All These Years (Hidden Wolves Prequel)

1. Chapter 1

Lee

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Werewolf! The familiar musk hit my senses like sunshine after two decades in a dark cave, blinding, painful, wonderful.

I froze in the doorway to the sheriff’s office, fighting the urge to flare my human nostrils and inhale that scent.

It’d been years since I’d encountered one of my kind, and this was not just any werewolf.

Micah. That male sweat with the touch of wolf was subtly different from the scent of the boy I remembered, and yet it arrowed deep into my walled-off heart and tugged.

“…do you?” Sheriff Tomlinson had clearly asked me a question, but I couldn’t dredge his words out of my shocked brain.

“Sorry. Say that again.”

“You’re not taking this seriously, are you, Lee?”

“I’m taking it very seriously. Chuck wants to run me out of town.” But despite my words, I was distracted, trying to subtly inhale those traces of Micah in this small room. Why? Where is he?

“Now, now, Lee. Have a seat.” Tomlinson dropped his considerable bulk into the wooden chair behind his desk, which creaked in protest.

I sat opposite and forced my attention back to the sheriff.

He tried to plaster a benevolent look on his face. The effort was less than convincing. “Chuck’s voiced a concern, and you know I have to follow up.”

No, you don’t. Chuck Fletcher had voiced multiple “concerns” in the last three months, since he’d realized that not only did his dog hate me— normal for a dog encountering a werewolf— but his wife, on the other hand, kept calling back a guy with my physique to do chores around the place.

It’d taken me till my last job for her to realize his true problem with me.

I noticed people, but I didn’t really notice women.

“What was it this time?” I asked. “The smell of my pet weasel driving his dog crazy again?”

I hadn’t planned to have a pet, ever, but finding Zipper as a tiny baby and raising him to live in my house had turned out to be a great excuse for why dogs all growled at me.

Animals generally found werewolves unsettling and scary.

Those hand-raised by us from birth were the only exceptions.

Dog owners tended to take their pets’ reactions badly, and Zipper was a useful explanation.

The sheriff frowned. “Chuck says you stole something from his house.”

I grimaced and ran a hand over my face. “He’s scraping the bottom of the barrel for excuses now. Come on, Sheriff, you know me. I’ve been in and out of people’s houses for the last ten years, doing odd jobs. If I was a thief, you’d have figured that out by now.”

“I still need your permission to search your house. No big deal. If the item isn’t there, you’re in the clear.”

“No.” I sat up straight. “Sorry, Sheriff, but no. A man’s house is his castle, and you need a warrant to search mine.

” I didn’t know what a thorough search might turn up that would look weird, but a forty-five-year-old man who looked fifteen years younger and turned furry at will might leave traces of that double life in his home.

I never had anyone over visiting, and I had a good lock on my door, so I hadn’t been meticulous about evidence in my private space.

“Are you going to make this difficult?” Tomlinson’s frown deepened.

“Why should I roll over for Chuck? If I say he stole my wallet when I was there and refused to give it back, would you search his house?”

“Are you putting in a formal complaint?”

“No, because I’m not a lying knucklehead like Chuck.

” I pushed to my feet. “Look, Sheriff, you know he hates me, and I figured out it’s because his wife doesn’t.

Which is none of my business— I’ll stop saying yes when she calls for a handyman.

But you know, if you want to investigate a crime, you might look into how he beats her.

” The shadowed bruises on her arms were the reason I’d given in to her entreaties the last time, even after I’d vowed to avoid the Fletcher house.

“If she files a complaint, I’ll do that.”

Which meant Tomlinson knew and couldn’t be bothered.

Too bad that jerk Chuck wasn’t a werewolf.

For abusing his wife, he’d end up dragged off by his Alpha and dropped down a deep hole.

I was the last person to applaud pack “justice,” but it was an effective end to wife beating.

Unless the abuser was the Alpha, of course…

I dragged my mind back from dark places.

“It’s 1960, you know. Women aren’t property.

You should let her know she’d be protected if she leaves him. ”

Tomlinson was already shaking his head. “I’m not encouraging a wife to leave her lawful husband. What kind of sheriff do you take me for?”

A bad one? That wasn’t fair, but the scent of Micah in my nose— and brain and heart— was making me rebellious. “The kind who wants to stop a murder before it happens?”

“Now, now. Chuck’s a bit impulsive, and I admit he’s hard on Peggy, but he’s not going to hurt her.”

I didn’t snort in disbelief, but it was a near thing. “Let me know if you get that warrant for my house. Or if you want to save yourself useless work, you could just tell Chuck no.” I stood, debating how to address the Micah-scent. “Uh, on a different note, I heard there’s a stranger in town.”

“The bum? Yeah, he’s in the lock-up now. If someone stole from Chuck, most likely it was him.”

Anger flooded me. “No one stole from Chuck!” I didn’t realize how forcefully I’d said that till Tomlinson flinched, then scowled darkly. Back off, back off. “Sorry, Sheriff, but you know he’s lying.” The last thing Micah needed— if “the bum” was him— would be any kind of criminal charges.

“So you say. You’re not making the call here.

” Tomlinson glared at me. I’d made him afraid for an instant.

I hadn’t meant to, but at the thought of a threat to Micah, my wolf had climbed up behind my eyes and growled.

The sheriff wouldn’t know why he was afraid of a man two inches shorter and fifty pounds lighter who’d never been known to be violent, but he’d hate feeling intimidated.

Time to soothe his pride. Pretend he’s your Alpha.

I bowed my head, making myself smaller, hating that I needed to, but staying on Tomlinson’s right side was essential in this town.

“Of course not. You have all the law enforcement experience. If you really think his complaint has any basis in fact, you’ll get that warrant, and I’ll fully cooperate with it. Just let me know.”

Tomlinson nodded, his body language reassured. “I’ll do that. Get out of here and stay away from Peggy Fletcher.”

“Gladly.” I’d love to warn Chuck off hurting her, but angering him would do more harm than good unless she left him.

And I understood why she didn’t. Divorce meant standing up in court and giving them a good enough reason to grant her release— and courts didn’t put enough weight on smacking your wife around.

They might say no, and then she’d be trapped with an enraged man.

Or they might say yes. Then she’d be a single divorcée, trying to survive, likely with no job skills at all, in a community that would look down on her lack of loyalty to her man.

She could leave town and head somewhere bigger, if she could afford the bus ticket, but Rock Springs, half an hour away, didn’t offer many more options, and Salt Lake City in Utah was a tough place for someone without support.

I’d only been there twice in the decade I’d lived here, and the anonymity was cold and lonely.

Hopefully, Peggy would find some other way out, but I needed to step back for both our sakes.

Tomlinson waved at his door. “Get out of here. I’ll talk to Chuck again, but if he insists, I might have to go to a judge.”

“Try the pawnshop first. If anything’s actually missing, I bet he took it there himself and plans to blame me.

” He owned our one local pawnshop and could fake up the books any way he liked.

Of course, claiming I tried to sell him his own possession back would look suspect as hell, but Chuck wasn’t smart.

That was a mess for another time, though. I couldn’t focus on Chuck. “Hey, I have a big job coming up, moving a load of gravel for Mayor King. It’d go better with an extra pair of hands. You think that bum you have in the tank might be willing to do an actual day’s work?”

“The bum?” Tomlinson cocked his head. “There must be men in town who could use the work.”

“Yeah, but if this guy’s hungry, I can get a day’s work out of him for a lot less than a day’s pay. I’m not making much on this job. You know what a tightwad Mayor King is. Heck, look at your department budget. He never parts with an extra dime.”

That was a surefire way to get Tomlinson on my side, since his battles with King over access to our tax dollars were legendary. He nodded. “Right. Makes sense.”

“You picked the man up for vagrancy, right? Not any real crime?”

“Broke and dirty, longhaired tramp. Not our kind here.”

I could read between those lines. Micah also had darker skin than “our kind here” in this little whitebread Wyoming town, partly courtesy of some American Indian ancestry whose threads ran through our old pack.

On me, that heritage looked like a working man’s tan.

But for Micah, whose mother was from Calcutta, the combined result had gotten him sneers and insults throughout our teens.

Not from other wolves. For all our faults, racism was rare.

We were, after all, a different race ourselves, and the women wolves married were chosen for intelligence and submissiveness, a valuable combination unaffected by skin color.

But we lived among humans, and even back in our hometown of Columbus, Micah had been “that dirty Injun” way too often, from adults as well as our classmates.

The human boys had been lucky I was restrained by pack rules, and good at keeping my temper.

I kept that temper now and shrugged. “Well, I can solve dirty and broke. I’ll throw him in the creek to clean up and feed him for a day’s work, give him a couple of bucks.”