Running with Wolves (Shifter Country Wolves Book 1) (8 page)

“Good morning, Dr. Nigel,” he said.

“Do you have a moment?” the other man asked. “Dr. Manse is back from her sabbatical studying the ruins in Malta and I’d like to introduce you before the school year gets too far underway.”

Even though Elliott stood a head taller than him, Dr. Nigel pulled him along the hallway with the force of a small tornado.

“Did really exciting work on the Bronze Age Collapse. Foremost scholar in her field, also translates late-Republic poetry like a dream. Here we are.”

Dr. Nigel pulled up at a doorway, then peeked around the corner, knocking on the door frame.

“Dr. Manse?” he asked. “Got a moment?”

“Sure, Dr. Nigel,” she said. She had a deep, booming, authoritative voice, though there was something about it that gave Elliott’s wolf pause.

“This is our new hire, Dr. Elliott Whiting,” he said, and pulled Elliott into Dr. Manse’s office with him.

She was fairly good-looking for an older woman, and had a state, serene presence, along with rich brown hair, a single white streak flowing from her temple to her collar.

Elliott’s wolf stood up and started pacing back and forth, and he could feel its urges inside his human form. Howl, alert the pack.

Dr. Manse was a lion. She smiled at Elliott, and Elliott forced himself to smile back.

Lions were fine. Bears and wolves sometimes didn’t get along in the wild, but that had been mostly between fringe elements. Lions and wolves, though, worked perfectly well together in professional settings.

But she knew he was a wolf. He knew that she could smell it on him, just as surely as she smelled like a cat to him.

“Welcome,” she boomed, holding out her hand. Elliott took it and shook, doing his absolute best to keep his cool.

“Dr. Whiting specializes in Middle Roman Empire history, as well as satirical fragments found from that time period. He’s also teaching Latin I this semester.”

Dr. Manse nodded, smiling wide.

“Call me Sarah,” she said. “I’m glad to see they finally hired another one.”

Cold sweat slid down Elliott’s back. She meant
another shifter
.

Dr. Nigel just cocked his head to one side, looking like a confused bird.

“Another what?” he asked.

Elliott could feel his wolf growling, and his eyes went wide. He made desperate eye contact with Dr. Manse.

He doesn’t know
, Elliott tried to think at her.

There was a long pause.

“Another historian,” Sarah finally said. “Always good to have more around.”

Elliott could have kissed her. Platonically.

“Nice to finally meet you,” he managed to say.

“I’ll see you all at the department meeting on Friday,” Dr. Nigel said, and then left the room.

Elliott looked at Sarah.

Sarah looked at Elliott.

“They don’t know,” she said. “I don’t know how you did that. I look at you and I can practically hear you howl.”

Elliott felt a little like the walls were closing in.

Then she laughed.

“Don’t look so worried,” she said. “Your secret’s safe with me. I went to grad school in Texas, where they shoot mountain lions on sight and they’re not much kinder to shifters. I’d never tell.”

“Thanks,” said Elliott. “There’s not exactly a lot of wolves in academia.”

“True,” said Sarah. “Though, if anything, they’d put your face on a diversity pamphlet in two shakes of a tail and brag about having one of the few lupine professors of Classics in the United States.”

She studied Elliott’s face for a minute.

“One thing at a time,” Elliott said. “Let’s see if the students eat me alive first.”

“I think you’ll be right as rain,” she said. “But good luck out there.”

It’s gonna be a day
, Elliott thought.

After his morning, nothing else seemed so bad. Even though he was teaching four classes, a pretty heavy load, he only had two of them on Tuesday. He had no idea why Tuesday was the first day of class, but figured that he wasn’t in a position to ask a lot of questions.

His first class, a survey on translating late-period Roman historians, was a small seminar. Out of ten students, there were three lions, a bear, and six humans. As the students laughed, talked, and argued about the relative merits of each writer and translation, Elliott quietly marveled at how well they all got along. When he’d been in school, the lions had kept to themselves in their own cliques, even in the lion fraternity. The same with the bears, though there were less of them. There had only been a couple of other wolves on campus at all, and Elliott had barely hung out with them, preferring to be a loner with a few human friends, mostly from the rugby team.

They had probably figured it out, but he’d never told them, and then they’d drifted apart after college.

Maybe things are changing
, he thought.
Triad marriage has been legal for, what, a year now?

“Any questions?” he asked the class when he finished going over the syllabus.

A girl raised her hand. Human, long blond hair.

“How frequent are the pop quizzes going to be?” she asked.

Elliott grinned.

“If I told you, they wouldn’t be pop quizzes, would they?” he said.

She made a face. It had probably worked with countless boys, but it did nothing for Elliott.

Welcome to college,
he thought.

“All right,” he said. “We’re starting with Livy’s
Ab Urbe Condita
, so please have the lines in the syllabus translated and ready by Thursday. See you then.”

The students got up and filed out, leaving Elliott an extra ten minutes to get across campus to his next classroom, where he’d be teaching Introduction to Latin Language. It was something he hadn’t taught in years, but Dr. Nigel had told him that all the Classics professors took turns teaching it, and it just
happened
to be his turn.

Elliott was pleased to have the job at all, and didn’t argue with the man.

He got to the other classroom a few minutes early and draped his sport coat over the back of a chair, then wrote PROFESSOR WHITING - INTRO TO LATIN on the board. Nothing worse than students in the wrong place, he thought, as he wandered over to gaze out of the room’s high windows.

A few minutes later, the students started trickling in. Elliott tried not to note which ones were shifters, but it was second nature to him by now. Mostly humans, some lions, a few bears.

No wolves. There were never wolves.

Quit worrying about it
, he thought. There were two more minutes until class, and he walked up to the head of the room, getting the syllabi out of his briefcase.

The bell on the quad tolled at exactly 2 pm, and he picked up his chalk and opened his mouth.

One more student came in as the bell was tolling. She was an older student and had at least fifteen years’ seniority on the other students, easily. She had light brown hair that was just barely starting to go gray at her temples, and wore a blue plaid shirt over a pair of well-broken in jeans with heavy boots on her feet.

When she entered, she stopped short for a second, then continued on to the back row. She sat and took her class materials out, never once taking her eyes from Elliott’s face.

Elliott’s heart nearly sang when he saw her.

Another wolf!
He thought.
Finally.

He smiled at the class, welcomed them, and went over the syllabus.

After class, the students trickled out and Elliott stuffed papers back into his briefcase, preparing to head back to his office, drop them off, and then go home so he could change before the pack meeting. If he showed up in slacks and a sportcoat, they’d probably figure out that he hadn’t been working on a farm all day.

“Professor Whiting?” said a woman’s voice. Elliott knew who it was before he even looked up.

“Yes,” he said.

It was the wolf student, and she stood nervously on the other side of the desk, drumming her fingers on the wooden surface.

“I just wanted to let you know that I’ll be taking a couple of absences toward the end of October,” she said. “Family trip that my husband says I can’t get out of.”

She gave a little shrug.

“Sure,” he said. “I don’t have a problem excusing pre-arranged absences.”

“Thanks,” she said, and nodded her head stiffly.

Then she waited another moment. Elliott wasn’t quite sure what was going on, but stood there, certain that she was about to say something.

“I’m Tamara Sorenson, by the way,” she said, almost like she was holding her breath.

Then she let it out, in a rush.

“It’s so great that you’re teaching this class,” she said in one exhale. “I feel so much better about going back to school now, my husbands thought it was dumb but my kids said to go for it, and look, here I am!”

Elliott smiled and nodded. He couldn’t imagine going back to college in his mid-thirties. It sounded daunting.
 

“Glad to have you in class,” he said.

“See you Thursday,” Tamara said. Then she turned around and left the classroom, practically humming.

I might see you tonight,
Elliott thought.
I’ve got a feeling
.

Chapter Eight

Shane

Shane stood back and cracked his knuckles, staring at the dresser. His knees were bruised from kneeling on them for so long. Plus, he’d managed to kneel on a screw already today, which had left a painful, dark purple dot right in the middle of his kneecap.

Also, there was something wrong with the dresser. The drawers seemed to sag, leaving a gap between the top of the drawer and the top of the hole for the drawer, and Shane had no idea what he’d done wrong, putting it together.

Why did we take all our furniture apart to move it?
he wondered for at least the hundredth time that day.
What the hell were we thinking?

He could feel the rage, borne of frustration, starting to swell inside him. The way Shane visualized it, it was a red cloud, black around the edges, and it moved like smoke.

The key to that visualization was that it also dissipated like smoke. The idea was that Shane breathed deep, and each breath helped to waft the imaginary smoke-anger further away from him. He’d thought it was impossibly stupid the first time he’d tried it, but then it had turned out to actually kind of work.

I wish I’d told my job I’d start today,
he thought.
Working outdoors is exactly the right thing to counter furniture frustration with
.

He opened his eyes. The dresser was still there, and still fucked up, a handful of small plastic parts and screws lying scattered in front of it.

I’m going to have to take the whole thing back apart,
he thought.
Why didn’t we at least keep the instructions?

A car drove up their long driveway, and Shane peeked out the window, then dropped the extra pieces into a dresser drawer and went downstairs to greet his mate.

“And how was school?” Shane said, coming into the living room. Elliott stood in the doorway, looking around.

“Good,” he said. “There’s less boxes.”

“That’s because I spent the day unpacking. Elliott, we’re never moving again,” he said, his voice serious.

Elliott laughed.

“Not a joke,” Shane said. “I don’t care if we find a mate and have twelve kids. We’ll stack ‘em like cordwood, because
I am not moving again
.”

Elliott grinned and leaned forward, kissing his mate on the mouth.

“Noted,” he said.

“Want a drink?” Shane asked. “I think we’ve both earned it.”

He held up a bottle of whiskey and Elliott looked at it, longingly.

“I shouldn’t,” he said. “Pack meeting tonight. I don’t want to say something I shouldn’t. Gotta be at the top of my game.”

“Right,” Shane said. “I’d almost forgotten, actually.”

“Liar,” said Elliott.

“Well, I was hoping that maybe the date had magically changed, and I wouldn’t have to go to it.”

He collapsed his big frame onto the couch, making it scoot back an inch or so on the floor.

“It’s not so bad,” Elliott said.

Shane knew that wasn’t quite how Elliott felt. The very first thing he’d said when he’d gotten the job at Cascadia State had been ‘
We can join the pack!’

His mate had desperately missed the camaraderie of the pack he’d grown up in. The way Elliott described it, the pack was sort of like your family, but different. Even though most of the boys had bullied Elliott for years.

“I guess I’ll skip the whiskey, too,” Shane said. “Probably not a good night to pick a fight with someone who beat you up in high school.”

Elliott’s face was unreadable for a moment, and then he looked across the room and didn’t make eye contact with Shane.

“I’m sure they’ve grown up,” he said. “We all have. It’s been twelve years.”

“Did Greta grow up?”

“Hell yes,” said Elliott. Finally, there was a smile on his handsome face, and he relaxed into the couch, turning his head toward Shane. “I remember her a little from high school, but nothing like
that
.”
 

He shook his head, still smiling.

“I can’t believe I missed that.”

“I bet she looked different,” said Shane.

“She must have, or I’d have been all over her.”

Now it was Shane’s turn to laugh.
 

“I don’t think so,” he said. “Between everything you’ve told me and the little I’ve gotten from her and your parents, I think you would have drowned yourself in a toilet to avoid talking to a cute girl when you were in high school.”

“Unfair,” said Elliott.

Shane just shrugged, and Elliott stretched his legs.

“Any chance you found my shitkickers today?” he asked Shane.

“I did,” Shane said. “In the box labeled
shitkickers
.”

“And you made fun of my labeling,” said Elliott. “See? It helped.”

“Was it your idea to take our dresser apart so it would be easier to move?” Shane asked. “I thought I might just toss the thing on the fire today.”

Elliott made a face, but didn’t respond.

“I gotta go get changed,” he said. “Pretend I know something about horse breeding.”