members were talking about it.
“Well, I don’t know how I feel about my girl spending time with a human,” he said, stepping close enough that he could almost run the tip of his nose down the side of my face. I resisted the urge to shrink away. “You never get that smell out of your clothes.”
“What I do is none of your business, Lee.”
“I’ll never understand why so many of our females are letting humans sniff around them,” he continued, as if I hadn’t even spoken. “I mean, why dilute the blood? Just look at your brother’s little girl. She could have been the pride of the pack. And now what’s that pup good for?” He sniffed dismissively. “She’s not even breeding stock. She’ll live a quiet little life as some human’s wife, and no one will care. What a waste.”
I tried hard to remember that from Lee’s perspective, he wasn’t saying anything offensive. His pack was a little more “conservative” than mine. He was repeating the opinions he’d heard his whole life. And he just wasn’t bright enough to keep them to himself.
But I guess the way I was gritting my teeth gave me away, and Lee said, “Oh, don’t pretend that you and Cooper are back to being attached at the hip. I remember how you talked about him after he ran off. You can’t say you’re any prouder now that he’s a coward and a dead-breeder.”
I scowled at his use of a rarely spoken epithet for a dead-liner’s parent. I bunched my hand into a fist and had it half raised when Clay stuck his head through his front door.
He saw the fist and the pissed-off, uncomfortable look on my face and frowned. “Mags, you all right?”
I lifted an eyebrow. Enter Clark Kent or, at least, Val Kilmer as Batman. My packmates rarely asked me if I was OK, particularly the males. They usually assumed I was fine, as long as I wasn’t griping at them or hitting them in some way. But somehow Clay had managed to ask without making it sound patronizing, as if he was about to swoop in and rescue me. And it was sort of nice. The decency of the gesture made me feel a genuine rush of affection for him. “I’m fine, Clay. Thanks.”
This was a completely inappropriate time to be thinking about nibbling on Clay’s earlobes.
“More competition, Maggie?” Lee asked, giving Clay a long appraising look before dismissing him with a sniff.
I gave Lee a dead-eyed stare. “Clay is a member of our pack.”
Lee shot a scathing glare at Clay. My lips quirked into a twisted smile. Lee was all swagger and smirks until he realized he was on an even playing field.
“He doesn’t have the close family ties that I do.”
“Which some people would consider a good thing,” I muttered.
Clay stepped out of the house and took none-too-subtle steps toward us, positioning himself at my side. Despite the comfort of his presence at my elbow, I wanted to tell him not to bother. Lee was all lazy, no action. In the years I’d known him, he’d never once been in a real fight. He backed off the moment he realized he might have to make an effort to cover his own ass. But he wouldn’t hesitate to, say, attack a lone human wandering around our valley in some misguided attempt to prove himself to me. There was no way I could go check on Nick now. My chest sort of ached at the thought, and I rubbed my hand against my sternum absentmindedly.
“Maggie and I go way back,” Lee told him. “Way back. We’ll be married and mated any day now.”
Clay arched his eyebrows and smiled at me. I shook my head. Clay snickered.
“She tries to deny our love.” Lee trailed a finger along my cheek. “Makes her feel like she’s playing hard to get.”
Clay growled. I barely resisted the urge to clamp my teeth down on Lee’s offending digit, but I put a restraining hand on Clay’s arm. As much as I appreciated it, it would hardly do to have him “sticking up” for me. It would make me look weak, and that was exactly the sort of thing that got around to other packs.
“Ah-ah-ah, Lee, we’ve talked about this,” I said, clucking my tongue. “Anything that touches, I get to keep.”
But as I said, Lee was none too bright, and he seemed to like the idea of staking his claim in front of Clay. He kept rubbing his freaking hands along my cheek. So I wrapped my fingers around his, yanked his hand palm up, and jerked his arm. He yowled and dropped to his knees. I smacked him on the back of the head for good measure.
The arm would heal, probably by tomorrow morning. But it would keep him from phasing until then, keep him from snooping around the valley and stumbling onto unsuspecting humans who had probably made it to their trucks by now.
I walked away, hooking my arm through an astonished Clay’s as we walked into his house. I wanted to visit Billie before we headed home for dinner.
“Good talking to you, Lee,” I called over my shoulder.
His voice was hoarse as he choked out, “You, too, Maggie.”
THE NEXT DAY WAS Saturday, which meant a long run, in human form, for me. Sure, it was easier and more fun to run as a wolf, but I liked the challenge that came with running on two feet. Plus, it was really difficult to keep an iPod clipped to fur.
I had a hard-packed dirt path worn up to the north point of the valley, beside the river, through a dense thicket of pine trees. It was rare that anyone joined me on my Saturday runs. As much as I loved running with my pack, I liked that it was just me, the wind, and the scent of pine. Every girl needs a little time to herself to hash things out in her head, even if my problems were a little more complicated than “Which dress should I wear tonight?” or “I need something waxed.”
Waxing was sort of a moot point for me.
I was reaching the hardest part of the incline up the valley wall, when a strange presence in the woods stopped me in my tracks. I lifted my face to the wind and waited, fighting the instinct to phase, just in case it was Nick again. I scanned the trees. This didn’t smell like Nick. It smelled like . . . nothing. It was like an olfactory blank space. The little hairs on my arms and neck rose as I felt the scrutiny intensify, as if whoever it was was trying to decide what to do. I stood my ground, waiting.
Eventually, the presence faded away, and I shook off the feeling. It was just before noon when I jogged up the steps to find my mother standing at the door with the cordless phone.
“It’s for you, hon,” she said, kissing the top of my sweaty head. “It’s your brother. He doesn’t sound happy. I’m making waffles for when he’s done yelling at you.”
I groaned, stretching my aching legs and pressing the phone to my ear.
“Would you like to explain to me why Nick Thatcher showed up at the Grundy clinic last night with a bite wound on his ass?” my brother demanded without bothering to say hello.
Shit. I’d forgotten about Nick. After the Lee incident, Billie had had another spell, in which she claimed strangers were breaking into her house every night and moving things around. I ended up spending the night with her while Dr. Moder monitored her at the clinic. If nothing else, it helped give Alicia some rest. Dr. Moder had forced me to leave at around four A.M. I crashed and completely blanked out Nick’s mangled butt cheek.
“I was provoked.” Cooper was silent on the other end of the line, so I continued, “He saw me, and he thought I was Mo. He was looking at me like I was Christmas morning, and then he called me by Mo’s name. Mo would have done the same thing.”
Cooper didn’t dignify that with a response. “You’re lucky he’s telling everybody around here that he had a run-in with a stray dog. I don’t know why, but he doesn’t seem to want to make a fuss. If he had been anyone else, he would have called the Weekly World News as soon as his butt cheek got stitched up.”
“Stray dog?” I spat. “Stray dog!”
“Maggie, you were the one who said we should stay away from Nick. And then you not only let him see you in wolf form, but you bit him? What were you thinking? Were you thinking? You could have seriously hurt him.”
“By biting his ass?”
“Mo says there are lots of important nerves and stuff back there. She was laughing too hard to get a lot of information across. I’m serious, Mags. I’m not cleaning up this mess, you got it? You’re always going on about you being the alpha. Great, you’re the alpha. You take care of this.” He slammed the phone down.
I yanked the receiver away from my ear, wincing. My dramatic eye roll was interrupted by a knock at the door. “What now?”
