Nightfall (22 page)
He stank of pack, but not of were. It had taken a few days to sort that, but the most logical guess was that the same were that had attacked and tried to turn Izzy had set up shop around Sweetwater, and had found hangers on.
The worst packs always had them, wolfy Renfields that the pack kept around for work so filthy it couldn’t even be contracted out to strays. If he hadn’t hated the other pack already for what they’d put him through, for what they’d done to Roxanne, and Izzy, and those he’d been sworn to protect, he would have hated them even more for this. He’d never allowed it around him. People either made the cut to join the pack, or they were warned off. Taunting them with possibility was a bullying tactic that made him sick.
This man had potential. It was hard for Julian to quantify what exactly made the difference between a person who would access their inner sense of loyalty and community, and someone who went off the deep end and used their powers to intimidate and destroy, but it was a crucial difference. The kid seemed like the type who would make it. Who could find a higher purpose and serve that goal. Why the other pack was stringing him along, he couldn’t understand, unless there was something more going on. Unless the kid was somehow more valuable to them as a human. Which, in truth, would make it even more valuable, in the long term, to give him the gift.
He scented Matthew long before the man stepped out of the shadows. Julian made a point of staring blandly at the patch of shadow that resolved into Roxy’s friend, keeping his features calm and neutral.
“Fancy meeting you here,” Matthew said, his voice dry and cold.
Julian kept the smile off his lips, but it was a near thing. “I live in this town, just like you do.”
“And you regularly hold up walls outside of bars?”
“When it suits my purposes.”
Matt snickered. Julian got the sense that the other man was trying to be threatening. It wasn’t working. “And it suits your purposes now?” His tone was mocking. Julian merely met Matt’s gaze, waiting. After a moment, Matt’s stance hardened, his face losing the small amount of civility it had carried. “I saw you trailing Dylan Fontaine across town. That boy has enough trouble in his life without the likes of you getting interested in him.”
Julian found himself wondering just how much Roxy had told Matt about him, and why he was still in Sweetwater. He hadn’t seen her since their last encounter, three weeks ago. Her scent hung around Matt, but it was a faint perfume of casual contact, not the overwhelming mix it would have been if Matt had been bringing her to his bed on a regular basis. That was something to make him smile, at least.
He would have left Sweetwater already, if not for her, and if not for the sense that he owed Carmen Nunez some protection for her granddaughter. It would be easier to rebuild the pack in a proper city, where he could more easily seek out those whom the change would benefit, either because of their status in society now, or because of the health and longevity that the gift could offer them. But he had no guarantee that the other pack would follow him if he did, and he wouldn’t leave Roxy and Izzy to be destroyed by his own negligence.
The fact that the pack had not moved on him in the past three weeks was distressing. The fact that the moon was just a few days from full, and he was essentially nothing but a stray Alpha, even more so.
He didn’t have the time or patience to put up with Matthew Robbins playing the role of White Knight. “Have you seen Roxy lately?” he asked, spreading his smile wide and toothy.
He’d hoped to push Matt back a step, but instead, the other man smirked. “Yes. When was the last time you saw her? Because the way she tells it, she goes out of her way to avoid you, these days.”
Well. That hadn’t played the way he meant it to at all. “My business with Dylan Fontaine is none of yours.”
“If it happens in my town, it’s my business,” Matt said, taking a step closer. Julian felt the wolf turn in his heart, snarling at the man in front of him, and at the action that Matt may or may not have intended to be threatening. He pressed the wolf back down, keeping himself, his man-self, at the forefront of his control. But he let his grin shift just a little, getting a little meaner, a little less human, and a little more vicious.
“Don’t step between me and my people, Robbins,” Julian said, keeping his voice low and quiet. He’d learned early on that screaming was never as intimidating as calm control. “You won’t like what happens to you if you do.”
It happened fast, and Julian hated himself for not expecting it, but at the same time, he’d never thought he’d see a human so fast. He had no idea how Matt had hidden the stench of silver from him, but it was only his supernatural reflexes that kept the swipe of the silver knife from burying itself in his ribs. His body dropped into a guard pose without his conscious mind deciding to move that way, and he pressed down harder on the wolf. Yes, a shift right now would guarantee that he would win any fight that happened, but blurring into his wolf-self in the middle of a busy downtown—well, busy for a medium sized town in East Texas—was likely to cause a panic, and he didn’t need that. Not unless it was necessary.
Robbins only had the one attack in him, it seemed; the knife hung loosely by his side now, not in a position to attack again. Strange. If the man knew what Julian was, knew enough to have coated the edge of his blade with silver, why hadn’t he found a better way to attack.
“I don’t want to do this,” Robbins said quietly. Distantly, Julian felt his entire self shifting into a defensive mode, prepping for another attack. He watched himself make Robbins into less of a human, disconnecting the man from his relationship with Roxy, from his importance to the town. He was a target, a target that needed to be stopped if it threatened his own life.
Julian didn’t respond to the statement Robbins had made. He watched the other man and waited to see how the scene would play out; he didn’t care much either way at this point if Robbins walked or Robbins died. The coldness that descended was absolute.
“I want you to leave this town, and I want you to stay away from Roxanne. And Dylan. Any everyone else who lives in Sweetwater. I want you to go somewhere else and be someone else’s problem.” There was an odd note to Robbins’ voice, a pleading sort of tone. Julian tried to keep it from distracting him. Analyze later, defend now.
“If I leave,” Julian said, keeping his tone measured and calm, his hands outspread in what would look like a peaceful gesture to the other man, although it really just made it easier to unleash his claws if it were necessary, “I will be leaving this town in danger. I won’t do that. Not just because of Roxy, or Dylan, but because there are innocent people here, innocent people who will be hurt if I run.”
“We can take care of ourselves,” Robbins snapped. “We always have before.”
“One silver knife doesn’t make you a hunter,” Julian said. “And you couldn’t take down an entire pack on your own. The whole damn town couldn’t do it, not if they came in force. I understand your Texan pride—”
“You don’t understand anything,” Robbins said, and then spat, a liberal wad of fluid flying into Julian’s face.
Which was enough humiliation for both man and wolf. He accessed the speed and the grace of the wolf with less than a thought and blurred across the alley way. He distantly heard the clatter as the silver knife fell to the ground. Robbins had a moment for his eyes to widen with surprise, and then the back of his head was slammed against the opposite building. Julian caught Robbins’ chin with his forearm, lifting the other man’s head back and up. He didn’t cut off Robbins’ airflow entirely, but he made the man work for every breath. He reached down with his free hand, lifting the hem of Robbins’ flannel shirt, and while the man watched with panicked eyes, he wiped the spittle off his face.
They were of a height, he noticed, and built in a similar way. Perhaps that was some of what Roxy saw in this man. Perhaps that was some of what she saw in Julian. It would be lovely to ask her, but he wasn’t going to hold his breath on that front. Not after the way she’d looked at him when she left the last time.
“Listen to me. You are not of my world, and I am not of yours. We are not the same, you and me, and you don’t understand the things I fight. Don’t fool yourself and think that you do. I let Roxanne walk away from me because it was the safest thing for her, and because it was what she wanted. Not because of you, and not because of your damn town. I’m here because I put you all in this damn mess, and I don’t walk out on problems I’ve created. Are we clear?”
The fear in Robbins’ eyes sent the wolf into utter madness. There was a long moment of balance, where Julian struggled with the animal inside of him, reminding himself over and over that there were consequences, here in the world of man, for tearing out the throat of something that had disrespected you. The ends of his fingers itched, his gums ached, and his shoulders and hips struggled to maintain their upright position.
The man won the fight, as the man had for many years, but the fight never ended without cost. Forcing the wolf back into its cage when it was struggling this hard for freedom felt like swallowing a handful of razor blades and waiting for them to pass. He fell back from Robbins, struggling to catch his breath.
The fool didn’t run. He watched Julian for a long moment, his gaze inscrutable. “She wasn’t kidding, was she? You’re not crazy. It’s actually true?”
Julian’s hands wound around his stomach, trying to resist the urge to vomit. That would only make it worse. “Get away from me. Just stay away.” But he did step on the knife blade, pinning it flat against the ground, to keep him from taking it with him. It was a horrendously weak exit, and in the wild it would be punished. Here, the human stepped away from him, brow furrowed and uncertain. After a few steps, staring at Julian, Robbins turned and walked away at that pace that made it perfectly clear that the walker wanted, very much, to be a runner.
Julian watched him go, and both the man and the wolf laughed. There was one last push from the wolf—predators loved chasing prey that ran—but as the pungent odor of fear in the air was replaced by the more stagnant smells of rotting trash and stale urine, the wolf slowly subsided. The man stood up straight again, tired and sore, but no worse for wear. He picked up the silver knife and held it carefully by the hilt. A bit of cardboard that didn’t reek too much came out of the trash, and served to wrap the blade; once he was satisfied that it would stay in place, he wrapped the bundle in a plastic shopping bag that had been blowing on the slight breeze, and tucked it away in the back of his pants. It made his back itch, but it wasn’t a sensation he couldn’t survive.
Silver was an interesting thing. Roxanne had constantly worn a silver necklace, and it hadn’t done him any harm, repelled him like a Hollywood monster, or glowed with an eerie light when he came close. But if Robbins had stabbed him with the blade, the wound would have been vicious, much worse than he would have managed with a regular steel blade. As he’d wrapped it, he’d looked it over; it seemed like the man had somehow coated the blade itself in silver, which was concerning in and of itself. It spoke to a level of planning that told him yes, Roxy had told Robbins plenty about who and what Julian was, and that yes, he and his kind had been portrayed as some kind of threat.
Which wasn’t really surprising. He’d hardly managed to give Roxy the best impression of his kind, between snarling at her in his wolf-shape in his basement, and then killing someone in front of her and facing her with his face still smeared with blood. No wonder she’d been able to handle it. If he’d only handled things differently—
But there was no point in walking down that road, even in his mind. He’d had his chance, and he’d ruined it. There was nothing to do now but move on. It was foolish that he was even obsessing about her as he was. She was a human woman. She couldn’t help him repopulate the pack, not easily. Her fierce independence seemed to be the sort that would take well to the gift, but he’d never believed in people being turned without their willing choice. It made the change immensely harder—as Izzy had seen—and those were more often than not the wolves that turned against the pack, that couldn’t cope with the intricacies of a life spent half in the wild, and half in the world.
Then Dylan walked out of the bar, a solid forty-five minutes ahead of schedule, and Julian pushed thoughts of the woman entirely out of his mind. He had something more important to do now. He let the kid get a decent distance ahead, then fell into step behind him, matching his footfalls to Dylan’s, and blending into the dark night whenever he could.