Off the Beaten Path Read online

  “Henry.” His voice was low and clear, just the barest hint of a Quebecois accent evident in his pronunciation of my name. “Welcome back.”

  “It’s good to be back.”

  He extended a hand, and I took it, then drew him into an embrace, pressing my nose against the crook of his neck. Humans might see two grown men hugging the life out of each other in a parking lot and wonder, but for me, this greeting was as traditional as a handshake. Liam was pack―new pack, barely pack―but he carried my sister’s scent on every inch of his skin, and the scent of my wolves beneath that.

  Liam scented me in return, and I could tell he didn’t like what he smelled. I hadn’t had a chance to clean up, and I still felt bathed in blood, dust, and death. It was no different than a dozen other missions, the price I paid as La Garita pack’s alpha, but Liam had grown up sheltered. I sensed his distaste and pulled back before I caused him any more discomfort. It was enough to have the smell of home in my head again. Soon the ache in my heart would ease.

  I threw my duffel bag into the back seat in silence. Liam offered me the keys, but I waved them away. “I’m tired. I might want to nap a little on the way home.” It was a four-hour drive from Colorado Springs, plenty of time to be awkward with my new brother-in-law. God, I hoped I slept.

  “Of course.” He got into the driver’s seat, started up the car, and turned on the heat. The radio was set to NPR. Naturally. No heavy metal or hard rock for Liam. I was lucky we weren’t listening to fusion jazz or French pop.

  “Samantha wanted to come.”

  Oh good, so we were going to talk about it. “And she didn’t because?”

  “The littlest pup, the new one. Ava? She isn’t doing so well.”

  Fuck. “What’s Tennyson’s diagnosis?”

  Liam sighed. “Failure to thrive. He can’t find anything medically wrong with her. Her shift isn’t noticeably out of alignment, no impingement on the heart or lungs, but she’s completely listless.”

  “Failure to thrive.” I shook my head. “He’s got to hate that.”

  “He does, very loudly,” Liam agreed. Tennyson was another of the newer arrivals, a transplant from a disbanded pack on the East Coast. He was one of the few werewolves with medical training for both the human and the animal parts of us, and after what had happened to his last pack, he was edgy as hell. I should have been there for him. I should have been there to ease the way for both of them.

  The timing of my latest mission couldn’t have been worse. Three new arrivals in under a month: one who’d just lost his pack, one who was marrying into mine, and a child stuck in her pup form who had howled endlessly, so despondent that she’d refused to eat for almost a week. I was the alpha of La Garita pack. It was my job to welcome new members, to help them integrate and feel like they were becoming part of a new whole. That was what pack was: a sense of wholeness, the anchor for a soul living in an unstable body. It was family, or that was what it aspired to be.

  Tennyson had been settling in, his walls still high but his reluctance to socialize ebbing. Liam and Sam had come back from their honeymoon even more ridiculously in love than when they’d left for it, which made it a little easier for me to deal with the fact that I had to share my sister now. Even Ava had finally stopped crying, willing to take food directly from my hand. She was a strong-willed pup, completely adorable, and I had three different couples vying to welcome her into their homes once she shifted back to human. Then I’d gotten the call.

  Almost a month later, here I was: returning home without the success that would sate my handlers, wiry and strung out from too much running and not enough sleep and with my own sense of pack so strained it was almost like I didn’t have one at all.

  Sam would ask me about that. I knew she suspected, but she’d been too happy to really dwell on it before. I’d have to work at my lie this time if she was going to buy it.

  “I’ll go and see her when we get back.” Maybe spending the night with Ava in my other form would comfort her some.

  “Samantha has been with her every day since you left. She’s doing everything she can.”

  Was that censure in his voice? “I know that,” I said with deliberate slowness. “I’m not accusing my sister of anything.”

  “There was much to deal with while you were gone. Some that was difficult for a human.” Making Sam the acting head of the pack while I was gone was nothing new, but Liam didn’t understand the way we ran things yet. Sam might be human, the only human there, but no one dominated her. If she’d been born a werewolf, I was pretty sure she would have ended up the alpha, not me.

  Given the work I did for the military, I was glad I’d taken on the responsibility instead.

  “Sam knows how to handle things when I’m away.”

  “She would be in trouble if a fight broke out.”

  I could feel my jaw begin to creak. That was almost always where my shift began, and the last thing I needed right now was to alpha out on my new brother-in-law. “Did a fight break out?”

  “No, but—”

  “Wouldn’t you have been there to assist her if a fight had broken out among my wolves?”

  “Of course I would.” His voice was soft now, deferent. He knew he’d overstepped—I could smell the faint sourness of his apology—but my easy mood was gone.

  “You’ve never really been part of a pack like ours before, Liam.”

  “My pack was—”

  “Your last pack was a bunch of lone wolves loosely associated because your government didn’t know what else to do with you.” The vast majority of werewolves were American, but the gene had spread to a few other nationalities. There were enough carriers in Canada to form something of a pack in the Laurentian Mountains, but they hadn’t been raised together, hadn’t spent their whole lives together.

  “La Garita pack is different. My mother was the alpha before me, and her father was the alpha before her. He was one of the original soldiers infected with the mutation. Our pack is firmly established, and most of our members have been a part of it their whole lives. They know us. They wouldn’t endanger Sam, but if you think she doesn’t have fail-safes in place for her own protection, then you don’t know her very well.” I let my irises bleed from blue to gold. “Don’t disappoint my sister by underestimating her.” Or else, my alpha glare added.

  If Liam could have shrunk any deeper into his seat, he’d have been under it. “I won’t.”

  “Glad to hear it.” It took more effort than usual to get my eyes to change back. Too much time spent shifted lately. I needed to get home, see my sister, settle in with the new pup, and rest. God, I needed to rest. I felt so tired now that I was back on somewhat friendly ground that I could barely hold myself upright. I leaned my head against the cool glass of the window and shut my eyes. I wouldn’t be able to sleep with just Liam in the car, not after our little altercation, but at least I could spare myself the trouble of making any further conversation with him.

  Apparently I was more tired than I’d thought, because the next thing I knew I went from dreaming I was hunched and quivering on all four feet over a body to suddenly waking up with a gasp, snapping my half-inch fangs in the direction of the disturbance. Liam had already pulled his hand back from my shoulder, apprehension clear in his face.

  My jaw was distorted, painful in the aching, grinding way that always came with a partial shift. I forced my teeth back to human and got my bearings. “Ah.” It was dark now, but the 4Runner rumbled to the beat of washboards in the dirt road, and above the trees I could just make out the edge of familiar, moonlight-limned mountains. We were almost to the guardian’s home.

  “I thought you’d want a moment to collect yourself before speaking with him.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Henry….” I thought for a moment he wasn’t going to say it, but Liam collected himself and pressed on. “Are you all right?”

  I wanted to snap at him. Fuck that, I wanted to actually nip him, draw a little blood and put
him in his place, but Sam would chew my head off if I did. And he was family. I needed to make an effort, even if it was harder now than I could ever remember it being.

  “It was a rough mission.” Understatement of the year. “I just need a little time to reacclimatize. I’ll be fine.”

  “Okay.” I could hear the doubt in his voice but didn’t have the time to pursue things—we were already pulling to a stop by the guardian’s home. John Parnell was waiting for us by the road, scowling as usual. His house was well lit, and I could see the silhouette of his daughter moving around the living room, probably cleaning up plates after another TV dinner. Things had been different for the family since his wife Clara left last year, and not in a good way. John had been our guardian for over two decades, but that didn’t mean he liked us.

  He did his job, though. “Fuck, it’s colder than a witch’s third tit out here,” he grunted as I rolled down the window. He passed me a sheaf of handwritten papers. We could have transmitted all this information digitally, but the government was understandably wary about werewolf networks getting hacked. Information isolation was a necessary part of keeping the pack safe. “Upcoming delivery dates, incident reports, and the maintenance log. Camera nine is malfunctioning.”

  “Another one?” I frowned as I glanced through the papers. “Last month it was camera six.”

  “They’re not really built to withstand the weather, and your infrastructure’s getting old. You should ask for a system overhaul.”

  I snorted. “Yeah, I don’t think that’s going to happen anytime soon.” I wouldn’t get any favors from my handlers until I gave them a successful mission. I’d already pushed things, lobbying for and getting the new blood.

  “Oh really?” John raised a bushy gray eyebrow. “Interesting times abroad?”

  “You could say that.”

  “Huh. Well, not to heap more damage on you, but you should know that there’ve been sightings of a large white ‘dog’ outside of Monte Vista. Nobody’s caught it doing anything wrong yet, but the weather’s just going to get worse over the next month. If it’s looking for food….”

  Fuck. “I understand.” I couldn’t bring myself to think about “stray dogs” right now. Wilson had kept his head for the past fifteen years; he could handle himself for another winter. He’d be all right.

  “I hope you do.” He slapped the side of the truck. “It’s out of your hands for now, at least. Don’t let it fuck you up too much. Welcome back, Alpha Dormer.”

  “Thanks, John. Say hi to the kids for me.”

  “I will.” He wouldn’t. He walked back to his house, and I rolled the window back up. We were almost there. The sense of disruption I’d been feeling ever since I left was finally ebbing away. My home was waiting for me. My pack. My family. It would be all right.

  When we got to the fence, Liam opened a program on his phone and typed in a code. The gate slid open for us, automatically closing once it got to its apex. The compound was a little less than a mile ahead. I could already see the lights through the trees.

  The first cabin at the end of the road was ours, in front of and slightly apart from the rest of our little town. It was larger than most of the other houses, a throwback to when our family had been more numerous. Dark logs and a tile roof gave it almost a Bavarian appearance, and the porch light glowed brightly. I was out of the truck almost before Liam stopped it, heading toward the front door at a jog. I was home, I was finally—

  Wait.

  I inhaled deeply, scenting the air just in front of the door. There was a smell here that I didn’t recognize. A person here that I didn’t recognize. Trespasser.

  I slammed the door open so hard it rattled on its hinges getting inside. Liam was right behind me, and I followed the smell of the intruder into the living room, feeling the shift pull at my face again, readying my fingertips to burst into claws that would—

  “Henry, stop!” Only here was Sam, right in front of me, smelling just fine. A little stressed, but healthy. Her long blonde hair was pulled into a disheveled bun on top of her head, and she was wearing one of my college sweatshirts. She smelled like us. She smelled like home. “It’s okay,” she said, and I wanted to melt onto the floor, collapse with my relief. “I’m fine. Everything is fine.” She smiled at me, broad and happy, and held out her arms. “God, I’m so glad you’re back.”

  I hugged her, and it was almost perfect. Almost perfect. The scent of the intruder still lurked in the air, stronger than ever now, and even though I wanted nothing more than to relax at last, I couldn’t. I looked over her shoulder at the couch.

  A man sat curled into a ball on the far right cushion, bundled up in what looked like every blanket in the whole house. His hands, clutching a tepid mug of hot chocolate, looked painfully red, and I heard an unhealthy-sounding rasp in his chest with every breath. His thin face peeked out from beneath lank straw-colored hair, but his expression was blatantly defiant.

  He was also completely, utterly human. Not a werewolf―he didn’t even smell like a carrier. He had no place here, in my home.

  “Who the hell is that?”

  Chapter Three

  Ward

  FIGHT OR flight. Two warring biological imperatives meant to save your ass when you were feeling threatened. I’d fallen prey to fight plenty of times in the past―I didn’t run away from trouble, I met it head-on. My friends called me reckless; I considered myself scrappy. Fight was a familiar instinct, one I could handle.

  I’d never felt the flight urge so strongly before in my life. Part of it was the way my hostess behaved as soon as she heard the front door open, her face a strange mixture of happy and apprehensive as she suddenly stood, leaving me alone on the couch. Part of it was Davis’s warning echoing in the back of my mind about what to do when confronted with a werewolf, how to behave when facing down an alpha: don’t look them in the eyes. Don’t move toward them―wait for them to come to you. And for fuck’s sake, Ward, don’t yell at them! The last thing fueling my instinctive urge to flee was the reality of the man—werewolf—person who ran through the door into the living room, teeth bared like he was ready to rip someone’s throat out, eyes bright and fierce and burning like stars.

  The sight of him stopped my breath. For that moment, he seemed larger than life, despite the fact that he probably wasn’t that much taller than average. He was broad, though, barrel-chested, every exposed inch of skin browned by the sun, the rest of him concealed by dirty tan fatigues. His jaw was covered with auburn scruff, his hair a shade closer to brown. He was―captivating. I couldn’t look away.

  When his eyes met mine, I scowled at him for all I was worth. This was the bastard who’d stolen my daughter. I might be quaking on the inside, but there was no way I was backing down to him.

  When he spoke, his voice was a rumbling growl. “Who the hell is that?”

  Oh, fuck no. He wasn’t going to talk over me like I wasn’t even here. I set my cup of cocoa on the end table, struggled out of most of the blankets, and got to my feet. It was harder than I liked to stay on my feet, but hey, at least I could feel them now.

  Sam spoke up before I could open my mouth. “This is Ward Johannsen. He’s Ava’s dad.” She paused. “You remember Ava? The pup—”

  “I remember.” Still growling. Not good. “What’s he doing here? John didn’t say anything about—”

  Sam shook her head. “He didn’t come in on the road. I found him in Sector Eight.”

  Finally, he actually spoke to me. “You hiked in?”

  “Yes.” If I’d sounded a little hoarser, I might have passed for a Shetland pony.

  “Over the river?”

  “Is there a river out there?” Maybe that was the weird expanse without the trees. I’d thought it had been a little more slippery than usual.

  He closed his eyes—still gold—for a moment, looking less like a wolf and more like a world-weary soldier. “Yeah, there’s a fucking river on one side of our territory. You’re lucky you didn’t fall
in.”

  “Right. Lucky,” I scoffed. “That’s what I am.”

  “You are. You survived getting here, and you’re going to live long enough to leave. Sounds pretty lucky to me.”

  “I’m not going anywhere.”

  “The hell you aren’t.”

  The growl was more pronounced now, resonating down into his chest and through vocal cords that quite obviously weren’t entirely human anymore. My heart felt ready to explode, but I wasn’t going to be intimidated.

  “I’m not leaving without my daughter.”

  “You aren’t going anywhere with her.”

  “Then it looks like I’m staying here.” The idea made me a little queasy, but if learning to live with a bunch of werewolves was what it took to stay with Ava, then I’d manage.

  “You can’t stay here. Do you have any idea how many laws you broke just stepping foot on our land?” He moved closer to me, his glare colder than the ice surrounding the house. “I’m within my rights to deal with trespassers however I see fit. The guardian wouldn’t even blink an eye if I handed your corpse over to him in the morning.”

  “Okay, that’s enough of that.” Sam put herself between the two of us, meeting her brother’s glare with one that matched it in intensity. “Don’t be so dramatic. You’re not killing anyone, Henry.”

  “What do you think I’ve been doing for the past month, sightseeing?” He gestured at himself. “These are the first clothes I’ve worn in weeks, Sam. The wolf hasn’t been sitting idle. We’ve been hunting.”

  Sam’s mouth tightened at the grim reminder, but she didn’t balk. “That’s work. This is home, and at home we act like the civilized people we are and talk through our differences without bloodshed.”

  “He’s not supposed to be here.”

  “Too bad, he’s here anyway.”

  “He’s not pack, Sam!”

  There was more than just anger making his voice rough. There was desperation there. I knew it well. It almost made me want to soften a bit, try to be a little more placating, a little kinder to a person who had obviously been through the wringer.