by Jessa Slade
Merrilee wrinkled her nose. “Didn’t Peter kill the wolf?”
Peter shook his head. “He just caught it and marched it in a victory parade. It was Russia, where they do that sort of thing.”
To her mind that wasn’t a preferable outcome. “Beck is keeping things quiet in town, but we don’t have that luxury. I want at least two iron weapons in every hand by tomorrow afternoon.”
She’d already told them about Babette’s scraps. Keisha started sketching at the office desk while Peter solidified her ideas in a drafting program, the two of them in their matching World of Warcraft T-shirts arguing whether iron-tipped spears or crossbow arrows would be more practical.
Some werelings—with the intrinsic wildness they could never fully tame—were incapable of dealing with a world where the wild was limited to national parks and weekend getaways. Her pack had successfully transitioned to modern life, via the magic of telecommuting. But now it turned out, strong Wi-Fi and a sizeable bank account were no replacement for cold, hard iron. For a nervous moment, Merrilee wondered if she was asking too much of her clever, artsy—and let’s face it—nerdy pack.
For a half second, she imagined a big, strong wereling crashing through the cottage door, hand-and-a-half iron sword over his wide shoulders. Maybe he’d say something suitably pithy, like, “I’ll save you!”
Before his face coalesced in her mind, she mentally kicked herself. After she kicked the imaginary savior out of her head.
She had to be the big, strong wereling here.
“Luckily we have a bronze sculptor—cougar-kind from Seattle—working here with friends,” Peter was saying. “He’ll have all the metal working equipment we need.”
“Lucky,” she muttered.
Keisha looked up from her sketches, her frown magnified by the round lenses of her glasses. “We got this, Mer. Why don’t you grab something to eat? You sound a little grumpy.”
Anybody else said that, Merrilee would’ve snapped their head off, made that her snack. But she nodded. Werelings were creatures of bodily passions, and she’d been neglecting hers, which was why she’d gone to Beck in the first place.
And just look where that had gotten her.
She left Keisha and Peter to geek out over the balance of iron throwing stars and padded down the hall to the kitchen, beer bottle in hand.
The windows framed a perfect darkness highlighted by the sprinkling of stars above the jagged peaks of the pines. She stared for a moment, feeling a strange mix of disquiet and pleasure at the stark view.
Run, it coaxed.
Run to? Or away?
She huffed softly and turned her back on the lure. Suddenly starving, she opened a microwavable package of mac and cheese. While she waited for the ding, she dug around in the cabinet for bacon bits. She assembled the ingredients—such as they were—and contemplated dumping the steaming orange mess into a real bowl. That comment from Beck about never using her cookware had stung, which was stupid. She didn’t cook, but she managed to keep her pack fed and happy, even if sometimes she didn’t have the time or energy to do more for herself. Certainly using a fork was concession enough to civility.
She took the meal outside to the back patio and settled into one of the Adirondack chairs. Balancing the hot bowl on one flat arm of the chair and the cold beer on the other, she started to ease back.
Then stopped.
She flared her nostrils. Unfortunately, cheese and bacon had overwhelmed her sensitive nose. But there was something...
She pushed silently to her feet. She had kicked off her shoes while waiting for Keisha and Peter, so she spread her toes across the pebbly concrete of the patio, muscles loose and ready.
From the shadows, a voice said, “Don’t let me interrupt your feast.”
Though she knew it was Beck the moment he inhaled to speak, instead of relaxing, her muscles tightened. But she forced herself to slouch back into the chair. “What are you doing here? You should be patrolling your town.”
“I have enough people. You don’t.”
“We got this,” she said, struggling for the note of confidence that had been in Keisha’s voice.
Beck stepped forward out of the shadows beneath the pines. He wasn’t wearing his usual biker leathers, which explained why she hadn’t heard the telltale din of the Harley.
He was naked.
See, this was the sort of thing that made her muscles tighten.
He sauntered toward her, the indirect light from the living room shining through the windows to illuminate the long lines of his body in warm light. Except for the dark line of curls across his chest and down toward his navel, skipping over the scars, to his... Her breath caught in her chest at the effort not to let her gaze drop any lower.
“I wanted to track the imp myself,” he said. “It was a bit of a run. Got an extra beer?”
She pursued her lips, thought of Keisha and Peter inside, and reluctantly handed over her bottle. “Help yourself.” As soon as she said it, she wished she hadn’t. It reminded her of their spat in the bar.
Clearly, he thought the same thing. His lips flattened, but he took the bottle from her hand. “Thanks.” Instead of sitting, he took a few steps back so he wasn’t looming over her.
Busying herself with the mac and cheese, she looked away when he tipped the bottle, exposing his throat. “The imp didn’t make it this far.”
He lowered the beer with a sigh, letting the bottle hang near his thigh, which practically forced her gaze to other dangling parts of his anatomy. “No. But I thought the pattern it made in town looked familiar. It was following that lone wolf. Can’t decide whether this is good news or bad. The imp was after a wereling, but not one of ours.”
Ours. Of course, he meant his pack and hers, not that they were one.
She angled her disobediently wandering eyes toward the trees, as if she was considering, which she was. “Probably he hoped to disguise his passage, muddying the waters with the presence of so many other werelings.”
Beck growled under his breath. “Doesn’t make me like him any better for putting the rest of us in the imp’s path.”
No, he wouldn’t, she knew. Beck took his people and his duty seriously, just as he was serious about everything.
He took another pull from the beer bottle then glanced at her. “Good beer.”
She rolled her eyes. “You know it’s one of yours.”
His lips quirked. “Must be why I like it so much.”
Her own amusement faltered. Like his meticulously crafted brews, anything he considered his would be special, worthy, treated as precious and held to the highest standards of wereling tradition. That was the way he was.
And that was exactly the way she wasn’t. She wasn’t special; she was Alpha by a quirk of her blood. Her small, eclectic pack didn’t even meet the human world definition of traditional. As for precious? Unlike the pure gold that shone from Beck’s eyes, she knew one bad scrape would reveal she was nothing underneath but some cheap, base metal, without the worth even of iron.
She’d told him how she used to run to force the verita luna. What she hadn’t told him was how afraid she’d been, caught like the il-luna halfway between the duty of becoming Alpha...and the fear she wouldn’t be.
She pushed her cooled food aside. “If we want answers, I guess we know one place to look. If we can find him.”
He cast a glance at her bowl. “You can run on a belly full of macaroni?”
As she rolled out of the chair to her feet, she shifted so she landed on all fours and gave him a writhing lip.
He had taken a long step back, wisely cautious of the verita luna.
After all, some truths had teeth.
She wolfed down—literally—the last of the orange noodles, then gave the bowl a last lap of her tongue.
“Pre-rinse cycle?” Beck shook his head. “Remind me to wash your dishes before I eat with you again.” He finished the last of his beer, and as he leaned down to place the beer next to her bowl
, he too shifted, bones lengthening, rich fur flourishing, his eyes more golden than ever.
She licked her lips, telling herself she needed to clear the cheese from her whiskers.
He sneezed once, probably from the beer bubbles, and took a few steps toward the shadowed trees. When he glanced over his shoulder at her, the stars glinted in his eyes and she read the irresistible call of the wild in the golden depths.
She tilted her head back for a short howl, knowing Keisha and Peter would hear and understand and not wait up for her.
Run.
* * *
As she had taken the lead during their last run, Beck expected Merrilee to do the same again. It was her territory, after all.
To his surprise, she stayed at his shoulder, even a little behind since she wasn’t as long through the neck as he was. Where the track through the pines narrowed, she coursed silently to one side, letting the trees come between them, but when the path opened, always she returned.
At first, the warm, wolfy scent of her made him worry he wouldn’t be able to clear his head for anything else. But the trek—wordless and simple—finally let the verita luna surround him, and he wasn’t Beck, fighting with Merrilee, he was a wolf hunting with his mate.
As if that thought wouldn’t get him into more trouble than the first.
They came to the place they had met over the scent of the lone wolf, Beck in human form, Merrilee in the verita luna. Any trail was long dispersed, but they paused to snuffle in the tree roots and scratch at a few rocks, just in case.
Beck swung his head, marking the basically straight line from town to the point where they stood. Merrilee aligned her body opposite his, her sable muzzle pointing toward the next valley.
With the easy lope of wolf-kind, they gained the ridge and traveled along the rockier but more open spine. At the highest point, Merrilee scrambled up onto a stony promontory, posing with her nose to the wind like the bold carving at the front of a Viking ship, the dark trees an ocean all around.
She whuffed, and he leapt up to join her, breathing her scent, her breath...and the hint of another wereling carried on the clear night breeze.
No one he knew. The lone wolf.
He inhaled, pulling the scent deep into his lungs, feeling his heart pound at the crisp air and the thrill of the hunt. They had the favor of the wind, but that was a tenuous advantage compared to iron.
When Merrilee crouched to descend, he blocked her.
Silly move, of course. She snapped at him, and when he hopped aside to avoid her teeth, she sprang down lightly before turning to glare when he followed.
She faced him with her dark head high and her tail an angry arch over her lithe spine. The faintest hint of shining fang showed between her lips.
He looked away, the most apology an Alpha could give. She received his apology as an Alpha would, by turning her back on him and resuming the hunt.
This time in the lead.
Plunging into the valley, they lost the scent for a while as they were forced to meander through the trees and boulders, but Merrilee kept to the course the wind had set. They were well outside the boundaries of either pack, and Beck’s hackles prickled at the unfamiliarity. Werelings were wild folk, no doubt, but they had their human sides that appreciated civilized comforts, and so they tended to adapt their lands to the best of both worlds. Here was wild only, untouched. His wolf reveled in the perilous purity, but the Alpha wanted control. And the man knew this was a place to hide trouble, lots of trouble.
Merrilee slowed, her head up, testing the wind. He did the same, catching the scent of the loner, plus smoke.
Close. And with a fire?
He exchanged glances with Merrilee who tilted her head in echo of his confusion. Wolf-kind had no need of fire.
Putting distance between them so they would not make one convenient target, they stalked the stranger.
It helped that he had a cheerfully crackling campfire masking sight, sound and smell. And he was drunk. He sat on a moldering log, staring into the flames, with a mostly empty whiskey bottle tilted beside him. His ragged coat looked much the worse for wear.
Merrilee rolled her eyes at Beck in disbelief. He gave her an exaggerated nod.
To the stranger, it must have appeared that they materialized out of nothingness. Though he was a wereling, he startled, one flailing foot kicking the whiskey toward the fire.
The spray of alcohol sent the fire raging up in a hungry gout, and the stranger shouted, not so much in surprise as dismay. He snagged the bottle and pulled it to his chest, before giving them a furious glare. “Loco lobos. Go ‘way.” He brandished the bottle, which might have been more menacing if he hadn’t seemed so anxious not to spill any.
Beck recognized the upper-shelf brand only the Sun-Down carried. It seemed unlikely the stranger had brought his own. He drew back his lips in silent threat.
“I tried to save you.” The loner rubbed his forehead. “Who leads here?”
Beck growled deep in his chest, but Merrilee barked once, just a little louder.
The loner’s gaze shuttled between them. “Awkward.”
Merrilee took a step toward him, rearing up and shifting in the same move, making the stranger sidle back with a muttered curse.
She stood in all her naked glory, bathed in firelight that tricked hints of red from her thick sable hair and highlighted the flush of their long run.
Of course she was bold in her own skin; she was a wereling and Alpha. Still, Beck kept growling that the loner was seeing her. He took a few stiff-legged steps, half circling the man.
The loner quickly averted his gaze, clutching the whiskey as if that were entirely enough companionship for him.
“The upper valley you passed through is mine,” Merrilee said, then she tilted her head toward Beck so her hair slid forward over her breasts. “The lower valley and the bar where you took that bottle are his.”
The stranger mutely held out the whiskey in his hands.
She shook her head. “I don’t want a drink. I want answers. You can start with your name and why you are here.”
Her tone was milder than Beck thought necessary for interrogating a thief and a trespasser, but he knew she was a good leader. And, he admitted wryly, she probably wasn’t suffering from this lust to slash the man’s eyes out.
“My name’s Eldon. Doctor Eldon Nally.” The loner spoke to the whiskey. “From Portland. I came...I just needed to get away for a while.”
When Beck took another prowling step closer, the man raised one hand in an appeasing gesture. His pale palm was bruised and laced with scratches.
Beck circled the camp but found no scent of others, wereling, imp or otherwise. He nosed a wereling-styled satchel, rigged to stay on during the shift that allowed wolf-kind to carry a few belongings. The pack held only a handful of energy bars and a pair of loafers that wouldn’t fit Nally’s swollen feet.
If this was a holiday, he’d come woefully underprepared, and from the dismal expression on his face, he wasn’t enjoying his stay.
Merrilee watched Beck’s exploration then returned her attention to Nally. “City wolf you might be, but certainly you haven’t forgotten pack courtesy. You should have introduced yourself when you crossed into our territory.”
Beck paused. Did she realize she’d spoken of their territory as one? He angled closer to her.
Nally nodded, his mouth downturned. “Sorry, yes. I was...distracted.”
“By the imp following you?”
He glanced up sharply, and Beck caught a glimpse of something hard and cold in the man’s otherwise unremarkable brown eyes: a mix of fear and fortitude. A look of desperation, the sort that drove men—and wolf-kind—to strange acts.
Beck moved closer to Merrilee. If Nally made one wrong twitch... He breathed out a low sound, a subliminal warning that the other male would feel in his skull.
Nally ducked his head. “I don’t know what you mean. Imp?”
“A kind of phae,” Merrilee sai
d. “Not something I’m sure I would’ve believed in if I hadn’t smelled it myself, dead by an iron stake. So I’ll ask again in a slightly different way, and please don’t pretend that the words themselves make any difference, because I’m wanting the truth here. Why were you being followed by the phae?”
Nally swiped his lips nervously. “I didn’t know it had a name. I just knew it was bad.” He took a hit off the whiskey. “And I needed to get away from it.”
“So you thought you could scrape it off on us.”
“No! Well...I hoped it might lose my track. And I thought maybe you’d kill it.”
“He did.” Merrilee put her hand on Beck’s neck. He couldn’t help but puff up a bit.
Nally let out a long breath that collapsed his chest within his tattered coat. “I can’t even kill a squirrel.”
That explained the energy bars.
Implacably, Merrilee continued, “And why was it following you?”
“Because the phae want this.” Nally fumbled in his pocket.
Beck stepped forward with a snarl.
Merrilee trailed her hand down his spine, soothing his hackles. “Slowly, Doctor Nally.”
With a wary look, Nally displayed a small vial clutched in his fingers. The glass looked too thin to be out amidst tree roots and rocks. “This is what they want.”
Merrilee tilted her head, following the angle of the purplish powder that sifted within the glass. “This and they? Rather vague.”
“The phae Queen sent emissaries to my lab to offer me riches in exchange for my discovery, a unique subspecies of psilocybe spore with the undifferentiated potential to...” He tilted the vial the other direction, and tiny sparkles flashed inside the purple powder. “Well, to take us anywhere we want to go.”
“Magic mushrooms,” Merrilee said flatly. “It sounds like you’ve been sampling your own wares, Doctor.”
Another glint of that dire light flared in his eyes. “My doctorates are in psychiatry and mycology, not liberal arts. I sought a cure for some of the worst disorders plaguing our times: depression, anxiety, post-traumatic stress, violence.”
She crossed her arms suspiciously. “You can cure those by getting people high?”