Chapter 10
Ten
…what was the good of being a movie werewolf? You howled at the moon; you couldn’t remember what you did, and then somebody shot you.
— ANNE RICE
“How was your date with Firefly Girl? Have you set a wedding date?”
I looked up from the tabby kitten in my hand and found my brothers hovering in the door of the barn and watching me expectantly. The results of my date must have been obvious because Atticus and Ranger shared a concerned glance when I didn’t offer an opinion.
“It went south, huh?” Atticus stroked his beard.
“It’s not up for discussion.” I tucked the tabby kitten into the incubator and picked up Caldenia. She started gnawing on my thumb, living up to her name. Ranger had all but memorized Ilona Andrews’s Innkeeper Chronicles, and he’d decided christening a kitten after an intergalactic predator was a good idea.
We’d removed Begonia, Caldenia and Chow-Chow from underneath a greenhouse. They’d been underweight and hungry and had more fleas than a leopard did spots, but they were doing better now.
“What did you do?” Ranger asked, stepping forward, hands braced on his hips.
What did I do…?
I didn’t much want to think about that. Or, quite honestly, about what I didn’t do. Which was kiss Alice, fall into bed with her, and then slide one-hundred-and-ten percent into love with her. My love-meter was stuck at ninety percent, and it was driving me bonkers.
My wolf whined, wanting to shift and burn off our aggression. We could have had her. You were a fool.
Last night after Alice had clarified her expectations for our dating life, we’d returned to Moonlight Valley more or less in silence, driven to her place in silence, and then parted ways in silence. There had, in fact, been silence all around, because I wasn’t going to accept anything less than total commitment from Alice Aymes.
I’d had fun with other girls, but Alice pulled at me. Both my wolf and I knew she was my mate. If I was ever going to give someone my heart and my bite, it would be her.
Nevertheless, I also knew that if I stuck around after she’d made it clear she would not allow herself to feel anything other than lust for me, I’d be giving up my pride along with my heart. I’d be reduced to tagging along at her heels, begging for whatever scraps she tossed my way.
Sex wasn’t enough, not when it came to Alice.
But we could have started with sex,my wolf growled.
Couldn’t, I growled right back.
I wanted all of her.
I glowered at my older brother. “I didn’t do a damn thing.”
Ranger frowned and paused, as if thinking something over, and then asked, “Are you seeing each other again for a second date?”
“Ranger.”
“Ford.”
“This topic is off-limits.”
“Can I date her?”
I answered him with a hair-raising growl. I reckoned that and my bared teeth sufficiently communicated my feelings on Ranger’s dating Alice. Those feelings included rage, jealousy, and a strong sentiment of when hell freezes over.
Ranger raised his hands, tilted his head to expose his throat, and took a healthy step back. He wasn’t going to push it.
“Stand down, Wolf Boy. I’m not fixing to ask your Alice out. I simply wanted to confirm a data point. Your feelings for her are not friendly or familial.”
I glared at him some more. Ranger could be supremely aggravating.
“So why are the two of you not seeing each other again? Did Alessandro object? Because we, your pack, could pay him a little visit and run him out of town.”
“No,” I gritted out.
“Did her parents object?”
“They work a lot.” For Alice’s sake, I wished that weren’t true. She clearly worried about pleasing them and living up to their standards, and yet they never seemed to be home.
Ranger clicked his teeth together, his hazel eyes flickering with streaks of wolfish amber. He was as mad as if I’d been accused of having sex in public or trying to change Alice into one of us. “Did you try to change her over? Are you thinking about it?”
“No. Damn it, Ranger! We are done talking about this.”
“We are not,” he countered. “Because so far this has been a one-way interrogation and not a conversation. It would be healthy for us to talk and exchange our ideas, let each other know how we feel about this situation. You and Alice aren’t doing this, so clearly I need to be modeling that behavior for you.”
I tucked the last kitten into the incubator. It licked my thumb before curling up with its siblings. “You want to know what happened? She’s only interested in a summer romance. She’s not planning on staying in Moonlight Valley.
“In fact, she’s planning on leaving as soon as she can. She doesn’t want a forever kind of man. She’s got…” I glared at the barn walls, trying to remember exactly what Alice had said. Right. It was burned into my brain.
“She has business plans, along with parental issues and poor self-esteem and a deep-seated need to please her family and prove to them that she’s a fucking excellent person who can make a fortune selling other people crap for their pets. Which she already is—an excellent person, that is—but apparently it doesn’t count if she doesn’t do it in Nashville.”
Atticus glanced between Ranger and me, his brows drawing together. “She can’t have business plans in Moonlight Valley? They’re Nashville-specific?”
“No.” I shrugged. “So that means there won’t be a second date.”
Now Ranger looked confused. “She can’t be a businesswoman and a girlfriend? Not that I think she should mix the two, as there are limited local opportunities for sex work. That biker club over in Green Valley isn’t hiring.”
“It’s not sex work. She wants to sell dog toys.” That did not come out right, but I plowed ahead anyhow. “She doesn’t have room in her schedule for a serious relationship. I would be her side gig.”
Atticus looked confused. “So?”
Ranger huffed impatiently, in agreement with Atticus. “Why can’t she? Why can’t you two have a temporary romantic interlude? I’m assuming she doesn’t mind the whole wolf thing?”
I crossed my arms over my chest and leaned against the workbench. Maybe this way I wouldn’t give in to the urge to throttle my brother. “The wolf is not the problem.”
At least I didn’t think it was.
“She’s your Firefly Girl,” Ranger said, continuing his thought as if I hadn’t spoken. “But she probably speaks a different love language than you. She flashes and you’re hearing temporary, but she has a shorter definition of forever, that’s all.
“The mating season of the Photinus carolinus lasts two, maybe three weeks a year. They mate, they lay eggs, they die.”
“I was hoping for a happy love story,” I interrupted. Ranger was not helping.
He shrugged. “They are happy, and they are forever. It’s just a shorter kind of forever than we wolves are used to. But so what?”
“Ranger has a point.” Atticus nodded slowly. “If you have a chance to be her mate, you take it. You don’t know what’s gonna happen tomorrow or if she’ll really leave.”
I shook my head, not liking the direction in which the conversation was headed. “You want me to settle? To accept a handful of days from her? That’s pathetic.”
“You’re a wolf.” Ranger patted me on the shoulder. It was more of a bone-rattling thump than a reassuring touch, but I gave him credit for the thought. “I want you to go after who you want. You convince her, and convince her good. You make yourself some opportunities.”
I liked the idea of going after Alice. I was a wolf of action, so going after her, making my case, making myself a chance? Those were good things to my mind. What if I did use whatever time she allowed me for as long as I could?
Alice didn’t want to stay here in Moonlight Valley, and she was no prisoner. I would certainly never do what our old man had done to Momma. So I could lose her. Fine. She was an independent woman and she would make her own choices. But…
I wouldn’t beg.
Good plan. We’re not a pup rolling over for a belly pat. We’re hunters! Predators! Top of the food chain!
My wolf was right. So if what she wanted was to give me her leftover time and none of her serious emotion, what was preventing me from dictating some of the terms in this relationship and making some plans of my own? Creating my own timeline and an Alice Aymes plan? Making a mark on her pride and heart and mind before she left town?
“You make an opportunity.” Ranger thumped my shoulder again for emphasis. “You do that convincing. You dominate all the doubts.”
Atticus nodded emphatically. “No doubts.”
“And, when or if she leaves town”—Ranger shrugged—“you leave first, with happy memories and no regrets, because you defended your territory, you left your mark, you caught your prey.”
It looked like I had a plan for tonight’s big town barbecue.
Find Alice.
Woo Alice.
Get back together with Alice.
My wolf howled. Let’s go!
My nerves were fifty percent because of Alice.
More like a seventy/thirty split.
My wolf was right. That other thirty percent, however, was due to Lucky Jansen and Big Joe’s visit and what I’d witnessed on the video he’d shared with me.
But I’d already decided I wasn’t pulling in Ranger on this one; I’d wait for him to go before I told Atticus the whole story.
After their combined pep talk, we’d turned to company business. First we’d gone out on a roadkill call and given the remains a respectful burial, then we’d been called out for a bee emergency.
Mr. and Mrs. Twipple had bees in their attic. They’d had bats two months before, so it was apparent Mr. Twipple had not upped his home improvement game. He was pushing ninety, though, and had no business being on a ladder, so I’d made a list of supplies I’d need from the home improvement store to patch the hole in their eaves that had turned their attic into wildlife central.
Ranger had rambled the entire job about how he’d helped district law officers with their speeding enforcement program by launching a drone that identified misbehaving drivers. And how he’d paid calls to all the local police stations to teach them to fly their own drones.
He was proud of his drone work. He’d been doing it pro bono for years and was convinced he’d be reincarnated as a bird so he could fly for real.
“You can see everything. It’s like an aerodynamic Eye of Sauron.”
Neither Atticus nor I could understand his avian love.
We’d nodded and suggested we go check out the weird noises Mrs. McCreery had been hearing in her attic. Which turned out to be a colony of bats. As well, a raccoon had been living up there and getting into the trunks of old costumes she’d been storing for our regional theater. We’d gotten a two-for-one from that visit.
Bats were good neighbors to have and useful pollinators, so Atticus had spent the better part of an hour sweet-talking Mrs. McCreery out of her determination to poison the entire colony. It wasn’t the bats’ fault they’d mistaken her attic for a nice, dark cave.
Ranger and I had rehomed the bats into some big plastic tubs and then blocked off their return route to prevent them from staging a reverse move-in. When they’d left her, she’d been complaining about the amount of bat poop she’d have to deal with; she had not appreciated Ranger’s pointing out that she’d been gifted with some high-quality fertilizer for her garden.
After we got back to the farm and Ranger finally took off with the enormous tub of bats—he planned to release them on a nearby mountain slope—I put a hand on Atticus’s arm to keep him from leaving.
He gave me a questioning look, and I mouthed hold on a moment. We waited together, listening to Ranger as he mumbled to himself, laughing quietly at the jokes or whatnot he was relating to his bat buddies.
I counted to three after the barn door closed before turning to Atticus. “We have a problem.”
“Alessandro still hunting for wolves?”
“Not that I’ve heard.”
Alessandro Aymes had been a pain in our behinds for many reasons, not least because he’d caught sight of Momma once after our old man had changed her.
We’d set up a camera by her den, and we took turns going out there, but she avoided us. I don’t think she recognized us either as wolves or men, but we held onto the hope that she was just freaked out and embarrassed and would come around.
“Then what’s up? What’s the problem?” Atticus asked.
“I had people drop by on Wednesday. Lucky Jansen and Big Joe. Carmine.”
Atticus raised a brow. He was not a member of the Lucky Jansen fan club, either. “Those fools? What did they want?”
“You might want to sit down for this.”
Atticus sat down. I stayed on my feet, pacing while I told Atticus about their visit and subsequent demands.
“Shoot,” he growled, his wolf making itself felt. He wasn’t much more in control than I was. “What was in that video? Or do I not want to know?” His face said he was imagining plenty.
“You should know,” I said grimly. “Someone had a camera on Maverick shifting into a wolf and going after our old man. If Lucky publishes even the first half, it’ll seem like Mav is responsible for our old man’s disappearance, and it’s not as if we can produce our old man as counterevidence.”
Atticus frowned, clearly turning possibilities over in his head. He understood that this was bad news.
And I wasn’t done yet. “It’s gonna look like murder. The video’s dated, so we can’t claim it was an old fight.”
“What if we claim the date was doctored and the fight happened years before our old man disappeared? Especially seeing as how werewolves don’t exist.”
I’d already considered that. “Mav is wearing that weird rose-pink T-shirt the town had made up for the annual fun run that year.”
Busted by cotton and altruism. It really sucked.
“Did you call Mav and ask him about this?”
“Nope. He’s up in the Smoky Mountains playing biologist.”
“You let anyone else in on this?”
Atticus meant had I told our other brothers or, God forbid, our sister.
I shook my head. “The fewer of us involved, the better, in case we do end up having to do Lucky’s dirty work for him.”
Atticus nodded. “I agree. We’ll leave Knox out of this on account of his terrible temper; he and his wolf would go knock Big Joe and Carmine’s heads together. And Rebel’s got his college finals coming up soon. I don’t want to put anything else on his plate.”
“I wasn’t planning on letting Ranger in on this, either.” I had thought about this, and I felt strongly that Ranger shouldn’t be getting involved. Ranger was smart, though. Scary smart. If any of us could think our way out of this mess, it would be him. But I didn’t want him dragged into a bad business.
Atticus had apparently come to the same conclusion. “We’ll limit it to you and me, and—when he comes home—Maverick. But I’m not ready to be Jansen’s pet wolf just yet. There has to be something we can do.”
“I’ve been thinking on that. Jansen’s video is the problem. If we could erase it somehow, then the Wolf Council wouldn’t have any reason to come down on Mav, and there wouldn’t be anything for Jansen to take to the police, either. He wouldn’t have any proof that Mav went after our old man.”
“You want to try to hack into Jansen’s phone? And his iCloud thingy? And anywhere else he might have put this?”
“Yeah,” I said glumly. “That would require us being omniscient. Maybe an electromagnetic pulse. I’d like to do it, but I don’t rate our chances of succeeding. I was more thinking we make a video of our own, catch Jansen shifting or something. Then we hold it over his head and it’s like nuclear détente.”
“How are we supposed to get him to shift on our schedule?”
“I had some ideas about that…” I could feel my face pinch because I didn’t like the best idea that had come to me.
Atticus studied me and, thanks to our twin connection, knew exactly what I was thinking. “Deelie Sue.”
“Yeah.” I did some more thinking, but I was out of ideas. Jansen wasn’t gonna come over, run in my woods, and shift on command. He didn’t trust me before, and he certainly wouldn’t trust me now that he’d given me an ultimatum.
Atticus kept right on as if I hadn’t interjected. “Deelie Sue has access to Lucky. Or she can ask him out for a run in their wolf forms.”
Deelie Sue had dated Lucky a couple times, plus she’d had some business dinners and a coaching session with him. I didn’t understand why a smart, successful woman like Deelie Sue would want to see an evil bastard like Lucky Jansen who was more than twice her age, but there was no accounting for taste. And maybe he gave excellent business advice, particularly if you were in the business of being evil henchmen.
“You think she would do it?”
“I do.” I let out a deep breath, because Deelie Sue’s help wasn’t a sure thing—and it would come with a price tag. “She likes people owing her favors, that’s for sure. And we could buy all our vehicles from her.”
I didn’t like the idea of using her, or of her using us, but I couldn’t come up with any other options.
“Maybe she’d do it if we asked because Lucky’s blackmailing us is wrong?”
I shrugged. “Maybe. You make a good point. But then, if we’re being fair, we’re asking her to take the two-wrongs-make-a-right approach with us.”
“How much time do we have?” Atticus looked resigned.
“Lucky gave us until the next full moon. He and his gang have some kind of weird, cult-like party planned for that night, and we’re invited.”
Atticus winced.
“That gives us about two weeks, and Mav should be here by then,” I said. “We can go all wolf on his sorry ass.”
Atticus smirked, but he didn’t seem amused. “You want the first crack at him? Which skin do you want to wear?”
“We’ll take turns—once in our human skins and once as wolves.”
“Nicely balanced.” Atticus looked pleased.
That was Maverick mostly sorted. Next up: the Moonlight Valley community barbecue and putting my Woo Alice plan into action.
It was turning out to be a very busy night for me.