Dead Heat (Alpha & Omega #4)(69)
The moon was almost full, so her change should have been easy. Pain, as her body rearranged itself, was now an old friend. It slid over her head with hot hands that dug in and cracked her jaw so forcibly that the pain of the rest of her body seemed gentle by comparison—until her shoulders slipped out of their sockets at the same time.
On a moon night, with the pack gathered together, pack magic shielded the sounds the changing wolves made in their pain, and the moon could sometimes change pain to ecstasy. But alone and in the full Arizona sun, Anna was obligated to make no noise that might attract attention. She was good at not attracting attention.
Some changes were better than others, regardless of the moon’s phases, but this was much, much worse than any shift she’d done this near the moon’s call. Before pain drove her to the single determination of silence, Anna belatedly recognized the wariness her wolf felt that drove her to speed the change. The wolf could not adequately defend herself while caught between forms. Anna had chosen to change in front of a virtual stranger and a fae she could not see and knew nothing about. A fae who could be the very creature they were hunting.
Anna trusted Leslie to have her back. But the wolf was more judicious in her trusts and Leslie was not pack, nor anyone they were long acquainted with. So speed was necessary and pain was a small cost to pay for safety.
When it was over, Anna lay winded and shaky, which wasn’t exactly a safe thing, either. She rolled to her feet and shook off the last of the muscle twitches. She couldn’t tell how long it had taken. Pain made time subjective.
She stretched, sliding her claws out until they dug into the soil. Satisfied that her body was working, she turned her head to look at the two women who stood carefully not looking at her.
“Are you all right?” Leslie asked when Anna moved around so she could look the FBI agent in the face. “That looked … that sounded like it hurt. We could hear your bones break.”
Anna sneezed and let her tail wag. Katie looked at Anna, and then quickly away again. Her hand over her mouth. “It’s not … it wasn’t…” Her voice stuttered to a stop—and then she made a break for her house.
Anna sighed. Yes. Werewolves are monsters and the change isn’t pretty. Unfair to ask the mundanes to deal with it. She’d had no choice.
“Can you find the fae?” Leslie asked. “I assume the deal is still in effect. If you find him and we can’t communicate, I’ll go back in the house and drag Ms. Jamison back out.”
Yes. Finish this business, thought Anna.
She checked out the big tree first, though it was too obvious. It smelled of fae magic, no question. But to her wolf nose, the whole yard smelled of fae.
She trotted the circumference of the yard and played a little hot and cold with herself to make sure she was right that the fae was somewhere near that big orange tree. The scent of the fae, who did not smell like Chelsea’s house or the day care, faded as soon as she got to the house end of the swimming pool. She quartered the yard around the pool and ended up back by the orange tree.
Not the butterfly bush, not the granite rock that was decorated with small pots of herbs where the sides of the boulder made natural shelves. Not the handful of tea rose bushes. Not the yuccas—which did indeed show signs of being dug up and replaced. Everything smelled of the fae, but not enough. Anna backed away and looked carefully for something she had missed.
Where? she asked herself, asked her wolf spirit. Where is he?
The wolf focused on one of the lemon trees, the smallest and scruffiest of them. Like the yuccas, it looked as though it was suffering from rough handling.
She closed in on it, shut her eyes, and let her nose lead her across the stone walkway and onto the gravel that covered the earth around the plants. Her ears picked up the sound of a door opening in the house, a car pulling up on the street, and Leslie’s heartbeat twenty feet away. Her nose followed the elusive trail until fae was all she could smell.
She opened her eyes—and fear, visceral and unexpected, turned her joints to water and closed her throat so she could neither breathe nor make a sound. Justin stood before her, the werewolf who had Changed her and then made her life a living hell.
And all she could think was, You’re dead. You’re dead. I saw you die.
The text message from Anna was simple. It said: Don’t worry. I need my wolf nose to find a fae. As Charles finished reading, he felt his mate’s shift begin.
She knew him. She was worried that he’d come looking for her if she transformed to wolf, so she was reassuring him that she wasn’t in harm’s way. If she hadn’t added the last bit, he’d have let her text message reassure him.
She was looking for a fae on her own? When the fae they were looking for was powerful and sophisticated enough to create a child from a bundle of sticks? Not without him, she wasn’t.
“Pull over,” he told Marsden, interrupting whatever the agent had been saying about the next place they were headed, had been headed.
“Excuse me?”
Impatient, Charles caught the other man’s eye and said, low-voiced, “Pull over.”
The car swerved out of traffic and came to a halt with a jerk.
“What the freak, man?” said Marsden, staring at his hands as though he couldn’t believe what had happened. That he’d just obeyed orders.
Humans weren’t used to following the hierarchy of the pack, but it still worked on them. At least it worked on them when Charles was giving the orders. It wasn’t magic. But there was a reason Charles was usually the most dominant in his world that was filled with dominant wolves. Even humans had that primitive brain that drill sergeants around the world tapped into, the part of the brain concerned with survival. That part heard an order and just obeyed.