“I can take the pups to Haven, but you need to go talk to your mother,” Hunter answered. Then, before I could argue, he pulled me closer and began stroking me into submission again.
It was hard to disagree while the bliss of my mate’s warm fingers roamed across tense muscles. So I lay back, figuring I could argue the point in the morning.
But Hunter wasn’t done speaking. I could count on one hand the number of times he’d mentioned anything about his past. Still, something about the anonymity of darkness must have called up his inner storyteller because Hunter’s deep rumble once again filled the air as I slid toward sleep.
“You might have guessed by now that my mother was a halfie,” my mate murmured. I would have thought I was dreaming if I hadn’t felt his breath teasing tendrils of hair around my ear. “Her pack put up with her,” he continued, “reluctantly. Even that acceptance stopped when she admitted she was pregnant with a human’s child.”
Once upon a time, there was a poor girl whose family treated her badly, I thought, Hunter’s mother turning into Cinderella in my drowsy mind. I only realized I’d murmured the words aloud when my mate chuckled, smoothing down my mussed hair as he carried on with his tale.
“That’s exactly right, darling,” Hunter agreed. “But in this case, there was no fairy godmother. Instead, the young woman’s pack cast her out before her child was born. She turned wolf in order to survive.”
Visions drifted through my mind like dreams. A pack of mangy mutts, a stick-thin but glorious Mother Wolf, the acceptance and joy of group hunts. I was too relaxed to question how I could see the world through a young Hunter’s eyes, so I simply released myself into the experience.
Then an abrupt shift, literally and figuratively. Hairless human legs, the confusion of changing forms after a lupine life. A long run through pitch blackness at Mother Wolf’s heels, bare feet aching in a way lupine paws never had.
A strange two-legger opening a door, her aroma reminiscent of Mother Wolf’s but subtly different. Being ushered inside, the door shut behind me to keep Mother Wolf at bay.
Incalculable time lost to confusion, fear, anger. Then human words slowly changing from sound to meaningful expression.
“By the time I could speak with my aunt,” my mate murmured, “the choice my mother made for me seemed like the ultimate betrayal. I was a stupid kid, so I ran away. But not back to the wolf who birthed me. Instead, I struck out on my own.”
“Of course you were angry,” I murmured at last, tongue unruly with grogginess. “Your mother had dumped you into a world that confused and scared you.”
In an instant, Hunter’s mood shifted to anger so strong I could feel the root-beer aroma pushing up against my skin. “She’d done the best she could,” my mate growled.
My muscles tensed in an instinctive urge to flee the danger. But then the uber-alpha forced his ire back down inside as he physically pushed the aroma away from my nose with a wave of one hand. “She’d done the best she could,” he repeated more quietly and gently this time around. “But when I finally got over myself and went back to find her, she was dead. Our pack of dogs was disbanded. I was too late.”
I couldn’t see my bed mate, but I could feel him as he unerringly clasped both hands around either side of my head. His touch was firm at first, then it gentled as he stroked calloused fingers across my unruly hair. “That’s why I’m asking you to give your mother another chance,” he whispered into the darkness. “She won’t be around forever and you never know when her time will run out.”
I thought he was done and my eyes were drifting shut once more when Hunter’s final words settled around me like a warm blanket. “I love you too much to help you make the same mistakes I’ve regretted for half of a lifetime,” he murmured.
My mate had invoked the L word, but I was too tired to protest. Instead, I fell asleep to the sensation of his warm lips gently pressing into my forehead, a happy smile imprinted on my face.
Chapter 4
I WOKE TO AN EMPTY hotel room, mate absent.
No, not absent—gone. My gut ached with an intensity I hadn’t felt since casting Hunter out of my ramshackle pack a month earlier. And when I reached out tentatively with my mind in search of our mate bond, I found nothing but darkness.
Somehow, I knew Hunter hadn’t just slipped away to pick up a cup of coffee and the morning paper.
You’re overreacting, I told myself. But my wolf growled within my skin, her nose picking up on clues my human half hadn’t been able to decipher. And when I tore through the suite to confirm her supposition, the signs were indeed ominous.
The three bloodling pups were no longer present and their bathroom den looked no worse than if a few humans had taken half a dozen showers apiece there. Hunter’s suitcase was similarly absent and the hotel receipt sitting beside the sink had a checkout time circled in red ink. Even my mate’s scent had dissipated as if he’d never shared this temporary abode with me and the pups.
Hunter said he loved me, then he left me, I thought, a stress headache starting up behind my right temple. I should have known it was coming. It’s happened before....
My wolf had reverted to wordlessness several minutes earlier. But now she growled again, more loudly this time. No, my inner beast wasn’t willing to admit that our mate had abandoned us without a note or forwarding address. I could feel her gathering herself together in order to muster two short words: Call him.
Good idea. Rational idea. Why hadn’t I thought of it first?
I hit the first button on my speed dial with more force than was really necessary and listened to the resultant ringing as I tossed the few belongings I’d unpacked into my duffel and strode out the door. Hunter’s SUV was gone, but a shiny rental car gleamed in the space he’d opened up. I had a sinking suspicion the new vehicle matched the key I’d found beside the hotel-room receipt, the same key that I was now clutching in one clammy hand.
No answer. My call should have gone to voice mail long since, but instead the phone just kept ringing as I unlocked the vehicle and slipped behind the wheel. I turned the key and saw the GPS spring to life, an address pre-programmed into the device.
My heart leapt...only to sink even further as I realized the location was within the same town where I’d so recently fled my father’s funeral. This wasn’t a designated rendezvous to meet back up with my mate. No, it was a subtle-as-a-brick-to-the-head message about where Hunter thought I should go next.
I was about to click the off button on the phone when the line finally picked up. “Hunter?” I began, relief coursing through my body. But instead of my mate’s soothing voice, a woman’s sultry tones filled my ear.
“Hunter’s phone,” she answered. “Meeshi speaking.”
I think I might have literally seen red. I only realized I was growling when Meeshi began to laugh at me, her chuckles as harmonious as the rest of her diction.
“You must be Fen,” the woman said when she was finally able to squash her mirth. “I’ve heard a lot about you.”
“Funny because I’ve heard nothing about you,” my wolf growled between human lips.
“And you’re her wolf,” Meeshi retorted. “Interesting. I thought you were a halfie, weak as a kitten.”
Neither side of my personality could muster a reply to that rabble-rousing statement. So I gathered my few remaining shreds of dignity and changed the subject. “Where’s Hunter?”
“I’m afraid Hunter’s unable to come to the phone right now,” Meeshi answered. She could have turned the statement into a jab, but instead she sounded kind.
Of course she would be kind when she knew where my mate was and I didn’t even know who she was.
I only realized I was growling again when Meeshi’s tone turned to pity. “I’m sorry, duckie, but he asked me not to forward your calls.”
Duckie? If Meeshi had been within arm’s reach, I would have tested my new throwing knives on a living, breathing target. I wouldn’t aim for her flesh of course; I’d j
ust see if my marksmanship was good enough to pin a sleeve or two to the wall.
And if my hand slipped.... Well, that was Meeshi’s own fault for riling me up, now wasn’t it?
Unfortunately, our distance prevented me from exacting such a satisfying revenge. Instead, I weighed the possibility of teasing a bit more information out of my conversational partner. Maybe later. It was obvious I wasn’t up to the task of subtlety at the moment.
Not when my wolf was so rampant that she easily stole my tongue without permission. Not when my human brain was barely able to string two words together.
And Hunter has made it entirely clear he doesn’t want to talk to me right now anyway, now hasn’t he?
The morning’s slight headache had already turned into a pounding throb, the pain barely lessening when I closed my eyes and rested my forehead against the steering wheel. I only realized I’d let the phone slip out of my grasp when I heard the whisper of Meeshi’s voice, tinny with distance, emerging from my lap.
“If you need someone to talk to, duckie, just call me back,” Hunter’s gatekeeper offered.
Without answering, I hit the “end” button and shifted the car into drive. Then, saving the address Hunter had so helpfully programmed into my GPS, I fished a piece of paper out of my messenger bag and inserted a different string of letters and numbers into the device in its place.
Because you can kick a horse out into the desert and leave her there until she’s so parched she thinks she’s going to die. Then you can offer a trough of sparkling spring water and even pour it directly over her head in hopes some of the life-giving fluid will seep into her mouth.
But if she’s pissed as hell because you abandoned her in the first place, you can’t make her drink.
Not that I’m saying I’m a horse. But I did ignore my absent mate’s hints and instead turned the car in the opposite direction from where he wanted me to go. Head and heart pounding, I started to drive.
THE HOUSE LOOKED LIKE a typical human dwelling on the edge of suburbia. The dwelling had been recently upgraded with a new coat of paint, a richly fertilized lawn, and a welcoming porch.
On the other hand, the strong cat-piss aroma wafting in through the window of my idling car didn’t seem quite right. Add in the pack of baying dogs beating against the walls plus the heavy blinds twitching open just long enough to allow the inhabitant to catch sight of my vehicle and I had a sinking suspicion I wouldn’t be well received if I clattered up the cobblestone walkway and knocked on the front door.
“So that’s why you wanted to buy a wolf,” I muttered, putting the car back into gear and rolling away down the street toward the secluded pull-off spot I’d scoped out moments earlier.
Safely out of sight, I took a moment to reopen the file I’d unintentionally swiped from Hunter’s collection the day before. It seemed like an eternity since I’d first poked through the puppy-mill owner’s records while waiting for the youngsters to be patched up at the vet’s office. Then as now, the oldest bloodling pup’s information caught my eye and wouldn’t let me go.
Thirteen years earlier, Mr. Puppy Pusher had sold his first foundling wolf to John Davis as a guard animal for a thousand bucks cash on the barrel. The timeline meant the pup should now be reaching maturity and getting close to the age of her first shift. Because while most werewolves didn’t begin transforming until they were around fourteen years of age, bloodlings had a distressing tendency to mature faster. In other words, cleanup of the puppy-mill owner’s messes needed to start here and now.
Hunter and I should be doing this together, I thought irritably, rubbing at my still aching head. Good news—the throb behind my right eye was easing up a bit. Bad news—the pain was now migrating down my neck instead, where the tendons stood out in stiff ribs of tension.
A strange combination of growl and whimper emerged from my lips without human volition. Shh, wolf, I said knowing that my inner beast’s suffering was even worse than my own. I was angry at Hunter and hurt by his absence, but my wolf’s reaction was pure instinct. Deep within our shared gut, I could feel her pacing, waiting impatiently for the uber-alpha’s return.
He’s not here, so we’re just going to have to deal, I told us both. To my relief, the wolf sighed and settled.
I wished I could have done the same. But Hunter’s absence just felt too wrong to overlook.
For the last month, my mate and I had worked together on various Tribunal jobs, and it certainly hadn’t been my intention to track this pup down on my own. But between the trio of bloodlings, our shared anger, and our frantic coupling the day before, my mate and I had never gotten a chance to talk rationally. So now I was the one left with the teenage bloodling’s sparse file clenched in two tight fists.
Good thing I was more than capable of dealing with one confused shifter plus an irate meth-lab owner all on my lonesome. Quirking my lips upward into a grimace that I was trying to pretend was a smile, I quickly shed my clothes and sprinted for the tree line buck naked. Once safely encircled by shielding shrubbery, I dropped to hands and knees and opened my mind to the wolf.
During the previous month’s drama, my inner beast and I had become, if not friends, at least efficient partners. Now, we shifted forms between one breath and the next, my human mind seamlessly joining the wolf’s to share command of our four-legged body.
Together, we shook out our fur and inhaled a deep breath of forest air. A pecan-like aroma of hidden fungi, the human scent of playing children, the chlorophyll richness of dense summer greenery. Despite my tendency to squash my weak wolf, I had to admit the lupine-enhanced sensations felt right.
Our tense neck muscles loosened and the pain behind our temples eased. In lupine form, even my human brain found it tough to cling to should-have-beens, and now I relaxed completely into the wolf. Two-legger insecurities and troubles could be dealt with at a later date.
Lead on, I told my animal half, giving up control so she could take the reins.
We hadn’t been four-legged in nearly a week, and I would have expected the wolf to be easily sidetracked by scent trails and beckoning rock perches. But my inner beast was still too affected by Hunter’s absence to require human insecurities as impetus for maintained focus.
Or perhaps she was as concerned about the half-grown bloodling pup as I was. Either way, she made a beeline for John Davis’s perfect human abode.
And her efforts quickly paid off. As we neared the thinning lawn leading up to the meth lab’s back door, the scent of another shifter reached our nostrils at last.
Actually, I thought the aroma was emerging from Davis’s chemical experiments at first. Nose-stinging ammonia was so similar to the lab’s cat-piss reek that it made my wolf shake her head in disapproval.
But, no, that wasn’t just a chemical odor. Instead, a thin thread of rose petals drifted underneath, and for the first time all day I felt my chest expand with hope. Perhaps the bloodling had preserved a tiny shred of her humanity despite being treated as a dangerous and unloved mutt for the first thirteen years of her life.
It took every shred of human willpower I possessed to prevent the wolf from springing forward and tracking down the bloodling immediately. Instead, I reminded myself and my animal half that we needed to win the rogue’s approval before we could spirit her away. If, as I suspected, she’d been treated like a weapon rather than like a sentient being for her entire life, then she would have no reason to follow my lead when I arrived to spring her from prison.
So we carefully padded along the property’s boundaries rather than running directly up to the back door. Davis must have installed a subterranean electric fence to keep dogs and wolf in check because a trail of beaten-down grass marked a solid rectangle around the perimeter of the bloodling’s territory.
Hmm, tricky. First I’d need to gain the bloodling’s confidence, then shift long enough to remove her collar before finally leading her back across this hidden fence line...all without being noticed by the meth-lab operator.
But before my animal half could fully tease apart the aroma that was entering our shared nostrils, the back door of the house slammed open and a broad, bearded man stepped out onto a small concrete stoop. He was large and imposing, both aggression and fear rolling off his form in nearly visible waves.
It was a bad combination. Particularly since the meth-lab owner held a rifle pointed straight at us.
My wolf barely had time to hop out of the way before Davis pulled the trigger, the bullet missing our head by inches. Without waiting for input from me, our lupine body turned and ran back into the trees where further missiles would be unlikely to strike soft flesh.
But Davis didn’t shoot again. Instead, he called after us with a tremor in his voice. “Get out of here and don’t come back,” he ordered, his voice harsh with fear but still commanding.
Something about his tone suggested the human knew what I was...but not who I was.
Which led to one unfortunate conclusion. The foundling pup had already shifted. She’d blown our cover to this law-breaking human, and now she was wandering alone through one-body society.
Perhaps it was a good thing Hunter and the Tribunal didn’t know about the rogue after all. Because I was pretty sure the shifter punishment for such behavior was fast and simple—death.
Chapter 5
IT WAS EASIER THAN I would have thought to track the bloodling down. For that, I had to thank the summer drought since recent lack of moisture meant the two-legger’s first mad dash through the forest was still discernible days later.
Once my pads hit pavement, of course the initial scent trail vanished...but the girl hadn’t gone far. A group home half a mile distant reeked of ammonia and rose petals, proof positive that the bloodling had managed to scope out her options and find a place to live as a human before making a break for it.
Good for her, I thought, pulling a bit more control away from my animal mind now that we were once again among the supposedly civilized. A wolf would look out of place here in suburbia, but a werewolf blended right in once I yanked our lupine tail upwards into a more dog-like posture and perked my ears forward with a welcoming slant. It seemed the escaped bloodling girl had managed a similar infiltration despite spending most of her life four-legged.
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