“Please stop calling Eva a pup,” Mo muttered. “You know I hate that.”
“My point is that I’m plenty supportive of the women in the pack when they have babies. I just don’t want to be there for the frilly free-for-all,” I said.
Mom, who’d given up on correcting my colorful vocabulary years ago, simply stared at me.
“Mom, please don’t make me pull the alpha card on you.”
“Being the alpha doesn’t mean you get to do whatever you want to do without regard for the feelings of others,” Mom intoned in her “important pronouncement” voice, turning away and walking out of the tree line.
“Kind of does,” I countered, but softly, under my breath.
“I can’t wait until you get pregnant,” Mo said. “And you’re forced to sit through your own shower. We’ll probably have to duct-tape you to your pink-bedecked mother-to-be throne.”
The very idea of being pregnant made me stop in my tracks and burst out laughing.
“Oh, haha, laugh as much as you want, Scrappy,” Mo told me as I braced myself against my knees for support. “You’re planning on marrying a male wolf—”
“I didn’t say ‘plan,’ “ I clarified. “I said, when I get around to mating, I’m going to marry another wolf.”
“Well, you’ll be pregnant before you leave the altar. You know you have superabsorbent eggs. It’s hereditary. Your brother’s ninja swimmers scoffed at modern prophylactics.”
“Damn it, Mo, I did not need that picture in my head.” I scowled at her. She preened a little and loped after my mother.
My brother and his mate were nearly sickening to watch. They were a combination of every nauseating chick flick ever made and the complete catalogue of Barry Manilow’s love songs. But in its own twisted way, their Disney-movie love affair helped me reconcile with said brother after years of not speaking and/or knock-down, drag-out fights. (The knocking and the dragging were mostly done by me.) So I was the tiniest bit fond of her, as fond as I could be of a human outsider.
Mo and I were a study of contrasts. I was small and what I prefer to think of compact and sporty—like one of those Porsche coupes. Mo was one of those “shouldn’t be hot but somehow through the combination of interesting features is” girls. She was willowy and tall, with a curly black halo of hair that had grown out to her shoulders while she was pregnant with Eva. I had stick-straight, aggressively brown hair that I never cut. She tried to be nice to everybody, where I never really bothered with that kind of crap. I charged into situations; she actually thought them through . . . which usually meant I got the first swing in.
Thanks to Mo, my mom was finally able to do all the froufrou girlie bonding shit she wanted to do when I was growing up. You’d think I’d be jealous, but honestly, I was happy for my mom. She’s a smart cookie. She knew that stuff made me miserable and that I would only be suffering through it for her. While Mo actually enjoyed getting her nails done and going shopping for something besides hiking boots.
Mo cleared her throat and pitched her voice into an intentionally cheerful tone. “Speaking of your brother —”
“If the next words out of your mouth have anything to do with sex, I can and will hurt you.”
“Fine,” she said, frowning. “Then the next words out of my mouth will be ‘fire extinguisher.’ “ I scowled at her, self-consciously rubbing at the crown of my head, where she’d actually once beaned me with a fire extinguisher to break up a tiny altercation between Cooper and me. Total overreaction on her part.
“Speaking of my brother,” I prompted her, while sending her a mildly threatening glare as Mom opened the front door of our snug house on the outskirts of the village.
Mo and I stepped through the door as Mom strode into the kitchen to make tea. That was what she did when she was angry . . . or upset . . . or happy. Really, she was an all-occasion tea drinker.
I pulled on a pair of sweats and a T-shirt, wondering how long I would be apologizing for this latest misstep.
“Cooper wanted to know if you could drop by the Glacier in the morning.”
“Why not the house?” I asked, quirking an eyebrow at her.
“Well, there’s someone he wants you to meet, or at least see.”
I groaned at Mo. “Mo, please tell me he isn’t going to try to set me up on some lame blind date.”
“Not quite. There’s a guy who’s been coming around the saloon asking questions about the attacks last year. Cooper thinks he’s some sort of investigator. Nicholas Thatcher, PhDs. As in, he has more than one. He’s not your typical Paranormal State wacko. There’s not a dowsing crystal in sight. He seems to be doing actual scientific research. Since you’re alpha, Cooper wants you to come by and get a look at him, see what you think.”
I quirked my lips at her. “That was low.”
She grinned at me. I was the youngest leader in our pack’s history and eager to prove my mettle. I’d inherited the job under less than ideal circumstances from our previous alpha, creepy-ass—and by no coincidence thoroughly dead—Eli, who took over the job for my self-exiled brother.
It’s a long story.
I took my job as pack leader seriously, and Mo knew the best way to get to me was to appeal to my position. She could be a conniving, sneaky wench, our Mo . . . hence my being the tiniest bit fond of her.
“Why the big discussion? Let’s just get rid of him. Run him back to the lower forty-eight. Or we could go with a slightly less pleasant, but bloody and satisfying, second option.”
“Cooper and I think you should meet him before you jump to any conclusions.”
“Fine, I’ll meet him, and then maybe his tires develop problems while he’s in the saloon, and he ends up careening into a ditch, never to be heard from again.”
“You’re a werewolf, not a hit man.”
“It’ll look like an accident.”
My mother shot me a sharp look, snatching the kettle from the stove with a clatter. “How many family conversations are going to be interrupted by me telling you, no, you can’t kill someone and make it look like an accident? Now, would you two please sit down and drink this tea before it gets cold?”
“Yes, ma’am,” we chorused sheepishly, taking seats at the table.
“Way to go, you got us into trouble,” I grumbled.
“I wasn’t the one planning the cold-blooded murder of a complete stranger,” Mo stage-whispered.
“No, you only plan cold-blooded murders when someone takes the last chocolate chess square without asking.”
“A girl’s got to have her priorities,” Mo insisted.
BY THE TIME I arrived at the Glacier, I’d worked up a pretty good head of steam.
I’d done a little bit of research on Dr. Nicholas J. Thatcher, and my Google results were disturbing. Mo was right. Thatcher wasn’t your typical lonely tech geek who fancied himself a paranormal investigator. He was calling himself a “zoological anthropologist.” He’d already decided that werewolves existed; now he just wanted to know how we came to be, how we lived. This was just the type of guy who would blindly stumble into proof of our existence, sell it to National Geographic, and send my whole family running away from scientists bearing tranq guns and skull saws.
Here’s the thing. I loved being a werewolf. I couldn’t imagine living in just one skin. And I was lucky to be able to turn into such a cool animal. I could have been stuck as a were-skunk or something equally lame. (They do exist. Poor bastards.) Werewolves changed day or night and had the most complete, dependable changes. And we had the stable pack structure, led by an alpha male mated to the female of his choice, who becomes the alpha female. Unless the alpha male handed his office over to, say, his much cooler and wiser younger sister.
And don’t believe all that crap Hollywood tries to peddle about being bitten and cursed by the full moon. You had to be born into our little club. No matter how many times we bit someone, that person would not go furry. They’d probably bleed a lot, though, and maybe get an infection.
Humans had no idea that we existed. Sure, we were the subject of lame movies, and every Halloween, we put up with little kids running around with fur glued to their faces, yelling “Grr!” But humans would freak out if they realized that they saw us every day at the grocery store, in their schools, in the woods. Hell, some wildlife experts could see us in wolf form and would never know they were looking at anything but a large, but otherwise normal, wolf. A picture of my cousin Samson made it into National Geographic the year before with a caption calling him a
