Alex tensed as if to pull away, but with his palms still cupping her ass…wasn’t happening.
“Shh,” Julian murmured, tugging her closer, pressing a kiss to her brow.
She jerked away. “What are you doing?”
He blinked. What had he been doing? Comforting her, cuddling her, as if what he felt for her was more than lust, as if what he felt for her was—
Julian yanked his hands out of her pants and took one giant step backward, even as she tried to move away, snagged her clumpy rubber heel on the snow, and began to windmill her arms so she wouldn’t fall.
Cade smoothly stepped up, caught her around the waist, and set her on her feet. Alex peered over her shoulder and smiled at him in a way she’d never once smiled at Julian.
“Stop growling,” she said without even glancing in Julian’s direction. Then she covered Cade’s hands, which still rested on her hips, with her own. “Thanks.”
Julian had never seen her behave so gently, or speak the same. He hadn’t believed that she could. What he really couldn’t believe was that he yearned to have her speak like that to him.
And because he did, Julian turned and walked away.
Barlow disappeared into his house. The slam of the door echoed in the still morning air. Alex understood the sentiment. Anger, hatred, lust—that she could get behind. But when he’d gone gentle on her, kissing her forehead, murmuring into her hair…
What the hell had just happened?
“He was marking you,” Cade murmured.
Alex turned her attention from Barlow’s house to his brother, who seemed far more amused than he should be.
“There’s a mark?”
Cade lifted his hand, and his fingers brushed the place on her neck that still burned from Julian’s mouth. “Not anymore.”
Cade’s touch was all business—like a physician during an exam. Nevertheless, Alex stepped out of his reach, suddenly uncomfortable. “Why would he do that?”
“You’re his. He wanted me to know it.”
Alex didn’t bother to correct him. Right now, she felt his—chosen, branded…marked.
“It’s a wolf thing,” Cade continued. “Sometimes we pee on trees.”
“I guess I should be glad he wasn’t a wolf when he decided to mark me.”
Cade’s lips quirked. “I guess.”
“Is everyone in town going to think I’m—”
“His?” Cade’s smile deepened. “They already do.”
“What?”
The word erupted, loud and confrontational, causing a middle-aged man who’d just come out of his house to glance across the street in their direction.
“Morning, Barry!” Cade lifted a hand, and after a few more seconds’ contemplation Barry bent, picked up his newspaper—The Werewolf Gazette?—and went inside.
Cade tilted his head and observed Alex as if she were a fascinating new specimen. “Julian hasn’t brought a new wolf to town since—” He paused and unease flickered over his face.
“Since Alana?” Alex asked.
Cade’s eyes widened. “He told you about her?”
Alex shrugged. He had; then again he hadn’t.
“If he didn’t bring you here for himself,” Cade murmured, “then why did he bring you?”
She wasn’t going to touch that question with a ten-foot pole.
“You’ll have to ask him,” she said. “You wanted to talk to me?”
“I heard they were looking for a waitress at the coffee shop.”
“And this is something I need to know why?”
“Thought you might want a job. I know you said you weren’t a cop—” His forehead creased. “But Julian said you were.”
“PI,” Alex supplied. God, she was so good at lying it was kind of embarrassing. “Not really a cop, but close.”
“Well, we don’t need a cop or a PI in Barlowsville, but we do need a waitress at the coffee shop. I bet you could handle it.”
“Maybe,” she allowed.
“It’s a great job for someone who’s new to town,” Cade continued. “Everyone drops by eventually. And once they know you’re working there, they’ll drop by even quicker.”
“Why’s that?”
“They’ll want to talk to you. Get to know you and let you get to know them.” Cade opened the door, taking a step inside before glancing back. “If you’re interested, just ask for Rose.”
Alex had considered going door-to-door, or accosting people in the streets for answers. She could have made the case that she just wanted to get to know everyone, but she figured that would sound fishy. The coffee shop was the perfect cover. She could talk to people and get a peek at them. See if they had any telltale burn marks.
The owner, Rose Bianchi—not a mark on her that Alex could see—was so thrilled to have an applicant that Alex feared the woman might hug her.
“You can start today?” she asked, her fluffy, white halo of hair bobbing above cheeks the same shade as her name. “Right now?”
“I don’t know anything about being a waitress,” Alex lied. It wasn’t as if she could mention all the towns where she’d picked up a few days’ work for tips just so she could buy another box of silver bullets.
“What’s to know?” Rose asked, handing her an apron, and her own pencil and pad. “You write down what they want; then you bring it to them.”
The place smelled like every diner Alex had ever been in. Coffee and fried eggs, bacon and toast. What had she thought they’d serve? People burgers?
“What happened to your last waitress?” Alex asked.
“She’s working at the bookstore now.” Rose shrugged. “Folks switch around. After a few decades, even a job like this gets boring.”
“Even a job like this?” Alex repeated.
“We’re always busy. Got something new on the menu every day.”
She indicated the chalkboard where the specials had been written in a precise, curving hand. Today’s omelet contained apples, spinach, and bacon, while the pancake of the day was cranberry nut. Alex realized she hadn’t eaten since yesterday. Luckily free food came with the job. She wondered if they’d care if she ordered all the specials at once.
“Always someone to talk to. Stories to hear,” Rose continued, patting Alex’s arm with a surprisingly soft, supple palm. Didn’t waitresses usually have rough skin? Although anyone that could heal a knife to the throat was going to heal dishpan hands in a jiffy. “You’re gonna love it.”
“Thanks,” she said.
Rose grinned, exposing slightly crooked but very white teeth. “I’ll be right there.” She pointed at the ancient cash register near the front.
Sometimes this town seemed like the land that time forgot. Then someone would wheel in on a snowmobile, or turn up the sound on their iPod, earbuds trailing into the pocket of their plaid flannel shirt, or share the latest Saturday Night Live skit, as the guys at the corner table appeared to be doing.
“That’s Joe behind the grill.” Rose lifted her chin to indicate the equally white-haired man flipping pancakes as he sang a song about the moon, and an eye, and a big pizza pie. He saluted them both with his spatula, but the look he leveled at Rose was pure devotion.
“Husband?” Alex guessed.
“Nearly a hundred and eighty years now.” Rose winked and headed for the register.
“A hundred and eighty years,” Alex echoed. She couldn’t imagine. She’d kill Barlow before the first year was through.
Alex jolted at her thoughts. She wasn’t going to marry Barlow. She wasn’t going to marry anyone. She was going to find the werewolf she’d come here to find, kill it, then run.
Once she got to work, Alex discovered that Rose was right. The job wasn’t hard. For a werewolf.
Alex had superior strength and amazing stamina, even in this form, so being on her feet for hours, carrying heavy trays loaded with equally heavy plates, setting them down, picking them up, and running, running, running…
Not a problem.
&nb
sp; However, if she’d been human she’d have washed out in an hour. The place was unbelievably busy, with wave after wave of customers filling the seats. Did anyone in the entire village eat breakfast at home?
A second waitress, who introduced herself as Cyn—short for Cynthia—and appeared to have been a waitress since the dawn of time, or perhaps the mid-1950s considering her red beehive and tendency to crack gum at the end of every sentence, handled most of the booths, leaving Alex the counter.
“That way you’ve only gotta deal with one person’s order at a time,” she said as she hurried by with a tray of coffee, juice, and tea for the local bridge club.
Alex couldn’t help but stare at the table full of elderly ladies, who twittered and laughed and discussed rubbers, slams, and dummies with great animation. She had to remind herself that they were werewolves.
Then she got a flash of the same ladies sitting around the table in wolf form, pearls still encircling their hairy necks, earrings swaying from their pointy ears, tasteful pink nail polish adorning their claws as they finished a hand of duplicate.
“I bet if I painted that on velvet, it would be a surefire hit,” Alex murmured. “Bigger even than the poker-playing dogs.”
“Order up!” Joe sang.
Joe sang everything. Alex had yet to hear him simply speak, and whenever his wheel was empty, he performed songs by someone he referred to as Dino. Everyone in the restaurant went silent when that happened. Joe had a fantastic voice.
He also had both his ears and no visible scars, as did Cyn and everyone else Alex had encountered so far.
The order, for the dapper gentleman at the end of the counter, consisted of three eggs poached, sausage, bacon, cakes, and toast, as well as home fries with onions and mushrooms. Everyone at the EAT Café consumed enough food for a ravenous wolf.
Har-har.
The metabolism of a werewolf was much faster than that of a human, and without the concern of cholesterol poisoning and a nasty dose of heart disease, the possibilities were endless.
Four cheeseburgers with a side of onion rings, fries, and cheese curds? Two steaks, baked potato with melted butter and bacon, broccoli with cheese sauce? Go nuts.
Why would anyone want to go back to the way that they’d been?
Alex bobbled the tray but managed to keep all the food from sliding onto her customer’s head. Her thoughts these days didn’t seem like her own.
“Breakfast is served,” she said brightly. It hadn’t taken her long to remember that the more chirpy she was, the more tip she got. Since she’d come here with nothing but fur, Alex needed all the money she could get.
She barely managed to fit all the plates on her tray in front of her customer, considering the guy next to him had ordered an equal amount of food and had five or six plates of his own.
“Anything else I can get for you, Daniel?”
Daniel Finnegan appeared to be in his midfifties, with salt-and-pepper hair and a nearly white mustache. He wore a gray tweed suit from an era long past, though Alex wasn’t sure which one, complete with a hat and shiny black dress shoes.
He’d introduced himself as soon as he’d taken his seat, refusing to allow Alex to call him by anything but his first name. “We’re all family here,” he’d said when she tried to call him Mr. Finnegan.
Everyone had the same attitude, introducing themselves as if they were sitting at Alex’s kitchen table instead of her station at the EAT.
They talked to her as if they were sitting in her home, too, as if they were lifelong friends. She should feel bad about that, but every time she started to she merely brought up the memory of her father’s last night in the mountains and all the guilt went away.
“I’ll take a bit more coffee when you get a chance,” Daniel said, tucking into his meal with a gusto at odds with his demeanor.
Alex made the rounds with the coffeepot, topping off the cups of all her customers and Cyn’s, too. She’d discovered years ago that to walk by someone who had only half a cup of coffee while you were carrying a full pot and not offer them any was a good way to get snarled at—and that was before she’d started waiting on werewolves.
Conversations ebbed and flowed. Alex learned quite a bit just by wandering past the tables filling those empty cups. Of course no one admitted to killing a Jäger-Sucher or snacking on an Inuit. Had she really thought they would?
“No,” she muttered.
“No, what, dear?”
Alex had made her way back to Daniel and poured him a refill. “Just thinking aloud,” she said. “So, how long have you been a werewolf?”
Daniel, who had just taken a persnickety bite of bacon, choked. Then he began to cough. Alex began to worry, until the rest of the room’s lack of interest reminded her that while Daniel might be choking, he couldn’t choke to death.
Alex handed him a glass of water.
“Why would you ask that?” he managed eventually.
“Shouldn’t I?” Alex leaned over the divider that hid the workings of the restaurant from the dining room and set the pot on a burner. “Is that ‘not done’?” She made quotation marks in the air around the last two words.
Daniel sighed and took another sip of water, his sober chocolate-brown gaze contemplating her over the rim before he set it down. “All of us agreed to become like this, which meant we had one thing in common.”
“What’s that?”
“Either imminent death, or a very shitty life.”
Alex was glad she’d set the coffeepot down or she just might have dropped it. Hearing shitty come out of Daniel Finnegan’s prim mouth was both shocking and slightly hilarious.
This time Alex choked, and Daniel offered her his water. She took it—no worries anymore in sharing cups, utensils, spit; germs wouldn’t hurt her—and took a swallow.
“Better?” Daniel dabbed at the pristine corners of his mouth with a napkin that did not appear to have been used at all. When Alex nodded, he went on. “We don’t ask one another how we came to be like this because we don’t want to remember what made us choose to leave behind our humanity. It’s never a pretty story.” His gentle gaze became shrewd. “Is yours?”
“No,” she said before she even thought about it.
Her life hadn’t been anything to write home about. Because she’d had no home to write to. No mother, no father, no family left at all. Her life had been death, or the distribution of it, with the certain knowledge that one day she’d find herself bleeding out from a werewolf attack just like her father.
If she’d been asked at that point—death or lycanthropy—would she have chosen this?
No. She knew what lay on the other side. Or at least she’d thought she knew.
Until she’d come here.
“You’re telling me no one chooses this life unless their other one sucks so badly they can’t wait to leave it?”
“Yes,” Daniel said.
“But…you like being a werewolf, don’t you?”
“I do.” He straightened his tie, adjusted his hat.
“Then why wouldn’t someone prefer to be one without the motivation of death or a really shitty life?”
He smiled at her as if she were a foolish child. To him, she probably was. “Humanity isn’t something to toss off lightly, Alex, there are things you give up that you can never get back. I hope Julian made that clear.”
Not so much, she thought.
“What things?” she asked.
Daniel contemplated Alex for several seconds, and she feared he might press her on the issue of what Julian had made clear and what he had not. She really didn’t want to lie to Daniel anymore, but she couldn’t exactly tell him that Julian had not only neglected to give her instructions, he’d neglected to give her a choice.
Eventually Daniel glanced away with a sigh. “Pets.”
Alex blinked. “Did you say pets?”
“Dogs are afraid of us. Cats hate us.”
“Cats hate everyone,” she said.
“Not the
person with the can opener,” he muttered. “Unless he isn’t a person.”
Huh. Alex never would have taken Daniel for a cat lover.
“I think I can live without pets.” She’d done just fine so far.
“Children.”
What on earth would she do with one of those?
“Next,” she said.
Daniel turned to her and frowned. “I have to believe that whatever you left behind was sufficiently horrible that you chose to forfeit any chance of having a child in order to escape it.”
“Okay,” Alex said agreeably. So far she hadn’t heard anything she’d given up on this side of furry that she’d wanted in the first place.
“Peace of mind,” he said. “A pristine soul.”
Except, maybe, for that.
“You better explain, Daniel.”
“You killed someone after you changed, yes?”
Alex didn’t think so, but still she nodded.
“It’s the price we pay for immortality.” Daniel laid his hand atop hers, and Alex’s throat went thick. She must not be as over the choking fit as she’d thought. “It’s a very high price.”
“What if the guy—” Daniel lifted a brow. “—or girl you killed deserved to be dead?” A thousand times over.
“Ah, Julian’s method,” he murmured. “A very—”
Together they said, “—bad man.”
“You still killed a human being,” Daniel continued. “Your soul is no longer white.”
“It ain’t black, either.”
“Perhaps,” he said, though he didn’t sound convinced.
“You agonize over who you killed,” Alex murmured. “So you have no peace of mind.” If that was the case, it was going to be a very long eternity for Daniel.
“No,” he said. “Well, yes. I do agonize over the person who ensured my immortality, and I always will. But that isn’t the loss of peace I’m talking about.”
“What is?”
His eyes met hers and within them she saw a stark fear that gave her an unpleasant little jolt. “We’re hunted, Alex.”
“The Jäger-Suchers.”
“We can never be completely at peace because there is always someone—” He took a breath. “—many, many someones, and they aren’t all Jäger-Suchers, who live and breathe to kill us.”
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