fate of the alpha - episode 1 (16 page)

“That was amazing,” she blinked up at him.

“It’s always amazing. Every time,” he told her.

For a few more minutes they lay in the moonlight. At length, Ainsley rolled on her side to face him.

“I guess we need to go back to Ophelia. At least you do. Maybe you’d better rinse off first,” she indicated the creek with her eyes.

Erik winced. There was no way he was going to service Ophelia. Not if he could help it.

“I’m trying to come up with a plan to avoid…that,” he said.

“Well, I think I’ll go to my house anyway. I don’t think I can deal with her tonight. I’m going to have a cup of tea and think about Copper Creek. Maybe we should send some of your guys and your equipment. You have some good guys, right?”

“Sure,” he replied without committing. He already knew that wasn’t an option. “I’ll stop over and see MacGregor to get his take on everything. He knows the rules and the bylaws better than anyone. Maybe there’s a workaround.”

They walked slowly to Ainsley’s house. She waved to him sweetly from the porch and went inside.

It took all he had not to break down as he turned his back on the Connors’ old Victorian and walked away.

CHAPTER 19

G
race had been on the phone so long, she was starting to lose feeling in her butt. And all for
nothing.
At least so far. She tried to shift her weight in her office chair to return some circulation.

Grace had decided that rather than looking for evidence, maybe she’d be better off looking for Lilliana. She’d begun by calling Springton Hospital. No luck. County General. Nothing.

Now she was on her thirteenth call to a municipal police force.

All the local townships and boroughs had their own departments. If something suspicious had been reported, or a person with an injury found, Grace ought to be able to track it through a colleague. The county had twenty-seven municipal police forces. And most of them were fairly sleepy, which meant that Grace’s colleagues had plenty of time to chat.

It had been a long night.

The Lower Providence Township phone rang once.

“Lower Prov Police, Fire and Ambulance,” said an eager voice.

Crap it was Joy Leipers. Grace would never get off the phone.

“Hey Joy, it’s Grace, from Tarker’s Hollow.”

“Graaaace! Have I got a story for you! You have a minute right?” Joy didn’t wait for an answer. “You know how it always gets wacky around here about the time of the full moon?”

“Uh, yes…”

That was the understatement of the year.

“Well, this month is no different. The Malones just got a chicken coop! You know the Malones right? Molly and Hal? Anyway, it’s the thing to do to raise chickens now and eat organic eggs and whatnot.” Joy took a moment to laugh at the upper middle class citizens of Lower Providence. Grace was decidedly alone among local police in serving the population to which she belonged. She tried not to make a big deal of it and over time they had seemed to forget.

“What happened?” Grace asked, knowing it would be quicker to get to the end of the story then to try and circumvent it.

“Well, you know these folks’ll call in an engineer to hang a picture on the wall. They brought in some Amish carpenter to design the prettiest chicken coop you ever saw. It was tucked under their porch with two levels and teak wood doors and stuff.”

“Um-hm,” Grace looped the yellow belt to Lilliana’s raincoat around her fingers and released it again. She had been holding it all night, hoping to get a reading out of it somehow, but it was just flopping around in her hands like any other raincoat belt.

“So, we get a call from Molly, she’s frantic. She says
There’s been a break-in! They’re gone - they’re all gone!
We send Phillip over there in a patrol car, sirens blazing! Guess what happened?”

“What?” Grace pretended not to see the punchline coming.

“Something broke into their chicken coop, took the chickens! Hal Malone was cursing like a sailor, Molly was crying, the kids were standing on the lawn in their pajamas. All over a couple of chickens. And some dumb box.”

Shit. Sounded like the work of juvenile wolves.

“What did Phillip think happened?”

“Oh who knows? Probably a fox or a dog! Anywho…What can I do you for?”

Grace blinked back into the matter at hand.

“We have someone missing but it’s too soon for missing persons. Her name is Lilliana Atwater. Mid-twenties, dyed red hair, was last seen in a yellow raincoat. Any reports or injuries or anything in your neck of the woods?”

“Nope,” Joy said, “can’t say that it rings a bell. Have you tried Springton?”

Gee, no, I didn’t try the town NEXT to Tarker’s Hollow.

“Yes, that was my first call. Working my way out from there. I’ll keep going. Something about it isn’t right.”

“Well, just keep an eye out for the chicken kidnappers while you’re at it, will you?” Joy chortled, hanging up.

Grace set the phone back on the receiver and went to cross Lower Providence off her list.

When she looked down at the paper she nearly jumped with surprise.

There, in the margin of her list, sat a hastily scrawled note.

A note that had not been there before.

The ink matched the pen in Grace’s hand.

But it wasn’t written in Grace’s neat handwriting.

The Rustic Kitchen - 9:30pm

The Rustic Kitchen was an old Victorian house that had been converted into a restaurant years ago. It also sold knicknacks and desserts, and was beloved by children and the blue haired set. Last Christmas Eve it had burned in an electrical fire, just after the owners had prepared two hundred dinners to donate to the homeless. Now the burnt-out shell was on the market.

Who would meet there?

And where did this message come from?

Grace looked down at the belt in her hand and up at the big clock over the station door.

9:14 PM.

She could make it to the meeting if she hustled.

CHAPTER 20

E
rik tried desperately to pull his thoughts from Ainsley as he marched back to his house.

But tugging his mind outward only drew his attention to the other love of his life.

The sandstone sidewalks of Tarker’s Hollow absorbed the beat of his footsteps without complaint. Red and yellow leaves skidded across the quiet street, turning gray out of the circles of the street lamps, each of which illuminated the house of a friend. The tree canopy rustled above, filtering the moonlight over his head.

Erik loved the stone of the houses and the wind worn cedar shake of their upper floors. Waxy leafed rhododendrons had begun to wilt and retract for the winter, revealing the intricate gingerbread woodwork of the porches.

There was no place in the world like Tarker’s Hollow. And Erik was about to leave it forever.

He turned right onto Yale and walked through the small town center, passing the hardware store one last time. Of course he wasn’t really going to call MacGregor. He already knew there was no workaround.

Crossing Yale and passing the construction site, he mourned that he would never finish excavating. Never see the Inn and the bookstore rise to fill the holes. Never bring in the highway, after all, and see himself and his men change the history of a place.

He turned and entered the college woods to take the path that led him home.

The sudden darkness spooked him a little for the first time in his life. Erik had grown up in these woods. But now he knew there were more things in the woods than he had ever dreamt of. And he was no longer one of them.

That brought him back to thoughts of Ainsley. In the pain of losing his wolf he had made a fatal error.

He had failed to impress on her the danger of being alone with someone after her. The lone wolf she’d bested tonight was child’s play compered to whoever set the trap that had robbed him of part of himself.

Julian had been at the house today to protect it. She would be safe there.

Torn, Erik paused under one of the globe lamps on the edge of campus before the path went fully into the trees.

At length, he sighed, and plucked his cell phone out of his pocket and began to type.

Ainsley, whatever you do, don’t leave the house alone. Don’t forget that someone wanted to take your wolf. Call Julian, call Grace, call someone, but don’t leave the house alone.

He turned his phone off before she could respond.

When he came out of the trees, he could see Ophelia silhouetted in the porch light. She was pacing and talking on the phone. Perfect.

He climbed the front steps, nodded at her, and ran upstairs.

His old duffel bag was in the closet. He threw a couple of changes of clothes into it, then took it in the bathroom and swept the items on the sink top into it, then headed back down the stairs.

The only way to keep Ainsley out of trouble with Ophelia, and to avoid sleeping with her, was to get out of town tonight. If he was lucky, he’d be gone before she got off the phone.

He wasn’t lucky.

“Erik,” she said brightly, nostrils flared.

Fuck. She would know he had been with Ainsley.

She circled him slowly.

“Where do you think you’re going?” she purred.

“Ainsley sent me away,” he tried to look ashamed.

“Why would she do that?”

“She told me I had to leave first thing tomorrow. And then… I tried to convince her not to make me go…”

“And then what?”

“And then she told me I’d better get my ass on the road tonight.”

Ophelia laughed, it was a cold, glittery sound, like broken glass on a dance floor. She leaned in slightly to sniff him.

“It’s too bad your pleas weren’t convincing. Would you like to try to convince me instead?”

“I, uh, I’d better do what Ainsley said. I don’t know what she’ll do if I’m still here in the morning.”

She laughed again and grabbed his ass, hard, sinking her fingernails in.

“I’m starting to think Ainsley and I have a lot in common. Go on then, I won’t stop you.”

He strode away quickly. The shattering sound of her laughter accompanied his exit.

CHAPTER 21

G
race cut through the dimly lit park to approach the Rustic Kitchen without being seen.

The triangle shaped field had a fancy name now, but when Grace and Ainsley were kids it was simply known as Triangle Park. The only thing in it was a bench. Otherwise, it was all open space with trees along the perimeter. The rare open area without trees made it the best place in town to fly homemade kites.

Surrounding the park were some of the oldest homes in Tarker’s Hollow. A retired professional ballerina lived in one of the old stucco center halls. Elizabeth Stile was one of the town’s mini-celebrities. The windows of her house glowed tonight, and Grace looked over, wondering if she would catch a glimpse of the elegant dancer.

Silhouetted in the glow of the lights, a very familiar form traversed the sidewalk toward the Rustic Kitchen.

Grace caught her breath.

Julian.

She had been picturing him so often lately, it was almost strange to see the real man. His blond hair glinted in the light from Elizabeth’s windows and Grace was nearly hypnotized.

Then the significance of his presence hit her.

No. It couldn’t be.

In spite of the feelings he brought out in Grace, she still didn’t really like him. But he was Ainsley’s friend. Ainsley trusted him. It wasn’t possible that he was wrapped up in something awful. Was it?

Grace drew back into the shadows and counted slowly to one hundred. She couldn’t risk him seeing her. But she didn’t want to miss the meeting either.

She peeked through the dogwoods and there was no sign of Julian, so she stepped out of the park and slipped across the street to the Rustic Kitchen.

She chose to enter on the side the kitchen staff used to use to bring supplies in and out. It was surrounded by large rhododendrons which could mask her exit. She held still behind the bushes for a moment but couldn’t hear anything inside. Whoever Julian was meeting they must be out in the dining room.

Grace stepped into the open door. The stainless steel appliances in the kitchen had survived the fire, but were painted with soot. The whole place still smelled smoky.

Suddenly, she heard voices. And they were close. How had she not heard them before? She ducked quickly into the alcove formed between the gigantic freezer and the backdoor, trying not to breathe.

The voices were in the kitchen now, both male, one must be Julian. The other was deep and gruff and somehow familiar. She closed her eyes to listen, but couldn’t quite place it.

They were having a heated conversation but she couldn’t make it out with the odd acoustics of the place. Everything echoed.

The men took a few more steps into the kitchen and Grace felt sweat form on her brow. They were just on the other side of the freezer.

“We can’t wait any longer. We need to get the Connor girl out of the picture.”

“Everything is under control,” said the deep voice.

“That’s what you told us about her dad. His loss was supposed to be the end of this pack.”

Was
Julian
a part of that?

“How was I supposed to know she would come back?” the deep voice complained.

“And then you tell us you’ll have the new alpha under your control. What happened to that? How did an untrained little girl defeat your champion?”

“She proved to be more than we bargained for,” said the deeper voice.

“Excuses. This is why they had to send me. To get some results.”

“Like you did with the old lady?” the deep voice asked with barely masked satisfaction.

Grace’s heart wrenched in her chest. Could that be true?

“That was unfortunate, I admit. But not tragic. Once the girl is out of the picture, we will have the time we need to find the key.”

Key? What key?

“She is not alone. She has allies,” the deep voice continued.