“How he looked?” I asked, cocking my head to the side.
“He was black, Peter. At that time, being with a white woman, even on the west coast, wasn’t exactly smiled upon—particularly when he was flashing money around. We stayed until last call, though, and listened to the band play all night long. It was probably one the best nights, up until that point, that I’d ever had in that city, and I’d had plenty of good ones up until then.”
“What happened?” Lacy asked. “You said it was the best night up until then.”
“I’m getting to that, dear,” Gen said. “We left the little bar and headed back to Jasper’s car. On our way we got hassled by a group of men who wanted to know where he was getting his money from, whether or not he was selling drugs, if I was his woman. I tried to get him to turn away, to just keep going and ignore them. But Jasper didn’t. Jasper didn’t back down from anyone.”
We all sat there on the edge of our seats. For my part, I’ve always enjoyed a good story, and I found myself not caring all that much about how it might have to do with Jaeger-Tech or what was going on in our pack. I just wanted to know how it turned out.
Jen swallowed, coughed dryly, and took another drink before continuing.
“Jasper didn’t back down, though. He turned back, pushed me behind him with one arm, and started arguing with the guys. He asked them what their problem was, and then they started shoving each other. Then fists started flying. The usual. I found out that night Jasper wasn’t a pacifist like I’d thought. After he knocked three of the guys to the ground, someone pulled a pistol and shot him. Twice in the face, once in the heart, once in the stomach.”
“Jesus,” Frank groaned, running a hand through his hair.
“Did they catch them?” Jake asked. “The guys who murdered him?”
Gen just turned and looked at him, and I knew what was coming from the expression on her face. “Oh no, honey. He didn’t die. Scared me so bad I nearly wee’d myself when he got right back up as soon as they ran off.”
“Holy shit,” Mary said, so clearly enthralled she didn’t even glance my direction to give me an unspoken apology for her language.
“Maybe he was a shifter?” Richard asked, frowning.
“Gunshot wound to the head?” I replied, frowning a little. “Little hard for even us to come back from something like that.”
Gen continued on, unperturbed by us interjecting our own opinions. “Afterwards, he dropped me off back at my place. He was all covered in blood, I remember, and he made me promise to never tell anyone, to never breathe a word of it to anyone. But that was easy. Who was I going to tell that would believe a crazy story like that? I didn’t see Jasper again after that night. Well, I should say I didn’t see him again until years later, out in Denver.
“It was the mid-90s, just before we found out Lacy’s mother was pregnant with her, and Lacy’s grandfather and I had taken a sort of mini-vacation down to the city to do some shopping and eat a meal at some place other than Dixie’s.”
We all laughed, making her smile a little. Dixie’s was one of the only places in town to eat, and it served pretty much standard diner fare. Not that we weren’t fans of it, or anything, but it did get a little repetitive.
“Leon and I were having dinner together on our last night in town at some fancy French place he’d found—can’t remember the name of it to save my life—when who should I see at the next table, but Jasper? And he hadn’t aged a day.” Her eyes settled on mine and didn’t shift or change one bit. She was telling the truth. The absolute truth, as far as she knew it. “Not a single day, Peter.”
“Maybe it wasn’t him?” Jessica asked. “Maybe it was just someone that looked like him?”
“Oh, no,” Gen said, “it was him. Know how I know? I got up and asked, just to make sure I wasn’t seeing a ghost.”
“Even shifters age,” Frank rumbled. “Believe me, I know.”
“Believe me,” Gen said, “I know, too. I’ve worked with you boys long enough to see that—but back to Jasper Davis. He recognized me, even though he didn’t recognize the name I used for him. He even invited me to sit at his table for a little while, since they were on the last course of their meal, but I was too terrified to join him. I mean, what kind of man gets shot four times nearly thirty years before and doesn’t change one day since?”
Gen paused and swallowed hard again as she seemed to recall that second meeting in the restaurant all those years ago. She picked up her beer and drank the last of it.
“Need another one?” I asked.
“Please,” she said.
I slid her mine, which I’d only taken a sip or two from.
She nodded her thanks. “Peter, did you ever wonder why I didn’t really freak out when I discovered what you and Richard were?”
I shrugged. “No, not really. I mean, people have found out over the years. We try to hide it, but discovery is unavoidable in the long run. Some just kind of ignore it and move on with their lives. Others just go with the flow, I guess.”
She nodded along. “Well, for me, the reason why I just took it in stride is that I’d seen stranger things. I’d seen Jasper Davis gunned down on the street already, and then I saw him again in that French restaurant, just as handsome and young as the day I’d first met and nearly fallen in love with him. So don’t tell me or these people that there are definitely not giants out there, Peter Frost. Or that there aren’t men who are young and have been around since before the world wars.”
She paused, took another long drink of beer, and shook it off with a shiver before continuing. “Because I think I dated one.”
Goddamn, I was an idiot.
Chapter Nine – Vanessa
“You should stay the night,” Peter said in his matter-of-fact tone as the rest of the group had said goodnight and began to filter out to their cars. “It’s a long drive back up to the safe house, especially if you’re just meeting us in the office tomorrow, anyway.”
We’d all sat in stunned silence after Gen’s story was finished. No doubt lingered in my mind that all three of us were dealing with the same people, a sentiment shared by the whole pack. Even Peter. We decided unanimously, as a democracy and not as a dictatorship, that we would reconvene in the morning at the Frost Security office and decide what to do now that all the information was on the table.
“Why?” I asked, going to grab my coat from the peg on the wall. The fall air had quickly dropped even further in temperature. “Need someone to help you clean up?” I teased.
Of all the things he needed, he definitely didn’t need help cleaning. Despite the hour, the whole pack had pitched in and quickly gotten things back to approaching normal. The table was moved back inside, a load of dishes was already going, and one of the men had brushed down the grill and gotten it clean.
He cleared his throat, glancing away when I tried to meet his eyes. “Look,” he began, shuffling his feet a little, “you know I’m not good at this.”
“Good at what?” I asked, knowing full well what he was talking about.
“This.”
“What?” I replied, taking my hands away from my coat and putting both fists on my hips as I gave him a look. I wanted him to say it.
We both looked at each other for a long time, neither giving ground. He might have been alpha of his pack, but that didn’t mean I needed to roll over and just accept the fact that he was shit at apologies.
“Son of a…Vanessa, I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have disregarded what you were saying about all this, just because I thought it was fantastical and crazy.”
“What you’re really saying, though, is that you believe your secretary over me.”
He shot me a startled, nearly horrified look. “No! That’s not what this means at all!”
“Then what is it? Because it sure looks that way, Peter. Mary and I both come to you with stories of the same thing and you dismiss them both, even though we told you pretty much the same thing. And now Gen pops up with her own stor
y and you take it as gospel right away.”
“Shit,” he muttered after considering my words for a long moment. He ran a hand down his face and scratched at his chin. “Well, okay, I admit it looks that way. But that’s not what the rationale was.”
“You mean, that’s not how you’re rationalizing it now.”
“That’s not what I meant, either,” he said, his words clipped and biting. “You’re putting words in my mouth.”
“No, I’m just telling you what I’m seeing and hearing.”
“I’m just trying to apologize here,” he growled.
“Oh?” I asked. “I thought you hated doing that.”
“Goddammit, Vanessa!”
“See?” I said, taking a step closer to him, a little smile on my lips. “We’re nearly back where we were before you joined up. That’s the Peter Frost I remember.”
“I swear to God, you’re an infuriating woman sometimes.”
“Now,” I said, my defiant chin jutted out at him, “tell me again why you changed your mind?”
He sighed, clearly exasperated. He went over to the couch and slumped down into it like an exhausted old man.
I kind of felt bad for him. Even though, of course, he’d brought it on himself by ignoring me and the information I’d given him. None of this erased the fact, either, that he was still ignoring the existence of the most powerful weapon we had against these people: the hybrid.
“The reason why I changed my mind,” he said slowly, clearly trying to control his tone and volume, “is that Gen brought it up on her own, and had a completely different set of circumstances concerning hers. She knew the man, saw him gunned down, saw him years later and he was clearly the same age. That’s why I changed my mind. She corroborated what both you and Mary were saying, but brought different details to it.”
I slumped down on the couch next to him, my thigh pressed against his without even realizing what I was doing; something about his touch sent a little thrill through me. Quickly, I slid away from him so we were no longer touching. As much as I wanted to be with Peter, I knew that right now was not the time. Not while we didn’t entirely, absolutely, completely trust each other. Not with all of this hanging over our heads.
Damn, I wanted to trust him, though. He had a good family, a good pack. People I knew I could grow to love and care for. But, still, they were all so…human. So unlike the shifters I’d known over the years. Of course they hunted, and of course they ran beneath the stars. But they cared about the lives they’d built in this human world, with all its trappings of man. And then, of course, they were in the business of security. While I was in quite the opposite.
Was that something I could do? Could I brush aside my life as a shifter? My old life as a thief? Not that it had been absolutely wonderful all the time. But it had been fun.
Besides, I was still a little pissed at him. “Is that the reason,” I began, my voice equally controlled and measured, “you didn’t tell Mary or I about the other one? About what we saw?”
He nodded, a little flushed.
I’d like to think the red in his cheeks was from our momentary contact just a few seconds before, but it could have just as easily been from me poking and prodding at his weak points. They always say that the ones who can hurt you the most are the ones you love the most.
“I couldn’t let you two start to discuss what you saw,” he said, glancing over at me. “If I did that, you might start to come up with different details that weren’t necessarily accurate. That’s always the biggest concern in collecting intel.”
I groaned and leaned back into the couch. I threw my head against the cushion and just stayed like that for a moment, looking up at the ceiling of his little cabin. It was a nice, quaint place and he kept it clean. Not a single cobweb, not even up in the corners. Rustic, but I liked it. Much homier than the safe house they’d had me in.
“What’re you thinking about?” he asked after a short moment of silence.
“Just about how you were never like this when we were together. You trusted me back then. Sure, we had our fights. What couple doesn’t? But you trusted me when I told you something, Peter.”
“I wasn’t a veteran SEAL back then. That probably has a little to do with it.”
I sighed. “Yeah, you’re right. It probably does.” I glanced down from the ceiling and caught the look on his face. He was actually smiling for once, those piercing eyes of his burning into mine. I smiled right back. “We also weren’t dealing with a multinational corporation hell-bent on killing both of us or your pack.”
“Stay then? Not, you know, like that. I’ll sleep on the couch; you can take the bedroom.”
Shaking my head, I sat up. “Peter, I don’t even have any clothes to change into for the morning. If I stay here, I’m just going to have to go back and change them before I go into town for the meeting at your offices. And right now, my showing up in today’s clothes is certainly not going to look good, no matter what way you try and spin it.”
He smiled a little, that half-smile of his that just drove me up the wall. “Yeah, you’re probably right.” He patted my leg, almost like it was out of old habit, and went to stand.
That familiar little shiver went through me, and I fought back the feelings and thoughts surging up from the scorching heat his touch left behind on my knee.
“I’ve been thinking, though,” he said, seemingly unfazed. “I do think we should bring you in from the safe house. I think it would be better for everyone if you stayed here for a while, at least until all this Jaeger stuff is sorted. Here, I can keep an eye on you.”
“Think I can’t take care of myself?” I asked with a half-smirk.
“No, that’s not it. I know you can shoot and I know you can fight. But I don’t like you being up there, cut off from the rest of us. If something happens, we wouldn’t be able to get there in time to help you.”
“Well, I could just disappear off into the woods. Shift into my wolf and run. They’d never find me out in the mountains.”
“Fine. Since you’re clearly going to shoot down every reason I have, why don’t you just stay for the hell of it? Would it be so bad to stay here?”
I got up from the couch and stood next to him, close enough that the space between our bodies measured in inches rather than feet. “I don’t know, Peter,” I said. “Do you think that’d be a good idea?”
“From a strictly tactical standpoint?” he asked. “Absolutely. I could use you for backup.”
“You know that’s not what I’m talking about.”
He shrugged. “If it starts to get uncomfortable, I can always set up a tent outside or just sleep on the back deck.”
“Curl up like a little wolf pup at the back door?”
He laughed and shook his head. “I was thinking more like on a cot or in a sleeping bag. I’m not exactly a stranger to a bunk.”
I smiled a little. “Well, let me think about it, okay? I’ve been up in that little cabin for months, and it’s quite the change. First time I’ve settled down in one place in I don’t know how many years.”
“Well,” Peter said, “if you decide you don’t want to, the offer is still–”
“Come on, Vanessa!” Mary’s voice suddenly called from the hallway, drawing both mine and Peter’s attention to where she was poking her head out around the corner and watching us both, her hair pulled back in a tight ponytail. “It can be like a slumber party!”
Something gave me the sneaking suspicion she’d been listening to every word we said, both the good and bad, and the caring and biting. That was definitely one of the drawbacks of “cozy” homes. As a shifter, you could practically hear everyone else in the house breathe.
My first instinct had been to turn him down, even if he really did want me to stay there for the purpose of mutual self defense.
But one glance at Mary’s grinning face and I realized one thing for sure: the poor girl had been forced to live here with hardly any regular female energy around her. Su
re, she had the women from the pack, and she had Lacy and Gen. But they weren’t here every night. And, while she was practically an adult, I was sure she missed her mother and the rest of her family.
So, with Mary on my mind, I gave in. “Fine,” I told Peter. “I’ll pack up my bag and bring it down with me from the cabin. But I’m the one sleeping on the couch. I’m not letting you white knight this shit so you can feel like some kind of honorable, superior alpha male. Got it?”
He smiled and nodded. “Got it.”
Out on the porch before I left, I gave Mary a big hug, and she hugged me back so tightly I thought she would have surely broken a rib with her excitement. So much so, I was surprised I was breathing normally when I pulled back.
Peter gave me a hug goodbye after she was finished trying to squeeze the life from me. Rather than one that was meant to comfort an aching, soul-deep wound like back at the cabin, this one just felt warm and welcoming as he held me against his body. His smell, always powerful in my nose, seemed to flood my brain with all the colors of autumn and winter. Verdant greens and earthy browns, pines and spruce and that spicy musk of his.
I closed my eyes as I lay my head on his shoulder, just soaking him in as we clung to each other, both sighing. His arms were across my back and his chin was on my shoulder as I wrapped my own arms around his broad chest.
God, it felt good to just be held by this man. Nearly two decades later, I was once again engulfed by his strong arms that were ready to protect me. To think that, maybe just for a moment, we were making that long trek together back to a place of normalcy. Or as close to normal as two shifters on the run from hunters could ever get.
“Okay, you two,” Mary said after a while. “There’s a child present.”
Laughing and slightly embarrassed, both Peter and I broke apart.
We lingered there for another moment, our eyes locked, smiles on our lips. Even though we were saying goodbye for the night, it was like we were saying hello for the first time in years to the best parts of us we’d left in the past. Finally, I broke the gaze and headed off to my car.
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