Wolver's Rescue (33 page)

“
Go over the
moon.”

“
Yeah, that’s it. Are you
going to take me over the moon?”

“
Not tonight. I need to go
out and you can’t come with me. You need to stay here where it’s
safe.”

“
Yeah, because that’s worked
so well this far.”

“
No one got
hurt.”

“
Oh, so now it’s okay to use
my own argument against me. The same argument, I might add, for
which you nearly bit my head off.”

He kissed her nose. The affectionate gesture
was his way of apologizing and it worked.

They were hiding out behind the school bus
like a couple of teenaged lovers. It was the only place in camp
where they could find a little privacy. All Tommie needed was a
pile of books to carry in her arms. She giggled. She didn’t carry
many books in high school.

“
What are you laughing about
now?” he asked.

“
I was imagining what you
looked like as a teenager, all arms and legs and big feet. I bet
you were the class bad boy that all the girls like me daydreamed
about.” She gave him a sly smile. “Or were you the kind of guy who
fulfilled as many of those dreams as possible?”

Bull didn’t think she was funny. His eyes
stared blankly over her head at the chipped black and yellow paint.
“I never went to high school. I was gawky and shy when I shifted
that first time. I was a man when I came home.”

“
Oh, come on Bull,” Tommie
said lightly. She didn’t like the sad and wistful look on his face.
“Surely the Today-I-am-a-Man thing is figurative. I can’t picture
our three cubs turning into men overnight.”

She was referring to the three boys who’d
performed so bravely. They were hers now too. Pathologically
overblown maternal instincts be damned.

Bull blinked and gave her a disappointingly
friendly hug. “You’re right. It didn’t happen overnight.” He was
smiling again when he looked down on her. “I have to go. Eli has to
be taken care of.”

All light heartedness left her. “I thought
you’d change your mind about him after what he did for Macey. They
were going to kill her, Bull. He saved his daughter’s life.”

“
I know. I was there.”
Bull’s face became an inscrutable blank. “He still needs to be
taken care of.”

“
You don’t take care of. You
eliminate. That’s what you do, right? Eliminate the
problem?”

He’d told her that himself and even if he
hadn’t, she’d watched enough television dramas to know a euphemism
for kill when she heard it. She’d tried not to think about it just
as she used to try not to think about the inner disturbances caused
by her wolf.

“
Yeah, that’s what I do,
eliminate the problem.” Bull agreed quietly and without hesitation.
“I take on the monsters most wolvers don’t want to think about. I
make the nightmares disappear.”

“
You kill people.” She
immediately felt a twinge of guilt, since she wasn’t exactly
blameless in that department. She was glad the Alpha was dead and
she had no remorse at all for the deaths of Buster and
Stu.

“
I don’t kill people. I kill
wolvers, feral wolvers. Humans rarely enter into it.” He shrugged.
“At least they didn’t until I met you. I told you, Tommie, this is
what I do for a living.”

“
No, you didn’t. You told me
you were an investigator.”

“
Yeah, a pretty title for an
ugly trade, but if you read the fine print on my job description,
you’ll see words like tracker, hunter, and killer. It’s what I am.
It’s what I was fated to do.”

“
It may be what you do, but
it’s not who you are, and it’s certainly not fate. You’re not a
killer, Bull. You have free will, a choice.”

“
Fate, good or bad, molds us
into who we are, Tommie. I made this choice a long time ago.” His
face became stony, his voice hard. He was shutting her out. “This
isn’t the conversation I wanted to have tonight.”

“
Well isn’t that too damned
bad,” she snapped. “Because we’re having it. This is the
twenty-first century, Bull, not the middle-ages. These are men, not
monsters or nightmares. You have no right...”

“
I have every right,” he
snapped. “The Convocation of Wolvers and my Alpha give me that
right. I’m the judge and the jury, and the decision is mine
alone.”

“
Well it shouldn’t be,” she
insisted with her hand on her hip.

“
Well,” he mimicked her
stance. “Why don’t you just step right up and tell it to the
Convocation. Stop and pick up some diapers on the way, because what
you call huffy-puffy is going to take on a whole new meaning. You
stand before the Convocation with a few dozen Alphas staring you
down and you’ll be pissing in your pretty pink panties.”

He held his breath for a moment and Tommie
could tell by his whistled sigh that he was trying to keep a hold
on his temper.

“
You’re thinking like a
human being, Tommie. We’re wolvers. There’s no counseling for us,
no therapy. You of all people should know how well that works out,
and I thought you of all people, doing what you do, would
understand.

“
You thought I was wrong for
trying to capture Eli after his escape. Did you ever think how
wrong it was not to? How long it would be before someone down there
noticed a black wolf roaming through their neighborhood? How long
it would be before Eli got hungry? What kind of prey would he find
down there?

“
Believe me, rats and mice
are quick and hard to catch and it takes a helluva a lot of them to
fill a belly that size. Dogs and cats now, they’re easy prey, and
much more filling. What if he hurt a child? Have you thought about
that?”

“
Don’t!” Tommie cried,
covering her ears. The thought of it was incomprehensible. “You’ve
seen his family. Eli would never hurt a child.” But even as she
said it, she thought about the man she’d seen in the cage. That man
wasn’t entirely human.

“
Eli the man wouldn’t, but a
cornered wolf might.” Bull’s voice became brittle and then he
repeated her thought. “What you saw in that cage wasn’t Eli. Even
Samuel recognized it and understood the possible consequences, and
Samuel loves the man.” He sighed again, this time in exasperation.
“Eli’s wolf doesn’t understand human moral boundaries any more than
yours does, and if the human is buried too deep, the wolf will do
what nature intended with no thought to right or wrong. If it’s
trapped, it will fight. If it’s hungry, it’ll seek the easiest and
weakest prey. When an animal is hungry enough, meat is meat. Pet
rabbit or yappy little dog, cattle, sheep, it doesn’t
matter.

“
Once that happens, it’s too
late. You can move them into wilderness areas, but they won’t stay.
Hunting wild game is hard work for a lone wolf. Why bother when
they already know where prey is plentiful and easy. If I don’t take
care of it, Tommie, someone with a shotgun or a rifle will. A wolf
that size will cause a stir, and that might lead to questions from
people like Gantnor.”

Tommie thought of Molly and the hopelessness
in her eyes when she spoke of living without her mate. “But Eli has
a family, people who love him. He deserves a chance.”

“
How many families would you
like to put at risk to give Eli his chance? One? Two? Five?” he
asked, his anger exploding. “One wolf killing pets or livestock can
bring down a shitload of trouble for the rest of us. Open season on
wolves means open season on wolvers, too.”

He had an answer for everything. Feeling like
a child who’d been reprimanded, she waved her hand and turned to
walk away, dismissing him and his argument.

“
Fine. Whatever. Go do
whatever you have to do. Have a high old time running poor Eli to
ground. I wouldn’t expect you to understand what he’s going
through, but don’t expect me to celebrate with you when you get
back, either.”

He spun her around so fast she crashed into
his chest. She hit so hard, she was pretty sure she bounced. When
she caught her startled breath, she looked up, ready to tell him
what she thought of guys who manhandled women, but immediately
thought better of it.

The Bull that looked down at her was one
she’d never seen before. The deep rumbling sound that vibrated up
from the depths of the rock hard chest was nothing like the sexy
growl she heard while making love. His eyes were clouded with pain,
but behind that cloud shined a fierceness she found a little
frightening.

“
I do what I do because few
others have the stomach for it, but don’t ever imagine I take
pleasure in it. Don’t ask me to apologize for it, either. Until
you’ve seen an entire pack slaughtered, don’t talk to me about what
one wolver deserves. Don’t think for a moment I don’t know what
happened to you in that cage. In here.” He tapped his finger
against her head, driving his point home. “And don’t think I don’t
know exactly what Eli’s family feels, because I do. To the depths
of my soul, I do.”

He was still angry when he gripped her cheeks
in his hands and kissed her. It was hard and fast and filled with
desperation. When he released her, Tommie could only stare at him
while running her fingers over her bruised lips.

“
It may be a barbaric
process, but it’s all we’ve got and I don’t make my decisions
without serious thought, deadly serious thought.” Bull turned away
from her, but before he did, she saw the horrendous pain in his
eyes. He called over his shoulder as he walked to his truck where
Bogie was leaning against the front fender. “If I didn’t, you’d be
dead. Think about that, Thomas Mortimer Bane.”

“
Think about that, Thomas
Mortimer Bane.”

Tommie did think about it. It was all she
could think about. Bull was at the clinic looking for her. He
wasn’t investigating Raymond Gantnor. He was looking for her.

“
I am the judge and the
jury.”

He was also the executioner, yet he hadn’t
killed her. Was she the exception or were there others?

“
I don’t make my decisions
without serious thought, deadly serious thought.”

Decisions. That meant there were alternatives
to death. Eliminate didn’t have to mean death. Bull said he had to
take care of Eli. She was the one who interpreted it, just as she
was the one who interpreted eliminate.

“
I thought you of all
people, doing what you do, would understand.”

Why? Why would she understand? She sure as
hell didn’t deal in death sentences. At Harbor House, she dealt
with people who were down and out. Her job was to offer a helping
hand to lift them up. Hard times could hit anyone, just ask the
woman in the nice car and expensive clothes who regularly stopped
in at the food bank. That car and those clothes were all she had
left of a bad relationship and they didn’t feed her kids. No,
Tommie didn’t judge the people who came to Harbor House.

Or did she? Didn’t she have her little group
of favorites, women she knew she could help; women she knew would
benefit from the support they found in each other? Weren’t there
others for whom no amount of help would make a difference, either
because they didn’t really want their lives to change or because
they were so deeply imbedded in a certain lifestyle that they
couldn’t? She did what she could for them, but invested her time
and heart into those who would benefit most.

She made decisions and judgments all the
time. The difference was that a mistaken judgment on her part
wouldn’t cost lives.

Macey sat down beside her.

“
You look like you’ve lost
your last friend,” she said. “Since I’ve lost all of mine, I
figured I’d keep you company.”

“
Ah, Macey, you haven’t lost
them all. You still have me and the others will come around when
the see the effort you’re making.”

Macey’s crime deserved punishment and at
Bull’s strongly worded suggestion, it was agreed that the girl’s
first shift would be delayed for one year. If they didn’t find an
Alpha to take her over the moon, he would do the honors for her. In
addition, she would serve as the group’s omega for a period of six
months.

Still not understanding how pack hierarchy
worked, Tommie didn’t see how a group who’d spent most of their
lives being abused by the position could now be so enthusiastic in
consigning one of their own to it. Bull clarified it for her.

“
The position of omega just
became a defined sentence of punishment and not a permanent
placement. Serve your time and you’ll be free.”

Since her brush with banishment, Macey had
gone to great effort to do everything she was asked and to make
amends. A few doubted it would last, but Tommie didn’t. She could
feel the change in the girl. Not wanting her to feel she was bereft
of all support, Tommie decided to help with Macey’s assigned tasks
when she could.

The punishment sounded harsh, but it was
fair. It also sounded as if Bull intended to maintain contact with
the group... unless Tommie’s judgmental behavior drove him
away.

Judgments and decisions; a wrong one could
affect the group as a whole.

“
Oh, Macey,” Tommie
lamented, “I think I’ve made a terrible mistake.”

The girl shrugged. “Look at it as a setback.
You learn from it, make amends, and move on.” She gave Tommie a sly
grin.

Out of the mouths of babes and teenaged
girls.

“
Smartass,” Tommie laughed.
“I thought you’d given up being a bitch.”