It didn't work.
"Why have those pills anyway? It seems like it's a bad idea," she said, nestling into the center of my chest.
Her eyes slid shut and she stilled. Most people squirm and shuffle around before they decide to go to sleep. Wolves don't. They curl up, tuck their nose behind their tail, and they go to sleep. It was one of the nice things about being in wolf form. You never really needed to find a comfortable spot when your bed was among the willows and the reeds. "They're for those who want to have a little extracurricular fun when the moon isn't showing her face. Maybe they want to go on a hunt or a walk with a pack mate in the dark. It's far safer to have your fur and fangs on than it isn't."
She mmm'd at me and I peered down at her, moving her bangs out of her face to check that she was asleep. A stray lupine whisker still stuck out at an odd angle from her upper lip, but it was a good overall transformation for a first-timer. I approved. I enjoyed the quiet, her weight comforting and familiar. We stayed like that until the world just had to make a rude intrusion.
My damned phone buzzed in my pocket. Sadie sighed and turned her head toward it, her lip wrinkling to show a single tooth at the sound. I strangled a laugh off in my chest and arched slowly so I could reach the noisy thing.
'That Bitch' splayed across the screen. A headache twinged to life in my forehead, working its way toward the hind of my skull. She was the last person I wanted to talk to while I held some innocent woman. Would my past never die? I answered, my voice low and displeased, "Hello, Lillian."
"Don't take that fucking tone with me, Fontaine. What the hell did you do with my nephew?"
Her voice was like being pepper sprayed across the head of my cock. "Thomas is fine. He took a walk out in the woods, someone found him, and he's home safe and sound. If that's all?"
"That isn't all. What did you do? Who did he bite?" Her voice fell and I heard her take several steps away from wherever she'd been. "I swear to God, Hudson, if you endangered Becca's boy, I'll have your pelt for a carpet."
"Bite?" I asked. "Maybe your senses are getting unreliable in your older years. It happens, Lil. Every bitch I've known has that same problem in their 40s. Sense of smell starts to go, the internal connection with your Lineage is all messed up-"
She snarled across the phone and I shut up, like any rational mutt would. "I know what I felt. I want to examine him, make sure you haven't harmed him in some way. And if I smell a human anywhere on him, I'm calling a Meet."
"You'd call a Meet of all our local supernatural folk just to prove a point?" It wasn't much of a question. Lillian would do it just to try to rip me apart. She had every sensible reason to be angry at me, but I didn't have any way to fix it.
Her voice was poisonous. "I'd call a Meet to see my nephew taken care of. To make certain that you aren't letting him in harm's way. To get custody if I have to and do away with whatever tail you're wagging these days. You're not stable enough to raise a pup. It's like a frat house over there."
"Better than him growing up in a convent."
She sniffed. "The church is misguided, but they care about the treatment given to young boys."
"You're the only nun I know that uses the word 'fuck', you know," I said, needling her.
Lillian didn't need to be poked. "You'll meet me, with Tommy, at the Safeway on Tableton Road in two hours, or the Meet will be called and I'll have him examined by the dragons."
She didn't give me a chance to protest or to try to explain that I had other things to do. She hung up as I opened my mouth and I was met with the wonderous silence I usually preferred after dealing with her. The problem was that Tommy would smell like human for the next few months. Any wolf that attacked a human, though I hesitated to call a puppy nipping an attack, would bear that human's scent for a good time to come.
It was one of the things that made wolves who committed bites so likely to be found. One good whiff from another supernatural being and they knew that you were guilty. Worse, the dragons were the lawyers of our universe. They would judge my son with little recourse other than an eye for the laws laid down between the various species hiding from humanity, and they would be likely to order his execution.
Lillian would protest, citing that it had happened under my responsibility. She would state that I had allowed or encouraged my son to commit the bite and, due to his young age, promote the possibility of it falling on my head rather than her nephew's. She would steal my son and kill me all in one blow, and she would smile as she did it. Hell, if she played her cards right, she might take out the whole pack.
It was all I could do to keep from smashing the phone into the nightstand. I tried to slide out from beneath Sadie, but she didn't want to budge. As I said, when a wolf sleeps it rarely moves around. It
