Play of Passion

before he was prepared.

So he was waiting for the Rat alpha at Fisherman’s Wharf as the sun rose high enough to chase off the whispers of fog that still licked over the bay. Teijan turned up as slick and neatly attired as if he’d stepped out of some sophisticated men’s magazine.

“Shucks,” Andrew said, leaning his arms on the metal fence that lined this section of the wharf, “you didn’t have to get all dolled up on my behalf.”

“You should be so lucky.” Teijan aligned his cuffs with the sleeves of his jacket. “I’m going for a job interview.”

Andrew narrowed his eyes. “Since when does the Rat alpha need to find a job?” Teijan operated what was effectively the biggest information network in the city, and probably the state. And there was serious money in information—especially since SnowDancer and DarkRiver had both decided to share the profits from any deals that came about because of intel the Rats passed on.

Brutal fact was, they could’ve demanded that data as a condition of allowing the weaker changeling group to remain in the city, but Lucas and Hawke were highly intelligent men. They understood that the Rats would be far more invested in the protection of the city if they not only had the right to call it home but were treated as an integral part of its functioning. Which they were most assuredly becoming.

Now Teijan shot him a sharp little smile, full of teeth. “Funny how easy it is to get into some buildings if you carry a résumé and look ‘respectable.’”

“Do I want to know?”

“No. Nothing to tell yet.” The dark-haired male looked out over the glittering sun-struck water of the bay. “My animal knows it can swim,” he murmured, “but just the same, neither it nor the human part of me is too fond of the water.”

“Then why San Francisco?”

A shrug. “We’d been scraping by, trying to find a home for a long time, and the old subway tunnels were unclaimed.” A whisper of wind ruffled his GQ-perfect hair. “Good thing it was the cats who found us out. You wolves would’ve probably decided we tasted good spit-roasted over an open fire.”

“No self-respecting wolf would eat a rodent—though we might’ve been able to use your teeth as decorations,” Andrew said with a straight face.

Teijan hissed out a very unratlike snarl. “Why the hell do I bother to talk to you?”

“Hawke thinks I give you cheese.” He pulled a small, foil-wrapped wedge out of his pocket. “Here you go.”

“Fuck you.” But the Rat alpha was laughing. “Why’d you want to meet?”

Putting both hands in the pockets of his jacket, Andrew let the salt-laced wind sweep across his face. “Wanted to see if you had any news to share.” DarkRiver always copied SnowDancer in on any reports as per their alliance, but Teijan quite often had little tidbits in progress that he didn’t put into the reports until he’d confirmed everything.

“Something weird going on with the Psy,” the Rat alpha now said. “Can’t quite put my finger on it, but if I didn’t know better, I’d say they were jumpy.”

Since Psy didn’t feel, that kind of apprehension was more than curious. “Anything to back up that feeling?” he asked, knowing Teijan had finely developed antennae for trouble after keeping his people safe and protected for years in spite of their lack of numbers and physical strength.

Teijan made a clicking noise with his tongue. “I’ve heard whispers of two or three Psy dead in suspicious circumstances, but no confirmations yet. Could just be a bad rehabilitation or two.”

Andrew felt his skin creep at the thought of the Psy punishment of choice—a total psychic brainwipe that destroyed the individual and left a drooling shell behind. “Maybe they suicided.” At Teijan’s glance, he shrugged. “If that was me . . .”

“Yeah.” Teijan blew out a breath. “But word is there’s nobody home after rehab, and there would have to be for them to understand what they’d become.” He glanced at his watch. “I better get going. I’ll send the intel through the grapevine if I hear anything else.”

As Andrew watched the other man leave, he wondered what face this world would’ve worn if the Psy Council had been successful in seizing total power as it had been trying to do for decades.

The vision was chilling.

“Drew?”

Shaking off the brutal images, he shifted on his heel to find himself facing Lara. “You must’ve come down before the shops opened,” he said, looking at the bags she had in hand.

“I’m in a bad mood,” she said. “I decided to work it off by spending money, but I hate everything I’ve bought. Who needs a stupid yellow dress anyway? Not someone with my skin tone.” That skin, a natural dark tan stroked with gold in this light, scrunched up as she made a face.

“I think you’ll look gorgeous in yellow.” He wrapped an arm around her shoulders, cuddling her smaller body to his. Like most people in the den, he tended to forget she wasn’t that much older than he was, she was so competent. But today she looked unbearably young. “This bad mood have anything to do with—”

“Don’t go there,” she warned, even as she slid her own arm around his waist, the soft black of her corkscrew curls glinting with sparks of red. “And I won’t hassle you about Indigo.”

He froze. “How the hell do you healers pull that shit?”

“Trade secret.” A hint of a smile, those high cheekbones giving her eyes an almost feline appearance as she glanced up. “How come she’s so mad at you?” she asked with a blunt honesty that reminded him of Ben, the pup the healer often babysat for her friend Ava.

“Not telling.”

She scrunched her nose at him. “You going to do anything about it?”

Andrew thought of the plan he’d hatched late last night. “Oh, yeah, I’m going to do something about it.” And the lieutenant would never see it coming.

CHAPTER 8

Having said good-bye to her mother a few minutes earlier, Indigo found Hawke and they sat down to coordinate the pack’s resources. “We have a lieutenant meeting later today,” she said toward the end.

“I remember.” Rising from his desk, he folded his arms, unfolded them, then shoved his hands through his hair, hair that echoed the stunning color of his pelt in wolf form. Right now, that wolf was riding him hard.

“Want to go for a run?” she asked, feeling more than a little twitchy herself. “We could both use it.”

The fact that Hawke didn’t even bother to pretend he didn’t need to let the wolf roam told her more than anything else. “Wolf or human?” he asked, his voice shifting in a way that made it clear the wolf was already in charge. His eyes, too, shimmered in the most subtle of ways—the wolf watching her from a human face.

“Human wolf,” she said, “it’s harder to maintain.”

“Let’s go.”

By the time they cleared the den, her wolf was at the forefront of her mind. She was still physically human, but her thought processes were no longer those of the cool, collected lieutenant. They were of the wolf who lived in her soul—of her body, only her eyes would’ve reflected the change. Though as they began to run, she felt her claws pricking at the insides of her skin and decided to let them slice through.

They ran side by side, getting out of the White Zone and into the thick darkness of the forest beyond, the trees whipping by in a blur of rich green and—as they began to climb higher—the occasional splash of snowy white. She was damn fast, but she knew Hawke could’ve outstripped her. It wasn’t simply that he was alpha—though that played a part in it. Her own wolf didn’t want to outstrip him, would’ve been confused if it could. But a larger part of it was that he was naturally faster.

But she was making him work for it, and that was what was important. It was a lieutenant’s job to challenge her alpha when necessary—as it was an alpha’s job to look after his pack. So Indigo ran them both to the edge of exhaustion, flying over fallen rocks and old trees, branches grazing her arms and threatening to slap her face, the