Chapter 19

By the time I flew through the door, wolf rampant behind my eyes, the living room was empty. Somehow, the realization that Justin and Wolfie must be facing off in a more private part of our little house felt even more ominous than the former's unwanted presence had been in the first place, and I ran into the kitchen without bothering to soften the heavy thuds of my hurried footfalls.

The overhead light was on, the cupboard doors were standing open, and the center island was laden with debris of heavy snacking—definitely not the way we'd left our kitchen hours earlier. But there was still no sign of a living, breathing shifter, so I headed back into the main room before turning left toward the only rooms left to explore.

I heard Justin before I saw him, his deep, melodic voice drawing me into the bedroom where I'd shared so many happy hours with my mate. "...your own mistake," he was saying as I stepped through the open doorway and into a darkened room. My eyes adjusted slowly to the lack of light, so I was forced to stand still and listen to my brother-in-law extol his own cleverness rather than dive into the breach as my racing heart and brain requested.

"You're not much of a pack leader, are you?" Justin continued. "To invite me onto pack land and then forget to rescind the invitation just because I asked about some rusty old sword.

"A sword that I now have in my possession anyway," Wolfie's older brother pointed out, the barest hint of gloating in his voice. I could hear the blade swishing through the air even as I was finally able to make out the dark shape of Wolfie standing not three feet away from me in the dimness. My mate was frozen in place, so I mimicked his lack of action despite the urging of my wolf to go, hunt, protect.

"Yes, I have your precious sword...and quite a lot of other useless debris that I found while snooping around in your completely unguarded village."

I tuned out Justin's voice for the time being and opened my full wolf senses to take in the contents of our familiar bedroom. And as I did so, I finally understood Wolfie's passivity. Now that the darkness was receding in the wake of my lupine half's assistance, my wolf clarified both the lay of the land and why my mate hadn't dealt with this intruder with his usual calm efficiency.

The scene in front of us appeared homey at first...until I took in the ominous details. There was Justin relaxing on our bed, boots muddying the quilt while the sword in question lay across his knees. Weapon aside, the first hint of danger lay in his hand—a syringe that must have been full of F2F.

That sight alone was enough to set my heart racing at double speed. I'd known this possibility existed ever since giving Dale the go-ahead to continue experimenting with the cocktail, and I considered any possible repercussions my own fault for not jumping on the potential problem as soon as it had occurred to me. Yes, this was the worst-case scenario—that the drug in question might be discovered by a less ethical werewolf and be used as a weapon. In Justin's hands, the possibilities for mayhem were endless.

The issue of future F2F use, though, appeared to be academic at the moment. Because my labored breathing stilled with a sudden gasp as I realized that a small human form lay beside Justin atop the bed's quilt.

I remembered now that Berndt's human wife Acacia had left the First Rites arena early in order to put their infant daughter Lantana to bed. "I'll be perfectly fine driving down the mountain by myself," the woman had said laughingly as she planted a kiss on her husband's bearded jaw. "Stay. Have fun," she'd admonished. And her spouse had obeyed.

We'd all obeyed. We'd danced and howled and embraced our new pack members...all while not only inviting the devil to our door by neglecting to rescind his welcome, but also while leaving the entire village unguarded so that same devil could walk in completely unhindered. The clan had felt so secure in our power and inclusiveness that we'd ignored our open borders and had allowed the human wife of a werewolf—whose mere existence more hidebound shifters would consider an abomination—to travel alone down a dark country road.

And now Acacia's halfie daughter lay injured or—I hoped—asleep on the bed beside the most sadistic werewolf I'd ever met. With her mother nowhere to be seen.

***

I felt more than heard another shifter waft in the door behind me. Or, rather, two shifters, as my lupine-assisted nose informed me upon picking out the signature aromas of both Fen and Glen.

"Find Acacia," I ordered, the two words more a breath than a whisper. And I felt the air whirl behind my back as Glen left as quickly as he'd come, his usual "On it, boss" implied this time rather than spoken.

"What do you want then?" Wolfie spoke at last. My mate had been silent up until this point, and I suspected he only spoke now in order to draw his brother's attention away from the backup that he'd been confident would eventually arrive.

The stalling had been effective, but I was dismayed to see that Wolfie's lupine half wasn't as confident of success as usual. And not just because of tiny Lantana who lay inches away from a blade so sharp it could have shaved the fluffy hairs away from her tender little head.

No, Wolfie was shaken by his own missteps that had allowed his brother to walk into the heart of our pack's territory unnoticed. Because, by werewolf law, Justin was currently our invited guest just as he had been the previous morning. And as such, the invader couldn't be attacked without serious punishment from the werewolf governing council.

True, we'd recently pulled the wool over the Tribunal's eyes with regards to Ember. But I didn't cherish any illusions that we'd get away with taking Justin down when he was protected by guesting laws. No, as much as I disliked the intruder, I also knew that my brother-in-law was smart enough to have left evidence of his location and guest status with his own pack. Which meant that if our pack harmed a hair on Wolfie's sibling's head, the Tribunal would surely scorch Haven back into the Stone Age.

That was assuming my brother-in-law didn't break that guesting protection by harming one of our own, of course. Unfortunately, while the evidence spread across our marriage bed definitely looked like just cause for retaliation to the human eye, to a shifter any current attack upon Justin would leave us rather than him in the wrong.

Because the sword, the drug, and even the kidnapped child were simply possessions in werewolf parlance. If our intruder twisted Lantana's neck, we would indeed have the right to reparations...reparations such as killing one of Justin's chickens or dogs. Not taking the murderer's life. Not over a girl who shared only half of her blood with werewolves.

But who will ever need to know why and how we remove the interloper? my wolf whispered in my mind. She craved action, wanted to leap forward and save the infant who we both considered a full-blooded member of our pack. My inner beast itched to push the syringe and sword out of Justin's hands and, yes, even tear out his jugular as I'd done for the first time only a few months before when faced with far less provocation than Justin had brought with him today.

Unfortunately, my wolf would have been solidly in the wrong in the eyes of the Tribunal, as I silently reminded her. In contrast, our actions during Justin's attack last winter had been black and white from the point of view of shifter law. The previous battle had taken place on outpack territory (fair game), my brother-in-law had attacked and we'd rebuffed that attack with equal force (fair fight), and in the end a wolf from each side had ended up in the ground (fair losses). There was no reason for any uber-alpha to step in and clear the air.

Now, though, I knew the Tribunal would rule against us if they caught wind of our pack attacking a named guest (unfair game), three against one (unfair fight), with the deadly force we'd need to end his current threat (unfair losses).

But I also knew that tonight's stakes were even higher than they'd been during Justin's last foray. Back in the winter, the jealous alpha had threatened to do our pack grievous harm...but now he menaced the safety of werewolves everywhere. Given the intruder's apparent interest in and knowledge of F2F, my wolf and I both knew that we couldn't allow Justin to leave Haven alive.

"Feeling toothless?" the shifter in question taunted as his three opponents stood poised but indecisive by the door. "Have you finally realized that your big bad wolf can't bark me down? No idea how to proceed when you're not the strongest shifter in the room?"

As my brother-in-law spoke, I begged my wolf for a little extra oomph. And as she pulled us into the half-wolf state in which her senses were on full alert within our human body, I noticed a second detail that my mate must have taken in right away.

Somehow over the last fifteen hours, Justin's lupine half seemed to have doubled in inner fortitude. So where I'd once thought our intruder easy to overcome with a simple alpha compulsion, now I wasn't even sure that Wolfie and I could have defanged the intruder if we'd been fully joined by a claiming moon and had been working seamlessly in tandem. Without that unity, there was no point in even trying to overcome the powerful intruder using speech alone.

But while I yearned to find out why and how Justin's inner wolf had been bolstered so dramatically in just a few short hours, Wolfie was still worrying the issue of his brother's purpose here in Haven. "So you just came by for a chat?" my mate prodded. "Let me guess. You're still so shaken up by your label of the older brother who always lags behind in every race that you figured out how to put your inner wolf on steroids and came by to gloat about that false sense of power. Lame, big brother. Lame."

As he spoke, I saw at last what my mate was trying to do. Wolfie was using the same childhood rivalry that had riled his own inner wolf in an effort to jolt Justin out of his gloating sense of security and onto a path of explanation. And, to my surprise, the tactic worked.

"Steroids?" A humorless chuckle filled the darkened room as Justin shifted his grandfather's sword a little closer to his hostage's tender skin. Behind me, Fen shuffled her feet ever so quietly in reaction and I reached back to touch her arm gently by way of reply. The alpha gesture of calming a jittery wolf was surprisingly natural to me now, and Fen stilled beneath my hand.

Before us, Justin was still rankling at his brother's accusation. "I don't need steroids to build up my wolf," he said angrily. "In case you haven't noticed, I'm already twice as strong as every other alpha at All-Pack."

And his statement was technically true...now that my brother-in-law had broken our regional gathering in two, dragging the weaker clans along in his wake as he formed his very own All-Pack. But that still didn't mean our intruder's powers had held a candle to Wolfie's the previous morning, despite my mate having recently siphoned off a good deal of his own alpha dominance to top mine up. So what had changed between then and now?

"Justin the jerk," Wolfie bantered, his voice light and airy despite the way his lupine half snarled and pranced beneath his skin. On the surface, my mate appeared as serene as always, but the evidence of my own wolf senses proved that his reactions were on a hair trigger. I just hoped our opponent wasn't savvy enough to draw the same conclusion.

Luckily, it appeared that the latter hadn't spent enough time with a strong inner wolf to learn the beast's full repertoire while furless. Because Justin merely listened with narrowing eyes as my mate continued to draw his brother into a verbal snare.

"I can see you making a note in that extra-small brain of yours," Wolfie continued. Then he raised his voice into a falsetto as he mimicked the words that he believed ran through his brother's head. "'Check to see if steroids actually do expand your wolf's powers.'"

Lowering his tone back to its usual deep register, my mate laid his trap. "Well, I'll do you a favor and save you the effort of looking up big words in a medical dictionary. Our resident doctor tested a variety of drugs and found that steroids don't work on shifters at all. They go right through you, like a laxative...or like the threats of a weakling bully."

But Justin didn't bite. "Your resident doctor," he mused smoothly, seemingly unmoved by his brother's taunting. I shivered, not liking how the tables had turned. Usually, my mate was the calm, collected opponent whose strength saved the day. So why was Justin now able to ignore the mockery streaming out of his sibling's mouth?

The answer came from our intruder's own lips, brought there at last by Wolfie's relentless teasing. "Speaking of dear old Doctor Dale, I had hours to explore what your strange little pack was up to while you were all dancing around campfires and fêting werewolves unworthy of the name," Justin continued. "And do you know what I discovered?"

To make his point, the shifter held up the syringe he'd been holding in his left hand, causing moonlight from the window to glint off the metallic tip. And as he did so, I finally saw something I should have noticed before. The reservoir of the syringe was empty.

"Your good doctor has developed quite an intriguing drug," Justin said, his lips quirking up into a full-blown sneer at last. "But he didn't think to test out the medication's potential side effects. Shifting a werewolf against his or her will? What's the point when any alpha worth his salt can do the same?

"Probably even your pet alpha-ette can force a shift," the invading alpha finished, nodding in my direction. From his previous lack of interest in the activity by the door, I'd hoped that Justin was only aware of Wolfie's presence and that Fen and I would eventually be able to slip beneath his defenses unnoticed. But it now appeared even that sally was doomed to failure.

"No," my brother-in-law continued in a thoughtful tone, ignoring the anger emanating from his brother and the tension radiating from the other shifters in the room. "So-called F2F is useless as currently envisioned. But I decided to try a dose myself this evening. And guess what? Your doctor's boring little drug does have a purpose after all. It makes an already dominant wolf much more powerful. And every time you inject yourself, you grow stronger yet."

When Justin paused to let us fully soak up his words, my wolf and I pushed our enhanced vision to its limit and peered closer at the scene atop our bed. And as we did so, we saw that our intruder didn't possess only a single syringe. Yes, Justin was only holding one implement in his fist, but the entire top of the quilt was littered with needles that Dale had readied for his next round of testing.

There must have been at least twenty doses arrayed across the bed...or, rather, those doses' delivery devices were arrayed across the bed. The drugs in question were instead flowing through Justin's veins.

So that's why he's so powerful, I thought. And here I'd assumed the situation couldn't get any worse.

And why he's so crazy, too, my wolf murmured silently.

As usual, she was right. The hint of erratic aggression that had been lurking beneath my father's skin ever since the Chief had tracked me down in the woods six months earlier was ten times as evident in the lupine half of the shifter before us. And just as I realized that Justin was yet less rational than he'd been the last time we'd met, our opponent woke Lantana by jerking the little girl abruptly up into his lap.

"So what do I want, you ask?" the menacing shifter continued. "I want you to beg and plead for me to relinquish this spineless baby into your tender, loving care. I want you to offer a trade of hostages—my wife, my child, your own heart served on up a silver platter. I want you to admit that I've won, that there's nothing you can do to stop me now unless I choose to rein in my temper."

Then, bringing his grandfather's blade up to lie across the squalling baby's neck, Justin made his final move. "Yes, I want all that...and then I want to throw your defeat back in your face and tell you that you possess nothing I desire. I want to watch this miniature travesty's blood spurt out across your marriage bed. And then I want to watch you cry.

"So," Justin finished, mocking his younger brother with every word and gesture, "what are you going to do to stop me?"