Howl at the Moon

by Christine Warren

  "About my work in the lab. About the Lupine genome. I've decoded it."

  A few people blinked, but that was the extent of the reaction until Missy smiled. "That's wonderful, Annie. How exciting for you. That's an amazing achievement. I imagine there will be all sorts of new advances in medicine and stuff because of you."

  Annie made a noise that would have sounded like a laugh, if she hadn't choked on it. "There's going to be a global Lupine nightmare because of me."

  "Why do you—"

  "When I decoded the genome, I found certain DNA sequences that could be directly cited as being responsible for the differences in strength, speed, and sensory ability between Lupines and humans. I found them, and I labeled them, and I started a paper on how manipulation of those sequences could be used to create a kind of cell-based therapy that might theoretically give the advantages of Lupine physiology to human subjects."

  Sam wasn't sure if the silence in the room had to do with the natural time delay caused when a bunch of laypeople tried to sift through Annie's scientific speech or if it represented the calm before a very large storm.

  Rafe fought through it first. "Are you saying, Annie, that you found a way to turn humans into Lupines?"

  "No, there won't be any Hollywood-style wolf men running around biting humans to spawn more of their kind. Humans and Lupines are still two completely different species, and you can't turn one species into another. But even human scientists have found that certain segments of the genetic code from one species can be introduced to another and cause certain adjustments in that subject's physiology or behavior. I couldn't turn humans into Lupines. No one can do that. But I found a way to make humans so much like us in their abilities that it would be hard to tell the difference."

  Graham didn't exactly explode, but when he spoke, his voice sounded cold and harsh. "And the reason you didn't tell me about this sooner?"

  Annie opened her mouth, hesitated, and closed it again. "I could try and explain again, Alpha, but the truth is… because I was stupid."

  "I won't argue with that." He gave her a piercing look that had even Sam wriggling uncomfortably and then turned to Noah. "What's your part of this story, then?"

  "More recent. Samantha, Annie, and I just came from her laboratory. There was a break-in tonight. Someone stole Annie's data."

  Watching Graham's face was like watching a massive glacier descend on the landscape. First everything froze under a thick layer of ice; then the briefest of hairline fractures formed and the whole destructive body came easing forward with its massive, mountain-shearing power. People tended to forget that something slow moving could carve entire mountain ranges out of the earth.

  If they looked at Graham's face, they would never make that mistake again. As soon as Missy saw it, she rose and rested a slim hand in the middle of his chest. As if that would somehow hold him back. He didn't even acknowledge it.

  He turned that look on Annie, and Samantha shivered in sympathy. "Are you telling me someone else has all this information? That your arrogance and carelessness has made it possible for anyone to apply the technology you've described? Is that what you're telling me, Annie? Because if it is, I would be perfectly within my rights to rip your throat out, or to run you out of this pack, and you know it."

  Samantha saw her friend recoiling, curling in on herself in a bid for self-protection. Instinctively, and perhaps idiotically, Sam couldn't help sticking her own neck out. "It wasn't carelessness, Graham. She didn't leave the stuff sitting out while she threw a cocktail party. Someone broke into the lab."

  His gaze swung slowly toward her. "Of all the people in this room, Samantha, you should be the last one opening your mouth," he said so quietly that even Missy looked nervous. "I'm not stupid enough to believe you haven't known about this for longer than the last couple of hours. And somehow in all that time, it never occurred to you to tell me about it."

  Samantha didn't step back from the force of his anger, but she did lower her eyes. She wasn't stupid, either. "It occurred to me," she admitted. "But I thought Annie deserved the opportunity to work it out herself."

  "Then obviously thinking isn't your strong suit."

  She clenched her jaw against the urge to talk back. That wouldn't have been stupid; it would have been suicidal. She harbored no illusions that the presence of half a dozen witnesses would hold Graham back. She wasn't even sure if Missy could.

  "Before we go placing blame," Noah interrupted, his voice sounding harder than Sam could remember hearing it, "I think we'd be better off figuring out who orchestrated the raid and why."

  He stepped forward, and whether it was to distract Graham or to place himself in the Alpha's path she couldn't be sure. Frankly, they were both equally stupid ideas; and both of them made her stomach flip.

  "I think we can all guess the why." Rafe spoke from his position on the sofa, neither rising to his feet nor taking his arm from where it draped on his wife's shoulder, but he sounded tired. After Annie's revelation, he looked tired, too. "The opportunity to become more like us, to gain our strength and abilities, is an idea that has occupied the human collective consciousness for centuries. If Cassidy Quinn were here, I'm sure she would tell you as much. And this…" He shook his head. "The idea that they could have all these things without having to pay what they consider our 'price' for our gifts—not have to shift, not have to face the animal inside of them—it must have proved too tempting to bear."

  Tess nodded. "It's the how that has me wondering. Somehow I doubt that anything Sam and Annie felt compelled to keep from Graham is something they'd have gone blabbing about to anyone else."

  Graham snarled loud enough for the whole room to hear. Missy pressed a second hand to his chest.

  "No one is saying they did," she said, but she gave the both of them a stern look. Missy might not be able to rip their throats out as fast as her mate, but she wasn't a pushover. And she was their Luna. Sam felt almost as bad about deceiving her as she did about deceiving Graham. "But whoever broke in must have found out somehow. I'm assuming you didn't get us this worked up about something that started as a random robbery."

  Noah shook his head. "A random thief has no reason to break into a secured biology lab, especially when there are at least ten million more financially rewarding targets in Manhattan alone. And if it had been a robbery, they would have taken something worth selling, like the expensive lab equipment or computers. All that looked intact."

  Missy sighed. "I didn't think so."

  Rafe looked at Noah and raised an elegant eyebrow. "You have a theory, I am guessing."

  Noah gave one sharp nod, accompanied by a not-so-subtle shifting away from Sam. She noticed it and frowned. Did he think that he could get her into any more trouble with Graham by describing the break-in in more detail? Her mind refused to focus on any other reason Noah might have for stepping away from her before continuing.

  Her mind might refuse, but her instincts were scratching and whining at her subconscious, trying to force exactly that kind of attention. She held firm, but she couldn't stop wrapping her arms around herself, as if the room had suddenly gone cold. She eased from her chair as if she needed to be able to bolt at the slightest notice. Maybe she did.

  "I've got more than a theory." Noah stood straight and firm in front of the fireplace, his jaw clenching and unclenching and his scent turning bitter in Sam's nose. "I've got proof. The break-in was the work of the U.S. Army, and the reason it happened was because I failed to bring them the information myself. That was the real reason I came here, not to recruit Lupines for the supernatural program but to get my hands on Annie's research and pass it on to my superiors."

  Silence.

  For a long moment, nothing happened. Sam heard the words, but it took several slow seconds for them to sink in and untangle themselves into a message that made sense. And even then, they didn't really make sense. She struggled to process them, but her instincts already knew. They sank bonelessly to the floor, raised their m
uzzles to the moon, and sang out a howl of rage and pain and betrayal, while above them her heart began to shatter.

  * * *

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  Hands closed over Sam's shoulders. She didn't know who they belonged to, just that they weren't Noah's, and she was grateful for that. If he had touched her just then, she thought she would have screamed. For a few seconds she thought she might have, but when most of the roaring in her ears subsided she realized it was only her mind and her heart screaming, not her voice.

  "Sam? Samantha. What's wrong? Are you all right?"

  The voice belonged to Tess, so Sam assumed the hands probably did, too. They urged her toward the sofa and pressed her down onto it. As soon as her butt hit the cushions, the hands shifted their pressure and began to force her head down toward her knees.

  "You're the color of the plaster in here. Put your head down before you keel over."

  A hysterical laugh boiled up in Sam's throat and she wanted to tell Tess that forcing the blood flow back to her head was not likely to cure what ailed her just then. She didn't know if anything could. But she couldn't speak. Her voice seemed frozen in the horror of what was happening. Her voice and her heart.

  She felt someone sink onto the sofa beside her, felt Annie's hand rubbing her back, and closed her eyes against a fresh wave of pain. How had everything gone so incredibly wrong?

  "Tess, what is going on?"

  Sam heard Rafe's voice, low and concerned.

  "I don't know," his wife answered.

  Then Noah's voice, harsh and concerned, talking over the remaining roaring that finally registered in Sam's sluggish brain as the sound of Graham's furious ranting. "What's wrong? Is she all right? Samantha?"

  The voice got closer, as if he were going to come to her, to touch her, and Sam recoiled, jerking her head up and pressing herself against the back of the sofa, as if she could scramble into the cushions and get away from him.

  Her eyes, wide and panicked, stayed locked on Noah, but in her peripheral vision she could see Tess looking from her to Noah and back again. The witch's eyes narrowed, and she stood, placing herself between the two of them.

  "Why don't you tell me what's wrong, Noah?" she said, and her voice sounded hard and more than vaguely threatening. "Why don't you tell me, tell all of us, why the woman you haven't been able to keep your eyes off of for the last six months is taking this news so badly? I mean, I think I can safely say that all of us are shocked, but her reaction seems a little more extreme, don't you think?"

  Noah looked as if he was going to ignore Tess. His body shifted as if he would take a step forward, and Sam felt a whimper of protest rip from her tightly seized throat muscles. He heard, and he froze, his jaw clenching until the muscles at the side jumped in protest.

  "Samantha, honey, are you okay?" he asked, and she noticed how soft and low he kept his voice. He'd used the same tone when he'd been inside of her, all tender and comforting. She drew harder into herself, wrapping her arms around her knees as if to protect her vulnerable belly from attack. If only she could have protected her heart the same way. But it seemed a little late to try to protect her heart, when it had already stopped and broken apart.

  "Does she look okay?" Tess demanded. "What the hell did you do to her?"

  "I didn't do anything to her," Noah snapped, turning a large cloud of frustrated anger on the other woman. "I would never hurt her."

  "That's a laugh. Look at her. I'd say she looks like you just kicked her in the stomach. Whether or not your boot actually made contact with her skin doesn't have a hell of a lot to do with the matter. You slept with her, didn't you?"

  Noah scowled at Tess, wariness creeping into his otherwise hostile expression. "How exactly is that any of your business?"

  "It's my business because I'm her friend, you jackass." She took a belligerent step forward.

  "We're her friends," Annie echoed, her voice soft but firm.

  "I'd say it's the business of everyone in this room at the moment," Rafe agreed, moving to stand beside his wife. Sam could just manage to see the rest of the room between their rigid bodies. "Everyone here considers Samantha a friend. Some of them consider her to be even more."

  "Family," Missy agreed, and she wore an expression Sam had never seen before. She looked almost… scary.

  "Pack." Graham spit the word out, and he looked as if he'd prefer to be spitting shards of Noah's bones from between his teeth. "Samantha is pack, and she's under my protection, human. So tell me right now why I shouldn't kill you for using her this way."

  Sam felt a protest stirring inside her, but she quelled it sternly. She shouldn't want to protect Noah from Graham's anger; she should be cheering the Alpha on while he munched on the man's intestines. Noah had betrayed her; she should hate him, not feel as if the prospect of a lifetime stretching on without him couldn't possibly have meaning.

  "I never used her," Noah ground out. "What's between Sam and me has nothing to do with the rest of it."

  "Are we supposed to just take your word for it?" Missy glared at him. "You have to admit, it looks awfully suspicious that you gained all of our confidences under false pretenses and then singled out the one person in the world who's closest to Annie and the most likely to know anything about her work. If you ask me, it would be a pretty good strategy to cozy up to Sam, even seduce her, just to see if she'd tell you what she knew."

  And she had, Sam thought helplessly. She'd told Noah everything she knew, including a few things she hadn't even understood. And he'd barely had to ask. She'd spilled it all like a leaky pitcher. Goddess, he must have thought he'd hit the lottery.

  "You should have just come and talked to me." Annie squeezed Sam's shoulder, then pushed herself to her feet and faced Noah. From the tension in her body, she also possessed a keen awareness of Graham hovering and steaming only a couple of feet away. The fact that she would willingly face down both of them for Sam's sake made her stomach clench. "You should have left Sam out of it. Whatever I might have told her wouldn't have been what you wanted. Sam doesn't know the science. I'm the only one who knows that."

  "For Christ's sake, I did not get involved with Sam so I could pry information out of her!" Noah barked. "I got involved with her because I can't keep my fucking hands off of her! I can't even look at her without getting a goddamned hard-on. Tess said it herself. I haven't even looked at another woman in six months! Does that sound like a con to you?"

  "I don't know what it sounds like, but if you've really wanted her for six months, why did it take till this past week for you to make a move on her?"

  Noah rubbed a hand over his head and blew out a frustrated breath. "I haven't been here for six months. Yeah, I've visited and I've spent time here, but I have a job and I have a life away from here."

  "I don't think this is the best time to be reminding anyone about your job, ace," Tess snarled.

  "What is wrong with you people that you can't see how crazy a man would have to be not to want her for her own damned self?" The words seemed to spill out of him with no thought as to what they really meant. Something in Sam still had enough energy to think wistfully that she wished she could believe them.

  "I think the same thing is wrong with us that told you it would be okay for you to betray the trust we showed you in welcoming you into this house," Missy said. "If you lied about your reasons for being here, why shouldn't we think you're lying about this, too?"

  "My brother wouldn't do that," Abby said, speaking for the first time since Noah's revelation. She sounded as if she wished she didn't have to speak now. Sam saw her move, rise from her husband's lap and square her shoulders with motions that looked almost painful. "I'm sure that what Noah did he felt he had good reason for. And I know without a doubt that he wouldn't have deliberately done anything to hurt Sam. He's not that kind of man."

  Graham snorted, a sound that might have resembled a laugh if it held the slightest trace of humor. "I'm not sure you know what kind of man your brother is, Abb
y. I'm beginning to doubt if any of us do."

  "That's not fair," she protested. "He's my brother, and if he had to do something like this, I'm sure it was because he felt he had no choice. We at least owe him the courtesy of listening to his reasons for what he did."

  "You've got it backward. After all we've done for him, he owes us, not the other way around," Graham bit out.

  Abby protested, then Annie countered, and Tess and Missy chimed in, with Rafe speaking up to try to keep order. Only Rule kept silent, watching the chaos with his impassive dark eyes. And Noah. Noah didn't speak, either. He just stood with his jaw clenched and his hazel eyes locked on Sam.

  She couldn't stand it. She might not have started this mess, but she also hadn't done anything to prevent it from getting to this point. Her mind skittered away from the reality of Noah's betrayal; the wound was too deep for that, too raw, and if she thought about it, she'd never be able to drag herself out of this horrible lethargy, this numbness that had gripped her. She had to shake free and do what she could to fix things. To fix things for the pack. That was all she could do.

  Slowly, feeling like an old woman or the victim of a brutal beating, she forced her muscles to unclench and straighten, lifting herself from the sofa with the care of infirmity. An hour ago she'd felt alive and young and vital; now she thought she'd never move freely again. Her heart had shattered, and her body felt like it might be next.

  Carefully she opened her mouth. It took two attempts before any sound came out, and even then, her voice sounded strange. Rough and hoarse and painfully slow.

  "No one owes anyone," she said, not looking at Noah. She couldn't do it, couldn't stand it. "Talking about debts isn't going to solve anything, and no one here can go back and change anything that's already happened. The best we can do is figure out what to do next."

  When she spoke, Noah shifted, his hands reaching for her. She flinched away. If he touched her, her outside would shatter as surely as her inside already had.