Heir To The Pack (The Cursed Pack Book 1) (14 page)

He laughed, his face
broadening with mirth.

She didn’t appreciate
being laughed at, but all of this was so far out of her range of experience she
wasn’t even sure why it was funny. “Is that a strange thing to say?”

“It’s not really a careful
activity.”

“What should I have said?”

“‘Good hunting.’”

She could manage that. “Good
hunting, Dash.”

He nodded awkwardly,
turned as if to walk away. Like lightning, he was at her side, kissing her hard
and fast. And was gone.

Her fingers rose to her
lips, touching the lip-print of sensation he’d left behind. Adrenaline coursed
through her veins, and more: the hot flash of lust. But he’d vanished.

That was the second time
he’d kissed her.

Gaelan stood still as a
rock, not looking at her, or anywhere near her, for that matter. He seemed
engaged in deep, profound study of a lampshade.

Well. She had better pull
it together, since she had an audience, even though he was an audience
carefully trying not to be one.

The thought that Gaelan
might turn into a wolf and eat her flickered through her mind. But Dash
wouldn’t have left him here if there were the least risk. She was sure of it.

Hmm. Safe now in their
rooms, she could put irrational fear aside. Maybe tonight was a chance to
expand her knowledge of the werewolves, and understand Dash a little better. “Is
there somewhere we can safely watch the hunt? Through a window, maybe?”

He looked up at her, blue
eyes innocent. “Now why would you want to do that?”

“Scientific curiosity. I’ve
never seen anything like that before.”

“Really?” He paused and
grinned at her. “What a surprise.”

“Are you laughing at me?”

“I am specifically not
laughing at you, very hard. Sure. We should be able to see something.” The big
man walked over to the main windows in the living area, and indicated the
curtains. “There’s a balcony out here,” he said. “We can go out there, or look
out the window. Either way, you should lower the lights, unless you want
everybody to see you looking.”

“I don’t.” The idea of
hundreds of werewolves staring up at her was unnerving. It had been intimidating
at dinner when they were in their human forms. She imagined it would be worse
with them all naked, and still more so once they were in their predator forms.

She walked around the
room, clicking off lamps, until they stood in complete darkness.

“I’m ready,” she said.

Gaelan opened the curtains
and stepped away from the wide French doors that stood behind them.

Still blinking as her eyes
adjusted, she walked forward. The moon hung above. Not yet ripe, but giving
plenty of light to illuminate the scene in the courtyard below.

Naked people flooded into
the space, milling about, waiting in motion. More continued to arrive all the
time, their bodies washed to monochrome by the moonlight: white, grey, and
black below.

She’d never seen so many
people naked at one time outside of a Spencer Tunick art photograph. The sheer
number of them depersonalized it, made it no big deal. Perhaps if she’d grown
up in Europe she’d have less trouble with the idea. But she still couldn’t
imagine being among such a group.

As one, they stopped
moving and fell silent. Dash had appeared, standing on the porch railing in his
bare feet. He did not make any gestures to the crowd with his arms, as she
would have expected from a human. She could not hear through the window glass if
anyone was speaking.

Irritated, she put her
hand to the door handle, turned the latch, and swung it open. She was grateful
the door opened without a squeak, and she stepped out onto the balcony. Conscious
of the crowd below, she stayed away from the railing, hovering instead by the
wall behind a large potted bush. Night tobacco, from the scent.

A murmur passed through
the crowd. Dash no longer stood on the porch rail. She cast about for him in
the crowd, a task that became easier as a clearing formed around him.

Dash shimmered, taking his
new form. She’d seen him go the other way, but apparently this way was also
easy for him. The shimmer, almost like a mist surrounding his body, hid the
change in form. In a matter of moments, the enormous black wolf stood
silhouetted in the moonlight. He threw back his head and howled.

The howl didn't sound
different to her from the howls she’d heard at dinner, but the effects of it
were another matter. The sound of his voice raised something inside her—a
heat in the blood, an urge to vault over the railing down into the crowd, to be
with the pack. To answer the call, to run and hunt with the wolves, to change
her form.

She shook herself, conscious
of the canine nature of the motion. But it was hopeless. She was not and never
would be anything other than human.

When she turned her
attention back to the packs, a haze of change moved across the crowd. The other
wolves did not change so fast, nor so prettily, as Dash. Body parts thrashed,
fur grew, noses elongated into muzzles. They yelped and whimpered, the change seemingly
painful for many of them.

This was part of his power—the
ability to change in the blink of an eye, and make it look easy. Did it hurt
him at all? Or did he cover it up with machismo? She rather thought not. He
seemed much too pleased with himself for that.

From behind her, she heard
a grunt. Gaelan was kneeling in the moonlight in the living room, still in
human form. His face dripped with sweat, his jaws twisted into an expression of
agony.

Fear skittered across her
skin. She stayed still, unsure what to do, half scared for him, and half scared
of him. What did she know about wolves? Would he lose control?

No. Dash wouldn’t have
left him to guard her if he couldn’t be trusted with her life. She barely knew
Dash, but her safety was important to him.

“Are you all right?”

Gaelan opened his mouth
and gasped for breath, then nodded instead of speaking. He held up a hand,
thumbs up, while he panted and sweated.

“I must say,” she
murmured, “your people have the oddest idea about what constitutes ‘okay’. Will
it pass soon?”

Again he nodded and
slumped to the floor, breathing more easily. “Hard to resist the change,” he
said, his voice gruff. “Even you heard the Call.”

“I did.” What did that
mean? “Hard to miss it.”

“Humans don’t usually
react.” He groaned. “You should go watch. They’ll be heading out soon.”

She turned back to the
balcony. Below, most wolves had completed their transition. A few stragglers
still thrashed about, but most were sleek with fur.

Dash howled once more, and
this time his voice was joined in harmony by hundreds of others. It made her
shiver, this wolfen choir.

At last the final wolves
changed. Silence fell. Beasts prowled around each other, sniffing noses, and
butts. Annie noted that butt-sniffing was not one of the traits usually
romanticized about werewolves, but, after all, they were canids.

A pair rolled about
together on the ground like puppies playing. Another wolf, nearly white,
growled at its neighbor, which yipped in submission and rolled over on its
back.

“That’s Irina,” Gaelan
said from behind her shoulder. “Watch out for her.”

“Why?” She’d thought her a
snob and shrugged it off, but at dinner tonight she’d been the recipient of
Irina’s cold green stare throughout. Maybe there was more than she’d first
seen.

“She’s a bitch, and I
don’t mean a female wolf. I’ll explain later. Listen, now, the Call to Hunt is
coming.”

One more time Dash howled,
turned, and ran out through the pack. They parted before him like the Red Sea,
making way for him, and falling in behind at the same time. Waves of grey,
black, and silver bodies flowed behind him, out of the courtyard, into the
wilderness, until at last the courtyard lay empty below.

Annie felt empty, too, as
though she’d been listening to a conversation in another language. She’d missed
something important, she knew, but she would never understand what.

She moved back into the
living room and sank into a large stuffed leather armchair. It had a red
blanket folded on one of the armrests, and she picked it up and wrapped it
around her shoulders. The softness of the material surprised her. Cashmere. Luxury
in every touch. Just what you’d expect in the quarters of a king.

Gaelan closed the doors
and the curtains, and flicked on a light. “Can I get you a drink?”

She made a face. “As long
as it’s not more of that awful moonshine stuff.”

He laughed. “We save that
for visitors. You’re family. Brandy?”

“Why not? I think I need
it.” She tucked her feet up underneath her. “When will he be home?”

“I wouldn’t wait up. Dawn
at the latest, but usually not quite that late. Big packs mostly hunt deer, but
everybody just ate. They’ll run around a while, chase some scents, and convince
themselves they're a grand bunch of hunters.” He held out a snifter to her, the
deep tawny color of the drink glowing in the lamplight.

She took it from him. “Thank
you. May I ask you something?”

He nodded. “Go ahead.”

“I thought werewolves only
changed at the full moon. In folklore, anyway. And that it was some sort of
contagious disease. Of course, we’re so far beyond the bounds of science here
that I feel ridiculous asking these questions. And like I’m some kind of
failure as a scientist.”

Gaelan sat on the floor,
cross-legged. Incongruous for such a big man to sit like a child. “Well,
folklore has some truth to it, and a lot of crap, if you don’t mind me saying. It’s
not a virus. We’re a different species. The full moon thing is bunk. We give
special religious significance to the moon. She is a goddess to us. Peasants
have trouble with that. Even the term ‘werewolf’ is something some potato
farmer made up.”

Her mind filled with
questions and her hand twitched, wishing for one of her usually ever-present
Moleskine notebooks to write down what she learned.

“Look,” he continued. “You
should get Dash to explain this to you properly. Or Elaine and Marjie. They’re
better with the culture stuff than I am. It’s part of their witch mystique.”

Damn. Just when she was
starting to learn something.

“I have two more
questions.”

Gaelan rolled his eyes. “Sorry.
Dash will talk you to death. I prefer action, myself.”

“You really wanted to go
tonight, didn’t you?”
I’m a burden on him
.
He loves Dash. That’s why he’s here.
“I’m
sorry,” she offered.

“Nah, it’s okay. What were
your questions?”

“Tell me about the
howling. The calls.”

“Three Calls. The Call to Come,
the Call to Change, and the Call to Hunt.”

“Is it a religious
ceremony?”

He shrugged. “More pack
magic and dominance. Dash shows he can call the packs to unity. There’s nobody
else capable of it, so they don’t have a lot of choice in Lycaon.”

Gaelan climbed to his feet,
clearly out of patience.

“Just one more question.” She
smiled at him, winningly, she hoped.

 
“You know, you seem nice and all, and
you’re really cute, but this question thing right here is why I’m never getting
married.” He rolled his eyes. “But go on. I don’t mind.”

Married? Cute? She didn’t
know whether to be put out or pleased. But the need to know won out, as always.
“I didn’t see a lot of children at dinner.”

He sighed. “And that right
there is why everybody keeps telling me I should. Get married, I mean. There
aren’t a lot of pups born these days. I’m not sure how many of us there are
left. I guess you could say we’re endangered. A rare breed.”

CHAPTER
ELEVEN

Annie tried to absorb the
idea that werewolves, potato farmer name or not, were an endangered species, an
idea that struck her at a very basic level as sad. She’d only now discovered
they existed, and it seemed they were on the verge of dying out.

As she pondered, a knock
came at the door.

Gaelan froze in alert
before silently stalking over to the door.

“Open it,” she said. “If
they were coming to do something nefarious, they wouldn’t knock.”

He stared at her,
wordlessly, turned, and put his hand on the doorknob. “What do you want?” he
called.

“I bring a message for the
lunaa
,” came the reply. The voice was
deep and silky. “I’m out here surrounded by guards.”

That word again. She
wished there was a way to stop it, because it was entirely inaccurate.

“Michael.” Gaelan opened
the door. “Come in.”

The visitor was the tall,
dark man who had accompanied the Oracle. As he entered, she could see all four
of the guards outside the door had changed into their wolf forms. From the
Call? Interesting. She supposed she should find it scary having werewolves
outside her door, but they were her guards, after all.

Michael approached, and
she began to stand up. “No need,” he said, spreading his broad hands in front
of him. “I bring you a short message.” He bowed to her, and remained bent in
the middle. His straight, shining black hair dropped from his head to the rug
like a curtain of silk.

She folded and refolded
her hands on her lap. There had to be an Emily Post for werewolves. She would
check the bookshelves tomorrow. If not, she’d have to corner one of Dash’s
aunts.

“What’s the message?” she
said at last. No doubt there was some polite way to respond to his courtly
manners, but she’d choose pragmatism over obsequiousness any day.

He stood, cleared his
throat, and adopted a pose that could only be described as at-ease, formally
informal. “The Oracle sends her best regards. She would like to speak with you
about the child, but she is quite tired this evening. She suggests you visit
her after the break of dawn. Bring Dash with you, and the boy.”

At last, she’d get some
answers. Tension she didn’t know she held drained from her neck and shoulders,
leaving her limp.

Gaelan gave her the
faintest of nods. So good of him to grant her permission. “That sounds fine. Where
shall I find her?”

“In the greenhouses. She
likes to visit the roses when she is here.”

“I will see you both
there, I imagine.”

“You will. Good night,
lunaa
.”

Gaelan escorted him back
to the door, not offering him a drink or other hospitality. As the door closed
behind Michael, Gaelan said, “You should get some rest.”

Fighting the urge to
pepper him with more questions was hard, but her rubbery muscles agreed with
Gaelan. She wished him a good night, and headed to the room where she had left
her things. Jack was curled up in the huge bed, with Daisy beside him. She
slipped out of the gown, wrestling awkwardly with the zipper, climbed into her
pajamas, and laid down beside her family.

Sleep would not come. Her
mind sorted through legends and tried to overlay them with what she knew of
this new species. She wished for a lab and the equipment to analyze their DNA.

When her tossing and
turning made Jack mumble and cry out in his sleep, she rose once again and
prowled out of the bedroom.

She paused before entering
the living room. Gaelan sat by a lamp, reading a book. He didn’t seem the type.
She decided not to interrupt him again. Back down the hall, her feet took her
to Dash’s suite. Of course, he wasn’t in there, but she thought she might worry
less about him, out all night if she saw his quarters. It wasn’t really
snooping. It wasn’t as though she was going to paw through his things.

His bedroom matched the
main style of the ranch.
 
She'd come
to think of it as “cowboy luxury”. The floors were wooden with rugs strewn about.
The walls held photographs rather than paintings, in contrast to the more
formal rooms downstairs. They were huge and seemed to glow from within. One
showed colorful leaves in front of a frothing stream. She reached out to the
picture, only stopping her hand as it approached the surface. Dash didn’t want
her sticky fingerprints on his art, but the photographs were amazing.

The bed was a wooden
four-poster, standing on a platform, dressed with a hand-made quilt and a fur
throw. Odd to see a quilt on a man’s bed, but the colors were masculine, browns
and reds. She walked over to inspect the fur, stepping up onto the platform. The
rug had a head attached.

She stepped back
hurriedly, stumbled and fell off the step, twisting her ankle.

“Ow. Only a man would put
his bed on a pedestal,” she mumbled, rubbing at it. What was that, a
coyote-skin rug? Ugh. She bet he wouldn’t have a wolf skin on his bed.

 
She got her feet under her and headed for
the door, only to nearly trip again. Dash had left his clothes from the journey
in a heap.

The least she could do was
to put them away. She picked up an armful and looked about for a laundry
basket. Nothing obvious. Flicking on the light in the en suite bathroom, she discovered
a wicker basket in one corner. She dropped the shirt and underthings in, and
out of habit checked the pants pockets. She’d washed a tissue far too many
times to be caught out.

Her hand landed on
something square and sharp. She pulled it out. The small white box looked like
a jewelry box, made of cardboard, fairly simple.

The urge to open it
overwhelmed her. Her fingers tightened on the box, and she met her own gaze in
the bathroom mirror.

“Hello, guilty conscience,”
she muttered to herself. “You weren’t going to snoop through his stuff,
remember?”

Her reflection in the
mirror seemed to shrug. “Well, unless I put his clothes back on the floor,
he’ll know I saw it. I already feel guilty for that. He’ll know I was in here,
he’ll know I found it. And he’ll assume I opened it. Given that I already feel
so guilty, I may as well open the damn thing.”

Good rationalization. Perfectly
logical. She flipped the box open, feeling only a minor twinge.

Two things lay within: a
lock of hair, white blonde, tied with an embroidered gold ribbon, and a slip of
paper. She put the box on the bathroom vanity, not touching the hair, and
carefully withdrew the paper between her fingers.

My
darling wolf, I cannot wait for us to be together, once more, and forever
– I

The “I” was written in a large,
feminine, and loopy hand. Below it, the writer had scrawled “XXX”. Kisses. Right.

“Oh, fuck,” Annie said,
perversely annoyed at how very proper her voice sounded as she said it. “Fuck,
fuck, fuck.”

Her fingers fumbled,
trying to reinsert the paper into the little box. Finally she jammed it inside
and snapped the lid shut.

What now? Weird enough
that she’d gone through his stuff, without leaving the box in the bathroom. She
turned, looked around, and considered throwing the box away and making a run
for it.

“Fuck,” she said one more time,
and drew herself up. She was a mother, and a scientist, and this ridiculous
childish panic was below her. The damned box could go on the end of the damned
bed, and he could find it there when he came in.

She set it on the bed, tweaked
the covers beneath it, then oh-so-carefully stepped down off the
bed-pedestal-whatever-you-call-it. Setting her features into the haughtiest
expression she could manage, she marched from the room, and back to her own
bed.

In the dark, she lay
awake, paralyzed with emotion, not moving for fear of waking Jack. Her eyes
hurt, and a couple of unasked-for tears sprung from the outer corners of her
eyes, to trickle back into her ears. She was leaking.

There was absolutely no
reason she should be so upset. She’d turned up a couple of days ago out of the
blue, and she had no interest in anything except a cure for Jack. Dash’s love
life was completely, completely irrelevant to her.

Except it wasn’t. She
cared, more than she should.

He was a fling, a
three-night-stand who’d accidentally fathered a child she loved. She was
convinced he would do the right thing by them, and that was more than she had
hoped or could ask for.

The problem was that he
was being so nice about it, it was hard not to like him. Especially when he was
so darned sexy. And so good in bed. And he’d kissed her twice since she’d
arrived.

What had she expected? Happily
ever after? Insta-love and a wedding ring? That was utter nonsense. She was a
fool. They would get Jack healthy. Dash would probably want some sort of
visitation rights. They would be friendly and civilized.

When had she gotten her
hopes up? The death of them hit her hard. Damn it. She had to move on. Lifting
a hand, she wiped her eyes, and rolled over to look at Jack’s peaceful little
features in the near dark. She stroked his hair back from his forehead, and
stifled a sob.

She would move on. She had
to.

*
         
*
         
*

When Dash paced back into
the suite in the light of false dawn, he had to focus, hard, on putting one paw
in front of the other. He couldn’t remember when he’d been this tired. Not only
the hunted-all-night kind of tired, either, but the kind of tired that came
from having to show his best, to play the good host, to not turn his back on
those that were barely friends, and to play politics throughout the whole
thing.

A pair of legs blocked his
vision, stopping him from getting to his bed. He tilted his muzzle upwards, and
saw Gaelan waiting.

“Hey, brother,” the big
man said quietly. “You have some work to do.”

He drew a deep breath,
pushed the idea of sleep out of his mind, and summoned his human body. After
the change finished he found himself sitting slumped on the floor.

“Gravity is winning,” he
mumbled.

“It does that.” G waved
something under his nose. “Coffee. I’ll toast you a bagel.”

Weakly, Dash reached for
the cup. “No bagels. No deer, but I ate a squirrel. Gross. Who knew? Seemed
like a good idea at the time. Can’t face a bagel.” When the glorious brown mana
was in his hands, he took a sip and grimaced. So strong you could stand a spoon
up in it. Just what he needed.

He levered himself up from
the floor and trailed G to the kitchen.

“You should put on some
pants,” Gaelan said.

“What are you, my mother?”

“I seem to recall your
little lady wanting us to wear clothes. And she doesn’t need any more excuses
this morning.”

Dash’s senses sharpened. “What
do you mean?”

“She went in your room
last night, when she thought I wasn’t paying attention. And then she went to
bed and cried herself to sleep.”

Shit. What had he done now?
“How do you know all that?”

“I have ears, eyes, and a
nose. And you asked me to keep an eye on her.”

Dash closed his own eyes
and leaned on the kitchen counter with both hands. Hopefully the coffee would
kick in soon. He felt like death warmed over. A shower. A shower would help.

“All right. I’ll go take a
shower and put on pants first, but I’ll talk to her.” He sighed and turned to
walk from the room.

“You’d better hurry.”

“Why?”

“Because you, Annie, and
the boy have an appointment with the Oracle this morning.”

He spun back toward
Gaelan. “Did she send word?”

“She did. After dawn, she
said.”

Dash glanced at the
window. Hell, that gave him less time than he needed to get himself together. “I’d
better run.”

Rushing into the bedroom,
the first thing he saw was the white box sitting on the end of the bed.

“Oh, fuck.”

 
He should have dealt with this when it
first arrived. He grabbed it, opened it, read the message. As no doubt Annie
had before him.

Discarding his first
impulse to roar into her bedroom and begin explaining, he instead threw the box
straight into the trash. If the fire had been lit, he would have taken pleasure
in setting fire to Irina’s little gift.

Still, Irina couldn’t have
known. If Annie had never turned up he probably would have done what everyone
expected, what his father had commanded, and married Irina. Pure convenience,
an alliance between packs. He didn’t love her. He barely knew her except from
these Gatherings, rumor, and gossip.

She expected it, clearly,
and sent her gift as an overture. No wonder she’d looked so pissed at dinner
last night.

He stalked into the
bathroom and turned on the shower with force, drenching himself with hot water.
Every muscle, every tendon, every ligament ached. And next he’d have to face
Annie. And the Oracle. He said a few choice words, repeatedly, enjoying the
release of tension it gave him to bite back the short syllables.