Page 19 of Moonlight's Mate
He lowered the beer with a sigh, letting the bottle hang near his thigh, which practically forced her gaze to other dangling parts of his anatomy. “No. But I thought the pattern it made in town looked familiar. It was following that lone wolf. Can’t decide whether this is good news or bad. The imp was after a wereling, but not one of ours.”
Ours.Of course, he meant his pack and hers, not that they were one.
She angled her disobediently wandering eyes toward the trees, as if she was considering, which she was. “Probably the loner hoped to disguise his passage, muddying the waters with the presence of so many other werelings.”
Beck growled under his breath. “Doesn’t make me like him any better for putting the rest of us in the imp’s path.”
No, he wouldn’t, she knew. Beck took his people and his duty seriously, just as he was serious about everything.
He took another pull from the bottle then glanced at her. “Good beer.”
She rolled her eyes. “You know it’s one of yours.”
His lips quirked. “Must be why I like it so much.”
Her own amusement faltered. Like his meticulously crafted brews, anything he considered his would be special, worthy, treated as precious and held to the highest standards of wereling tradition. That was the way he was.
And that was exactly the way she wasn’t. She wasn’t special; she was Alpha by a quirk of her blood. Her small, eclectic pack didn’t even meet the human world definition of traditional. As for precious? Unlike the pure gold that shone from Beck’s eyes, she knew one bad scrape would reveal she was nothing underneath but some cheap, base metal, without the worth even of iron.
She’d told him how she used to run to force the verita luna.What she hadn’t told him was how afraid she’d been, caught like the il-luna halfway between the duty of becoming Alpha…and the fear she wouldn’t be.
She pushed her cooled food aside. “If we want answers, I guess we know one place to look. If we can find him.”
He cast a glance at her bowl. “You can run on a belly full of macaroni?”
As she rolled out of the chair to her feet, she shifted so she landed on all fours and gave him a writhing lip.
He had taken a long step back, wisely cautious of the verita luna.
After all, some truths had teeth.
She wolfed down—literally—the last of the orange noodles, then gave the bowl a last lap of her tongue.
“Pre-rinse cycle?” Beck shook his head. “Remind me to wash your dishes before I eat with you again.”
While she rolled her eyes—as if they hadn’t swapped plenty of spit—he finished the last of his beer, and as he leaned down to place the bottle next to her bowl, he too shifted, bones lengthening, rich fur flourishing, his eyes more golden than ever.
She licked her lips, telling herself she needed to clear the cheese from her whiskers.
He sneezed once, probably from the beer bubbles, and took a few steps toward the shadowed trees. When he glanced over his shoulder at her, the stars glinted in his eyes and she read the irresistible call of the wild in the golden depths.
She tilted her head back for a short howl, knowing Keisha and Peter would hear and understand and not wait up for her.
Run.
***
As she had taken the lead during their last run, Beck expected Merrilee to do the same again. It was her territory, after all.
To his surprise, she stayed at his shoulder, even a little behind since she wasn’t as long through the neck as he was. Where the track through the pines narrowed, she coursed silently to one side, letting the trees come between them, but when the path opened, always she returned.
At first, the warm, wolfy scent of her made him worry he wouldn’t be able to clear his head for anything else. But the trek—wordless and simple—finally let the verita luna surround him, and he wasn’t Beck, fighting with Merrilee, he was a wolf hunting with his mate.
As if that thought wouldn’t get him into more trouble than the first.
They came to the place they had met over the scent of the lone wolf, Beck in human form, Merrilee in the verita luna.Any trail was long dispersed, but they paused to snuffle in the tree roots and scratch at a few rocks, just in case.
Beck swung his head, marking the basically straight line from town to the point where they stood. Merrilee aligned her body opposite his, her sable muzzle pointing toward the next valley.
