Liam (The Calhoun Brothers #2)

Chapter 1

Chapter

One

“Isaid no.”

Wow. If Liam was actually a werewolf, he would be quaking in his boots. His brother was, but Rory had always seemed different than the rest of them, right? So Liam just didn’t care that the big pack alpha was yelling at him.

“But—”

“Liam, what the fuck did I say?” That was a wild roaring growl.

Liam tilted his head and settled on counting to ten, but he only made it to about three before he held up one finger.

“One, my dear friend Jameson, I didn’t fucking ask your permission.

Two”—he held up another finger—“I am not part of your pack. I don’t take orders.

Three, I paid you the respect of letting you know I was going.

I know you’re busy. I’m not waiting, so you can either get on your pony and ride with me, or you can just chill the fuck out and understand that I’m a grown fucking adult who can do what the hell he wants to.

You do not own that land, and I have to go. ”

Rory was standing there, his brother open-mouthed and about as pale as sheet, but Liam didn’t care. He was being called to go. Something was up there, up in the mountains where the dragons had lived; he knew it, and whatever it was felt like a weird alien beacon in the center of his brain.

Maybe that was what it was.

Aliens. Like aliens with brain-sucking technology that made people they wanted to probe come to them.

Maybe it was more dragons.

Maybe he was crazy.

Maybe Liam just needed to go up into the altitude and have a stroke. He’d heard of it happening to people when they climbed Everest and shit. They would have cerebral edemas and just die in the cold.

He didn’t care, but he was going, and he wasn’t putting it off another day.

He’d been patient, waiting for everybody to get their shit together, but the snows were gone, and he was tired of twiddling his thumbs and explaining himself and asking permission to do something that he didn’t have to ask permission to do because his brother decided that he was a fucking werewolf.

Asshole.

“Are you quite done?” The other alpha, Jameson’s brother, Keegan, stared him down, so Liam arched an eyebrow and just stared right back. They were a co-alpha pack, and that was a wall of muscle and aggression glaring at him.

“That’s going to be up to you. If you try to put me off again, I might rant and rave some more.”

Obviously, these guys were not used to having their authority challenged.

Again, Liam didn’t care. He wasn’t sure what the fuck the pair of werewolves who ran the pack wanted, but he did know he didn’t care. He had to get up the damn mountain. Urgently.

Liam shouldered his backpack. “I’m not going to harm anything, I just have to go up and see.

Consider this me filing my flight plan. I’m heading up there—” He pointed up the mountain.

“I’m going to look around. I will probably spend one night at the old compound because it’s a long damn haul even on my bike, and then I’ll be back. ”

Jameson huffed out a hard breath. “You could stop at Loyal’s.”

“I could, and if I get up there and figure out I can’t go any farther, then that’s what I’ll do. But I’ve got this mountain bike. I’ve got food, I’ve got clothes.”

Keegan rolled his eyes. “Get in the fucking four-wheeler. We’ll put the bike on the back. I’ll drive you up as far as we can until the four-wheeler can’t make it.”

“Cool.” He bit back a grin and did not pump his fist in the air like he wanted to, but he’d won. He helped Keegan strap his bike to the all-terrain vehicle before he hopped on, letting Keegan do the driving.

See? He could be reasonable.

“Be careful,” Rory murmured. “We have no idea what’s going on up there.”

“I’ll do my best,” Liam agreed. He would be careful. As careful as he could, anyway. But he’d been like a compass needle pointing up that way for months.

Liam kissed Rory’s daughter on the top of her very little head when his brother offered her over. “I will. I’ll be back, I just have to go see. I need to.”

He nodded, because that was that. And they headed up into the heart of the Uintas, Keegan still rumbling a little bit. “I can’t believe you just did that.”

“Did what?”

“You’re all butt hurt,” Keegan told him.

“I have to do this, man.”

“I don’t understand why.”

Liam shrugged. “I don’t understand either.

I’ve dreamed about it night after night after night.

It’s like there’s something up there, man.

There’s something calling me. And I have to go figure out what it is.

Hopefully, it’s just nothing. Hopefully, I’m just crazy.

But if I’m not, if I’m not absolutely losing my mind, then there’s something up there, and I need to deal with it. ”

Keegan grunted. “Sure. I can’t really argue with your logic.”

“Oh, stop it. I know it’s not logical, hence the whole I-might-be-crazy part. That has nothing to do with anything.”

“You sure you’re not part wolf?”

“Pretty much, yeah. I don’t see myself getting pregnant anytime soon.”

“Well, you know, there are the other kind. The ones who get the other wolves pregnant.” Even over the rumble of the engine, he could hear Keegan’s amusement. “Alphas, we call them.”

“Yeah, unlikely.” He actually wasn’t looking for anything like that.

He just wanted to get on with his life, stop dreaming about something or someone needing him, and get back to important stuff like finding shit.

That was his job. He could find anything.

Someone needed some strange part of some machine that he’d never heard of?

No problem. He could find that strange part.

A person needed passion fruit in the middle of winter.

He was on it. Lemons. Every kind of lemon.

Anything known to man in the middle of winter when a pregnant dragon was craving. He was that Calhoun.

They drove up the mountain, the trail fairly well-marked, especially on the way up to Loyal’s.

They didn’t stop there, although Keegan did smile widely as they passed.

Rory had told him and his brothers the wolves could do this weird thing where they talked in their brain like the dragons did, so Liam just assumed that was what Keegan was doing.

It didn’t matter; he didn’t care. He just wanted to get up the mountain. The climb was fairly easy for a bit and then all of a sudden, the grade turned to a stone-cold bitch, the four-wheeler grumbling. Still, it did all right until the snow started.

“You still got another couple miles to go from here,” Keegan told him. “I’ll shift and run with you, but we have to leave the four-wheeler here.”

“Fair enough. You saved me a night biking up here, so let’s do this.

” He settled his backpack and went to cut a stick to walk with, because his mountain bike wouldn’t go any farther either, studiously ignoring the fact that behind him, Keegan was turning into a wolf.

It was unnatural, it was weird, it creeped him out.

But that was not on Keegan. That was on him. They headed up, Keegan zipping by him. The big red wolf was fucking gorgeous. It was really unfair how cool the wolves were, and that Rory was the brother to become one.

He was just going to be a Calhoun no matter what. Just a dude on two legs singing the Eagles songs at the top of his lungs and keeping his core engaged as he walked in his hiking boots. Up the hill. Up the mountain. Oh damn, those dragons had liked their altitude.

Goddamn, that pull though, the tug inside of him, kept getting louder. Stronger. And Keegan suddenly stopped, sniffing the air, and then barked sharply.

“I don’t care what it is; I have to go see.” It would be nice if he could understand wolf, but shit, he couldn’t even speak chihuahua. The clearing where the dragons’ home had been was overgrown, kind of wildly so, for as short a time as it had been deserted.

He’d been told there was nothing there now but the outbuildings and a clearing. The house itself had supposedly been transported to the dragon realm, but Liam could see the entry to the sunken home. So he walked right up to the door of what had been the main tunnel into the dragons’ home.

He took a deep breath. With his luck, there was some kind of weird dragon-y booby trap here, and he was going to open the door and get turned into dust. Liam could handle that, because at least it would shut up the hum of this call in his head.

Feeling unaccountably anticipatory, he grabbed the door handle and heaved it open, coming face-to-face with a painfully skinny young man holding a baby in his arms.

“He did come… Alpha, I knew you would,” the guy said. And then he collapsed, just keeling over forward in a dead faint.

Liam darted forward and grabbed the baby before they hit the ground. The infant was skin and bones, but alive. Liam stood there for half a second, staring, wondering what the hell this all meant.

Then he snorted. “Hello, there. Well, shit. What do I do now?”