by Amy Lane
Jack and Katy had spent the next hour sitting very still and pretending to needlepoint or read while listening to Teague growl to himself over the sticks and string.
He’d won at the end, and when they’d left, he’d put in a request for more yarn. He’d written the specs out painfully: Worsted. Plain. Some color I don’t hate.
Jack had looked at the tight writing on the little piece of paper and figured that they’d have to see if there was a colorway called khaki. Katy had wrinkled her nose at Teague and shrugged.
“You put it to another man most every night,” she said plainly to her beloved. “It’s not like getting something with color is going to make you any more gay.”
Teague had smirked. “Since I also put it to you, darlin’, I’m thinking that makes me bi—and since you’re the one who’s getting some of that, I don’t know how far over into the other territory you want me to shift.”
Katy had smiled at him, the full-wattage kind she knew melted his knees just a little, whether he loved Jacky more or no. “I don’t think I’ll be getting any less if I have you make me something in purple, you think?” She’d been rewarded by a quiet, smoldering smile.
“I think you could be right, field mouse. How ’bout you get any color you want, and some more for Jacky, and I’ll knit you all up whatever I can manage while I’m laid up here. How’s that?”
Katy had smiled at him and rubbed noses, charmed at his sweet and slightly besotted smile back.
Now she said to Jack, “I don’t want to tell him. I don’t want to tell him anything. I want him to sit there and knit for a week. Hell, I want a fucking blanket, and we bought enough yarn for it, didn’t we?”
And then, together, they both said, “Fuck.”
“Which we forgot at the restaurant,” Jack swore, burying his face in her back. She rolled her eyes.
“Yeah, we need to go get that.” She sighed, and Jack sighed with her.
“Because sometimes you don’t want to do shit that’s necessary.”
They weren’t talking about running back for the yarn, and they both knew it.
“Maybe we could just tell Cinnamon and Joshua,” Jack said hopefully—and Katy, who had been living with two taciturn men for nearly eight months now, actually grunted in response.
“And maybe he could break himself all over again in the tantrum he’ll throw when he finds out we didn’t tell him. And then maybe Cory could scold us like a disappointed mommy, and Green could look all sorrowful and shit because, damn, don’t we know by now how this family thing works? And then, just for fun, maybe Bracken could pull all our blood out from a paper cut, and that would be the best part of our night!”
Jack chuckled behind her. Every now and then he made that height thing really work for him, and in spite of the fact that he wasn’t a fighter and he wasn’t Teague, he could really make her feel loved and protected. She thought that, in another life, where she wasn’t a werewolf and didn’t have to depend on a pack to keep her safe, she and Jacky might make a nice, stable, two-point-four-kids-picket-fence couple.
Of course if they ever met Teague Sullivan in that life, he’d rock their world, and then where would they be?
“Here,” Jack said, still laughing. “How about I run back and get the bags, and you get the car and meet me down there. And then we go back and tell Teague and Cinnamon and even bite the bullet and call up Green.”
“I’ll go down there,” she said thoughtfully. “The rest of the plan is good, but I think maybe I should go down.” She turned to him and kissed the corner of his mouth, because she could. “I just think that maybe they’ll show themselves when they think I’m alone and helpless.”
Jacky growled. It was satisfying that he would get all protective and shit, but they’d both been in the same fight the night Teague had been wounded, and she had held her own. It hadn’t been any little werewolf fight either. It had been a full-out battle, with vampires and shape-shifters and everything but elves—on the enemy’s side, at least. Cory had brought enough elves for Green’s people to be well represented. Katy was not particularly reckless, but she did have some confidence now. She could fight.
She could certainly hold her own with some assholes who didn’t have the balls to walk up and introduce themselves to a couple of werewolves from out of town.
Teague would have said “Hell to the fuck no!”—but Teague had got himself broken, and Jacky was not Teague. He went to fetch the car while she trotted down to Bubba Gump Shrimp Company, where they’d eaten after their visit to the aquarium.
She liked the restaurant. It was pricey, but Green didn’t mind when they ate on his dime, and they’d sat out on an enclosed porch, perched on pylons that were literally sunk into the ocean. Their view had been nothing but pretty blue sea under the gray sky. Why was it that at the ocean, even a gray sky wasn’t a hardship?
They were in luck! When Katy dodged into the crowded foyer, she spotted the bag they’d left behind immediately, and the door hostess had seen her and simply handed it over. The restaurant was crowded and full of food and alcohol smells, which had made it a little disconcerting to sit down and eat in.
Now it also made it easier for the werewolf to hide and wait.
But that didn’t mean Katy didn’t smell him, and it didn’t mean she didn’t have her hand on the little switchblade she’d carried with her since she’d been a teenager living on the streets. She didn’t need it, though. The asshole brought his own knife.
She was alert enough to expect the grab as she walked out of the restaurant, and was hauled around the gift shop to the side of the building with the dumpsters, and she was strong enough to have the guy’s hunting knife at her attacker’s throat before he had a chance to do more than breathe in her ear.
“You all they got, fucker?” she hissed into her new friend’s surprised face. He looked to be in his thirties, which meant in werewolf years he was probably much older, but he was missing some of his teeth, and he had the bad skin and bone structure that usually came with a lot of poor nutrition as a child and growing adolescent.
If he didn’t smell like drunken werewolf, he’d be just another homely white man with hair the color of dirt on a sidewalk.
“I’m not much, but there’s a lot of me,” the guy said, laughing without humor. Katy grunted. Obviously more than one. She wondered how long she had before Jacky brought the car around.
“Why not come up and say hello, army of one?” she asked seriously. She saw him flush and duck his head.
“I don’t know.” He scowled. “You didn’t come introduce yourself to the area alpha. What’s up with that?”
“This is Green’s territory,” Katy said, a little surprised. “How long’s your alpha been here?”
The guy shrugged. “We been here about a year,” he admitted. “Cujo and his woman came up from SoCal back then, said SoCal was waging a werewolf war, said they wanted to just have their own territory and hang here and be cool. So we did. And we ain’t smelled no other werewolves until you and your man here. We figured we’d scare you off, we don’t have to deal with you. Who the fuck is Green?”
Katy grimaced and wished for Cory. Cory did this shit better. “Green’s the guy you’re gonna have to answer to if you keep lying to me. You put a knife in my side and haul me around a building to scare me? You’re so full of shit I’m surprised your shorts aren’t full. You want to try again?”
The guy grimaced. “Well, scare you, get myself a piece of ass. You know. Whatever.”
Katy found herself growling. “Is this knife silver, asshole?” She held it up against the guy’s stubbled throat. When he didn’t flinch back from it, she assumed not and contemplated her next move. But first: “Why do you guys smell funky, like sour beer? There’s no reason you should be drunk.”
The guy shrugged. “Man, that’s not us, that’s Cujo’s mate. She’s crazier than a shithouse rat, but she’s got some serious magic mojo. Fucking crazy redheaded bitch with pointed ears. She’s the one
tells Cujo how to handle strangers.” Suddenly he leered, and with his baggy, stubbled face and bad teeth, the expression did a lot to make Katy wish she hadn’t eaten quite so much at Bubba Gump’s. “I’m the one who thought your ass looked pretty tight in those jeans.”
“Fucker, I got me two men, and either one of them could kill you for free and not remember the stink of your breath the minute after.” Well, Teague could, but he had enough fierceness for both him and Jacky, even laid up like he was. “But good men like that, they don’t pick some weak princessy bitch to be theirs, do you hear me? You tell this Cujo”—and wasn’t that the dumbest name on the planet? Really? Cujo?—“that if he wants to introduce himself, he’d better go back to Mommy and learn him some manners. And you tell him, he messes with us, he pisses off Green. Green’s worst guy, he’s still better’n you. He’s got a whole army of people with pointed ears that’ll fuck you up unless you leave me and my men the fuck alone, and maybe even then, you hear me?”
The guy grimaced and tried to be tough. “You don’t scare me, cunt. You’re just waiting to bend over and take it from a man that’s not afraid of you.”
Katy laughed and thought maybe Lady Cory’d rubbed off on her. “That’s not you, asshole! You’re just lucky this knife’s not silver.” And with that, she used it to sever his carotid artery.
She managed to jump back and avoid most of the blood spray, which was good because she didn’t want to attract any attention walking back. She’d dropped the shopping bag with the souvenirs and yarn when she’d been grabbed, and she dodged around the building to get that. When she got to the road in front of the restaurant, with the exception of some questionable stains on her pants, she looked like any other tourist in a pair of flared-leg jeans and a sporty little black leather jacket.
She hopped in the car—a very old Volvo, apparently Cinnamon’s personal vehicle—and Jack’s nostrils flared.
“What in the fuck? I smell blood!” He sniffed again. “Gross blood.”
Katy grunted. It smelled… off. Like elf blood mixed with werewolf blood and fermented in a blender with lots and lots of pot. “Yeah. Too bad the guy will live,” she told him. She’d seen his throat knitting back together as she’d left him crouched, bleeding, and swearing to himself in the dumpster lot behind the restaurant.
“He approached you?”
Katy looked at him and shrugged. “You sound all surprised and shit, Jacky. You knew that’s why I wanted to go back alone, right? They wouldn’t come around when you were there. They think you’re a hot shit alpha. Me? To them I’m harmless. They don’t know I’m Lady Cory’s girl. No girl who hangs out with Lady Cory is gonna walk away without some ninja shit rubbing off, right?”
Jack made a weird sound—a whimper or a grunt or a whine or all three—and then sighed. “Holy shit. I really am the wife. Teague’s the warrior, you’re the ninja, and I’m the helpless asshole who gets Teague hurt because he’s so busy worrying about me that he lets some fucker just scoop him up into midair!”
Katy couldn’t help it. She rolled her eyes. “You think that’s why Teague got hurt? That’s not why Teague got hurt. Teague got hurt because we were in a battle, idiot. Teague got hurt because that’s his job. We need to face that, Jacky, and we need to face that right now. Cory saved him, sure, but she shouldn’t have done that—”
“Why does everybody keep saying that!” Jack swore. “I’m tired of hearing how she should have just let him die! Doesn’t everybody realize that it was Teague falling from the sky there?”
“You think I don’t know that?” Katy snapped. “I know it, Jacky. I know it. Green knows it. The whole damned hill knows it. And don’t think people wouldn’t have just choked up and cried if Teague died. But you know this nice little vacation we’ve got here? The house and the people make us good food and give us our car? The way we got to wake up and take care of each other when Teague was busy being hurt and in pain in the next room? You think we’d get any of that if Cory died? Do you know what would have happened if she had died a couple of nights ago? We’d have no Teague, because no one would have the heart or the skill or the love to make him better.”
Katy sighed and wished she had something to kick, and Jack sighed in the exact same way with the exact same expression on his face. They caught each other’s eyes and laughed.
“So you went all ninja and shit on him?” Jack asked after a moment, and Katy harrumphed into the gray of the late afternoon.
“What do you suppose they want?” Jack asked. Katy knew she had to get coherent.
“They wanted to tell us their dicks were bigger, but there’s more to it than that.” She squinted a little, wondering what it would be like to be out on the beach this time of the afternoon. The tide was probably full and noisy, and the swells would be terrifying and huge. She hadn’t told Jacky, but she was dying to go wolf and swim in that madness. The idea of it seemed absolutely thrilling.
“What more?” Jack asked with half his brain. He was, to his credit, trying to find a way out of downtown Monterey. The famed Cannery Row might have become a tourist trap since John Steinbeck wrote about it, but that didn’t make the frontage road any less congested and vital to the city’s economy.
“They’ve got some sort of freaky leader dynamic,” she said sourly. “There’s an elf in there, and this assumption that they’re here in a power vacuum. That and the cowardice… you know, the way they wouldn’t come at me with you there.” She snorted. “That and they’re stupid! How they could think they’d take one of us out with a knife? Dumbest fucking criminal I’ve ever met, and I used to know a lot of them. Honestly, Jacky. I don’t know what their game is, but it’s bad. We’ve got to tell Teague, and we’ve got to tell Green or Cory. We may be stubborn here, but we’ve got to try hard not to be too stupid, you know?”
Jack grunted. “We were already going to tell him. How was it not stupid to tip our hand and then let them know we’re not weak?”
Katy blinked. Well, shit. She hadn’t thought of that.
“Maybe they’ll stay the fuck away from us?” she said hopefully, but she wasn’t buying it, and Jacky’s shake of the head wasn’t either.
“Nope. Mostly I think it means we’ve got to be cagier than ever. And I’ll place bets that someone’s going to have to come down here and kick some ass before Teague’s well enough to leave.”
Katy pouted. She knew it was childish, but, well, damn it. “I was sort of hoping I could scare them away until we left,” she confessed. “I didn’t want Teague to have to worry. You’re right, it wasn’t a smart thing to do. No wonder Teague loves you best.”
Jack stopped short at a yellow light, and a passel of cars almost piled up behind him.
“Teague what?” he asked, ignoring the cacophony of horns and phalanx of dance figures behind them.
“Jacky, there’s traffic—”
“What did you just say?”
“There’s traffic!”
“The light’s red!”
“Well there’s gonna be traffic when the light goes green, and I don’t want to talk about it,” she told him rationally. He squinted at her. The light went green, and he pulled out like a sane person and wound his way along the coastline before going inland for 17-Mile Drive to the homes in Pebble Beach.
There was a pullout parking lot with beach access right before the road went right. Jack pulled in there and turned toward her with something approaching a stern expression on his face.
“I don’t want to talk about it,” Katy told him, sorry she’d ever put it into words. It was the truth. She knew it. She’d known it since she’d wormed her way into their lives. It didn’t bother her—it had never bothered her. Some girls, she knew, would be all princessy, would demand to be the queen or the crown jewel in an arrangement like this. But those girls thought like humans, and Katy hadn’t thought like a human even when she was one. The more she thought about it, the more she remembered those hazy, bitter days in the piles of bodies at the shooting galler
ies as a quest for a pack. The only pack she’d found as a human was the warped and twisted kind. But healthy Katy had found herself a healthy pack. She didn’t need to be the pack princess with a diamond tiara. She just needed her men. She needed them healthy and happy, and if that meant they needed each other a little more than they needed her, well, women had been keeping quiet parts of themselves, covert desires, and secret gardens thriving and weeded in their bosoms since they first looked at their male counterparts and wondered “Where in the hell is he gonna put that?”
“We are too going to talk about it!” Jacky groused. She just looked at him, her mouth twisted and one eyebrow higher than the other, until he started to shift uncomfortably in his seat.
“Jacky, do you think Teague would throw himself in front of a bullet for you?” she asked after a moment. Jack’s face scrunched up sourly.
“Yeah,” he said softly. “Do you think he wouldn’t take one for you?”
“I know he would,” Katy told him with absolute assurance. “But it wouldn’t leave him any less dead. You’d take a bullet for me. I’d take one for both of you. If that man had us dangling off a cliff and could only save one of us, he’d save us both if it crushed his heart. I’m not going to complain that he loved you first. That you’re the one who makes him all soft before I go in and make him strong. I’m not going to complain that you followed him like a puppy dog, even into a life you’re not good at. You love me. You both love me.”
“But to say he loves me more—”
“Who you think Lady Cory loves more? Green or Bracken?”
Jack swallowed and thought hard. “I think it’s tight,” he said at last. “I think it’s damned tight. But I’d probably have to say Green, just a little. Maybe because he was first, or maybe because he was part of her life with Adrian. Maybe it’s just because he’s her leader, and he’s got the double whammy.” He looked out to the sea, where jumbo breakers were swelling up almost to where the dunes dropped down to the beach. High tide, indeed. “I think she probably hates to think about it. Probably worse, even, than me or Teague do.”
