Howl at the Moon

by Christine Warren

  It probably hadn't helped that since she rarely left the lab, Annie didn't have a whole lot of experience with men, or a whole lot of opportunities to meet them. When a reasonably attractive, if you discounted the coating of slime, and reasonably intelligent, if you equated ruthless self-preservation and a wily, cutthroat sense of ego with intelligence, man waltzed into her territory and played the smitten flatterer, Annie had reacted like any woman in her situation would have: she'd developed a crush.

  Sam set her teeth. "What does Gordon have to do with it?"

  "He's been very interested in my work," Annie said, her shoulders hitching defensively. "Very supportive, He's helped out a lot, Sam. Two hands make the tests go a lot faster, after all."

  "I'm sure."

  She was. And she was also sure that two names on a paper published in Science would make Entwhistle's career plans go a lot faster, too.

  "Don't look at me like that." Annie frowned. "He has helped. It's just… lately…"

  "Well, maybe I'm being paranoid, but it feels like he's paying more attention than he used to. Not to me, but to the work."

  "And?"

  "It started around the same time I started to get the feeling of being followed. That just strikes me as a really big coincidence. I'm not sure I can trust him anymore."

  Sam refrained from telling Annie she never should have. "You can't think he's the one following you? You spend most of your time in the same lab with him anyway, and it's not like you wouldn't notice if he kept showing up where you were outside of here."

  "I know," Annie said. "But maybe he's involved in it somehow. Sam, I know this all sounds crazy, but I'm starting to get really scared. This work is significant. There could be a lot of people interested in it, if they knew about it, for all the wrong reasons."

  Sam shook her head. "That's it, An. I don't care what your plans were; you have to tell the Alpha. And if you don't, I will."

  "I can't. Not yet." She held up her hand when Sam opened her mouth to protest. "I've got time, at least a few more days, before things get to the point where we need to be worried. I'm keeping the key to my notes separate from the main data, and the results from my latest panels won't be in until the middle of next week. Until those are here, the data is too incomplete to be useful to anyone. I promise."

  "Annie—"

  "No, Sam, I mean it. I promise that if the danger was imminent, I'd go to Graham myself, but it isn't. And until I run tests on the samples I just took, I can't confirm half of what I've already done. It'll be okay."

  For a long minute, Sam stared across the desk at her friend, reading her face, her eyes, and her body for the truth. It was her scent that finally tipped Sam's decision. She could smell nerves, yes, but not fear, and no traces of panic. Not yet.

  Sam stood and nodded once. "I'll give you a week, Annie, but that's it. After that, I need to fill Graham in on what's going on. It's going to be bad enough going back to work with him this afternoon, let alone getting through the week."

  Sam meant it, too, because Graham Winters wasn't just Sam's Alpha; he was her boss also. Sam worked with him at his office in Vircolac, the city's premier private club for the Other community. She served as personal assistant, assistant general manager, bookkeeper, and go-to girl. She didn't make a habit of keeping secrets from the Alpha.

  Annie nodded and stood herself, jaw firming. "Thank you, Sam. I owe you one."

  Sam snorted. "You owe me about seven thousand, three hundred, and forty-two, but who's counting?" Shaking her head, she turned and opened the office door. "One week, Annie. The clock is ticking."

  As Sam made her way back out of the lab and into the Manhattan afternoon, she sent up a silent prayer that the alarm wouldn't go off before they were ready for it.

  * * *

  CHAPTER TWO

  The Vircolac Club had been founded when Others first began to congregate in the New World in large enough numbers to require a private and safe place to gather. For most of the time since then, it had been run quite skillfully by the Winters family, and in addition to being the Silverback Clan's Alpha, Graham Winters also happened to be the club's current owner. As his personal assistant, Sam helped him with both club and pack business and had enough to do to merit a stack of message slips on her desk when she returned from lunch.

  "Hey, Sam." Daisy Cliff, one of the club hostesses, had been monitoring the phones while Samantha was out, and she gave a cheerful wave when Samantha stepped back into her office in the town house's old front parlor. "It was pretty quiet today, but that could be because the Man is next door shoving a lunch fit for the Hundred and First Airborne down his wife's throat."

  Samantha rolled her eyes. "He'll tell Missy that while she's nursing she's still eating for two, but Missy will tell him that he can shove his multivitamins where the sun don't shine, so it all evens out."

  Daisy laughed, a light, trilling sound that proclaimed her part-Siren heritage more clearly than her penchant for really brief bikinis. "True, but things must be going relatively peacefully, because I haven't felt any tremors in the foundation."

  "Thanks for holding down the fort for me, Dais, but you should get back before Richards decides I need another lecture about taking his staff away from their appointed positions."

  Richards, the club's butler, liked to think of himself as a stern taskmaster, but Samantha and Daisy both knew he would have spared the hostess for the rest of the day if Samantha had needed the help.

  "No problem. It's been quiet everywhere, including the dining room. Holler if you need anything else!"

  Samantha nodded and waved Daisy out the door, but her attention was already focused on her message slips. She sorted them into two piles, the ones she could handle and the ones that needed to be passed on to Graham. Hers always turned out to be a lot bigger. Tons of people thought they needed to talk to her boss, but Samantha made a vigilant gatekeeper.

  Focusing on work helped her push her visit with Annie out of her mind, and within a few minutes she had managed to relax. She'd given Annie a week, and she'd do her best not to worry about it before then. She had the majority of her callers dealt with by the time she scented the Alpha's return. She looked up just before he opened the office door.

  "Hey, boss." She grinned as the polished wooden panels swung toward her. "How's it hangin'?"

  Graham didn't even blink at her informal greeting. Their relationship operated on a level few others in the pack could have boasted of. Samantha was closer to the Alpha than anyone other than his mate, his cubs, and his Beta, so they tended to dispense with the formalities of rank.

  "I swear that female is going to turn my hair gray before I'm forty-five," he growled, but the tone held no real menace. It never did when he spoke of his mate, no matter how much she might currently be driving him crazy.

  "It'll look good on you," Samantha offered, still grinning. "Very distinguished."

  Graham just sighed like a man much put upon and hitched his hip on the edge of her desk. "It's all right. I'm getting used to it. Besides"—his expression took on a distinctly mischievous cast—"I can always get her back and round out the family in a few months. Four is a nice, even number of pups, don't you think?"

  "Oh, sure. And I'm sure if you gave it one more try, you could manage to have a daughter just like Missy. That would be so sweet!" She fluttered her eyelashes innocently.

  Graham turned a little pale. "And deal with boys sniffing around a daughter of mine? Just whose side are you on, anyway?"

  "I refuses to answer that question on the grounds that it may incriminate me."

  "That's fine, because I know a way you can make it up to me."

  Sam let her eyes narrow. "And what would that be?"

  "I'm going to need you to do me a favor."

  She shrugged and dropped her teasing glare. "Sure, no problem. I'll put it on your tab. What's going on?"

  "The pack is going to start setting an example of interspecies cooperation."

  Sam quirked an e
yebrow. "You mean we don't already?"

  The question was only half-humorous. The Silverback Clan had a long history of interspecies cooperation, dating back to the time before their Alpha had actually mated with another species. The fact that Graham's family had operated Vircolac for centuries and always opened its doors as neutral ground for all Others played a part in that, as did the pack's long association with the Council of Others. In fact, compared to a lot of the Others out there, the Silverback Clan looked a lot like a supernatural version of the United Nations. Only functional and quite a bit more effective.

  "This time we're doing it specifically with the humans, and with the government in particular," Graham said. "I discussed it with Rafe and the rest of the Council last night. I think the consensus labeled it as a 'gesture of good faith.'"

  "Which really means that Rafe wanted it and the rest of the Council decided they'd rather watch the pack do the real work of it than dirty their own hands taking it on."

  "Exactly."

  Rafael De Santos, Felix werejaguar and head of the Council of Others, tended to get what he wanted from the Council, which was why he made one of the best leaders the Others had ever had. Managing that group was no mean feat when you considered that the rest of the membership consisted of the most powerful vampires, shape-shifters, changelings, and magic users in Manhattan. Still, one of the reasons that things tended to happen according to Rafe's plans was Graham. Having the Alpha of the Silverback Clan as a close friends and a staunch ally had often proved useful to Rafe. It looked like it was about to do so again.

  Sam just shook her head. "Okay, so what are we on the hook for this time? More surveillance duty? Security for a contingent of humans from Trinidad and Tobago who want to consult with the Council on treaty negotiations with their local population of were-Gila monsters? I can round up volunteers. I'll ask for the ones who likes palm trees and sunbathing. You know, to put the visitors at ease." Her words were joking, but she had already reached for the phone. Her job around here was to make things happen, and Sam was good at her job.

  "Actually," Graham pursed his lips and developed a sudden fascination for his fingernails, "it's that word 'volunteer' that I wanted to talk to you about. You in particular."

  Sam's head started shaking before he even finished speaking. "Oh no. You know what happened the last time you sent me on some other kind of assignment. It took me months before I could find where you'd filed the bar receipts."

  "I handled the office just fine."

  "You put them under 'M,' Graham, and when I asked why, you called them medical expenses."

  The Alpha shrugged. "Don't worry. This time, you won't be going anywhere. This is a desk job."

  Sam eyed him with growing suspicion. He wore his most charming smile, the one that said he was about to convince you to invest your last dollar in a housing development in the middle of the Okefenokee Swamp. Missy called it his Conner smile. Conner was the name of their second son.

  Sam could already feel her feet getting wet. "Why doesn't that reassure me?"

  Graham clucked his tongue. "Because you have a disturbingly suspicious nature, Samantha. I'm sure your family raised you to be more openhearted than this."

  Considering the fact that the family who'd raised her had also raised him—in the pack, everybody helped raise everyone else's pups—that wasn't much of a stretch.

  "And do you know why I'm suspicious?" she asked. "Because whenever you get that look—the one you're wearing right now—it bodes ill for me. So stop stalling and lay it on me. I'm a big girl. I can take it."

  "We need to clear off some desk space in here," Graham said. "We're going to be having a visitor for a little while."

  "Oh, my goddess! We're being audited?"

  Graham shuddered. "Bite your tongue. No, nothing like that. I've agreed to let a select branch of the U.S. military have the opportunity to recruit pack members. Strictly as volunteers, of course. An army officer is going to be setting up a minioffice space with us for a few weeks."

  Sam's glimmer of suspicion exploded in a siren-blaring and red flag-waving supernova of alarm. "Who?"

  "Noah Baker."

  Yeah, that's what she'd been afraid he would say.

  On the surface, there was nothing wrong with Noah Baker. For a human, in fact, he'd made quite a few friends in the Other community since his sister had gotten mixed up with, and subsequently married to, a sun demon. Everybody seemed to like the man, from his demonic new brother-in-law, Rule, to Graham, to Rafe De Santos himself. Even Rafe's wife, Tess, liked Noah, and she wasn't one to suffer fools lightly, or even at all. But then, Noah Baker had proved to be no one's fool. A major in the army's highly selective and newly developed supernatural squadron, he had grit, training, and a cool head under pressure. Not to mention a talent for making large objects make even larger booms.

  The only person Sam knew who didn't see the human as an all-around swell guy was Sam herself.

  Something about Noah just made Sam's hackles rise every time he got within twenty feet of her, and it didn't seem to matter what form she was in at the time. Human, wolf, or were, Sam's teeth went on-edge when Noah walked into a room and her hormones went haywire. She'd gotten to be friends with his sister, Abby, but with Noah, the best Sam could manage felt more like a tense cease-fire. And now Graham expected her to share office space with Noah?

  Too much a Lupine to directly challenge her Alpha's word, Sam took a more subtle approach. "So he's going to be recruiting for his own unit? This 'spook squad' he's on?"

  Graham nodded. "His own unit and a couple of new ones. Apparently, the Pentagon has been pretty happy with the way the squad has handled a couple of recent incidents leading up to and resulting from the Unveiling." The revelation of the Others' existence had set a few backs up around the world. Riots, demonstrations, and protests had been the least of the trouble. "I think their successes have inspired the army to expand, put together a few new teams."

  "Do you really think many members of the pack will be interested? Playing well with humans is a new skill for a lot of us."

  "To tell you the truth, I think it's a great opportunity. As loyal as our members are to the pack, it's got to chafe a lot of them to know they're not going to get ahead without challenging someone in a dominant position for a better place in line. That's why we get into trouble from time to time with things like the Curtis incident." Graham made euphemistic reference to the time his cousin Curtis had tried to rip his throat out and steal his mate, but Sam got his point. "This should give some of our gammas a good chance to get out from under my paw, so to speak."

  "I'm sure no one has a problem with your paw, boss." But even as Sam said it, she uttered a mental curse. Graham made sense. Spending a lifetime in the middle of the pack didn't suit everyone. Graham's former Beta made a good example. Logan Hunter had chafed under the traditional pack system of hierarchy, and the only solution for him had been to leave Manhattan and take over as Alpha of the White Paw Clan in Connecticut.

  Graham making sense, though, failed to make Sam feel any better. All she could think of was the impossibility of getting any work done while a pair of very human and disturbingly intense hazel eyes looked on.

  The Alpha flashed her a grin. "You may be nearly as biased as Missy."

  Sam forced a smile of her own. "Not quite." She drew in a deep breath. "Well, you're the boss. When can we expect the troops to land?"

  "How about now?"

  Noah caught the flash of surprise and annoyance on Samantha's face and stifled a grin. He knew he made the Lupine tense just by walking into the room, but then, she did the same to him. Unlike him, though, he suspected Sam had no idea why they disturbed each other so badly. She probably wrote it off as lousy chemistry.

  Oh, it was chemistry, all right, but Noah couldn't describe it as lousy. Not by a long shot.

  Samantha Carstairs made Noah Baker feel about as predatory as her closest friends and relatives actually were. He might not get furry on full
moons, but looking at the luscious female Lupine made him want to howl at one. It had been that way from the first time he'd set eyes on her, while he still thought she was a kidnapper holding his little sister captive. He'd taken one look at Samantha and felt his entire body go on alert. A few parts had even gone on high alert.

  She had the body of an athlete, not as sinewy as a runner or as fine as a gymnast but covered in sleek, firm muscle and decorated with curves just generous enough to make a sane man look twice. Noah had looked more than that, taking stock from the top of her mane of wavy, richly brown hair to the tips of her feminine feet. Of course, by the end of their first meeting those feet had turned into paws and tried to pin him to the ground in the middle of the small park down the block, but even that hadn't put him off. He'd dated women with bigger vices than occasionally shifting into timber wolves.

  After a second of silence, Samantha started to squirm and Noah deliberately shifted his gaze to the other werewolf in the room. Stepping inside, Noah set a cardboard file box down on the chair beside the office door. "Thanks for agreeing to put me up, Graham. I appreciate it."

  The Silverback Alpha shook his hand, relieving the last of Noah's worries that the Lupine might still hold a grudge over the way his sister had briefly set the pack's Luna in harm's way a few months back when she'd been pursued by demons. Apparently, Graham didn't like having demons surrounding his wife.

  "It's no problem," Graham said. "In fact, I was just telling Sam I think it might be good for some of our young males. Give them a place to channel their aggression other than in a dominance challenge."

  Noah smiled. "I'll do my best."

  He looked around the spacious room, taking note of the territory Sam had already marked. The huge cherry desk stationed in front of the door to Graham's private inner office had the look of a sentry's gatehouse, and Noah had no trouble picturing her fending off intruders and interlopers. Her area only took up one end of the grand old sitting room, though. There would be plenty of space for him. And he'd be near enough to give the electricity between them time to spar.