by Unknown
Salo stumbled back to the engineering office that employed most of his pack before he collapsed into helpless unconsciousness on the coarse gray carpet. He hadn’t held his wolf form long, and it had only been half shift. So when the sound of a slamming door roused him, he had the (questionable) strength and steadiness to rouse himself and assume a defensive stance, ready to shift again if necessary.
“The hell happened to you?” Soren asked as his bullish body melted from the gloom of the office reception area and into the haze of illumination thrown off by the single desk lamp left burning on Eric’s drafting table.
“What does it look like?” Eric growled back.
“Fenris Wolves?” The bear shifter’s chest puffed out with a surge of eager strength, his massive hands closing into anvil-heavy fists.
“Rein it in,” Eric sighed as his own shoulders drooped. Salo glanced at his watch. “That was almost three hours ago.”
Soren black brow perked. “Tell me you didn’t get your ass kicked. How many were there?”
Eric winced at the insult and the memory of the slash wounds in his side, now closed by his accelerated healing rate but still sore. His ego, too. “Two. Sons of Fenris road scum. And Agency.”
This got the berserkr’s other brow up. “Agency?”
Eric nodded wearily and let his weight fall back against a bank of metal file cabinets that clattered in complaint. “Goddammit, I knew they’d be on alert after that news photographer got a shot of me last Friday.”
Soren’s wide face twisted with a grimace. “Gotta love face recognition software.”
“One of the moles in the police department rolled up on us, and we scattered all directions, and Vanessa—.” Everything inside Eric seized in a moment of panicked recognition. He forced himself back to his feet. “Shit, Vanessa. I have to find her and make sure she got away.”
“The girl was with you?”
“With me? Fuck, you should have seen her. Soren, she runs like one of us, like a fucking shifter. She’s so… so unbelievably fast.”
“She is a shifter.”
“I mean she….” It took a moment for Eric to really hear what his pack brother had said. “She’s what?”
Soren chuckled, actually fucking chuckled then, cavalierly tossing his head to shake back strands of his black hair fallen over his forehead. “You didn’t…? Ha! I forget wolves can’t smell for shit compared to—.”
Eric lunged at the bear shifter and drove Soren back against a desk. With the combined weight of the men, it slid across the carpeted floor like the surface was ice.
“What do you mean she’s a shifter?” Eric demanded, wild-eyed and sounding crazed even to himself.
“She’s a cat, man. I can smell her on you. Couldn’t quite get a bead on her at the street fair with so many other scents, but you reek of….” The larger man held his hands up in supplication to his friend and choked back the rest of that badly worded statement. “Whatever you’ve been up to with her, her scent is all over you. She’s. A. Cat. Trust the bear nose, dude.”
Eric heaved in a deep breath and turned from him friend. He wanted to punch something, anything, and he wanted to make sure it wasn’t Soren. “No way I would have missed something like that. Wolves can smell other shifters.”
“You can smell other wolves, latents and turned. Cat shifters are rare. I doubt you’ve even met more than maybe two or three before. How would you have recognized something you’d only smelled a couple of times?”
“A cat?” Eric asked again, spinning back toward Soren and then shying away from his pack brother’s scrutiny. Salo’s incredulousness was more than wounded pride at not having realized Vanessa was another supernatural. A cat? That meant she wasn’t a wolf and wasn’t… wasn’t a mate. Pointing to a small porcelain figurine of a kitten playing with yarn, a knickknack adorning a secretary’s desk, Eric plaintively rasped, “A cat? You’ve got to be kidding.”
“Not a housecat, man, jeez. She’s a lioness. You know—sleek, regal, dangerous, sexy? Real queen of the jungle shit. In the Panthera, the lions call the shots, and among the lions, the lionesses speak first.”
“You can smell all that?”
Soren nodded.
A lioness. The thought sank in slowly for Eric, mixing with the gut-wrenching disappointment of realizing Vanessa was not a latent wolf he just hadn’t been able to sense for all the uncontrollable attraction he felt toward her. But it fit the woman, he knew, as the little clues in her personality and behavior fell into place when viewed through the filter of this new information.
“The Panthera,” Eric murmured thoughtfully. “That’s the ruling council for the cat shifters, right?” He had indeed met a couple of members of the assembly when they’d come to see Ron a couple of years back.
“Yeah,” Soren answered, voice lower and more cautious as he obviously read the distress in Eric’s reaction. “The different species have to band together. Not enough of them to defend themselves otherwise. They all have a representative among the ruling order, but it’s always led by lions because they’re the least warlike of the breeds.”
This got a bitter snicker from Eric. “They haven’t met Vanessa.”
“No?” Soren asked, and it didn’t sound like an idle question.
“No, she’s not part of their, whatever, social organization.”
“The lion shifters are a pride.”
“She doesn’t know that’s what she is. Vanessa has never shifted.” This brought Soren’s head and massive shoulders back. “What?” Eric asked.
“The whole thing with turning and latents, it’s not the same with cat species. If they’re going to shift, they do it when they hit adolescence. The latents never shift, but they’re extremely important to the Panthera and its breeds.”
“If they never shift? Why?”
“Eric,” Soren said in a long, heavy breath. The bear shifter took a careful step toward Salo. “This is big. I’d say we have to tell Ron, but he’s on the flight to Scotland to meet with his contacts there over some kind of troubling news. He’ll be incommunicado for days, maybe a week. And you’re pack leader in his absence.”
“And?”
“The Panthera needs to know about the girl. You have to take her to them.”
“What? No.” Soren was making it sound like Eric had to deliver Vanessa into the hands of some feline illuminati. Like this Panthera was going to take custody of her and hide her away. Like she suddenly wasn’t his anymore.
Like she ever had been, his conscience countermanded him.
“No.”
“Eric—.”
“I’m not getting us involved with interspecies politics.”
Salo recognized the mounting frustration—and irritation—in Soren’s snorting breath. “Are you even going to tell her? She has a right to know what she is, don’t you think? And who’s going to protect her now? You, us, the pack? That’s a lot to commit us to, I’d say. She’s valuable to them, Eric, and they’re valuable to her.”
And all perfectly reasonable, Eric had to admit even as he stood there glaring at his brother in arms. What a perfect solution to his problem, to un-complicating his life and putting aside the temptation that was Vanessa Dreyer. Just dump her on the Panthera.
“No.”
CHAPTER FIVE
Vanessa had reasoned it out on the walk home from the Yancy’s garden, in another pair of borrowed slippers and housecoat. Either she was having a total psychotic break or she was, and always had been, completely sane. Of course, after the events of the last evening had kept her up half the night pacing, only to have her finally fall into a fitful sleep that led her on another naked sleepwalking tour of her neighbors’ backyards… maybe it wasn’t wise to be too optimistic. Even if Vanessa was right about everything she thought she could do—from the running to her heightened sense of smell to her ridiculously sharp eyesight—that opened the door on a lot of questions about her dreams. About how many really were fragments of memory. About why Aubr
ey would rather have had Vanessa think she was crazy than reveal to her whatever she really was. About what she’d seen those men do yesterday, what she’d seen Eric….
Eric. He was sitting on the top step of her front porch with his elbows on the knees of his jeans and his head in his hands as Vanessa came around her next door neighbor’s high hedge. It couldn’t even have been six in the morning yet, and he looked like he’d been there a good long time already. He looked good, too, she couldn’t help noticing, with his light hair tied back from his face and his tensed shoulders and biceps straining the cotton of a dark gray t-shirt. The thought that he’d come looking for her, had tracked her down, presumably to make sure she was safe, stopped Vanessa mid-step. Great look for me, she thought awkwardly as she folded her arms over the pink housecoat that didn’t exactly do wonderful things for her shape. Two hedgehogs in a sack, she’d concluded from a glance in a picture window she’d passed.
As soon as Salo caught sight of Vanessa, he launched himself off the steps and down the walkway toward her. In an instant, he had his long fingers laced through the hair behind her ears, his thumbs tracing the full curve of her cheeks, sending shivers all along the back of her scalp and neck.
“You are fucking impossible to track,” he told her in an exasperated sigh. “Why does every single yard and garden in this whole neighborhood smell like you?”
Vanessa felt herself blush, even with the morning already so warm. “I sleepwalk. A lot.” She tried not to draw any more attention than necessary to her attire, but she reflexively glanced down at the quilted robe. “Naked,” she admitted with an awkward shrug. “My neighbors are all used to finding me like that in their yards, so they leave clothes out for me. And slippers. And sometimes a thermos of coffee. Snacks.” She blew a heavy breath out from her aching chest. “Whatever. You know what I mean.”
When her next thought hit her, the distraction relieved at least a small measure of Vanessa’s embarrassment. “You tried to track me,” she said, braving a longer glance up into Eric Salo’s bracingly, thrillingly green eyes. “You were hunting for me?”
“I needed to know you’d gotten away safely. It just took me a couple of hours to get ahold of a contact I knew I could trust at the police department to run your address, especially with the Agency on alert and their people inside the precinct and—.”
“You were hunting for me.” Vanessa’s flush of self-consciousness succumbed to the heat of exhilaration, and she grabbed Eric’s face, too, and held it with fingers splayed along his smooth, taut skin. “You were hunting for me because you could, because it’s what you do. That’s what a wolf does.” His gaze broke from hers, dimming, like he was chagrinned at the thought. “You’re a wolf.” A real wolf. Werewolf. Shifter. And she wasn’t crazy.
“I didn’t mean for you to find out that way,” he said. “I didn’t mean for you to find out at all.”
Vanessa sniffed incredulously. “How could I not find out something like that if….?” She started to ask before trailing off. If I’m involved with you, she had meant to say. If I’m seeing you, kissing you. If I’m with you. That was assuming a lot, though. Too much, apparently. Just because Eric Salo was obviously attracted to Vanessa, had kissed her, wanted her, did not mean he meant for her to be anything to him. Wasn’t that what Koller had been getting at? After all, hadn’t Eric been avoiding her after their encounter at the festival? Even yesterday wouldn’t have unfolded the way it had were it not for Vanessa accidentally falling into Salo’s arms. Slowly, she withdrew her hands from his face and took a small shuffle back from the man to give herself the space to fold her arms protectively over her stomach.
It was a few seconds more before Eric wordlessly released his own hold on Vanessa. “You have to come with me right now,” he insisted then. “I have to take you somewhere.”
“What are you talking about? I have work today.” She took a full step back from Eric and held up her hands. “Hey, you don’t have to worry about me anymore. You’ve seen now that I’m in one piece, right? I even learned a few important things about myself yesterday, thanks to you.” Like the fact that she was some kind of shifter, probably, maybe, and that he definitely counted as one. And that she had, like an idiot, convinced herself that a chubby, mouthy little secretary had caught herself a Nordic Adonis, when he was really just too polite to mention it was probably nothing more to him than that curvy girl curiosity most guys didn’t want to admit they had. “Duty done,” she assured him with quiet resentment in her voice. “Guilt assuaged.”
“No, it isn’t,” he insisted with a hangdog look that part of her wanted to slap off his face. “Yesterday, getting you tangled up on my fight with those other shifters—Fenris Wolves—and then letting the Agency get a glimpse of you, I opened the door to a part of your nature that you knew nothing about.” He left room for a suitably ominous pause before he added, “And it knew nothing about you, until now.”
“It?” she repeated doubtfully, but how could she gauge what was unbelievably in a situation like this. Shifters, Odin and Fenris Wolves, the Agency. It was all a vague mishmash in her head, along with her feelings for the inconstant Mr. Salo.
“You can’t be what you are and not have protection, Vanessa. You have to at least meet the others of your kind.”
The woman blinked hard as she stared at Eric, her chest seizing. “My kind? Yesterday you were asking me what I was. Now it sounds like you know.”
Salo wouldn’t look at her, his eyes downcast. “Call in sick today. I’ll take you to them.”
Vanessa would have argued were it not for her own curiosity, her realization that she needed to face her nature and her past and unravel them once and for all, and the fact that she didn’t think she could deal with Jeremy Koller just then. It was already a suitably hot day for it by the time she showered and dressed in a cleavage-baring, little white tunic top and jeans and took a bit of time on her long brown hair and her makeup. Even knowing Eric Salo’s interest in her was reluctant, passing, because she knew that, she wanted to look good for herself, and white was her color. Plus, indulging the girlie morning ritual made him wait, perched tense on the edge of the couch in her living room. Vanessa had to admit, being female, an innate gift for passive aggression was also part of her nature.
On the drive to wherever, Eric hid behind his sunglasses and didn’t talk at all. Their only communication was the silent struggle over the air conditioning in his sleek silver sports car—not too flashy—with Eric turning the temperature down, Vanessa turning it up, Eric turning it back down, Vanessa turning it off. Aubrey would have slapped her hand and told her it was driver’s privilege to control the radio and the temperature. She suspected that Eric felt too guilty for that.
Was he taking her to “her kind” for her protection, really, or was it just a convenient way to get her off his hands?
Salo pulled the car into a slip of meager shade on a quiet commercial street and led her past the outdoor patio of a one-off little gourmet coffee shop. Vanessa wondered if this was just his way of paying her back, making her wait, letting her twist in the wind, until he stalked right through the place to the backdoor and the obscure little patio behind the business. On their way, they had to approach two men leaning in the doorway, partially blocking the passage and looking professionally ominous in their crisply pressed business casual shirts and slacks over unusually muscular physiques.
The one to the left of the door was nearly as big as Eric but harder and more defined, almost distressingly so. And harder in more than physical ways. The glare of his dark eyes, set in deeply tanned skin and partially veiled by the very long black hair he wore parted in the middle, verged on feral. His posture, while not overtly aggressive, maintained a tension that expressed profound irritation with everything around him; Vanessa could feel it as she and Eric approached.
In fact, Vanessa found herself experiencing a pronounced physical reaction to the two strangers that grew in relation to her proximity to them, a sensation quite
different from the one she had at Eric’s nearness. Her feelings—her attraction—toward Salo centered on her chest and her groin, more like garden variety desire dialed up to maximum intensity. But what she felt as she walked toward the men flanking that back patio door came from her solar plexus, like an invisible cord connecting her to them, and they were reeling her in. The sensation drew her to them magnetically even as it warned her they were dangerous.
The leaner blond man on the other side of the door seemed less obviously threatening than the black-haired man, and less intense, but more sensual. Very metrosexual with the perfectly styled golden hair, waves mussed just so at his crown, skin smooth and smelling even at a distance of expensive aftershave scented like the beach. As Eric pushed through the door and held it open for Vanessa, this man was the one who turned his angular face to take a long, deep sniff of her as she passed. Eric’s reaction was to growl almost silently at the stranger and take Vanessa by the arm to draw her through the door and out of the other man’s reach.
Vanessa frowned lightly, first at Eric, then the subtly leering blond, then at Eric again. What did Salo care of someone else paid attention to her? She didn’t appreciate him just being possessive on principle.
Then the dark man pressed through the door, his advance pushing Eric and Vanessa into the small paved courtyard. With a nod, he directed their attention to yet another impossibly attractive blond man, this one sandy-haired, sitting in the shade under a broad outdoor umbrella that was positioned over a metal bistro set. Thanks to the guards at the door, these four were the only patrons on the patio.
Even from several feet away, Vanessa could feel that same visceral pull toward this new man, could smell his freshly washed hair and skin. She could appreciate his attention to detail, to the fine white linen of the shirt he wore so effortlessly and the sheen of the dark cotton slacks. Vanessa would have been willing to bet money that his black sunglasses hid the kind of bright blue eyes that romance novels would have described as ‘piercing.’ No denying the attraction, though she didn’t feel any particular need to act on it, not like… like the urgency of her desire for Eric.