Shifting Shadows: Stories from the World of Mercy Thompson

by Patricia Briggs

  She remembered the last time he’d been allowed to punish her and couldn’t suppress her reaction. He enjoyed her panic and was pressed close enough that she could feel it.

  “I don’t think that she’s the one who is going to be punished,” Charles said, his voice still soft. But something in Anna loosened. He wouldn’t let Justin hurt her.

  She couldn’t have said why she knew that—she’d certainly found out that just because a wolf wouldn’t hurt her didn’t mean he would stop anyone else from hurting her.

  “I didn’t tell you to talk,” Justin snarled, his head snapping away from her so he could glare at the other man. “I’ll deal with you when I’m finished.”

  The legs of Charles’s chair made a rough sound on the floor as he stood. Anna could hear him dust off his hands lightly.

  “I think you are finished here,” he said in a completely different voice. “Let her go.”

  She felt the power of those words go through her bones and warm her stomach, which had been chill with fear. Justin liked to hurt her even more than he desired her unwilling body. She’d fought him until she realized that pleased him even more. She’d learned quickly that there was no way for her to win a struggle between them. He was stronger and faster, and the only time she’d broken away from him, the rest of the pack had held her for him.

  At Charles’s words, though, Justin released her so quickly that she staggered, though that didn’t slow her down as she ran as far away from him as she could get, which was the kitchen. She picked up the marble rolling pin that had been her grandmother’s and held it warily.

  Justin had his back to her, but Charles saw her weapon and, briefly, his eyes smiled at her before he turned his attention to Justin.

  “Who the hell are you?” Justin spat, but Anna heard beyond the anger to fear.

  “I could return the question,” said Charles. “I have a list of all the werewolves in the Chicago packs and your name is not on it. But that is only part of my business here. Go home and tell Leo that Charles Cornick is here to talk with him. I will meet him at his house at seven this evening. He may bring his first five and his mate, but the rest of his pack will stay away.”

  To Anna’s shock, Justin snarled once, but, with no more protest than that, he left.

  TWO

  The wolf who scared Anna so badly hadn’t wanted to leave, but he wasn’t dominant enough to do anything about it as long as Charles was watching. Which was why Charles waited a few seconds and then quietly followed him down the stairs.

  The next flight down, he found Justin standing in front of a door, prepared to knock on it. He was pretty sure it was Kara’s door. Somehow it didn’t surprise him that Justin would look for another way to punish Anna for his forced retreat. Charles scuffed his boot on the stairs and watched the other wolf stiffen and drop his arm.

  “Kara’s not home,” Charles told him. “And hurting her would not be advisable.”

  Charles wondered if he should just kill him now . . . but he had a reputation that his father couldn’t afford for him to lose. He only killed those who broke the Marrok’s rules, and he only did it after their guilt was established.

  Anna had told his father that Justin was the wolf who Changed Alan MacKenzie Frazier against his will, but since there were so many things wrong in this pack there might have been mitigating circumstances. Anna had been a werewolf for three years and no one had told her that she could not have children. If Anna knew so little, then it was more than possible that this wolf didn’t know the rules, either.

  Whether the wolf was ignorant of his crimes or not, Charles still wanted to kill him. When Justin turned around to face him, Charles let his beast peer out of his eyes and watched the other wolf blanch and start back down the stairs.

  “You should find Leo and give him the message,” Charles said. This time he let Justin know that he was following him, let him feel, a little, the way it was to be prey for a larger predator.

  He was tough, this Justin. He kept turning around to confront Charles—only to meet his eyes and be forced away again. The chase aroused his wolf; and Charles, still angry at the way Justin had manhandled Anna, let the wolf out just a little more than he should have. It was a fight to stop at the outside door and let Justin go free. The wolf had been given a hunt and it was much, much too short.

  Brother Wolf hadn’t liked seeing Anna frightened, either. He’d staked his claim and it had taken all of Charles’s control not to just kill Justin in Anna’s apartment. Only the strong suspicion that she’d go back to being afraid of him had allowed him to stay seated until he was sure he could control himself.

  Climbing four flights of stairs should have given him enough time to silence the wolf. It might have, except that Anna was waiting for him, rolling pin in hand, on the landing below her apartment.

  He paused halfway up the stairs, and she turned around without a word. He stalked her back to her apartment and into the kitchen area, where she set the rolling pin on its stand—right next to a small pot that held a handful of knives.

  “Why the rolling pin and not a knife?” he asked, his voice raspy with the need for action.

  She looked at him for the first time since she’d seen his face on the stairs. “A knife wouldn’t even slow him down, but bones take time to heal.”

  He liked that. Who’d have thought he’d get turned on by a woman with a rolling pin? “All right,” he said. “All right.”

  He turned abruptly and left her standing in front of the counter because if he’d stayed there he would have taken her, seduced her. The apartment wasn’t large enough either to pace or to get much distance between them. Her scent, blended with fear and arousal, was dangerous. He needed a distraction.

  He pulled one of the chairs around and sat on it, leaning back until it was propped on two legs. He folded his arms behind his head and assumed a deliberately relaxed posture, half closed his eyes, and said, “I want you to tell me about your Change.” He hadn’t missed the clues, he thought, watching her flinch a little. There was something wrong with how she’d been Changed. He focused on that.

  “Why?” she asked, challenging him—still caught up in the adrenaline rush of Justin’s visit, he imagined. She caught herself and turned away, cringing as if she expected him to explode.

  He closed his eyes entirely. Another moment and he was going to put all the gentlemanly behavior his father had taught him aside and take her, willing or not. Oh, that would teach her not to be afraid of him, he thought.

  “I need to know how Leo’s pack is run,” he told her patiently, though at the moment he couldn’t have cared less. “I’d rather do that through your impressions first, and then I’ll ask you questions. It’ll give me a better insight into what he’s doing and why.”

  • • •

  Anna gave him a wary look, but he hadn’t moved. She could still smell the anger in the air, but it might just have been a remnant from when Justin had been there. Charles was aroused, too—and she found herself responding to it, though she knew it was a common result of victorious confrontations among males. He was ignoring it, so she could, too.

  She took a deep breath, and his scent filled her lungs.

  Clearing her throat, she tried to find the beginning of her story. “I was working in a music store in the Loop when I first met Justin. He told me he was a guitarist like me, and he started coming in a couple of times a week, buying strings, music . . . small-ticket stuff. He’d flirt and tease.” She gave an exasperated huff for her foolishness. “I thought he was a nice guy. So when he asked me out for lunch, I said sure.”

  She looked at Charles, but he looked as though he might have fallen asleep. The muscles in his shoulders were relaxed and his breathing was slow and easy.

  “We dated a couple of times. He took me to this little restaurant near a park, one of the forest preserves. When we were finished he took me for
a walk in the woods. ‘To look at the moon,’ he told me.” Even now, with the night long over, she could hear the tension in her voice. “He asked me to wait a minute, said he’d be right back.”

  He’d been excited, she remembered, almost frantic with suppressed emotion. He’d patted his pockets, then said he’d left something in his car. She’d been worried that he had gone to get an engagement ring. She’d practiced gentle ways of saying no while she waited. They had very little in common and no chemistry at all. Though he seemed nice enough, she’d been getting the feeling that there was something a little off about him, too, and her instincts told her that she needed to break it off.

  “It took longer than a minute, and I was just about to go back to the car myself when I heard something in the bushes.” The skin on her face tingled with fear, just as it had that night.

  “You didn’t know he was a werewolf?” Charles’s voice reminded her that she was safe in her apartment.

  “No. I thought that werewolves were just stories.”

  “Tell me about after the attack.”

  She didn’t need to tell him about how Justin had stalked her for an hour, herding her back from the edge of the preserve every time she came close to getting out. He only wanted to know about Leo’s pack. Anna hid her sigh of relief.

  “I woke up in Leo’s house. He was excited at first. His pack only has one other woman. Then they discovered what I am.”

  “And what are you, Anna?” His voice was like smoke, she thought, soft and weightless.

  “Submissive,” she said. “The lowest of the low.” And then because his eyes were still closed she added, “Useless.”

  “Is that what they told you?” he asked thoughtfully.

  “It’s the truth.” She ought to be more upset about it—the wolves who didn’t despise her treated her with pity. But she didn’t want to be dominant and have to fight and hurt people.

  He didn’t say anything so she continued her story, trying to give him all the details she could remember. He asked some questions:

  “Who helped you gain control of the wolf?” (No one, she’d done that on her own—another black mark against her that proved she wasn’t dominant, they’d told her.)

  “Who gave you the Marrok’s phone number?” (Leo’s third, Boyd Hamilton.)

  “When and why?” (Just before Leo’s mate stepped in and stopped him from passing Anna around to whatever male he wanted to reward. Anna tried to avoid the higher-ranking wolves—she had no idea why he’d given her that number and no desire to ask.)

  “How many new members have come into the pack since you?” (Three, all male—but two of them couldn’t control themselves and had had to be killed.)

  “How many members of the pack?” (Twenty-six.)

  When she finally wound down to a stop she was almost surprised to find herself sitting on the floor across the room from Charles with her back against the wall. Slowly Charles let his chair drop back to the floor and pinched the bridge of his nose. He sighed heavily and then looked at her directly for the first time since she’d begun speaking.

  She sucked in her breath at the bright gold of his eyes. He was very near a change forced by some strong emotion—and despite seeing his eyes, she couldn’t read it in his body or his scent—he’d managed to mask it from her.

  “There are rules. First is that no person may be Changed against their will. Second is that no person may be Changed until they have been counseled and passed a simple test to demonstrate that they understand what that Change means.”

  She didn’t know what to say, but she finally remembered to drop her eyes away from his intense stare.

  “From what you’ve said, Leo is adding new wolves and missing others—he didn’t report that to the Marrok. Last year he came to our annual meeting with his mate and his fourth—that Boyd Hamilton—and told us that his second and third were tied up.”

  Anna frowned at him. “Boyd’s been his third for as long as I have been in the pack and Justin is his second.”

  “You said that there is only one female in the pack besides you?”

  “Yes.”

  “There should have been four.”

  “No one has mentioned any others,” she told him.

  He looked over at the check on her fridge.

  “They take your paycheck. How much do they give you back?” His voice was bass-deep with the heat of the change behind it.

  “Sixty percent.”

  “Ah.” He closed his eyes again and breathed deeply. She could smell the musk of his anger now, though his shoulders still looked relaxed.

  When he didn’t say anything more, she said quietly, “Is there anything I can do to help? Do you want me to leave or talk or turn on music?” She didn’t have a TV, but she still had her old stereo.

  His eyes stayed closed but he smiled, just a twitch of his lips. “My control is usually better than this.”

  She waited, but it seemed to get worse rather than better.

  His eyes snapped open and his cold yellow gaze pinned her against the wall where she sat as he uncoiled and prowled across the room.

  Her pulse jumped unsteadily and she bowed her head, curling up to be smaller. She felt rather than saw him crouch in front of her. His hands when they cupped her face were so hot she flinched—and regretted it when he growled.

  He dropped to his knees, nuzzling against her neck, then rested his body, now taut as iron, against hers, trapping her between him and the wall. He put his hands on the wall, one to each side of her, and then quit moving. His breath was hot on her neck.

  She sat as still as she could, terrified of doing anything that might break his control. But there was something about him that kept her from being truly scared, something that insisted he wouldn’t hurt her. That he never would hurt her.

  Which was stupid. All the dominants hurt those beneath them. She’d had that beaten into her more than once. Just because she could heal quickly didn’t make getting hurt pleasant. But no matter how much she told herself she ought to be frightened of him, a dominant among dominants, a strange man she’d never seen before last night (or, more accurately, very early this morning), she couldn’t be.

  Though he smelled of anger, he also smelled like spring rain, wolf, and man. She closed her eyes and quit fighting, letting the sweet-sharpness of his scent wash away the fear and anger aroused by telling this man about the worst thing that ever happened to her.

  As soon as she relaxed he did as well. His rigid muscles loosened and his imprisoning arms slid down the wall to rest lightly on her shoulders.

  After a while, he pulled away slowly, but stayed crouched so his head was only slightly higher than hers. He put a gentle thumb under her chin and raised her head until she gazed into his dark eyes. She had the sudden feeling that if she could look into those eyes for the rest of her life, she would be happy. It scared her a lot more than his anger had.

  “Are you doing something to me to make me feel like this?” She asked the question before she had time to censor herself.

  He didn’t ask her how he made her feel. Instead, he tilted his head, a wolflike gesture, but kept eye contact, though there was no challenge in his scent. Instead, she had the impression he was almost as bewildered as she was. “I don’t think so. Certainly not on purpose.”

  He cupped her face in both of his hands. They were large hands, and callused, and they trembled just a little. He bent down until his chin rested on the top of her head. “I’ve never felt this way before, either.”

  • • •

  He could have stayed there forever, despite the discomfort of kneeling on the hardwood floor. He’d never felt anything like this—certainly not with a woman he’d known less than twenty-four hours. He didn’t know how to deal with it, didn’t want to deal with it, and—most unlike himself—was willing to put off dealing with it indefinitely as l
ong as he could spend the time with her body against his.

  Of course there was something he’d rather do, but if he wasn’t mistaken there was someone else coming up the stairs. Four flights of stairs were, evidently, not enough to keep intruders away. He closed his eyes and let his wolf-brother sort through the scents and identify their newest visitor.

  There was a knock at the door.

  Anna jerked back out of his hold, sucking in her breath. Part of him was pleased that he’d managed to distract her so much that she hadn’t noticed anything until then. Part of him worried at her vulnerability.

  Reluctantly, he stood up and put a little distance between them. “Come in, Isabelle.”

  The door opened and Leo’s mate stuck her head in. She took a good look at Anna and grinned mischievously. “Interrupting something interesting?”

  He’d always liked Isabelle, though he’d tried hard not to show it. As his father’s executioner, he’d long ago learned not to get close to anyone he might someday have to kill—which made his circle of friends very small: his father and his brother for the most part.

  Anna stood up and returned Isabelle’s smile with a shy one of her own, though he could tell she was still shaken. To his surprise, though, she said, “Yes. There was something very interesting going on. Come in anyway.”

  Once the invitation had been issued, Isabelle blew in like the March wind, as she usually did, simultaneously shutting the door and holding out a hand to Charles. “Charles, it is so good to see you.”

  He took her hand and bowed over it, kissing it lightly. It smelled of cinnamon and cloves. He’d forgotten that about her, that she used perfume with an eye toward the sharpness of werewolf senses. Just strong enough to mask herself and so give her some protection from the sharp noses of her fellow wolves. Unless she was extremely agitated, no one could tell how she felt from her scent.

  “You look beautiful,” he said, as he knew she expected. It was true enough.