Hold Steady (Becoming the Wolf Book 2)

by T. S. Joyce

  Because her wolf was still here, too.

  Chapter Eight

  “Snacks, sippy cup, extra clothes, toys, jacket. Lana?” The sound of Morgan’s voice echoed down the empty hallway as she called for the little girl.

  They were so late. She’d told Mom that she would have Lana at her house by five, and it was a quarter after and she still wasn’t out the door.

  Lana scuttled around the doorway to the living room, her cheeks covered in magic marker. “I did my make up, too,” she chirped happily.

  Morgan shifted the overnight bag, her purse and the pink, flower pillow that was trying desperately to escape her grasp. “Wow, baby. It looks… No more makeup until you are twenty, okay?”

  She checked her panic. How had Marianna made everything look so easy? Deep breath. It wasn’t the end of the world. It was just a little marker. It wasn’t as if she had been bitten by a werewolf or anything. That would require panic. She would just clean it up when they got to Mom’s house.

  “Come on, Lana. You ready to go see Grammy?”

  Lana rubbed her eyes sleepily. “Can you carry me?”

  “Right.” She readjusted the flailing bags and made room on her hip before she scooped her up.

  Keys. Where had she put the dadgummed keys? Lana had gone limp and Morgan struggled to keep her snuggled to her chest. With both hands full, she pulled the door closed behind her with the toe of her sneaker, but she lost her balance on the welcome mat. Welcome, my ass. She never opened the door for anyone in that neighborhood. She tripped forward and her legs splayed in opposite directions as she tried to right herself. Lana yelped as Morgan landed hard on her backside.

  “Son of a…biscuit!” They were already late. Morgan sighed in resignation and lay out on the cracked concrete like a star. What was a couple more minutes?

  “Morgan,” Lana whispered. She touched under Morgan’s eyes with her little hands. Purple, frightening eyes.

  “I’m okay. I just got scared you were going to get hurt is all.” She stroked the girl’s dark hair. “Your momma was always so much better at this stuff.”

  “I miss Mommy.”

  “You and me both, kiddo.” Morgan squeezed her little hand. “Come on.”

  She hauled them both upright again and trekked to her truck parked by the curb. The bags hung awkwardly and bumped her hips every time she took a step, but who was going to care? No one was watching.

  The wind switched directions and a familiar scent hit her squarely in the nostrils. She jerked her head and sniffed.

  Grey’s old truck was sitting on the curb a couple houses down. Of course he saw her fall. That was the perfect end to the day.

  She buckled Lana up and pressed her favorite book into her hand. She shut the door gently and jogged over to his truck. “What are you doing here, Greyson?” she asked as he rolled down his window. Full name. Burn.

  “Keeping you and the kid safe,” he answered. He took off his sunglasses and revealed crystal-blue eyes. He arched his eyebrows and waited.

  “You applying for guard duty was our problem in the first place. Thank you for the concern, but I’ve got it covered,” she said, patting the door frame twice before she turned.

  “I’m still going to be coming around from time to time,” he said, just loud enough for her to hear. “You said you needed time and space. I gave you a shit-ton of time, and look.” He gestured to her home. “I’m giving you two houses worth of space.” He smiled brightly, and she hid a smile. He didn’t need to be encouraged.

  “Stalking is very unbecoming on you,” she said primly.

  Grey shrugged and lifted up a Ranching Monthly magazine in front of his face.

  Couldn’t he see how torn up she was to see him? Couldn’t he understand her need for space? She straightened her spine and glared. “I’m going to call the police.”

  “No interfering with my life,” she said, feeling like she needed to stick to her guns at least a little.

  “Fine,” he said lightly. “If you make cracker crumb chicken, can you bring me a plate?” he asked, a smile in his voice.

  Oh, she knew what he was doing. Mr. Charming, sucking her back in. Well…it was absolutely working.

  “I can’t make any promises,” she said primly as she sauntered away.

  But she was definitely going to stop by the store on the way home and get stuff to make cracker crumb chicken.

  If he was going to play bodyguard, he should at least be compensated.

  Chapter Nine

  Three weeks had passed with no danger to Morgan and Lana. Most of him was relieved, but Wolf had only given in to sitting in a car for hours a day doing nothing because he thought there was a chance of killing someone. Sometimes it was hard compromising with a monster.

  His cabin was finished. He and Marissa jokingly called it the Crawford Pack Cabin, because it was just Grey in the sprawling house. It had only been finished for a few days, but Marissa had already picked out a room and had not so subtly circled furniture she wanted for it out of a catalog. He would get her room all fixed up for her birthday. He would have talk to Dean about it first, but if she wanted a room, she could have one. She was over there all of the time anyway.

  His stomach growled. Morgan will feed us soon, Wolf said in his head.

  “You always think she’s going to read your mind and come up with a meal every time you’re hungry,” he muttered, flipping the page of his book.

  She feeds us every day now, Wolf pointed out.

  “Once a day. Not eighteen meals like you seem to need, you greedy asshole.”

  Wolf waited for him to read one sentence before he muttered, Hungry.

  “Shut up,” Grey gritted out. “I’m not going to do this again, where I read the same damn sentence twenty times because you can’t stop whining.”

  Hungry, hungry, hungry, hungry, hungry, oh look, there comes Morgan, probably to feed us.

  Grey looked up and sure enough, Morgan was sprinting toward him. Only she didn’t have food in her hands and there was fear etched into her face.

  He threw open the door before she even reached him. “What happened?”

  “Lana. I went to take the laundry upstairs and I heard something. When I came out, she was gone. I can’t find her anywhere, and I smell something. Someone has been in the house. Multiple someones, but I had the doors locked. They must have found the spare key. And I tried to Change but I can’t—”

  She wasn’t even finished talking before he was Changing. He pushed it as she shielded his body as best she could with hers. Sure, his windows were tinted, but it would still look odd if someone saw her talking to a man one minute and a dog the next.

  As he finished the last of it, she opened the door to let him out. She bolted for the house while he tried to keep up with her on wobbly legs.

  She opened the door and he raced past her, picking up a thick scent right away. Werewolf. Morgan must be too new to be able to decipher the difference between human and wolf. Two fresh trails snaked through the house, beginning at the back door where the spare key was indeed still in the doorknob. Wolf followed it into the living room where bright colored crayons were scattered all over the floor and a coloring book lay open on the edge of the coffee table. The room stunk of unfamiliar werewolf.

  He raced out the back door as she opened it and he turned and growled once. Stay here.

  “Oh my God, Grey, she’s really gone. I’m calling the pack to help! Bring her home,” she pleaded, removing the traitorous key and shutting the door. The lock clicked. Good little wolf.

  He ran after the trail, nose down, through the alleyway that separated the backs of the next row of houses. The breeze held animal but no new exhaust fumes, so they must be waiting for a car to pick them up somewhere. He had to make it to them before their escape vehicle did. The backsides of houses and garages whizzed by him and the smell of oil and gasoline and garbage mixed with everything. Another block more and the trail ended. As he doubled back, a man jumped out from be
hind a bright blue garbage bin. Two other men, one tall and lanky and one built like a freight train, were huddled in an open garage packed with moving boxes in the back of a house. The thin one held Lana with his hand over her mouth as she kicked and screamed, tears streaming down her face. He let her mouth go and a wail escaped her. The man who’d jumped out at him looked like he'd rather be anywhere else in the world and backed away, but the burly man closest to Wolf gripped a knife. It stank of silver.

  Wolf pulled his lips over gleaming teeth and let his fury fuel a bellow deep in his chest. He would kill them all and they would spend their last dying breath full of regret.

  Lana looked so scared, and every instinct told him to get the men off her first, but if the blond man with the knife had his way, he would kill Wolf way before he could do any good for her. Silver flashed as he slashed the knife downward, but Wolf ducked out of the way, drawing him closer. The man rode his forward momentum and came at Wolf again, and this time he connected blade with flesh as Wolf latched onto his arm. Wolf pulled him into his body as the man lodged an ill-placed silver knife in Wolf’s shoulder. As the man toppled forward, off-balance and covering his face, Wolf latched on to his throat and clamped down. He was made to break bones and rip necks, and that’s what he did. Wolf tossed the man’s limp body to the side. The weight of it thudded dully against a wooden fence as Wolf’s gaze drifted to the face of his next target.

  Lana’s attacker was hurting her. He was pulling too tightly on her mouth, straining her neck, and her eyes were large with fear and pain. As Wolf lunged, the man dropped her, and Lana landed on her backside and yelped in pain. That tiny noise was all it took to turn everything red. They’d hurt his little girl and a roaring sound filled his head.

  The knife had gone into his shoulder at an odd angle and was still in place, buried almost vertically in the thick muscle there. He paced closer and turned his head far enough to pull the knife blade out and toss it closer to the man, tempting him to pick it up. Wolf could smell his silver-seared flesh but couldn’t feel it. Not yet. All he felt was fury.

  The man dove for the knife as Wolf tensed. He dove for the back of the man’s neck that was so neatly presented for him. The man thrashed wildly, but Wolf would die before he let go. He clamped down harder with supernatural jaw strength to match teeth made for tearing and crunching through bone and then pulled back. It wouldn’t be enough, but he needed to get the man’s neck muscles out of the way first.

  The man roared as he reached over his head and grabbed Wolf by the scruff of the neck with both hands and threw him into the fence the first man was lying under. Digging his paws in, he jumped up and launched himself at the fleeing man’s back, catching his injured neck in his jaws and snapping his spine.

  Before the body had even landed on the unforgiving concrete, Wolf scanned the ally for the other man. Lana sat in the garage crying, her wide gray eyes fixed on him. She had never seen him in his monstrous form and he regretted that she’d seen him for the first time like this.

  His words sounded garbled coming from Wolf’s throat. “Stay there, Lana.”

  He picked up the retreating man’s scent and followed it around a corner, but he couldn’t tear himself away from Lana. He circled back and whined. She was so small. She was hurt and crying and scared and he couldn’t leave her alone in the alley, no matter how important finding the other wolf was. A growl sounded behind him.

  He wasn’t able to turn around fast enough before the wolf was on him. The last man hadn’t run after all. He had Changed. From the weight of the animal as he sunk his fangs into Wolf’s neck, he was huge. Wolf instinctively curved his body inward to latch onto the others shifter’s front leg. The bone went snap.

  The wolf yelped and loosened his grip. Wolf used his powerful neck muscles and yanked the other wolf under him by his crippled leg and then he latched on to his muzzle. The bones crunched between his jaws. Wolf was tired of clean deaths. This man had taken Lana, his tiny girl, Lana. He held on to the scrabbling wolf until blood rattled in his lungs—until the kidnapper slowly suffocated from his crushed face. He held his mouth and nose closed as he struggled wildly. A whistling sound came from the wolf’s muzzle as the last few molecules of air tried desperately to make it to drowning lungs. He didn’t let go until the animal went slack and its eyes glazed over.

  Lana stood frozen against the side of the house. Not the way he had wanted to introduce her to his animal form. His belly brushed the ground as he crawled to her, slowly whining. He licked her face clean of tears when he got close enough.

  Three wolves. That was all he had seen and smelled, so she should be safe. He jerked his head in the direction of Morgan’s house. They were two blocks away, at least. His instincts screamed to stay as a wolf to protect her, but it was a long walk for the child. He needed to carry her.

  “Stay right here,” he said before he slunk around the corner to push his Change as fast as possible in the open garage. He hated her being out of his sight for even a moment. A stack of boxes leaned crookedly against the left side of the garage, and he scanned them until he found one that sounded promising. It read winter clothes. He ripped it open and grabbed a pair of dark gray sweats from the top and pulled them on as quickly as he could.

  Darkness was setting in, and he didn’t want them in the back of this alleyway any longer than they needed to be. He dragged the two bodies by the fence into the garage and ran out to grab the other, which had already Changed back to a human corpse. Grey piled him on top of the other two and shut the garage behind him. He noted the house number over the door and ran around the corner. As recognition lit Lana’s face, he picked her up and crushed her to him.

  “Are you okay? Are you okay?” he murmured as he checked her for injuries. She seemed shaken but wasn’t hurt.

  He took off at a brisk walk back to the house, head swiveling and keen wolf eyes scanning for danger. Lana squeezed her arms around his neck and cried. The place he was stabbed in the shoulder had shifted when he Changed and was now in his back, open and bleeding freely. Warmth trickled down his spine in a steady stream. The last thing he needed was for someone to see them like this. He jogged, the ill-fitting sweats pulling irritatingly as the too-short legs bunched around his calves.

  “Morgan!” he yelled as he reached the back door to the house.

  She should have heard him from there. He bolted, a feeling of unease hitting his gut again. The back door was wide open.

  “Morgan!” he called again. Even to himself, his voice sounded frantic. Shutting and locking the door behind him. He put Lana in the closet and turned on the light.

  “Lana, stay right here. I promise I’ll be right back. Be quiet as a mouse, okay?”

  She nodded and the movement dislodged a tear that slid down her cheek. Grey shut the door and jerked the handle, forcibly jamming it.

  Grey stilled himself and listened. The latch of a car door clicked from somewhere outside. He ran through the house and straight through the open front door. A man was shoving Morgan’s limp body into the trunk of a black Honda Accord. A rental car from the look of the license plate.

  He sprinted for the man. A flash of fur came from the right and landed on him so hard it knocked the wind out of him. A gray wolf latched on to his arm and shook hard enough to rattle his bones. He let go as Grey tried to right his balance and went for his neck. Desperately, Grey threw his arm up and into the wolf’s throat. He stood, reckless to get to the car as the man shut the trunk. The kidnapper hesitated and shot a glance at the gray-colored wolf.

  The wolf leapt for Grey’s shoulder, but Grey caught him by the neck and slammed him to the ground. The wolf scrabbled, viciously raking sharp nails down Grey’s chest and the tender skin on his belly. He took his knee and rotated it over to where the wolf’s body and legs faced away from him as he choked the life out of him. The screech of tires sounded as the car sped away. With an angry jerk, Grey snapped the wolf’s neck and jumped the creaky gate. The best he could do was memorize t
he license plate number as it pulled farther and farther away from him.

  “No!” Grey roared.

  The air stank of blood and he pulled his hand away from his stomach. His flesh was torn wide open and he was holding himself together with his blood-soaked hand. He pressed harder, grunting with the deep pain that pierced his body. Had Morgan had time to call the pack before she’d been taken? He stopped at the dead wolf and bent and tried to drag the body to a less-conspicuous location. He groaned with the effort. It wasn’t going to happen. Not with his injury. The deceased wolf was already turning back into a man, and the dead weight was too heavy for him to drag anywhere in his condition. All he could hope for was that no one looked too closely behind Morgan’s crepe myrtles until help arrived. Grey shook his head and cursed as he rushed inside the house. He grabbed the phone and dialed Dean as he stumbled down the hall to get Lana out of the closet. He broke the handle completely and pulled her onto his chest as he sat down heavily against the opposite wall. She clung to him as he readjusted his hand to keep pressure on his open stomach.

  “Dean. I need help. Morgan. They took Morgan. I’ve got Lana safe. There are bodies in a garage near her house and one out front. All werewolves.” He gave Dean the address of the garage and the license plate number before he forgot them. “Dean, I’m hurt. Who is closest to here? I have Lana—p”

  “Jason is out your way. He’ll be there in a few minutes. Let me give him a call and I’ll call you right back. We’re all coming. We’re on our way. Hold on, Grey,” Dean said before he hung up.

  Grey tried to hold onto consciousness long enough for Dean’s call, but the light in the room collapsed on itself until there was nothing left.

  Morgan, Morgan, Morgan. He had to get to Morgan.

  He had to make sure she was safe, because if she didn’t exist, nothing did.