Finding Home (Build-A-Pack #2)

Chapter Two

Holden

T he door to my office cracked open and Deputy Jonah Pearce peeked in. “Chief?”

“Yeah?” I’d been filling yet another report, so I’d take anything to interrupt the tedium.

“I went to have lunch at the diner and there’s whispers about the Halls again.” Pearce, one of the junior deputies, had ears like a bat which was kind of handy for a small community such as ours.

I sighed. “Okay. Let’s keep our ears and eyes open, maybe drive by the house on patrol a bit more again. I’ll go visit Tiny Tots before I go get my lunch.”

“Sounds good, I’ll tell the others.” He gave me a little salute and slipped away again.

I was the most senior deputy at the Luxton station, and since we covered a lot of the remote areas, people had gotten to call me Sheriff around town. Why? Because the actual man in charge, Sheriff Gerrell, didn’t care about anything but his friends in the slightly bigger towns north of us and taking credit for anything and everything he could.

The only thing he hated more than me was the fact that I could tell he hated me, no matter how much he tried to hide it. It was the wolf-shaped elephant in the room whenever we had to meet. Gerrell was a speciest, he hated werewolves and vampires for whatever reason, and me being a bitten wolf was even worse.

Technically, I was older than Gerrell. He was a couple of years younger than my sixty-one, but I still looked about forty, the age I’d been when bitten. It fucked with Gerrell’s bigoted little head, and I couldn’t have enjoyed it more.

I’d seen his emergency information when our receptionist, Penny, showed me how to access those files in, you guessed it, an emergency. That’s when I learned Gerrell didn’t want to be turned. He’d rather die if the worst happened.

There was a registry for humans that stated whether they wanted to be either bitten by a werewolf or a vampire when in mortal danger. I didn’t know the percentages, but I assumed most people would still like to live if they weren’t speciest assholes.

I saved the report and put the computer into sleep mode, then left my office.

Going past the desks in the back of the larger area, I ignored the few deputies who were doing their paperwork. We’d had a busy few days, so everyone was trying to catch up, yours truly included.

As I stepped through the swinging gate, Penny lifted her gaze from her computer.

“Jonah already told me, go, go,” she shooed me off.

I rolled my eyes and turned around, then walked back through the room. We parked official vehicles in the lot on the side of the building, so I headed to the side door.

“Hey, chief?” Deputy Mikayla Fischer stepped out of the locker room.

“Yeah?”

“Can I swap shifts with someone for Tuesday? My grandpa is refusing to go to the doctor again and….” She groaned. This was not a new thing.

“Of course. If nobody else will, let me know and I’ll try to cover it, okay?”

“Okay, thanks, chief!”

I escaped the building and went to my patrol car. As much as I enjoyed being the “boss” at the station, I wasn’t the kind of person who enjoyed peopleing a lot. I’d never been very social, really.

That’s why it was a bit strange why I liked Brodie McRae’s pack so much. He was new in town, but he’d taken over from his shitty uncle and frankly, this town needed that. Rusty Douglas had been a drug dealer, manufacturer, and an Alpha wolf. He’d also been an abusive bastard and a human trafficker, even if we’d never caught him in the act or had other solid evidence, but he’d sure traded some meth for poor Carys Rossi.

I rolled my neck, trying to calm down as I drove along Main Street to get to Tiny Tots. The daycare center was bigger than some people might’ve expected, but then this was a town where people still had a lot of babies. Sadly, the economy meant that in areas like ours, both parents often needed to work, which in turn brought in a lot of business for Meredith, the woman running it. Being that she was a good person, she gave discounts for the poorest families where she could.

I parked right in the front and got out, raising a hand at the old fellas who liked to sit across the street in front of the hardware store. I sometimes wondered if the store was still open only because the family running it owned the building and the men in the front bought their sweet tea from the cooler by the cash register.

As I went through the front door of the daycare center, Meredith’s receptionist, her daughter Nika, smiled at me reflexively. Then her expression got more serious.

“Uh-oh,” she deadpanned.

I snorted softly. “It’s nothing active. Is your mom free?”

She came around the desk and shook her head. “No, but I'll fill in while you chat.”

“Thanks, Nika.”

Nodding, she started deeper into the building. I appreciated the fact that there was a security gate at the mouth of the long hallway she went down. There’d been calls made for people trying to pick up kids that weren’t theirs. Estranged parents weren’t even the worst of it.

Meredith bustled down the hall and through the gate, then gestured for the couch by the front desk. “I don’t have much time—”

I lifted my hand. “No, it’s fine.”

She was a human in her mid-forties and her personal style was a lot like a fifties rocker chick with some daycare owner details. She wore overalls with paint splatter smears, but her hair was still in victory rolls and her winged eyeliner was on point.

“So, which family is it?” she asked, all too shrewd.

Then again, it wasn’t as if I was here for a social call. Meredith had asked me out about a year ago, just before my predecessor retired and I became the senior deputy, and I’d had to tell her I didn’t really swing her way.

I sat on the other end of the couch and sighed. “Rumors about the Halls again. Anything new here?”

She echoed my sigh and thought for a moment. “When Val picked up the kids yesterday, she had on more foundation than usual. The kids are quieter than they should be at those ages, but they’ve always been like that.”

I frowned. I knew what she meant. You could spot an abused kid from a mile away from our professions, but without proof, there was nothing we could do.

“Oh,” Meredith said suddenly, her expression falling even more. “I think she’s pregnant again.”

I groaned quietly. “That’s what? Five under five?”

“Yeah. In a two-bedroom trailer, too.”

“But they’re still—”

“They’re all clean, they’ve been fed and don’t seem super hungry. No bruises on the kiddos.” She lifted her hands in a “what can you do” gesture.

“Yeah.” I sighed again. “Okay. Well, if anything changes?” I pushed to my feet.

She did the same and nodded. “Absolutely.”

We said bye, and I left to head into the diner for my late lunch.

Small town life was a blessing and a curse. These days, I enjoyed the slower pace, the less violent way of doing my job. I’d worked as a police officer for sixteen years when I went on a domestic call that ended my life as I knew it. I was trying to keep the victim safe when the perpetrator shot me.

It was only the fast first responders, the close location to the hospital, and the fact that I wanted to be saved by any means if the worst came to be that I lived.

It was a different life, but not worse by any means. The fact that I’d had to learn how to deal with having a wolf inside me, as part of my psyche and my body? Well it had been difficult in the beginning, but you learned to survive.

My parents hadn’t been speciest, per se, but I had still been glad they were both gone by the time I was turned. They’d had me and my twin brother in their early forties and both passed away in their seventies.

Sometimes I wondered what my brother would’ve thought about me being a werewolf. I hoped he would’ve been glad I was still around, if nothing else. We’d been close growing up, but then his path took him into the arts while I became the jock, which balanced things out.

I sat down in my usual booth at the diner and took off my hat, placing it on the seat next to me.

“Hey, Holden! The usual?” Tadeo, the always perky waiter walked to me with his pot of coffee.

“Yeah, sounds good. Thank you.”

“Sure thing!” He finished pouring me a mug, then walked back to the window to tell his brother Reyes my order.

They’d bought 51 percent of the Diner from their grandparents a handful of years ago, and ran it together. They were colloquially known as the Ortiz boys, even though they were both in their thirties.

Tadeo was a human, while Reyes was a vampire. It was interesting to have a vampire cook, because he couldn’t really taste what he was making, but apparently he’d been a chef somewhere fancy in Las Vegas or Los Angeles or some such before he was turned, and I supposed that sort of skill didn’t just vanish.

I’d been told the food had gotten better here since they took over. I would have to take the townspeople’s word for it, since I’d only moved into town after them.

The brothers lived right outside town in a two-family home. Reyes had a wife who worked at the local hospital, and Tadeo had an ornery cat and no need for other people in his space.

We’d bonded over that once at the bar, actually. Tadeo didn’t care for romance or sex, he just wanted to be left alone with his cat and his books. I could understand that.

My cat was ornery too, and I didn’t care for romance, either. I wasn’t on the ace spectrum—something Tadeo had taught me about—but after my love life had crashed and burned once, I didn’t care about trying again. Besides, sex was… okay. It had never been amazing for me, and I didn’t have enough interest to keep trying these days.

Since I was a bit late with my lunch, it arrived fast and there were only a couple of old ladies in the booth in the back, gossiping away. I half-listened to them while I ate my full English breakfast for lunch, and caught one of them saying something about the Halls. Well, fuck.

I finished my meal, then got to my feet, put my hat on the counter to wait until I’d paid and went to bother the old birds.

“Oh, Sheriff Drumm!” Sheila Ogden, the retired town librarian, clapped her hands enthusiastically.

“Sheila.” I tilted my head, then looked at her companion. “Barb.”

Barbara-Anne Urban was a force to be reckoned with in the local book club and Yahtzee circles, or so I’d been told.

“What can we do for you, Sheriff?” Barb asked, beaming as hard as Sheila.

“Well, I wasn’t trying to eavesdrop, but you know, damn wolf ears.” I gestured at my noggin.

A low chuckle carried from the kitchen, and I barely kept myself from rolling my eyes toward the window. It wasn’t only werewolves who heard all the things, vampires had heightened senses, too.

“Oh, of course. And we weren’t exactly being quiet, either,” Sheila said quickly, already invested in what I had to say.

“It’s just that I heard you mention the Hall family…,” I trailed off on purpose.

Sheila quickly scooted deeper into their booth and patted the seat for me to sit. Like a good boy despite, in reality, being only ten years her junior, I sat down.

“You know how my grandson Robbie lives in the trailer behind the Halls’ right?” At my nod, Barb continued, “Well, it seems like Levi Hall has taken to drinking again, and that’s not good.”

“And the yelling is happening more again,” Sheila added. “Miriam Peters told me she saw them at the Walmart Super Center in Warren, and Levi had been shaking Val by the shoulders.”

I kept my expression neutral and nodded slowly. “It does sound like something Levi would do.”

It wasn’t a secret in town that Levi Hall was an alcoholic who got loud and potentially violent. He’d been arrested a couple of times, but nothing ever stuck because his father was a lawyer in Erie.

“Robbie says he’ll call your people if there’s any sign of real trouble,” Barb told me seriously, reaching over to pat my arm. “It’s so nice to have a Sheriff who cares about folks.”

Feeling supremely uncomfortable, I replied, “Well now, Barb, you know I’m only a Deputy, no matter you people keep calling me Sheriff.” I gave her a small grin I didn’t feel.

“Pshaw!” Sheila swatted my shoulder. “You know that if you ran for Sheriff, we’d vote for you in a heartbeat!”

I did know that, yes. It was just that I didn’t want to be in charge of anything more than I already was. Sheriff Gerrell was an asshole of a man, but I would gladly let him be that if I didn’t need to take part in the politics and the ass-kissing in the northern part of the county.

The radio on my shoulder crackled to life. “Saved by the radio,” I told them and stood up.

It was dispatch saying there’d been a minor traffic collision a couple of miles outside of town and asking who was the closest to go check. I grabbed the excuse, quickly paid for my meal and told Tadeo to keep the rest, and told the ladies to have a good day.

Grabbing my hat, I made my way out of the diner and into my vehicle. Back to work it was.

T hat evening, I defrosted some lasagna and ate it on the couch with my cat Cindy Clawford next to me. She didn’t care about my food, but she was eagerly waiting for me to be done so she could follow me into the kitchen for some Dreamies treats.

My phone let me know I’d received a message. It was Kye Rossi, Brodie’s mate, who was making sure I was coming to hang with them on the next full moon. It would be my second one with their pack, and there would be two more wolves joining us this time.

Brodie’s cousins, Ben and Max, were doing really well with their hard won sobriety. I liked those guys a lot, they’d never been trouble, and I’d always kind of felt bad for them with how their father had thrown his Alpha weight around to get them to heel. It wasn’t easy to get rid of the kind of bond you had with your Alpha when he happened to also be your parent, or so I’d heard. Rusty hadn’t involved them in his drug business, but he’d made them do chores and such.

Brodie was a good man, a good Alpha, and the way his pack was shaping up told me a lot of his character. Kye’s sister Carys had gone through hell, yet she still wanted to stay in Luxton and in that large Victorian house in the woods. It spoke volumes of how much she and her brother trusted Brodie to be good for them.

Now if only I could bring myself to accept Brodie’s invitation to be his beta. I knew everyone in the pack knew about loss and Brodie had told me he understood that I wasn’t ready, but at the same time I craved the connection.

Being his beta would mean that I’d be his enforcer, a nominal step above Ben and Max who would likely also agree to be his betas now that they were healthy and strong again. They would be the ones behind the frontline, while I would stand next to Brodie, figuratively speaking.

I would need to do some hard thinking before the full moon. Part of me was ready, and I felt like it was time to take the leap, because the craving of having a pack, a chosen family, had started to get too much to ignore.

Cindy meowed pointedly, and I sighed, then finished my food and went to serve my queen some treats. Before long, we’d be curled up in my bed, with her right next to my pillow and my arm up around her. I wanted to say it was because she insisted, but it was a comfort thing for me, too.