Cool Nights, Hot Dreams: Wolves of Aurora 1

by Athena Blaez

  “Sean?”

  Ryder’s voice pulled him back to the present.

  “You were miles away. Everything alright?”

  “Fine. I have a lot on my mind.” Sean put his seatbelt on. “You were asking me something, weren’t you?”

  “I could just assume your silence was acquiescence and say you agreed with my plan.”

  Sean chuckled. “You could but you won’t.”

  “Why wouldn’t I?”

  “Because you’re a nice guy, Ryder.”

  “I can be a not-nice guy,” Ryder protested.

  “And I can not go out with you for dinner.”

  “You win. I was asking if you wanted to hit the diner on the square. Today is Thursday and they have fresh cheesecake.”

  “That’s fine. I don’t want to be out too late tonight. And how do you know they have fresh cheesecake?” Sean twisted in his seat to watch Ryder pull out his phone and type in a text message before he started the truck. “You went there for lunch, didn’t you.”

  Ryder backed out of the drive slowly and rolled down the street, his attention obviously on his rearview mirror. “Busted.”

  Sean glanced back to see a dark four-footed shadow dart across the street and into the underbrush that abutted against the house.

  Their gazes met and Ryder smiled at Sean. “One of mine.”

  “This is so surreal,” Sean said when he faced forward again.

  “And more surreal than getting a busted head from a dream attack?”

  “Point.”

  The sun was just going down when they settled at the small window table at the cafe. The restaurant was brightly lit, cheery images painted on the wall. And clean. The place was amazingly clean.

  A waitress appeared at their table. She was an older woman and her graying hair was starting to come out of her messy bun. “Evening, fellas. Ryder, back for more? Where do you put it all? In a hollow leg?”

  Ryder laughed and pushed the menu across to Sean. “Let me have the usual, Charlene.”

  “So predictable,” Charlene said with a tap of her pen against her order book. “What about you, handsome? New in town?”

  Sean sighed inwardly. He really needed to get out of the shop more. There was so much in town he never experienced, apparently. “No. Just a bit of a recluse.”

  “Well, Ryder will cure you of that. I’ll leave you a few minutes to decide and bring drinks out. Coffee for you, Ryder. What about you, hon?”

  “Water,” Sean said, looking at her with a smile.

  Once she was gone, he leaned across the table. “You do seem to get around town for someone who claims he stays out of view much of the time.”

  “Business owner,” Ryder said. “I have to funnel the tourists to my business or I don’t have lights.”

  They paused as Charlene set their drinks down and disappeared again.

  “Does she know?” Sean motioned vaguely at Ryder. “That you’re a…you know.”

  Ryder started laughing. “You make it sound like a dirty secret. The old-timers in the town, those who have had family since Aurora first incorporated, either know us or know we exist. Our packs are a bit of an open secret here. Tourists don’t appear to know. Or care. I’d bet that your family abilities probably have root here, too. Did your mother have family here?”

  Sean pulled back in surprise. “Yeah, actually. She had an aunt who was raised here as well. It’s why she wanted to move back when she was diagnosed with cancer. Even though the best cancer care is an hour away. And my best friend from college is from here as well.”

  With a huge grin, Ryder spread his hands. “Aurora is apparently a hotbed of psychic and supernatural activity. In fact, I don’t know if you’ve done the walking ghost tour. It’s quite interesting. Aurora has a very colorful history.”

  “Since I’ve been here, I’ve focused on getting the shop off the ground. Between that and my mother, I haven’t had a lot of time for well…anything, I guess.”

  “How is your mother doing?”

  Sean sighed heavily and pushed the menu away. “She’s holding up. She has beat cancer twice but it keeps coming back, more robust than before. I think when we moved here, she knew that this time would be her last time fighting it and she’s resigned to die.”

  “What do her doctors say?”

  “They’re doing their best and not willing to give up just yet. I think she has, though.”

  Ryder’s hand covered Sean and the move was a surprising comfort. Just the warm touch helped to chase away a little of the despair that threatened to overcome him when he allowed himself to even think about his mother’s illness. “I’m here if you need me, Sean. You’re not alone. You have your friend, Jeremy. He’s a bit of a flake but he seems like a good guy. Katrina has her head on straight. And now you have me.”

  “Thanks. I appreciate it. Mostly…” Sean looked at their hands. Funny, he didn’t want to move his and lose this point of contact. “Mostly, it’s day by day. This business with the shop and now my crazy dreams…it’s starting to get to be a bit much.”

  “Let me help you, Sean. I have the resources—”

  Sean stiffened. He jerked his hand away. “I don’t want your money and I don’t need you to take care of me—”

  Ryder lifted his hand, remaining still. “I’m not trying to take care of you, Sean. I’m offering help. You don’t have to do any of this alone.”

  “I know. I’m sorry. And you are helping. Knowing someone is watching my mother while I’m not there is a huge help.” Sean buried his face in his hands. He knew he was overreacting and snapping at someone who really did seem to want to help him. “I’m sorry. I’m just tired. And I’m worried. My dad has been sniffing around wanting money and…my mom does not need that stress right now. Neither do I.”

  “Tell you what.” Ryder motioned for Charlene. “Let’s eat and talk about other things and I’ll get you home at a reasonable hour so you can be with your mom.”

  “Yeah.” Sean sat back with a deep breath. “Yeah, thanks. I’m sorry that I keep cutting our dinners so short.”

  “I’m good with it. Spending time with you is what I’m after. I know you don’t want to ask for money but if you need something, Sean, I’m serious, ask. I can float a loan with lower interest rates than a bank if that would make you feel better.”

  It rankled Sean that he would need help from anyone. Other than Jeremy, at least. He and his mother had survived all these years with no help from family or those who claimed to be friends. Jeremy was the only friend who stuck around all this time.

  For whatever reason, though, knowing Ryder was willing to have his back helped Sean breathe easier. If Ryder could continue having his people keep an eye on his mother, he would consider that a huge load off his mind. He could deal with his father.

  He was afraid what would happen if his father actually got to his mother. “It’s all good right now. Thanks for the offer. Having someone keep an eye on my mom is really the biggest help you can be right now.”

  “Done,” Ryder said. He pulled his phone and typed in a text message. It chimed back almost immediately and he set it aside. “I’ll have eyes on your house twenty-four hours a day until we can get your father to back off.”

  “Now,” Sean said. He squared his shoulders and stared across the table at Ryder. “Feed me before you take me home. You mentioned something about cheesecake.”

  Chapter 10

  For all of Kenneth Silva’s faults, he was truly grieving for his son. Ryder sat with several of his pack in the man’s living room as he broke down in gut-wrenching sobs. “My boy is dead, Ryder,” he said through shuddering breaths. “My boy is gone.”

  What the hell could Ryder say to him? It wasn’t some tragic accident. Bryan had been shot at close range. Twice. With silver. There was no way he could have healed through it unless he had been an older, more experienced shifter.

  Bryan was still so young.

  “What are you going to do about it?” Kenne
th’s next words were accusatory and borderline insubordinate. That wasn’t new. Kenneth was insubordinate to Ryder as his alpha from the beginning. But laced through his agonizing words was the pain of a father looking to the leadership for answers.

  Answers Ryder didn’t have.

  “I’m doing everything I can to figure out what happened, Kenneth. We will find who did this and we will make them pay.”

  And to hell with Sheriff Bradley warning him off to let law enforcement do their job. He knew this was someone who knew what Bryan was. Silver wasn’t a reliable metal for ammunition. No reputable gun owner would just keep silver lying around to load their guns.

  It was chosen deliberately for what it would do to a shifter’s body.

  The answer was small comfort to a grieving father. From the back bedroom, he heard Kenneth’s wife, Loren, wailing in her own grief. It was heart-wrenching and hair-raising with its intensity.

  Ryder jerked to his feet. “If you need anything, call. I’ll see it done for you.”

  Kenneth stood as well, wiping at his face. “Just let me have first crack at who did this. That’s all I want.”

  With a nod, Ryder motioned for his second to follow him out the door.

  “Hell of a thing to come back from vacation for,” Bennie said.

  “I’m sorry I had to call you in.” Ryder checked his phone for the periodic report from the wolf guarding Sean’s home. “There’s a lot at play here and I believe they’re related. I’m not sure how, yet.”

  “What can I do?” Bennie Floyd was a good man and a hell of a second in his pack. He stepped up right after Ryder had been proclaimed alpha for the pack and was his right hand ever since.

  “Right now, keep your eyes and ears open. Rumor and gossip may be our only hope to find a lead. I’ll make contact with the other pack leadership and see what I can figure out from them. Other than that, make sure we have plenty in rotation to continue watching the Hastings’ house. Anyone comes and goes, I want to know about it.”

  “Got it.” Bennie followed Ryder to his truck. “This is sorry business, Ryder. I feel for Kenneth, even though he’s a huge pain in the ass.”

  “He is that, but he’s our pain in the ass. We will take care of him. Put someone to keep tabs on the funeral ceremonies and keep me apprised. Make sure the family is provided for.”

  “One casserole brigade, coming up.” Bennie’s words were said lightly but they were deeply entrenched in decades of tradition. Much like the humans when they closed ranks around those who lost loved ones, wolves did the same. “And you stay in close touch, too, Ryder. This has a bad feeling to it, especially if whoever it is doing this is targeting us.”

  Ryder felt like he had been left out of a loop. He was at loose ends and in trying to pick them up they were evading his grasp. He was not in control and he didn’t like that feeling one damn bit.

  “You’re a hard man to find,” Ryder said as he entered the diner. With a lift of his chin, Charlene met him at Devan’s table with his coffee. He slid onto the bench opposite of the other alpha.

  “Not in my natural habitat, but in yours,” Devan said with a gesture of his coffee before he took a sip. “I can see how that confused you. How did it go with your man?”

  “He’s devastated.”

  “You sound surprised.”

  “I am, in a way. Kenneth was hard on Bryan. There was rumbling in the pack that he was a little more strict than they felt he needed to be, but it was his family and I could only interfere if it affected the pack as a whole. The man I saw? He was genuinely grieving for his son.” Ryder dumped creamer and sugar in his coffee and stirred slowly, his thoughts running ahead of him. “Tell me you know something.”

  “You know as much as I do. Ted is being as open as he can with the investigation but…he’s in a bad spot, too. He’s got two packs, possibly three, looking at him for answers.”

  “Three?” Ryder didn’t blow on his coffee before sipping and it burned his lips.

  “McBride’s pack. They’re going to be affected by this as well. Probably not as much as we are but…” Devan shrugged.

  Ryder grunted in agreement. “Have you talked to him?”

  “I was thinking of taking a ride up there. Interested?”

  “Sure.”

  “Enough to pay for breakfast? I’ll drive.”

  Ryder pulled his wallet and tossed out a few bills to cover Devan’s meal and his coffee. “Only if we go now. I don’t want to be away from town for too long.”

  The small bar where the Skull Creek pack operated was forty minutes out of town. Their territory stretched the farthest east of Aurora. They were a small pack, fairly new, and comprised of wolves who had wandered in from other parts of the country. They had no history or legacy in or around Aurora. Both Ryder’s and Devan’s pack allowed their presence because they covered territory that neither of their packs had the wolfpower to handle. It helped keep the balance of power in check, as well as giving the south end of Colorado a solid wolf pack presence.

  When Devan pulled into the gravel parking lot of the bar, a cherry picker was parked out front taking down a sign off the side of the building. A young man in his midtwenties was outside supervising with crossed arms. He turned to their approach.

  Ryder recognized him as the owner of the bar. Rudy Hoffman. He was a member of the Skull Creek pack and their current alpha’s partner. They had first met when their pack underwent a right of challenge and an alpha change.

  Rudy dropped his arms and met both of them before they got to the door. “What can I do for you?” he asked with squinting eyes.

  “Rudy, I don’t know if you remember us,” Ryder began. “I’m Ryder Cole and this is Devan Ross.”

  He nodded slowly. Ryder could tell he was trying to recall their names. Finally, something must have clicked and he motioned for them to follow him into the bar. “You need to talk to Gage?”

  “If he’s around,” Devan said. He removed his Smoky the Bear hat when they stepped into the building.

  “Let me call him. It’ll take him a bit to get here. He went to our south border to check something out. Have a seat.” Rudy gestured to the bar and disappeared behind a door marked Employees Only.

  The last time they were in this bar was when the sheriff had called Devan and Ryder in to witness the alpha challenge for the pack. Gage McBride had been reasonable at that time, welcoming the unbiased third-party witnesses to make sure things happened on the up-and-up. What affected the packs affected the region, and Ted Bradley was always interested in keeping things peaceful.

  Gage was particularly ruthless in quelling the problem and ran the troublesome former alpha out of the pack. To Ryder’s knowledge, things had been peaceful ever since and all pack business settled down to local interests only.

  Rudy set them up with beers while they waited. It didn’t take long for the Skull Creek pack’s alpha to stroll in. He lifted his chin in greeting and shook their hands before inviting them to a table for a little more privacy.

  “I heard about what happened. Finding the body and all,” McBride said after Rudy refreshed their beers. “Is it as bad as rumor tells it?”

  Devan nodded grimly. “I’m examining all the options,” he said after a long draw on his bottle. “Hoping that you’ve heard something. Rumor, trash talk, anything that might give us something to go on.”

  McBride pointed a finger at Devan. “You have good instincts, then. I thought maybe things would settle down after I exiled Charlie. Looks like I should have put him down when I had the chance. We drove him to the Nevada state line and dropped him off with a warning not to show his face around here. He was bringing too much attention on us with all this bullshit.”

  Ryder leaned forward. “Is he back in town?”

  McBride leaned in and they huddled together to talk in low voices. “That’s the rumor. One of my boys caught scent of Charlie when he went in for supplies about a week ago.”

  “And he’s sure it was this Charlie?
” Devan asked.

  “Yep.”

  “Did you report this to the sheriff?”

  “Report what? We don’t have full proof he’s back in town. If he hasn’t violated any laws, what’s the sheriff gonna do? And he hasn’t been back in our territory that we’ve seen.”

  McBride had a point. A ronin wolf wasn’t exactly illegal by any stretch of the imagination. However, having been told not to show up and then doing so was grounds for finding the wolf face down in a ditch in many pack territories.

  “Gage, why did you challenge him?” Ryder asked.

  “For being an unrepentant dickbag?” McBride chuckled and finished off his beer. He waved the next beer away. “You already know. He was getting into illegal shit. Drugs, bootleg merchandise, petty larceny, most shit that gives self-respecting packs a bad name. He was forcing Rudy to sell drugs out of this place.”

  Ryder looked around. For a honky-tonk on the edge of a tourist town, it wasn’t a bad place. He remembered the rumors about this being the place to score.

  “And it was giving the pack a black eye. Ted said he would be forced to step in if we didn’t get Charlie under control. So…I did. But the most disturbing rumor, and mind you it’s just rumor, was that he was going to run for sheriff during the next election.”

  Devan started laughing. “That’s ridiculous. Sheriff Bradley is well liked in the county. Hell, in the whole damn state. And he happens to like his job. It would take a scandal to blast him out of his position.”

  “Or a death,” McBride said.

  Ryder felt his throat close up. Sheriff Ted Bradley was the linchpin of balance in Aurora. Hell, in the entire region. He was the key to their continued hidden survival. “Surely this Charlie would know that a death would bring unwanted attention—”

  “Charlie wasn’t all up here.” McBride tapped at his temple. “Probably sampling too much of his own merchandise.”

  Oof. Ryder frowned. Drugs and shifters didn’t mix well. It was a volatile combination.

  “Two brothers, the Cohn twins, used to run with him. We have kept them close in the pack. None of my guys report they’ve been near town so I doubt they know Charlie’s back or that they’ve been to see him. No guarantees, though. They’re inbred hicks but they’re not stupid.” McBride slung an arm over the back of his chair. “We’ve been a little relaxed lately so it’ll take some time to see if that’s actually true.”