Deceiving the Protector

by Dee Tenorio

  No, in that she had to be honest. Laurel, she’d left behind. Had risked everything to give her a chance. She was the one who’d failed.

  She turned away and lifted the scarf from the hook, wrapping it carefully over the stinging skin before shrugging her flannel overshirt onto her shoulders. At least the bite never got any worse, right?

  Of course, that didn’t mean other situations never did. If any further proof were needed, one only had to take a look at the seething Wolf waiting for her to come out of the dressing room.

  Once they’d reached the outer edges of the town, he’d allowed her to walk instead of run. She’d needed the break by then, not that he’d given her much of one. Question after question had come at her.

  Are you all right?

  Why the hell did you move? I told you to stay by the goddamn road.

  What do you know about this killer?

  There were more, but they all seemed like variations of the last one. What do you know?

  It wasn’t a stretch of the imagination to translate that one into Why won’t you trust me?

  She hadn’t answered a single one.

  If she valued either of their lives, she wasn’t going to. She’d been stupid out there. Stupid to give in to the pull he had on her, stupid to have moved from the spot he’d put her in. But while he’d knelt, inspecting the kill, she’d seen the gleam of something in the tree branches. In her scared mind, she’d thought it was the edge of a black blade. The blade of the axe Asher liked to wear on his back. What she’d have done if Asher had jumped down, she didn’t know. Probably what she’d done when the antlers had come her way.

  Gone away. Been completely useless to Tate, but she hadn’t been thinking. She’d simply reacted, tried to put herself between Asher and his prey so Tate wouldn’t know how close he was to his own death. She touched the scratch fading on her cheek briefly before shaking herself and dragging on her pack. Hard to say how successful that plan had been.

  She stepped out, reining in her surprise that Tate wasn’t immediately scooping her under his wing to escort her out of the building. Instead, he waited nearby, his back to the wall, those eyes of his searching the room like a sentinel. Before the curtain was completely open, he’d locked onto her, but he didn’t move a muscle. His gaze flickered a startling Wolf yellow, a muscle ticking in his cheek with his still unebbed anger.

  Yeah, not very successful at all.

  “Come on, we still need to get across town.”

  She followed, prepared to be as obedient as possible, just to expedite things. If they hurried, they’d get through to the highway again in just a few hours. Dread tightened her belly as she checked the sun again, allowing herself to revel for a second extra in the warm rays. If only they could strengthen her for tonight, when she’d have to face Asher. Then again…“Would you mind if we found something to eat again while we’re here?”

  Better to have the nutrients to heal already absorbed or she’d be right back where she’d been this morning.

  Tate shot her a disgruntled look.

  Lia raised her chin. She couldn’t back down on this. “I’m hungry.”

  His gaze flickered, the anger suddenly interrupted by something she almost couldn’t define. Almost. But she decided she had to be wrong. Why would admitting she was hungry give him any sense of satisfaction? In the end, it didn’t really matter. His mask of calm came down and the Tate she could almost feel beneath her skin disappeared. “Fine.”

  As meals went, she could do worse than pork chops with hearty cut vegetables, potatoes dripping with gravy and a bowl of slaw on the side. Throw in the Ma-and-Pop diner atmosphere of aged booths with pale blue leatherette and Formica tables and a bottomless glass of fruit punch, and she was this close to cheery. It certainly made the penetrating glare from the other side of the table much easier to ignore.

  She was about halfway through her food when the silence apparently got to be too much for him.

  “Tell me something, Sunshine,” he began, putting on what she was starting to think of as his “endearing big brother” face. The one that said he was patient and understanding, even while being overbearing.

  This should be good.

  “You won’t tell me what you’re up to—” He paused, as if waiting for her interjection.

  I’m not that easy to bait, Mister-General-Sir.

  “Then why don’t you tell me where you’ve been?”

  “What, you mean which states?”

  “I mean anything. Where were you born? Where have you traveled? Ever find anything interesting on the road? Better yet, you said you had a family once. What were they like?”

  Lia stared at him while she chewed, wondering what on earth he might be getting at. “They were…nice.”

  “Nice? That’s it?”

  She shrugged. “What else is there to say? They were good people. Hard workers, great parents. I last saw them during the raid that killed them. They didn’t deserve what happened to them.” No one deserved what the squads did. Slipping into your house in the dead of night before dragging you from your bed with guns to your face while they demanded answers to questions you couldn’t answer. And then they fired. “What about yours?”

  “Mine?” He blinked, looking honestly surprised.

  Hmm, asking the questions was a hell of a lot more fun than being under the microscope herself. “Your family, what was that like, growing up with the Alpha? Did you always know what he was?”

  His chuckle had more than a healthy amount of derision in it. He seemed to weigh answering her or not, but apparently he decided to go with a quid pro quo approach and started talking. “Pale’s no saint or anything, honey, so get that out of your head. Angels don’t exactly sing when the guy walks into a room. He’s just a man—a good man, don’t get me wrong, but being an Alpha didn’t exactly do him any favors.”

  “So he was born that way?”

  He nodded, almost shrugging. “There’s a scent to him. A dominance no amount of ass-kicking seems to dent.”

  “You kicked his ass?”

  Her lack of faith in his skills at least brought the real grin back to his face. “We sure as shit gave it a good try.”

  “I take it that’s a no, then?”

  “Yeah, it’s a no. We didn’t always know what to call him, but we recognized he was different from the beginning. The Wolf in him is closer to the surface than anyone else I know. He has to be stronger to keep it in control. It makes him just a little faster, a little stronger than everyone else. More focused. Other than that, he’s just like you and me. A pain in the ass from sunup ’til sundown. He was as a kid, he still is. I expect him to stay that way until he’s old and decrepit.”

  “I was actually a pretty easygoing kid,” she volunteered, her belly pleasantly filled, something in her warmed by his slowly relaxing posture. If she used her imagination, this could almost be like two people just sharing a meal together. Way more comfortable than two people circling one another like suspicious animals.

  “Yeah,” he scoffed. “Sorry, not buying that. You’ve got stubborn down to your bones. That doesn’t come from a few years of shit happening. I doubt you could pull off happy-go-lucky even back in diapers.”

  She couldn’t help but giggle a little. He wasn’t wrong. “My mother used to tell me I was going to go unconscious eventually because I’d hold my breath if I didn’t get what I wanted.”

  He lifted his coffee cup for a quick gulp. “That I can believe.”

  “You would.” She dipped her bread in the gravy. “So, tell me, how do a bunch of orphans become the last hope for shifter kind?”

  “Well, it’s pretty simple. Our mother—”

  That got her attention off her food. “You knew your mother?”

  “Not the one you’re thinking of, no. That woman dropped me in an orphanage in South Dakota when I was two days old. I guess I have to be happy knowing she thought she was doing the right thing for me, but it’s hard to have an opinion on someone you
never met.” He shrugged, dismissing the topic with a casualness that was as honest as it was sad.

  She couldn’t imagine not knowing the woman who had given her life, but she knew it wasn’t like that for most of their kind. The way shifters had devolved after the loss of their packs and their cultures, rape and violence, abandonment and remorselessness had become the norm. To people like Tate and his mother, life wasn’t always given. Sometimes it was taken…and sometimes it was forced into being.

  “My mother was a woman named Moira. She didn’t run an orphanage at first, she just took in children as her own. Shifter, human, she didn’t care. We were all just kids needing a mother and she was determined to give that to us.” His face softened, the hardest edges fading as his eyes took on a faraway glaze. “At first it was just the four of us—Pale, me, Mina and Ty. Aaron we found when I was about five, but the place didn’t really start taking in other kids until I was around ten. Then they were everywhere, but it made her so damn happy, we didn’t mind. I think it made her feel like she was in a pack or something.

  “She loved to talk about the old ways. About how shifters were supposed to take care of each other, how we’d find mates and raise pups and all that shit no one does anymore. It was like, no matter what had happened to her, she still had all these dreams for what the world could be again, if someone was willing to try to make it happen. After she died, Pale decided to be that person. We decided to help him.”

  “So it’s really real then? Resurrection?”

  He nodded, solemn and still. “It’s home.”

  Home. She’d had one once, a place of safety that made your heart warm just to see. To remember. “My home was in Iowa,” she whispered, thinking back. “At 218 Humboldt Lane. Can you believe I still remember the address? I haven’t seen it in years but I can still see the numbers on the side of the house. Horton wasn’t a much bigger town than this one. Everyone knew everyone else on our block. We had a neighborhood grandmother, and the kids had run of the entire street, especially in the summer. Most of all, I loved our house. It had brick all around the bottom and Mom’s roses were twined up the porch supports. And it was blue. The only blue house on the block. I used to love waking up to smell the roses peeking in the windows. Or Mom’s fresh bread…”

  The corner of his mouth lifted and his eyes unfocused a little more. “My mother used to make fresh bread, too. She’d let the loaves cool on the window sill and we’d bet each other to try to steal one without her noticing.”

  She could just imagine how tantalizing that smell must have been to a trio of young boys. Walking stomachs, all of them. “How’d that go for you?”

  “Almost lost a couple of knuckles to her wooden spoon,” he replied with a laugh that sounded almost as rusted as her own. “She was a freakin’ sharpshooter with that thing. I got cracked in the back of the head with it once—” The present came crashing back to him, it seemed, because his stare fixed on her pointedly.

  “You learn to be a good pebble thrower in the facility,” she replied, not in the least bit sorry about the rock she’d thrown. “Doesn’t look like sticks or stones have hurt you very much.”

  “Funny.” The hot edge of his anger seemed averted, at least, despite the sarcasm. He wrapped his big hands around his coffee mug, looking down into the dark liquid. “So, you were in one of those kid camps?”

  She almost had a bite of chop to her lips, her hand locking in place as she realized what she’d admitted. She pushed the meat into her mouth, searching him for some kind of reaction, but his expression was as calm as a pond in winter. “That what you all call them on the outside?”

  His nod was slight. “Those of us who know about them. Didn’t think anyone came out of them alive.”

  They don’t. Lia put her fork down, her appetite waning. How many kids had she seen taken from their dorms, never to come back? How often had they come from the test rooms, wishing they’d never returned? Too many, and most of them young. Too young to tempt a scientist with the promise of fertility to study. They’d been used for chemical warfare development. For anything that required spare parts or basic nervous systems. They’d been little more than lab rats, plentiful and expendable. “It’s not common, no.”

  “How’d you manage it?”

  “Very carefully.” She busied her hands by shoving the fork into as many pieces of vegetable as she could get to stay on and shoving them in her mouth. It had taken a year. Months of memorizing where the guards liked to stand, how long the cameras spent pointing in each direction…using her claws to sharpen the rods of her cot into blades capable of cutting through anything her claws couldn’t. It had been painstaking because she knew she’d have one chance—just one—to escape. After all this time, it still hurt that she’d ultimately failed. “A person can survive anything as long as they can find a good enough reason. Especially me.”

  “I think that’s the one thing you and I can agree completely on.” The warmth of his voice made her look up, surprised to find it was in his eyes as well. It was all she could do not to melt under that steady stare. How did he do that? Turn his gaze into a caress that all but stroked her cheek? How did he know when she needed it, even if she could never accept it?

  “Yeah?” She couldn’t help the smile that pulled at her lips. It had been so long since someone had looked at her with approval, she knew her resolve against him didn’t have a chance in hell of staying firm if he got it in his mind to melt it.

  “Absolutely. You’ve got to be the most obstinate, uncompromising female I’ve ever met.”

  “There’s a compliment in there somewhere, right?”

  The bastard, all he did was grin.

  “So is fresh bread and broken knuckles the best thing you remember about your childhood?”

  “No. Not even close. I have a lot of good memories from back then. Hell of a lot more than most of the folks I meet on the Underground. I know how lucky I was, even if it didn’t last.” He frowned into his coffee, taking another drink that did nothing to hide the sadness she could sense beneath the calm expression he wore.

  “I was lucky once, too,” she offered, hating to see him feeling bad for having a happy childhood. No one should feel bad for that. “My parents really were good people. They tried to give us a good life, one where we could live just like everyone else. Free to do whatever we chose. The raid didn’t happen ’til I was almost twenty, so I’d had years and years to learn from my parents. To remember them. No matter what was done to me after, no one could take those memories away.” She thought back, considering something he’d like to hear. “I was named after my parents’ best friend. She was the crankiest, nerve-rackingist old lady you’ve ever met.”

  “You loved her,” he guessed and she was glad to see that twinkle back in his rainwater eyes.

  “Completely,” she answered with a laugh. “And she spoiled me rotten for it. My parents used to have to steal me back home.”

  “Is that where the holding-your-breath-to-get-your-way thing started?”

  “Who do you think taught me?” The memory had her almost giggling. “She’d be all of ninety-five now, if she’s still alive. Totally blind but don’t think for a second you can get anything past her. Aurelia is a force of nature.” The warmth of the memories faded slowly. She could still see Aurelia’s gnarled hands and brown, time-lined face. The thick white hair she’d used to brush, that special Aurelia scent of old lady and sheer stubbornness.

  Of all the things she missed, Aurelia ranked right up there with her parents. Unlike them, who she couldn’t often allow herself to think about or it would hurt too much, Aurelia was a source of strength. An example that there was never a reason to give in. It was the greatest irony in this life that Asher preferred to use her full name, never knowing that his threats were always laced with a reminder to stay alive.

  She ate her food quietly for a while, and he let her. The interrogator had morphed into the thinker. She could practically see the gears turning in his mind as he watc
hed her, the questions he was telling himself he was closer to answering. That needed to stop.

  She took a drink—and a fortifying breath. “Do you think Resurrection can last?”

  “What?”

  She could take a little pleasure in catching him off guard, couldn’t she? “Well, all these shifters in hiding…We’ve survived because no one knew what we were. We were spread out, rootless. If all of us gather in one place, doesn’t that just make us easier to get rid of all at once?”

  Great, what was that smug look on his face? “I’m guessing you’ve never heard any of the stories, then?”

  “What stories?”

  “Pack lore.” He hitched a shoulder. “That’s what my mother called them, anyway. The old stories, fables and myths passed down from generation to generation. She said they were how Wolves learned to be Wolves. She loved telling them to us when we were growing up.”

  It was her turn to frown, thinking back as far as she could. “Mom used to read me stories when I was little, but I don’t remember anything…wolfy.”

  “Well, not everyone knows them anymore, so it’s possible they didn’t tell them to you. Taken as a compendium, the overlying message is that shifters are more powerful in numbers than on their own. Alone, we die. Together, we have a chance. We fortify each other. The more there are of us, the healthier, the stronger and the more resilient we become.”

  “But not invisible?”

  “No. Nothing can do that.” His expression turned distant then. She was about to grill him on what looked to be complete bull when he started talking again. “The most important story I was ever told was the story of the Four. Our origins. The Four weren’t shifters, they were Wolves, pure to the bone and Alphas to boot. The strongest of their kinds and ravenous. A white Wolf from the north, a black from the west. The gray from the east and the red from the south. Having fought their way to the middle of the continent, they immediately began to fight each other for dominance. The battle raged for days, but there was no victor.