Running with Wolves (Shifter Country Wolves Book 1)

by Noir, Roxie

  A car pulled up in the driveway, and Greta stomped toward the door.

  She reached it, opened it, took a deep breath, and then turned around, trying to smile.

  “Dinner was amazing,” she said. “I’m really, really sorry.”

  “We’ll see you at the pack meeting,” Elliott said. “Now go kick that drunk asshole out of your bar.”

  Greta and the barback, Jim, hardly spoke during the whole ten-minute drive back to her bar.

  “I’m really sorry,” Jim said. He was about twenty-two and had the exact look of a wide-eyed farm boy. “Were you busy?”

  Greta grit her teeth together. It’s not Jim’s fault, she reminded herself. Don’t take this out on him.

  “Kind of,” she said.

  One of the sexiest men I’ve ever seen was feeding me cheesecake while his mate kissed my neck, she thought sarcastically. Nothing I’d rather do than go kick this jerk out of my bar.

  She shoved her car door open before Jim even stopped completely, and stomped through the door and into the main room before he even had the engine off. A few regulars sitting at the bar glanced up at her, saw her face, and glanced away again.

  Annika just pointed at the two pool tables. Zeke was sitting on the floor, leaning his entire body against one of them, his face mashed up against the heavy wooden table. The air smelled like match smoke, and as Greta approached him, he unsteadily lit another one, then held the tiny flame to the thick wooden leg of the pool table.

  Nothing happened. The table leg was just beginning to turn dark brown where Zeke had been trying to light it on fire, but it was obvious that he could light a thousand matches without causing any actual damage.

  “Get the fuck out of my bar,” she said, standing with her hands on her hips.

  Zeke looked up at her. His eyes seemed like marbles in their sockets, rolling around loosely.

  “Greta,” he said. “I missed you.”

  “Give me your phone,” she commanded.

  Instead, he gestured at his body, half-slumped and on the floor against a pool table.

  “All this could be yours,” he muttered. “I fuck way better than that nerd.”

  Doubt it, thought Greta.

  “Phone,” she ordered again.

  “You deserve a real man,” he went on, shoving one hand into his pocket. “Not some whiny baby who can’t even fight his own fights.”

  He pulled his phone out of his pocket, and Greta snatched it away.

  “You would love my cock!” he shouted, so loud that everyone at the bar turned. Greta’s spine stiffened and a shiver of danger ran down it as she squeezed her left hand into a fist, flipping through Zeke’s contacts for his older brother. The one in the police.

  After three rings, he answered.

  “Dane Sorenson speaking,” he said.

  “Hi, Dane, this is Greta over at the Tooth and Claw,” she said. As she did, she turned around and watched Zeke.

  His face changed slowly, from anger, to confusion, to horror.

  Dane sighed into the phone.

  “Can I help you with something?” he asked. From the tone of his voice, it seemed like he already knew what she was going to say.

  “Your brother is drunker than a drowned mouse and trying to set my bar on fire,” she said.

  “Do you want me to call the fire station?” he said. He sounded alarmed, and Greta felt bad.

  “No, no,” she said. “He’s lighting matches and holding them to the leg of a pool table. The pool table is fine, I just need him out.”

  “I’ll be right there,” he said stiffly, then ended the call.

  He sounded pissed, and Greta couldn’t help but be nastily pleased.

  She threw the phone back to Zeke and it landed in his lap. He just stared at it.

  “Come on,” he said. Half of his face tried to leer at her, but his eyes rolled around lazily in their sockets. “Bend over this pool table, sweetheart, I’ll show you how a real wolf fucks, not one of these pussies who couldn’t even hack high school.”

  Greta was utterly furious, her wolf growling and snapping, just barely beneath her skin. She began to sweat from the sheer effort of not shifting, because what she wanted to do was go wolf and just tear this joker’s throat out.

  He was exactly why she wasn’t mated and didn’t really like to date. It seemed like right below the surface of every wolf in Rustvale was someone like Zeke, who thought that Greta owed him sex, that she was something to be bargained for and won. A trophy.

  He doesn’t know he almost just died, she thought. He still thinks that, because I’m thirty, female, and unmated, he’s better than me.

  Instead of kicking his face in, she walked into the backroom office.

  “Let me know when his brother gets here,” she called to Annika, the barmaid. “And Zeke’s banned forever, obviously.”

  “Got it,” the other girl called.

  Chapter Seven

  Elliott

  The alarm went off at 6:30 on Tuesday morning, but Elliott was already lying awake in their enormous bed, staring at the ceiling. Gray light just started to seep through the window, and Elliott wished that he could go back to sleep, or that classes started the next day, or something.

  I should be excited, he thought. I got a tenure-track job. It’s like finding a diamond-encrusted unicorn on the bottom of the ocean. What’s my problem?

  He knew his problem. His problem was Rustvale, his problem was his parents who thought that he worked on a farm.

  His problem was that the school’s administration didn’t technically know he was a shifter, and a wolf shifter at that. His problem was that of all the students in his classes, there would be three, maybe four wolves out of almost a hundred students.

  Elliott knew that all those problem were related. His lying to his parents about his degree was related to no wolves wanting to go to college, because wolf society discouraged college. People who got more school than they had to were considered soft and weak, and even if no one would ever come out and say that, it was what they thought.

  He sighed and got out of bed, padding into the bathroom.

  The first step is that you stop lying, he said, looking in the mirror as the water heated up. You put yourself through school roping cattle and doing farm work. You could kick the asses of half the wolves in Rustvale, easy.

  Why not fess up about having a Ph.D.?

  He stepped into the shower and let the water hit his face, waking him up instantly, and he shook his whole body a little. A dog thing, he knew, but sometimes those things just felt so good and so right that he did them where no one could see. In the shower, for example.

  As he dried off, he remembered that they also had their first pack meeting tonight.

  On one hand, they’d see Greta again, and Elliott could hardly wait.

  On the other, he’d see everyone who’d bullied him in high school again. He hadn’t talked to anyone in high school — except Greta — since he’d graduated, and he’d only met Greta again a few days ago. He had no idea how he hadn’t noticed her in high school — those curves, that laugh — but he’d probably been too busy trying to not get beaten up.

  He shook himself off again, something oddly comforting in that animal movement. Then he went back into their bedroom and began digging through a box labeled Elliott, Work clothes, Black Pants.

  By the time he walked onto campus, an hour before his first class, he felt a little better. There was always something about that first day of school: the perfect crisp snap to the air, the excited students, all the professors looking the sharpest that they’d look all year. Even in graduate school he’d looked forward to buying new pens and notebooks, and then slowly filling them over the course of the semester.

  In fact, there were a couple of boxes labeled Elliot, Grad School, Course notes in the house. Shane wanted to get rid of them, and he had a point when he said that Elliott was probably never going to even look at them again, but Elliott just liked having them around.
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br />   The Classics Department was in a wing of the Liberal Arts building, on the third floor. Elliott took the stairs, wanting to stretch his legs as much as possible and get some of his nervous energy out before teaching.

  “Morning, Elliott,” said Professor Hunt, a tweedy, older human who walked determinedly down the hall.

  “Morning, Eustace,” Elliott said.

  Before his first job interview, he’d taken the pictures of the other faculty from the department webpage and made flashcards, then forced Shane to quiz him.

  Once a dork, always a dork, but at least now he knew everyone’s names as faces like the back of his own hands.

  A head popped out of an office door, an older man with a bad dye job and glasses that might have been trendy forty years ago. Dr. Nigel, the department head.

  “Dr. Whiting!” he said. For some reason, Dr. Nigel insisted on calling everyone by their title and last name. The rest of the department seemed to only use first names, so Elliott had no idea what it was all about. He chalked it up to the whole “quirky professor” thing.

  “Good morning, Dr. Nigel,” he said.

  “Do you have a moment?” the other man asked. “Dr. Manse is back from her sabbatical studying the ruins in Malta and I’d like to introduce you before the school year gets too far underway.”

  Even though Elliott stood a head taller than him, Dr. Nigel pulled him along the hallway with the force of a small tornado.

  “Did really exciting work on the Bronze Age Collapse. Foremost scholar in her field, also translates late-Republic poetry like a dream. Here we are.”

  Dr. Nigel pulled up at a doorway, then peeked around the corner, knocking on the door frame.

  “Dr. Manse?” he asked. “Got a moment?”

  “Sure, Dr. Nigel,” she said. She had a deep, booming, authoritative voice, though there was something about it that gave Elliott’s wolf pause.

  “This is our new hire, Dr. Elliott Whiting,” he said, and pulled Elliott into Dr. Manse’s office with him.

  She was fairly good-looking for an older woman, and had a state, serene presence, along with rich brown hair, a single white streak flowing from her temple to her collar.

  Elliott’s wolf stood up and started pacing back and forth, and he could feel its urges inside his human form. Howl, alert the pack.

  Dr. Manse was a lion. She smiled at Elliott, and Elliott forced himself to smile back.

  Lions were fine. Bears and wolves sometimes didn’t get along in the wild, but that had been mostly between fringe elements. Lions and wolves, though, worked perfectly well together in professional settings.

  But she knew he was a wolf. He knew that she could smell it on him, just as surely as she smelled like a cat to him.

  “Welcome,” she boomed, holding out her hand. Elliott took it and shook, doing his absolute best to keep his cool.

  “Dr. Whiting specializes in Middle Roman Empire history, as well as satirical fragments found from that time period. He’s also teaching Latin I this semester.”

  Dr. Manse nodded, smiling wide.

  “Call me Sarah,” she said. “I’m glad to see they finally hired another one.”

  Cold sweat slid down Elliott’s back. She meant another shifter.

  Dr. Nigel just cocked his head to one side, looking like a confused bird.

  “Another what?” he asked.

  Elliott could feel his wolf growling, and his eyes went wide. He made desperate eye contact with Dr. Manse.

  He doesn’t know, Elliott tried to think at her.

  There was a long pause.

  “Another historian,” Sarah finally said. “Always good to have more around.”

  Elliott could have kissed her. Platonically.

  “Nice to finally meet you,” he managed to say.

  “I’ll see you all at the department meeting on Friday,” Dr. Nigel said, and then left the room.

  Elliott looked at Sarah.

  Sarah looked at Elliott.

  “They don’t know,” she said. “I don’t know how you did that. I look at you and I can practically hear you howl.”

  Elliott felt a little like the walls were closing in.

  Then she laughed.

  “Don’t look so worried,” she said. “Your secret’s safe with me. I went to grad school in Texas, where they shoot mountain lions on sight and they’re not much kinder to shifters. I’d never tell.”

  “Thanks,” said Elliott. “There’s not exactly a lot of wolves in academia.”

  “True,” said Sarah. “Though, if anything, they’d put your face on a diversity pamphlet in two shakes of a tail and brag about having one of the few lupine professors of Classics in the United States.”

  She studied Elliott’s face for a minute.

  “One thing at a time,” Elliott said. “Let’s see if the students eat me alive first.”

  “I think you’ll be right as rain,” she said. “But good luck out there.”

  It’s gonna be a day, Elliott thought.

  After his morning, nothing else seemed so bad. Even though he was teaching four classes, a pretty heavy load, he only had two of them on Tuesday. He had no idea why Tuesday was the first day of class, but figured that he wasn’t in a position to ask a lot of questions.

  His first class, a survey on translating late-period Roman historians, was a small seminar. Out of ten students, there were three lions, a bear, and six humans. As the students laughed, talked, and argued about the relative merits of each writer and translation, Elliott quietly marveled at how well they all got along. When he’d been in school, the lions had kept to themselves in their own cliques, even in the lion fraternity. The same with the bears, though there were less of them. There had only been a couple of other wolves on campus at all, and Elliott had barely hung out with them, preferring to be a loner with a few human friends, mostly from the rugby team.

  They had probably figured it out, but he’d never told them, and then they’d drifted apart after college.

  Maybe things are changing, he thought. Triad marriage has been legal for, what, a year now?

  “Any questions?” he asked the class when he finished going over the syllabus.

  A girl raised her hand. Human, long blond hair.

  “How frequent are the pop quizzes going to be?” she asked.

  Elliott grinned.

  “If I told you, they wouldn’t be pop quizzes, would they?” he said.

  She made a face. It had probably worked with countless boys, but it did nothing for Elliott.

  Welcome to college, he thought.

  “All right,” he said. “We’re starting with Livy’s Ab Urbe Condita, so please have the lines in the syllabus translated and ready by Thursday. See you then.”

  The students got up and filed out, leaving Elliott an extra ten minutes to get across campus to his next classroom, where he’d be teaching Introduction to Latin Language. It was something he hadn’t taught in years, but Dr. Nigel had told him that all the Classics professors took turns teaching it, and it just happened to be his turn.

  Elliott was pleased to have the job at all, and didn’t argue with the man.

  He got to the other classroom a few minutes early and draped his sport coat over the back of a chair, then wrote PROFESSOR WHITING - INTRO TO LATIN on the board. Nothing worse than students in the wrong place, he thought, as he wandered over to gaze out of the room’s high windows.

  A few minutes later, the students started trickling in. Elliott tried not to note which ones were shifters, but it was second nature to him by now. Mostly humans, some lions, a few bears.

  No wolves. There were never wolves.

  Quit worrying about it, he thought. There were two more minutes until class, and he walked up to the head of the room, getting the syllabi out of his briefcase.

  The bell on the quad tolled at exactly 2 pm, and he picked up his chalk and opened his mouth.

  One more student came in as the bell was tolling. She was an older student and had at leas
t fifteen years’ seniority on the other students, easily. She had light brown hair that was just barely starting to go gray at her temples, and wore a blue plaid shirt over a pair of well-broken in jeans with heavy boots on her feet.

  When she entered, she stopped short for a second, then continued on to the back row. She sat and took her class materials out, never once taking her eyes from Elliott’s face.

  Elliott’s heart nearly sang when he saw her.

  Another wolf! He thought. Finally.

  He smiled at the class, welcomed them, and went over the syllabus.

  After class, the students trickled out and Elliott stuffed papers back into his briefcase, preparing to head back to his office, drop them off, and then go home so he could change before the pack meeting. If he showed up in slacks and a sportcoat, they’d probably figure out that he hadn’t been working on a farm all day.

  “Professor Whiting?” said a woman’s voice. Elliott knew who it was before he even looked up.

  “Yes,” he said.

  It was the wolf student, and she stood nervously on the other side of the desk, drumming her fingers on the wooden surface.

  “I just wanted to let you know that I’ll be taking a couple of absences toward the end of October,” she said. “Family trip that my husband says I can’t get out of.”

  She gave a little shrug.

  “Sure,” he said. “I don’t have a problem excusing pre-arranged absences.”

  “Thanks,” she said, and nodded her head stiffly.

  Then she waited another moment. Elliott wasn’t quite sure what was going on, but stood there, certain that she was about to say something.

  “I’m Tamara Sorenson, by the way,” she said, almost like she was holding her breath.

  Then she let it out, in a rush.

  “It’s so great that you’re teaching this class,” she said in one exhale. “I feel so much better about going back to school now, my husbands thought it was dumb but my kids said to go for it, and look, here I am!”