Odd Wolf

by Virginia Nelson

  “What does a rogue do with their time, anyway? I mean, without pack…do you just hang out with humans every day or what?” Greg didn’t sound cruel, only curious.

  “I do the same thing you do, probably. I go to work. I pay my bills. I go home. Pretty typical, although I am forced to move frequently while you stay in this one spot.” Neither man gave off aggressive vibes. Also, they belonged in some weird way to the woman he couldn’t shove out of his mind no matter how hard he tried, so Lynwood gave them more honesty than he’d usually give strangers. “The big difference is my decisions are my own, not decided by committee or by some power drunk alpha.”

  Snorting, Charley nudged his shoulder. “Dare you to call her power drunk to her face.”

  Lynwood was surprised when his lips curled in a half smile.

  “But, well, do you have to run alone, too? I mean, doesn’t your wolf miss the pack?” Greg asked.

  The question was posed with the same openly curious tone, completely lacking any real malice, yet it cut deeply. “Sometimes we sacrifice things to get what we want. I wanted out of the pack. I might be wolf, but that’s not all I am, so I don’t need pack.”

  The explanation skirted neatly around the question, neither admitting loneliness nor denying it. Lynwood glanced at Charley out of the corner of his eye, noticing the sadness written on the other wolf’s face. “Look, you can fly solo all you want. Just don’t mess with Dara, understood?”

  Opening and closing his mouth, Lynwood couldn’t think of a proper response.

  One hand clamped down on his shoulder and he peeked up at Greg. “If you ever want to run with someone, gimme a call. We could shoot some hoops or something, maybe. I don’t know. Anyway, I don’t know how long you’re sticking around, but if Dara likes you, we could share a beer. She’s good people, so if she likes you…eh.” Greg shrugged.

  Lynwood fumbled, trying to think of something to say back to the unexpected offer. The pack would hang out with him? On purpose?

  A glance at Charley found the other man considering him carefully. “As I said, Pack is family. We don’t have to like everyone in the family to care, if that makes sense. If she accepts you, there’s something redeemable about you. I can’t see it, but…If you hear from her, tell her I’m worried.”

  The confession was so far beyond anything Lynwood expected. Once they vanished around the corner, he still didn’t move, unable to process exactly what the conversation meant.

  “Hey, you almost done with your break? Because you’re five minutes over your fifteen and I’ve got shit to do.” Duffy’s face flushed red from the grill as he peered out the back door of the restaurant, looking annoyed.

  “Yeah, I’m coming.” Heading back to work, he shot one last glance in the direction the wolves vanished. What kind of woman inspired her generals to be so accepting of a stranger, especially since harboring a rogue was clearly against pack regs?

  Considering the hows and whys of it almost quieted the wolfish part of him. Almost.

  But he couldn’t ignore the way his wolf perked up at the mention of socializing with others of its kind. Perhaps he could spend a little time with Greg, drink a beer with someone like himself for the first time in a long time. After all, he didn’t know how long he’d be allowed to remain, nor when he’d get a similar offer.

  Although he tried to downplay it, the animal inside him practically wriggled in enthusiasm at the idea. Instead of humming, he whistled while he flipped pancakes. It felt good to have a possibility of socializing with his kind on the horizon.

  And maybe he’d see her again…

  CHAPTER Six

  She should feel guilty for not telling Charley where she’d headed, but he didn’t approve of interspecies problem solving. He was Pack, and wolves didn’t need outside help to survive. Since he’d never been Alpha, he didn’t understand wolves weren’t the strongest creature out there or how the delicate balance of their power rested not only in strength of claw, but in negotiations with other groups.

  Besides, since when did the Alpha have to answer to her second? Knocking three times on the red door, she shifted her weight from foot to foot. “C’mon, Mia. I don’t want to get caught standing out here.”

  As if she heard, Mia cracked the door open and peeked outside. “Shh! The kid is sleeping for school.” Ushering Dara inside with hand gestures, Mia pointed upstairs. “At least, I think she’s sleeping.”

  “The kid?” The last Dara heard, Mia didn’t have any children.

  “Yeah, my best friend is staying with me for a while. Long story, but hey, how are you?” Pulling her into a hug, Dara inhaled the dusty herbal smell of the local witch leader. Forcing back a sneeze, she tugged free of the embrace to consider Mia. Dark curls hung around a familiar pale oval face and about a bazillion tiny bells and discs clanked on her skirts and arms.

  “I’m not bad. Been a rough week, but hey, that’s life, right?”

  Footsteps thudded down the stairs which turned out to be a young looking woman with very short, white blond hair and almost black eyes. “Hey, Mia, I got her to sleep and—oh! You have company. Sorry.”

  “Dara, this is Janie Smith. I don’t know if you remember her, but she was in school with us? Dara was a year—or was it two?—ahead of us in high school.” Mia moved behind her glass counter, rummaging in the display case and knocking down a crystal studded wand. “Janie is—”

  “Late.”

  Dara spun on her heel, rocking forward into a posture more suited for a fight. The man appeared out of nowhere and the crackle of almost electric energy around him made the hair on her arms raise. The wolf sniffed the air automatically, struggling to identify the new person and failing.

  “Chance!” Janie nudged past Dara to gaze up at the man. His eyes, glass green and almost alien, seemed to soften around the edges a bit when he looked at the short-haired woman. “I’m not late. I was just leaving. Nice to meet you, Dara, and Vic is asleep, Mia. If it is okay with you, I’ll be back in an hour or so.”

  The man smirked, one fingertip tracing along the woman’s brow. “Or two. We’ll need more than an hour.” His voice sounded laced with sexual promise, a tone more suited to privacy than in a room full of people.

  “That’s fine. Hey, Chance, have you met Dara?” Mia asked, still rummaging in the counter as if nothing unusual was happening. Then again, Mia’s store, aptly named Odd Stuff, suited her life well. In Dara’s experience, all things weird popped in to see Mia at some point or another. She was a magnet for the strange and unusual and always had been.

  “Nope,” Chance said. Tilting his head, he squinted at Dara before adding, “Dog?”

  Scowling, Dara answered, “Wolf.”

  The man’s smirk was fast and more than a little devious. “Same thing, right?”

  Janie punched his chest. “And you say I’m the one who starts all the problems. Go, just go. Nice meeting you, Dara. Ignore the jerk. He’s running on too much power and I’m running on too little, so we’re neither of us fit for socializing.”

  None of it made sense, but they weren’t who she’d come to see, so Dara shrugged. “Nice meeting you.” She hadn’t finished the sentence before they both vanished into thin air. “Did they just teleport? Like in the movies?”

  Mia snickered. “Yeah, do you turn into a wolf like the movies?”

  Shrugging, Dara moved to the window seat at the front of the store. “I have a problem.”

  “I gathered as much from the phone call. Ha! There it is.” Coming up with a glass or crystal ball, Mia held it out toward Dara as if she’d be happy to see it.

  “There’s a display with about a dozen crystal balls in the back room. I saw it the last time I was here. If you’d mentioned what you were looking for, I could’ve saved you a good five minutes of messing up your display.”

  Mia shook her head. “No, we need this one. So, some big, black winged thing attacked you and you think it is eating your magic—”

  Dara interrupted with a raised
hand. “I don’t have magic. Wolf, remember?”

  With a roll of her eyes, Mia joined Dara on the seat. “Apples, oranges. Your wolf power or whatever you call it. Same thing, it is all magic in different forms. Or energy. Call it whatever you want, but this creature is eating it?”

  “Worse. I didn’t mention this part when I called, but it seems to be draining my pack via the pack bonds. You see, we’re all connected—”

  “Like a web!” Mia looked excited. “There’s this book series, with webs of power—”

  Scowling, Dara grunted. “Yeah, it isn’t a web. I’m not a spider, either.”

  “Sorry. So, not a web.”

  “No, not a web.” Fingertips plucking at the seat cover, Dara looked into the night. “They’re lines. The pack feeds their energy or whatever into me. I share it back. We’re all connected to each other and then everyone is connected to me, because I’m the alpha.”

  “Still sounds like a web,” Mia pointed out.

  “It isn’t a web.”

  “Sorry.”

  Mia didn’t look sorry, but Dara let it go. “Anyway, since the attack, I’ve had these spells where my energy is sapped. I suspect whatever attacked me is somehow infecting me and they’re also taking the pack energy. It weakens us, and with the bodies—”

  Fingers clenched on Dara’s arm, and Mia’s eyes were wide. “Bodies?”

  “Yeah, bodies.”

  “Like, have you had problems with fog lately? Because we’ve been—”

  “No. And could you stop interrupting? There have been bodies, sloppy kills, which I first attributed to the shifters being irresponsibly created by someone or another…anyway, then I was walking toward the pack and something swept out of the sky and attacked me. No fog. A black feathery thing attacked me, if that makes sense. Why do we need a crystal ball, again?”

  Dara asked because Mia stopped listening and was holding the ball in one hand. Humming softly, she waved the ball around Dara a couple times before dropping it back to her lap. Her face looked crestfallen and she nibbled her lip. “I wanted to see your aura.”

  “Do I have one?” Dara resisted sneering the question. She loved Mia—the woman was kind and always made it a point to help when she could. Even so, some of the stuff she dabbled in went from weird to downright silly, in Dara’s opinion.

  “Everyone has an aura. Well, except Chance, but I think in his case it is more likely his is too big to be visible.” Waving a hand, Mia scowled. “And now you’re the one distracting me. As I was saying, I wanted to look at your aura and see if it explained anything.”

  “Hey, Mia?” a small voice drifted down the stairs to ask.

  “Go back to bed, Vic. You have school in the morning,” Mia said without getting up.

  “Mom left, so can I play on the computer for an hour?” A blond head, darker than her mother but still clearly related based on the shape of her face to Janie, peeked between the wrought iron rails of the spiral staircase.

  “You have school in the morning,” Mia repeated. “Go to bed.”

  “Aw, c’mon, Mia. She’ll never know. Please?”

  “Do you want to watch videos or play the mining game thing?” Mia asked.

  Taking this as an invitation, the girl scrambled down the rest of the stairs to stand before them. “The mining game thing, duh. Although it has a name. Hi, I’m Victoria.”

  “Hello, Victoria,” Dara said politely.

  “Hey, Mia, if I help you, can I play for an hour on the computer? Please?”

  Mia tilted her head at the kid, and Dara resisted stomping her foot in frustration. She didn’t have all night for this. She wanted to hunt the thing chasing her, but she hoped Mia might know what it was, which would make the killing of it easier.

  Because whatever the thing was, Dara planned to kill it.

  “How on earth could you help me?” Mia’s question seemed sincere, which irked Dara further. Why didn’t she just tell the kid to can it and go to bed?

  These kind of conversations made Dara happy she didn’t have pups of her own yet. Kids were complicated and—

  “Okay, here’s the deal. This lady is a wolf, which means she’s two things born to one body, right?” The kid tilted her blonde head and twirled a lock of hair around a finger, seeming disinterested while she rambled on. “She’s in charge, so the other wolf people are tied to her, which she explained in a really lame way.”

  “Victoria!” Mia exclaimed. “You’ve been told not to eavesdrop. For that alone, I should send you to bed without another word.”

  “Yeah, but you won’t because I mentioned two things in one body.” Victoria looked smug.

  “Who is this kid?” Dara asked.

  “Janie’s daughter. She’s…it is really hard to explain what she is, but I can say she’s related to the fairy queen and therefore seems to be a bit more than—” Mia hadn’t finished her sentence when the kid laid a hand on her leg.

  “We’re wasting good mining time. Would you like me to finish or go to bed?”

  “She’s spunky, I’ll give her that,” Dara admitted.

  “That’s the nicest way anyone has called me a brat all week. I like you.” Victoria beamed at Dara. Mia tugged her hair, and the child turned to face her. “What?”

  “You’re right. I’m intrigued at the two parts bit. Go on.” Mia stood as she spoke, heading over to a coffee machine. “I might agree to the mining, depending on the validity of your story.”

  Bouncing on her heels, the girl clapped her hands and then spun to face Dara. Speaking in a rush of words, she said, “So, anyway, the thing attacking you was trying to split the two apart and take the wolf. Three drops of blood—it took three drops of your blood and, before you ask, no I don’t know why it is important. I can’t See that bit.”

  “See?” Dara asked.

  “She sometimes has the Sight, it seems. Don’t tell her mother. Janie will flip if she realizes some of the stuff this kid is doing on the side.” Mia smirked, swapping the plastic cup in the machine for a fresh one before clicking brew. “And not solely because of her obsession with computer gaming. Is that all you know, Little Miss Magical, or is there more?”

  “If you don’t pass along the curse, it is going to cure you. Can I go play for an hour? Please?” Victoria clasped her hands together and smiled at Mia.

  “Yeah, yeah, yeah, scram. If you tell Sven and Janie I let you stay up, though, I’m going to play dumb and say I didn’t notice.” Mia accepted the hug the girl hurtled at her and then cast an amused smile at the retreating child. “I seriously love that kid.”

  “So, did anything she said make sense to you?” Dara asked.

  Snagging her coffee cup and blowing on it, Mia turned to face Dara. “I hoped it would make sense to you. I’m not a wolf, after all, so, no…I don’t understand it all. Do you need cured? Because she said—”

  With a shake of her head, Dara stood. “I need to stop whatever is sapping our energy, so perhaps it requires a cure? I don’t know. But you can see something on my aura, you said?”

  Mia nodded, looking unhappy. “I half wish Chance hadn’t been so distracted. He might have been helpful with this. I can ask Vance if I can look at his book collection, I guess…”

  “The vampire?” Dara shook her head, moving toward the door. “I’ll pass thanks. I’m not a huge fan of him.”

  “Which seems to be the general consensus around here a lot lately, poor dead guy. Anyway, I’ve never seen anything like what is coating your aura. It is bad, I can say with certainty. And dark. And I can admit whatever Vic babbled was probably useful, but she’s young. Not everything she says is reliable or entirely understandable. Anyway, I’ll research more on my end, if you want.” Mia tugged Dara into another hug, this one single armed since her other hand held her fresh coffee.

  “I’d appreciate it,” Dara said. On her way to the door, something caught her eye. Picking it up, she held it up to Mia. “How much for this?”

  “For you? On the house
. I’ll call you if I find anything.”

  “I appreciate it.” Pocketing the golden band, Dara headed into the night. “Curses and cures, witches and seers, black creatures swooping out of the night, dead bodies and a rogue.” Talking to herself, she tilted her head back to the sky, listening to the distant roar of the lake. Winds were blowing hard, leaving the water likely all white caps, but the night was full of restless energy.

  Or maybe it was her filled with restless energy. Fingering the band in her pocket, she turned to the south part of the harbor. She needed to thank Lynwood for his help, chase down a monster, and be sure her pack would remain safe.

  No biggie, even if the night had barely begun and exhaustion already dogged her every step.

  CHAPTER Seven

  Shucking his shoes at the door, Lynwood stretched. He hadn’t slept for shit, not since he’d met the alpha who consumed his logic and his thoughts, and he’d worked a good four hours over because one of the employees at the diner was a no call no show. Add on his strange visit with two members of Dara’s pack, and he’d used up all of his reserves.

  Without turning on a light, he stumbled to the kitchen and yawned a jaw popping yawn. A beer, vegging out on the couch, and maybe ordering a pizza sounded like a damn good plan to him. Especially since if he never saw another stove in his life, it’d be about a day too soon. Snagging the beer, he’d started to turn when her voice rang out through his apartment. “I’ll take one of those, if you don’t mind sharing.”

  Adrenaline shooting through his bloodstream jerked him wide awake and filled him with useless energy. He’d nearly dropped the beer and was glad he had not opened it yet since fumbling the bottle would’ve covered him in ice cold foam. “Hey,” he managed. Reopening the fridge, he swapped the beer he’d shaken up with one off the shelf and grabbed her one. Popping both lids, he offered one bottle to the woman perched on his dining room table. “We’ve got to stop meeting like this.”

  “What, you’re not a fan of me repeatedly breaking into your apartment? Seriously, you really need to start locking your windows.” With the unwanted piece of advice, she tilted the bottle and chugged.