "I'd let you invest my savings. I think I have twenty-two dollars and ninety-seven cents right now."

  He frowned at her, all amusement gone.

  "It was a joke," she explained.

  But he ignored her. "Most Alphas have their members give ten percent of their earnings for the good of the pack, especially when the pack is new. This money is used to ensure there is a safe house, for instance. Once a pack is firmly established, though, the need for money lessens. My father's pack has been established for a long time—there is no need for a tithe because we own the land we live on and there are investments enough for the future. Leo has been here for thirty years: time enough to be well established. I've never heard of a pack demanding forty percent from its members—which leads me to believe that Leo's pack is in financial trouble. He sold that young man you called my father about, and several others like him, to someone who was using them to develop a way to make drags work on us as well as they work on humans. He had to kill a number of humans in order to get a single survivor werewolf."

  She thought about the implications. "Who wanted the drags?"

  "I'll know that when Leo tells me who he sold the boy to."

  "So why didn't he sell me?" She wasn't worth much to the pack.

  He leaned back in his chair. "If an Alpha sold one of his pack, he'd have a rebellion on his hands. Besides, Leo went to a lot of trouble to get you. There haven't been any pack members killed or gone missing since you became a member."

  It wasn't a question, but she answered him anyway. "No."

  "I think maybe you are the key to Leo's mystery."

  She couldn't help a snort of derision. "Me? Leo needed a new doormat?"

  He leaned suddenly forward, knocking his chair over as he swept her off of her own and stood her on her feet. She'd thought she was used to the speed and strength of the wolves, but he stole her breath.

  As she stood still and shocked, he prowled around her until he came back around the front and kissed her, a long, dark, deep kiss that left her breathless for another reason entirely.

  "Leo found you and decided that he needed you," he told her. "He sent Justin after you, because any of his other wolves would know what you were. Even before your Change, they'd have known. So he sent a half-crazy wolf because any other would have been unable to attack you."

  Hurt, she flinched away from him. He made her sound special, but she knew he was lying. He sounded like he was telling the truth, but she was no prize. She was nothing. For three years she had been nothing. He had made her feel special today, but she knew better.

  His hands, when they came down on her shoulders, were hard and impossible to resist. "Let me tell you something about Omega wolves, Anna. Look at me."

  She blinked back tears, and, unable to resist his command, raised her eyes to glare at him.

  "Almost unique," he said and gave her a little shake. "I work with numbers and percentages all the time, Anna. I might not be able to figure the odds exactly, but I'll tell you that the chances that Justin picked you out to Change by sheer chance are almost infinitesimal. No werewolf, acting on instincts alone, would attack an Omega. And Justin strikes me as a wolf who acts on very little else."

  "Why not? Why wouldn't he have attacked me? And what is an Omega?"

  It was evidently the right question because Charles stilled, his former agitation gone. "You are an Omega, Anna. I bet that when you walk into a room, people come to you. I bet complete strangers tell you things they wouldn't tell their own mothers."

  Incredulous, she stared at him. "You saw Justin this morning. Did he look calm to you?"

  "I saw Justin," he agreed slowly. "And I think that in any other pack he would have been killed shortly after he was made because his control is not good enough. I don't know why he was not. But I think you allow him to control his wolf—and he hates you for it.

  "You should not be ranked last in your pack." His hands slid down her shoulders until he held her hands. Oddly that felt more intimate than his kiss had. "An Omega wolf is like the Indian medicine men, outside of the normal pack rankings. They had to teach you to lower your eyes, didn't they? To submissive wolves, such things are instinctive. You, they had to beat down.

  "You bring peace to all those around you, Anna," he said intently, his eyes on hers. "A werewolf, especially a dominant wolf, is always on the edge of violence. After being shut i
n an aircraft with too many people for hours, I came into the airport craving bloodshed like a junkie craves his next fix. But when you came up to me, the anger, the hunger left."

  He squeezed her hands. "You are a gift, Anna. An Omega wolf in the pack means that more wolves survive the Change from human to wolf because they can find control easier with you there. It means that we lose fewer males to stupid dominance fights because an Omega brings a calmness to all those around him. Or her."

  There was a hole in his argument. "But what about earlier, when you almost changed because you were so angry?"

  Something happened to his face, an emotion she didn't know him well enough to read, except to know that it was strong.

  When he spoke it was with visible effort, as if his throat had tightened. "Most werewolves find someone they love, get married, and spend a long time with their spouse before the wolf accepts her as his mate." He dropped her gaze and turned away, walking across the room and giving her his back.

  Without the warmth of his body, she felt cold and alone. Scared.

  "Sometimes it doesn't happen that way," he told the wall. "Let it rest there, for now, Anna. You have been through enough without this."

  "I am so tired of being ignorant," she spat, suddenly hugely angry. "You've changed all the rules on me—so you can damned well tell me what the new rules are." As abruptly as the anger had come, it was gone, leaving her shaky and on the verge of tears.

  He turned and his eyes had gone gold, reflecting the dim light of the room until they glowed. "Fine. You should have let it be, but you want truth." His voice rambled like thunder, though it wasn't very loud. "My brother wolf has taken you for his mate. If you were nothing to me, I would have never allowed such abuse as you have suffered since your Change. But you are mine, and the thought of you hurt, of being able to do nothing about it, is an anger that even an Omega wolf cannot easily soothe."

  Well, she thought, stunned. She'd known he was interested in her, but she'd assumed it had been a casual thing. Leo was the only mated wolf she knew. She didn't know any of the rules. What did it mean that he said his wolf had decided she was his mate? Did she have a choice in the matter? Did the way he aroused her without trying, the way he made her feel—as if she'd known him forever and wanted to wake up next to him for the rest of her life, though she'd known him only hours, really—was that his fault?

  "If you had let me," he said, "I'd have courted you gently and won your heart." He closed his eyes. "I didn't mean to frighten you."

  She should have been frightened. Instead, suddenly, she felt very, very calm, like the eye in a hurricane of emotion.

  "I don't like sex," she told him, because it seemed like something he ought to know under the circumstances.

  He choked and opened his eyes, their bright color giving way to human dark as she watched.

  "I wasn't enthusiastic before the Change," she told him plainly. "And after being passed around like a whore for a year, until Isabelle put a stop to it, I like it even less."

  His mouth tightened, but he didn't say anything, so she continued. "And I won't be forced. Never again." She pulled up the sleeves of her shirt to show him the long scars on the underside of her arm, wrist to elbow. She'd made them with a silver knife, and if Isabelle hadn't found her, she'd have killed herself. "This is why Isabelle made Leo stop making me sleep with whatever male pleased him enough. She found me and kept me alive. After that I bought a gun and silver bullets."

  He growled softly, but not at her, she was pretty sure.

  "I'm not threatening to kill myself. But you need to know this about me because—if you want to be my mate—I won't be like Leo. I won't let you sleep around with anyone else. I won't be forced either. I've had enough. If that makes me a dog in the manger, so be it. But if I am yours, then you damned well are going to be mine."

  "A dog in the manger?" He let out a gusty breath of air that might have been a half-laugh. He closed his eyes again and said in a reasonable tone, "If Leo survives tonight, I shall be very surprised. If I survive you, I'll be equally surprised." He looked at her. "And very little surprises me anymore."

  He strode across the floor, picking up his chair and setting it where it belonged as he passed it. He stopped just in front of her and touched her raised chin gently, then laughed. Still smiling he tucked a piece of her hair behind her ear. "I promise you will enjoy sex with me," he murmured.

  Somehow she managed to keep her spine straight. She wasn't ready to fall into a puddle at his feet quite yet. "Isabelle said you were a good lover."

  He laughed again. "You have no need for jealousy. Sex with Isabelle meant no more to me than a good belly scratch and rather less to her, I think. Nothing worth repeating for either of us." There was a whisper of sound outside the room and he took her hand. "Time for us to go."

  He paid polite compliments to the meal as he handed over a credit card to a young-looking man who called him "sir" and smelled of werewolf. The owner of the restaurant, Anna supposed.

  "So where would you like to go next?" she asked as she stepped out onto the busy sidewalk.

  He pulled his jacket on the rest of the way and dodged a woman in high heels who carried a leather briefcase. "Somewhere with fewer people."

  "We could go to the zoo," she suggested. "This time of year it's pretty deserted, even with the kids out of school for Thanksgiving."

  He turned his head and started to speak when something in a window caught his attention. He grabbed her and threw her on the ground, falling on top of her. There was a loud bang, like a backfiring car, and he jerked once, then lay still on top of her.

  Chapter 3

  IT had been a long time since he'd been shot, but the sizzling burn of the silver bullet was still familiar. He hadn't been quite fast enough—and the crowd of people made sure that he couldn't go after the car that had taken off as soon as the gun had fired. He hadn't even gotten a good look at the shooter, just an impression.

  "Charles?" Beneath him, Anna's eyes were black with shock and she patted his shoulders. "Was someone shooting at us? Are you all right?"

  "Yes," he said, though he couldn't really assess the damage until he moved, which he didn't want to much.

  "Stay where you are until I can get a look," said a firm voice. "I'm an EMT."

  The command in the EMT's voice forced Charles to move—he didn't take orders from anyone except his father. He pushed himself off of Anna and got to his feet, then leaned down and grabbed her hand to pull her up from the frozen sidewalk.

  "Damn it, man, you're bleeding. Don't be stupid," snapped the stranger. "Sit down."

  Being shot had enraged the wolf in him, and Charles turned to snarl at the EMT, a competent-looking middle-aged man with sandy hair and a graying red moustache.

  Then Anna squeezed his hand, which she still held, and said, "Thank you," to the EMT and then to Charles "Let Mm take a look"—and he was able to hold back the snarl.

  He did growl low in his throat, though, when the stranger looked at his wound: never show weakness to a possible enemy. He felt too exposed on the sidewalk, too many people were looking at him—they had acquired quite an audience.

  "Ignore him," Anna told the EMT. "He gets grumpy when he's hurt."

  George, the werewolf who owned the restaurant, brought out a chair for him to sit on. Someone had called the police; two cars came with flashing lights and sirens that hurt his ears, followed by an ambulance.

  The bullet had cut through skin and a fine layer of muscle across the back of his shoulders without doing a lot of damage, he was told. Did he have any enemies? It was Anna who told them that he'd just flown in from Montana, that it must have been just a drive-by shooting, though this wasn't the usual neighborhood for that kind of crime.

  If the cop had had a werewolf's nose, he would never have let her lie pass. He was a seasoned cop, however, and her answer made him a little uneasy. But when Charles showed him his Montana driver's license, he relaxed.

  Anna's presence al
lowed Charles to submit to cleaning and bandaging and questioning, but nothing would make him get into an ambulance and be dragged to a hospital, even though silver-bullet wounds healed human-slow. Even now he could feel the hot ache of the silver as it seeped into his muscles.

  While he sat beneath the hands of strangers and fought not to loose control, he couldn't get the image of the shooter out of his head. He'd looked in the window and saw the reflection of the gun, then the face of the person who held it, wrapped in a winter scarf and wearing dark glasses. Not enough to identify the gunman, just a glimpse—but he would swear that the man had not been looking at him when his gloved finger pulled the trigger. He'd been looking at Anna.

  Which didn't make much sense. Why would someone be trying to kill Anna?

  They didn't go to the zoo.

  While he used the restaurant bathroom to clean up, George procured a jacket to cover the bandages so Charles wouldn't have to advertise his weakness to everyone who saw him. This time Anna didn't object when he asked her to call a taxi.

  His phone rang on the way back to Anna's apartment, but he silenced it without looking at it. It might have been his father, Bran, who had an uncanny knack for knowing when he'd been hurt. But he had no desire to talk with the Marrok while the taxi driver could hear every word. More probably it was Jaimie. George would have called his Alpha as soon as Charles was shot. In either case, they would wait until he was someplace more private.

  He made Anna wait in the taxi when they got to her apartment building until he had a chance to take a good look around. No one had followed them from the Loop, but the most likely assailants were Leo's people—and they all knew where Anna lived. He hadn't recognized the shooter, but then he didn't know every werewolf in Chicago.

  Anna was patient with him. She didn't argue about waiting but the cabdriver looked at him as though he were crazy.

  Her patience helped his control—which was shakier than it had been in a long time. He wondered how he'd be behaving if his Anna hadn't been an Omega whose soothing effect was almost good enough to override the protective rage roused by the attempt on her life. The painful burn of his shoulders, worsening as silver-caused wounds always did for a while, didn't help his temperament, nor did the knowledge that his ability to fight was impaired.