by Holley Trent
And he probably wasn’t going to attack her. She knew that. But she was wound up all the same.
“Came to do one last check before I head home for the night,” he said. “I may not be back tomorrow.”
“Why not?” Leticia asked.
Petra imagined Paul shrugging. He seemed like the smug, shrugging type.
“Probably won’t be necessary,” he said. “Is she awake?”
“Yes.” Leticia scooted to the left edge of the bed, freeing the tension on the covers and allowing Petra to sit up.
Since Petra seemed to be wearing pajamas and not just one of those dinky open-backed gowns, she sat up, too, and nearly passed out.
“Shit.” She slapped her hand down on the mattress when she swayed left and someone, probably Graciella, grabbed her arm and straightened her up.
“Go slow,” Graciella said. “You haven’t had a solid meal in forever, and you’re probably a little anemic. I think the hospital you were at had to give you blood.”
And people blood wasn’t wolf blood. Arnold may have been her twin, but they were obviously fraternal. They had incompatible blood types. He would have probably been happy to open a vein for her, but her O- didn’t like his B+.
“Still don’t even know what caused the wreck,” Petra said. She rubbed her eyes and then fixed them on the doctor in the doorway.
Jackass.
He just looked to her like the kind of man who thought he knew everything—high and mighty in his scrub pants and expensive-looking, gold-framed glasses.
She squinted at him. Wait. Did he have those on before? She could admit she’d been a little distracted the last time he’d been in the room, but she would have remembered him wearing glasses. She’d gotten a damned good look at him and his sea green eyes.
“You weren’t wearing glasses before. Could you even see what you were doing?”
He made some sound that could have been a laugh, but she wasn’t sure. He’d barely opened his mouth to make it. “Running gag around here. Curse of the contact lenses. One of mine always falls out at the worst possible time.”
“Have you looked into LASIK?” Lisa asked.
“Mm-hmm. My optometrist referred me to have the surgery done. There’s just the matter of getting the time off from work and driving into Albuquerque. Chris and I are the new guys at the hospital. We don’t have any seniority as far as vacation time scheduling goes.”
“Who’s Chris?” Petra found herself asking. Not that she cared at all, but sometimes when she lacked information, her mouth worked without the say-so of her brain and tried to acquire facts. Useless shit she didn’t need cluttering her mind.
“Chris was my roommate, but I moved out when his girlfriend, now wife, moved in.”
“You’re not still bitter about that, are you?” Lisa chuckled.
He grunted. “I wasn’t bitter. I like her. I was just surprised that things happened the way they did. Shocked the hell out of me.”
Leticia tossed the remote control onto the edge of the bed and bent. When she picked up her heel, Petra realized she was putting on her shoes.
Don’t go! Don’t leave me here with him.
“Where are you living now?” Graciella asked.
“Same building, just in a smaller unit. It’s not like I could ever actually get away from Chris. We lived together for too many years. We wouldn’t know what to do with ourselves if we weren’t bumping into each in hallways all the time.” Paul took Leticia’s former place at the bedside and leaned onto the edge, canting his head.
Ohhhh boy. She felt like a socially inept specimen, and he was some cross between a Ken doll and a nearsighted Mel Gibson playing Mad Max. He probably hadn’t had a haircut since the last time Mel Gibson was on a movie poster.
And he was perfect-looking. She wanted to punch him right on his square jaw, but instead, her mouth started moving again.
“You don’t look very old for a doctor,” she blurted, and then looked away with shame burning her cheeks.
Like you’re so good at guessing, anyway.
If she stared at him a little longer, she might be able to make a good guess, but he was hard to look at. His gaze was too intense—threatening, maybe—and there was judgment laced into his raised chin and flaring nostrils.
He doesn’t like what he’s seeing? Well, right back at ya, dude.
“I’m assure you, I’m old enough,” he said. “I’ve probably got T-shirts older than you.”
“I doubt that,” she muttered.
She looked young, maybe, with her general lack of fat in places most women over eighteen had mounds. Puberty had been over for seven years, and she had barely any curves to show for it. That had likely been partly due to starvation when she and Arnold were on the road. Their mother had been a vibrant, voluptuous wolf. She didn’t know about her father—couldn’t remember him. He’d bounced when the going got tough, and she did the best she could not to think about him. That was why she didn’t claim his name.
She scoffed, and didn’t realize she had until everyone else in the room turned and stared at her.
She grimaced and cleared her throat.
Then her stomach growled.
Damn it.
“Good timing,” Leticia said. “I was going to go see if dinner was ready. Esther was cooking us something.”
“Who’s Esther? Someone said her name before—said she was at the hospital?”
“Right,” Lisa said. “Esther’s one of our wolves. Recently found her way to the pack, but she already knew folks here. Adam is her uncle-in-law, and Mrs. Carbone is her maternal aunt. Her brother, Anton, is the pack’s next alpha. She’s got two kids who keep us in hysterics.”
“Kids?” Kids are good. Kids soften most wolves. “There are kids here?”
“Uh-huh,” Leticia said as she padded to the door. “Got a bunch of babies, and then there are Esther’s kids from her first marriage. They go to the school in town with all the Vikings.” She giggled and disappeared around the doorframe.
“Vikings…” Petra furrowed her brow and slowly swiveled her gaze over to Paul.
He had a crackling, breathtaking kind of energy that wasn’t warm like a wolf’s, but marked him as being just as weird as one.
Witches, they’d said.
She’d never been around any witches before.
Maybe that’s why he’s wigging me out. His energy is weird.
“A bit far from the sea, aren’t you?” she said under her breath.
He grunted. “Contrary to what history might lead you to believe about the first Vikings in North America, my clan has been on this continent for nearly a thousand years. We’ve been settled in New Mexico for about two hundred.”
“That’s how you were able to snap up such a big parcel of land out here in the middle of nowhere, right?” Lisa asked.
Paul grunted again. “The queen at the time led the group here based on a dream the goddess Gefjon sent to her. Gefjon told her where they could find water to well in this terribly dry place, and fortunately, the clan trusted her when she started them on the trek.”
“I bet folks leave you alone out here.” Petra stared somewhere in the general vicinity of his Adam’s apple. Most of the time, she tried to look a man in the eyes when she was talking to him, but she couldn’t bring herself to give Paul that same courtesy.
Actually, if he’d been a wolf, she would have been expected in most packs to not look him in the eyes. Women were supposed to avert their gazes, as if they were looking into the face of God and not just power-tripping assholes who went furry on the say-so of the full moon.
“You’d be surprised,” Lisa said after a moment. “The reason the wolves live here is because Adam and all the guys do security work for Paul’s clan—the Afótama. Their queen is always a hot target. While most people don’t concern themselves with this community, the few that know about it and the Afótama fear what their queens have historically been able to do.”
“What can she do?”
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Paul picked up Petra’s left hand and fiddled with the corner of the bandage there.
Her gut seemed to fall right out of her body at his touch, and it took her lungs along for the ride.
She wanted to yank her hand back, but couldn’t. She may as well have been paralyzed, given her body’s insistent refusal to cooperate when she needed it to.
“Suffice it to say, she’s a powerful psychic with a fairly diverse magical skill set, much like the rest of her family,” he said. “What makes her scary is that she can use her power across great distances.”
“Oh.” Petra cringed, more at the thought of what kind of damage the queen could do and not so much at the sensation of Paul ripping the bandage off her hand. “Does she know I’m here?”
“If she doesn’t know yet, she’ll find out soon enough,” Lisa said. “Anton’s mate, Christina, works in the executive mansion, as does another of our wolves, Ashley. They see Queen Tess all the time. They’ll probably chat about the news, eventually, and Queen Tess will probably make her way over here to meet you and Arnold. The community is small enough—a few thousand people—that she’d recognize all of us on sight, even if she couldn’t psychically discern that we were wolves.”
“Half-wolf in my case,” she said quietly.
Petra wriggled a little lower under the covers and rubbed her eyes again. Too much information was being thrown at her too quickly. She wanted to go back to sleep, wake up, and try that whole “thinking” thing again.
“Really? Half?” Lisa asked.
“Surprise, surprise. We’re in-betweeners. Hard to belong anywhere. That’s one of the many reasons Arnold and I have been exploring the great U.S. of A on our own for all these years.” She dropped her hands, sighing, and waited for her vision to clear on Lisa. For whatever reason, Petra was reading her as the dominant wolf in the room. “That gonna be a problem?”
“Why would it be a problem?” Paul asked.
Petra refused to look at him. She looked at Lisa, who was looking at Paul, likely studying the things his too-pretty face was doing.
“The Afótama don’t have a problem taking in halves and quarters. Tess tries to pull everyone back into the fold if they want to be here.”
Lisa met Petra’s narrowed gaze. “I could tell something was a little off about Arnold. Him being half-wolf accounts for the energy difference. He can shift, though?”
Petra nodded. “I can’t.”
Obviously.
She had no mate and, thus, no bite. The part of her that was beast would remain trapped inside her until her mate had bitten her. She wasn’t even so certain that the wolf would come out even then. Just because Arnold got the gene didn’t mean Petra did. She felt like a wolf, though. She communicated with the beast part of herself frequently and trusted the beast’s instincts, but she had no way of knowing if she’d ever be able to shapeshift.
Her mother never had. She’d never been bitten, as far as Petra knew.
“Like we said,” Graciella began. “Everyone here is a little weird. Stephanie is also a half-wolf. I don’t think her mate cares one way or the other.”
“Darius?” Lisa asked with a note of incredulity. “He’d kiss the ground she walked on even if she didn’t have a drop of wolf in her.”
“You’re right. He so would.” Graciella gave Petra a little nudge. “And I have a mate, but didn’t want a bite, so I don’t shapeshift. Anton refuses to bite Christina, so she can’t shapeshift. Esther can shift, but the full moon doesn’t force her to.”
“That’s entirely nonsensical,” Paul said.
“Seems that way, but you’ve got to remember there are different wolf types. Alpha, Mrs. Carbone, Vic, Anton, Colt, Darius, and Esther—they’re not the same kind of wolf as the rest of us. Part of the reason they were outcasts. They’re not controlled by the moon cycles. They aren’t forced to shift.”
“I didn’t know your pack was that mixed up.”
Lisa guffawed. “Oh, you have no idea. We’ve got folks here from eight or more different packs. Norseton is like the Ellis Island of werewolves. Give us your expelled, your poor, your howling masses…”
Paul’s sultry laugh rolled over Petra’s skin like a caress and forced all the blood in her body to her cheeks again.
What the hell is that?
She kept looking at Lisa. Anywhere but at the man.
She cleared her throat and went even lower beneath the covers. Before, she’d wanted to get out of the bed, find some clothes, grab her brother—wherever he was—and run, but the bed seemed a safer bet for the time being. At least there, she was covered. No way for anyone to leer at her or critique her inadequate form if they couldn’t see it.
“Diversity is a good cure for inbreeding,” Graciella said brightly.
“I’d say so,” Lisa agreed.
“Is inbreeding a big problem in wolfpacks?” Paul asked.
“The fear of it was why my mother took a human mate,” Petra said quietly. She didn’t know whom she’d meant to share that tidbit with, only that she’d had to contribute to the conversation. She was sitting there in the middle of the discussion and didn’t want to be ignored. She wasn’t used to being ignored.
She cleared her throat and fondled with the top edge of the bed sheet.
In bed like some kind of invalid. Need to get up. Get my bearings. Go…somewhere. Anywhere.
“Small pack?” Paul asked.
She didn’t answer immediately, and she couldn’t think of a good reason why except for spite. There was no sensible purpose for keeping him waiting, except that she just wanted to.
“Smaller than most, probably,” she said. “I wouldn’t know anymore, though. Haven’t really been home for long in ten years.”
“That’s a long time away from your family,” Lisa said.
“I don’t have any family anymore,” Petra admitted. “No one but Arnold.”
None that she’d claim, anyway. Her mother may have been dead, but her father was probably out there somewhere being irresponsible garbage like he’d been when she and Arnold were kids. She had no intention of seeking him out.
Leticia poked her head into the room and locked Lisa in her gaze. “Esther needs me to run to the store so she can finish dinner. I’ll be right back.”
Lisa gave her head a hard shake and started for the door. “Not by yourself, you’re not. I’ll go with you.”
“For goodness sake, I can get to the store without getting dragged off by some wild animal. The grocery store is a ten-minute walk from here.”
“In the dark. You may have a wolf’s instincts, but you can’t shift and you can’t shoot worth a damn, either.” She herded Leticia out of the room, putting her head back in at the last moment to say, “We’ll be back in half an hour.”
Petra hoped the doctor would follow them out, but instead, he went to his bag on the dresser and unzipped it.
She squeezed Graciella’s hand and gave her what she hoped was an articulate look. Don’t leave.
Graciella patted her hand, smiled softly, then reached across her and grabbed the remote. “This television only has basic cable. Once you’re up and getting settled in and decide you want a different tier or something, let Nixon know.”
“I don’t really know the difference. I don’t follow any shows. We keep moving too much to get attached to anything.”
“Is that the way you like things? Because Arnold seems like he’d be happy to stay put for a while.”
“Does he, now?” Petra asked flatly. “Where is my brother, anyway? I haven’t had a chance to talk to him, really, since I woke up this morning. I need him to tell me what’s going on.”
“I’m sure he’s just giving you some space.”
More like hiding, the freakin’ coward.
He’d never said anything to her about wanting to settle down somewhere. Not one peep about any particular city. Nothing about finding a steady job or finding a permanent place to park their truck.
Wait…
“Our truck. Where’s our truck?”
“The one you wrecked?” Graciella furrowed her brow when Petra nodded. “Sweetie, that’s gone. Totaled. Scrap metal is what the EMT told the folks at that hospital. Had you and Arnold not been wolves, you probably wouldn’t have survived the impact.”
“I don’t remember. I—” Petra closed her eyes and clawed at the blanket over her, desperate for some tactile stimulus. She didn’t know what had happened, only that she’d been at the wheel, and Arnold had been about to take a nap. His eyelids had been drooping and she kept telling him to go ahead and sleep—that there wasn’t anything to see on the desolate stretch of road they were traveling. That was all she remembered.
“So, we can’t leave?” she whispered. “No way we can go?”
“Like we said before,” Graciella said, “no one’s keeping you here against your will, but I doubt Adam will be so eager to set you loose without you having some sort of plan. Things are good here. You’d have a roof over your head. As much quiet or noise as you want. A chance to earn your own way without some greedy alpha sucking up all your paycheck as dues. You could have a normal life.” She cringed. “Well. As normal as any wolf could possibly have.”
“I don’t believe normal is possible at all.”
“Well, believe it. This pack has been doing just fine for more than a year. Ask anyone in Norseton if they’re on the up-and-up if you don’t trust my bias. They’ll tell you the same thing.”
Anyone in Norseton.
Reflexively, her head turned toward the doctor, who leaned against the dresser with his arms folded over his chest and holding a few pill bottles in his large hands.
If he had an opinion about what Graciella had said about the pack, he didn’t speak it. Instead, he studied Petra for a long moment, and then shifted his gaze to Graciella. “I need to examine her. Will you hang out long enough for me to check her breaks?”
Breaks? “I’m broken? I don’t feel broken.”
He didn’t respond except to move closer to the bed and set the pill bottles on the nightstand. From that distance, she couldn’t tell what was in them.