That realization earned me an approving nod from Chief Stormwinder, which in turn gave me the uncomfortably ecstatic feeling of a puppy who had just enjoyed his first pat on the head. Later, after guessing my boss’s feelings and squashing an underling’s complaint before words had time to leave the supplicant’s tongue, I racked up a second head nod coupled with that all-important crinkling of the eyes that I’d been longing for from the beginning.
The amount of weight I placed on my boss’s good will was a bit over the top, I knew. But I couldn’t quite talk myself out of the joyous feeling that buoyed me up every time I made Stormwinder proud.
After a few hours, though, the session was beginning to drag. Stormwinder hadn’t been kidding about the pedantic nature of some of the cases appearing on his docket, and I had a hard time getting excited about the six-inch encroachment of one pack leader’s fence onto another pack leader’s land. My stomach growled as my mind wandered in the direction of lunch, and I hoped we’d run out of petitioners before I ran out of patience.
Perhaps that’s why I didn’t realize the nature of the final dispute until it was almost too late.
“She’s my daughter,” growled a male about Stormwinder’s age. The defendant’s close-cropped beard was salted with gray, which amplified the air of authority hovering around his broad shoulders. All in all, he seemed like an upstanding shifter. Still, I didn’t like the way the male’s emphasis sat upon the possessive pronoun rather than upon the word “daughter.”
“No, she’s my mate. You can’t have her back.” Shifter B was younger and more adamant but also less dominant. In a fight, he’d lose every single time...which made me wonder how he’d managed to claim the older male’s daughter in the first place.
I didn’t realize I’d spoken the thought aloud until all eyes turned in my direction. And far from looking pleased with me this time around, Stormwinder’s eyebrows were both raised in warning.
You’re not a member of this Tribunal, he was telling me, so don’t put your foot in your mouth.
Member of the Tribunal or not, though, I was present and my uber-alpha dominance had been responsible for keeping the session running as smoothly as it had for the last couple of hours. So I didn’t back down, merely cocking my head to one side instead as I waited for the males to answer my question.
“He stole my daughter out of her bed at night,” the older shifter began at the same time his son-in-law responded with: “She came to me.”
Neither mentioned love or affection, I noticed. Of course, my EOD crew mates wouldn’t get soppy either when shooting the shit around other guys. And yet, every one of my hitched team members cherished his spouse so thoroughly that he’d gladly lay down his life for her. So I opted to give the shifters before me the benefit of the doubt and assume they were just saving face by hiding the depth of their more tender emotions.
When it came right down to it, though, the issue seemed pretty cut and dry. Whoever the female was the most bonded to was the one she should live with. Why we were even discussing the issue without her input was beyond me.
I scanned the small crowd, expecting to pick out a woman’s face. Her body language alone should make it clear whether she’d been abused or claimed against her will. Either would be an obvious reason to send her home with her father.
In the absence of that information, who the heck had the right to take a woman away from her chosen mate?
But there wasn’t a single female face to be found, just a sea of clean-shaven or grizzled shifters. In fact, I suddenly realized that the closest member of the opposite sex was Angelica, who I couldn’t even smell from this distance as she cooled her heels in the car.
Now it was my turn to wrinkle my brow. “Why isn’t your daughter and your mate here?” I pressed.
Both supplicants looked at me like I was crazy. Which is when Stormwinder’s heavy hand came down upon my shoulder.
“We’ll take a short recess,” he told fellow Tribunal members and audience alike as he steered me down a path leading away from the gathering. “And then we’ll rule on this case when we reconvene.”
Finally, too quietly for other shifter ears to pick up, he hissed. “That’s enough, Hunter.”
And now the puppy had been soundly swatted on the rump for misbehaving. But even though I’d craved Stormwinder’s approval earlier in the day, I wasn’t so sure I was willing to bow to his will this time around.
Not if he was about to make an ethically incorrect judgment and hang an innocent female out to dry in the process.
Chapter 21
“What exactly do you think you’re playing at?” Stormwinder demanded.
We’d walked about a quarter of a mile down a deer trail until the peacekeeping session and the shifters who had assembled therein were a mere fragment of sensation lingering around the edges of my consciousness. From this distance, I could smell their presence, but couldn’t disentangle individual identities.
Instead, my wolf nudged at my insides, flicking my attention from breeze-blown leaf to swooping swallow. A flock of turkeys half-hidden in the tall grasses made me salivate and the scent of a passing vole nearly had me lunging in search of an easy snack.
To cut a long story short, I was angry. And that meant I was 98% wolf.
The beast in question did its best to lull me into complacency, promising simplicity in our animal skin. We could shift now and take off into the nearby trees, never to be seen or heard from again. Was it really worth the effort of trying to carve out a place for ourselves in the werewolf world? Of wasting energy in an attempt to stroke egos and manipulate lives that weren’t our own?
Stormwinder clearly thought so. But I wasn’t so sure.
“Hunter.”
My companion’s attempt to slap me with a compulsion was laughable, but I still did him the courtesy of turning back around so we were once again standing face to face. Then I clamped down on my inner wolf sufficiently to allow words to emerge from human lips. “You know, you never even told me your first name.”
The older shifter peered at me from beneath a lowered brow. “Lucas,” he said after a minute. “It’s Lucas Stormwinder. Does my given name really matter?”
It would matter if my boss were truly drawing me into his circle of friends, grooming me to become more than a tool in his arsenal. The buoyant sensation that had so recently expanded my chest faded as a sour rush of acid rose up my throat instead. Had I really allowed myself to be played for a fool so easily?
“What do you plan to do about the issue of...” I paused, realizing I hadn’t caught either supplicant’s name in the current case. Given that lapse, what made me so much better than Stormwinder himself?
“About the Darter girl?” my boss asked, finishing the sentence I’d had no way of completing. “The laws are simple. If she’s been bred, she belongs to her mate. If not, to her father.”
Been bred. As if the woman in question was a horse or a cow. A possession to be bought or bartered, handed over based on rules of property ownership. An accessory with no free will of her own.
I shivered, thinking of Blue-eyes’ intent stare. Her smart mouth and her keen wit. I had a hard time believing Stormwinder would apply those same rules to his own daughter, but I couldn’t prevent myself from asking: “And what if the Tribunal was deciding Angelica’s future instead?”
“I’d never let my Angel be stolen away from me by an unworthy male,” Stormwinder growled. Immediately, his wolf rose back up beneath his skin and our inner beasts battled in loaded silence, amber eyes meeting amber eyes and clashing with invisible sparks. Then the older shifter dropped his gaze and stomped a few feet away, exhaling furiously.
I liked the wily old wolf a little better knowing that his perfect facade could so easily be cracked at the mere mention of his youngest daughter. Still, I had a sinking suspicion his love for Blue-eyes was no different from the keen admiration a duck hunter might feel for his favorite retrieving hound.
Angelica was Stormwind
er’s prize possession. And, I was coming to realize, my struggles all week had been an ill-fated bid to be lumped into the exact same category.
In the end, the decision was easy to make. “I’m out,” I said simply.
Now it was my turn to curve away, to blunder into the tall grasses that ringed us on every side. A deer fly circled until it found a patch of bare flesh, then it bit down hard. But I didn’t bother slapping the insect away. The external pain was nothing compared to the roiling of my gut.
I’d been stupid to assume I could find what I was looking for in the werewolf world. Stupid to think I could replace my meaningful job as an EOD tech with my current position, which basically amounted to acting as a glorified mood-machine in the employ of a shifter I barely knew.
Most of all, I’d been stupid to think there was a place where my inner monster could be an asset rather than a danger to those around me. Because if Stormwinder was pulling my strings, I was basing my morality on the older shifter’s good judgment...a judgment that had now proven to be irrevocably skewed.
“Wait.” This time Stormwinder didn’t bother to imbue his word with command. Instead, he swung me around with one hand on my shoulder, a gesture that pushed an unconscious growl out from between my barely human lips.
Did the old man really want to incite a physical challenge here and now? Surely he knew that I’d eat him alive if he pushed even a tiny bit further?
His buddies would hear the screams and come running, of course...but not before Stormwinder was reduced to a pile of bloody meat lying atop trampled grasses. Maybe the turkeys would enjoy mopping up shreds of shifter flesh?
“Wait,” Stormwinder repeated, this time more quietly. His shoulders bowed beneath the weight of my displeasure, the muscles of his face tightening into a pained grimace. “You don’t understand,” he forced out.
Deep down inside, I wanted to be wrong. So I calmed my wolf with an effort and commanded, “Explain.”
Rather than speaking, my companion crossed the deer trail we’d been following and then continued off in that new direction until the grasses swallowed him up to his hips. He was fleeing the remnants of my compulsion, I realized, and I noticed for the first time how the icy coldness of my own anger bit into my flesh.
As a result, it felt good to follow in my boss’s wake, stepping out of my virtual AC and into the more natural heat of the sun. We broke new trail in silence for a long moment before pausing beneath a massive oak.
The tree had grown up in a pasture rather than in a forest, its limbs arching out in all directions like a shade canopy. And underneath the broad leaves, bare soil surrounded the trunk where grasses were hard-pressed to gain a foothold.
The effect was an awful lot like the virtual scorched earth I left in my own wake.
Sure enough, Stormwinder didn’t even attempt to meet my eyes as he scuffed a heel into the dust. “You’ve never spent much time around shifters,” he said at last, stating the obvious, “so you can’t really understand what it means to make and keep our laws. I know the results seem brutal to you, but it’s the only way to prevent the type of bloodshed that tears entire packs apart. We’re monsters, Hunter. You don’t keep monsters in check with loving kindness.”
I shivered, reluctantly admitting that his words had merit. After all, if my own inner beast had its head, we would have snapped that nameless drifter’s body in half less than a week earlier then eaten my best friend alive in his own bed. Based on my own repeated actions, who was I to judge Stormwinder for his Victorian rejection of women’s lib?
Still, I couldn’t simply let the female’s fate fade into the background. “But what will happen to Ms. Darter if she’s returned to her father?”
“If she wants to reconnect with her mate, then he’ll find a way to make reparations and win her hand properly.”
The statement sounded like a promise, but I didn’t see how Stormwinder could know what the younger shifter would do when faced with an irate father-in-law and an absent life partner. My gut told me it wouldn’t be so easy to keep rational brain at the fore when the most important person in someone’s life was ripped out of his grasp.
“I still can’t be part of that,” I said finally, picking up a twig to snap between trembling fingers. The minor destruction momentarily soothed my wolf’s urge to rip and tear, halting the shaking caused by repressed rage. Nonetheless, I wished the world of shifters could be as black and white as the world of bombs. Danger I could handle. Ambiguity...not so much.
“I understand.” Stormwinder had stepped so close I could feel his breath teasing at my hair now, but I didn’t glance in his direction. I couldn’t trust my wolf not to slit the older male from snout to stern...or to beg him to call me “son” one more time.
Instead, I turned to go. But my boss called me back yet again. “Please don’t make a final decision yet,” he said, the words a gentle request.
I almost thought I heard a tremor in the older male’s voice, in fact, as if he was afraid to see me go. But that was probably just a figment of my imagination. Because when he continued, his voice was firm and clear.
“Come home and sleep on it. There are alternatives. You can do as much or as little as you feel comfortable with. I don’t want to lose you.”
I didn’t say yes, but I also didn’t say no. And when my feet carried me away from the oak tree, they led me back toward the spot where the Tribunal members had parked their cars rather than into the heart of the nearby forest.
Because I wanted to believe that Stormwinder had werewolf-kind’s best interests at heart. And I appeared to be willing to dispense with my own hard-won honor in order to gamble upon the older shifter’s good will.
Chapter 22
My phone rang as I circled around the peacekeeping grounds and headed back toward Stormwinder’s sweet ride. “Stooge” read the caller ID and my finger hovered over the answer button.
Human or no, I badly wanted to talk to my ex-partner. After all, I could have used some level-headed advice right about then. And despite his antics, my buddy had always been my go-to guy for input in the past.
But what exactly was I supposed to ask this time around? “Say, if you were a werewolf and thought you were likely to rip someone’s throat out, would you sever all ties with the one person willing and able to keep your inner monster in check?”
Because that’s what it really came down to. Yes, some childish part of me wanted to turn Stormwinder into an approving father figure. But a larger, more rational portion of my brain had noticed my relative mellowness ever since the older shifter had come onto the scene. Somehow, the Tribunal member’s civility appeared to be rubbing off and preventing me from taking that extra step between alpha werewolf and alpha asshole.
Unfortunately, my inability to control my inner monster didn’t appear to be the greatest line of inquiry to embark upon with a human whose mind had been blown less than a week prior due to witnessing my transformation from skin to fur. So I let the phone slip back down into my pants pocket...then stopped in my tracks as a high-pitched buzzing impinged upon my pity party.
I was nearly on top of Stormwinder’s limousine at that point, which meant I was only feet away from the other Tribunal members’ vehicles as well. So I didn’t know for sure that the sound was coming from the car Blue-eyes was stashed inside...but I also didn’t know for sure that it wasn’t.
Remote-activated bomb, I concluded as I broke into a run. I’d heard the exact same buzzing during an overseas mission mere seconds before a doorway blew up and took two of my human crew mates out with it. My friends hadn’t been able to pick out the shrill tone and I’d been so busy shaking my head and attempting to figure out why someone was blowing a dog whistle that I hadn’t drawn the obvious conclusion.
I’d lost two friends due to my previous round of negligence. I didn’t intend to make the same mistake twice.
Okay, so I’ll admit up front that my wolf-assisted ears weren’t 100% accurate. I’d once nearly ripped out a
n old lady’s hearing aids, thinking the transmission between speaker and ear was triggering an incendiary device. But, hey, she was okay in the end, right? And, with bombs, you were always better safe rather than sorry.
“Out, out, out!” I yelled, pounding on the roof of the limousine as I sprinted for the far side. Why was the vehicle parked so that Blue-eyes was located as far away as possible from the peacekeeping grounds? Didn’t Stormwinder consider the fact that an enemy might take this opportunity to strike at his unprotected flank—his beloved youngest daughter?
Before I had time to search for the source of the sound, though, the rear door of the limousine opened to disgorge an irate pack princess. “What do you think you’re doing?” Blue-eyes demanded.
But I ignored her words. Instead, I skidded across the gravel lot, slamming my shoulder into Angelica’s midsection then twisting her torso to become an upside-down mirror image of my own. I wanted the girl’s face against my chest so my back would shield her from any potential explosion.
Finally, pack princess fully situated, I ran flat out down the road away from the potential bomb threat.
The first outburst wasn’t a mechanical explosion, but it did come from an expected source. Blue-eyes was less than thrilled about her kidnapping, so she pounded her fists against my unyielding stomach muscles for a good long while before deciding that words were a better defense. “Put me down, you bumbling idiot!”
“Radio-activated bomb,” I huffed shortly. I was in excellent shape, but sprinting with a living human being dangling over one shoulder was no easy matter. And Angelica definitely wasn’t helping as she attempted to evade my grip and wriggle out of my arms.
Still, I kept going, eyes on the horizon. My feet were tempted to slow, to at least turn and see whether the driver had evacuated safely. But I didn’t think I could trust my charge to keep fleeing under her own volition if I released her body from my grip.
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