Shallow Grave: Grant Wolves Book 2

by Lori Drake

  Sighing, he turned and walked along the water’s edge. The band started up again, and it didn’t require a wolf’s sharp ears to pick it up from the lakeshore. He listened while he walked, lost in thought until an unfamiliar voice penetrated the fog.

  “Hey, man, party’s back there.”

  Chris turned. His eyes roamed the darkness until he finally spotted the man crouched in the shadow of a boulder. “Yeah, I know. Just out for a walk. Adam, right?”

  “Oh! Sorry, didn’t recognize you at first.”

  Chris suspected it might have been because Adam’s long bangs fell across his eyes, but the lanky wolf unclipped a pair of horn-rimmed glasses from the collar of his T-shirt and put them on.

  “Good thing you weren’t wearing those, or I might not have recognized you either.”

  Adam chuckled. “Clark Kent’s got nothing on me.” He peered up at Chris for a moment before adding, “You’re not gonna enjoy the rest of the show?”

  Chris glanced toward the house. “Maybe I’ll catch the encore, I dunno. Just wanted some air.”

  “Yeah, yeah. I get it. Hard to hear yourself think in all that racket. What do you think of Seattle so far?”

  “It’s… cold.”

  Adam grinned. “You think this is cold?”

  “Sure, uh, relatively speaking. I grew up in Southern California. It’s kind of lucky I actually own a coat.” Chris blew into his hands and rubbed them together. “What about you? Where are you from?”

  “Alaska.”

  “No shit, really?”

  “Yeah.”

  “What’s it like?”

  “Cold.” Adam grinned again. “It’s beautiful, really. People tend to think it’s nothing but glaciers and permafrost, but there’s so much more. Forests like you’ve never seen with trees towering over two hundred feet tall, clear blue rivers so thick with salmon that you can practically catch them with your bare hands…”

  Chris listened, smiling. “Sounds like you loved it there. What made you leave?”

  The joy of remembrance faded from Adam’s face like an autumn leaf shifting from golden to brown. “It’s a long story. You don’t want to hear all that.”

  Chris crouched, putting himself on the other man’s level. “I’d like to, if you’ll share.”

  Adam hesitated, but nodded. “Well, long story short… my dad’s an asshole. A real man’s man, you know? Anyway, he always loved to brag about how he’d sired the first set of twins in seven generations, but all we ever seemed to do was disappoint him.”

  “You and Lucy are twins?” Chris couldn’t keep the wonder from his voice. Lycanthrope multiple births were beyond rare.

  “Yup. That’s why Lucy dyes her hair, so no one gets us mixed up.” Adam grinned again, teeth flashing in the moonlight. “Sorry, a little twin humor.”

  Chris chuckled, liking the kid the more he interacted with him. Though, to be fair, Adam could have been anywhere from twenty-one to forty-five. It was hard to tell with wolves, but he seemed younger. It might’ve been Adam’s low dominance drive.

  “Parental expectations can be hard, especially when the parent is a strong alpha. Joey knows a thing or two about that.”

  Adam nodded. “Well, I think it’s safe to say I don’t have an alpha bone in my body. I know, because I’m pretty sure he broke all of them at least once, looking for it.”

  Wincing, Chris put a hand on Adam’s shoulder. He flinched, but didn’t pull away, and relaxed after a moment. “That’s shitty. I’m sorry.”

  Adam shrugged. “The only way to make it stop was to leave, so that’s what we did. Lucy wouldn’t let me go without her, and I… I didn’t have the strength to tell her no. I needed her as much as she needed me. Always have, always will.”

  Chris knew a little something about that. “At least you have each other. That’s something.” He squeezed Adam’s shoulder before letting his hand fall away. “How long have you and Lucy been in Seattle?”

  “Not long, hmm. Maybe eight years. We weren’t planning to stay, originally. We wanted to go farther, put more distance between us and him, you know? But Eric made us an offer we couldn’t refuse.”

  There was a certain tragedy to the twins fleeing from one bully and ending up with another. Chris wished there was something he could do, but if they were still here, the situation might not be as bad as he feared.

  “What kind of offer?”

  Adam hesitated, eyes darting toward the house. Eric and Jessica’s music continued to roll out the back door and down the beach like a sonic alibi.

  “Sanctuary,” he said after a moment. “Protection.”

  Chris wasn’t sure what made that so irresistible, but he was an alpha and had no problem standing up for himself. Regardless, he sensed there was more to the story based on the shift in Adam’s demeanor.

  “Oh?” he said, hoping that Adam might go on, but the other man just nodded. “Are you happy here?”

  “Yeah, of course.” The words tumbled out a little too quickly. Adam wet his lips. “So you own the house, eh?”

  “Apparently.” Chris’s eyes were drawn back to the house in question, but Adam’s next question snapped them back to him.

  “Are you going to kick us out?”

  “What? No, no, of course not. I mean, it’s more your home than mine now, and I already have a place to stay.”

  “With Joey’s pack.”

  “With my pack.” The distinction was important to Chris, in that moment. “But yes, Joey’s too.”

  Adam smiled, relaxing visibly. “Cool.”

  “Does the whole pack live in the house?” Chris asked, uncertain how such things went for packs like theirs.

  “Yeah, mostly. Itsuo… he comes and goes. Jenny has a dorm room. She stays there during the week but comes out here on the weekend usually. She doesn’t have a car, so she has to hitch a ride.”

  Chris connected a few dots. “She came all the way out here on a school night, just to meet me?”

  “Yeah. We were all looking forward to meeting you, I mean… your dad’s a legend around here. I wish I could’ve met him.”

  “Me too,” Chris said.

  “Aw, shit. I’m sorry.” Adam lowered his eyes and hunched his shoulders. If he got any lower, he’d be on his belly.

  “It’s fine.” Chris put a hand on Adam’s shoulder once more. He hadn’t meant it as a rebuke. “Really. I think you’ve all got some mental picture of me as this tragic orphan that grew up alone, but I’ve got a family. I’ve got a father, a mother, the whole package. Henry Martin is just… a guy that I share some DNA with, you know? I’m curious about him, and sometimes I wonder what my life would have been if he and my birth mom had survived. But I’m happy with my life. I wouldn’t change it.”

  Adam risked a glance in Chris’s direction as he spoke, but didn’t meet his eyes. He remained wary, and Chris withdrew his hand, not wanting to make the guy more uncomfortable.

  A few seconds passed, then Adam said, “We should head back.” He pushed to his feet.

  Chris followed suit, realizing that the music at the house had stopped. He could hear Jessica’s amplified voice as she worked the crowd, so the set wasn’t over quite yet. As he walked back to the house with Adam, he tucked his hands in his pockets, resigning himself to standing around bobbing his head to the music a bit. It wasn’t easy; his feet itched to move to anything with a good beat, and their music certainly had plenty of those.

  The music started up again when they were a few feet from the back steps. He could almost swear he felt the air stir around him as the music washed over him, drawing him inside like a moth to a flame. He stood with Adam near the back door while the band played, scanning the crowd and bobbing his head to the rhythm of the bass drum. Ben’s auburn head was easy to pick out in the crowd, but finding Joey’s took him a little longer on account of her short stature.

  With his own pack members accounted for, he started looking for Adam’s. It was pure instinct; he didn’t even realize he
was doing a head count until it registered that several were missing. Brandon was with Ben. Colt and Kate were wallflowering on the other side of the room. Adam was with him, of course, but Jenny, Lucy, and Itsuo were nowhere to be seen. Granted, Itsuo was barely any taller than Joey, but he should’ve stuck out in this crowd.

  It shouldn’t have mattered. It was a big house, and they might have wandered outside like Chris and Adam had. But he couldn’t shake the sense of wrongness that clung to him like cheap perfume, and when the song ended and the applause died down, another sound caught his attention even through the ringing in his ears: a woman’s scream.

  He wasn’t the only one that heard it.

  “Lucy!” Adam shouted, and darted forward, pushing his way through the alarmed crowd to get to the front of the house.

  Chris followed in his wake. They found the blue-haired wolf standing in a doorway, staring into the room beyond with a hand over her mouth.

  “Lucy! What is it? Are you okay?” Adam grabbed his twin’s arm, and she turned toward him, her head following her body just a few seconds behind as she tore her eyes from whatever sight had so horrified her.

  While Adam drew Lucy into his arms and out of the way, Chris approached the doorway and looked inside. There was blood everywhere. It had sprayed the ceiling, the walls, the floor, and the bedspread, where a woman lay on her side with her entrails hanging out. On the wall above the bed was a message scrawled in blood. One word. Three letters.

  Run.

  Joey pushed past Chris into the room and rushed for the bed. “Jenny! Chris, get Ben!”

  Chris tore his eyes from the grisly scene and turned to do that, but Ben was already there. He stepped aside to let his brother past, and Ben rushed in to join Joey. Chris moved back to block the doorway, not wanting any of the rubbernecking guests to get an eyeful. He could just barely hear Ben and Joey conversing in hushed tones behind him.

  “She’s alive, but barely. I’m going to need my bag. It’s in the trunk.”

  “I’ll get it.”

  “She said she wanted to lie down,” Lucy said, sobbing against her brother’s shoulder. He held her and rubbed her back, questions in his eyes that Chris didn’t have answers for.

  What in the actual fuck?

  Joey slipped past him, pulling the door closed behind her. She grabbed Chris’s arm and caught his eyes. “I’ll be right back. No one enters, understood? No one.”

  He nodded and watched as she strode off with such purpose, such presence, that the crowd naturally parted around her.

  Eric shoved his way through the crowd to get to them a few seconds later. “What’s going on?” he demanded, his eyes boring into Chris’s as if whatever it was were all his fault.

  Chris chose his words quickly, but carefully. “Jenny had a mishap. Ben and Joey are taking care of her.”

  Eric frowned. “Get out of my way.”

  He tried to move past, but Chris stepped in his path and held his eyes, alpha to alpha. “You can’t do anything for her. You’ll just be in the way.” Joey may or may not have meant to include Eric in her instructions, but getting in Eric’s way gave Chris enough satisfaction to make it worthwhile regardless.

  Eric’s eyes glinted dangerously. He grabbed the front of Chris’s jacket and slammed him against the door. The door rattled in its frame. “You don’t get to tell me what to do. She’s mine,” he said. A low growl rumbled from his throat.

  Chris’s eyes narrowed and locked with Eric’s. He wasn’t intimidated in the least by the other wolf’s domineering behavior. Truth be told, it made him want to step aside even less. “Get your hands off me.”

  Eric’s grip on his shirt only tightened. “Or what?” he sneered, leaning in closer.

  Chris smirked, laughing on the inside. The guy was comically easy to provoke. It may have been truly unwise to needle him, but Chris just couldn’t help himself. “Or your girlfriend’s gonna be pissed, for starters. I think you’ve been humiliated enough for one night, don’t you?”

  Eric’s low growl intensified. A muscle in his cheek twitched and a vein in his forehead stood out. A few long, tense seconds passed before his lips slowly curved in a smile and his balled fists relaxed. “You’ve got balls. I like that.”

  Chris stared at him in disbelief. While he’d remained unfazed by Eric’s aggression, this abrupt shift in his demeanor caused the hairs on the back of Chris’s neck to stand up. It was unsettling as hell.

  Eric smoothed wrinkles from Chris’s jacket and gave his chest a pat, then stepped back and turned away. “Adam, get your sister upstairs,” he said, then motioned the rest of his pack closer and had a few quiet words with them.

  Shouldering Ben’s medical bag, Joey returned just as the Granite Falls pack was dispersing through the crowd. She paused only a moment to frown at Eric. “Get these people out of here before someone calls the cops.”

  “Wait,” Chris said. “Whoever did this might still be here.”

  Joey frowned, but nodded. “Deal with it.” She slipped past Chris and into the room, closing the door behind her.

  Though he had no desire to get up close and personal with Eric again, Chris stepped forward to speak quietly with him. “There’s a lot of blood. Whoever did this should stink of it.”

  Eric nodded. “My people are at the doors. If they’re still here, we’ll get them.” Then he faced the milling crowd of curious partygoers. “All right, scabs! Party’s over, get out!”

  Joey picked her way across the bloodstained carpet carefully but quickly. There was so much blood. It was hard to believe that it all came from one small woman. The room looked like something out of a crime drama. No, more like a horror movie. She’d never been a fan of slasher flicks, but she imagined they were something like this.

  Ben had rolled Jenny on her back while Joey was gone. He knelt on the bed beside her, pressing a formerly white pillowcase to her abdomen.

  “We need a doctor,” he said, calm but not quite collected. “Hell, we need a fucking surgeon.”

  “You’re all we’ve got at the moment. You said it yourself: she probably wouldn’t survive long enough for us to call for help,” Joey reminded him, setting his bag down on the edge of the bed.

  “If I can get her sewn up, she might be able to regenerate her way out of this, but she’s lost a lot of blood and her pulse is thready. She may need a transfusion.”

  Joey unzipped the bag and started pulling out supplies. “What do you need?”

  “Scotch. Make it a double.”

  “Be serious.”

  “Gauze pads, lots of them. Suture needles and thread.”

  “Disinfectant?”

  “Don’t bother. If she survives long enough to get an infection, she’ll heal that too.”

  “Even during the new moon?”

  The question gave Ben pause. Wolf regeneration during the new moon was at its weakest, but it still happened. He grimaced, then shook his head. “We’ll have to take our chances. We don’t have the right supplies or the time.”

  Nodding, Joey rummaged in the bag for what he’d requested, then took over compress duty while she watched him struggle to thread the needle. His hands were shaking, making the task difficult.

  “You can do this,” she said. The confidence in her voice surprised her, but it was more important for him to hear it than for her to feel it.

  Ben stopped and closed his eyes. His nostrils flared as he took a deep breath. “You sure about that scotch?” he asked.

  Joey snorted. “When you’re finished, I’ll find you some.”

  Ben opened his eyes and eyed her briefly, then went back to his task. “I’m holding you to that.” This time, he managed to thread the needle on the first try.

  As Ben set to work, Joey counted her blessings that Jenny remained unconscious. She kept her fingers pressed to the pulse point on the girl’s slender wrist, keeping track of the slow but steady beats while Ben worked. As long as Jenny’s heart kept beating, she was in good shape—or, if not good,
at least not dreadfully bad.

  “I need both of your hands for a second,” Ben said.

  Joey set Jenny’s arm down and complied, but when she went back to check for the young wolf’s pulse, she had difficulty finding it. “I can’t find her pulse. Shit, Ben, she’s not breathing!”

  Ben cursed and abandoned his work, scrambling to perform compressions while Joey worked on keeping Jenny’s insides from spilling out again. Blood welled between her fingers and she grabbed a fresh handful of gauze to press to the partially stitched wound.

  “Come on, girl… don’t quit on us,” Joey whispered.

  She couldn’t be sure how long Ben spent performing CPR. He switched back and forth between doing chest compressions and puffing air into Jenny’s lungs several times before she finally took a breath on her own.

  “It worked!” Ben exclaimed.

  “Don’t look so surprised, please. And get back down here.”

  Ben shifted on his knees to resume his stitching. “Sorry. In training, they said that it didn’t work as often as it does on TV.”

  Joey nodded and curled her fingers around Jenny’s slender wrist once more. “It could be my imagination, but I think her pulse is stronger now.”

  “I work out.” Ben glanced up and grinned.

  Joey couldn’t help but laugh. It was an anxious laugh, but a laugh nonetheless. “Shut up and sew.”

  When they were finished, they sat back on their haunches and studied Ben’s handiwork. It was, frankly, terrible. But the wound was closed.

  “Nice job, bro.”

  “Don’t thank me yet. She’s still bleeding internally. The rest is up to her. Speaking of which, about that transfusion…”

  Joey’s eyes darted to the bag. “Do you have a blood-type kit or something?”

  “No, unfortunately.”

  “Maybe one of her packmates knows her blood type.”

  Ben smirked and wiped his bloody hands on a strip of bedsheet. It didn’t help much. “That’s what I love about you, Joey. Your unflinching optimism.”

  “A negative.”

  “What?”

  “Your blood type, jackass. A negative.” Joey climbed off the edge of the bed and looked down at her own bloody hands, then around the room in the vain hope that there was an attached bathroom. There was not.