Page 31 of Soulmates
Not a fair fight. Not a fair fight at all. I snatch the creature, break its neck, and run back to Trajan. Tossing the masked bandit within his reach, I turn my back. He groans. There’s a scrape. A slurp. Then he strains. Gags from someplace deep. Vomits. I don’t turn around.
More slurping. More retching. The process continues well past when I’m ready to hurl right along with him. Finally he rises, his footsteps scuffing through the dirt.
“Do you think we can make it past the cabin?” he asks. “There’s that hotel about two miles down the road.”
I glance at him, making no move to shift. If he leads, my wolf will follow.
OXO
I wake up next to a dead guy. A resourceful, persuasive dead guy, who scored us a hotel room despite looking like a burned-out bum with a large “dog” at his side. I’m calling him Rocky now. Because raccoon.
Our hotel room is small and barely clean. It smells like mold and old cigarettes, and it beats the hell out of the great outdoors. I might be a wolf, but sleeping in the dirt sucks.
I can’t remember if I shifted before I fell asleep or passed out and then made the change. Trajan pulled the drapes, locked the door, and covered himself completely with the mottled orange bedspread. I’m lying on top of the spread, naked and starving and pretty much alone.
Dead guys don’t make the best company.
For one slamming second, I’m lost without the pack. They’ve always been around, either in my home or in my head. I might have lived in a dorm at school, but I texted my cousin Marcus half a dozen times a day, and my sister twice as often. We were bound by more than blood.
Trust is built into the bedrock of the pack, which is why I didn’t stand my ground when Uncle Brendan escorted me out of the conference room. The memory sends a flare of embarrassment across my skin, though I could be just chapped from this cheap-ass bedspread.
The pack’s Delta, our enforcer, had asked me to meet him, and his deputies—including Marcus, ffs—caught me off guard. I may never really get over havingRyan shoot me in the ass. The memory catches me a hundred times a day, and every time, it’s like a punch to the belly.I should have stood up to Uncle Brendan. I should have stood up to them all.
Because in the mix of scents that Trajan brought with him out of the burning house, there was wolf. And it wasn’t from me.
Fortunately, a cell phone’s chirp drags me out of the latest chorus ofIsn’t David an Idiot. I pry my eyelids open. The room is dim, with just a skinny line of yellow framing the window. It takes some fiddling, but I manage to turn on the squat little lamp in the bedside table. Its twin sits on the table by Trajan’s head, and underneath the lamp, I catch the red flash from the phone.
Moving hurts, but nothing that a couple of downward dogs won’t cure. I may well be the only werewolf who likes yoga. I don’t know. I haven’t asked around. I check the phone, and it’s a text from Sheena, asking what the hell is going on. Trajan’s lying there like a corpse, shrouded in orange, and I reply to Sheena because it’s going to be a while till my favorite raccoon fiend wakes.
They tried hard but they didn’t get us.
I only had to wait a few seconds for her to respond.
WTF?!!!
Instead of texting her, I call. “Can you talk?” I ask as soon as she picks up.
“Tell me what’s going on.” Her words are clipped, harsh, the kind of no-bullshit attitude I can deal with.
I give her the bullet points: the visitor, the shooting, the explosion. I skip the raccoon. “And now he’s dead in the bed, and I’m naked.”
She doesn’t answer right away, and I get distracted by a bag of corn chips, a package of tiny chocolate donuts, and a Mountain Dew.Anda pack of smokes. Damned if Rocky hadn’t thought of everything.
“The only way anyone could have found you is by following me.”
Sheena interrupts my scavenging. Her conclusion is obvious, and one I’ve obviously been avoiding. I mean, Trajan trusts Sheena, so I trust her. Whether someone followed her or she sent them, I can’t deny we got set up.
I stuff my mouth full of chips as if somehow the crunching will help me come up with a plan. When Trajan rises, we need to move along, and though it would help if I had a pair of jeans, I can always shift. Not boasting, but most wolves can’t go back and forth more than once in a day. Mine can. It almost makes up for being continuously underestimated.
I end the call, promising only that Trajan will be in touch later. I finish off the chips and donuts, wash them down with Mountain Dew, light up, and resolve to spend the afternoon thinking things through. Trajan will bitch about the smoke, but I need to reevaluate my approach. My father wants me to be the family pack’s alpha. Might be time for me to start acting like it.
Chapter Ten
IT’S HARD TO win an argument when you’re naked. Especially when one look at the dude you’re arguing with gives you a semi. I have a towel around my waist, left over from my shower, but there’s only so much cheap terry cloth can hide.
I’m in the doorway to the bathroom, hanging on to the towel with both hands. Trajan’s sitting on the edge of the bed, looking all bulky and sleepy and hot. His shirt sleeves are scorched black, the cuffs burned away, and there’s a splatter of raccoon gore down the front.
He’s flipping his cell phone around like he can make it play back the conversation I had with Sheena.
