Well, this setting is definitely inconvenient, I thought inanely.
Hairs once again rose along my neck as Grey stalked past, his inner beast even more rampant than usual. Like Sinsa, the uber-alpha was seconds away from shifting, and I realized too late that perhaps our uninvited guest was attempting to hinder us rather than helping prevent this disaster that I’d willingly unleashed on one-body territory.
Because Grey was definitely Stormwinder’s pawn. And hadn’t I already concluded that the Tribunal member’s primary goal was to pry Hunter loose from our pack and bring my mate back into his former role as the older male’s lap dog?
But there was nothing I could do in the face of such a powerful uber-alpha. Nothing to do but watch as Grey walked up to Sinsa and planted both broad hands atop the quivering werewolf’s heaving flank.
My own wolf was still wide awake due to our recent attempt at compelling Sinsa’s transformation away. Perhaps that’s why the rush of uber-alpha intention caught me off guard and nearly pushed me off my feet.
For whatever reason, my stomach clenched in abrupt agony. My eyes watered so hard I almost couldn’t see Grey sucking the transition right out of Sinsa’s addle-pated brain. And, in reaction, I instinctively reached out into thin air in hopes a support would appear before I fell flat on my face.
To my surprise, the much-needed assistance did indeed materialize out of the blue. “Shit, that hurts,” Lupe moaned. Still, she managed to hold both of us upright so we wouldn’t create a scene in front of the interested one-bodies. Slowly, quietly, we paced backwards toward the double doors.
Shiver, fliver, miver, river....
My wolf was babbling now, her words no longer making rational sense. Or maybe I just couldn’t understand what she was trying to communicate when my head pounded like the floor of a dance studio filled with elephants?
“I think I’m going to shift,” Lupe whispered, her voice nearly as garbled as the words currently flowing through my brain.
Right, the buddy system. I was supposed to be preventing Lupe from doing something she’d later regret. But all I wanted right then was to go to ground and lick my own wounds.
Still, I was the alpha in charge. So I straightened my spine with an effort and peered through air that seemed significantly dimmer than it had been a moment earlier. At last, I managed to pick Ginger’s maroon hair out of the crowd and to likewise catch her eye.
Can you take over the class? I asked silently, not bothering to send the words down the pack bond. I was pretty sure I wouldn’t succeed at such a complicated maneuver even if I tried, so I merely crossed my fingers and hoped Ginger could understand my thoughts as implicitly as my mate frequently did.
Sure enough, my friend raised her eyebrows in alarm as she took in both my and Lupe’s bloodless faces. But the twin often acted as my second, so she knew when to ask questions and when to merely act. Nodding firmly, she mouthed: Sinsa’s okay now. Do what you have to do.
“Let’s go,” I said to Lupe, dismissing the problems behind us as I took the teenager’s hand in mine. “You can shift in the backseat of the Volvo. I’ll lock us both in and I doubt our wolves will be bright enough to figure out the release latches.”
Behind me, I felt the final hint of electricity dissipating as Grey proved himself an asset rather than a liability. Then, together, Lupe and I stumbled out into the darkness.
The parking lot had never felt so far away.
***
Waking up in a location I didn’t remember lying down in was getting royally old. And with Lupe’s furry tail shielding my eyes from any light, I was tempted to turn over and drift right back to sleep. Surely I’d feel better after just a few more minutes of slumber?
The pounding on the window, though, suggested nap time was over. So, blinking groggily, I pulled myself upright and peered out into the dim parking lot.
Despite the closest street light being well over twenty yards away, the dark shape leaning over the windshield was still painfully obvious. Swathed in shadows, though, it could have been anyone—friend, foe, or scary paranormal beast. Unconsciously, I cringed away from the hulking shape, my fingers twining into the hair of the wolf by my side like a child seeking comfort from her favorite teddy bear.
Then the fur beneath my hand turned into human hair seconds before the outside visitor materialized into Glen, my most solid supporter. “Ow,” complained my car mate, prying herself loose from my clenched fist.
“You’d better come back inside,” Glen said at nearly the exact same instant, his voice muffled by the glass and steel that separated our forms.
And as my terror faded, I realized that my vision had been confused by a rime of ice that was still forming on the inside of the windshield in reaction to Lupe’s and my humid breath. So the terrifying image hadn’t been merely a figment of my unreliable mind, just a sleepy reaction to clouded vision. The realization made the frigid car feel a little warmer.
Sighing in relief, I clicked the door lock open and stepped out into the night, leaving Lupe behind to dress at her leisure. The air smelled different than I recalled, vaguely autumnal, as if we’d swept backwards eight weeks to a time of pumpkins, bonfires, and colorful leaves. “What’s going on?” I asked, trying to pull my wolf onto the right track even as she flared our nostrils against the unexpected scent.
“I don’t know,” Glen answered. But his face was grim and his eyes didn’t quite meet my own. He did know, I realized, but he didn’t want to tell me.
Then raised voices impinged on the nighttime quiet as a huddle of shifters and one-bodies left the elementary school together. “I won’t be put off again,” the mayor was saying angrily. “Christy is terrified and I want to know which one of your dogs was harassing her when she walked home this evening. That beast should be put down.”
Beside me, Glen and Lupe growled in tandem, reacting instinctively to Amanda’s implications. Touching each lightly on the shoulder, I held my ground as Ginger peeled away from the grouping and loped over in our direction.
Unlike Glen, the trouble twin met my eyes willingly, her relief at my appearance evident. “Christy took her poodle and left early,” she explained tersely. “But now her grandmother’s back claiming someone chased the kid all the way home. Doesn’t make any sense, though. Hunter’s bloodlings were all inside the entire time. I counted them constantly just to make sure.”
She seemed to expect me to gainsay her, but instead I glanced toward my own charge, with whom I’d spent the last who-knows-how-long comatose in my car. Did we do it? I asked with my eyes. The teenager’s cheek twitched as if she wanted to reassure me, but eventually she shrugged. Nope, Lupe didn’t remember the intervening time period any better than I did.
“Well, it should be easy to figure out what happened,” I said, taking charge even though I had a sinking suspicion I was getting ready to uncover my own guilt. “Without a herd of sheep to muddle the tracks, any one of us should be able to scent out the culprit. We’ll send the bloodlings home first, though.” No need to prompt a repeat performance if Sinsa got upset and decided to turn two-legged in front of the already suspicious mayor.
“I’ll take them back to Wolf Landing,” Glen offered, stepping around me to rally the masses. His willingness to help was appreciated, but his shoulders were tense and he still managed to look everywhere other than into my face.
It hurt like hell to realize that one of my most dependable pack mates didn’t trust me...but what exactly had I done lately to earn my way into his good graces? The male was astute enough to have picked up on my wolf’s irregular behavior, so I shouldn’t have been surprised that my unwillingness to confide in my friend was now flying back to slap me in the face.
“Good idea,” I said levelly, dropping the issue for the present moment. Then, scanning the dim parking lot, I noticed Cinnamon padding toward us in lupine form. The male twin’s nose would be the perfect choice to sniff out any evidence that human appendages might fail to pick up. “Let’s not
give Amanda time to get any angrier,” I added as I led my whittled-down pack toward the argument I’d momentarily blocked out.
“Where are you staying this time?” Amanda was asking as Ginger, Lupe, Cinnamon, and I came up beside her. Lia looked decidedly shell-shocked, having apparently been in charge of defusing the older woman’s anger while Glen tracked me down. But Grey was the one caught in the mayor’s crosshairs at the present moment.
Despite having called Amanda’s granddaughter “meat” only an hour earlier, though, the enforcer was currently doing a very capable job of pretending to be human. “With Celia, on the mountain,” he answered. “But Lucas and I will definitely recommend your bed and breakfast to our friends. Those waffles really stick to your ribs.”
To my surprise, the mayor colored prettily, Grey’s praise of her cooking all it took to counteract what had seemed poised to become a nuclear explosion. “Well, I appreciate that,” she began. Then, noticing my approach, the red on her cheeks took on an appearance of anger rather than pleasure. “Your dogs...”
“Let’s figure out what happened,” I interjected before Amanda could tear into us a second time. I heard a quick scuffle behind me, and when I stepped back Cinnamon had sprouted a collar and leash. His sister twitched her eyebrows and grinned.
“I know what happened,” Amanda started. But when Grey offered her his arm, the mayor promptly shut up and led us down the street toward an area where three overarching street lamps in a row had burnt out. The expanse between the distant patches of illumination was dim enough to make vision difficult for one-body eyes, suggesting a more benign explanation for the little girl’s terror.
“This is where Christy got scared?” I asked, eying the empty storefronts. I could see how a kid walking back to her grandmother’s house in the near darkness might be spooked by the unfamiliar scenery, especially when her poodle had so recently faced down a group of angry wolves.
Sure, Christy thought our pack mates were mere dogs. But Sinsa and company’s anger in the gymnasium would have been enough to give the little girl nightmares without any additional harassment. I found it hard to blame the kid for shying at shadows when the monsters in question were very much real.
“Yes, right along here,” Amanda said firmly. “One of your beasts must have followed her out into the night. My poor grandbaby said she heard it panting behind her back the whole way. And when she turned to look, it ran at her. I warned Celia...”
Letting the mayor ramble on, I paused and pulled my wolf up behind my eyes. She was achy and tired from the aftereffects of Grey’s counter-shift, but simply scenting the air was no hardship even in human form.
Meanwhile, Grey and Lia seemed quite capable of preventing Amanda from going bat-shit crazy, giving me the opening I needed to drift down the sidewalk in the opposite direction from the way Ginger and Cinnamon were currently traveling. Puny wolf-dog, my inner animal noted as we picked out the spot where the poodle had stopped to mark its territory against the side of a telephone pole.
Christy’s scent was also present, bubble gum reeking from where she’d spat it out only a few feet away from Fluffy’s territorial marker. I could smell the little girl’s fear hovering in the air too, mingling with the more recent odors emanating from the grouping behind my back. No, Christy wasn’t lying—something had scared the kid.
But when it came time to hunt down the werewolf aroma of fur and wild, nothing jumped out at me. And when Cinnamon and I traded places and went back over each others’ work, both twins shook their heads at me in negation. Amanda was pissed and Christy was scared, but there was no evidence a shifter was responsible for the little girl’s fright.
So I promised to keep our “dogs” locked up for the remainder of Christy’s visit, but I went home with a happy heart. In this case at least, Lupe and I no longer had the cloud of suspicion hanging over our heads. Strange blackouts and unconscious shifts aside, neither one of us had been responsible for scaring that kid.
Chapter 11
The next afternoon, though, life appeared significantly grimmer yet again. Four months of working with the FBI hadn’t turned up a single shifter-related case...or at least none had smelled like werewolf to me. But as I stared down at yet another corpse by Robert’s side, I found myself doubting the efficacy of my own nose.
“Definitely the same MO,” my partner murmured, his eyes intent upon the newest victim. Like the one-body that my wolf had tried to gnaw upon a week earlier, this man’s face had been sliced and diced postmortem. And, once again, neither I nor my inner beast had been able to pick out the faintest hint of werewolf associated with the scene of the crime.
Despite the evidence to the contrary, though, I found myself wavering rather than jumping to the obvious conclusion—that this death, like the other, was unrelated to shifter-kind. The sticking point in both instances was location.
Because Robert had picked me up that morning just as he always did when a suspicious death occurred. And just like last time, he’d driven us well into outpack territory, a considerable distance away from the nearest clan.
Unfortunately for my peace of mind, though, the nearest established pack this time around was the same as the nearest established pack last time: Wolf Landing.
It’s basic geometry, I reminded myself. Any three points create a triangle, regardless of their relative orientation.
But did any three points create an equilateral triangle with my own home base as one of the three corners? Despite the sun baking the frost off the nearby grass and gently warming the top of my head, I shivered and pulled my collar up closer around my throat. I didn’t want to admit that anyone associated with my clan could create the psychopathic display laid out in front of our eyes, but I owed it to Robert to pass along my fears anyway.
“I don’t smell werewolf,” I said, speaking softly so the crime-scene techs wouldn’t pick up on my words. “But I feel like I’m missing something...”
“So we’ll poke around,” Robert replied grimly, nodding at the detective in charge as we padded past. Luckily for us, this was a different officer from the astute policewoman who had nearly gotten me thrown out of the previous crime scene, and Robert had come up with a semi-official badge for my use in the interim as well. So we weren’t hindered as we cruised down the alley, poking behind dumpsters and trying every locked door just in case the killer might be hiding therein.
Like last time, the body was located close to downtown, only two short blocks away from Starling Point’s main street in this case. But despite the proximity to town center, the area around us felt dead...and not just because we’d been tasked with investigating a corpse.
Instead of the crowd of onlookers I would have expected at such an event back home, the narrow street we now walked along was completely devoid of civilians. Meanwhile, most of the shops on either side showed signs of having been closed for years, dust and grime turning their windows impenetrable rather than allowing the curious bystander to peer inside.
A few of the buildings had been converted into residences instead of simply being left derelict, though, and I smiled at the Christmas lights wrapped around the appendages of a leftover Halloween scarecrow. At the decoration’s feet, a portable charcoal grill still smelled faintly of smoke, completing the season-inappropriate display.
“Is it okay if I question the neighbors?” I asked Robert, unsure how to proceed when my consultant duties, for the first time, required more than a sniff and a head shake to carry out. I didn’t doubt that the official law-enforcement personnel had already done a far more thorough sweep than I could manage on my own. But would the cops have thought to ask about sightings of a large, scary dog?
“Be my guest,” Robert answered, pounding on the door in front of us as he replied. Of all the buildings along the street, this one seemed most likely to turn up a resident, especially since a battered sedan was parked not quite as close as it should have been to the curb. The make and placement screamed “old-lady car,” so I wasn’t at
all surprised when shuffling footsteps took their own sweet time toodling from the farthest recesses of the apartment toward our present location.
Are you paying attention? I asked my wolf succinctly. To my relief, she’d been calm and attentive all day long despite—or perhaps because of—our episode the previous evening. Now, her nose picked up the wince-worthy perfume even before the door opened and revealed the exact little old lady I’d been envisioning.
“Oh my!” the one-body greeted us, ignoring me completely as she took in Robert’s dark suit and broad shoulders. “You’re here about the murder, aren’t you?”
Bloodthirsty, my wolf noted approvingly, and I had to hold back a laugh. I didn’t so much get the impression that the woman in front of us was savage, but it was clear that the murder and subsequent police activity had been the most excitement our newfound companion had seen in several years.
“I’m sure you’ve already been questioned once, ma’am,” Robert began, donning his best ingratiating smile. “But I’d consider it a big favor if you wouldn’t mind talking to us again.”
My partner’s charisma was so profound that I felt the faintest flutter in my belly...despite having a devoted and delectable mate waiting for me back at home. The old lady, in contrast, lived entirely alone, and I half expected her to melt into a heap of goo at his very feet. She certainly did the metaphorical equivalent.
“Oh! It’s no...no problem,” she answered, tripping over her own words. “I don’t mind telling you again. Come in. Have some cookies.”
Immediately, she turned, leaving the door wide open behind her as she walked at a snail’s pace back down the hall. And as Robert brushed past to precede me into the building, I couldn’t help raising an eyebrow and muttering, “I bet the other cops didn’t get cookies.”
“But I’m not a cop,” my partner rebutted quietly enough so our distant prey couldn’t hear. “I’m with the FBI. And federal agents love cookies.”
Wolf Landing (Alpha Underground Book 3) Page 7