by Parker Foye
The naked man’s throat convulsed with a swallow. He laid his head left, then right, and rolled his shoulders back with an exhalation. “You smell like him. Did he bite you?”
Teddy’s hand went straightaway to his still-sore bruise as he took a step backward. Jim had said he didn’t kiss and tell, so how could the naked degenerate know? “What are you talking about?”
The man rose to his feet, gripping the tree for support. He looked strong enough, but there was a hunch to his back and he had his arm pressed against his belly as though he were in pain. Still, he staggered toward Teddy.
Teddy took a step back, his body reacting even though his mind had apparently shut down. He wasn’t thinking fast or clearly.
“Like Alpha. You smell like Alpha.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” The man must have been deranged. That made him even more dangerous than an animal. Animals were at least predictable.
“Doesn’t matter.” The man closed his eyes and laid his head to the side again. “You’d better run.”
The thought had crossed Teddy’s mind, but he’d been looking for Jim.
“You should run. Go back before any of the others see you. Knowing about you is one thing.” He opened his eyes again, and they were different than before. Still pale, but yellower. Almost...canine.
Teddy took another step back without thinking. The man didn’t look right. He didn’t look quite human. “What the fuck?” he whispered.
“Knowing about you is one thing,” the man repeated. He rolled his shoulders yet again. “But seeing you is another. They’re gonna be mad looking at what Alpha’s got.”
The man was rambling nonsensically, and that was Teddy’s clue to get the hell out of there, but he’d gone into the woods in the first place to find Jim. He still needed to find Jim.
He glanced over his shoulder at what was behind him, and the man said in a strained whisper, “I’m sorry.”
Teddy whipped back around and shone his light on him. “For what?”
The man was gone, and there was a big fucking dog where he’d been.
Teddy dropped the phone in horror and stepped off the path into a thick patch of trees.
Not a dog. A coyote, and Teddy was no good at discerning such things, but he was pretty sure the beast had the same fur pattern as the canine he’d seen hanging out near Jim’s. All red with a little spot of white between the eyes.
Gulping, Teddy moved backward as quickly as he could, keeping his gaze on the approaching beast and using his hands to pat for branches and tree trunks behind him.
Jim was out there somewhere, but Teddy would have to find some other way to warn him. He’d have to get help and return.
The coyote stalked slowly but gracefully after him, and when Teddy heard the growl, he turned to run before realizing that the growl hadn’t come from the coyote on approach.
There were two more ahead of him, and they were bigger and had their fangs bared.
Teddy tugged at the coat plackets as his fight-or-flight instincts warred, and there it went—that ominous heaviness in his gut. The sweaty palms. The burst of frantic energy.
I’m dead, he thought, even as he took off at a hard sprint, running at an angle. Putting his back to those things was probably a mistake, but it was one he had no choice but to make. He’d rather have them at his back than at his throat.
The last time a wild dog had gone for his throat, he’d been able to walk away with a ripped-up arm, but there were three of the creatures pinning him in, and none of the trees nearby looked sturdy enough for him to climb.
When another massive beast appeared ahead, Teddy laughed hysterically and he pivoted and shook his head hard. “I guess I shouldn’t have strapped myself into a roller coaster expecting a merry-go-round ride.”
“No, you shouldn’t have, but that’s not your fault.”
Jim.
Where the big beast ahead of Teddy had been before stood a nude man.
His nude man.
“Take one more step toward him,” Jim said, “and I won’t hesitate to go for your throat.”
It dawned on Teddy that Jim wasn’t talking to him. He was talking to one of the trifecta of beasts that were closing in.
And behind Jim, fully dressed, was Mrs. West, followed by Jamie, who was not so fully dressed.
“Teddy, don’t go,” Jim said. “Please wait. I’ll explain.”
Teddy shook his head again, dizzy with uncertainty and his throat tight with fear.
Jim was some kind of beast. With barely a shake, the canine had transformed, and there was Jim standing where it had been. He was seeing things that weren’t real, and that either meant there was something wrong with him or something wrong with everyone else. Neither was a good scenario.
“Teddy, I’ll take you home.”
Jim’s home. The animal’s lair. Teddy had let himself be lured into it. Obviously, he’d missed major red flags again.
So fucking naïve.
“No,” he said dolefully. “I...”
He didn’t know why he was still standing there.
He ran, and he didn’t look back to see if anything—or anyone—followed.
All along, he’d known that a man like Jim would have some dark secrets, and Teddy would have abided him almost anything because no one had ever made him feel safer. He’d let Jim strip all his defenses and work his way under his skin and into his heart because he wasn’t the kind of monster Teddy was used to.
Apparently, he was a literal one.
Chapter Fourteen
“Shit.” Teddy considered crossing the street, but conflict seemed imminent. Within seconds, he had a West within ten yards in two directions. They’d found him.
The night of the full moon, he’d left Chesterton in a hurry and had caught the first bus he could into Manhattan. A friend was letting him crash on the sofa, no questions asked.
It had taken Teddy two weeks to not shake every time he thought about Jim or Chesterton, or the beasts that lived back there, but the nightmares were still evolving. Sometimes Jim was the hero. Sometimes he was the monster. Sometimes he was both, and Teddy didn’t know what that meant.
Pausing over a sidewalk grate on 41st Street, Teddy considered his retreat options. If he were a little bit late getting in line for his audition, so be it. At least he’d show up unscathed and reasonably sane.
Too late.
Jamie was there at his side and pulling him out of the pedestrian traffic.
“Go away,” he said. “Or the hallucinations will come back. I’m pretty sure that’s what happened. I went insane from stress and money worries and hallucinated that I saw coyotes in the woods.”
Jamie was grinning broadly when he looked at her, showing off all four of her pointy canine teeth.
Teddy stopped and pressed his palms to his eyes. “Oh my God.”
Mrs. West, at his right, pulled him by the arm toward the hole-in-the-wall pizza joint Teddy always avoided.
Jamie ambled up to the counter with her thumbs tucked into the pockets of her jeans, and Mrs. West sat him in the corner.
He shook his head.
“I haven’t said anything yet,” she said.
“Doesn’t matter.” He studied his nails and picked at one ragged cuticle. “I’ve got to go to an audition. Hamilton is looking for another King George. I suck at walking in heels, but I’ll adapt.”
“You don’t want to be King George.”
“I don’t?”
“No.”
“If you’re trying to pull a Jedi mind trick, I’ll have you know I’m immune. Those only work on weak minds.” He cleared his throat and added in a mutter, “Coyote mind tricks, I’m not so sure about.”
Certainly, that was what Jim had do
ne to him. He couldn’t get the man out of his head, and was tired of feeling so fucking terrified and yet yearning for someone at the same time. He understood, on a rudimentary level, that it wasn’t Jim he was afraid of. He was afraid of what he’d seen, and what he’d heard in that forest.
It had taken Teddy three days to so much as look up shapeshifters online, and that had been a waste of time. None of the sites were trustworthy. He’d had to go to the library and explain to a circumspect research librarian that he needed to know all about moon shifters. He might have scared her with his nonsensical ramblings, but, professional that she was, she’d pulled books for him. He’d checked out three dusty volumes on witchcraft and folklore and had been too scared to open them. Things like Jim weren’t supposed to exist.
“This pizza’s a rip-off.” Jamie slid a few slices of pepperoni pizza in front of them and sat.
Things like her weren’t supposed to exist.
What other fictional things are really out there?
Tentatively picking up the greasy slice, he pondered how he’d ever thought she was normal. She didn’t move like she was normal. She was a pretty predator, just like her cousin.
“Make Jim reimburse you for it,” Mrs. West said. She bit gingerly into her slice and made a face.
Teddy put his pizza down. He wasn’t hungry, and didn’t think he could eat even if he had been. His stomach was in knots in a way he hadn’t felt since his first off-Broadway audition five years prior. “Why are you here?”
Jamie picked up a napkin and rubbed the grease off her fingers. “Oh, we were just in the area.”
“Bullshit.”
She sighed. “Will you believe I came to pick up a kid?”
“No.”
She shrugged. “Okay. We came to kidnap you.”
“No.”
Mrs. West snorted. “Was worth a shot, I guess.”
“I’m not going back there.”
“You have to.”
“The hell I do. I’m perpetually single because at twenty-two, I gained a habit of removing myself from toxic situations. I’d say being in the midst of a pack of shapeshifting beasts counts.”
“And being in this pack of beasts is so much better?” Jamie pointed out the door, toward the hustle and bustle of New York City, of people bumping each other without apology, of the yelling, the honking horns, the car exhaust.
He shrugged. “I know what I’m getting myself into here. Back there, no one told me anything. Everyone expected me to go along without knowing the plan, and that’s not right.”
“I agree,” Mrs. West said. “Trust me. I try not to be an apologist for Jimmy, but I think he does the best he can. He doesn’t always do things the way I would, but that’s why he’s the alpha, not me.”
“Alpha.” The word was sour in Teddy’s mouth. The designation of a man who was at the top of the predator pyramid. Teddy was, apparently, just prey.
“You’ve got to go back to him, Teddy.”
Once upon a time, he had wished someone would want him badly enough to chase him, but he’d been thinking about human someones. “If he wants me, why are you here instead of him?”
“He doesn’t even know we’re here. He can’t leave the area while the pack is unstable. The weaker coyotes start to lose their grips, and there’s only so much the stronger pack members can do to keep them all in check.” Jamie pointed to herself and then her aunt. “We don’t have enough of the right magic.”
“Magic.” Another sour word in Teddy’s mouth. Magic must have been what that beast in the woods had been referring to when he’d been blathering about Teddy’s scent and the others knowing what Teddy was.
He’d thought he’d been Jim’s boyfriend, but those dogs had been looking at him like he was their next meal.
His scar throbbed with yet another spontaneous ache, but he ignored it. He ignored the picture in his head of gnashing teeth and advancing canines. He wasn’t going to shake in front of the Wests, no matter how much the anxious energy inside him demanded it.
“Or power or energy,” Mrs. West said. “Call it what you want, but don’t tell me you haven’t felt it. You don’t have to be a coyote to know it’s there. You probably feel it every time you’re around Jim, or else you wouldn’t be his.”
Teddy shook his head. He didn’t want to admit that, because then he’d be buying into the ridiculousness. He’d been overwhelmed damn near every time Jim had walked into a room, and more so when he’d stood close, but that was a byproduct of chronic horniness, not magic.
He twiddled his thumbs and scoffed.
He knew better. The sex was nice, but the company was enough. Put into context, Jim was an easy man to figure out. He hadn’t lied about that.
And Teddy missed him.
“You have to go back,” Jamie said. “Alphas don’t function well if they lose their mates, and I don’t want those fuckers to win. I don’t want to see the pack swirling down the drain.”
“Why does this have to rest on my shoulders?”
Mrs. West chuckled. “You drew the short straw. I did, too, as did my mother-in-law.”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“When you get attached to an alpha, it’s because you have something they need, and you have to keep giving it. Maybe they do fine for a while without it, but they’re not meant to lead indefinitely without having that rock to hold them up.”
Teddy crooked his thumb at himself and raised an incredulous eyebrow. “Me.”
“Of course you.”
“Okay. Me. The guy with the debilitating canine phobia.” His tone had skipped from deadpan straight to sardonic.
“The man so many pack members are afraid of.”
“If that’s true, they need to get their heads examined.”
“She’s right,” Jamie said. “Maybe you don’t have fangs or fur, but you know what words to use to put people in their place, and you certainly put Jim in his.”
“Oh, honey. Talk is cheap to everyone but my alma mater. You have any idea how much a liberal arts education costs nowadays?”
Jamie grinned again. Her fangs weren’t scary. They were just teeth, and she wasn’t going to hurt him. She was his friend, and Jim was her cousin. She was invested in their happiness.
I deserve to be happy.
Happiness tasted much like fright at the moment.
“I’m sure being in the thick of a shifter pack wasn’t what you aspired to as a child,” Mrs. West said, “but you’re uniquely qualified. You could do some good.”
“I can’t make those beasts be civil, Mrs. West. I can’t even get that growling son of yours to do that.”
“You don’t have to make them do anything,” Jamie said. “Just don’t run. You being there is enough for right now. We’re not going to let anything happen to you.”
“We?”
“Yes,” Mrs. West said. “Jamie and me, and Jimmy, of course. Also, Jim’s lieutenants, and the guys who swear they’re going to start stepping up to help. You don’t know them, but they care about the pack. We need you to trust us. Can you?”
Teddy wrung his hands.
They were asking for a hell of a lot. They were asking him to put his fears aside and throw himself into the thick of a dangerous situation so he could help a dangerous man keep his hold on a pack.
He didn’t think he had the stuff for that. He was a waiter with an acting hobby who could run four hundred meters pretty quickly.
And maybe he had a little soft spot for big men who liked to cuddle.
He let out a breath.
“When you see a group of us walking into the restaurant,” Jamie said. “What do you do? You pick your head up, you straighten your spine and you pull your order pad out of your pocket. You know the group is going to give you a hard tim
e, but you still do the job, and you’re good at it because you know how to maneuver people.”
“I dunno...” Teddy rolled his napkin into a long tube.
“Help him, Teddy,” Mrs. West implored in a whisper, squeezing his hand. “Jimmy’s not too proud to beg. Do you want to see him beg?”
Teddy shook his head. “I don’t want to see that. I’d never want to see him like that.”
“So you’ll go?”
Teddy nudged his pizza plate away and rolled his gaze up to the ladies. He put on a smile for them, or at least something he hoped resembled one. Smiling had been hard in the past couple of weeks because he couldn’t stop thinking of how stricken Jim had looked when Teddy had run away.
He pushed his hair behind his ears and rubbed his scar.
He was being offered something that people hoped for before the world chewed them up and made them cynical: magic. He would have been stupid to turn down something and someone that felt so right because he was scared about all the things he didn’t understand.
But Jim understood those things, and he’d promised to tell Teddy everything.
Teddy was going to make him. His eyes were wide open. He wasn’t that inexperienced farm boy anymore.
He pushed his chair in and tossed his unwanted pizza into the trash. “Can you take me to Jim’s? I guess I didn’t really want to wear heels and breeches, anyway.”
Chapter Fifteen
When the light flicked on in the living room, Jim groaned and slung his arm over his sensitive eyes. He’d been in the dark for two days. It suited his mood. “Turn that shit off, Jamie.”
Keys jangled and then hit a flat surface. Possibly the top of the low bookshelf near the door.
“Not Jamie. I thought you were supposed to be a big, bad coyote alpha,” came the familiar, teasing tenor voice. “Can’t you smell me?”
Jim dropped his arm and watched a phantom stroll across the room with hands tucked into sweatshirt pockets. Jim’s nose didn’t lie. That was him. That was Teddy.
“Why is it so warm in here?” Teddy asked. “Did you not turn the air on? Hottest stretch of Indian summer in twenty years.”
