Chapter 36

Loki.

The girls left and I breathed a sigh of relief. Now that I understood what was going on with me better, I really didn’t want to be around Asire. I think she sensed it too. The look on her face when I left her bedroom this morning. Talk about guilt, if I wasn’t feeling bad enough already, it was now on a whole new level.

I hadn’t intentionally been cold to her. It just came out when I couldn’t come up with anything to say. It hadn’t helped that she’d been wearing a tank top that wasn’t nearly thick enough to keep my eyes from wandering. Really, I was just glad she hadn’t been awake when I got out of the shower this morning. I had forgotten my clothes and there hadn’t been any clean towels. I felt like a letch walking out into her room without anything on. I could have put my dirty clothes back on, but they had somehow gotten wet while sitting on the floor.

It all worked out. She hadn’t seen anything.

We took Henrik’s car to go deal with the werewolves. Thankfully, he was a big man also and had an SUV. I could have squeezed myself into a smaller car, but it wouldn’t have been pleasant for anyone involved.

“What do we know about Basil?” I asked while Henrik pulled out of the driveway. Asire and the girls were already out of sight. That part of me that insisted on wanting Asire was disappointed. The rest of me was even more relieved. Nothing good would come of a friendship with Asire.

Just thinking about it… Eve’s face appeared in my mind. Her gentle features and puny body.

It was almost better than a cold shower. Any attraction I had for the tall, curvy cousin of Billy’s disappeared.

Of course, an insidious part of me thought, that was probably because she wasn’t with me right now. When Asire was in the room… thoughts of Eve vanished into thin air. She took up my present the way Eve had taken up my past. It sickened me to admit that and I felt even guiltier than normal.

“… not usually like this,” Henrik was saying. I realized I had asked him a question and then didn’t bother to listen for the answer. I plugged back into reality and gave my mind something fixable to focus on. “Legions have the smallest number of Orphans in the city,” he said. “But next to us, it’s werewolves. They’re more reluctant to abandon their own.”

“How many are there?” Wynn asked.

“Sixty. Maybe seventy,” he said. “That’s from all over the world, mind you. Seattle is the best dumping station the world has.” He sounded bitter. “Almost all those wolves answer to Basil,” he continued. “There are more werewolves than that in Seattle as well, and I think a handful of them also look to him as their alpha.”

I whistled. That was… a fucking huge pack. There might be one or two bigger, but not by much.

“They aren’t a pack,” Henrik said. “Keep that in mind. He can’t control them like an alpha could their wolves, so he has to rely on his strength and sheer intelligence to keep him from losing control.”

“If he’s not stupid, then why would he attack us in the street?” That was Wynn.

Henrik grunted. “I do not know,” he said. “Normally, Basil would rather talk it out. Partly because Reggie is the type to get revenge.”

“What’s the rest of the reason?” I asked “Well, like I said, he’s not stupid.”

“Is there anything else?” I couldn’t put my finger on why, but I thought he wasn’t mentioning something.

“Here’s the thing,” Henrik said. “Basil and Reggie are buddies. Not like Reggie and Asire are, but they’ve gone out and had drinks. In Basil’s eyes that makes Reggie an ally and I don’t know why he’d attack her. I really don’t know why he’d attack Asire, because, although she’s unaware of it, Basil is really attracted to her.”

White noise filled the car. Oh, wait, no. That was the sound of my blood rushing to my head and anger sparking in my chest. It took me several seconds to shove the emotions aside. I mean, she isn’t mine. She’d never be mine. So, once I had everything under control, I managed to continue civilly. “Oh?” I said.

“Yeah,” Henrik continued. “She isn’t aware of it, but I think that’s willful ignorance on her part, so that she doesn’t have to feel awkward around him.”

I didn’t say ‘huh’ if for no other reason than not looking like an idiot. I couldn’t come up with coherent words at the moment. However, if the werewolf had been here, I would have come up with lots.

Most of them four letters.

I had better get myself under control before I met with him. This was absurd. I had no right to be reacting like this. It was also foreign. I had never been the jealous type with Eve. Of course, we were mated about six months after we met. Not a lot of time for another man to encroach on my girl.

Not that I thought of Asire that way.

I was giving myself a headache.

“He’s never done anything about it,” the man said.

Past all the roiling emotions in my chest, I realized that this was the most I’ve ever heard him say. Then again, no one else in this car knew a damn thing about Basil, so he kind of had to talk.

“I think mostly because he’s nearing thirty and she’s only twenty-one. And he met her when she was sixteen. While no legion would bat an eye, werewolves aren’t that relaxed about such things.”

Silence. I should have said something, but there was that whole…intelligible words thing. I’m surprised I’m thinking as well as I am.

“So it’s really strange that he’d attack her,” he finished. “He’s always been really polite and kind to Asire. Letting one of his wolves take a hunk out of her arm and nearly breaking her wrist? It doesn’t get much more out of character than that for Basil.”

“I see,” I said. Hey, real words. Good for me. There was a tapping sound and it took me a few seconds to realize it was my fingers on my knee. I stilled the motion, but that left nowhere for all this energy to go. The energy that told me it’d be okay if I destroyed the werewolf.

It made absolutely no sense. She wasn’t mine. I didn’t even want her.

“What do you plan on doing?” Regory asked, coming to my rescue. I glanced back at the man. He and Henrik would get along. Neither of them ever spoke unless they had to. The most relaxed Regory ever got was when he was around Billy. He’d smile and tease then. At the moment he was tensed and his expression was closed down. And his green eyes were boring into mine. They saw too much.

I looked ahead again. I could tell myself a thousand different ways that everything was normal. Okay. That look on Regory’s face put paid to that idea. He was an observer and everything he observed told him things I’d rather no one knew.

Henrik shrugged. “I haven’t decided yet. Guilt would work nicely.”

Against my better judgment, I heard myself say, “Why don’t you let me handle it?” I wouldn’t kill him.

I wouldn’t.

Nope.

I should be running back to New Mexico as fast as I could.

“What do you suggest?” Henrik asked.

“I’ve dealt with a pack before,” I said. “There’s a werewolf in my Family. If I do to these wolves what I did to those? They’ll get the message.”

Elijah was back at home right now, but he’d vouch for me on this. His old pack, the one he grew up in, had taken a lot of joy in roughing him up. The older he got, the rougher they became. When I found him, he was inches from death and I found myself in that situation too often to walk away.

Those wolves were forced to leave my city. I’d like to say with their tails between their legs, but I hadn’t stuck around to watch the departure. I had been a busy kid, raising so many other kids and running a security business. At the time, I think I was sixteen or seventeen.

Henrik tapped on the steering wheel. He looked thoughtfully out the windshield, as the wipers made easy work of the snow that was starting to trickle in. “All right,” he said. “I think I can let you handle this. Asire brought you in, so there must be something right with you.”

I snorted.

I wouldn’t kill Basil.

It’s a bad sign when you don’t even believe yourself.

The image of Asire’s face came to mind. I pictured her asking me why Basil was dead and me stammering over a lie about what happened. I could see her eyebrows going up and her head cocking to the side ever so slightly. Like she was surprised and trying to figure out why at the same time.

That cured most of the urge to kill the bastard.

I couldn’t murder him for being attracted to Asire, I told myself sternly. If I did, I’d have to burn down most of Seattle before I left.

We pulled into a residential part of Seattle about three minutes later. Luckily, I had myself under control again.

Jeez. I spent most of the morning trying to distance myself from this girl and there’s a hint of someone else who could be with her and this is how I act? Deliberately, I brought up an image of Eve. Picturing her soft blonde hair and the exact shade of blue her eyes had been. Whatever anger I had left was cured.

Henrik pulled up to a house that was halfway down the street. It was suburban perfect. The lawn was manicured, there were bushes under the windows that were perfectly trimmed. The sidewalk was clean and there wasn’t any trash in the yard. Everything was…boring. I didn’t live in a neighborhood. My house was all by its lonesome without neighbors, which meant it had personality.

Perhaps my anger wasn’t completely cured because I was sitting here comparing my house to his. As if it mattered.

Ugh. I should just put a bullet in my head.

Or his.

Whichever.

My headache got worse.

The four of us got out the car. I felt Wynn’s magic pulse as he checked for hidden traps. He gave me a thumbs up when nothing came back. He was solemn for a nineteen-year-old kid, but that didn’t keep him from having energy and arrogance. He would have sauntered right up to the door and rang the bell if Henrik hadn’t said, “Hold up. Asire texted me something.”

We all stopped. Wynn and I were watching Henrik, but Regory was watching me. His dark green eyes cataloguing every move I was making. At this point, I could only hope that he didn’t tell Dovie about any of this.

Henrik’s brows popped up. “Huh,” he said before tucking his phone away.

“What was it?” I asked.

“Debienne’s been doing some shit,” he said. He tapped on his phone for a second and then raised those brows again. “This shouldn’t be too difficult. Apparently Basil gave Debienne a lot of money recently.”

“Why?” I asked.

“I imagine I’ll be getting another text from someone soon, telling me precisely that,” he said. “For now, they no doubt are aware that we’re here. We should probably stop standing around chatting.”

He marched up the walkway and to the front of the house. He banged his knuckles against the wood three times. It was more satisfying than ringing the doorbell would have been.

As if confirming that they had been aware of our presence, the door opened immediately. A girl was standing on the other side. She glanced up, but quickly averted her eyes so that she wasn’t looking into any of our faces. She had light blonde hair that went past her shoulders and crystalline blue eyes. She was about a foot shorter than me, but somehow seemed smaller.

“Come in,” a voice from another room called.

The girl stepped aside to give us access to the house. We all moved into the building. My first impression was of a lot of leather. The couch, the chairs and a jacket hung up on a rack. All of black, as well. The floors were gray and the walls white.

My second impression was a lot of werewolves.

To the right of the door was the dining room and kitchen. It was full of wolves. There were only five of them, but somehow werewolves always seemed to take up more space than they actually did. To the left was the living room and there were three in there. Including the girl in front of us, that made nine. There was an upstairs, so I bumped that number up to fifteen. Just in case.

Basil the Bastard was sitting in one of his black leather chairs. Lounging really. It was almost reclined and his ankle was propped up on his knee. He was dressed in jeans and a plaid t-shirt. For some reason, the fact that he wore boots in his own home irritated me. Or maybe it was just him.

I couldn’t be certain at this point.

Because I’ve lost my mind.