In other words, she was just as well-bred as I’d originally assumed.
The teenager was quite a catch too—young, nubile, and quite refined. By human standards, she was just barely old enough to marry with parental consent. By shifter standards, she was at the prime age for a forced mating, assuming the old-fashioned tradition was still permitted in this backwards clan.
I only realized I was growling when Ophelia jerked back the hand she’d been reaching toward my chest. “Are you okay?” she asked tentatively.
“I’m fine.” Brushing away her words, I turned toward the field of battle. I could guess which shifters were Ophelia’s relatives and which were her attackers by scent and by actions, but I wanted confirmation before doling out judgment.
Because that judgment was going to be particularly harsh.
So I softened my shoulders and cocked my head as I returned my attention to the girl. No need to scare her shitless if I wanted her to speak openly. “You were taken against your will from your home by the Prices, am I correct?”
“Um...yes?” The teenager’s tone didn’t entirely match her words. But I figured she’d been spooked once already when she was dragged out of her bed, then she’d received a second scare when I abruptly descended into lupine overprotectiveness. So I softened my voice yet further as I attempted to draw her out.
“To be entirely clear, you didn’t want to come here tonight? You wanted to go back to your parents?”
Ophelia glanced over one shoulder before answering. Far in the distance, I could see the glow of a porch light although the rest of her residence was cloaked in pitch darkness. The Prices might be a secondary clan without much standing in the community, but their young were good hunters to drag a pack princess out of her father’s home without waking the alpha himself.
“Ophelia?” I prompted gently.
The moon burst out from behind its watery curtain in time for me to peruse my companion’s face. She was as easy on the eyes as her scent had suggested, only a hint of weakness around her chin preventing prettiness from turning into outright beauty.
I could see why the males were willing to fight over her attentions.
Although, now that I remembered the warriors in question, I realized the field of battle had gone abruptly silent. And when I turned my head, I found fourteen wolves quietly panting in the grass in fur form, gazes fixed on me.
Yes, most of the audience lupine. But the last two combatants had drawn erect in their naked human flesh. Unlike their lackeys, these leaders strode toward us, more interested in the female at my side than in the strange male trespassing on pack land.
“Ophelia?” said one of the men, mirroring my own words in a tone as seductive and smooth as honey. This male was a Price, I could tell. And for a moment I thought perhaps I’d gotten my wires crossed after all. Was tonight’s battle really a farce, cover for a pair of young lovers sneaking off to elope against their parents’ wishes?
But, no. Ophelia had been shrieking and complaining long before kin reached her side. And now she glared so hard at the Price male that I thought he might implode from sheer force of will alone. “I want to go home with my brother,” she told me, stepping toward the other naked man, the one who had not yet spoken.
“Just a moment.” I stilled the girl with a hand on her arm, not wanting an innocent to be caught up in the backlash of the dominance display I was about to unleash. I didn’t particularly care if the compulsion ripped up her brothers and cousins—according to their file, Gray males had been as guilty of raiding as Price males in the past, even if the former were attempting to rescue their relative this time around. But a kidnapped teenage girl shouldn’t have to deal with a third trauma on top of what was already bound to have been a difficult night.
Obediently, Ophelia paused and I took advantage of the lull to step in front of her. “You should be ashamed of yourselves,” I told the entire crew of teenagers and twenty-somethings, glad the moonlight allowed me to meet each eye in turn. I hadn’t yet bothered to whip any dominance into my words, but already one wolf in the back whined and made as if to turn tail and run.
“Stay,” I chided, letting my words wash over everyone in front of me rather than focusing on the runner alone. The males froze statue-still and I stalked between them like a commanding officer analyzing a company of new recruits in boot camp. Like my own CO back in the day, I didn’t particularly like what I saw.
“Taking a female against her will is an act of animals, not of men.” I spoke quietly, knowing from personal experience that painful words hurt even worse when you had to strain to make out their meaning. “A woman is not chattel. Ophelia is not a thing, a possession. She’s a human being like you and like me. And she deserves better than this sorry set of shifters out playing games with her life.”
I ended up inches away from Mr. Smooth-talking Price. The male would have cringed backwards if my compulsion hadn’t been holding him in place. But his submission wasn’t sufficient to illicit my pity. Instead, jabbing my index finger into his bare chest, I spoke directly to the primary instigator of the night’s battle.
“I think you need a reminder of women’s rights and personhood,” I told him, letting my power to sway and command roll more fully into my voice while also ensuring that the resultant energy swelled out to affect the males arrayed around us with its repressive shadow. “So whenever you look at Ophelia...or at any other female...for the next month, you’ll see your mother’s face juxtaposed on top of her enticing young body. And when your eyes drift south and you take in that girl’s curves, your balls are gonna ache so bad you’ll want to...cut...them...off.”
I heard one of the shifters behind me gasp, his gaze apparently having been accidentally trained upon the female in question when my command went into effect. Mr. Smooth-talking Price managed to flinch as well, this new compulsion supplanting the one that had bade him to hold his current pose.
“But...” he began.
Ignoring the expressions of alarm, confusion, and complaint all around me, I raised my voice so it could be heard above the din. “Go home, all of you. And think about this before you get the next urge to come and raid your neighbor’s property, whether that property is cows or daughters. Because next time, I promise you, I won’t let anyone off so easily. The repercussions will be much, much harder to bear.”
Looking around at the drawn faces and pained stances, I felt confident that my uber-alpha dominance would give the males something to mull over the next time they considered raiding. Still, I didn’t want to depend on sleight of hand alone to get my way.
Good thing I have another inducement up my sleeve.
My ace in the hole—my inner beast—was already awake and restless within my human skin. He wanted to rip and tear, to punish these males soundly for their attempted kidnapping and potential rape.
Just what the doctor ordered, I decided. So even as the last word left my lips, I released the compulsion that held the shifters before me in line. And at the same instant, I relinquished my iron control over my human form.
My wolf burst out of furless skin with a snarl of barely repressed rage, chilling the air around us from summer cool to winter frost. In response, the males and Ophelia alike scattered like fallen leaves before a hurricane. A mere glimpse of unbridled animal aggression was sufficient warning to ensure they wouldn’t soon forget my words.
By the time I was able to rein in my wolf’s rage, in fact, I was left alone in a field that I suspected would become a raiding grounds no more. Only then did I allow my mouth to loll open into a lupine grin.
Mission accomplished and job well done, I decided. Chief Stormwinder would be proud.
Chapter 16
Stormwinder requested an in-person debriefing, and I was elated enough by my success that I was glad to comply. I’d righted a wrong without spilling any blood and had managed my inner monster in the process without feeling a twinge of rebellion. This was the meaning I’d been looking for. This was the partners
hip I’d sought with my wolf. For the first time in a long time, I’d been thoroughly challenged and hadn’t come up short.
But my passion cooled as I drove further south. The part of the country I passed through was much more rife with werewolves than the coastal location where I’d spent most of my adulthood, so I stumbled across more than a few shifters when I stopped to pump gas and fill my belly. Some were weak outpack drifters intent upon scraping by without getting jumped, while others were strong clan-affiliated males who I would have expected to challenge me with a glare as soon as I set foot out of my rental car.
None of them made a move to confront me, though. Instead, werewolves both large and small flinched away as soon as they set eyes upon my face.
By the third such encounter, I’d had enough. Clapping my hand onto the shoulder of a male whose biceps were every bit as bulging as my own, I swung him back around to face me before he could jump into his pickup truck and spin gravel in his haste to escape.
My plan involved questioning the burly male, but the instant stench of terror instead made me scrunch up my nose in distaste. Must evade the monster, my companion’s posture proclaimed. His body shrank away beneath my hand and I released him as quickly as if I’d grabbed hold of a hot skillet.
His reaction made no sense since, up until recently, males had been falling all over themselves in their attempts to take me down. Or, at least, it made no sense until my companion mumbled his greeting into the ground: “Enforcer.”
Apparently word had traveled much faster than I gave it credit for. And I also seemed to have been mistaken about the combined cleverness and leniency of my recent actions.
My plan on Friday night had been to hit the raiding males where it hurt...without, you know, literally hitting them where it hurt. I’d considered it a major win to enforce the Tribunal’s rules without breaking bones and had been gratified to be able to free a kidnapped pack princess in the process.
Unfortunately, my newfound infamy suggested my outside-the-box solution had gone considerably beyond the pale. Once again, unspoken shifter rules had tripped me up and cast me out of the good graces of those who shared my part-lupine DNA.
As I mulled over my newfound scare factor, a visible sheen of sweat broke out on the other male’s forehead. He trembled like a willow in a gale, his eyes scrunching shut so he wouldn’t run any slight risk of meeting my gaze.
It was pitiful.
“Go home,” I told him, then regretted my words when the other male jumped into his truck and made a three-point turn to return from whence he’d come. He’d evidently been heading in to work or to his girlfriend’s house initially—definitely his vehicle had originally been pointed in the opposite direction.
“I didn’t even compel him,” I growled under my breath, slamming the door of my own vehicle so hard the hinges complained. Only after I was half a mile further down the road did I realize I still hadn’t managed to pump any gas into my car.
I FED THE CAR COURTESY of a pay-at-the-pump station with no werewolf in sight. Then I parked by the side of the road and took to the woods for a full twenty-four hours, hunting rabbits to fill my growling belly so I wouldn’t be forced to watch fear enter the eyes of yet another shifter at a roadside McDonald’s.
And as I relaxed into my wolf, I accepted the disappointment I harbored for myself. When I’d left the raiding field Friday, I was so certain that Stormwinder would greet me as a returning hero, that his unlined face would crinkle up on either side of his eyes as he praised me for my restraint. In contrast, I now felt more like a teenager after a drunken smashup, anxiously searching for any alternative to sneaking back home with my tail between my legs.
But like that hypothetical teenager, I had nowhere else to go. So, at long last, I pulled back down the winding drive that led to my boss’s clan home. The overarching oaks and stately homes on either side of the gravel road looked no different now from when I’d left a few days earlier, but the sick feeling in the pit of my stomach was entirely new.
My plan was to hunt down the head of the household and take my lumps as quickly and quietly as possible. Then I’d rent a hotel room and wait for my next assignment in peace. Unfortunately, most of Stormwinder’s pack stood between me and my goal, the entire community having assembled on the alpha’s lawn in order to enjoy the cooling breeze at the end of a long summer day.
Children played tag or tripped up their elders. Males old enough to know better were engaged in a sneaky spitting contest with the apparent goal of sticking a watermelon seed into the hair of every pretty girl present. And the targeted females, not to be outdone, were fighting back with everything from one-squirt water pistols to machine-gun-sized super soakers.
I parked at a distance, not wanting to impinge upon the tranquility of the scene laid out before my eyes. For an instant, that same spot in my gut that had twinged when Stormwinder called me “son” was back at work, and I felt a strange yearning to beg a slice of watermelon off some friendly matron so I could join in the playful battle. Perhaps Blue-eyes would soak me to the skin in retaliation and I could forget my monstrous nature for thirty seconds at a time.
Showdowns could never be so innocent for a wolf of my stature, though. So I squashed the unaccustomed urges and instead skirted the far edge of the festivities while hunting Stormwinder with nose alert and eyes peeled.
I couldn’t pick out my boss from my carefully selected position well beyond the edges of the crowd, though. Which was a good thing, I told myself. If Stormwinder had chosen bookkeeping over the enthusiasm of his extended family, then his seclusion would make it even easier for me to report in private without riling up the masses.
By this point, I wasn’t all that far away from Stormwinder’s front door. Perhaps a couple of a hundred meters tops. But each of those meters led directly through the heart of the jubilant pack picnic and my feet refused to take the first step in such a treacherous direction.
Instead, I headed into the trees and out of sight, planning to avoid the crowd and enter the clan headquarters from the rear. I wasn’t being a coward, I told myself, lying through my teeth. It was simply safer this way.
Chapter 17
There were no guards. No wolf-form shifters sniffing the air. Not even any two-leggers alert enough to notice my approach.
In fact, I’m pretty sure I would have been able to tiptoe around the perimeter without anyone being the wiser if I hadn’t noticed a kid toddling away from his parents. The boy was old enough to walk...barely...and I found myself pausing to make sure he didn’t wander too far and end up hurt before his merrymaking elders clued in to his absence.
Junior Junior. My nose informed me of the child’s identity long before I would have made the connection with my naked eyes. If the similar aromas were anything to go by, this was Stormwinder’s grandson and likely also the son of the male who had pounced on my back a few days prior.
Blood will tell. Because the kid appeared to be just as intrepid as his forefathers. Rather than remaining close to the gaggle of womenfolk who kept the pack’s other youngsters restricted to a small patch of well-mown lawn, Junior Junior was heading directly for the bushes in my general direction. And despite his auspicious heritage, no one had yet noticed the youngster’s jailbreak.
I caught the flash of a white rabbit tail at the same moment the boy did, then nearly laughed as the toddler attempted to pounce with entirely human teeth and nails. The bunny eluded his grasp easily, but the child pulled himself back erect and staggered off in not-so-hot pursuit.
The slow-motion game of tag might have gone on indefinitely had the child’s third pounce not landed him in entirely the wrong position. I’d found myself padding ever closer as Junior Junior staggered on an intercept course with my own planned route. So I was only twenty feet distant when he began to scream bloody murder.
The sounds of gaiety from the nearby picnic stilled, but I couldn’t be bothered with glancing back over my shoulder to see who would come to the kid’s rescue
. Instead, I frantically scanned the boy’s tear-stained face, trying to figure out what was wrong.
Had he skinned his knee? Fallen on a thorn? Or had something much worse taken down the third generation of Stormwinders?
There. The dive-bombing insect heading directly for the kid’s face was apparently the second in a long string of yellow-jackets scrambling out of a hole in the ground by his feet. Having dealt with more than my fair share of stinging insects during my wild youth, I knew yellow-jackets were second only to paper wasps in pure agony-inducing defensive capabilities.
In other words, they hurt like hell. And if the kid was allergic, his first sting might already be one too many.
So I closed the distance between us in a few quick strides. As predicted, the yellow-jackets changed tactics when faced with a taller intruder, zooming toward my face instead of bombarding Junior Junior’s. Good. Their moment of confusion gave me the opportunity to stuff the kid halfway under my shirt before dashing for the safety of Stormwinder’s residence. If yellow-jackets followed and tangled themselves in my sweaty locks, I was too hardheaded to care.
I fully expected worried parents to materialize at my side in short order and take the wailing toddler off my hands. Because Junior Junior was even louder now than he had been previously. He was terrified at my snatch-and-run, wounded by at least one yellow-jacket, and generally out of sorts with life in general. As a result, his screams were approximating the frequency of air-raid sirens...which is to say, they were entirely ear-splitting.
I wouldn’t mind giving the kid up one little bit.
But no one came to meet me as I approached. Instead, male as well as female necks bent earthward, eyes looking everywhere other than in my direction.
The conclusion was obvious. These shifters, just like the ones I’d stumbled across earlier in the weekend, had apparently been informed about my dominance display during Friday’s raid. And just as obviously, they were terrified to set off my supposedly hair-trigger temper.
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