Which is all a long way of saying—what happened next was my own damn fault. I should have been paying attention to my surroundings rather than reliving the past. But I lowered my guard...and a trio of young males got the jump on me.
Two were in lupine form, darting out of the bushes to my right as I rounded a bend in the trail. But it was the third who I really had to worry about. He dangled by human arms from an overarching limb, dropping onto my back as I darted left to avoid being bowled over by his companions.
Before I knew it, the hard barrel of a handgun was pressing into the indentation at the base of my skull. My muscles instantly froze into place.
“Some soldier you are,” my attacker whispered into my ear. “Dad made a mistake when he chose you over me.”
Chapter 13
It was the word “Dad” and the familiar scent more than the cold reality of the weapon that gave me pause. If this pup was Stormwinder’s son, then I needed to treat him with kid gloves. No ruptured spleen, no broken bones...nothing more than a little lost face, and preferably not too much of that.
So rather than taking the easy way out and barking the pup into line, I twisted out of his grip. One moment I was captured. The next moment, the pistol was sailing off into the undergrowth as the young male rotated over my shoulder to land with a thud onto his back.
Out of the corner of my eye, I noticed one of Junior’s companions shifting into human form and turning toward the spot where the weapon had so recently disappeared. After stilling this second opponent with a curt “Down,” I didn’t even bother to check that my command had been obeyed. It would have been. My compulsions always were.
Instead, I angled toward the third combatant, a wolf who was lunging in my direction with fangs bared and lips curled. Junior still lay between us, but my primary opponent was busy shifting into fur form. In other words, the odds would soon be two wolves against one human.
Might as well join the party.
Slipping shorts down long legs without bothering to untie shoe laces, I stretched my muscles into their new orientation in a split second of fleeting agony. Then I relaxed into the body that was more fully me than any other.
Being wolf felt like coming home.
My animal brain also simplified matters. Friends would greet me with tail up and tongue lolling. Foes curled their lips into a snarl and pinned their ears.
Friends were to be played with. Foes were to be dealt with. Easy peasy.
The alpha’s son was still in the midst of transformation, but his companion fit my mental template for foe perfectly. So rather than wait for my opponent’s attack to hit home, I surged forward in a preemptive counterstrike.
Before the other wolf knew what hit him, my jaws had closed around the side of his throat. Hairs obstructed my breathing as I sought the skin underneath, crunching down as hard as I could. There was no reason to test, to warn. My prey had ambushed me and I planned to end the current struggle as quickly, as efficiently, and as finally as possible.
Then another furry body slammed into my side, sending me spinning in a different direction. Three inches of hide came away in my mouth and I spat out the wafer in annoyance. Growling, I turned to face Stormwinder Junior.
The name caught in my brain just like bitten-off fur currently worried the skin between my teeth. Stormwinder Junior.
I was so deeply entranced in wolf mode by that point that I could barely understand the meaning of the first word. But the second moniker made me think of baby birds and defenseless pups. It also made me consider whether there was something I’d meant to do differently. Perhaps I hadn’t intended to become embroiled in a fight to the death among lesser wolves?
Not that my primary opponent appeared defenseless. His friend whined from the far side of the trail, tilting his head in an attempt to lick at the bloody gash on the side of his neck. But Stormwinder Junior stood stiff-legged and growling as he protected the former with his own lanky body.
In an effort to understand the warning brushing up against the back of my lupine mind, I turned my head to check on the third wolf. The earlier compulsion was already beginning to wear off and this final opponent had mustered enough willpower to begin crawling across the damp leaves away from the battle. I could see metal gleaming near his entirely human hand....
Wait, not metal. A gun.
Abruptly, human memories cascaded through my brain. A company commander shouting orders at a row of raw recruits as they stood at attention in a shooting range. Stooge cleaning his handgun with the same loving care parents lavished upon their firstborn. An instructor telling my group that we were being molded into weapons, but never to forget our true purpose.
“A weapon is only a danger if it’s pointed in an improper direction,” he told us. “Remember that your first and foremost duty is to uphold the Constitution of the United States of America. You do that by protecting the innocent and the weak.”
I shook my head in lupine confusion. Stormwinder Junior was neither innocent nor weak. He’d snuck out before dawn with a gun and two lackeys to attack a guest on his father’s land. He’d managed to get the jump on me, which was pretty impressive despite my wandering thoughts. And he’d planned to return home with blood on his hands.
Why, then, was it so wrong for that blood to be his own?
Still, I hovered, not quite ready to pounce and finish the current war. The dueling commands within my own body confused me, so I did the only thing I could think of. I leapt upward into humanity, losing track of my surroundings for a split second as I reached for my greatest weapon—the human brain.
In that instant, Junior struck...but I was faster. His teeth were intended to clench down around my unprotected thigh. Instead, my knee caught the side of his jaw, chipping a tooth and giving the alpha’s son what would likely turn into a colorful black eye.
For my own part, lupine teeth grazing off my kneecap hurt like hell. And yet, my brain was now fully operational, so I understood what my niggling memories had been trying to tell me a few seconds earlier. Junior, more than anyone, needed to leave this field of battle unscathed.
Plus, I’d spent the last eight years eschewing contact with my own kind for the primary purpose of keeping civilian blood off my hands. I wasn’t about to lower my standards due to the aggressions of a trio of overgrown pups.
Initially, I hadn’t wanted to freeze Junior in his tracks because I’d hoped one semi-serious battle would be sufficient to prevent recurrences in the future. Now, though, I was fed up and ready to leave Stormwinder’s territory far behind. So I went for the easy way out.
“Down,” I commanded, smiling grimly as three thuds in quick succession proved that my dominance chops were no worse for the wear. Actually, I thought I might have heard another animal or two falling over in the woods as the waves of alpha compulsion rolled outwards from the virtual equivalent of a detonated land mine.
To my surprise, Junior was able to resist the coercion long enough to shift into human form before he struck the ground. Now the youngster howled out his rage loudly enough to be heard in the next state over. “Let me up so we can fight like men!” he commanded. But his voice broke on the final syllable, proving that my opponent was actually little more than a child.
A child with a powerful father...who I would allow to deal with his own spawn at his own leisure. “Stay,” I added by way of reply, knowing the secondary command would keep my attackers in place for far longer than it would take me to jog back, collect my sea bag, and make tracks out of Stormwinder’s territory.
Because I could smell other shifters in the woods around us now that I was paying attention. Whether they planned to come at me as singletons or in groups didn’t really matter. My extreme dominance meant the males couldn’t resist attacking...and at the same time that they could never win those much-anticipated power struggles.
It was a treadmill I wanted off of. Somewhere, somehow, I’d find a place to exercise in peace. But it wasn’t here. And it wasn’t amid Stormwin
der’s pack.
With ears, eyes, and nose alert for further ambushes, I turned on my heel and I ran.
Chapter 14
Stormwinder hooked me up with a hotel room, a credit card, and a rental car. “How much should I spend?” I’d asked, still expecting my boss to turn off the charm at any moment and take me to task for leaving half of his pack temporarily stranded in the woods. (Yes, I’d been forced to freeze several more potential combatants on the way back to the clan’s home base.)
But the older shifter never so much as raised an eyebrow at my activities. Instead, he remained cordial and fatherly, almost appearing to appreciate my ability to best half of his warriors with a single word.
“I doubt you’re going to break the bank,” he’d replied to my financial question. “If you run too wild, I’ll let you know.”
At the time, I’d thought he was overly trusting...especially once I discovered that my new credit line lay well within the realm of six figures. But by day two of my life as a kept wolf, I realized that Stormwinder knew me far better than I knew myself. I’d run out of things to spend the free money on already and was instead thoroughly bored.
So when I woke to a whiff of wolf and the sight of a manila envelope lying just inside my door, I was thrilled. Finally, something to sink my teeth into.
Perhaps even literally.
Stormwinder’s pack and my nearby accommodations were located in central Virginia, not too far from the North Carolina border. But the paperwork informed me that my first mission lay halfway up the state in the remote recesses of the Appalachian mountains. Over several years, the Price and Gray clans had fallen into a Hatfield and McCoy style of retaliatory raids—or so their dossier suggested—and the Tribunal had decided it was time to shut the shenanigans down.
Friday being the most common raiding day meant tonight was the perfect time for the guillotine to fall. And I’d been chosen as the preferred blade.
Fun, fun, fun.
Unfortunately, my enthusiasm didn’t carry me all the way from hotel room to destination. By the time I pulled off the interstate at dusk, I was starting to second guess my own actions. What would be required to prevent the clans in question from simply picking right back up where they’d left off once I was out of sight? And was I qualified to apply that level of pressure to wolves unaffiliated with Stormwinder’s own pack?
“Talk to me,” my not-quite-boss answered after the first ring.
“I’m nearly there,” I began, then halted my own rambling before it had more than barely begun. Inhaling deeply through my nose, I skipped the small talk humans would have expected and got straight to the point. “What are my marching orders?”
I thought I caught the faintest huff of laughter in reply. But when Stormwinder spoke again, his voice was just as sedate as ever. “The file isn’t self-explanatory?”
“Well, yes.” I didn’t like to backpedal, so I forced my spine to stiffen as if I were speaking to my commanding officer in the Navy. “Yes, sir, the goal is very self-explanatory,” I continued. “But not the level of force mandated to achieve said goal.”
I paused and let the repercussions of my sentence stretch out to fill the silence. Over the last eight years, there had been few gray areas in my life, and I wasn’t entirely comfortable with the one I’d stepped into now. It felt like dog shit—smelly and oozy and difficult to scrape off the bottom of my shoe. If Stormwinder wanted me to use lethal force with these hooligans, he was going to have to say so.
And he did. This time around, in fact, I didn’t even need to use my imagination to hear the chuckle preceding my boss’s words. “By the time a problem reaches the Tribunal, son, we’re done pussyfooting around. If your chosen resolution turns into a bloodbath, I’ll back you up. I trust you to use your own common sense.”
My stomach turned over as a confusing combination of emotions spiraled through me. I understood folks in the rural South used the word “son” all the time when speaking to an unrelated, younger male. Still, the three-letter word did something to my belly I couldn’t quite explain.
At best, being called “son” eased my worries that I’d lost Stormwinder’s respect earlier that week when I hung his real offspring out to dry. At worst, the seemingly innocuous word might have woken an urge I’d thought long since repressed and that I didn’t particularly want to analyze while focused on a mission.
I was so intent upon ferreting out the meaning of Stormwinder’s chosen honorific, though, that I lost my chance to question the more troublesome term—bloodbath. Instead, my boss was already signing off before I could draw him out further.
“Is that everything you needed to discuss?” The older shifter was all business now, and I could almost feel the threads of pack drawing him back into the minutiae of his own daily life.
In the face of Stormwinder’s much greater responsibilities, it felt rude to ask for further clarification. Plus, when it came right down to it, I wanted to live up to the older shifter’s complimentary judgment of my abilities.
So I merely “yes, sir”ed him and hit the end button. Then I rolled the windows back up to shut out the scent of freshly mown hay and turned on the AC.
Time to work on keeping my cool.
A LUPINE NOSE MADE it easy to sniff out the path that the young pups were accustomed to taking between the neighboring clan homes. And the raiders in question were all young pups, as best I could tell. Males old enough to shift but not yet old enough to settle down. Males full of testosterone and the urge to run.
Males an awful lot like me.
Slipping between the strands of barbed wire so I could enter the nearest pasture, I was surprised to find the napping cattle unspooked by my night-time appearance. Instead of running from my predatory nature, in fact, they drifted closer as if in search of a handout.
No wonder if they’re used to being herded by werewolves.
I shifted, ignoring my nudity, and held out a hand for a half-grown calf to nose into. Dog-like, it licked my palm, sandpaper tongue slipping out above enormous teeth.
According to Stormwinder’s file, these livestock were the usual recipients of the warring clans’ aggressions. Honestly, the whole kerfuffle appeared pretty harmless. Kill your neighbor’s cow when you’re hungry, then they reap revenge by slaughtering your prize steer for their own dinner. Nobody gets hurt and both sides end up eating well, so what’s the big deal?
Daughters, that’s what.
I heard her before I saw her, a high-pitched shriek announcing the young woman’s presence from half a mile distant. “No!” she cried. “Get your hands off me!”
Her white nightgown flapped in the breeze and almost appeared to glow beneath the dim starlight. Then I growled as the raiders came into view on a hilltop a quarter of a mile distant.
The laughing males were tossing their prize from shoulder to shoulder as they ran two-legged in my general direction. The girl wasn’t being injured, but there was no way she’d be able to escape on her own either.
Then, further off in the distance, the howling of wolves proved that the female’s kin had discovered her absence and were racing to the rescue. The raid I was hunting had already begun.
I was lupine with grin gaping and tongue lolling in seconds. This was what I’d signed on for—a way to vent my aggressions in a world that was entirely black and white.
Because if a girl was being kidnapped, it was easy to separate the angels from the demons.
Chapter 15
By the time I reached the battlefield, both sets of combatants were four-legged and entirely intent upon sowing havoc and reaping mayhem. The fingernail moon had drifted behind a cloud in the interim, so I was left guessing about which wolf belonged to which clan. Based on scent similarities, though, I suspected the two sides were relatively evenly matched. Eight young males battled eight other young males, all doing their best to rip off ears and shred enemy skin.
The warriors appeared so intent upon each other, in fact, that I was a bit surprise
d the female hadn’t taken advantage of their inattention to run back the way she’d come. Instead, the girl hovered just beyond the field of battle, the rich odors of honeysuckle and rose petals whirling around her anxious form.
“You’re a Gray,” I guessed aloud, watching the teenager jump and twirl to face me. The pungent aroma of fear filled the air and I took a step backwards so I looked less like a dark, looming figure and more like the nice guy I was attempting to become.
“Who are you?” she demanded, chin raised to hide her fright. If I hadn’t been able to infer the girl’s heritage based on the path her kidnappers had so recently taken, then I could have easily told now from attitude alone. The Grays were a more powerful clan than the Prices and this young woman possessed all the poise and arrogance of a blue-blooded pack princess.
“Tribunal enforcer, ma’am,” I told her, dipping my own chin in a show of respect that I hoped would mollify. I wasn’t particularly impressed by Miss Gray’s bloodlines or by her inability to save her own darn self. But she was the wronged party here, and there was no reason not to stroke her ego a bit if it would keep her calm and collected.
Sure enough, my show of submission had the desired effect. The teenager stepped closer and her scent transitioned from fear to interest. “Yes, I’m Chief Gray’s daughter,” she said finally, belatedly confirming my guesses.
She didn’t offer her first name, but I’d memorized all relevant bios during a short lunchtime pit stop earlier in the day. Based on age and bearing, this particular female had to be Ophelia, Chief Gray’s youngest daughter at seventeen years old.
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