Weremones (11 page)

“Whatever her name is, she’s got a hold on you like nothin’ else. When that happens you might as well hang it up. It’s fate. You’re caught.”

Adam curled a lip. He might be horny, but he wasn’t tamed. No one caged him.

Especially, not a little bit of a human female. He would decide when and where he had Diana Ridley. And he’d be the one to decide when he was finished with her. He, Adam J.

Weis, was alpha wolf in this county.

He shook his head to clear his thoughts. He thrust a hand through his hair. Grime coated his fingers.

“No. I’m the one who should be apologizing. I’ve been an ass all day.” Adam sighed and shrugged. “A beer sounds good. But no bar.” He made a face. “They smell bad.” That is, the females who tried to pick him up, smelled like stale cigarettes, alcohol and sexual interest. He liked a lighter lemon and vanilla scent, like Diana Ridley’s scent.

Mac laughed. “You’re the only guy I know that complains about the way a bar smells. Besides, I was only yanking your chain about going to Jillie’s. I know you don’t like places like that.”

Mack gave Adam a friendly smack on the shoulder. Adam tensed but let it go, taking a small comfort in the brief contact with someone he considered his. Wolven needed the touch of their pack. His pack doled out contact in such small quantities that each small touch was a hard won treasure.

“We could pick up something to eat and toss the football.”

Adam snorted. “We’d have to find the football first.”

“Yeah. I think those boys of yours eat footballs for dessert.”

Adam went to put away his tools. Mack followed, unbuckling his tool belt. Dust settled in the house. The peaceful silence made more acute by the absence of hammering, sawing, and air compressors humming.

———

“You need to go to her.” Mack’s insight was as eerie as it was accurate.

Adam jerked around. The look in his eyes would have paralyzed a lesser man.

“You need to mind your own business.” He didn’t
want
a mate.

Mack continued to stare over Adam’s shoulder, his eyes unfocused as the otherworldly quality in his presence deepened.

Damn.

Adam forgot his temper as the familiar tingle and scent of his friend’s particular brand of magic washed over him.

Only other beings firmly lodged in the supernatural world would have scented or sensed Mack’s gift. Humans were fragile creatures. And yet, the fates or gods occasionally bestowed on their number a measure of power and made them something more than human. Psychics with magic as real as any other supernaturals.

This made a great reason for those like Mack or Diana to keep their special abilities secret. Some of those supernatural beings would have the ex-special forces soldier on their grocery list in a heartbeat. Some would want the human for other reasons, some of them very dark. Human scientists would want to poke and prod, to find out what made the gifted different. To the wolven, those like Mack were potential pack members, or Diana Ridley, a breedable mate.

Mack knew all of this and still trusted Adam. For his part, Adam intended keep that trust, to protect that rare friendship and the human’s humanity.

Mack returned to the present with a slump. Adam barely caught his limp as a noodle friend.

“What do you see?” he asked.

Mack’s laugh was depreciating and a little wild at the edges. Adam was glad he’d been born wolven. He’d never have, and didn’t want, gifts like the human’s. He’d make Mack wolven to get rid of the visions if it weren’t changing one set of problems for another. Neither did he want to jeopardize the man’s humanity.

“What I always see. Shadows. Spreading darkness. Danger.
Death.
A Hunt.” He rubbed a hand over his face. “Man, I hate when I see that one. He’s a bastard to shake.”

Adam frowned as the most important phrase pricked at his over-sensitized instincts.

“A Hunt? Is someone poaching in my territory?”

Besides all of the weres he’d yet to evict.

Mack’s visions could be so damn vague. Part of him wanted to interrogate his friend about the hunt. Worry over Mack’s health won out. Adam slipped an arm under the bigger man’s shoulder and hauled him out to the truck.

“How about that beer? Leave your truck. I’ll drive.” He settled Mack into the passenger side. The foreman stretched out as much as possible and leaned his head back against the rest. His skin looked gray. He grabbed Adam’s arm before he could move away.

“Give me a little while to sort it all out. If it has anything to do with Barry, maybe I can come up with something useful.”

“Don’t worry about it.” Adam laid his own hand, for comfort, on the restraining hand. He moved it away before making the human uncomfortable with the contact. “You told me once that your visions aren’t always about us, that the Fates mess around in your head sometimes.”

Adam rolled the window half way down to help combat Mack’s after-vision shakes. He shut the door with a slam.

“I’ll get your belt and toss it in the tool box on your truck. Then we’ll grab that beer and order some pizza at the house.” His house, where he could keep an eye on Mack’s recovery.

He paused and unclipped the cell phone from his waist, handing it through the window. Adam had learned from dealing with the boys’ phobias that normalcy,
whatever that was
, was best for combating unnerving situations.

“Go ahead and call the order in. Six pepperoni and a couple of meat-lover specials for us.”

“Do you think that’s enough?”

Mack chuckled when Adam paused to think over the sarcasm. Teenagers were hard to fill up. Wolven teens were more like, well, a pack of starving wolves.

“Yeah, probably. If it’s not, the boys can finish filling up on sandwiches.”

Adam went back inside the house under construction, picking up with half a mind on the task.

He hadn’t blown off the she-wolf poisoning incident as much as he’d portrayed to Mack. He’d looked into the matter.

God bless technology. On the Canis website a pack had access to nearly every Wolven community with a computer. There were chatrooms on topics varying from recipes to the best way to take down an elk. There were links to personalized sites for different packs. He could easily find out who’d been declared rogue. That is, if anyone felt inclined to answer the new guy’s queries.

As a new alpha, Adam was starting over. His reputation as Tarrant Beta was good. Better than good. But no one knew if they wanted to take a chance on the new Pater Canis over Anderson County, Texas.

He’d lucked out. Her name had been Lynn Garner. Lynn had been declared rogue a year ago by her pack alpha in conservative Maine and formally cast out from her pack.

There was no reason given and no one would ask. Wolven were medieval that way.

When an alpha declared a wolf rogue, it was law. Blacklisted. Other alphas respected that. No one wanted someone else’s trash corrupting the pack’s balance. Hell, applying for pack membership was like applying for an exclusive job. You needed references. Preferably, of the well connected variety.

The process of finding a mate went much the same way. Usually Canis decided it was time to pair up before instinct kicked in, demanding a mate. The alpha contacted his contacts. Contracts and treaties were drawn up. Nothing so important as a life-pairing was given away freely. And
voila
! A match was made with the final consent of both packs’ alpha females. Moving and marriage were political. Without the proper references, forget it.

Could Lynn Garner have heard about the inquiries he’d made for new pack applicants? Or the insanity that had him post his interest for an alpha pairing? A brief lived insanity. He’d taken the posting down less than a month after putting it up.

Amanda was dead. Adam desperately needed a power base. Five teenagers did not cut it in the muscle department. An alpha female would have contacts to draw other females. Which would draw unsettled males looking for mates in another pack. All in all it seemed a simple solution to his problem.

Until he ran up against the issue of Garrick’s reputation. No female wanted to be the first anything in the bastard’s old pack. Adam hoped that Lynn hadn’t wanted to join his group. He would’ve hated to have to turn her away.

What was worse was the knowledge that only a human would have killed her in that manner. A wolven would have ripped her to shreds.

Why put the murdered wolven female in
Adam’s
trash pile? That had the feeling of a wolven challenge. A warning?

The sabotaged equipment and electrical box could be a warning that someone wanted more than to hurt Adam financially. Perhaps it was his position, like a stray wolven looking to settle down. No one on the council would say anything if Adam lost his pack, or his life, in a Challenge. His pack was too small, their reputation less than nothing, for anyone to care, except maybe the Tarrant Pack.

Mack’s vision took on a more immediate concern. The psychic had seen a death coming. Well, it wasn’t his death. Not this time. He had Mack to thank for that.

Adam’s lip curled, showing teeth as a growl escaped from deep in his chest.

Bring it on.

He’d be damned if he let some piece of shit rogue out of a B rated werewolf movie invade
his
territory.

Diana let herself into the house with a sigh. She leaned against the door and closed her eyes, feeling alone and weary. Her traitorous thoughts drifted to Adam Weis.

Any woman the focus of attention that primal shouldn’t be lonely. The fantasy alone was enough to get her hormones humming.

No. She did not need a man that powerful trying to control her. An overbearing human Richard had been hard enough to get out from under. Better to be lonely. She wouldn’t survive a creature like Adam.

The sound of low volume arguing roused Diana to action.

Guests. Oh, joy. Karen’s new study group. Or more aptly put, Karen’s excuse to bring Bradley and the other boys back into her immediate circle.

Diana shook her head. No. She’d had a hard day was all. She wasn’t lonely. She needed a break, to get out. She didn’t need a man to make her happy.

She was
happy
, drat it!

She would take her happy self to the kitchen, where she’d make a healthy dinner.

Then, she’d make that call to just plain vanilla human Bob Benedict for a dinner date tomorrow night. She’d have her break and some conversation that didn’t involve pep rallies, college SATs, or werewolves.

Diana Ridley, that was her,
happy, happy, happy
. She squared her shoulders, pasted on a smile, and marched to the kitchen to meet her troops.

“Hi Mom!”

She stopped at the floral outside edge of the dining room carpet. Her smile faltered a second before Karen’s pointed stare and bright
don’t embarrass me in front of my friends
smile helped her to recover. Diana tried to digest the strangeness sitting at her dining table.

Surrounding her buoyant cheerleader daughter were all five fidgety and feral Weis boys and two geeky overachievers. Both poor kids watched the other inhabitants of the dining room warily.

“Hello everyone.”

The Weis bunch was full of ma’ams. Diana had to admit the werewolves were polite.

Karen gestured to the two geeks.

“Mom, this is Marilyn and Doug” “Douglas.” The boy corrected. He checked the time on his watch. The thing might have been smuggled out of a NASA lab.

Marilyn nodded politely and pushed up her glasses.

To his credit, Bradley shifted slightly away from Karen when Diana’s eyebrows rose. A slight flush stained his cheeks at her regard. Mark grinned like a loon and dropped his pencil under the table.

Interesting.
Apparently, teen werewolf hormones were as active as a regular human teenager’s. Probably more. Yes, she was definitely having a talk with the young, brooding, and hunky Bradley Starr.

Her gaze shifted to the other Weis boys. They looked both nervous and earnest for approval, except for Mark who’d disappeared. Marilyn squealed. Under the table came a bump and a small yelp.

“Ahem.” The little egghead, Douglas, gave Diana a pointed look while addressing the rest of the group at the table. “We
are
on a timetable here people.”

Whatever she’d been about to say was lost when a low rumbling came from Bradley’s end of the table. Diana wondered if she was about to have a repeat of her introduction of Werewolf 101.

“Did you just
growl
at me?”

Bradley’s white smile grew wider and hungrier as the boy’s arrogance faded, replaced by white-faced unease.

Catching her daughter’s panicked
help me
look, Diana interrupted, thinking to diffuse the situation. “Anyone up for a snack before dinner?” Instead of snacking on Douglas.

The hearty,
yes,
turned into the shuffling of papers and books. Mark got cuffed on the head and pulled out a few crumpled sheets from the middle of a book.

———

The office phone trilled. Adam set aside the contract bid he was hurrying to finish working on to reach for the portable. He didn’t want to be ate for the dinner date to interview a pack applicant.

“Hello?”

“You the head werewolf?”

The voice on the other end was gravelly and coughed a couple of dry smoker’s coughs.

Adam went still, his hunter’s instincts surfacing. Adam kept his voice light and very polite.

“Excuse me?”

“You heard me.” The man sneered. “You’re either the alpha fuzzy or not. Which is it?”

A red haze filmed over Adam’s eyes. Fury rolled under his skin. No one disrespected the alpha. He snarled into the phone and hung up. He set the phone down before he flung it across the room.

A few minutes later the phone trilled again. He waited five rings before he picked up.

“What do you want?” There was real menace in his voice.

“Hey, don’t get your tail in a knot. I want to trade information.”

It was Adam’s turn to sneer.

“What makes you think I want anything from you, two-foot.”

The man on the other end laughed, a raspy sound that ended in another smoker’s cough.