by Lola Gabriel
“What are you drinking?” Archer asked her.
“I thought you said this wasn’t a date. Why would you buy me a drink?” Brianna challenged him.
“It’s not a date, Brianna. I just thought some drinks would make this a little more enjoyable.”
“Oh,” she said, disappointed when she should have been relieved. “I’ll have a red wine, please.”
“Why don’t you go grab us a table?” Archer said. “Somewhere quiet. We don’t really want ears on our conversation.”
She felt herself blushing as she turned away from him. She rolled her eyes, telling herself to stop acting like a lovesick teenager. She scanned the room. It was fairly busy, but the majority of the patrons were crowded around the pool table and dartboard. She headed towards the back of the room, where it was almost deserted, choosing the table furthest away from everyone else.
Archer approached with their drinks. He handed her a glass of red wine and sat down opposite her, taking a sip of his own drink; a bottle of Budweiser.
“Good choice,” Archer said. nodding approvingly as he looked around at the quiet area they were sitting in. “So. Tell me, Brianna. What do you know of the immortal world?”
She took a large gulp of her wine, trying to put out the fire that burned inside her as he looked at her, an amused smile playing across his lips. The wine did nothing to put out the flames, but it was good, and she took another sip.
“Let’s just say I know enough,” she said. “And I’ll be the one asking the questions.”
The amused smile stayed on Archer’s face, and he laughed softly. “You’re a feisty one, aren’t you? Okay, ask away.”
“I know enough to know that not all immortals are immoral and nasty. So I’ll ask you again. Why did you kill Caroline? Did she do something to you, or did you just want another trophy kill under your belt?”
“A trophy kill?” Archer replied, laughing. Brianna narrowed her eyes, shocked that he seemed to find this funny. Her shock must have shown on her face, because he stopped laughing, suddenly serious. “I’m sorry. But you have this all wrong, Brianna. Do you seriously think I’m a hunter?”
Brianna thought of the paw prints beside her building. She didn’t think Archer was a hunter; not really. But accusing him of being one seemed much safer than accusing him of being a wolf.
“You tell me,” she said.
“I’m pretty sure I just did. I am not a hunter. I’d be happy to tell you everything, but I must warn you; knowing about this stuff is dangerous for a mortal.”
“You don’t say. But it’s a risk I’m willing to take. That’s why I’m here.”
“Do you know what a Matchmaker is?” Archer asked.
Brianna nodded, suddenly afraid. What if she had this back to front? What if Archer was a Matchmaker, and he had taken Caroline out because she was getting in his way?
“That’s what Caroline was,” he said. “She approached me the morning I killed her and offered me a professor from her college as a mate.”
Brianna took a moment to digest the two simple sentences that gave her a ton of answers. Archer wasn’t a Matchmaker; Caroline was, but she hadn’t been interested in Brianna. It really was a coincidence that they had ended up meeting. It was Helen. It had to be. That was why Caroline had shown so much interest in her. And when she had sneaked out of the dorm room early and left Brianna in bed there, she had gone out to see Archer.
It was a relief for her that Caroline hadn’t known about her. It was likely that her secret was still a secret here. And she was glad to hear that Archer was no Matchmaker. Not just for her own safety, but because, as much as she tried to deny it to herself, she liked him. She liked his honesty and the way he teased her and kept her on her toes. She still felt a little sad for Caroline. She had seemed nice enough, but knowing what she knew about Matchmakers, Brianna thought that Archer had probably done the world a favor by getting rid of her.
“Brianna? Are you all right?” Archer asked, peering at her with such genuine concern that she felt her heart skip a beat. She nodded.
“Yes, sorry. Just processing. So you hunt Matchmakers?”
“No,” he replied. “I can’t stand them, but I don’t go out of my way to hunt them. If they cross my path, I will end them, though.”
Brianna finished her drink in one big gulp.
“Another?” she said, gesturing at Archer’s drink. He nodded, and she went to the bar. She came back to the table with the drinks. “How did you come across Caroline? You said she approached you and offered you a mate, but surely, she didn’t just walk the streets offering her services to random people. How did you get on her radar?”
She watched Archer’s face crinkle slightly as he debated how to answer the question. He sighed, and Brianna thought he had resigned himself to telling her the truth, no matter what his plan had been before he’d gotten here.
“From your assumption that I was a hunter, you obviously know that certain mortals hunt immortals. One such bastard has traced my pack, and a good friend of mine was killed recently.”
“I’m sorry,” Brianna interrupted, meaning it.
Archer flashed her a grateful smile and went on. “Caroline had information about the hunter’s location. She wanted to make a deal. She would tell me who he was, and in exchange, I would let her have free rein of the district. The teacher was just a sweetener in her mind. I couldn’t bring myself to work with a Matchmaker, and, well, here we are.”
“So you know who the hunter is now?”
“No. I told you. I would never work with a Matchmaker,” he said.
“But presumably, you didn’t tell her that.”
“I did.”
“Wait. You didn’t pretend to make a deal with her to get the information before you ended her?”
“No,” Archer answered. “It probably sounds stupid to you, but my word means something, Brianna. If not to anyone else, at least to me. If I had agreed to the deal with Caroline, I couldn’t have killed her, whether she deserved it or not.”
“I don’t think that’s stupid,” Brianna said. “I think it’s pretty noble of you.”
“It didn’t help my pack, though. The hunter is still on the loose. And being with me here tonight is dangerous, Brianna.”
“Not as dangerous as making friends at college, apparently.” She smiled. Archer returned the gesture, and she found herself studying him again. She pulled her gaze away, picking up her glass for something to do with her hands. “So you’re a wolf, right?” she asked.
He nodded. “How did you know?”
“You left paw prints around the side of my building,” she chuckled.
“Careless of me.” Archer shook his head. “But in my defense, no one would see paw prints and jump to the conclusion a wolf shifter had been by. You had to know about this world before that.” Brianna nodded, confirming that she did. “Let me guess. Your older sister ran off with a vampire.”
It would be easy to say yes, but Archer had been straight with her, and she felt like she owed him the truth. At least most of it. She wasn’t ready to tell him she carried the Sanmere protein. Not because she thought he would harm her, and certainly not because she thought he would pass the information on to a Matchmaker, but because she never wanted anyone to know that about her. The supernatural world wasn’t her world, and the harder it would seem for her to fit into it, the better in her eyes.
“Not exactly,” she said.
“Don’t be shy, Brianna. I’ve just literally confessed to murder. You can tell me how you know about shifters, surely.”
“I moved here a couple of weeks ago from New York. My roommate there was abducted by a Matchmaker. She went for a blood test, and the doctor was in league with a local Matchmaker. He told him she had the Sanmere protein in her blood. When my roommate told me about it, I wasn’t sure I believed her at first. No, scratch that, I thought she was nuts. But she proved it to me.”
“You saw her shift?”
Brianna shook
her head. “No. But she took me somewhere where bear shifters went to ‘let their hair down,’ as she put it. Imagine my surprise when she takes me out to the middle of nowhere. We were hiding, and a group of men ran past, and before my eyes, they were gone, and a group of bears had taken their places.”
“I can see how that made a believer of you.” Archer smiled. “But why didn’t she just shift and show you? Actually, hold that thought. We need more drinks.”
He got up and went to the bar. Brianna watched him as he walked away. He had the effortless grace of an animal, that much was true, and she figured the sense of danger she felt around him came from his animal side, too. But he definitely had empathy, a human quality. Why did he have to be a wolf? Why couldn’t he just be a student?
He came back and sat back down with their drinks.
“Did you hold it?” he asked.
“Hold what?” Brianna asked, confused.
“Your thought about why your friend didn’t just shift herself.”
“Oh, yeah,” she said. “She wasn’t a shifter.”
“You said a Matchmaker took her.”
“He did. A couple of bear shifters saved her. That’s how I knew not all immortals are bad. Some of them are actually about helping humans.”
“I’d like to think I’m one of them.”
“And yet you hunted me down to kill me if I knew too much. Right?”
“Wrong,” Archer said quickly. “Do you really think so little of me, Brianna?”
Brianna blushed. “No. But why did you search for me if you weren’t going to kill me?”
“I didn’t know you already knew of the existence of immortals. I wanted to know exactly what you saw when Caroline died. If you had seen too much, I would have called a vampire friend and had him erase your memory of it. I know it’s not exactly ethical, but like I said, it’s dangerous knowing about this stuff, and I didn’t want you poking around in this world and getting bitten.”
Brianna considered his words and nodded. Hadn’t Raina offered to do pretty much the same thing for her once she had saved her life? “It makes sense.”
“So what did you really see? What convinced you Caroline’s death was supernatural?”
“Other than the fact that there was no way she’d bled out? The silver poisoning was a big clue,” Brianna answer with a small laugh.
Archer laughed with her. “Yes, I imagine it was.”
“Did you get to the sheriff and erase his memory?” Brianna asked. She shook her head, answering her own question. “No. You couldn’t have. He told me Caroline died from blood loss right at the scene. There’s no way you got to him before that.”
“The sheriff knows about us. He works hand in hand with us. He keeps out of our business as long as we’re not harming mortals. In fairness, I think he would have complaints if we were just killing each other all the time. He would never be able to pull off a cover-up of that scale. But he knew what Caroline was and what she did to mortals. I called him and told him what I was planning, so he was waiting for the call.”
“And the paramedics, too?” Brianna asked.
Archer nodded. “Yes. The system wouldn’t work everywhere, but this is a small town, and ultimately, we all need to get along to some extent.”
“Yeah, I get that, but I must admit I’m surprised the sheriff goes along with it.”
“You haven’t heard the stories about some of the crooked cops in this country?” Archer snorted. “Covering up murders, drug busts, the works? At least the sheriff here is protecting his people in his own way. We scratch his back when he needs it, too, you know. Sometimes he has crimes to solve and no leads, and he’ll come to me, and one of the pack’s best trackers will sniff out his criminal.”
Brianna considered this.
“Yeah. That makes sense,” she said. She reached out to pick her glass up and realized it was empty. She nodded towards Archer’s drink. “Another?” she asked.
“I’ll get them,” he said.
Brianna shook her head and got to her feet. “No, you won’t. It’s not a date, remember? It’s my round.”
Archer gave a soft laugh, and Brianna hurried away from the table before he could change his mind and argue with her. She got their drinks and came back to the table.
“So, do you have any leads on your hunter?” she wondered.
“Not really,” Archer said, shaking his head. “The pack members are looking into it, trying to track his scent, and they’re questioning Caroline’s associates.”
“Hopefully you’ll get something, then. If she knew about the hunter, surely some of her people will know, too.”
“That’s what I’m hoping,” Archer agreed. He paused and smiled at Brianna. “So, New York to Nebraska. Really?”
Brianna laughed. She was starting to get used to that reaction.
“Yes. I went to New York with the dream of being a singer. It didn’t work out for me, and it reached a point where I decided to give it up and find something else to do with my life. I chose Nebraska because I wanted a change of pace, really.”
“You’ll sure get that here,” Archer snickered. “What are you studying?”
“Medicine,” Brianna said. “I’m thinking of specializing in surgery, but I’ve got plenty of time to decide. Today is my first day.”
“Talk about a dramatic start.” Archer smiled.
“I know. And people say New York is bad.” She took a sip of her wine and watched Archer for a second, drawn in by his brooding gaze. “What do you do? For a living, I mean.”
“I’m the pack alpha, so I take care of all of the pack stuff. We pool our resources. We own the building we live in and the business attached to it. I oversee all of it,” he replied.
“Ah.” Brianna grinned. “So you delegate for a living.”
Archer raised an eyebrow, but then he laughed. “Yeah, I guess you could say that.”
He spent some time telling Brianna more about his responsibilities and how the pack operated. She was transfixed by his stories, but more than his words, she was transfixed by his eyes; how they sparkled when he tilted his head to the right and they caught the light. She couldn’t stop looking at the way the muscles in his arms rippled slightly when he moved them while making a gesture as he talked.
She imagined herself running her hands over his bare chest, her hands moving lower. She imagined herself pushing his jeans down, stripping him and riding him all night long.
“Brianna?” Archer called her. “Are you okay?”
“Huh? What? Oh. Yes, sorry. I was in a world of my own for a moment there,” Brianna said.
Archer laughed softly. “I was just asking if you wanted another drink.”
Brianna did. She was enjoying Archer’s company, and she didn’t want the night to end, but she also knew that nothing could ever happen between them, and the longer she hung around him like this, the harder it would be to walk away. She shook her head.
“No, thank you. I really should get going. I’ve got class in the morning,” she said. Archer looked at his watch. Brianna raised an eyebrow. “What? Just because I’m a student, I can’t have an early night?”
“No, it’s not that. It’s the idea of you thinking you’re having an early night when it’s already almost midnight.”
Brianna checked her watch, shocked to see that Archer was right. She had done it again—lost track of time completely. Archer laughed at the expression on her face. He finished the last of his drink.
“Come on, I’ll help you get a cab,” he said.
Brianna finished her own drink and followed him out of the bar. “It’s a nightmare getting cabs here at this time. I’ll just walk home. It’s not a bad night.”
“Okay. Let’s go,” Archer said. Brianna frowned. “I’ll walk you home,” he said. “Like I said in there, it’s dangerous being seen with me. But it’s even more dangerous wandering the streets alone at this time.”
“You don’t have to do that,” Brianna insisted, although she
was pleased that he had offered.
“I know. But I want to,” he said.
A shiver went through her at that. He wanted to spend more time with her.
No, she told herself, he’s just being a gentleman, not wanting anything to happen to me. That was more likely to be the truth, but she couldn’t help wondering. She had caught Archer watching her subtly a couple of times when he thought she wasn’t looking.
They set off walking, and Brianna realized that even though the air had grown chilly, she barely registered the cold. She barely registered anything except Archer beside her. She kept feeling little shivers running up and down her back, and she knew they were nothing at all to do with the breeze.
“Are you cold?” Archer asked as they walked.
Again, she felt like he was reading her innermost thoughts. It was better to think he could do that than to think he could read her body and see the shivers going through her. She shook her head and smiled.
“No, I’m okay,” she said. “It’s not a bad night.”
“And the wine helps,” Archer added.
“Yeah, it definitely does,” Brianna laughed.
They kept walking, passing by closed restaurants and shops. Soon, they were walking past houses, some still with lights on, some all in darkness, and Brianna thought about what secrets the drawn curtains were hiding. Now that she knew there was a whole other world out there, she wondered if some of the seemingly normal families were in fact immortals. She didn’t think she’d ever know for sure, and she decided against asking Archer. He had said it himself. Knowledge like that was dangerous; a danger she didn’t want or need.
Brianna’s foot slipped off the edge of the sidewalk, and she made a little shrieking noise, throwing her arms out for balance. There was nothing she could grip, no purchase, and she felt her stomach roll as she lurched to the side, sure she was about to face plant onto the road.
A strong arm wrapped around her waist, pulling her back. She stumbled a little and found herself pressed against Archer’s side, his arm still holding her tightly against him. She could feel the heat coming off his body and smell the musky scent of him beneath his sweet cologne. Her heart raced as she peered up at his face. He held her gaze for a long moment. Brianna felt her insides swirling. If they stood like this much longer, she wouldn’t be able to resist leaning her face up to his, and that would be a mistake, despite the tingling of her body where she was pressed against him.
