I wrapped my arms around him in a tight hug and rested my head against his chest so that I could hear his heart beating. “Promise not to engage him in an argument? Even if he tries to bait you into it?”
Cody gave me another kiss, this time on the top of my head. “I promise. But if he even thinks about hurting you, I will step in.”
I moved my arms down to rest at his waist and tilted my head up for a kiss. I loved it when Cody got all alpha male, but I didn’t want him to take on the prince. “I can handle him.”
“I don’t doubt it.” Cody gave me another kiss before rubbing his nose against mine in an Eskimo kiss.
I smiled at him and grabbed his hand as I pulled away and headed for the door. “Let’s not get Caylee in trouble for being late.”
Chapter 18
Mason
I leaned against the wall and crossed my arms over my chest, looking out over the baggage claim area. Austin had decided to send me and my brother to get Gemma from the airport. At first, I was pissed. Then, I realized he had given us an opportunity to get a lead on what might have happened to Anna. She had already been missing for a couple days now and I was going insane.
A group of people startled to trickle into the area, and luggage came down the conveyer belt so the plane must have landed. I pushed off the wall and scanned the growing crowd for the woman we had been sent to get. Gemma was a halfling from the Canadian pack up north. Her pack master had been killed and the pack was being torn apart by a civil war as different factions battled for dominance. She had requested sanctuary in our pack until things settled because she was half human and unable to shift.
I shuddered at the thought of not being able to shift into my wolf form. Being trapped in just a human form for your entire life was a horrible fate. It also left you vulnerable to the other pack members – Gemma would always be the weakest of the pack and stuck at the bottom of the hierarchy.
I felt a mental nudge from Jason and saw him start to circle around from where he had been waiting on the opposite end of the baggage claim area. He had spotted her coming down the hall and she came into my view once she entered the large room. She was a petite brunette, walking with her head down and shoulders slumped forward.
Jason and I both headed towards her and she looked up in alarm as we approached. We exchanged glances as her eyes darted between the two of us and she took a hesitant step back. She resembled a frightened rabbit more than a wolf. It made me nauseous to think about how she must have been treated to react like this.
I gave her a friendly smile. “Hey, Gemma? I’m Mason and this is Jason.”
She gave me a nod and then looked at the floor, her hair covering her face. Jason looked at me and I just shrugged. “Did you have any luggage?” I asked her gently.
She peeked through the curtain of hair. “No.” Her voice was so soft I would have struggled to hear her if I had been human. I eyed the shoulder bag that she was carrying – it didn’t look much larger than the bags the girls carried around on campus for their books. I doubted that she could fit much in there.
Jase and I stared at each other for a second. This hadn’t been what we were expecting. I wished Anna was here. She would know exactly how to handle this.
“Uh, can I carry your bag for you?” Jason offered. Girls usually liked stuff like that, but this girl didn’t. She shook her head no and hugged the bag even closer to her as if it contained something precious.
Jase looked helplessly at me for direction but I just shrugged again. Maybe she didn’t like crowds and would relax a little once she was in the car. “This is a small airport,” I told Gemma. “So the car isn’t far.”
She gave me a small nod but kept her head down and her eyes on the floor, waiting for us to move forward before trailing behind us. I felt like a jerk, having a girl walk behind me like that, so I stopped to try and beckon her forward. She halted the same time that I did and just stared at my hand confusedly.
“Come walk with us.” I gave her what I thought was an inviting smile. She just stared at me, so I must have fallen short on delivery. There were people still streaming around us, so I was careful with what I said next. “You don’t have anything to fear from us, we’re not going to harm you.”
She looked at me as if I had two heads, but shuffled forward to stand between Jason and I. Gemma held her bag to her stomach, with her arms pressed in close, as if she was afraid to accidentally touch either one of us. I was clueless on how to start a conversation here, usually human girls were friendlier.
We awkwardly walked to our Jeep as a group and I opened the front passenger door for Gemma, leaving it up to Jason to drive. Gemma looked surprised that I was offering her the front seat but didn’t argue.
Once we were all settled, Jason kept urging me to try and start another conversation via our bond. I rolled my eyes, he always left this shit to me.
“So, Gemma…” I cleared my throat. “You live in Canada?”
She squeezed her bag close and answered softly, “Yeah.”
I felt Jason’s frustration before he burst out, “With white wolves, right? That’s where Arctic wolves are from?”
I gave him a warning glare. Obviously, it would be better to ease into an interrogation with her, not just shout questions at her.
Gemma gave Jason a shy smile before her eyes darted away. “Some of the wolves are, most are just regular.”
“Is that where you grew up?” I asked curiously, leaning forward to hear her response over the noise of the engine and the highway.
She nodded. “My father was in the pack, but my mom was human. My mom and I had a little house just for us.”
“That must have been nice,” I told her. “My brother and I grew up in shitty packs that were nothing like the one here.”
Her eyes met mine in the rearview mirror and I saw a spark of curiosity.
Jason noticed it as well, because he kept it going. “Yeah, the wolves in our first pack were a bunch of real assholes. Our second wasn’t much better, but we had Cody to look out for us then. Not many wolves were willing to try and fuck with him.”
I flinched when he cursed, but Gemma didn’t seem to mind. She seemed too shy to ask any questions, even though she might want to. I decided talking about our history a little might make her feel more comfortable opening up to us. She listened as I spoke and Jason occasionally interjected. The more I told her about how Austin ran his pack, the more curious she seemed to be.
“What about humans or halflings?” she asked quietly. “Does your pack have any?”
“One of our wolves, Tony, had a human wife when he was in his last pack,” I started to explain. “His son, Alex, is a halfling.”
“He’s a cool guy,” Jason added. “He’s going to go to school to be a nurse.”
Gemma’s jaw dropped. “He’s allowed in school?”
Jase and I exchanged glances. Her last pack sounded like it was pretty fucked up, and she hadn’t even told us anything yet.
“Yeah,” I told her gently. “Jase and I are in college now, getting a business degree so we can help out with the pack businesses.”
“But Alex isn’t a wolf?” Gemma asked with a furrowed brow.
I shook my head. “He can’t shift, but that doesn’t make him any less of a pack member. He’s still just as much a part of the pack as Jase or I.”
Gemma stared at me for a moment before lowering her head in thought. I met Jason’s eyes through the rear view mirror. It sounded like this girl had it worse than we had it growing up. We communicated with our pack bond and we were both in agreement. Our mission might have started out as ‘operation: get info from the Canadian pack girl’ but now it was ‘operation: convince Austin not to send her back to hell.’
“Are you hungry?” Jason asked Gemma.
She bit her lip nervously and looked at the floor. She probably was hungry but was too afraid to say so.
“Because we’re starving,” I informed her. “We’ve been working all day and need
a little bit of a break before we go back.” That wasn’t true at all. Austin had told us to bring her back without any detours, but we needed some more time alone with her. Maybe sharing a meal together would get her more comfortable with us.
“Catch31?” Jason suggested.
I nodded. That was a good choice. “Have you ever been to the beach before?” I asked Gemma.
She shook her head with wide eyes. “I’ve always wanted to see the ocean.”
I grinned. “You’ll like this place. It’s right on the ocean front so we can take you on the beach first. Plus, they have really good seafood there.”
She gave me a shy smile. “That sounds nice.”
We found decent parking down at the ocean front since it was a cold day in November and let Gemma free on the beach. She was fascinated by the sand and the waves of the ocean. She even took her shoes off to wade into the shallows and splash in the small waves despite the frigid temperature of the water. Jason and I watched as she tilted her head back and the breeze played with the ends of her hair.
When she finally turned back to us, there was a lightness to her step that had not been there before. She gave us the first genuine smile I had seen from her so far. “Thank you.”
I smiled back at her. “Ready to eat?”
She nodded, and we walked back onto the boardwalk so she could have a seat on one of the benches there and put her shoes back on. The Neptune statue loomed over us and she gazed up at it curiously. “I thought humans only worshipped the Christian god?”
Jase and I glanced at each other. If she hadn’t been allowed in school, had she ever had interaction with humans before? The Montreal Pack was pretty well known for keeping themselves isolated from humans.
“Most of the humans in this country are Christian, but there are all different types of religions here. This statue is more a tourist thing than a religious thing, though,” I explained.
She blinked and then stood. “Huh.”
“Do you want me to get your picture with it?” Jason asked as he held up his phone. “Tourists come from all over to do that.”
She nodded with a shy smile. Jason took her picture and she seemed fascinated when he showed her the result on his phone. Just how isolated were the wolves of the Montreal Pack?
We walked over to Catch31 and asked for a table for three. The waitress gave Jase and I a flirty smile, but Gemma was too distracted to notice. She looked at everything we passed as we walked through the restaurant as if she had never seen anything like it before. I pulled out a chair for Gemma and the waitress turned all of her flirtations onto Jason. I guess she had decided that Gemma and I were an item.
The waitress, Amy, left us with our menus and Gemma stared at hers.
Jason cleared his throat. “The seafood here is really good, they get everything daily from local docks.”
“Oh, I’m a vegetarian,” Gemma said absentmindedly.
Jason and I stared at each other in shock. “Willingly?” he asked in disbelief.
Gemma turned red and I kicked him under the table. I had never heard of a wolf or halfling being a vegetarian either, but there was no need to be rude. He gave me an apologetic shrug, but I motioned over to Gemma, who was now completely hiding behind her menu.
“Um, they have oyster soup?” he said tentatively.
I rolled my eyes. “Vegetarians don’t eat any living creatures, right Gemma?”
“Yeah,” she said softly.
Jason just sighed but kept his mouth shut. “Would you try some boardwalk fries if we got some for an appetizer?” I asked Gemma.
She peeked over the edge of the menu at me and smiled. “That sounds good.”
Gemma started to warm up to us after the fries came and she chatted about her life in Canada. She lived with a small pocket of wolves in the center of Canada, far from the pack leadership in Montreal. I hadn’t realized just how huge their pack was- their pack territory encompassed all of Canada and included Alaska.
Their pack had small groups of wolves all over their territory with the pack-master and other leaders only making occasional visits. Unfortunately for Gemma, that meant that she had very little interaction with anyone outside of her small group. There were less than twenty wolves in her little village, and she was the only halfling. Her mother had died years ago, leaving her alone in a pack that treated her little better than a slave.
She spent her days cooking and cleaning for the full-blooded wolves. She told us that she almost never left the village and had only met a handful of humans in her life. Her pack didn’t give her access to internet or television, so the only way she knew about human culture was from reading books.
Jason and I were so engrossed in her story, that neither of us thought to steer the conversation towards the Arctic wolves until we were almost finished with our meal.
“I think you’re going to like staying with us,” I told Gemma. “We’ll bring you to class one day with us, our professors won’t mind.”
Gemma’s eyes lit up and she gave me a shy smile. “That would be nice.”
Jason finished the last bite of his meal and set down his fork. “Yeah, we can bring you whenever we go out and do human stuff, too.”
Gemma nodded enthusiastically and took another sip of her drink. We had ordered her one of those fruity drinks that girls always seemed to like and Gemma had been absolutely delighted by it.
“So, Gemma,” I started out, wanting to switch to more serious conversation now that she was more relaxed. “Did you know our girl, Anna, might be from your pack?”
Jason nodded. “She’s an Arctic wolf, pure white coat.”
Gemma’s face closed off. “Her type would never interact with someone like me. She would have been sent to the pack master once she was born.”
Jason and I glanced at each other. “Anna’s not like that, she’s cool.” I told Gemma. “But she was adopted by humans when she was a baby, so she didn’t grow up with wolves.”
Gemma’s jaw dropped. “That’s impossible, the pack would have never agreed to that. The white wolves are the most precious wolves we have, they’re the ones who-”
Jase and I leaned forward eagerly but Gemma eyed us nervously. “I’m not even supposed to know about any of this, if anyone found out that I told you…”
The waitress picked that exact moment to bring us a check and try to flirt with Jason again. Gemma was quiet as she watched Jason fend off the waitress’s advances but then bluntly told her that he had a girlfriend. I left the waitress cash – with an extra tip for dealing with Jason’s rejection.
Let’s be honest, six months ago, one or both of us would have taken the waitress up on her offer. But now that we had Anna, all the other women in the world just seemed…less. None of them had her warm smile, her bright blond hair, her soft skin, her laugh… The whole world just seemed duller without Anna. I felt lost without her.
I snatched the Jeep keys from Jason as we walked back. He scowled but didn’t argue. After we all got into the Jeep, I put the keys in the ignition, but I didn’t start it. Instead I turned back to Gemma. “Anything you tell us, stays with us. Anna is everything to us and we just want to get her back.”
“You love her?” Gemma asked softly, searching my eyes.
I nodded. “We both do. With every part of our souls. We will do anything to get her back.”
Gemma took a deep breath. “No one tells me anything, but they forget that I’m around sometimes. I’m beneath their notice, just like a piece of furniture.”
I gave her hand a squeeze. “Not anymore. Our pack isn’t like that.”
She gave me a small smile. “We’ll see.” She looked off into the distance as if gathering her thoughts. “The white wolves have magic, unlike the rest of the pack.” She looked at us both to gauge our reactions, but I just nodded. It didn’t surprise me that Anna was special.
“They go to Montreal once they are born to get special training and responsibilities,” Gemma told us.
“What a
bout Anna’s mother, Astrid?” Jason interrupted. “Was she one of those wolves?”
Gemma paled again. “Astrid was banished… we’re supposed to pretend like she never existed.”
“But she did exist,” Jason pressed. “And she had Anna.”
Gemma nodded slowly. “The pack was very excited when two twin white wolves were born almost fifty years ago. They considered it to be very lucky, and both were sent to Montreal to grow up. They were the source of a lot of gossip, as they were more spoiled than any of the other wolves in the pack.” Jason and I exchanged glances. One of them must have been Anna’s mom.
“They were sent up north once they were old enough and finished training.” Gemma hesitated. “You already know our real mission, right?”
Jason and I both nodded, unwilling to give away that we were clueless.
Gemma seemed satisfied with our answer and continued. “Our pack guards the world from the fae. The white wolves are the only ones who can truly guard, the rest of us support them. The pack master stations the white wolves near where the fae come through into our world.”
My ears perked up at that. Anna had been taken by one of the fae who claimed to be her father.
Gemma leaned towards us to whisper. “Rumor has it that Astrid met one of the fae. She failed in her duty to protect us and sided with one of them.”
My eyebrows rose. “Astrid’s daughter? She’s fae?”
Gemma shrugged. “I don’t know anything about a daughter, just that Astrid was banished and her sister, Ingrid, was sent home to mate with the pack-master’s son.”
Jason and I looked at each other through the rearview mirror before I reached down to start the Jeep. Hearing that Anna really was part fae and not a purebred wolf didn’t change anything for me. Anna was still Anna. But for everyone else? Would that change anything? The council thought she was incredibly valuable because she was a purebred white wolf. But how would they feel once the truth came out? Would they leave her alone to be with us? Or would they consider her an enemy?
Finding the Power Within Page 17
