Half Wolf (Alpha Underground Book 1) (5 page)

Or maybe she was responding to the way Hunter stepped subtly between us so she’d have to reach over his sodden head to get to me.
Bad doggy
, I thought but was a bit too chicken to actually say the words aloud.

“Um, well,” the woman backpedaled, “I was just checking to make sure there’s nothing you need. Oh, and here.” She held out a soggy paper sack, and even my human nose could catch the distinct scent of warm chocolate-chip cookies inside.

Hungry,
my wolf whispered, and I only realized we’d reached out to grab the food too quickly when the campsite host jerked her arm away as if she’d been stung. Dratted wolf.

Still, the woman recovered quickly in the face of my copious thanks. “Some
trolls
have been leaving bad reviews of our campground online,” she continued, wrapping her mouth around the word “troll” with an effort as if she was repeating a phrase recently introduced into her lexicon by a hip grandchild. “There’s a flier in the bag with a list of common review sites,” she added. “If you enjoy your stay, I hope you’ll consider logging on and putting in your two cents’ worth.”

The request seemed so ludicrous. Here we were fleeing from dozens of angry werewolves, shaken up by the idea that a serial killer might be targeting halfies, and trying to decide whether Hunter and Quill were more likely to protect our backs or eat us while we slept. Meanwhile, my own wolf was as out of control as a mild-mannered beast like her could be. Plus, who knew whether Hunter was one of those alphas who used the term “meat” about humans, killing them for sport or simply to relieve boredom.

And in this mess of danger and confusion, our campsite host was concerned because her business probably averaged a three-star review rating?

Still, the cookies smelled good, if damp. So I shot the older woman an honest smile. “I’ll be sure to do that,” I offered. And I didn’t even wait until she’d turned her back before I dug into the bag of warm treats.

I opened my eyes the next morning to a horrendous sight. A young woman, naked, chest ripped open and blood splattered in every direction. She appeared to have been caught midshift, with lupine ears starting to burst out of a human head and with her hands already replaced by paws. There was no question that the victim had once been a vibrant shifter with a long life ahead of her. And now she was dead.

It isn’t real
, I told my queasy stomach, pushing the cell phone and the appalling image it contained away from me. “What the heck?” I demanded aloud.

I was too upset to soften my voice, and all around me both furry and furless heads popped up out of our heap of werewolf slumber. The grisly wakeup call had my heart beating way too fast, so I allowed myself a second to calm down by making sure everyone was present and accounted for. Yep, Lia and Cinnamon and Glen and Ginger were all within arm’s reach, enclosed by the tent’s curved walls. And as long as Hunter and Quill hadn’t stolen our old clunker while we slept, then our pack could chalk up one more successful survival of a night in outpack territory.

“What’s with the horror show?” I asked more quietly now that I’d gotten my breathing back under control. My eyes locked with Ginger’s, unsurprised that the female trouble twin had been the one to stuff her cell phone in front of my nose at dawn. (
Dawn!
Didn’t she realize we’d probably only fallen into bed three hours earlier?) In response, the teenager reclaimed the device, flicking through a few screens before showing me what might have been the same girl...had all of her body parts been intact.

“Couldn’t sleep.” The trouble twin shrugged as if it went without saying that if she suffered from insomnia then the whole pack should as well. “So I decided to poke around online and see if Hunter was telling us the truth. And he was. This girl, Daisy, went missing from the Rambler pack two weeks ago. She showed back up yesterday morning with her heart ripped out of her chest. They think it was
eaten.
”

Beside me, Glen growled and I patted his furry head in consolation before jerking with my chin to suggest he shift. My usual backup was solid in human form, but his wolf sometimes had a tendency to overdo the chivalry. Today, I definitely needed him calm and in control...and that meant I needed him two-legged.

Once Glen’s body began to morph away from fur, I returned my attention to Ginger and asked the question I didn’t really want to hear the answer to, at least not right at that moment. Lia was looking on with wide eyes, which made for an unfortunate audience to such a grim conversation. But the girl was a halfie just like I was, and if she was going to wander through outpack territory then she needed to know what kind of dangers she faced. “Any others?” I asked quietly.

“At least half a dozen,” the trouble twin replied grimly. “There’s...”

“More like twenty.”

The growling voice came from outside our canvas walls and I was glad Glen had shifted seconds earlier or my right-hand man might have ripped through the fabric to fight off the intruder. We really couldn’t afford another tent, though, and I instantly understood that the voice didn’t represent any immediate threat. So I grabbed Glen’s wrist to hold him back and merely muttered “Once a stalker, always a stalker” under my breath.

My words eased the tension around me as my pack mates came to the same realization I’d achieved seconds earlier—that Hunter was the one hovering outside our den’s walls. Not that the uber-alpha should be easily dismissed, but at least he wasn’t actively working against us.

Or so I thought. Ginger apparently disagreed.

“You seem to know an awful lot about this serial killer,” she said grimly, raising her voice to make sure the words carried beyond the tent walls. “Care to elaborate?”

“To tell you about Daisy Rambler, eighteen-year-old half-blood who was so badly terrorized by her pack that she built a little hut half a mile away in the woods?” Hunter’s voice was cold now and I pulled the sleeping bag up to my shoulders in hopes the fabric would warm my soul. “To tell you that her family didn’t even realize she’d gone missing until she’d been absent for an entire week, that even then they thought she’d run away and hesitated to contact the Tribunal. That I found her by following the scent of carrion through the forest. And when I returned the rotting corpse to her clan’s loving arms her alpha didn’t even bother to build the girl a funeral bonfire. Is
that
what you want to know?”

The uber-alpha seemed personally affronted by the halfie’s mistreatment both before and after death and I had a hard time accepting Ginger’s insinuation that he might have somehow been involved in Daisy’s dismemberment. Still, it was hard to forget that Hunter had seemed equally caring and interested at our initial meeting and yet he’d still forced me out of my clan and into outpack territory the very next day. As an enforcer whose authority was backed up by our regional governing body, Hunter’s word was law both inside and outside of our pack, and he could have easily let us wiggle out from under the requisite punishment for our law-breaking three weeks earlier. So I had to admit I didn’t really understand his motivations at all. Maybe Ginger was right and our tagalong companion actually
was
conning our entire pack.

The inhabitants of the tent fell silent for a moment as we took in the uber-alpha’s words. Then, at last, Hunter spoke again. “Someone is killing halfies to steal their power, and you’re the strongest halfie around. Now can you see why I want you to go west, not east?” He paused as if trying to decide how to turn a command into a question, finally settling on: “Will you, Fen?”

My name on his lips did the job my sleeping bag hadn’t, providing the strength to straighten my spine and remember that I had a pack to protect. For a moment, warmth seeped through uncovered limbs as if the uber-alpha’s eyes were roaming across my body...which was a ludicrous fancy since Hunter was outside the tent and the early morning light was so dim he probably couldn’t tell which shape was me in the first place. Still, the uncomfortable feeling put a bite into my words as I got down to the business I’d already been planning to deal with as soon as my friends awoke.

“That’s none of your affair since you’re not a member of this pack,” I countered more harshly than I’d originally meant to. “At least not yet,” I added, mitigating my tone slightly. “Maybe you could give us some space so we can decide whether we want you following us around?”

Hunter huffed out a snort that said as clearly as words:
And how would you stop me going wherever I want to go?
But I heard no other sounds pushing into our temporary domicile. No receding footsteps. No slam of the car door as he crawled back into his own bed.

“Hunter?” I asked after a moment’s pause.

“I’ll wait,” he rumbled. And this time Glen wasn’t the only one to growl. Ginger had her hand on the zipper of the tent and looked intent upon heading out naked to whoop the uber-alpha’s ass, in fact, before I shook my head at the girl to bring her back into line.

The trouble twin flicked her long maroon tresses back over one shoulder in annoyance, but she conceded the point. Still, when she settled back down, the young woman made a point to slide closer to Lia as if she planned to protect her cousin with her life. “Let’s get on with it,” the redhead grumbled. “Can we vote Hunter out first?”

“No, Quill first,” I responded, ignoring the twin’s incendiary language. Truth be told, I hadn’t quite decided what I wanted to do about my own personal stalker, so the cowboy shifter seemed like an easier choice to start off with. “The question is, stay or go. Glen?”

My second-in-command shrugged. “Probationarily only, right?” he asked me. And, when I nodded, he mirrored my movement. “Okay, then. We could use more muscle around here. And we can always let Ginger beat him up if he sets his feet the wrong way.”

Glen had a good point. Our pack was light on wolf-power, with only him and the aforementioned Ginger really up to the task of protecting us from trouble in lupine form. Cinnamon was always willing to defend his sister’s back, but he was a lover not a fighter and tended to pull his punches. And Lia and I were, unfortunately, worse than useless in that department due to our half-blood heritage.

“Cinnamon?” I asked next, moving my gaze around the tent. The male trouble twin met my eyes for only a split second before turning to his sister and raising his eyebrows in question.

“Sure, I like him,” Ginger said, her voice purposefully loud as if she was speaking to Hunter rather than me. And her twin followed her lead, although without the attitude, voting in the affirmative as well.

We’d already reached the majority quorum required to allow Quill a spot in our clan, so the issue was pretty much settled. Sure, I had the right to overrule the others since I was technically the leader of our little pack. But, honestly, I liked the cowboy shifter too. He was polite, soft-spoken, and had paid for our campsite. He’d fit right in.

So I was shocked when I turned to Lia and found the girl shaking her head vehemently back and forth. Then, in the tiniest voice imaginable, she cast her vote. “No,” the girl whispered. “I don’t want Quill to come with us.”

***

“What did he do to you?” Cinnamon demanded, scaring Lia even more by grabbing her shoulder and spinning her around to face him. I expected Glen to counter this display with his usual voice of reason, but my most steadfast companion instead lunged forward as if he planned to latch onto the girl’s other arm and replicate the trouble twin’s assertive behavior.

Before the kid could get ripped in half—and before the swearing outside the tent grew any louder—I slapped the guys down with my mild alpha dominance. “
Stop it.
” The words wouldn’t hold them in place like Hunter’s would have, but at least the bee-sting-level compulsion should snap my pack mates out of their posturing.

Sure enough, Cinnamon and Glen both inhaled deeply, the former unhanding the kid and the latter merely pulling her in for a brief hug before letting her go as well. Hunter was still muttering under his breath outside, a dull rumble that circled the tent to stop mere inches away from our pack’s youngest member. But the uber-alpha seemed content to let me speak, so I ignored him and crouched down so my face was level with Lia’s. “
Did
anything happen?”

The kid shook her head slowly and it took a moment for her to gather her thoughts. “No, I just don’t like the way he
looks
at me.” I could barely hear the words with my human ears, but I had a feeling Hunter had picked them up just fine by the way his swearing changed over to a deep growl. Our uninvited guest must have turned wolf in his agitation.

“Did Quill say anything?” I asked now. “Try to get you to go off alone with him? Touch you where he shouldn’t have?”

“He shouldn’t touch her
anywhere
.” Hunter’s angry words proved he was human again. I was starting to lose track of his lightning-fast transformations, something an ordinary werewolf could do perhaps once in an hour if he was strong and well-trained. But nobody had ever said Hunter was an ordinary werewolf.

“Ignore the peanut gallery,” I said, filing the uber-alpha’s frequent shifts away to be analyzed at a later date. “
Did
Quill touch you, Lia?”

The kid kept her eyes trained on the ground and merely shook her head. No, it appeared her disapproval of the cowboy shifter was a gut reaction only. And while I didn’t like to ignore her intuition, everyone else seemed okay with adding Quill to the pack. Which suggested Lia was just young, inexperienced, and overreacting.

Yes, I’d seen Quill’s covetous gaze last night. But the cowboy shifter had also seemed to accept my admonishment and I’d noticed him keeping a greater distance from Lia afterwards. The unfortunate truth was that the girl was going to get those hungry looks from pretty much any outpack male. And given the fact that females were probably few and far between in his life, it was hard to hold the cowboy shifter’s initial reaction against him.

So I made the decision for all of us. “Ginger will train some manners into him,” I promised our youngest member. “And like Glen said, we’re only letting him in on probation. So if anything happens, Lia—anything at all—you can tell us and we’ll kick him out. Okay?”

“Okay,” the girl whispered, and I hoped I wasn’t making the wrong decision.

Still, the clock was ticking. Every minute we spent in the comfort of our tent debating our next move was another minute that the barflies could use to track us down. We needed to get back on the road ASAP, and that meant deciding which, if either, of the two strange males was going to ride along with us as we traveled to our next destination.

“So, Quill’s in, tentatively,” I continued. “How about Hunter? You can vote with thumbs up or thumbs down since he’s sitting
right outside the tent
and listening to every word we say
.
” I raised my voice in annoyance, but the uber-alpha only laughed. And my pack mates, as usual, ignored the nuances of my request.

“I like Hunter,” Lia said, her voice a little louder than it had been previously. “I want him to come with us.”

I rolled my eyes. The timid halfie was terrified of the charmer Quill but was thrilled to have an uber-alpha in the pack? I’d never understand the minds of children.