The black wolf had beaten them before and the scent that drifted over from them told Owen’s wolf they were content to let the pack rank stand.
Tough, sensible males like them made this pack richer.
Nearby he heard snarling. Before he could stop her the golden-brown bitch was racing toward the sound. She planted herself in front of a silver-tipped female and growled at the two challengers circling the older bitch.
It took every bit of strength Owen had not to charge them in defense of his female. The black male beside him obviously felt the same because he was snapping his teeth, salivating and trembling. But the female had sought out this fight. She’d pushed her way into it and accepted it on behalf of the older female. The older female head butted her hip like she wanted to knock the golden-brown out of the way but after a moment backed away and let the younger female take on her opponents.
Owen and Tom watched as Suzanne charged, flashed her teeth, snarled and nipped. She reared up, collapsed one female by dropping her weight onto her back then scrambled back to her feet. The second female smashed into her but Suzanne spun in time, deflected the momentum and got in a nip at the other’s belly. All three wolves whirled around each other, struck out hard with their forepaws and bit down on ruffs and vulnerable back ends until as suddenly as they’d charged the other two females raced off.
The golden-brown bitch moved in a tight, alert circle. When she growled no other challengers came forward. The fur bristling on her back started to relax back into smooth, glossy waves. She walked up to the silver-tipped female, stood in front of her for a moment then watched the female drop her head, turn and slowly disappear into the crowd.
With her tail held even higher than before, Suzanne’s wolf skipped back to the two males and shouldered her way in between them, taking a place she’d aptly demonstrated she deserved.
The three victors made their way around the clearing. Other wolves held themselves still to be sniffed then spronked or dropped onto their chests, extending invitations to play. Some trembled, exposed their flanks and whined with pleasure when they were greeted, sniffed and nudged playfully.
Owen paused when they passed a brown female. She was lying down, chin on paws, hardly watching the other wolves move. He sniffed the air around her. She was lonely. And sad. Despite the wolves who hovered near, touching her hip with their snouts or giving her cheek a lick now and then, she stayed where she was and watched the pack with ancient eyes.
He walked up to her. Loomed over her. Lifted his lip so his incisors were exposed then dropped his head. He buried his snout in her ruff, exhaled hard enough to ruffle and dot her sleek fur with moisture. It took two solid nudges, the second one harder than the first, to get her on her feet. Even then she looked at him with a defiance that should have earned her a reprimand. Her grief was too palpable for him to do anything but nudge her disinterest as he nudged her shoulder.
Finally she lifted her head and walked back toward her adult pups. They and other wolves surrounded her, played with each other, took turns nuzzling her. Owen’s last glimpse was of her settling back down on the ground, chin on paws, exhaling hard enough to send up a little cloud of dust.
When he and the two wolves flanking him had circled the clearing the golden-brown female raced around him and the black male then took off like a shot beneath the trees. They and at least half the pack followed. The run wasn’t what he was used to but it was what he expected. Older wolves remained in the clearing, socializing, sniffing or chasing each other at half-speed. The rest of the pack followed Owen’s wolf. They stayed close together.
They followed their new Alpha.
Chapter Fourteen
Owen shrugged into his leather jacket and slipped into the darkness beneath a stand of pines. Tom and Suzanne had their backs to him and were talking to Brodie Dell and his mate about the investigation. They were also screening him so he could circle around to the parking lot without being seen.
Using his nose and ears, he trailed Terrence Smith. The young were was limping a bit from the beatdown Owen had handed him. Those deep scratches on the back of the pup’s neck didn’t slow him down any and he jumped into his bright blue, flashy little SUV without so much as a pause to check out who was around. He simply cranked the ignition and took off.
Owen knew enough to scent the air and take a good look around before he got in his pickup and followed.
There was little traffic, especially on this backwoods dirt road, so he kept his headlights off. His wolf kept its eyes on the road for him. Damn thing was sharper than night vision goggles.
He had a hunch about Terry. Had a hunch about all those young, full-of-stupid-ideas weres. Had a hunch somebody had planted those ideas in their brains because after they started in on a plan they couldn’t see far enough ahead to carry it through to completion. Not without disappearing for a while and regrouping. Nope. Nobody in that brain trust was smart enough to plan and carry out precision attacks designed to wreck the structure of the pack.
Terry stopped at the bottom of the dirt lane, put on his turn signal and headed in the direction of the county road. A minute later Owen did the same…except for the turn signal part. When they started to run into some traffic Owen dropped back so two vehicles were between him and Terry. He switched on his lights and breathed in the air through his open window.
Pup must have had his window open too because it was like following globs of fluorescent paint on a moonlit blacktop.
As he drove Owen slammed his fist down on the wheel and called himself all kinds of stupid. He’d just gone and demonstrated to one and all he was their Alpha. Just stepped right up and claimed the big prize.
Except it felt more like a penalty.
He was not going to stay, dammit. These people deserved so much better than him. He ran from packs, he didn’t run them.
Terry slowed down enough that the car behind him passed. He was driving like he was looking for something, a turnoff maybe. Dropping back, Owen checked his GPS. Sure enough there was a side road coming up but there was also a square marked Restaurant. Feeling like luck was on his side tonight, Owen touched the brakes, killed his headlights and coasted to a stop on the gravel shoulder. The stretch of road ahead was long and straight. It ran smack up the middle of a valley. If the pup turned off Owen would see it. If the pup didn’t turn off Owen could always get back on the road and catch up to him.
He didn’t have to wait long.
Law-abiding little driver that he was, Terry put on his turn signal and pulled into an all-night gas station with a small restaurant taking up the lot beside it.
Owen jumped out of his truck and started jogging down the road.
When he was close enough to see in through the restaurant’s big plate-glass windows he found he wasn’t all that surprised by what he saw.
Steven McMaster. Tonight the guy wasn’t dressed in his soft-drink company shirt and his delivery truck wasn’t in the parking lot. The sixty-something were had a baseball cap and a black windbreaker on. He looked completely nondescript, like somebody’s grandpa, and the snarl that kept twisting the corner of his mouth as he talked to Terry told Owen the older were was pissed.
Owen was pretty sure he knew why. His stomach felt like somebody had filled it with ice cubes. The old farts. All four of them. A pack within the pack yet so informal they acted like casual acquaintances. On the periphery so nobody paid much attention to their movements. Accepted members yet newcomers all the same. The ice melted in his gut when it started churning with anger. How many times had he sat at David’s table, eaten the male’s cooking, listened to how much he’d liked Ed, how much he was missed, what a good were he was. Owen spit on the ground, trying to clear the rancid taste filling his mouth.
Bastard might have been the one who pulled the trigger.
He and his pals had outfoxed Owen and an entire sheriff’s department. Old and easygoing was a perfect cover. Pulling his cell phone out of his pocket, he backed away from the restaurant and
headed for his pickup.
“Wait there. I’ll round up the boys and we’ll grab that bastard tonight.”
“He’s yours but grabbing Steven McMaster now is tactically unsound.”
“You did not just tell me to wait on this son of a bitch.” The growl in Tom’s voice was unmistakable. And loud. Owen seconded that emotion but they needed to be thinking with their heads not their adrenal glands.
“His employer will know he’s missing as soon as he doesn’t show up to work tomorrow. If the others get wind of him disappearing they’ll scatter. We need to grab somebody who won’t be missed right away so we can work on getting a confession and the names of his packmates out of him.”
The connection went silent for a moment. Owen checked his rearview mirrors, his speed, confirmed he had almost a full tank of gas. Yep. His suspicions had been correct and he’d planned this tail with precision.
It sucked to be right though.
“Who then?” Tom growled again, like he was salivating to get his paws on somebody and hand out a little backroom justice of his own.
“Garnett Ross.”
“That big bastard? We’ll have to work him over good to get a confession.”
“Yeah but he works for himself and his route doesn’t follow a set schedule. If he drops off the radar for a day or two nobody’ll notice.”
“Consider it done.”
Owen could practically hear Tom’s savage grin.
“Wake up.”
Owen almost purred with satisfaction when Garnett sputtered, snorted water out of his nose and struggled against the chains binding him. The solid flat-back chair he was tied to had been bolted to the concrete floor of Cory Amos’ garage. Isolated and currently uninhabited, the place gave them all the time in the world to get to the truth.
Stepping forward, Owen clapped Skip Walters on the shoulder, took the bucket out of the were’s hand and set it next to the garden hose.
Tom and four of his deputies were outside. Owen had demanded that. This was pack justice, plain and simple, and involving law-enforcement officers, even if they were weres, went against the oath they’d sworn to protect and serve.
Grabbing another chair, Owen turned it around so he could sit on it backward, facing Garnett. The grizzled blacksmith looked like hell. One eye was swollen and marbling up in a fine rainbow spray of color, although Owen knew the were would heal fast. His hands were tied behind his back, his ankles were tied to the chair and the chair was holding up a lot better than Garnett.
“Who shot Ed?”
“Fuck you.” Only it came out as fub.
Owen let the corners of his mouth curl up. “Never met the man.” Leaning to one side, he picked up the hose, turned it to a light mist setting and focused the spray on Garnett’s neck and chest. The were was dressed in a t-shirt and jeans and he was already sopping wet. It was cold in the garage and the water, straight from a mountain well, was maybe a degree or two above freezing.
The cold mist took its time seeping into Garnett’s heavily muscled body but because he didn’t struggle like he would against a gushing blast the cold had time to sink in deep and stay there. Garnett might be a were but all that shivering he was doing was only buying him time.
“Who shot Cory?”
This time Garnett blinked stupidly, like his brain was starting to shut down. Owen was counting on that. He’d kept his voice quiet, even gentle. Even let the were drift to sleep a couple of times. Nobody had yelled at Garnett or threatened him. Well, not since Tom and a bunch of other deputies had grabbed the guy out of his traveling forge truck on the other side of the county line that morning and hauled him back here. Owen had simply asked him the same two questions going on five hours now. He was waiting for the male’s guard to let down, for the numbness in his brain to loosen his tongue. He’d give this technique another few hours and if it didn’t work he’d move on to Plan B. Plan B involved pain, some broken toes and a few volts to the guy’s nut sac.
Owen was good with whatever worked.
“What…” Garnett shook his head, snorted out the water that had glided up into his nose and looked around the garage as if his head was sitting on a wonky swivel. “What guarantees do I have you’ll let me live if I tell you?”
“You can leave,” Owen assured him readily, although he didn’t flick off the misting. “I’ll let you out of here soon as you tell me what I want to know.”
Garnett groaned and tensed his muscles as if he was testing the strength of the chains. Again. Chances were if they hadn’t broken over the past five hours they weren’t going to now but the guy was welcome to try.
In the silence of Cory’s garage, with the late-afternoon sun hanging in the horizon outside, Owen misted the rogue were like he was a prize fern. He gave it exactly eight more minutes then said, “Who killed Ed?”
“Wrrssh.” Garnett lifted his head and ran his tongue over his lips as if he was trying to prod them into working right. He swallowed. “Keenan.”
“Keenan O’Donohue?”
Garnett nodded lazily. Owen wasn’t fooled. While he was conscious Garnett kept almost constant eye contact with him, probably because he wanted to prepare himself if Owen attacked. Now Garnett wouldn’t look him in the eye and was looking to the left instead. Dead giveaways the guy was lying.
He decided to try again. “Who killed Cory?”
“Jackson.”
“Jackson Fender?” Bingo. The guy was telling the truth this time.
Owen exhaled slowly. “What did you tell the young males so they’d go along with your plan?”
“Never knew. Dumbasses.” Garnett blinked again. “Never knew much,” he corrected himself and, what do you know, those eyes of his refused to meet Owen’s.
“Tell me more.”
Suddenly Garnett seemed in the mood to talk. Hypothermia left most people unable to make decisions and the ones they could make were bad.
“Told ’em they could mount any female they wanted. Mated. Unmated. Wouldn’t matter. Top dogs…” Garnett laughed and it was a guttural, cruel sound. “Own everything they piss on.”
“After they’d convinced the pack to accept this group-rule scheme, what then?” Owen’s voice was still calm and modulated.
“Needed older weres to fill the other half of the ruling group. Huh. Stupid pups were falling over themselves to get us to step into the group. Figured we’d had the idea but were too weak or stupid to do it ourselves. Figured we’d be pushovers. Figureheads. Stupid pups.”
“Thank you, Garnett. We’ll be out of here very soon.” He motioned Skip forward, gave the man a moment to produce the padlock key and let Garnett hear it. “Just one more question. Who’s we?”
Sitting on the edge of Tom’s bed, Suzanne relaxed as Owen rubbed at the knots in her shoulders. They’d been up a day and a half now but it had been worth it. Jackson Fender, Steven McMaster, David Holt and Garnett Ross were in cells down at the sheriff’s office and they’d stay there until they were hauled in front of the pack that evening. That would be in about twelve hours. Time enough for the pack to process the shock of discovering they’d accepted killers into their midst and been utterly fooled by them.
She and Owen looked up when Tom walked into the bedroom, fresh from the shower with a towel draped around his hips.
“You did some good investigative work, Young,” Tom said as he stretched. A vertebrae in his back popped and he sighed with obvious pleasure.
Owen twisted on the bed so he could look at her face.
“Nothing Tom wouldn’t have done,” she told Owen with what she thought was a remarkable lack of ego. “While he was, um, checking that Cory’s place was secure I ran a check on Garnett Ross. The bank manager helped. He ran Garnett’s credit cards. The manager was a good friend of Cory’s and Ed’s and he was glad to cooperate.
“The town of Grace Junction kept coming up then stopped about eighteen months ago.”
She remembered warning flares going off in her head when she heard the
name.
“I called their Alpha, woke him up and asked for the 4-1-1. The man cursed himself up and down as soon as I mentioned Garnett’s name. See Lowell—he’s their Alpha—he took the pack over eighteen months ago.” She shook her head then touched Owen’s hand. The adrenaline and fatigue were catching up to her and his fingers were better than homemade chicken soup and warm milk. “The pack keeps itself isolated but now and then you’d hear whispers something wasn’t quite right. That their old Alpha treated the females in his pack like a personal harem. He was a megalomaniac and Lowell, who’s one of the guy’s many illegitimate cubs, fought him for control. Lowell said he won the fight but his father wouldn’t accept it. I could hear the pain in his voice when he told me his sire came at him with a knife.”
“Did he kill him?” Owen asked without censure.
“Yes.” She leaned forward and sighed when his fingers moved over her neck. “From the sound of it, and I checked with their sheriff to confirm, Lowell had no choice.” Looking up at Tom, she felt her back relax even more. “Lowell recognized the four names I gave him. They were his father’s inner circle. His band of enforcers. Apparently they got to gobble up almost as many goodies as his father did. Lowell sounded sick with himself when he told me he’d banished them instead of killing them.
“And it looks as if they moved around the periphery of a lot of packs, hunting for weaknesses they could exploit. Looking for a way in so they could start up their psycho-were ways all over again.”
Falling silent, she rocked slowly in time with the movement of Owen’s fingers. For a while she thought about getting dressed again and going down to the station. But Tom had assigned a full contingent of weres to guard the prisoners. She realized it was mostly nervous energy she was feeling. That wasn’t much of a surprise. So much had changed over the last day and a half. Yet one thing remained in a holding pattern.
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