Gerald's Lot

by Odessa Lynne

  “It will heal.”

  The floor was cold under Gerald’s feet when he stood. “The fuck it will. It’s broken clean through. Someone needs to set it.”

  “I’ll see to it later. When did the human come to you?”

  Lamar’s warning slipped to the forefront of his thoughts. “I don’t know what you’re—”

  Tanis roared at him, “Submit!”

  Gerald cringed at the pang against his eardrums and surged back against the bed. “What the fuck! I just want to help you. Can’t the questions wait for one damn minute?”

  “When did he come?”

  Tanis wasn’t going to let it go. The militant harshness of his expression said so.

  Fuck it. “Last night, I don’t remember exactly!”

  Tanis pushed Gerald back onto the bed.

  Gerald landed with a soft bounce. His heart was trying to beat its way out of his chest and he couldn’t decide how he should react to being so blatantly pushed around.

  Tanis’s clawed hands flexed again and it was an abrupt reminder of the precarious nature of a wolf’s control around the scent of humans. Lamar was younger than Gerald, not by a lot, but he was still human and male, and his scent would still be a problem.

  Goddammit. Gerald wasn’t often driven to curse against God—his mama would kick his ass if she ever heard him—but he’d severely fucked up when he’d hugged Lamar.

  He hoped Lamar had better sense than him and had done something about it before anyone discovered his connection to Gerald. Gerald’s allegiances weren’t likely to be a secret to anyone.

  He made himself quiet down, take responsibility for what he’d done. Next week, after heat was over, then he’d worry if Tanis was still trying to push him around. Right now, circumstances precluded him from placing blame.

  “It was late. Leif and Raleigh weren’t here. He just showed up. I didn’t know he was—”

  “It was a trap. He’s going to try to take you—”

  “He doesn’t want to have sex with me! Is this what you call being a reasonable people, thinking everybody wants a piece of your mate’s ass? Because this isn’t my definition of reasonable.”

  Tanis’s teeth flashed. “He’s going to try to take you into his confidence, convince you his treason is justified. Use you for his own gain.”

  “Ah.” Gerald’s heartbeat slowed. He felt a bit like a fool, but he’d had reason, so he just cleared his throat and tried to think through Tanis’s accusations.

  “Maybe,” he said. “But he won’t do it without me knowing it.”

  Tanis’s body went rigid and he glanced over his shoulder. “My kin has arrived. Stay here.”

  Gerald watched Tanis leave, a million and two thoughts cascading through his brain.

  He’d known Lamar most of his life. Lamar and Gerald’s brother Jacob had been best friends until Lamar had helped Gerald join the fight against the renegades who were trying to drive the wolves off Earth.

  He’d known Tanis for fourteen days and nothing Lamar had said last night about Tanis could be disproven by anything Gerald had already seen.

  So why did he suddenly feel like Lamar might be more foe than friend?

  He pushed to his feet with a rough sigh, ready to go peek around the corner of the open door, but before he could get there, a tortured scream reverberated from the outer room.

  The sound curdled his blood and his heart lurched so hard he felt it into the soles of his feet. He threw himself toward the doorway just as Raleigh appeared and blocked his path.

  “Alpha said stay out of the way.”

  “What the fuck is going on?” He tried to shove his head under Raleigh’s arm to get a look into the outer room. He glimpsed Tanis—but no, that wasn’t Tanis. Tanis was on the floor, and—

  Oh fuck no. Gerald turned, hunkering over with his hands on his knees as his stomach clenched into a hard, roiling knot.

  Raleigh’s hand landed on his naked back. “What’s wrong?”

  “His arm.” Gerald took a few deep breaths, and the cold sweat eased. Despite years of trying to deaden his sympathetic urges, he still had trouble with the sight of large amounts of blood or obviously painful injuries. “My God, did you see what they were doing?”

  “It has to be fixed, or it won’t heal right. It’s easier this way than rebreaking the bones later.”

  “Oh my God.” Gerald pressed the back of his hand to his mouth. “Just shut up.”

  Raleigh huffed. “I’m sure Alpha will forgive your weakness, but I wouldn’t be so weak if he were mine.”

  Gerald side-eyed Raleigh and thought about kicking him in the damn shin. “You’re jealous.”

  Raleigh huffed again and turned his head. “Stop talking, human. Alpha might need my attention.”

  “Oh my God. You are. You’re just a jealous little prick who wants the alpha all to himself.”

  Raleigh turned his back on Gerald.

  “Come on, admit it,” Gerald said. He glanced around for the clothes he’d been wearing last night but the sparse furnishings made it easy to see they weren’t in the room.

  “Alpha will want to fuck when he’s healing properly. You should be preparing yourself instead of trying to rile me into acting against Alpha’s wishes.”

  Gerald laughed. “You little prick. I’ll have to watch my back around you, won’t I?”

  Raleigh’s shoulders stiffened but he didn’t look back at Gerald. Gerald didn’t care. He’d done what he wanted, which was let Raleigh know he was on to him.

  But then Raleigh surprised him by turning after all, a frown on his face. “Alpha made me part of his pack, and you belong to Alpha. Why would you think you need to watch your back around me?”

  “Did you just figure out what that meant?”

  Raleigh sniffed, face tightening. “You’re insulting me.”

  “Yes I am.”

  “I would never intentionally try to hurt anyone who belongs to the pack. I would protect you.”

  Gerald tried to peek around Raleigh again, but Raleigh did a very good job of stepping right into his path. “Let me see what’s going on. I won’t try to go around you.”

  “You don’t believe me.”

  “If you don’t move, I’m going to try to stick my head under your arm again.”

  “I’ll protect you,” Raleigh said, “because that’s what Alpha wants.”

  “Now you’re insulting me.”

  Raleigh’s eyes narrowed. “How? The truth can hardly be an insult.”

  “You’ll protect me, but only because Tanis wants you to?”

  Raleigh’s flash of teeth pretty much answered that question.

  A growl came from the other side of the doorway, and a short but firm, “Submit, Paetaniskeille. I can’t help you if you refuse to submit.”

  Tanis’s voice, but clearly not Tanis.

  Another growl followed, then, “I am ready.”

  Of course that was when Raleigh moved out of the way, just as a pained yell echoed through the air.

  Gerald took one look at Tanis’s sliced open arm being manipulated by someone who looked just like him and the whole damn world shrank so quickly he lost track of where his feet met the floor.

  When he opened his eyes he was flat on his back with Raleigh and a bloody, pale-faced Tanis standing over him.

  He groaned and pressed the heels of his hands into his forehead. “Shit.”

  “I caught you,” Raleigh said, sounding far too smug. “Alpha wouldn’t have wanted you to damage your weak human skull on the hard floor.”

  “Raeshikid. Leave us.”

  “Yes, Alpha.” Finally sounding cowed, Raleigh moved away. Gerald watched him approach the Tanis lookalike, but before he got too close, Leif grabbed Raleigh by the back of the neck and pulled him to his side.

  Tanis crouched over Gerald, looming into view.

  “Don’t get that arm anywhere near me,” Gerald choked out. “Not while it’s cut open.”

  Tanis presented his arm. “Th
e break has been set. The wound will heal.”

  Gerald grimaced but made himself look. He’d warned Tanis…

  But the skin and muscle had been pulled back together and was being held in place with a foot long piece of wide, clear tape. Blood smeared the wound and there were several distinct bloody prints on the tape, but Tanis’s arm was no longer a gaping mass of tissue and—other stuff Gerald could not think about without risking a repeat performance.

  He rose on one arm, then sat up. Easier to hide his dick from everyone’s view that way. “Glad you made it back, big guy.” He glanced past Tanis to see Tanis’s lookalike staring at him while Leif and Raleigh talked in low tones.

  Unsettled by the pointed stare, Gerald quickly returned his gaze to Tanis. “Where’s Eris?”

  “Irrelevant to the conversation we’re having.”

  “You’re always going to be a prick, aren’t you?”

  Tanis’s only reply was a soft exhale through his nose. He reached for Gerald’s chin with his uninjured arm, his eyes half-closing as he breathed deeply. “Your scent both soothes and inflames me. It pains me to know I’ll enjoy it for so short a time. Now—tell me why the one called Lamar visited you last night, before I decide I was right to want to hunt him down and kill him.”

  “You can’t kill him just for coming in the damn room. And I touched him, not the other way around. It was my mistake.”

  “Answer. My patience is running out.”

  “How well do you know him? He seemed to know a few things about you.”

  “I know of him. That is enough.”

  “Tell me what yo—”

  Tanis pressed his fingers into Gerald’s cheeks, making it impossible for Gerald to move his mouth in a way that let actual words come out. “Stop delaying your answer.”

  Tanis released him, and Gerald massaged his jaw. Tanis hadn’t hurt him—nothing more than his pride anyway, but he eyed Tanis with all the heat of his growing anger. “If you do that to me again, I’m going to pop you in the balls, and if that means you’re going to tear out my throat, I guess you’ll just have to live with it. I’ll be dead.”

  “You’ll submit as you should.” Tanis’s eyes flashed fire, his voice tightening with obvious irritation. “Now stop trying my patience.”

  “Pretty sure you don’t have any. Isn’t that what you keep—”

  “Enough! I’m the one to ask questions. Your place is to observe and learn.”

  “My place is with the rest of my family in the fucking U.S. of A., not here!”

  He’d gone too far, he was sure of it, and he regretted his temper immediately. Sunny wouldn’t have done it, and Gerald didn’t like the reminder that he hadn’t felt like Sunny for too damn long.

  He wanted his life back. He’d been ready to reclaim it and he’d made one damn miscalculation with the wolves and it was costing him everything. He wanted his freedom—he wanted a goddamn choice.

  But Tanis didn’t respond the way Gerald expected. Tanis’s eyes glittered, the outer edges turning dark and shimmery. Gerald swallowed as that weird gaze caught his.

  “We all have a place in the prophecy. Some are positioned to have a greater impact than others. Some arrive unknown and unexpected at the proper place and time and choose their fate without even realizing what they’ve done.”

  “Don’t start talking in riddles,” Gerald snapped out.

  But his chest felt tight and his breath came with less ease. Something about Tanis’s words had the ring of finality to it and it shook Gerald to his core.

  Chapter 20

  Tanis blinked and the shimmer in his eyes faded. “You’ve chosen your fate. Your place is here. But there is a solution for the dilemma you’ve caused me. Paetaniskeilel brought it to my attention.”

  Gerald needed to relax. He was on edge, nervous because he was naked, probably sweating too much, and it was making him act in ways counter to what was good for him—what was safe.

  He distracted himself by trying to decipher the name Tanis had spoken, but even though something about it sounded familiar, the name meant nothing to him.

  He made a guess and gestured with his head toward Tanis’s lookalike. “Your kin?”

  Tanis looked over his shoulder. The wolf was still staring at Gerald in an unnervingly direct way.

  Gerald did not stare back.

  “We were born of the same one,” Tanis said as he turned to face Gerald again. “We are identical in every way that nature allows. Only our divergent fates distinguish us.”

  “So you’re twins.”

  Tanis frowned. “No.”

  “Seriously, same thing,” Gerald said. “But four instead of two.”

  “I do not think you understand.”

  “I do, I do. Now tell me about this dilemma you mentioned.”

  Tanis tilted his head, but his stance didn’t change. He was crouched so close to Gerald that his fingertips were almost brushing Gerald’s knee. Those fingers curled inward in a reflexive motion before he visibly relaxed them.

  Not good. If Tanis was agitated, that meant trouble of some kind. Trouble wasn’t something Gerald wanted.

  When Tanis started speaking again, the timbre of his voice had deepened. “I can’t allow trespasses against what’s mine. Your human friend—” The way Tanis twisted the word made it clear he didn’t consider Lamar a friend at all. “—has trespassed and he knows the consequences.”

  “I told you I hugged him, not the other way around. And what makes you so sure we’re friends?”

  Suspicion brightened Tanis’s fiery eyes. “If you aren’t, then I will certainly kill him.”

  “Shit. Fine, we’re friends.”

  “He’s hoping his alpha will intervene, that she’ll want to take you away from me, using the excuse he’ll give her to justify her actions.”

  “Ah, there you go,” Gerald muttered. The fucking wolves were jealous as hell and he’d known it all along. The only difference was how they considered pack an extension of themselves. Fuck all you want inside the pack, go outside and there’d be hell to pay.

  Not so different from humans after all.

  “I’ll claim my right to fight for what’s mine,” Tanis continued. “If his alpha doesn’t intervene, he’ll either submit or die. He won’t want to submit, because he’ll lose his status with his alpha. But Zeintaegoer will not intervene. He’s just a human, and she knows she won’t win. She would lose her entire pack.” Tanis’s expressed turned grave. “Therefore, he will die.”

  “It was just a damn hug! You don’t have to kill him for that.”

  Tanis’s eyes tracked across Gerald’s face. He rested his finger on Gerald’s chin and his claw came out, a slow slide that spoke of control and deadly intent. “But I do.”

  Shit had just got serious again. Too serious for Gerald to take sitting on the floor.

  He surged to his feet, then watched Tanis rise gracefully from his crouch. Tanis favored his injured arm, but so casually that Gerald couldn’t help his awe.

  “Why aren’t you in excruciating pain?”

  Tanis raised his arm. His claws were extended halfway and when he flexed his fingers, they hardly moved, but shit, they moved and that was something unbelievable after what Gerald had seen. “My arm is stiff and slow, but it will heal. I feel no pain.”

  Of course Gerald knew the wolves healed terrible injuries, but to see with his own eyes just how insignificant one of those terrible injuries had proved to be…

  No wonder the renegades seemed determined to get their hands on ever heavier and more dangerous artillery and weapons. They were fighting a losing battle. Gerald knew it and so did the organization he worked for, the wolves knew it—how could they not?—and that left only the renegades themselves. They knew it too, and they were feeling just desperate enough to have started accepting into their ranks anyone they could find who was willing to fight. Sometimes those people were terrible people in their own right, but they fought, and that was all that mattered.

&n
bsp; Matthew had reported on that, and because of Gerald’s position, he’d learned as much about the efforts of the renegades to grow their base over the last three years as the wolves had.

  But something else was going on here. He could feel it in his gut. The speed in which Tanis was healing wasn’t natural. No fucking way.

  Just what kind of miracle tech did the wolves have? Was a piece of it here where Gerald could get his eyes on it?

  He’d wondered about things, things he’d glimpsed only on the peripheral, such as Matthew’s crushed hand, cracked apart by a wolf right in front of Gerald’s face with no thought to the pain it would cause Matthew even in his unconscious state—and then Alan had taken Matthew away for surgery or some other kind of medical treatment and Gerald had assumed things, things he’d had to assume for everything else to make sense.

  But what if those assumptions weren’t right? What if there was more to this story? How badly would James want to get him out if he had something for James no one else had been able to get?

  He let his gaze wander, only to find too many wolves staring back. He quickly refocused on Tanis.

  Tanis was watching him with tight eyes and the sheen of sweat on his face. “Have you decided you have no interest in saving Lamar’s life?”

  Every muscle in Gerald’s body tensed at the reminder that Lamar’s fate was in his hands. “Of course not. I don’t want him dead.”

  “I recognize the look in your eyes. Cunning suits you, but this is not the time or place for it. You make me wonder if I’ve failed you by overestimating your intelligence.”

  Gerald glowered. “You fucking prick.”

  One—and only one—of Tanis’s eyebrows quirked. “Maybe you’ll decide he isn’t worth saving after all, when you hear what you’ll have to do to save him.”

  If Gerald hadn’t spent so much time studying Tanis and learning what he could of his expressions over the last fourteen days, he might not have recognized the hint of humor in his words. But he did, so he smiled, because that was his natural tendency.

  There was a reason everyone who really knew him had shortened his middle name to Sunny.

  And things couldn’t be that dire if Tanis found humor in them, right?