Chapter 10

Reprieve came from an unexpected source. One moment, Grey was leaning against the wall, bored by the entire event. The next moment, my teeth began to chatter as the auditorium filled with a gust of wintry chill.

“Who left the door open?” a one-body asked loudly, bringing the babble around us to an abrupt halt. Just what we needed—for the entire audience of pet owners to start paying attention at the critical moment when I itched to keep them all profoundly in the dark.

Meanwhile, Amanda’s granddaughter finally broke free of the fear that had frozen her feet in place. “Fluffy!” she screeched, flinging herself into the middle of the pack of disordered werewolves, one of whom was poised to become an entirely naked teenager in short order.

In response, Fluffy growled around his mouthful of hair while Calla whimpered a little more loudly. But to my surprise, the electricity sparking through the gymnasium lessened in intensity as Grey stepped out of the shadows and paced intently toward the transitioning bloodling.

Only then did I realize the alternative solution that had slipped my mind as I focused on the alpha compulsion I’d been unable to make stick. A stronger werewolf often guided a youngster through her first shift...and the same trick could be applied in reverse to halt a transformation occurring at an inconvenient time and place.

Well, this setting is definitely inconvenient, I thought inanely.

Hairs once again rose along my neck as Grey stalked past, his inner beast even more rampant than usual. Like Sinsa, the uber-alpha was seconds away from shifting, and I realized too late that perhaps our uninvited guest was attempting to hinder us rather than helping prevent this disaster that I’d willingly unleashed on one-body territory.

Because Grey was definitely Stormwinder’s pawn. And hadn’t I already concluded that the Tribunal member’s primary goal was to pry Hunter loose from our pack and bring my mate back into his former role as the older male’s lap dog?

But there was nothing I could do in the face of such a powerful uber-alpha. Nothing to do but watch as Grey walked up to Sinsa and planted both broad hands atop the quivering werewolf’s heaving flank.

My own wolf was still wide awake due to our recent attempt at compelling Sinsa’s transformation away. Perhaps that’s why the rush of uber-alpha intention caught me off guard and nearly pushed me off my feet.

For whatever reason, my stomach clenched in abrupt agony. My eyes watered so hard I almost couldn’t see Grey sucking the transition right out of Sinsa’s addle-pated brain. And, in reaction, I instinctively reached out into thin air in hopes a support would appear before I fell flat on my face.

To my surprise, the much-needed assistance did indeed materialize out of the blue. “Shit, that hurts,” Lupe moaned. Still, she managed to hold both of us upright so we wouldn’t create a scene in front of the interested one-bodies. Slowly, quietly, we paced backwards toward the double doors.

Shiver, fliver, miver, river....

My wolf was babbling now, her words no longer making rational sense. Or maybe I just couldn’t understand what she was trying to communicate when my head pounded like the floor of a dance studio filled with elephants?

“I think I’m going to shift,” Lupe whispered, her voice nearly as garbled as the words currently flowing through my brain.

Right, the buddy system. I was supposed to be preventing Lupe from doing something she’d later regret. But all I wanted right then was to go to ground and lick my own wounds.

Still, I was the alpha in charge. So I straightened my spine with an effort and peered through air that seemed significantly dimmer than it had been a moment earlier. At last, I managed to pick Ginger’s maroon hair out of the crowd and to likewise catch her eye.

Can you take over the class? I asked silently, not bothering to send the words down the pack bond. I was pretty sure I wouldn’t succeed at such a complicated maneuver even if I tried, so I merely crossed my fingers and hoped Ginger could understand my thoughts as implicitly as my mate frequently did.

Sure enough, my friend raised her eyebrows in alarm as she took in both my and Lupe’s bloodless faces. But the twin often acted as my second, so she knew when to ask questions and when to merely act. Nodding firmly, she mouthed: Sinsa’s okay now. Do what you have to do.

“Let’s go,” I said to Lupe, dismissing the problems behind us as I took the teenager’s hand in mine. “You can shift in the backseat of the Volvo. I’ll lock us both in and I doubt our wolves will be bright enough to figure out the release latches.”

Behind me, I felt the final hint of electricity dissipating as Grey proved himself an asset rather than a liability. Then, together, Lupe and I stumbled out into the darkness.

The parking lot had never felt so far away.

***

Waking up in a location I didn’t remember lying down in was getting royally old. And with Lupe’s furry tail shielding my eyes from any light, I was tempted to turn over and drift right back to sleep. Surely I’d feel better after just a few more minutes of slumber?

The pounding on the window, though, suggested nap time was over. So, blinking groggily, I pulled myself upright and peered out into the dim parking lot.

Despite the closest street light being well over twenty yards away, the dark shape leaning over the windshield was still painfully obvious. Swathed in shadows, though, it could have been anyone—friend, foe, or scary paranormal beast. Unconsciously, I cringed away from the hulking shape, my fingers twining into the hair of the wolf by my side like a child seeking comfort from her favorite teddy bear.

Then the fur beneath my hand turned into human hair seconds before the outside visitor materialized into Glen, my most solid supporter. “Ow,” complained my car mate, prying herself loose from my clenched fist.

“You’d better come back inside,” Glen said at nearly the exact same instant, his voice muffled by the glass and steel that separated our forms.

And as my terror faded, I realized that my vision had been confused by a rime of ice that was still forming on the inside of the windshield in reaction to Lupe’s and my humid breath. So the terrifying image hadn’t been merely a figment of my unreliable mind, just a sleepy reaction to clouded vision. The realization made the frigid car feel a little warmer.

Sighing in relief, I clicked the door lock open and stepped out into the night, leaving Lupe behind to dress at her leisure. The air smelled different than I recalled, vaguely autumnal, as if we’d swept backwards eight weeks to a time of pumpkins, bonfires, and colorful leaves. “What’s going on?” I asked, trying to pull my wolf onto the right track even as she flared our nostrils against the unexpected scent.

“I don’t know,” Glen answered. But his face was grim and his eyes didn’t quite meet my own. He did know, I realized, but he didn’t want to tell me.

Then raised voices impinged on the nighttime quiet as a huddle of shifters and one-bodies left the elementary school together. “I won’t be put off again,” the mayor was saying angrily. “Christy is terrified and I want to know which one of your dogs was harassing her when she walked home this evening. That beast should be put down.”

Beside me, Glen and Lupe growled in tandem, reacting instinctively to Amanda’s implications. Touching each lightly on the shoulder, I held my ground as Ginger peeled away from the grouping and loped over in our direction.

Unlike Glen, the trouble twin met my eyes willingly, her relief at my appearance evident. “Christy took her poodle and left early,” she explained tersely. “But now her grandmother’s back claiming someone chased the kid all the way home. Doesn’t make any sense, though. Hunter’s bloodlings were all inside the entire time. I counted them constantly just to make sure.”

She seemed to expect me to gainsay her, but instead I glanced toward my own charge, with whom I’d spent the last who-knows-how-long comatose in my car. Did we do it? I asked with my eyes. The teenager’s cheek twitched as if she wanted to reassure me, but eventually she shrugged. Nope, Lupe didn’t remember the intervening time period any better than I did.

“Well, it should be easy to figure out what happened,” I said, taking charge even though I had a sinking suspicion I was getting ready to uncover my own guilt. “Without a herd of sheep to muddle the tracks, any one of us should be able to scent out the culprit. We’ll send the bloodlings home first, though.” No need to prompt a repeat performance if Sinsa got upset and decided to turn two-legged in front of the already suspicious mayor.

“I’ll take them back to Wolf Landing,” Glen offered, stepping around me to rally the masses. His willingness to help was appreciated, but his shoulders were tense and he still managed to look everywhere other than into my face.

It hurt like hell to realize that one of my most dependable pack mates didn’t trust me...but what exactly had I done lately to earn my way into his good graces? The male was astute enough to have picked up on my wolf’s irregular behavior, so I shouldn’t have been surprised that my unwillingness to confide in my friend was now flying back to slap me in the face.

“Good idea,” I said levelly, dropping the issue for the present moment. Then, scanning the dim parking lot, I noticed Cinnamon padding toward us in lupine form. The male twin’s nose would be the perfect choice to sniff out any evidence that human appendages might fail to pick up. “Let’s not give Amanda time to get any angrier,” I added as I led my whittled-down pack toward the argument I’d momentarily blocked out.

“Where are you staying this time?” Amanda was asking as Ginger, Lupe, Cinnamon, and I came up beside her. Lia looked decidedly shell-shocked, having apparently been in charge of defusing the older woman’s anger while Glen tracked me down. But Grey was the one caught in the mayor’s crosshairs at the present moment.

Despite having called Amanda’s granddaughter “meat” only an hour earlier, though, the enforcer was currently doing a very capable job of pretending to be human. “With Celia, on the mountain,” he answered. “But Lucas and I will definitely recommend your bed and breakfast to our friends. Those waffles really stick to your ribs.”

To my surprise, the mayor colored prettily, Grey’s praise of her cooking all it took to counteract what had seemed poised to become a nuclear explosion. “Well, I appreciate that,” she began. Then, noticing my approach, the red on her cheeks took on an appearance of anger rather than pleasure. “Your dogs...”

“Let’s figure out what happened,” I interjected before Amanda could tear into us a second time. I heard a quick scuffle behind me, and when I stepped back Cinnamon had sprouted a collar and leash. His sister twitched her eyebrows and grinned.

“I know what happened,” Amanda started. But when Grey offered her his arm, the mayor promptly shut up and led us down the street toward an area where three overarching street lamps in a row had burnt out. The expanse between the distant patches of illumination was dim enough to make vision difficult for one-body eyes, suggesting a more benign explanation for the little girl’s terror.

“This is where Christy got scared?” I asked, eying the empty storefronts. I could see how a kid walking back to her grandmother’s house in the near darkness might be spooked by the unfamiliar scenery, especially when her poodle had so recently faced down a group of angry wolves.

Sure, Christy thought our pack mates were mere dogs. But Sinsa and company’s anger in the gymnasium would have been enough to give the little girl nightmares without any additional harassment. I found it hard to blame the kid for shying at shadows when the monsters in question were very much real.

“Yes, right along here,” Amanda said firmly. “One of your beasts must have followed her out into the night. My poor grandbaby said she heard it panting behind her back the whole way. And when she turned to look, it ran at her. I warned Celia...”

Letting the mayor ramble on, I paused and pulled my wolf up behind my eyes. She was achy and tired from the aftereffects of Grey’s counter-shift, but simply scenting the air was no hardship even in human form.

Meanwhile, Grey and Lia seemed quite capable of preventing Amanda from going bat-shit crazy, giving me the opening I needed to drift down the sidewalk in the opposite direction from the way Ginger and Cinnamon were currently traveling. Puny wolf-dog, my inner animal noted as we picked out the spot where the poodle had stopped to mark its territory against the side of a telephone pole.

Christy’s scent was also present, bubble gum reeking from where she’d spat it out only a few feet away from Fluffy’s territorial marker. I could smell the little girl’s fear hovering in the air too, mingling with the more recent odors emanating from the grouping behind my back. No, Christy wasn’t lying—something had scared the kid.

But when it came time to hunt down the werewolf aroma of fur and wild, nothing jumped out at me. And when Cinnamon and I traded places and went back over each others’ work, both twins shook their heads at me in negation. Amanda was pissed and Christy was scared, but there was no evidence a shifter was responsible for the little girl’s fright.

So I promised to keep our “dogs” locked up for the remainder of Christy’s visit, but I went home with a happy heart. In this case at least, Lupe and I no longer had the cloud of suspicion hanging over our heads. Strange blackouts and unconscious shifts aside, neither one of us had been responsible for scaring that kid.