Wolf Song (Wolf Song Trilogy #1)(2)
Brick bared his teeth and launched himself at his alpha. Prepared to die.
Suicide by werewolf.
Mother Luna, give me strength to wipe the oily smirk from that *’s muzzle before I go.
Barely eighteen, without the deadly muscles and massive bulk he’d acquire if he lived to prime adulthood, he faced a mature and powerful creature with decades of experience and more than one hundred pounds on him. He gauged his chances somewhere between nil and none. Even slim and fat seemed too great a percentage with the odds stacked more heavily against him than the siliconed boobs of Magnum’s groupies. But irrational fury compelled him, lent him a false sense of bravado.
He grasped the older male’s long, stringy locks and tugged, wringing a surprised yelp from the other wolf. A scent, acid and toxic, rose from the Magnum’s hide like a noxious cloud.
“You fight like a girl,” the alpha spat, shoving him away. “Apologies, ladies.” He winked at his coterie of human wolfies before turning back to Brick. “Are we done here, whelp?”
“You’re done, wolf. I haven’t begun.”
A head taller than the alpha, Brick relied on his youthful speed. And recklessness. Definitely not his best idea, calling attention to himself and maybe putting paid to his ability to visit Gee, if not his ability to draw breath. Underage, he shouldn’t have been in the saloon at all, let alone issuing his death-wish challenge. The stunned and silent crowd surrounding the combatants jostled for position to best view the coming massacre. No one dared step up to second him.
“Submit to me, pup.” Rage lit eyes the color of urine, the male’s stench equally foul. “And I might yet let you live.”
Brick ignored the command. He head-butted the pack leader in the throat until the squat honcho gasped for breath, grabbing at his neck, then rippled off a quick succession of punches and uppercuts. Magnum’s head snapped back, his nose exploding like a liquid rose, blood squirting from nostrils and cut lip.
“Hold him.” The wolf chief barked the order, the words all but strangled due to the blows to his vocal chords and hemoglobin he gargled.
Two of his lieutenants—henchmen, really—stepped forward and wrenched Brick’s arms behind his back to allow Magnum to knee him in the family jewels. Pain and nausea crippled him, doubling him over, sending him to the floor.
Nice. Their oh-so-powerful fearless leader needs help to mash me into the ground.
“That’s where you belong, punk. On your knees before me.” With the side of his hand, the alpha chopped him on the back of his neck. When he sprawled forward onto the peanut shells, the lieutenants released his arms so they could kick and pummel him into a limp mound of ground round.
Magnum beat him into oblivion.
The pack closed in, along with darkness.
Chapter One
Summer McCoy perched in the uppermost branches of her special Ponderosa pine, in raven guise, engaging in her favorite pastime, spying on the lone wolf chopping wood below. Two days’ worth of whiskers shadowed his rigid jaw. She loved when he forgot—or didn’t bother—to shave. Scruffy stubble suited him.
The sun beat down on the back of his bronzed neck and shone on his hair, the color of roasted coffee, a shade lighter than the dark shadow that charcoaled his face.
She fluffed her feathers in anticipation. Take your shirt off, Brick.
She’d heard the giant werebear, Gee, call him that name a decade ago. He’d made some joke about a wall and the hardness of the male’s head. But Brick hadn’t laughed back then. Not ever.
He’d fascinated her from the moment he’d arrived in the glade, bruised and battered. Once she’d learned his name, she’d treasured it, taking pleasure from repeating it often. Secretly, of course. Unwrapping the syllable frequently to admire its radiance in the privacy of her tree house, the way a woman wearing pearls against her warm skin enhanced their luminosity and iridescence.
Now, as if he’d heard her silent urging, he complied with her plea, shrugging out of the plaid flannel and flinging it onto a tree stump. Her beak opened as she sucked in breath. Sweat glistened on his torso, glazing rippling pecs and abs, shoulders broad enough to span the Badlands. A huge, incredible specimen of masculinity. Thick biceps flexed as he wielded the ax. Her heart beat faster than a hummingbird’s wings. Heat licked her.
Calling upon every ounce of inner strength she could muster, she willed herself not to shift into human form and topple out of the pine to land like a graceless lump of naked flesh at his feet. She recalled the first time she’d shifted and fallen, as a young cougar kit just learning to climb trees. Half skinwalker, half cat born into a shifter clan of mountain lions, she’d never taken her feline form again, to the chagrin of her dwindling clan. They’d grown fewer in number but far stronger under her Uncle Cal’s leadership, grabbing acres of land in and around the shifter mecca known as Shady Heart. More and more, Cal pressed her to pick a mate from his coterie of lieutenants and other cats vying for her hand, as he pushed to consolidate his power and prepared to seize control of the county—including the area currently occupied by the lupine town of Los Lobos. But Summer remained detached from shifter politics.
And she only had eyes for her lone wolf.
Brick had first come to the mountain glade—in the no-man’s land between wolf and cat territory—ten years earlier; a skinny adolescent, pulpy and wounded, splinted, bandaged, unable to walk, barely able to lift that hard head of his, the crown swathed in gauze, his shell cracked like Humpty Dumpty’s. His face resembled raw meat that had been forced through a sausage grinder. His inner scarring, from what she could glean from a distance—and from Gee’s one-sided conversation—infinitely worse.