Maybe it would have been easier if Cormac had just shot me.
I called T.J. first. My stomach was in knots. I thought I was going to be sick, waiting for him to pick up the phone. I hadn’t talked to him since the night outside Obsidian.
He answered. My gut clenched. But it was still good to hear his voice.
“It’s me. I need to talk to you. And Carl and Meg.”
For a long time, he didn’t say anything. I listened hard—was he beating his head against the wall? Growling?
Then he said, “I’ll pick you up.”
I rode behind him on his motorcycle, holding on just enough to keep from falling off. We hadn’t spoken yet. I’d waited on the curb for him, shoulders bunched up and slouching. He’d pulled up, and I didn’t meet his gaze. I’d climbed on the bike, cowering behind him. He’d turned around and ruffled my hair, a quick pass of his hand over my scalp. I’m not sure what this said. I was sorry that he was angry at me, but I wasn’t sorry for anything I’d said or done. I didn’t want to fight him, and I didn’t want to be submissive. That would be admitting he was right. So I wallowed in doubt. He’d touched me, which meant—which meant that maybe things weren’t so bad.
We pulled up in front of Meg and Carl’s house. He got off. I stayed on. I didn’t want to do this.
T.J. crossed his arms. “This was your idea, remember?”
“He’s gonna kill me.”
“Come on.” He grabbed me behind the neck and pulled. I stumbled off the bike and let him guide me up the driveway, like I was some kind of truant.
He opened the front door and maneuvered me inside.
Carl and Meg were in the kitchen, parked at the breakfast bar like they’d been waiting for us. T.J. had probably called ahead. Meg had been leaning with her elbows on the countertop; Carl had his back to the counter. Both of them straightened. With them in front of me and T.J. behind me, I suddenly felt like I was at a tribunal. I shrugged away from T.J.’s hand. The least I could do was stand on my own feet.
Carl stood before me with his arms crossed, glaring down at me. “You haven’t quit the show. What do you have to say for yourself?”
I thought I’d finished with that when I moved out of my parents’ house. I shrugged. “I got a raise.”
He cocked his hand back to strike, and I ducked. We both froze midmotion. He stood with his fist in the air, and I bowed my back, my knees ready to give, cowering. Then he relaxed, and I did the same, straightening slowly, waiting for him to change his mind and hit me anyway.
This was so fucked up. But all Wolf wanted to do was put her tail between her legs and whine until he told us he loved us again.
His hands opened and closed into fists at his side. “Can’t you say anything without trying to get a rise out of people?”
“No.”
Carl moved away to stalk up and down the length of the kitchen. Meg, arms crossed, glared at me. I cringed and tried to look contrite, but she wasn’t having it.
Nothing to do but plow ahead, now that I was here. What was it some weird philosophy professor had said to me once? What’s the worst thing that can happen? You’ll die. And we don’t know that’s bad . . .
Ah, so that was why I’d changed my major to English.
I wasn’t here to talk about me. “The police came to talk to me—”
“What?” T.J. said, gripping my shoulder. Carl and Meg both moved toward me.
I ducked and turned, getting away from T.J.’s grasp and fleeing to the living room, putting the sofa between them and me.
“Just listen. You have to listen to me, dammit!” The sofa wasn’t discouraging them. T.J. was coming around it from one side, Meg from the other. Carl looked like he was planning on going straight over. I backed against the wall, wondering if I could jump over him.
I had to talk fast. “A detective called me. They’ve got a serial killer—mauling deaths. At first they thought it was an animal, a feral dog or something. But now they think it’s one of us. They asked me for help. They—they took me to a crime scene today.” My breathing came fast. Talking about it, I remembered the scene, what it looked like, the way it smelled. The memory was doing something to me, waking that other part of me. My skin was hot; I rubbed my face. “I saw the body. I smelled it . . .
I know . . . they’re right. It’s a werewolf, but I didn’t recognize him. There’s—it’s a rogue, in our . . . in your territory.”
Pressed against the wall, I slid to the floor, holding my face in my hands. I couldn’t talk anymore. I remembered the smell, and it was making me sick. Wolf remembered, and it woke her up. Made her hungry. I held on to the feeling of my limbs, my human limbs and the shape of my body.
Then T.J. was kneeling beside me, putting his arms around me, lending me his strength. “Keep it together,” he whispered into my hair. “That’s a girl.”
I hugged him as hard as I could. I settled down somehow, until I was calm enough to breathe normally, and I didn’t feel like I was going to burst my skin anymore.
T.J. let me pull away from him. I huddled miserably on the floor. Carl looked like he was going to march over to me. Meg held him back, touching his arm. She stared at me, like she’d never seen me before.
“Why did you agree to talk to them?” she said.
“Don’t you think it would have looked a little suspicious if I’d told them to fuck off?”
“What could they have done about it if you had?”
“I couldn’t do that. I’ve got a reputation—”
“That’s your problem.”
I ran a hand over my hair, which was coming out of its braid and needed washing. This wasn’t getting anywhere. How did I word this without seeming like I was questioning them, or ordering them around? “The pack should take care of this, shouldn’t it?”
Carl glared. “If there was a rogue in town, don’t you think I’d know about it?”
“I don’t know. Maybe he’s got a good hiding place. I mean, if you knew about him, he wouldn’t be a rogue.”
Meg blocked my exit around that end of the sofa. “You told them it was a werewolf that did this? You told them that was what you smelled?”
“Yeah.”
Her shoulders were bunched, like hackles rising. She wasn’t being the good cop anymore. “You should have lied. You should have told them you didn’t know what it was.”
Easy for her to say. I didn’t lie well. Especially to cops. “They have tests for that kind of thing now. They would have found out eventually. I’m lucky they’re not assuming that I did it.”
“You’re an easy target,” Carl said, turning on me. “How many times do I have to tell you to quit the show?”
“Two hundred markets,” I countered, raising an eyebrow. I could almost see him working out the math of how much money that was.
T.J. said to Carl, “If there’s a rogue in town killing people, the cops can’t handle it. We have to. If we don’t want them paying more attention to us, we have to make the problem go away.”
That was exactly what I’d been trying to say. I owed him a steak dinner.
I said, “This detective knows just enough to identify the problem, but not enough to do anything about it. T.J.’s right.”
Carl paced, back and forth, back and forth, like he was caged. His jaw was tight. “Do you know anything else about this rogue besides how he smells?”
“No,” I said.
T.J. said, “We could go looking. Find out where these deaths have happened. If he’s marking a territory, we’ll find him. I could do it on my own if you want—”
Meg said, “You’re wrong. There’s no rogue.”
Of course she’d side with Carl. She kept glaring at me, and I didn’t like the look in her eyes: cold, predatory.
“We have to do something,” I said, ignoring Meg at my peril.
“Nobody’s going to do anything until I say so,” Carl said.
“When is that going to be?” T.J. crouched like he was getting ready to pounce.
Carl glared. “When I say so.”
“And in the meantime he kills again.”
Glaring down at him, Carl stepped close to T.J. His fists tightened. “Are you challenging me?”
For a minute I thought it was going to happen, right then and there. It wouldn’t take much for an argument between an alpha male and his second to degenerate into an all-out fight. That was part of why T.J. sided with Carl most of the time. The least little dissension could be misinterpreted.
When T.J. didn’t back down, but met Carl’s gaze without flinching, I thought they would fight. Then T.J. slumped, his back bowing and his head drooping.
“No,” he said.
Carl tipped his chin up with the victory. “Then it’s settled. We wait. This is my pack, my territory. I’ll take care of it.” He grabbed my shirt and hauled me to my feet. “And you will not talk to the police again.”
“Yeah, just wait until they come knocking on your door.” I bit my lip. That came out more sarcastic than I’d intended.
Carl pursed his lips. “I think we need to have a little talk.”
Oh, great. This was when he would put me in my place. His hand shifted to grip the back of my neck and he pushed me ahead of him, toward the hallway that led to the bedrooms.
Meg stepped in front of him, stopping him. “Let me talk to her.”
Carl stared at her like she’d turned green. Meg had never had one of these “little talks” with me. She’d always left it to Carl. Even knowing that our “talks” often ended up with him screwing me, she left him to it. It was part of being with the pack, of being wolf. Maybe she’d finally had enough.
She glared at me like she wanted to bite a piece out of me. I concentrated on cowering. I didn’t want to be an alpha; I didn’t want to challenge anybody. I could feel the Wolf shrinking inside me, ready to whine. I never thought I’d prefer getting dressed down by Carl. I leaned back so I was touching his body, sheltered by him.
Then Carl and Meg were the ones trading glares. A good old-fashioned staring contest. What would happen if they got into a knock-down, drag-out fight? That wasn’t supposed to happen.
“Not today,” Carl said and marched past her, pulling me along with him. I scrambled to keep up, dizzy with fear and the irony that at the moment I actually felt safer with him.
When we got to the bedroom at the end of the hall, he pulled me inside and closed the door. He trapped me, hands spread on the wall on either side of my head, his usual stance. He glared at me for what seemed like a long time. My heart raced; I kept my gaze lowered, waiting.
Then he went for my neck.
I might have thought he’d turned vampire, if I didn’t know better. He nuzzled my hairline, and his mouth opened over my skin, kissing me. I tipped my head back, giving him access. His tongue licked, he caught my earlobe in his teeth, released a hot breath against my cheek. He used the full length of his body to press me to the wall. I could feel him, aroused like he’d been let out of a monastery and into cheerleading practice.
Despite my confusion, I melted in his arms. I clung to him, not wanting to lose contact with a single inch of him. There was more than one way to win submission from an underling.
“You’re not angry?” I murmured.
“I’m reminding you of your place.”
Carl’s toy. I’d almost forgotten. I moaned a little, both turned on and frustrated that he was completely avoiding the issue.
His hands kneaded my back, working through my shirt, then slipping under my shirt and digging into bare skin. I arched my back, leaning into him.
“I can’t go back to what I was.” I gripped his hair in my fists, holding his head to me while he traced my throat with his tongue.
“I know,” he said, his voice low. “You’ve gotten strong. You could move up.”
Inside, I froze. Carl didn’t notice. His hands were working their way to my front, to my breasts. I gasped a breath and tried to think straight. “Move up?”
“You could challenge Meg. You could take her place.”
Then it was like he was necking and groping someone else. I was still clinging to him, but I gazed over his shoulder and my mind was detached. Suddenly professional.
“You’re not getting along with Meg, are you?”
He went still. His hands stopped groping in favor of simple holding, and he pressed his face to my shoulder. He didn’t say anything. He just held me.
I smiled a little. It was such a revelation, the idea that Carl was having relationship problems. Idly, I scratched his hair until he let me go.
He moved to the nightstand, opened a drawer, and took out a business-sized envelope. He handed it to me, only then raising his gaze to mine.
Inside, I found photos. Blurry photos taken on a full moon night, people and wolves running together. One of them was me. These were copies of the photos Rick had given me. The ones Arturo had used to hire Cormac.
“You?” My voice was tight with hurt. Whoever had given these photos to Arturo had probably also put up funds to pay Cormac. Whoever had done that wanted me dead, but wanted to keep their hands, and maybe their teeth and claws, spotless. If it had been Carl, it had probably been the money I’d been giving him that had gone to pay Cormac. That was too terrible to think about.
“Meg,” he said. He stood close to me, speaking low, but sex was gone from his manner. “She said she gave them to Arturo because she was jealous of you.”
“Jealous, of me?” She was Meg. She was beautiful and strong.
“Of the success of the show. The attention. The attention from me.” He looked away at that, probably the most human gesture I’d ever seen Carl make. Like he was admitting that he’d been using pack dynamics as an excuse to sleep around. Like for once he realized how odd it was, this in-between world we inhabited.
“You know what this means?” I said. “She sold me down the river. She practically gave me to Arturo on a silver platter—”
And it suddenly occurred to me that maybe Carl told me it was Meg so that I’d get angry enough at her to challenge her. That he was manipulating both of us, so he could get her out of the way without getting his own paws dirty. This was assuming I’d actually win if I challenged her. I didn’t want to think about that.
But Carl’s brown eyes were so hurt, so lost, and I didn’t think he could fake that. He’d never been able to disguise his anger or lust. He wasn’t good at masking his feelings, or faking them. He was a brute-force kind of guy.
“What did you do when you found out?”
“We had a talk.” That was a euphemism. So, had they had the usual kind of ass-kicking talk, or had they had the kind of talk that Carl and I had been having a minute ago?
“What did she say?”
“She said she was sorry. She’ll back off.”
“That’s it? Just like that, she’ll back off?” I didn’t know who to be angry at. Was she really sorry or was Carl making excuses for her? Why didn’t he do anything to her for this? “Maybe I should have a talk with her.”
“Maybe you should,” Carl said. Slowly, he leaned in, his lips brushing my cheek, moving to my mouth.
I turned my face away. I shoved the photos back into the envelope and gave it to him, then left the room before he could throw a tantrum.
For a heartening moment, I thought I was going to reach the front door and escape without anyone stopping me. I touched the doorknob.
Meg put her hand on the door, in front of my face.
I didn’t have to look. I felt her glare, the heat radiating off her body. Her breath feathered against my cheek. She knew I knew. Things would never be the same with us.
If I didn’t react, she could stand there forever. She wanted me to react. She wanted to scare me. Where was T.J.? I didn’t dare turn to look to see if he was still in the living room.
For a split second I thought that maybe T.J. was in on all this as well, though on which side I couldn’t say. He wouldn’t stand up for me in a fight. Suddenly, t
he whole world was against me.
Meg spoke, her voice low. “If he ever has to choose between me and you, don’t think for a minute that he’ll pick you.” She meant Carl. She could have him.
“He won’t fight for you,” she continued. She grimaced, an expression of distaste. “He’s spineless.”
She may have been right. He was still in the bedroom, and if I screamed, I wasn’t sure he’d come to help me.
Whispering, I said, “I don’t want to fight you, Meg. I don’t want anything.”
“Nothing? Nothing at all?”
That wasn’t true. Gritting my teeth, I braced for her to hit me. “I want to keep the show.”
Her hand moved. I flinched, gasping. But she only touched my chin, then brushed her finger along my jaw before closing her fist and drawing away.
She opened the door for me and let me go.
T.J. was waiting at his bike, fiddling with some arcane bit of engineering.
“Can we go now?” I said, hugging myself.
“You okay? You’re shaking.” He wiped his hands on his jeans and mounted the bike. I crawled up behind him.
“Did you know Carl and Meg are fighting?”
“They’re always fighting.”
Not like this. I choked on the words. Closing my eyes, I hugged him tight.
I never watched the local TV news, so I didn’t have to work too hard to avoid watching it tonight, to see if Angela Bryant had filmed my better side or not.
But at 6:15 P.M. exactly, Ozzie called.
“Kitty. Did you know you’re on the news?”
Morbidly, I sort of hoped there’d be a plane crash or something that would bump a prostitute’s murder off the news entirely.
“I had a feeling,” I said tiredly.
“What’s up with that?”