Crashing sounded from downstairs and Grady ran out the door.
He wasn’t surprised to find all five of the Alaska family’s prepubescent descendants huddled with their grandparents in the corner of the breakfast room. The table was knocked over and there were plates and silverware everywhere. Apparently Rafe had found Alisha at the breakfast table and carried her off. And according to Dale, Mag had done the same, picking Janelle out of her seat and hauling her from the room without a word to his daughters shortly after Alisha’s heat had erupted.
Grady shook his head surveying the mess and children his two friends had left behind. Everything was all nice and civilized in royal wolf circles until somebody went into heat. And then you got a real lesson in the differences between werewolves and humans.
Grady got everyone cleared out of the kingdom house easily enough, all while Rafe and Alisha and Mag and Janelle did what mated wolves did when a second heat came on unexpectedly. It was too late for Mag and Janelle. They’d all be fucking like bunnies until Alisha got pregnant again—hopefully not with triplets this time.
Falling back into old protocol, after he got the kids and their grandparents situated, he called in the current Wolf Springs beta sheriff to let him know what was going on so he could keep an eye on things—though the entire commercial and civil center of Wolf Springs sat between the kingdom house and the town’s residential neighborhood, so there wasn’t too much chance the smell would leak out and scramble the senses of other wolves as it sometimes did when a she-wolf went into heat in a more populated part of town. The sheriff should have an easy time keeping everyone away from the kingdom house while their state sovereigns gave into their inner beasts, and he knew Rafe’s mom would make sure food got delivered to the house so nobody starved.
Grady’s job (which was technically no longer his job) in Wolf Springs was done. And when he climbed back into his Chevy Silverado, he knew he’d have nothing to feel guilty about if he headed back to his Oklahoma kingdom town, the place he was actually in charge of. According to the newsfeed he’d read this morning, the storm had passed over and was now headed up toward the eastern part of Colorado, the part Tu was headed to.
If he took the right route, he’d probably be able to avoid it all together. However, when he got to the highway, he decided at the last minute to go north on I-25 instead of south. And though he cursed himself for the next two hours, he never once made a move to turn back or even stop.
He didn’t stop until he got out of his truck in front of the kingdom’s log cabin, which stood on a bluff overlooking the South Platte River. He knocked on the front door, feeling like an idiot. No answer, and he could only smell Tu’s scent faintly inside the house. Like she’d been there and had decided to leave again.
“Good,” he thought. Maybe she’d used her brains and decided to turn around. He might have even passed by her on his way here.
Yeah, most likely that was what happened. He should head out. If he left now, he might be able to beat the storm and get back to Oklahoma before nightfall.
However, he didn’t move. He was in human form, but he could feel the hair on his wolf standing up. Maybe he’d just check around back where he knew Rafe’s family usually parked their cars. Make sure hers wasn’t there, and then get back in his truck and drive down to Oklahoma. Where he belonged. He started around the house, feeling like a damn fool, wanting to kick his wolf for making him not only drive here but also check to make sure Tu’s car wasn’t there, even though common sense told him it definitely wasn’t.
However, common sense was wrong. There was the Audi sitting in the car deck behind the house. But if her SUV was here and Tu wasn’t in the house, where was she?
That was when a shot rang out, piercing the overcast sky like thunder and sending all the birds scattering out of the nearby trees.
5
Tu watched overhead as all the birds flew away with fearful caws while on the ground, an assortment of woodland creatures ran to get clear of whatever menace had decided to invade their abode.
Tu felt bad for frightening them. If she had been a Disney princess like the ones she’d seen while growing up, she might have told them in a high falsetto that she meant no harm to them. Only to herself.
But she wasn’t that kind of princess. In fact, in her current all-black ensemble, including a wool cap to cover her French braids, most people wouldn’t have been able to tell she was a princess at all. Right now, she wasn’t pretty or resilient or brave enough to overcome what had happened in the past with an “oh well” smile and a song.
And she definitely didn’t feel brave. At all. Just scared she’d be out here for another hour, working up the courage to pull the trigger, only to pull the gun away from her head again when she shot.
The reverberation from the Colt 45’s kickback was still ringing through the bones of her arm. She now wished she’d purchased a smaller gun, but the gun store only had the 45 caliber silver bullets in stock, so she hadn’t had much of a choice. Too bad it was daylight and only a weak crescent moon expected to appear that night. She sure could have used the extra strength that fuller moons gave weres to handle the gun.
For a moment, the fear of actually going through with her plan overtook her, but then it ebbed away, pushed out by the sorrow that had become even more constant when the scent of the pup she’d carried had disappeared. She had to do this. She couldn’t live with herself, not after what her stupidity had caused. She had to push past the religion she’d grown up with and find the strength to do this, even if it meant she might go to hell. Truth was, there was no place in the afterlife that could be worse than the hell she found herself in anyway.
She wished, not for the first time, that she could take a bottle of pills or asphyxiate or hang herself the way a human would if she wanted to shuffle off her mortal coil. Using a gun felt so violent. But she wasn’t a human, and as the princess of the state with the highest suicide rates in the union, she’d heard what happened to weres who tried to kill themselves using human methods. Sometimes they died as intended, but more often than not, they morphed into wolf form while unconscious, healing before their human bodies could die from the trauma.
She raised the gun again, let herself feel it’s heavy weight in her hands. No, if she was serious about doing this, a silver bullet was the only thing she knew for sure would do the job. She couldn’t wimp out this time. She had to do this. She had to—
The other body hit her like a mac truck, tackling her to the ground, even as two large hands took control of her gun. In the end, only Tu fell to the hard, snow covered ground while the gun remained with her attacker.
“What the f—” She broke off, when she saw Grady standing above her, his face half-covered by the shadows of the trees—the only things in this patch of forest that were bigger than him.
“Grady?” she said out loud, climbing to her feet. “What are you doing here? Why did you… ?”
This time it was Grady who ended the conversation abruptly, turning his back on her and walking toward the summer cabin, leaving her with no choice but to follow him or stay out here and freeze to death, which probably wouldn’t happen anyway because even if hypothermia set in, she’d just turn back into wolf.
“I NOT TRY TO…” Tu couldn’t sign the words to finish the sentence. “I only shoot gun. Fun. Hunting.”
Tu really tried to sell the lie, even mustered up one of her old devil-may-care smiles as she signed the words.
But she could tell Grady didn’t believe her. If not by the skeptical look on his face, definitely by the way he turned away from her to shove the Colt 45 inside the gun safe he’d opened on the kitchen wall. With such force, it was a wonder the thing didn’t go off. She watched the gun disappear behind the small door before Grady cupped the keypad with his hand so she couldn’t see the numbers he was punching in.
Yeah, he definitely didn’t believe her. And strangely, this made Tu feel momentarily like her old self again. Because the irritation she fel
t was familiar, common among young people whether they be human or wolf: it was the irritation that comes when someone in a position of authority doesn’t believe the shit you’re shoveling.
She remembered how she’d gone through the roof, nearly cussing her sister Janelle out, the morning after her sister’s second wedding weekend. Janelle had dared to call her out for asking Mag’s brother if he was carrying any coke, and then more than insinuated the headache that had made Tu miss the post-wedding breakfast was due to a hangover. Janelle had been spot on. But still. Grady had the same look in his eyes that Janelle had, and by God if it didn’t piss her off now, just as it had back then.
“Why you here?” she signed angrily.
“Alisha and Rafe go second H-E-A-T after you leave,” he signed back. “Janelle and Mag caught, too.”
Oh. Well, that brought her up short. So he’d come here to tell her to drive back to be with her nieces and nephews while their parents… did other things.
“Okay,” she signed. Then. “Thank you. I return now.”
The weekend which had loomed so ugly and empty before her just a few hours before, a seemingly insurmountable impasse filled with too much time spent avoiding the awkward company of her parents, now seemed doable thanks to this new situation. And who knew how long Rafe and Alisha would stay in heat? Anywhere from three to seven days. Their heat frenzy might last long enough to get her through the entire week.
She just had to find her purse… she stopped short in front of the row of hooks hanging next to the cabin’s front door. The hook she’d hung her purse on now sat empty.
Where had it gone?
She turned around, knowing without having to be told exactly who had taken her purse and why. No wonder he’d just been getting around to putting the gun away though she’d arrived back at the house at least a full five minutes after he did. He’d been too busy hiding her purse, which not only had her cars keys in it, but also her phone.
“Give back,” she signed to Grady.
“Children fine. Grandparents there. Don’t need you.”
Well, that hurt. “Give back,” she signed again, feeling more stubborn than she had in a good, long time.
“Storm coming,” he signed in reply. “Not safe go out.”
“Don’t care. Give back purse,” she signed forcefully.
Grady folded his arms across his broad chest, as much of a “this conversation is over” as a deaf person who didn’t talk could give you.
“Serious?” Tu signed. Then even more furiously. “Serious?!?!”
Grady didn’t move an inch and Tu let out a frustrated growl before launching herself across the room to begin tearing apart the first floor of the cabin, looking for her goddamn purse.
Meanwhile Grady sat down in one of the recliners in the den, a door down from the front room, and turned on the TV. A little fiddling with the remote and a closed caption box appeared at the bottom of the screen, then he lazily flipped through the channels until he came to a program about a one hundred-year-old fish bait factory, owned and operated by a colorful group of family members.
If he was at all fazed by her anger over being kept in this cabin against her will when her nieces and nephews needed her, it didn’t show in the way he silently watched the antics of the show’s crazy set of same-aged cousins, who were currently out on a pond, seeing if they could catch fish with bait inserted into their long beards.
6
“What this place?”
Grady had never been so embarrassed in his life. His entire life, and mind you, he’d grown up in a small town where the kids had no problems throwing things at the defective wolf in the street—at least, they hadn’t before the first unannounced public appearance of his beast. He’d thought he’d been ashamed when he woke up buck naked inside a cage with a tranq still lodged in his side, the whole town gathered around pointing and laughing.
But somehow this was more excruciating than that. Tu Ataneq was in his tornado cellar.
It was Thanksgiving and he’d been lying on his double dog bed reading a book when he first caught her scent getting closer. She was alone and he thought she might be headed to their barn to meet up with Luke, who was setting the place up for what he called the most epic half-moon party ever. But the scent hadn’t ever seemed to move further away, and the next thing he knew, the door was opening and Tu was coming down the steps, her face lit by moonlight.
She reeked of beer and she swayed a little as she took in the small concrete space with freaked out eyes. Then she signed, “What sign for ‘dude?’”
He stood up and slowly made the sign for her.
“Dude, W-T-F?” she immediately signed back. “Why you down here?”
“Surprised you can sign—so drunk.”
Tu just laughed, throwing her whole head back.
“I think I sign better drunk. True story.” She then added, “Dude!” with a saucy wink. “But serious—what this place?”
He almost didn’t tell her. His first impulse was to tell her to leave. No, better yet, to get the fuck out of here, and he almost went with it. But at the end of a few short breaths, he signed. “My room. Where live.”
Understanding dawned on her face. “You live here? All time?”
He nodded.
“Why?”
“Can’t live in house.”
“But…”
Luke’s room was too small for two grown wolves of their size to share, but he could tell she was thinking of the kingdom office off to the side of the living room, the one where his father conducted what little legitimate business he had, when he wasn’t laid out in his bedroom in a meth fugue.
“Should live in house. Father, brother should make room.”
He shook his head. “No. Shouldn’t live in house.”
“Why?”
“My wolf… big… bad… dangerous.”
“All wolf dangerous.”
And with his heart stuck in his throat he told her something he hadn’t told anyone else outside of Oklahoma.
“My wolf MORE dangerous. Better I stay here.”
Tu looked around the space again and shook her head. She obviously didn’t agree. “Why you come here for really awkward dinner? Why you want watch your father glare at
me and town people stare? Why you don’t stay Wolf Springs?”
It was true. The Wulfkonigs’ Thanksgiving dinner, which they’d eaten at the local diner, had been awkward at best. Luke and Tu giggling and whispering into each other’s ears, like they were the coolest kids in the place, pretending they didn’t notice the Oklahoma king’s obstinate silence or all the stares they were getting from the handful of kingdom town residents—mostly widowed males and addicts who either couldn’t or didn’t want to deal with putting together their own Thanksgiving dinners.
Grady hadn’t been much better. Luke had his arm around Tu’s shoulders in a way that meant she wouldn’t have been able to sign comfortably even if she wanted to. And Grady didn’t want to think his brother had initiated their intimate conversation so Grady wouldn’t be able to read their lips as they talked into each other’s ears, but that was how it came across. And so he’d sat there, like an oversized lump in the booth next to his dad, shoveling food into his mouth until the forty-two minute (he tracked it) torture session disguised as a Thanksgiving dinner came to its merciful end.
But Tu was here now, in his space, without Luke to keep her from signing with him, so once again Grady told her the truth.
“Things bad there. Rafe…”
He didn’t think she had the vocabulary to understand how bad Rafe had gotten since Alisha ran out on him the morning after their mating was complete. How the formerly noble king had been reduced to a shadow of himself. Shambling around his shuttered kingdom mansion, in a whisky-fueled stupor, refusing to perform his role as king.
He shook his head wearily. “Rafe bad. Want get away for little bit.”
“Get away?” she repeated these signs as a question. “To here?”
>
“Yes,” he answered. “Small and cold but home.”
“Okay, but where you pee?”
A smile came to Grady’s face. “Climb up. Pee next to barn.”
She laughed. “Where you pee during Luke party?”
His smile disappeared. “Leave before Luke party. Can’t be here. Beta.”
She wiggled her eyebrows, and waved her hands around in a mock simulation of fright. “Yes, you beta king. Almost forgot.”
Watching her joke about the job he took very seriously made Grady’s mood darken. He signed, “Your parents think you where?”
Tu shook her head, that laughing smile of hers coming to her face. “I twenty-one now. Don’t have to tell them where go.”
He signed again, “Your parents think you where?”
She looked peeved now, but not in a way that reached her eyes. A mocking peeved, like she was having all the laughs and he was a dweeb for asking.
“N-E-B-R-A-S-K-A princess house. Her brother single. Mom want me flirt with. Get pledge meeting. His crown very rich.”
Of course her parents didn’t know about her Thanksgiving date with Luke. Folks from a state as prosperous as Alaska would rather their daughter date a rich nobody than a mange state prince.
“This sign for N-E-B-R-A-S-K-A…” Then he modeled the state sign for her before asking, “What say to parents when you go back?”
“Don’t like Nebraska prince smell,” she signed, easily incorporating the sign he taught her. She was smart, Grady mused, but she was down here in Oklahoma killing all her brain cells with too much alcohol and marijuana. “Same say all princes they try pledge me.”
He shook his head, finding it hard to believe she was turning down princes to be with his handsome but fucked up brother for Thanksgiving.
“You love Luke,” he signed in such a way it could have been a statement or a question.
Her eyes twinkled. “Luke fun.”
Wolf and Soul (The Alaska Princesses Trilogy, Book 3) Page 5