by Chant, Zoe
“Then I don’t have a clue.”
“I don’t want to scare the life out of the kid,” Aria said, “but we might have to go back to Luke with some more questions. If we can even find him.”
“You’re right. He said Eli put down roots here. If we could find out why, they might tell us something.”
He didn’t know if Luke would be able to answer many of their questions—or any of their questions—but it was worth a second try. Especially now that he could tell Luke that Eli had given up Weston like that. That was the kind of betrayal that could snap a pack-bond in two, especially if the connection was already fraught.
And no matter what kind of wolf superpowers Eli had, that snapped bond would affect him too. Letting his brother die for him might even have made Eli’s own wolfish nature backfire against him. There was no doubt in Colby’s mind that Eli would spend the whole night—and maybe even all of tomorrow—licking his wounds.
I agree, his wolf confirmed. Our mate is safe for right now.
He stretched and yawned, wincing as every sore muscle in his back twinged.
“Okay. Tomorrow we tackle the kid again. But for tonight, we’re good. You can get a good night’s sleep. Anything else can wait until the morning.”
She kissed him softly, more tenderly than he’d ever been kissed in his life.
“We can get a good night’s sleep,” she said.
14
Yesterday morning, Aria’s life had been completely different.
She had woken up feeling one of Mattie’s stray Legos digging into her calf. No more building Lego castles on the bed had been her first thought of the day. She had staggered up, bleary-eyed, and almost sleepwalked to the bathroom to start getting ready. Her first smile of the day had been thinking about taking her family to the nature preserve.
She hadn’t woken up with any real problems then, obviously. She hadn’t even had a big deadline weighing on her.
Yesterday, she’d been perfectly happy with her life.
Today, she was something more than that.
Today, she found her mouth curved into a smile before she was even fully awake.
She was being hunted by a homicidal werewolf, sure. But what did that matter? She had a heroic werewolf lying right there at her side, ready to protect her.
She had everything she’d had yesterday—and Colby Acton.
My mate.
The clear light of day hadn’t made the word or the feelings fade away.
She rolled over on her side so she could face him. In sleep, Colby’s face was more fully relaxed than she had seen it before, and she wondered how much of his energy when he was awake had been devoted to protecting her. She wanted to see more of him like this.
She wanted to see him like this awake, too, but she didn’t mind having the chance to study him while he was asleep.
His soft black hair was mussed by the pillow. The furrow between his brows, which she realized now had been nothing but him concentrating on her completely, had smoothed out.
He had tiny laugh-lines etched into his face instead, and that made sense. He was the kind of person made to spend a lot of time happy.
He was the kind of person who made a lot of other people happy too.
And she was his mate. Maybe it was because she’d spent so much time studying nature, but that felt completely right to her. It made more sense to her than dating ever had, really.
All this time, she had worried that there was something wrong with her that meant she would never have the romance she’d always secretly craved.
But there hadn’t been anything wrong with her at all. She just hadn’t met her mate.
Colby stirred and blinked. He was smiling instantly too, and at least for right now, that furrow of intense concern was staying away.
“Morning,” he said softly.
She took advantage of his continued peacefulness to kiss that little spot between his eyebrows while it was still smooth. “Morning.”
“You look happy.”
“I am happy,” she said honestly. “I was thinking about you, and how glad I am that we met.”
His mouth quirked. “It’s hard to say this as romantically as I want to, but: ditto.”
She giggled, letting her head fall against his shoulder. “So what’s the plan, Marshal? If you want to tell me that arresting Eli Hebbert involves us going right back to sleep, for the record, I’m not going to argue with you.”
“Wouldn’t that be nice?”
He stroked her hair as he talked, and his touch was just firm enough—his fingers raking over her scalp in exactly the right way—that she felt like she was melting into the mattress.
“Mmmm,” she moaned.
Luckily, he stayed more on topic.
“I know a couple of older wolves in the area, or at least my dad knew them. I think they’ll talk to me. The kind of idiotic wolf superiority angle Eli’s practicing isn’t new—actually, it peaked a couple generations ago and has been fading out ever since. My dad’s friends will know more about it than I could, and they’ll know who’s operating in this area. Maybe they can lead us to Luke. Or maybe we can skip the middleman and they’ll just lead us straight to Eli.”
That sounded like a plan to her. She couldn’t deny that she was thrilled to have the opportunity to meet a few more werewolves in their natural habitat.
They had a quick breakfast before they got on the road. Since Aria had showered last night, she got the food ready while Colby freshened up. It felt like the clock was ticking away too quickly for them to spend much time having an elaborate breakfast this morning the way they’d had an elaborate dinner last night, so she settled for cereal and a rapidly assembled fruit salad.
She could try to rally her cooking skills later.
Luckily for them both, she could brew a mean pot of coffee. She had honed that to an art on her middle-of-nowhere camping trips, where she usually slept lightly and woke up at sunrise. She liked hers strong, black, and laced with enough sugar that a spoon could almost stand up straight in it.
Her mom called it “sludge.” Her dad called it “trucker’s coffee.”
Aria called it a very, very good morning.
Colby joined her while he was still rubbing his head with a towel. She could see him sniffing the air.
“Speaking of heightened senses of smell, you have no idea how much it woke me up in the shower just to get a whiff of that.”
She poured a cup for him, taking a second to appreciate the fact that the US Marshals Office had apparently stocked this particular safe house, at least, out of a collection of garage sales: this was a chipped #1 DAD mug.
He would be a good dad, actually, she thought. And he’ll be really good for Mattie.
She trusted him completely, but she knew she couldn’t rush him into Mattie’s life, no matter how much Mattie had liked him. They would have to take things a little more slowly there, so Mattie would have time to get used to having someone new in her life.
But she had no doubt that Colby would earn a mug of his own before he knew it.
“It’s strong,” she warned him, and he took the mug up in both hands. “I tend to weigh mine down with sugar.”
“Sugar’s good, but right now I think I need this in an IV drip.”
He tilted his head back, drinking so fast she seriously wondered if he was going to burn his throat. He was practically inhaling it.
“I think it might be safer to give it to you in an IV drip!”
He looked sheepish. “Sorry. Normally I have a little more of a sense of decorum. Right now I just feel like I want my eyelids wired open. Facing down some of these old wolves is no joke. They might have liked my dad—everybody liked my dad—but it’s hard to say how they feel about me.”
“It’s hard for me to imagine anyone not liking you. Anyone besides federal fugitives, anyway.”
“Most people like me a normal amount, I think.”
He looked down hopefully at his coffee cup, spurring Ar
ia on to refill it. If he wanted to drink enough high-octane caffeine to stay awake for forty-eight hours straight, that was his business.
“But I’ve been out of the wolf loop lately,” he continued. “They might think I snubbed them. I think everyone expected me to go to the older wolves when my dad died and see what local pack might have room for me. I didn’t do that.”
“Why didn’t you?”
She poured out a bowl of the exact kind of sugary, nutrition-free cereal that she tried not to keep in the house and started eating.
The fruit salad cancels this out, she told herself. Not to mention whatever calories I might burn off if we get the chance to go back to bed today and do something besides sleep.
“I don’t know. I never even really considered it, and I used to sit around wishing I still had a pack. I guess I’d never had one before that didn’t happen organically—either with my dad or with my buddies in the Army. And...” He moved his spoon around in circles in his cereal bowl. “Besides, I already had the pack I wanted. They just weren’t other wolves.”
“Your friends,” Aria said softly. “It’s easy to see how much they care about you.”
That put a small smile on his face. “Easy for you, maybe. I spent a while thinking that I needed to be careful to...” He trailed off.
“Seem human?” she suggested. “Even humans need people. I don’t know what I would have done without my family.”
“You’re allowed to lean on your family.”
“You’re allowed to lean on your friends, too. And even if you feel like it’s more than they’d lean on you—you’re allowed to need things they don’t. I know Eli Hebbert took it way, way too far, but you’re allowed to be part wolf, Colby. It’s part of who you are, and it’s nothing to be ashamed of.”
He ran one fingertip over her knuckles, dipping into the space between each one. His hand was warm from holding his coffee cup, and the gesture made her feel pleasantly shivery.
He looked like he was touching her partly to make sure that she was really there. He shook his head a little, almost incredulously.
“No one would ever guess you found out about werewolves because one tried to attack you.”
“And once, when I was visiting my publisher in New York, I got mugged. But that doesn’t mean everyone there would have grabbed my wallet if they could have gotten away with it.”
She shrugged.
“Sure, at first, I was scared of werewolves. But it didn’t take me long to realize that anything mean about a werewolf would be more likely to come from the human half than the wolf one. And as soon as I met Luke, I was sure of it. I didn’t even have to find out you were a werewolf to see that they were as good and bad as anyone else.”
It felt like inspiration hitting her out of the blue, like a lightning bolt.
“Luke could be part of your pack,” she said.
“Really?” But he looked intrigued.
“He needs someone. And it would be nice for you to have at least one other werewolf in your pack, right? Someone to romp through the woods with?”
“My wolf would like to strenuously protest the idea that we ever romp,” Colby said, but he was grinning. “Yeah, honestly, I wouldn’t mind taking the kid under my wing. I’ve got a soft spot for juvenile delinquents anyway, since I almost was one.”
“So you’ll have me,” she put as much emphasis as possible on the word, wanting him to have no doubt who much she meant it, “Luke, Theo, Gretchen, Martin, and eventually—I’m one hundred percent sure—Mattie, my mom, and my dad. Although my mom might also try to adopt Theo. She was pretty head-over-heels about that hostess gift thing.”
“That’s a pretty big pack,” Colby said. He laced his fingers through hers and held her hand tightly. “All the other wolves are going to be jealous of me.”
“Good,” Aria said brightly. “Then let’s go meet some of the old-timers, and if they’re rude about you going off on your own, we can rub it in their faces that you’re perfectly happy.”
“I am now that I’ve met you,” he said.
*
Aria didn’t know what to expect of a gathering of werewolf senior citizens.
Would it be a bunch of grumpy men in a hunting lodge? Would the walls be decorated with racks of antlers from deer they had taken down together in weird werewolf bonding exercises? Would they sniff her out immediately as a human intruder? Would Colby get raked over the coals for not only living with humans but mating with one?
Or would it be more like some kind of bizarre hippie commune, with shifters roaming around naked and unashamed?
She was having too much fun coming up with possibilities. Which meant, unfortunately, that by the time the well of her imagination ran dry and she wanted to dig into specifics with Colby, they were already there.
Gulp.
She got out of the car, glad that she’d ditched last night’s clingy, enticing rose-colored dress for something more practical and back-to-basics this morning. She wanted to make a good impression on Colby’s dad’s friends, sure, but she also wanted to be able to run if she needed to.
She stood by everything she’d said this morning about knowing that not all werewolves were like the Hebbert brothers, but that didn’t mean that insular, clannish old werewolves were necessarily going to lay out the welcome mat for them.
And it didn’t mean they weren’t going to run into Eli Hebbert himself, for that matter. It was still hard to say what kind of tracking his super-nose was capable of.
It was best to be prepared for anything.
“You look nervous,” Colby said.
“Just a little.”
She looked at the enormous house looming over them, taking in the stone wolves carved on each side of its massive doorway, and revised that:
“Just a medium amount.”
He took her hand and held it as they walked. “I know it’s intimidating. But I’m only worried about whether or not they’ll be chilly towards us. I promise. Nothing worse than that. My dad would never have wasted his time with wolves who had some kind of anti-human sentiment going on.”
She liked that Colby had so much faith in his dad’s intrinsic goodness. She had always felt that way about her parents, no matter how many little spats and quibbles she and her mom had had over the years. She really was glad that Colby had had that same kind of support.
And she believed him, which gave her the necessary jolt of courage to stand still and straight-backed as he knocked on the door.
It was opened by a perky blonde woman in her late fifties. With her brightly colored clothes and beaming smile, she reminded Aria immediately of Mattie’s old kindergarten teacher.
“Hello!” the woman said cheerfully. “How can I help you?”
Colby said, “I’m Colby, ma’am. Bryan Acton’s son.”
“Well, of course you are. You look just like him. I should have realized right away. Go on and give me a kiss if we’re going to be friends.” She tilted her face up.
Colby leaned in and politely gave her a chaste kiss on each cheek. Aria recognized the gesture immediately: wolves often nuzzled up to alphas they were trying to befriend, pressing little wolf kisses to each other’s faces.
It was usually a lot messier in the wild, in her experience, and she had to admit that she was glad there hadn’t been any slobber involved here.
So this woman, however chipper she sounded and however friendly she looked, was high up in the local packs, high enough to request—and get—an immediate sign of respect from Colby.
The woman turned her attention to Aria next. “Now, you don’t ring as much of a bell, sweetheart.”
Meaning my scent isn’t right, Aria thought wryly.
It was kind of funny that after years of rough-and-tumble camping trips, she now kept having it implied that she came across as too civilized.
“I wouldn’t, ma’am,” she said politely. “I’m only here because of Colby. My name is Aria Clarke.”
“The nature photograph
er?”
God, I love werewolves. They’re probably singlehandedly keeping me in business.
“That’s me.”
“Aria is my mate,” Colby said. “She knows the score.”
“You took a picture of a cousin of mine once,” the woman confided in Aria. “She’s an Arctic fox. When you used her for the cover, I thought we’d never hear the end of it.” She held out her hand. “I’m Mel Wondery. Pleased to meet you both. And I’ve been leaving you to stand out on the porch when you’re Bryan Acton’s son and you’re practically a celebrity, where are my manners? Come on in.”
Here was another shifter her mother would love. It only took Mel a whirlwind two minutes to have them settled in a parlor with glasses of lemonade in their hands.
Aria looked around at the room’s dark, foreboding décor. It seemed like as much as possible had made been made out of ebony, onyx, and obsidian, so the whole room was a smooth, glittering black that swallowed up all the light. The Victorian-style couch was upholstered in wine-colored velvet, and its feet were carved into enormous mahogany claws. The fireplace grate was studded with garnets.
It was like some kind of unholy cross between the castle in Beauty and the Beast—pre-Belle—and a Gothic fantasy.
She couldn’t imagine anyone more out of place in it than small, bubbly Mel Wondery, in her teal and bubblegum-pink yoga clothes.
“Your house is...”
“Godawful,” Mel said, settling down in a chair with twin screeching dragon heads carved onto the back. “Can you even believe it’s real? My great-grandfather built and furnished it, and it’s taken everything the family has to keep it looking this horrible. He wasn’t born a wolf, you see, he was turned, and he went through this tragic downward spiral where he thought he was an unlovable monster and ought to have the house of one, apparently. Then he met my great-grandmother... who, luckily for him, had quite the sense of humor. I’d have bulldozed the place, but it’s grown on me over the years. And the Historical Society pays for part of the upkeep now, if I let them have tours every other weekend. But I don’t think any of that’s what you came here to ask.”