Big Bad Wolf

by Christine Warren

  He frowned down at her, wondering if he could possibly look as baffled as he felt. “But that should make you happy. Why should knowing you’ve found the right person scare you?”

  “Because there are so many ways I could ruin it.”

  Graham laughed. “Oh, baby, if you think I haven’t had the exact same fear every minute of the time since I met you—”

  She lifted her head and pulled back—the whole three or four inches he allowed her—to meet his gaze with a scowl. “Damn it, would you stop being all perfect for just a few minutes?”

  Graham blinked. “Huh?”

  “You have to stop it! You just keep doing and saying the right thing all the time, and it’s driving me crazy! Where is the arrogant jerk I first met, the one who thought doing an impression of a bulldozer was the most effective way to win friends and influence people?”

  The woman could change her moods so fast, she left him dizzy, Graham decided as the first squeezing knots of a headache began to form behind his eyes. Shit. She was actually causing him mental anguish! And this was his mate?

  “Just tell me one thing,” he groaned.

  “What?”

  “Was that supposed to make any kind of sense to me at all, because I really feel like that last sentence of yours was broadcast in Swahili and someone forgot to show me where the closed-captioning button is on this remote.”

  “Now you know how I’ve felt for the last three days!”

  “And how did I confuse you?”

  “You’re the one who had to go and be a werewolf.”

  He gave a short bark of laughter. “Yeah, because God knows I did that just to piss you off.”

  “You know that’s not what I meant. It’s just this interspecies divide we keep running up against. It makes everything so bloody . . . complicated.”

  “Welcome to real life.”

  Missy gave an exhausted sigh and wriggled up into a sitting position.

  “I suppose we’ll each find some way to adjust,” she offered. “I mean if you can try being more reasonable from time to time instead of always barking orders at me, I suppose I can run through the forest on Thursday night and let you chase me down. You know, since it will help save you from your evil, scheming cousin.”

  “Look on the bright side.” He eased into a sitting position next to her and tried to look encouraging. “When I catch you, I’m going to throw you down and make you scream with pleasure.”

  “Sure, that’s what they all say.”

  He sighed. “I’m sorry you have to go through this. I wish it wasn’t a tradition, or I wish it had already become obsolete. But it is what it is, and I can’t change it. And unfortunately, given the current situation, non-participation isn’t really an option for us.”

  “Yeah. That’s pretty much what I thought.”

  Graham felt her restlessness even before she stood, pulling out of his arms to cross the room. She stopped in front of the window, turning to stare out at the street outside below them, which annoyed Graham. He wanted to see her face, and it seemed like she was hiding it from him.

  “So I guess I’m going to get to see a real-live Lupine matehunt,” she mused. “Even if it kills me.”

  “I won’t let anyone hurt you.”

  When she spoke, her words came so softly that he could barely hear her answer.

  “I know.”

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Missy stared at the wall like a lobotomized inpatient and let the conversation drone on around her. The last few days had passed much too quickly, most of them thankfully full of laughter and sex and idle conversations and the kind of getting-to-know-you exercises most couples took months or years to get to. Yet in less than a week Missy felt as if she knew Graham better than she knew any other person in the world, maybe even including herself.

  The only dark spot in an otherwise stellar experience had been the occasional feeling she had of being kept prisoner in a particularly luxurious jail cell. Since the attack at her apartment building and the declaration of the matehunt, Graham hadn’t allowed her to spend a single minute unprotected. When she wasn’t with Graham, he had Logan following her around like a big, furry shadow, and when neither of them was available, Samantha got drafted into guard duty.

  Today, Graham and all of his most trusted male pack members were meeting to discuss the Curtis threat and their strategy for the coming matehunt. Half a minute ago, they had dumped Missy in this room full of women she didn’t know, with the exception of Graham’s secretary, and deserted her, hieing off to their secret clubhouse while she was condemned to endure the seeming equivalent of a werewolf tea party. Never mind that she’d been too dazed to protest, she still planned to blame everything on him.

  She felt Samantha’s hand tugging at her elbow and looked up at the other woman who had rushed over to greet her, the second Graham had left her at the door.

  “Luna,” the brunette murmured, urging her to face the crowd that had gathered around them. “Everyone’s been waiting to meet you. Can I introduce them to you?”

  There she went with that “Luna” thing again, even though Missy still didn’t understand how she could be the alpha female when she wasn’t even Lupine. Shouldn’t they have rules about this kind of thing?

  “Sure,” she agreed, since she couldn’t think of a way to disagree, and let Samantha lead her over to a large, almost throne-like chair and urge her to sit. The symbolism was not lost on her. She looked up at the Lupine who stood at her side like a sentinel and sighed. What the heck had she gotten herself into?

  “This is Lucy Fallon,” Samantha introduced as a tall, black-haired woman who looked capable of taking on Xena in a fair fight stepped up before the chair and looked down on Missy with an expression of obvious disapproval. “She’s a police officer in Alphabet City.”

  Ah. That explained it. She probably worked the late, late shift, too. The one when all the bodies tended to be found.

  “It’s nice to meet you,” Missy lied. She felt horrendously awkward, unsure if she should be shaking hands or nodding her head or letting people kiss her ring—not that she was wearing one. Instead, she just smiled and hoped this wouldn’t take too long.

  Lucy stared at her until Missy saw Samantha frown. When the silence stretched for another few seconds, Samantha started to growl, and Missy looked at her in shock. Missy got an even bigger shock when she saw the secretary’s lips twist and bare her teeth in a snarl.

  “I just introduced you to your Luna,” Samantha snapped, her voice sounding a handful of octaves lower than it had just a few seconds ago. “Be careful you don’t offend her with your bad manners.”

  Lucy narrowed her cop’s eyes, dark, flat, and vaguely unsettling, and bared her own teeth in a sneer.

  “My manners are fine for meeting a human,” she hissed without looking away from Missy’s face. “It takes more than you calling her by the title to make her my Luna. She’s human. The fact that Graham is fucking her does not make her my alpha.”

  The woman turned her back on Missy and began to stalk away, and it didn’t take a Lupine Emily Post to make the reluctant alpha realize she’d just been insulted. Big-time. It didn’t matter that she’d never asked to be anyone’s Luna. She still wasn’t the type to stand back and let herself be insulted.

  “You may be right. Sleeping with Graham probably doesn’t make me alpha,” she agreed, raising her voice so it echoed clearly among the quiet crowd that had gathered to watch the interplay. She waited until Lucy turned back to face her before she finished her statement. “After all, it obviously didn’t do much for you.”

  She knew she’d scored a hit when she saw Lucy’s face alternately pale and then fill with bright color. Great. Not only was the woman a cop with an attitude, she had to be a jealous, scorned lover, too? That might just make Missy’s day. Still, she’d made her stand, and she couldn’t back down now.

  Casually she crossed one leg over the other and smoothed an invisible wrinkle in her ill-fitting jeans as
if she wore yards of fine-woven silk. “But there’s a difference between you and me, Lucy. Graham may have fucked you once upon a time.” She flicked her eyes up and down over the woman’s tall frame, clearly insinuating that she couldn’t understand that piece of Graham’s past folly. “But I’m the one he made his mate.”

  “Bitch!”

  If the woman had sprung first and cast aspersions later, she might have been able to knock Missy into another dimension entirely, but as it was, all Lucy managed to do was hit the back of the chair and send it tumbling ass-over-end with herself on top of it. Missy had slid out of the seat before the “b” sound had fully formed on Lucy’s lips, and by the time the Lupine realized her prey had escaped, Samantha and another woman had stepped between the would-be combatants and faced Lucy with their teeth bared.

  “Back off!” Samantha snarled, and Missy had to blink twice before she convinced herself she was looking at the same brunette she’d accused of being timid earlier that morning. Funny how a little violence could change her opinion about someone.

  Climbing to her feet, she dusted her hands off on her butt and peered out from behind two Lupine shoulders, which meant she really couldn’t see a darned thing. Wedging her hands between her self-appointed bodyguards, she pried them apart and stepped forward until she could look her attacker in the eye.

  “Be careful whom you call a bitch, Lucy,” she warned, meeting the other woman’s furious gaze with a level one of her own. So what if her knees were knocking on the inside? In this case, appearances were all that mattered. “Only one of us gets furry once a month, and believe me when I say, it ain’t me.”

  Lucy growled and shifted her weight forward. The women standing just behind Missy started to step forward, but Missy held them back with upraised hands. If by some weird twist of fate she really was Graham’s mate, she did not plan to spend the rest of her life letting someone else fight her battles and defend her from the big bad she-wolf.

  “Let me make this perfectly clear, Lucy,” she said, her voice firm despite her inner unease. “The fact that I’m not Lupine has not escaped anyone. Not me and certainly not Graham. If he doesn’t mind that I’m human, then it damned sure isn’t any of your business. Do you understand?”

  “It’s my business when he parades you in front of the pack like an equal,” the Lupine snarled. “It’s my business when you set yourself up as alpha female despite the fact that you couldn’t win a tug-of-war with a newborn pup. You’re weak, and in our world, a weak leader is a dead leader.”

  “But I don’t have to be as strong as you.” Missy held herself tall and steady and dared any one of the women in the room to challenge her, Lucy included. They might be able to kick her butt, but that didn’t mean she had any intention of cowering in front of them. “I am the alpha’s mate. That makes me alpha whether you like it or not. I don’t care if I can’t fight you and win, because if you lay one single hand on me, Graham will rip out your intestines and feast on them. So tell me again how I don’t deserve to be alpha.”

  Lucy met her steady gaze for one heartbeat. Two. Three. Then Lucy visibly swallowed a very bitter pill and looked away. Missy felt her knees almost buckle with relief.

  “Very good.” She nodded, pretending to be confident and self-assured and powerful and a hundred other things she’d never been in her life. “I’m glad to have met you, Lucy. Now get out of my living room before I forget to be a gracious winner.”

  The other woman stalked out the door like she had a hot poker jammed up her rear, but at least she left. When the door closed behind her, Missy took a very deep breath and let it out on a sigh.

  “Well,” she said, turning to face Samantha. “That was fun. Why don’t you introduce me to everyone else?”

  Spending an entire afternoon with a roomful of unmated female werewolves turned out to be one of the most educational experiences of Missy’s life. In between some of the most bloodcurdling and frankly terrifying descriptions of sex she’d ever heard, she managed to piece together the story of Lupine mating, matehunts, and being alpha in a much more coherent manner than Graham had been able to manage.

  “So he was really serious about that,” she said, sitting cross-legged on the floor beside the empty pizza boxes. It was now around dusk and she’d been “chatting with the girls” for most of the afternoon. “If Graham hadn’t taken a mate, his cousin could honestly force him to step down from being alpha? Just because he didn’t have a mate and pups? Isn’t that a little insane?”

  Annie, the woman who had formed the other half of Missy’s Lupine shield against Lucy, shrugged. “It’s tradition. That’s just sort of the way things work.”

  “Yeah, but that doesn’t make it less insane.”

  “Well, you’ve got to realize that things weren’t always so easy for Lupines as they are now,” Samantha explained. “Now we’re integrated into the rest of the world, even if we’re still a great big secret. But a few hundred years ago, people used to burn us at the stake for being disciples of Satan.”

  “I thought stake burning was for witches.”

  “A fallacy, actually, since most witches were hung. Werewolves got burned. Or beheaded. Or shot with silver bullets, once gunpowder made its debut.”

  “Yay.” Missy grimaced.

  “Exactly.” Annie nodded. “So you can see how making sure that each pack would have a successive generation to keep us from dying out became a pretty high priority. We might really be just legends, if it hadn’t been for Breeder’s Rights.”

  Missy guessed that was true, but she wasn’t quite sure why it still applied in the twenty-first century. And she really wasn’t sure why it applied to a human. She swirled her glass of soda and watched the ice cubes circle like racers on a NASCAR track.

  “Do Breeder’s Rights apply in this case?” she asked as she raised her head to meet Samantha’s eyes. “I mean, no matter what Graham may say about me being his mate, it can’t really be true. Can it?”

  Annie looked slightly aghast. “Of course it’s true! Lupines don’t lie about mating. The bond is sacred.”

  “I didn’t mean I thought Graham was lying,” Missy soothed. “Just that he might be a little . . . confused. I mean, he’s Lupine, but I’m not. I’m human. I don’t even know if we’re . . . compatible in the way he’s hoping for. Are Lupines and humans the same species? Can we even have babies together?”

  “Of course,” Annie said. “Lupines and humans are related in much the same way as wolves and domestic dogs. They are biologically a different species; however, they share an identical number of chromosomes and such a large statistical percentage of mitochondrial DNA that they can and do mate and produce reproductively viable offspring. In fact, empirical evidence would seem to support the hypothesis that the offspring of a Lupine-human union may even have a more vigorous reproductive system than either of its respective parents, due to the introduction of new and varied forms of DNA into the genetic pool.”

  Missy blinked. “Oh.”

  Samantha leaned forward to murmur an explanation. “Annie is a biology professor at NYU. Genetic research.”

  Missy repeated, “Oh.”

  Sure she was. Why not? Why put limits on the surrealism that was fast coming to encompass Missy’s life?

  “Then you’re saying that Graham could get me pregnant?”

  Annie shrugged. “Sure.”

  “Has that happened before? I mean, are there lots of little hu-pines running around?”

  Samantha grinned. “Not so much. I think Annie was giving you the theoretical data, not a case study. There are stories about it happening in the past, but I’ve never met anyone who was mated to a human. It’s supposed to be a trip, though. The stories say that some of the pup’s talents can leak into the mother. She can sort of borrow the quicker reflexes and better night-vision thing while she’s pregnant. Isn’t that wild?”

  Missy’s eyes widened. “Yeah, wild.”

  “Mind you, it’s just conjecture,” Annie said, “but d
ue to the physical connection between mother and pup, it does make a sort of logical sense.”

  The repetitive use of the word “pup” leached the color out of Missy’s face faster than the flu. “Would I have . . . puppies?”

  Anne saw Samantha’s grin and raised her a chuckle. “No, so you can calm down. Lupine pups look just like human babies. Shifting is something we have to learn how to do. Some precocious pups learn it as early as seven or eight, but most come into their abilities around puberty.”

  Relief made Missy sag against the legs of the armchair she’d been leaning on. “Okay. That’s slightly less terrifying. Mind you, only slightly, because, hello? Horny teenagers are hard enough to deal with, but a horny teenager who can turn him-or herself into a werewolf?” She shuddered. “But I’ll take what I can get.”

  Samantha looked at her as if Missy had just handed her the key to the city. “So you’re okay with it then? You don’t mind being Graham’s mate? You don’t mind having babies and staying with the pack?”

  When she put it that way, the speech made Missy shift uncomfortably, so she hedged. “Well, I’m not running away screaming, am I?”

  “I think there’s a bit of middle ground between running away screaming and living happily ever after with our alpha.”

  Annie gave Missy a stern glance.

  Missy squirmed. “Give me a break here. This is a lot to adjust to, you know. Before last Friday, I didn’t even know Graham wanted to take me out to dinner, let alone that he was going to pull this mate thing on me. I need some time to get used to this.”

  “You’ve got about three more hours.” Samantha glanced at the clock and back at Missy. “You might want to hurry it up.” The reminder of the time and the hunt that would take place later that evening made the knots in Missy’s stomach pull tight.

  “Yeah, right. The matehunt. About that . . .”

  Samantha crossed her arms over her chest and looked at Missy. “What about it?”

  Fidgets overcame her, and Missy sighed. How was she supposed to explain to someone who had grown up with Lupine culture that the idea of being chased through the dark of Central Park by a pack of aroused werewolves didn’t exactly get her juices flowing? In fact, it froze them as solid as a glacial crust.