by SM Reine
“You want me to move the whole pack to Spain?”
“We just need a few experienced fighters to train the rest,” Pedregon said. “Your pack protected the Fissure throughout the Breaking. You performed a service to protect the world. Now I ask for you to protect your kind.”
It wasn’t like Abel had wanted to protect the Fissure. He hadn’t wanted anything to do with the bullshit that he’d survived after the Breaking, and he wasn’t about to volunteer to do it again.
“Sounds bad over there,” Abel said. “But there’s not much we can do about it. We don’t got any extra hands. Especially not experienced ones.”
“Your government fosters you. Your OPA protects you. Whatever deficits you suffer won’t be fatal, as they may be for my family,” Pedregon said. “We’re all truly one pack. One people.”
Shouts rose from the surrounding cottages. Abel’s head snapped up, his ears perking to the sound of flesh meeting flesh.
The scent of blood reached his nose next.
“We’re done,” Abel said.
He didn’t wait to see what Pedregon would do. He bounded between the houses, tore away brush, erupted onto the adjoining street.
There was no telling what had gone wrong. It could have been anything—a dispute over food, personal property, or just an irritable shifter throwing a punch. Now there were a half-dozen guys brawling on pavement so fresh that the air reeked of tar. Their braced feet left shallow divots.
It wasn’t anything remarkable. Abel had been splitting these messes up more days than not.
He waded in. “Break it off!”
A fist struck his skull. A knee sank into his gut.
Once the Alpha was in, others came too, swarming from the other streets. Werewolves shouted in agreement with Abel.
“Stop it!”
“Split up!”
The fight didn’t stop so much as disperse, like a fire out of fuel. Men scattered. Suddenly, Abel wasn’t getting struck anymore.
He was left standing in a scattered group of confused-looking shifters.
“Where’d they go?” Trevin asked, glancing around. His fists were still bleeding. “What was that about?”
Abel never knew. “They’re gone now.”
“I can chase them,” Pedregon offered.
Until that moment, Abel hadn’t realized that the stag shifter had followed. His woolen hair was mussed. Pedregon’s lip had blood on it, but if there had been a cut, it had already healed.
“Stay out of fights that aren’t yours,” Abel said. “Trevin?”
“On it.” Trevin loped down the road, following the others.
Pedregon looked disappointed.
Abel left him on the road like that, with all those heaps of disappointments. It wouldn’t be his last one. Far-away shifters getting slaughtered by some asshole government? It wasn’t like Abel didn’t care. He just couldn’t care.
By the time Abel reached his cottage, he was sore, tired, and shaking with the healing fever. The shifters had gotten off more than a few hits. Even an Alpha needed a minute to walk that off.
And even Alphas needed to sleep occasionally.
The cottage he shared with his mate looked like all the others. Maybe the flowers were kept better. Their steps were the only ones with offerings on them: half-melted candles, colorful rocks, some seeds and nuts. But it was all the same, elsewise.
Heaviness sank into Abel’s body as he climbed those steps. It wasn’t that he was deliberately kicking over the offerings packmates had left for Rylie; he just didn’t have the energy to care if he did. They fell off into the bushes on either side and he crushed at least one little clay candleholder under his heel.
A breeze made the air shift, and it swept out from underneath the closed front door of his cabin.
The scent of strangers washed over Abel.
The only people who should have been home right now were Rylie and Benjamin, their new baby son. Barely weeks old.
This intruder was male. His skin oils and hair grease were all over the doorknob. He smelled like pack, but sick. Wrong.
The healer had insisted that Rylie take a break after giving birth—mental more than physical—but Rylie was not following instructions. It pained her to be away from her pack. She kept letting people make “personal visits” who had not a hair of personal business with her. So it wasn’t until Abel started opening the door and smelled gunpowder that he was filled by rage.
There was a gun in the house.
Abel shoved the front door open, and he only took a moment to process the scene within.
A male shifter stood by one wall.
Rylie stood by the other.
She was staring down the barrel of his firearm, arms spread to hide the bassinet behind her.
The scent from Rylie’s corner was one of pleasant familiarity. Even the feces in Benjamin’s diaper smelled interesting rather than repulsive. That was Abel’s baby. This was his pup.
Someone was pointing a gun at his pup.
The hatred tore Abel in half, and a wolf exploded out of him. Ribcage shattering. Blood spraying. Fur flashing over his skin like wave over beach.
Abel’s clawed paws, each the size of a tire, slammed into the floorboards.
“It’s not my fault!” cried the attacker.
Those were his last words.
Abel didn’t even wait for his jaws to grow canine teeth before he bit. A hard twist of his head shredded the man from neck to belly, and organs spilled from the tear. Hot blood splashed over Abel’s face. He tore again, and again.
Rylie screamed. The baby started to cry.
The man was dead when he hit the floor.
The werewolf sanctuary was in the process of building the hospital—a feature Abel had never expected they’d need, since shifters had way of taking care of these things naturally. Preternatural strength came with preternatural regeneration too.
It turned out that the weaker shifters made in Genesis didn’t always heal fast enough. In the first week alone, they’d lost three shifters in street brawls. Rylie had cried for twelve hours straight. The following week, they’d broken ground on a medical center.
The hospital would open in the autumn. For now, they used a sprawling tent, outfitted under Seth’s supervision. They’d been taking shipments of supplies for over a month and hiring healers aggressively. Now they had enough to service all of Grove County if needed—shifter and mundane alike.
Of course, that was assuming that the mundanes were willing to take shifter help.
Abel didn’t need to be checked out by a doctor once he shifted back into his human form, but he went to the hospital tent at Rylie’s insistence anyway. He spent five minutes with the healer to appease her. There was nothing to fix. His scars weren’t as bad as they used to be, and Rylie’s attacker hadn’t even gotten off a single gunshot.
Now Abel sat in a chair with Benjamin tucked in one arm so that Rylie could be seen privately. While sleeping, the baby looked like a grumpier version of his mom.
Benjamin had fallen back into his nap once Rylie had nursed him, and he hadn’t even woken up for the healer to examine him. No survival instincts this early on. The thing only ever ate, slept, and pooped.
Their chair was separated from the neighboring exam rooms by curtains. He could hear the doctor examining the assailant’s body on the other side of the right-hand curtain. “This pack member is identified as Wood Lathrop,” said the doctor, speaking into a recorder as she worked. “Cause of death is obvious. I’ll be recording it as massive trauma. What do you think, Doctor Monroe?”
“How do you even tell with shifters?” muttered the other doctor.
Abel’s curtain snapped open. His mate stood on the other side.
Rylie Gresham was as beautiful as the day Abel had decided to stop trying to kill her. She was still the blond, knock-kneed waif who looked like a hard gust of wind could blow her into the clouds.
Fortunately for the entire world, Rylie was a hell of a lot
tougher than she looked.
Abel had met Rylie because he’d been the eldest son of a werewolf hunting family, and their policy had been to kill every last werewolf. They’d nearly hunted the breed to extinction.
But one thing had led to another, and Abel had gotten to know Rylie better than any of his other prey. She hadn’t been scared of him. She also hadn’t been disgusted by his scars. And when Abel had been bitten by a werewolf, changing into the man he was now, it turned out that Abel and Rylie’s wolves liked each other. A lot.
Becoming Alpha mates had been a natural evolution from there. Now they had three offspring and a sanctuary filled with thousands of shapeshifters.
“Why did you do that?” Rylie demanded. She was angrier than he’d seen her in a long, long time.
Abel wanted to take Rylie into his arms, but he wasn’t going to move an inch with that baby sleeping on him. Benjamin was so little that an accidental bicep flex could crush him. “Did the healer say you’re all right?”
“Yes, obviously,” Rylie said. “What were you thinking? You killed Wood!”
He flashed a big, lazy grin. “You don’t gotta thank me for it. When I said that I would spend my life protecting you, I meant it.”
Her jaw dropped. “How in the world was that protecting me?”
“The healer said that you weren’t injured, right?” Abel asked. “No brain damage?” She’d drawn near enough that he caught her by the waist, pulling her onto his lap. Rylie didn’t feel much less frail than Benjamin. Abel felt safest having them both against his chest.
Rylie wasn’t in a cuddling mood today. “Wood didn’t have silver bullets.” Stronger werewolves, like Abel and Rylie and their original pack, could only be killed by silver. Standard bullets hurt about as much as a bad sneeze.
He dropped his voice low, since the baby was squirming against him. Benjamin stretched his legs out long without opening his eyes. He looked halfway between a string bean and a loaf of bread. “I don’t care what bullets he had,” Abel said. “It wouldn’t take silver bullets to kill Benjamin.”
Unlike his parents, the baby had gray-blue eyes, like all human newborns. Every test the witches ran on him came back clear. Their infant son was a mundane human, subject to all the vulnerabilities associated with it.
“Wood was scared,” Rylie said. “He wouldn’t have shot either of us. He just wanted someone to hear him, and if you’d given me more time to talk—”
“Rylie, I’m never gonna apologize for protecting the baby,” Abel said.
Benjamin whined. Rylie lifted him from Abel’s protective grasp, and she rocked him as she stepped away. Her frown hadn’t faded. “He didn’t get enough sleep. I’m going to take him home, and you and I are going to talk about this later.”
Abel got up. “I’ll come too.”
“No, Abel, you can’t.” She massaged her temples, eyes closed. She looked like she might fall asleep on the spot. “There’s too much business to attend. Killing Wood is going to shake a lot of people, and we’re already sitting on a powder keg in this valley. We can’t both be out of commission.”
“Let Aunt Gwyn and them handle it,” Abel said.
Rylie clutched Benjamin to her chest. “It’s me or you. We’re the Alphas. If you aren’t going to help—”
“No, it’s fine,” he interrupted. “I’ve got it. I’ll stay up.” He couldn’t remember the last time he’d slept more than three or four hours in a row. Before the baby, there had been all the post-Genesis bullshit, and before that had been the war, and the Breaking, and…
Goddamn, Abel was tired.
Nothing about Rylie’s scent was inviting. She was hostile, radiating anger at him. No matter how hard she tried to keep her features calm, she couldn’t lie with her scent.
It wasn’t that Rylie wanted an Alpha on the job. She didn’t want Abel coming back to the cottage with her.
“Why’re you so mad at me?” he asked.
Her glance was withering. “You killed Wood,” Rylie said in a tiny voice.
She swept out.
“Wood wasn’t anybody,” Abel called after her. A refugee with issues, someone who’d aimed a gun at his mate. He wouldn’t apologize for any of that.
“You know why she is angry, don’t you?” Pedregon asked, ducking through the curtain that had just closed behind Rylie.
Abel hadn’t smelled the rival Alpha coming. “I already told you to get out of pack business. Don’t make me throw you out of the sanctuary myself.”
“This is about marriage, not your pack,” Pedregon said. He offered a cup of water to Abel. When the wolf didn’t take it, Pedregon drank. “I’ve been married to my wife for twenty years. We’ve fought about everything under the sun that you can imagine.”
“Unless your woman has raked you over the coals for saving her life, you have no idea what I’m talking about,” Abel said.
“We have been in fights as big as that, over matters much smaller. The dimension of the situation doesn’t matter because the real issue lies within a woman’s heart,” Pedregon said. The stag was still hunched over, as he always was, as if struggling to maneuver around an old wound on his side. He was older than he looked, maybe as old as Abel’s father would have been.
“I’m listening,” Abel said.
They exited the hospital tent into air that felt like the first hints of rain. It was cool in the shade and muggy in the sun. Pedregon brushed flies from his neck. “Women don’t know how to think through such scary times. It takes a man’s clarity to guide her, understand her, and understand what plagues her. You have to look beyond her words to the source of her true anger.”
Rylie had survived more in her short life than most battle-tested soldiers at retirement. “You know your wife, but you don’t know my mate. She ain’t like that.”
“That’s the thing, you see. Your wife isn’t acting like herself lately. Things have changed. Haven’t you noticed, how her attention draws inward? How little interest she shows in intimacy? How seldom she looks beyond your new baby? Motherhood changes a woman.”
It had sure changed Rylie. Their twins hadn’t done much to her, since they hadn’t raised their eldest kids. But she was a different person in the weeks since Benjamin came. Abel couldn’t even remember the last time they’d slept in the same bed, much less had sex.
“Having a baby renders a woman vulnerable, and her needs can only be met by a real man.” Pedregon’s eyes were very bright gold, blazing in a bar of sunlight that cut through the trees. “She needs you to provide for her. You need to make her feel safe.”
The words landed like ice picks directly into Abel’s heart.
He hadn’t really protected her from Lathrop, because Lathrop never should have gotten a chance to attack in the first place.
“I hope I have not overstepped,” Pedregon said. “But I remember how difficult these times are. I have five children, you know. You can get through this.” He rested a hand on Abel’s shoulder in the briefest show of solidarity.
Fresh anger smoldered in Abel’s heart. “I’ll think about your advice.”
Chapter 13
Music, shouts, and laughter drew Sophie’s attention from her translation. She rose from Lincoln’s desk to peer out his bedroom window. Her body ached from sitting too long, and no wonder—judging by the increasing gloom, she must have been translating for hours. She’d been too focused to feel time pass.
Several new cars had pulled up the driveway. Most of the people arriving had that Marshall look about them: the light hair, the fair skin, the sturdy physique. Some were approximately Lincoln’s age, but many more were small children. These must have been his nieces, nephews, and sisters arriving for the promised barbecue.
“Where, then, is Mr. Lincoln Marshall himself?” Sophie asked, glancing at the clock. It had been hours since he’d failed to follow her into the house. She’d assumed at first that he’d been visiting with other relatives or had taken a walk to clear his mind. Only now did she begin to worry
—and dread.
She would have to go downstairs to ask Lincoln’s family if they had seen him.
Sophie delayed joining the barbecue by searching through her bags for something that would help her fit in with the Marshalls. There wasn’t a lot of variety in her wardrobe. She settled on a pair of white linen pants and a billowing blouse light enough to provide cool in the late summer heat. It wasn’t identical to the collared shirts and denim that the family’s women wore, but at least it wasn’t her more dramatic coat and boots.
There was no sign of Susannah when she went downstairs—the least unfriendly of a hostile crew. She found Lincoln’s sole suitcase by the couch in the living room, but not Lincoln himself. Shadows moved beyond the doorway to the stoop, its screen propped open with an old leather shoe.
She lingered by a bureau to peer through the lacy curtains. Ashley was embracing another woman of similar age, both relaxed and smiling. The sister, Skylar, scooped up a little blond child with a laugh so that she could kiss his cheek. The sun glowed upon all of them.
“Hello,” Sophie said, stepping through the doorway.
Ashley’s expression shuttered. Smile gone.
The other woman couldn’t seem to decide if she wanted to look disbelieving or confused, and it was strange to see such indecisiveness on decisively Marshall features. “This is the woman that Lincoln brought?”
“Yes, this is Sophie Keyes,” Ashley said. “They’re not dating. They’re just so attached to each other that they’ll visit each other’s families, regardless of the impact that has on the bereaved.”
Sophie gave a smile that made her whole face hurt. “Are you another of Lincoln’s sisters?”
“Yes, I’m Abigail Adair.” She extended a hand, presumably to shake. Sophie barely touched her fingers before Abigail withdrew. “Wow, your hair is so pretty. Can I touch it?”
It wasn’t really a question, because Abigail’s fingers were already in Sophie’s braids, twisting them around her fingers. She twisted the beads on the tips and Sophie recoiled. Omar had carved those beads for her over a few boring weeks at their farm.