“Sorry about the boobs. Pretend they aren’t there.” Impossible to do when her nipples were almost stabbing me in the throat. “I had to change to keep up with Cord.” She squeezed me harder. “I’m so glad you’re here.”
“No thanks to some people,” I grumbled at Graeson while awkwardly returning Dell’s hug.
Molten-chocolate eyes striated with mossy green ensnared me. “I should have been here waiting for you. I’m sorry that didn’t happen.” He caressed my cheekbone with his thumb. “I planned on meeting you at the airport to avoid a scene like the one you described.” He traced the rigid line of my jaw until his hand slid off my chin. “But you’re still here and not a scratch on you. Looks like you handled yourself.”
The urge to swell under his pride rankled. It must be the warg blood in my system. “Yes, well, I’m not a total damsel.”
“Bessemer—” Dell began in a rush.
I cut her off with a gesture. “Let him speak for himself, Dell.”
“You were worried about me.” His lips hooked to one side in a crooked smile that threatened to disarm me. “Did you think I’d stand you up on purpose?”
“You bamboozled my family into coming to Georgia.” I would not be taken in by an unspoken promise and a nice set of tattoos. The thick black bands wrapping his wrists, cypress forests sprouting up his forearms, was the only ink delineating a canvas I had seen nude almost as often as covered. I barely recognized him in honest-to-goodness clothing. “I ought to wring your neck for putting them in danger.”
I would have too, but Aunt Dot and my cousins could take care of themselves. Unlike me, the weak link, they had honed all their skills to a killing edge. Gemini were peaceful, but we weren’t pushovers. A wanderer’s life meant traveling through hostile fae territory on occasion, and when you’re on the highway alone, you learn to defend yourself, your family and your belongings, or you fast become roadkill.
“Bamboozled,” he echoed.
“You’ve got thirty seconds.” I started tapping my foot to give my nervous energy an outlet. “Give me a reason to stay, or I walk.”
“You’re aware of how the pack bond functions?” Tone light, he nearly succeeded in making me underestimate how critical his connection with the other wargs was to his continued mental health. Without the others sharing his grief over his sister’s death, he would revert to the burned-out shell of a man I’d first met not two miles from here. “Each warg is connected to me through a secondary bond that only the alpha can access outside our group. Sharing headspace with the others keeps me level, functional, but it requires an unobstructed connection to work.” His voice dipped to a rumble. “When we returned to Georgia, our minds were open books.”
“And Bessemer riffled the pages,” I finished for him. What secrets had he unearthed that warranted setting Aisha on my trail? “What are you going to do?”
“Close it.”
Dread balled, a firm knot twisting my gut. “Your grief will rebound.”
The reason for the mental Band-Aid was to grant him a reprieve. Graeson had until the next full moon to get his revenge for Marie’s death or Bessemer would announce an open challenge to fill his position, that of beta in the pack. The bond was a temporary fix, one with an expiration date fast approaching. Apparently Bessemer felt it wasn’t approaching fast enough.
“Oh, you caught a rabbit. I thought I smelled one.” Dell hooked a thumb over her shoulder. “Do you want me to clean it for you?”
In all the excitement, I’d forgotten about what had tempted me outside in the first place.
“I appreciate the offer, but I’ll pass.” Accepting gifts of unknown origins was not a thing fae did lightly. “I’ve decided I’m going to give it a proper burial.”
“Is there something wrong with it?” Nose wrinkling, Dell flared her nostrils. “Why would you toss dirt over a perfectly good meal?”
“I found it on my steps right before you and Graeson arrived.” As much as I hated for even a tiny life to be wasted, that decision had been made when the gift-giver abandoned the kill, well-intended gesture or not. “I don’t trust it.”
A nearby bush rustled as if a bird had shaken its limbs taking flight, but what prowled forward was no swallow. Thick and muscular, a gunmetal-gray wolf with a gleaming silver streak down its back emerged from the shadowy forest interior, sat on its haunches and inclined its head.
“Get in the house,” Graeson said under his breath.
“Wargs are predators.” I planted my feet. “If I show weakness now, it’ll eat me alive later.”
“I have to do this alone.” He walked me up the steps backward, shoved me inside and closed the screen door between us, standing close enough to talk through the mesh. “I promise I’ll explain everything when I get back.”
“I doubt that.” I snorted when his eyes twinkled in reward for my sass. “Be careful.”
“I’m beta for a reason.” He shucked his shirt, hands dipping to his fly and zipping down, holding my gaze the whole time. “Trust me.”
“Trust is earned.” Graeson had manipulated me one too many times for his own gain. Blindly trusting what he said or did wasn’t going to happen. “I expect you back in one piece.”
The now-familiar cracking sounds as bone rearranged itself held me captive at the threshold. Graeson embraced the change in steady increments, which must have increased the pain tenfold. Muscle flowed beneath his skin as he went to greet this newest visitor.
This was a statement, a master’s show of control over his body, of dominance over his wolf, and I got the feeling whoever waited for him in that clearing was the worst kind of dangerous if Graeson felt the need to show him exactly what sort of adversary he could be.
The shifting pressure became too much. Graeson ruptured, a lush sterling pelt erupting over his quivering flesh all in a blink, as though the beast inside had shredded his humanity in its eagerness to be set free.
Dell pulled on Graeson’s discarded T-shirt—for my comfort more than hers since I was the prude visiting what amounted to a nudist colony once the fur started flying—and plopped down in the flattened grass, angled so a cut of her eyes allowed her to watch over both me and Graeson.
Fingers pressed to the cool mesh of the screen door, I marveled at the sinewy wolf shaking out his fur as if being back on four legs was cause for joy. “Are you going to tell me what’s really going on here?”
“Cord told you—it’s an interpack issue.”
“We both know that’s not the whole story.” I couldn’t tear my gaze away from the eerily polite wolves long enough to peg Dell with my patented glare. “Stop giving me the edited version.”
“He’s going to kill me for this…” a sigh that meant she was caving, “…and I do mean skin me and use my fur to trim the hood of his jacket.”
Seeing as how the active secondary bond meant he was aware of Dell at every moment, able to eavesdrop on our conversation through her mind if he chose, I doubted he had murder on the brain. At least where she was concerned. The wolf in the clearing… I wasn’t so sure what the deal was there.
“Bessemer met us at the airport and kept us as guests in rooms we use for containing the moonsick until about an hour ago.” Meaning they had been segregated for something like twelve hours. “Taunting the caged is the kind of thing Aisha lives for, but she was noticeably absent. That lit a fire under Cord to get to you.” Busy conducting a one-woman thumb war, Dell scowled at her hands. “She must have wanted to catch you alone, force you to shift and see what makes you tick.”
“Force me to—?” I wasn’t a shifter, my soul wasn’t spliced with an animal’s, but I was capable of mimicking one or two aspects of another species for a short burst. Like when I’d used Aisha’s blood to borrow her claws, her strength and a touch of aggression. It’s not a thing I do on command, and after my first experience with the soothing warmth of the pack bond, not an action I would take lightly with a warg involved. Had Aisha not kept coming for my throat, I wouldn’t
have given her the satisfaction of feeding off her magic to defend myself. “How does she know what I’m capable of?”
“The reason Bessemer isolated us from the pack was so he could take his time raking through our heads.” Her nails dug into her thighs. “We had no choice but to submit. He’s our alpha, and shutting down the bond meant Graeson would suffer.” Drops of crimson welled. “Bessemer knows you joined with us. He knows what you are. Everything Graeson learned about you Bessemer knows too.”
Crap. So that was the point Graeson had been meandering toward when the gray wolf interrupted us.
The violation of the alpha skimming my life’s history, gleaning confidences I had never shared with anyone but Graeson, made my skin chill with shame and tingle with fury.
The details of my personal life had made for pillow talk between the alphas.
“You’re not a warg. That type of connection shouldn’t have been possible.” Dell rubbed the wounds with her palm, smearing blood as they sealed before my eyes. “He must have wanted a firsthand accounting of what you’re capable of from someone he trusts before allowing you onto pack lands.”
“Can you sense him?” Warg politics were foreign to me. Bessemer had sent his mate to get bloodied in the name of curiosity? Was that same interest enough to warrant a front-row seat for the attack, or would he be satisfied sitting at home with his senses perked until I’d made my flickering connection? “Where is he now?”
She jerked her chin toward the imposing gunmetal wolf who stood like a king in the circle of flattened grass, gold eyes shining as he stared at me with hunger that made my skin crawl, and I realized I had made a mistake in assuming Bessemer would want to greet me as a man. His beast had superior reflexes and senses, all the better to assess me. Framed that way, I understood the breadth of the error in judgment I had made. I was thinking like a fae, and that might get me killed if I stayed among the wargs for much longer.
As if thinking of her had conjured her, Aisha appeared at her mate’s side. She peeled her lips over her teeth in a wolfy grin for me that Bessemer mirrored. Instinct guided me to ease outside and join Dell, presenting a united front.
Quick to notice the drift in their attention, the silvery wolf that was Graeson shifted to the left and put himself between Dell, my first line of defense, and the alpha mates.
My fingers curled into fists at my sides, my thumb smoothing over my concealed spur. “Are they going to fight?”
She considered their postures. “Not today.”
Not today implied maybe tomorrow was a distinct possibility. “Graeson would fight his alpha?”
“Over you?” A wild smattering of laughter erupted beside me. “Yes.”
“I came here for help, not to stir up trouble.”
“Where teeth and hearts are involved, men are not rational.” She gave my thigh a sympathetic pat. “It’s a dominance thing. It’s not your fault. Any mate Graeson brought home would face the same firing squad.”
“Oh fudge.” The implications hit me with the force of a Mack truck, and I dropped my head into my hands. “After Aisha attacked, she called me the beta. I thought it was—I don’t know—a taunt, but it wasn’t, was it?”
The way Dell shrank in on herself told me my hunch was right.
“Aisha is alpha, because she’s the female half of the alpha pair.” My brain sorted all I knew about wargs and about Graeson’s situation into neat little stacks that wouldn’t stand taller than a coffee mug if I placed them on my desk. “Graeson is the beta.” The wheels kept spinning. “Initiating the pack bond is an intimate act. Inclusion of a new member, I would imagine, must be sanctioned by the alpha.”
I read the blossoming dread on Dell’s face and knew I was headed in the right direction. “Unless another type of intimate bond was formed that might supersede that of a wolf to his alpha like a—”
“—mate,” she finished for me when my mouth and brain got disconnected.
“Bessemer thinks I connected with the pack bond because I’m Graeson’s mate.” The idea sent shivers cascading down my arms. “Graeson is beta… That makes me beta too?”
No wonder Bessemer had his fur britches in a wad. Betas answered only to their alphas, and his beta had brought home a fae of undetermined strength and origin, one who might jeopardize the running of his pack by weakening his second or sowing discord in the ranks.
Dell twisted hair around her finger and tugged until I was amazed it remained attached. “Yes?”
“We’re in trouble, aren’t we?” This might not have been the us Graeson had hoped for, but I would stand by him in this. The mate thing was big. Huge. Neither of us had signed up for it. Graeson was…confused…about me, and my gift was to blame for that. The same gift that had apparently incensed his alpha. “From what Graeson’s told me, your alpha is an eye-for-an-eye kind of guy.”
Meaning if he viewed our bond as legitimate, he would also view it as a slap in the face that he was shut out of such a huge decision when I wasn’t a warg and therefore couldn’t be Graeson’s lifemate. Also meaning all the poking and prodding Bessemer would have done to test my fitness prior to welcoming me into the pack would now occur post-bond.
“Bessemer is a hard man.” Dell worried the hem of her borrowed shirt. “He has to be.”
A wolflike growl rumbled through my chest upon hearing the fear in her voice. Must be the dregs of Aisha’s blood yet to be flushed from my system. The fact remained I didn’t like how subdued Dell had been acting, as if someone had burst her usually bubbly personality. Her eyes widened at the guttural sound, as if it carried a message she understood. I cleared the tightness from my throat. “So it’s fair to say that Bessemer wouldn’t mind seeing his beta brought down a few notches.”
“More than,” she agreed.
Again the silent wolves drew my eye. Too bad the pack bond wasn’t a thing I could tap into at will. I would give a lot to know what those two were discussing. Without asking I knew Dell wouldn’t tip me off about the content, assuming she could pick up reception for their conversation.
This whole interlude made me wonder if, under normal circumstances, there were distinct channels you could tune into to converse with specific wolves. That would come in handy.
In the clearing, the standoff was ending. Not a drop of blood had been spilled. That was progress, right?
The alpha pair turned and left, the subtext clear: they weren’t afraid of turning their backs on Graeson.
I, however, had no trouble admitting my unease. I wasn’t taking my eyes off them, not even long enough to retreat inside the trailer. The tip of Graeson’s tail flicked my calf as he trotted past, but I kept my stare fixed until Aisha and Bessemer were gone and not so much as a tree limb swayed to betray their passage.
A nasally chuff sounding suspiciously like a snort drew my attention to Dell, who was staring at a point beyond my shoulder. I finally turned away from the woods just as Graeson ducked around the side of my home. He reared up on the steps and scratched at the door with a pathetic whine in his throat. Dell laughed at his antics, but I resisted his charm. At least until he flopped on the grass, rolled over and showed me his fuzzy white belly just begging for rubs. I opened the door—like a sucker—and he leapt to his paws, darted in and trotted to the rear of the trailer. The jerk leapt onto my made bed where he proceeded to roll until my sheets were a tangled mess.
“Wow.” Dell snicker-chuckled. “I can’t believe you fell for the old rub my belly shtick.”
“There’s one born every minute,” I grumbled, trailing after him. “What does he think he’s doing?” Shimmying on his back up and down my bed, paws kicking in the air—that wasn’t normal warg behavior. Was it?
“Um, if I had to guess…” she stood and backed a safe distance away, “…I’d say he’s marking territory.”
“Raise one leg, Graeson. I dare you.” I stomped over to my table and rolled up an old sales flyer for a chain store three states away. “One drop on anything that belongs to me,
and I’ll load you up and drive you to a vet for a few corrective snips. You’ll spend the rest of your life squatting when you have to pee.”
“It’s a good thing your nose isn’t better,” Dell singsonged.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” The sales paper hit the floor. “No. He didn’t.” I bolted down the steps and really looked at the Airstream’s wheels. Liquid glinted on the rubber and glistened on the grass nearby. I leaned closer and inhaled. Ammonia. “I can’t believe he hosed my trailer.” A similar glint drew my eye to the wheels of my truck, which shined. “And my truck?” Sure enough, it too had been splashed with Graeson’s golden stamp of ownership. “I’m going to kill him.” Standing out here among his conquests, I wrinkled my nose. “As soon as he finishes washing the stink off my stuff.”
Cackling merrily, Dell shucked Graeson’s shirt, flung it at me and skipped backward toward the woods. “I need to head home and check on Meemaw. Her arthritis is flaring up something awful. See you later.”
“Hey,” I called after her retreating back. “What are the odds of me arranging a meeting with the Garzas?” The pack witches had performed the divinations to track Charybdis’s movements. I would give my eyeteeth to get my hands on that information for my case file. “They live around here too, right?”
“The Garzas are…complicated. I can’t guarantee a meeting, but I’ll ask.” She twisted her bottom lip then released it with a pop. “They made a pit stop on the way back from Mississippi. That much I do know. I’ll reach out once they get home.”
More delays, but hunting Charybdis was a bunch of hurry up and wait. “I appreciate it.”
She lifted a hand in farewell. “No problem.” Then she was gone, and I was alone with Graeson.
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