Otherworld Nights (30 page)

Clay took off after Eaton. Reese and I raced to where I could now hear Noah’s voice.

“Kate!” he called. Then, “She was right there. I could hear—”

Nick’s whisper, shushing him before Eaton overheard. I ran full out, branches lashing me, heart pounding. I could hear Reese behind me, whispering, “It’s okay. Nick’s got them. It’s okay,” and part of me wanted to whip around and tell him to shut up, just shut up, it wasn’t okay. But I heard the anxiety in his voice and felt him, right there on my heels, and I knew we were lucky to have him, damned lucky, and I had to hold it together, be the kind of Alpha he expected. The kind they all expected.

A figure moved in the trees. Downwind, so I couldn’t catch the scent, and the forest was so thick that all I saw was a flash of a parka and dark hair.

Eaton.

I held up my hand, stopping Reese before he plowed into me. Eaton was just standing there, almost hidden in the trees. Looking east. Watching something. I eased in that direction and saw Kate
in her purple snowsuit, doing a very poor job of hiding as she crouched behind a log. Her hat was askew, blond curls tumbling out, her cheeks rosy from the cold, her blue eyes dancing. My beautiful little girl. And Eaton stood, less than fifty feet away—

He shifted, and I sucked in breath so fast I nearly choked.

It wasn’t Douglas Eaton watching Kate. It was Mark.

“Damn it,” Reese whispered, relieved. “Moron couldn’t stay put.” He started forward.

I grabbed Reese’s arm as I stared, transfixed, at Mark Eaton. I saw him watching my daughter, and the look in his eye hit me like a fist to the gut, and I knew what had been missing when Douglas Eaton was around Kate and Lori Romero’s daughter. This look. The one that brought a thousand memories spilling back, and a whimper bubbling up in my gut, silenced by a wave of fury. I launched myself at Mark, barely hearing Reese’s exclamation of surprise.

Mark
did
hear Reese and he turned, saw me, and ran toward Kate, his ankle obviously fine. He was closer, but I was running as fast as I could and—

My foot caught on a vine. I stumbled. Reese grabbed me and I recovered fast, but it was enough to give Mark the advantage he needed.

“Kate!” I shouted.

She looked up and grinned. Then she saw my face and turned, as if sensing Mark. Seeing him, she jumped up. She started to run to me, but he was almost to her and—

A shape dropped from the trees and landed on Mark’s back, knocking him down. Mark reared up. He grabbed Logan and wrenched him off, arm swinging to throw him. I hurled myself at him. Kate did, too. She caught his arm and sank her teeth into his hand. He screamed and dropped Logan. I grabbed Logan and tossed him to Reese, then caught Kate and pulled her off Mark. She didn’t let go, and when I pulled her away, she took a chunk of his hand with her. Blood spattered the snow as Mark yowled.

He charged us. I wrapped my arms around Kate and backed away, stumbling and tripping, but I couldn’t put her down, not even to fight him, couldn’t let her go. He pounced. I kicked and hit his shin and he fell back, but he only snarled and shook himself off and came at us again. Reese hesitated, Logan in his arms, looking to me for direction. I shook my head, telling him not to let go of Logan.

A shout from the east. Nick racing at us, Noah right behind. Mark ignored them and charged again. I dove, shielding Kate. As I fell, a blur shot from the trees to the west. Clay barreled into Mark’s side and sent him flying. Then he fell on him. Mark hit him with everything he had, fists and feet and even teeth, snapping and snarling as if he were in wolf form, instinct taking over.

Clay glanced at me. I nodded. Then I hoisted Kate up, her face pressed against my chest, and motioned for Nick to take Logan from Reese. We hustled the children away from the fight. Reese stayed, and when I glanced back, he was circling with Noah, waiting for Mark to make a run for it. He wouldn’t try. Clay wasn’t fighting hard. Not yet. Just keeping things going until we got the kids far enough away. When we did, I heard an unmistakable snap as Clay broke Mark Eaton’s neck.

A bush crackled to my left. I looked over to see Douglas Eaton, in human form, jogging through the woods. He saw me and stopped. I tensed, but he kept his distance. He looked at me, then at Nick, each of us clutching a child to our chest. His gaze swung behind us and I glanced over my shoulder to see what he did—Clay standing over Mark, the boys at his back.

“He came after our daughter,” I said.

Eaton’s head dipped, his gaze unable to meet mine. “I’m sorry. I tried … I didn’t know what to do.”

I nodded, hugged Kate tighter, and headed back for the house as Eaton walked to where his brother lay dead in the snow.

T
he kids were fine. At first, I wasn’t sure how much they understood, but as I cleaned Mark Eaton’s blood from Kate’s face, she said, “That man wanted to hurt me.”

I hesitated, and the mother in me wanted to say, “No, everything is fine, it was just a mistake.” The Alpha in me knew I couldn’t. Whether my children were werewolves or not, they were part of the Pack and they needed to understand the dangers.

“Yes,” I said. “He did.”

“Logan saved me.”

She looked at her brother, standing beside the sink, watching with quiet concern, and she smiled. He mumbled something and dropped his gaze, but his eyes glowed.

“He did,” I said.

“You and Daddy helped,” she added. “I did a little, too. But it was mostly Logan.”

“It was.” I bent and picked him up in a hug so tight he squirmed until I put him down again.

“It was just lucky,” Logan said. “We were trying to trick Uncle Nick and Noah. Kate was only pretending to hide. They’d find her and I’d jump out of the tree. Only it wasn’t them that found her, so it was an even better plan than we thought.”

“It was.”

I looked at them, and I thought of what had almost happened and—

“I’m okay, Mommy,” Kate said, putting out her arms for a hug.

I kissed her and blinked back tears, and wet the cloth again.

When I’d finished, Nick was waiting outside the door. Clay had brought Eaton to the house to speak to me. When I turned the twins over to Nick, he put an arm around my shoulders and whispered, “We’ll talk later.”

When it came to my past, I’d learned that Nick made a better confidant. By talking to Clay about it, I was saying,
These people hurt me and I forbid you to do anything about it
. He tried to hide his frustration, but I’d come to realize it wasn’t fair, and turned instead to the guy who’d just listen and offer me all the support and sympathy I needed—and the kick in the ass when I needed that, too.

I found Clay out back with Reese, Noah, and Douglas Eaton. I sent the boys inside to help Nick with the twins and then took Eaton farther from the house, where we could talk.

Clay had him repeat his explanation to me. The short version was this: take the story Mark had given and reverse the brothers in it.

Growing up, Mark Eaton hadn’t taken much interest in girls. Douglas hadn’t noticed at first—he was five years older, and off to college before his brother entered high school. When he realized it, he’d suspected his brother was gay and tried to help him deal with that. Mark had gone along with the ruse.

Soon, though, Eaton noticed his brother’s interest in little girls. He saw the way he looked at them, the work and volunteerism he chose to bring him in contact with children. When a girl in their father’s neighborhood went missing, Eaton asked Mark if he’d known her. Mark figured out what he was saying. They had a blowout fight, Mark took off, and the girl turned up with her mother, who’d lost custody.

Eaton had apologized and the brothers made up. Then came the night Eaton returned unexpectedly from his girlfriend’s place and discovered Mark had gone for a run. He decided to surprise him … 
and found him at that decrepit cabin with Peyton James. Nothing had happened, but Eaton realized she posed too great a temptation and called her father.

After that, Mark confessed. Lots of sobbing. Lots of self-recrimination. Promises to get help. Vows to stay away from children. Barely two months later, he started dating Lori Romero, who had a little girl. Eaton insisted he break it off. The next morning, Dillon Mitchell was dead after what could have been a werewolf attack, and Mark began a subtle campaign of blackmail: either Douglas backed off about Lori and her daughter or Mark would frame him as a man-eater. When we showed up, Douglas thought that was exactly what his brother had done. Hence his fear. And when he realized we had a young daughter? Fear had escalated to outright panic.

Did Mark fight with Dillon and kill him? Did he eat him? Douglas suspected the death had been accidental and Mark had taken a couple of Bobby Walters’s dogs out to eat the body. But I think, in spite of everything, he just couldn’t bring himself to think his brother was capable of murder and cannibalism.

To keep Mark away from Kate, Eaton had drugged him and put him in the same cabin where he’d brought Peyton. Then he’d kept coming around us, trying to figure out what to do next. I think he knew something had to be done, that Mark wasn’t going to stop, that the next little girl he targeted wouldn’t be as lucky as Peyton. Was that why he tipped his hand about the bog?

Mark’s foot hadn’t been injured, as he claimed. And apparently Mark had found a way to skip his last dose or two of sedative, leaving himself clear-minded enough to trick us. He’d caught our scent as we’d circled outside. Then he’d called Eaton on the walkie-talkie his brother had left him and whispered that we’d come for him and he was in the backseat of our truck heading to our chalet. Eaton had to get over there right away and save him. Eaton fell for it and everything played out as Mark intended—us racing back to
the cabin, smelling Eaton in the woods, focusing on him, and letting Mark get to Kate.

In an ideal world, Eaton would have told us everything from the start. But the reputation of the Pack has endured for centuries, and that reputation says we would have saved ourselves the bother of an investigation and just killed him and his brother. That changed under Jeremy, but it will take more than a generation or two before we can reasonably expect the average mutt to trust us to make a judicious decision.

Eaton had whisked his brother away before he could go after Kate. He’d tried to get to know us better, maybe decide if we could be trusted. If that was truly his goal—and I think it was—then we had failed. Normally, I’d have listened, but having the twins there had made me anxious and defensive. An unfortunate collision of circumstances.

Later, I would talk to Jeremy about what I could have done differently. Maybe nothing.

For now, I sent Reese and Nick to help Douglas Eaton bury his brother in the frozen earth and then we left him alone with his grief.

Nick, Reese, and Noah left the next day. Jeremy had found them a place in Toronto where Antonio would join them, while Jeremy spent Christmas with his girlfriend, Jaime. Karl and his wife, Hope, would meet the Pack in Toronto, and they’d all come up as planned on Boxing Day.

Yes, I felt bad about kicking the guys out after all their help. But they insisted and Clay insisted, and the next day, when I took the kids to town, we came back to find them gone and our own Christmas began.

And begin it did, at warp speed. Less than twenty-four hours after being attacked by Mark Eaton, the kids were making gingerbread cookies and chattering about Santa and panicking when Clay
pretended we’d left their stockings at home. There were no questions about the Eatons or what happened in the forest. Everyone was safe. Christmas was coming. Life moved on.

We crammed Christmas Eve full of everything on the kids’ list. By the time the stockings were hung by the chimney with care, Kate and Logan were nestled all snug in front of the fireplace, having literally done that final task and then dropped onto the rug and fallen asleep. We carried them up to bed.

I got the fire going again—the kids had insisted we put it out earlier, so Santa wouldn’t get immolated. Clay took off to do something, and I was sitting in front of the blazing fire, munching a cookie left for Santa, when he came into the family room, hair dusted with snow.

“You were outside?” I said.

“Making reindeer tracks.”

I lifted my brows.

“Did you hear the kids earlier, talking about reindeer?” he asked.

I had. Kate had been concerned that the chalet roof was too steep for the reindeer to touch down on, and Logan insisted they didn’t
really
fly.

“That would be magic,” Logan had said. “There’s no such thing as magic except in books, like
Harry Potter
. Reindeer can’t fly. It’s scientifically impossible.”

One could argue it is just as impossible for a man to visit every house in the world in one night. Our son may be scary smart, but he’s still four. His logic isn’t perfect. Still, he was certain there was no such thing as flying reindeer.

“So you made reindeer tracks?” I said.

“I did. Not on the roof, of course. That wouldn’t work. But they landed in the middle of the yard, then walked over to the house. I figured that should do the trick. I considered adding deer droppings, but Logan would figure out the size differential, so I settled for tracks. Plus a few tufts of deer hair caught in the bushes.”