CHAPTER FIVE || REED #2
“Interesting,” I said, trying not to be interested by the fact that my scent was distinctive to him, the way his was to me.
Because this is real for him too, a little voice in the back of my mind whispered.
I ignored it.
Instead, aiming for coldness but missing the mark entirely, I added, “Most humans don’t pay that much attention.”
He smiled at that, even though it hadn’t really been meant as a compliment. “I’m a detective. I notice things. It’s kind of hard to turn it off.”
“Right,” I said.
I realized, way too late, we were here alone and Harris had kissed me earlier.
I hadn’t even processed that—on purpose, given that it was the best kiss I’d ever had.
It had been exactly right—masculine and filled with need and urgency, but also a tenderness I hadn’t known I would even enjoy.
Usually I’m more of a rough-and-tumble sort of guy, but I suspected Harris would bring out a much softer side of me if I let him.
Hell, if we wanted to, we could make great use of the mattress up in the loft right now. Or the couch. Or the kitchen counter. I wasn’t sure I was that picky.
My cock started to harden at the mere thought of it.
I took a step back from him.
“Uh. Well, now that you’re settled in, stay here. I need to go check on the bar. Lacey is going to kill me as it is.”
I turned to leave.
“Tell me one thing. Was Lacey turned into a wolf, too?” Harris asked, his voice low and quiet. “Like Oliver? Do—do any of these people have a choice?”
“Yes, they have a choice!” I snapped, turning to glare at him. “We don’t just turn humans into wolves for the hell of it.”
“But you can. You don’t need to be born a werewolf.”
He seemed awfully fixated on this. I searched his expression. “I thought you were having a hard time with the idea of werewolves existing.”
“I mean, it’s nuts to me that a human can shift into an animal. But I’ve seen enough to know that the world is a way crazier place than I thought. And hell, vampires and witches are real, so I guess why not werewolves, right?” He paused. “How does it work?”
I gave him a blank look. “How does what work?”
“The wolf bite. Becoming a werewolf. Is it like in the movies or—”
“It’s not pleasant,” I said, in a tone designed to shut him down.
“Anyway, I’m just curious,” he said, his lips twitching with amusement at my prickliness. “I know we’re soulmates or whatever, but I still need to get to know you, Reed. I want to.”
The wolf in my chest preened. Our mate wanted to know us. He wasn’t afraid—he was curious. That boded well.
Except no, it didn’t.
Every moment I spent not being a dick to him was a cruelty.
Letting him think anything was possible between us wasn’t remotely kind.
I didn’t want a mate. I had the leadership of the pack—fractured though it was—and that was more than enough.
Plus, Harris couldn’t hope to fight back against any of the supernatural creatures that might attack.
He was helpless. A sitting duck.
And the idea of him lying on the ground, his eyes wide and staring, taken apart the way the hiker had been—
The sudden fear was like ice water dumped over my head, reminding me of what was important. And what was at stake. I needed to leave.
“You’re afraid,” Harris whispered, staring at me. “I can feel it. What the hell are you so afraid of, Reed?”
Yeah, I needed to leave. Right now.
Instead of answering his question, I shook my head and took a step back from him. “Don’t go anywhere. I’ll send Daniel to check on you. I’ll be back tonight.”
“I’ll hold you to that,” Harris said firmly, locking eyes with me. “I’m still pissed at you, by the way.”
“Good. I’m a dick,” I said, turning and heading for the door. “You should leave, now that you know that about me.”
He studied me, his eyes glinting. “Sorry. I’m not that easy, bud. You’re going to have to work a lot harder than that to get rid of me.”
“There’s nothing here for you,” I said over my shoulder. “There’s only disappointment. You shouldn’t have come.”
I was halfway out the door, but I still heard his reply just fine. “You’re wrong about that.”
The door slammed shut between us.
* * *
When I got to the bar, it was Lindsey behind the counter, rather than Lacey.
“Where’s Lacey?”
“I had the afternoon free and I offered to help out. Lacey headed back to help Daniel with research for a spell.”
I cast a wary look around. It was still relatively early, and we didn’t have any patrons yet, save for Robert, who I could see through the bay window sitting by himself on the back patio, a mug of beer between his hands.
He was one of our regulars and came in every day like clockwork at exactly two in the afternoon.
His heavy jacket was wrapped around him, dwarfing his narrow frame.
“Daniel knows how to cast a locator spell,” I said. That was the logical next step in these situations, one he didn’t even have to be told to do.
“Lacey filled me in. He tried and it didn’t work. He thinks it’s not in our world anymore,” Lindsey replied. She set two shot glasses onto the bar and then grabbed a bottle of whiskey from the shelf behind her. She poured both. “Maybe it’ll stay gone.”
“I doubt it.” Then I frowned at her. “What are you doing?”
“Buying you a drink with my free labor. Which you’re welcome for, by the way.” She paused, fixing me with a knowing look. “I figure you probably need it.”
“Lacey,” I muttered, heading behind the bar. She’d clearly told Lindsey everything she’d seen me doing in the alley with Harris. “Look, I’ve got other things to do. Talking about my feelings isn’t one of them.”
“I’m aware,” Lindsey said solemnly. “Now that you’re Alpha, talking about your feelings is off-limits. I’m mostly just curious about the random guy you were making out with in the alley.”
“You think I might be able to adjure Lacey before she can tell anyone else?” I asked, feeling crestfallen. I eyed the shot on the counter. Maybe I did need it, after all.
“Not likely.” Lindsey snorted. “I’m sure the entire pack knows by now.
Hell, even the human townsfolk are probably going to start asking you when the wedding is.
” She paused and gave me a meaningful look.
“Besides, adjuring members of your pack for petty reasons isn’t a good idea. That way lies trouble. And lots of it.”
She wasn’t wrong. Jeremy doing exactly that as alpha is what had gotten us into our current mess, after all. A monster on the loose, a weakened pack, and an inexperienced alpha who didn’t have a single clue what he was doing.
“Fine, I’ll have one drink.”
“Excellent choice.” She beamed at me, but there was a speculative look in her eye I didn’t like at all. We downed our shots. The whiskey burned, but it was a good heat.
She poured another.
I immediately grabbed it and tipped it back.
That’s when she hit me with, “He’s your mate, isn’t he?”
I choked, barely managing to swallow.
“Sorry,” she winced. “I could have timed that better. But it’s true, isn’t it?”
With wide eyes, I stared at her. “Did Lacey tell you that?”
“No, she just thinks you got some action. Jeremy called to warn me that there was about to be a little drama afoot. He’s the one who told me that Harris is your fated mate.”
“He could have called me directly.”
“You aren’t answering his calls.”
I shrugged, avoiding eye contact. “And how, exactly, does Jeremy know this? Does he suddenly have psychic powers along with an appetite for blood?”
“First off, he can survive on raw meat instead of blood, which is what he usually does. And second, Jeremy knows because Nicolas told Thierry. And Thierry is—”
“Jeremy’s fated mate,” I supplied, glaring down at my empty shot glass. Though, if I were being fair, I hadn’t minded Thierry as much as I might’ve expected. He was okay for a vampire. Mostly. He clearly loved Jeremy. So there was that, at least.
“Anyway, they’re blood-bonded, so Jeremy caught Thierry thinking about it. And then he called me to tell me to buckle up.”
That made sense. Vampire blood bonds were a type of intense telepathic connection between the vampire and their mate.
Which meant Nicolas, Thierry’s brother, was Cole.
In other words, Harris was Nicolas’s friend.
And Nicolas was the brother to my best friend’s fated mate.
That’s why Harris was at the wedding in the first place.
He had even told me as much when we first met, but I had been otherwise occupied by the fact that I had just met my fated mate and recognized him on the spot.
Still, I felt very dumb for not having connected those particular dots. Harris was already way more mixed up with the supernatural than I would’ve liked.
She added, “I was actually coming to the bar to warn you—which Jeremy asked me to do, by the way. But apparently, Harris found you first. And he wasted zero time.”
“No, he did not,” I said, eyeing the whiskey. Wolves have exceptionally high alcohol tolerance, and this was not just a two-shot conversation.
“I could watch the bar if you need to… err… talk it out with Harris,” Lindsey suggested, obviously feigning nonchalance. “I’m happy to hang out all night if I need to. I don’t have any appointments for the rest of the day.”
“I have bookkeeping to do,” I said immediately. “And inventory. Plus, I ought to reorganize the storeroom. And there’s a monster on the loose.” I shrugged with mock helplessness. “So, I’m all booked up.”
She shook her head at me. “Men. You’re all hopeless. I’m lucky that I’m more into the ladies.”
“He needs to leave. He’s human. And as long as he’s here, he’s in danger.”
“I haven’t even met the guy, and I can already tell you there’s a zero-percent chance of that happening.”
“Are we drinking more, or are you going to torture me by having this conversation sober?”
“We’ve already had two shots.”
“We’re wolves. That might as well have been nothing at all.”
Lindsey arched a brow, pouring a double for both of us.
After I’d taken my shot, Lindsey said, “You’re going to have to talk to him. You know that, right? And cut it with the ‘but he’s human’ crap. That’s not what’s really going on, is it?”
“You didn’t see what happened to that hiker,” I replied, shaking my head. “It happened on my watch. And what happened to Jeremy…”
Before I could stop it, memory tore through me.
Jeremy, Thierry, and I all locked in combat with three nightmare creatures, each of them covered in vines and black viscous fluids that burned the ground.
The creatures were impossibly strong. Jeremy, in wolf form, going down.
The monster getting behind him and pulling its claws back—
I moved to spring to his defense. But I knew—deep down, I knew—I wasn’t fast enough or strong enough to help him.
And then, an instant later, I was being picked up and thrown. Then the awful solidity of the evergreen tree as I slammed into it hard enough to black out.
I was already crawling toward him as I came to. Thierry fed Jeremy his blood and begged him to wake up. All three of the monstrous creatures from the Otherworld were dead at Thierry’s hand. He must’ve gone berserk.
And my best friend—the guy I’d known, loved, and sometimes hated since we were kids—was lying there on his back, naked and pale, his chest covered in blood, and not moving.
Gone.
I was right there and I hadn’t been fast enough to stop them from killing him, despite having fought monsters from the bleeds all my life. I’d been too distracted with my own life-or-death struggle, too focused on my own monster.
But the thing that kept me up at night was wondering if I hadn’t fought viciously enough because deep down, I had believed that Jeremy couldn’t die.
Partly because he’d always been so strong and in control.
Or maybe because he’d found his true mate—vampire or no—and the universe wouldn’t take that away from him.
Especially not after what had happened with Ian, his previous mate.
Or maybe it was because Jeremy had been my closest friend for our entire lives and the idea of him dying in some random monster attack, even a formidable one, was like thinking the sun might randomly decide to move backward: an impossibility of nature.
And maybe that was really what had gotten him killed. Maybe I would have fought harder if I had let the possibility of his death be real for me.
“What happened to Jeremy wasn’t your fault.”
I swallowed the guilt, not wanting to argue with her about it.
But the whiskey did nothing to prevent the chill that swept through me.
“I already like him. Harris, I mean. What if I’m handed this gift—my destined person, something most people never experience, even though I don’t deserve it—and then I lose him? ”
The way I lost Jeremy.
I didn’t need to say that part aloud. I figured we both understood.
Before Lindsey could reply, two of our regulars—Jess and Charles—sauntered in.
“We need beer. We’re celebrating tonight!” Jess announced, holding up her left hand to show off the diamond sparkling on her finger. “Charles finally did it! And I said yes!”
Behind her, Charles was beet red and beaming from ear to ear in an aw-shucks way that would have been completely adorable if I had been in any other headspace.
“Well, screw that, Jess!” Lindsey said, recovering first and grinning back at them. “Just a beer won’t do! How about a beer and a shot?”
Jess grinned, practically bouncing on her tiptoes in excitement. “Hell yeah! We’re getting married!”
Lindsey busied herself with the customers and I’m pretty sure I must have said all of the things I was supposed to say, given that I saw these folks every single day: congratulations, when’s the wedding, how did it happen, all of it.
But the moment the words left my lips, they were just as quickly forgotten.
I was on autopilot, lost in my thoughts.
Harris was a fuck of a lot more breakable than Jeremy had been. And being a werewolf—hell, even being the alpha—hadn’t helped my friend when the monsters had attacked.
I hadn’t been able to stop it then. And I wouldn’t be able to stop it now.