The Wolf's Mate Book 3: Callie & The Cats (2 page)

Outside in front of her ancient Ford Taurus,
she hugged her best friend, for possibly the last time. “Tell Jason
about the baby, Cades, sooner rather than later. Let him feel
guilty for being such a dick and then forgive him for everything,
for me.”

Sniffling, her best friend turned emerald
green eyes to her that were shining with tears. “I don’t want you
to go, Callie. Please stay.”

“I can’t. I’m rogue now. And you can’t be
yourself with me, because the person you are now isn’t the same as
who you were before you became alpha. You’re trying to hold onto
that person, but it’s time to let her go and embrace who you are
now. And I need to find myself, too. Somewhere out there is a place
for me. I’ll be fine. You’ve taught me a lot about courage and
love, Cades. I couldn’t ask for a better friend than you. I love
you.”

“I love you too, Callie.” She kissed Cadence
on the lips once and hugged her tightly, and managed to hold back
the gut wrenching heartbreak so she didn’t make her feel worse than
she did already. When she was several miles outside of town, she
pulled over to the side of the road and cried, saying goodbye to
the only life she’d ever known.

So where does a 24-year-old rogue werewolf
female with no job and no family to speak of go to start over? No
clue. She only knew for sure that she didn’t want to stop in any
towns with wolf packs, so she asked Peter to help her by scouting
out a map of surrounding states and marking the pack territories.
Wolf packs lived more towards the Midwest and south, so she opted
to go north east, skirting along the border of Ohio and crossing
into West Virginia and then up into Pennsylvania. She had enough
money to last her a few months until she found a job, and planned
to take her time meandering through West Virginia and southern
Pennsylvania, stopping at small hotels and B&Bs along the way,
waiting for a town or an area to catch her eye.

A week into her trip, and nothing had. So
far, the only thing she’d accomplished in her plan to find herself
was to figure out that she really hated driving in January. If
she’d been smarter, she might have waited until the weather turned,
but the truth was that come the January full moon, Jason was going
to want Cades to be alpha for all the females and Callie didn’t
want to be the reason they weren’t happy. Of course if Callie had
been really smart, she would have bought a plane ticket somewhere
warm to start over. Like Hawaii.

She hit the tiny town of King, Pennsylvania
with a quaint clapboard sign announcing “Welcome” at the city
limits, and followed the signs towards a bed and breakfast. It was
dark and sleeting, and she was very thankful she was going to be
stopping for the night. Her knuckles were white on the steering
wheel as her car crested the top of a hill and started over, spying
the stop sign at the bottom of the road that dead-ended into a two
lane road. The car eased over the hill slowly enough, but picked up
speed and she gingerly pressed her booted foot to the brake and it
didn’t slow down.

Panic laced through her and she pressed
harder, then pressed her foot into the floor. Nothing happened
except that the car picked up speed and raced towards the stop
sign. She prayed that there were no cars coming and closed her eyes
when her car lurched past the stop sign and blazed across the two
lane road. When her eyes opened for a split second as the car
crashed past the small barrier hiding whatever lay beyond the road,
she saw nothing but trees and darkness. The car tipped nose
downward, flipped, and crashed hard, and the last thing she
remembered as her forehead cracked against the steering wheel and
the windows shattered around her, was thinking that she should have
stopped earlier and waited out the storm.

Chapter 3

**Ethan**

Normally he didn’t patrol with Eryx, but
they’d both been feeling so out of sorts and twitchy at the station
that night that their father had sent them out together. They
usually worked mornings, but once a week they took an evening shift
to give their uncles a break. He thought approaching Melania
yesterday would have made him feel better but it hadn’t. He had
been under the impression that he was just starting to want a cub,
and he’d known without a doubt that she was going to say no to
anything except straight sex or a no-strings-attached cub, but it
hadn’t eased the ache in his heart.

“Maybe we’re coming into a heat of our own?”
He glanced at Eryx as he drove. His brother was more serious than
him, quiet and brooding, but he took love and relationships as
seriously as he did. Not that it mattered in the long run.

“We’d be the first,” he snorted, not taking
his eyes off the treacherous roads. It had been cloudy but dry all
day, and come nightfall, the sky had decided to pour sleet and with
the temperatures dropping fast, the roads turned icy and dangerous
in a matter of hours.

Just when he was about to say something
snarky to his brother, a car streaked past the stop sign on Perry
Avenue, crashed through the small protective barrier, and dropped
down the embankment with an enormous crash. Eryx drove up to the
scene as Ethan called for the rescue squad. They got out of the
patrol car with flashlights and stood on the edge of the road in
the middle of the broken barrier and stared down the hillside at
the car that had miraculously landed right side up.

“You first,” Eryx said with a shove to his
shoulder and Ethan scanned the flashlight back and forth in front
of him as he picked his way down the slick snow covered hill. He’d
grabbed their medical kit, but had no real illusions that the human
or humans inside the car were alive. As the car came into view, it
was clear it had rolled. The windows were shattered, the light from
his Magnum picking up the broken pieces like diamonds on the
snow.

“Fuck me.” Eryx said quietly. He agreed
completely. The closer they drew to the car, fighting through
several feet of snow at the bottom of the hillside, the more edgy
he felt, as if there were something horribly wrong about the whole
scenario. Not just the potential loss of life, but another thing
entirely.

Sleet whipped inside the car from the broken
windows, and the blood covered head of the poor human was slumped
to the side. He could see the lightly tanned skin of the human’s
neck, striped with blood. Delicate and small, it was clear this was
a woman. Eryx shined his light inside the car and they both reached
their hands to the neck of the woman at the same time. The instant
they touched her skin, a sizzle of warmth shot through him and he
looked at his brother and saw Eryx had the same startled look.

“Eryx?” He whispered, his throat suddenly
dry.

“I feel it, too. Tell me she’s alive, Ethan.
Please.” Eryx made room for Ethan’s EMT expertise, and he pressed
his fingers into the side of her neck for her pulse and found it
surprisingly strong.

“She’s alive.” He assured his brother, and
Eryx let out a breath he’d been holding and clicked the radio on
his collar, barking for the ETA on the rescue. The crackle of the
night operator’s voice over the radio sounded harsh in the quiet
stillness of the valley, “10 minutes, boys.”

Ethan smoothed the hair gently from the side
of her face that was resting on her right shoulder. A gash just
above her hairline over her left ear must have happened when she
hit her head on the door, and leaning inside, he could see a cut on
her forehead that was bruising quickly but had stopped bleeding,
probably from the steering wheel.

“Can we, should we get her out?” Eryx asked,
shifting nervously on his feet.

Ethan tested the door after unlocking it and
it was damaged enough it wouldn’t budge without considerable force.
“If we force the door open, we might hurt her more. It’s best to
wait for the squad.”

“So we do nothing while our mate lays there
bleeding?” Eryx growled and Ethan felt the same raw protectiveness
for this stranger who was immediately imbedded in his heart.

He began to unbutton his coat. “Not nothing,
we can at least keep her warm. Give me your coat.”

They didn’t really need the coats. Cats ran
warmer than humans, so giving her the wool coats they were both
wearing didn’t hurt them any, and they’d both risk frostbite for
their mate anyway.

Mate.
He let the word roll around in
his mind, loving the way it sounded. Mountain lions didn’t have
mates, but the woman in the car was theirs. He was certain of
it.

They kept silent as the squad used the Jaws
of Life to cut the car apart, but they were both worried. He could
feel his brother’s concern because it was a mirror of his own. It
took a half hour to get the door off, and he had to stop both
himself and Eryx from rushing to her side. The locals knew they
were lions, but they didn’t go parading around with fangs and
claws. And he knew if he touched her even once more that he would
never want to let her go, and she was injured enough to need
medical attention. Although he desperately wanted to take care of
her himself, it was in her best interest to let the professionals
handle things.

**Eryx**

“If he touches her again, I’ll rip his head
off,” Eryx growled under his breath as the EMT from the fire
station in the next town looked over their mate on the
stretcher.

“He’s supposed to touch her; he has to make
sure she’s okay. Calm yourself.” Ethan whispered, but Eryx picked
up the same tension in his brother’s voice that he had in his own.
They were helpless, while their fragile human mate was being tended
over by more humans, and not nearly fast enough in his opinion.

“Hey! Get her in the squad already!” He said
loudly, and EMT Edward Batten looked up and narrowed his eyes. “I
don’t tell you how to do your job, Fallon, you don’t tell me
either.”

Ethan put a restraining hand on his shoulder
but it did nothing to ease the fear that was lodged deep in his
belly. They’d both agreed that the odd feelings they’d had over the
last few days were clearly because of this woman. According to her
ID, which he’d confiscated along with her purse from the floor of
the front seat, she was 24-year-old Calliope Marie Hunter from
Allen, Kentucky, wherever the hell that was. What she was doing in
King he didn’t know, and he didn’t care. She was here, she was
theirs, and that was all there was to it. The crew was working by
floodlights and when they’d pulled her out of the car with a neck
brace on, they’d both sucked in a breath at her beautiful face. Her
hair was honey brown, what wasn’t covered in dried blood anyway,
and she had the lushest mouth he’d ever seen, even with her lips
cut and bruised.

Positively aching to hold her and take care
of her, it had taken every ounce of willpower he possessed to let
the EMTs do their jobs. It was a great relief to see the ambulance
take off for the nearest hospital, which was 27 minutes away.

“Boys?” Their father spoke from behind them
and they both turned in unison.

The story spilled from their lips in hushed
voices and he nodded, finally. “That does explain your feelings;
it’s not abnormal for supernaturals to get a sixth sense about
mates. For our kind, the males will sometimes feel that mate
connection to another female, but she’s not a lion, so I’m not sure
why you’d feel that way about her. You know what will happen if you
keep her. You risk her life. Again.”

Without missing a beat, Ethan said what Eryx
was going to say, “We’ll go, then. Wherever she wants.”

“You’d walk from the pride?” Their father
asked in surprise.

“You would have, if our mother wanted you
to.” Eryx said, feeling in the depths of his soul more connected to
that sweet girl in the back of the ambulance than he’d ever felt
connected to anyone outside of his family before.

“True.” Their father sighed. “You have to be
careful not to freak her out. She may not have any idea what it
means to be a mate, and that both of you believe her to be yours
together, may prove an obstacle that will take some time to
overcome. Get to the hospital. I’ll be at the station after this is
all cleaned up.”

Grateful to be released, Ethan popped the
trunk to see if she had any bags and grabbed the two suitcases.
There was a box in the back seat but they couldn't get to it
without ripping the front seat out, so they left it to be gathered
later at the impound lot. Bags in tow, they lurched up the hill as
fast as they could and drove to the hospital.

The nurse at the desk told them she was with
the doctor, and he’d come out to talk to them when he was
finished.

“Well, we talked before about what it would
mean if one of us had a mate and the other didn’t. Clearly this
isn’t a scenario we contemplated before.” Eryx said as they both
paced the length of the empty waiting room. For their kind, the
males sometimes felt a mate connection to a female, but because the
female lions didn't want mates, the connection was one-sided. This
was an entirely new scenario - a mate connection to a human. It
gave him hope.

“It’s better this way, though. We can both
keep her safe until we can leave.” Ethan said as he shifted
anxiously. Eryx sighed and ran his hand through his hair, something
he did when he was particularly worried or upset. His stomach was
in knots and hadn’t stopped feeling like it was stuffed full of
lead. He didn’t dare wonder about her fragile human body and what
could have happened to her with the force of that accident. No
matter what, he’d take care of her for the rest of his life,
gladly.

“We could go to Indiana, to Uncle Rhett’s
ranch. He could always use another pair of hands.” Ethan offered
and Eryx stopped his pacing and looked at him, and then nodded.
They’d need money, and small town deputies didn’t make much.