Hunting Ground (Alpha & Omega #2)(19)

Charles looked at her thoughtfully. "People talk to you," he said. "That could be useful."

APPARENTLY, they were going to jog to the restaurant. Anna was glad of her tennis shoes on the wet and steep hill they charged down.

Charles, cat-footed as he was, slipped and slithered in the pouring rain. His cowboy boots were slick-bottomed, though she didn't think it really slowed him down much. They both ran quietly, but she could feel the attention they were drawing. In the city, people pay attention when you run because it makes you either predator or prey.

It concerned her for a moment, but risk assessment was something she'd have to leave to Charles. She didn't know the wolves involved-or how far they were from the restaurant, exactly. He kept their speed to easily within human limits, so he was giving some consideration to the attention they were gathering.

She liked running with him. Without him, something inside her always worried that she would become the prey. She couldn't imagine Charles being anyone's prey.

After a few blocks, he slowed to a brisk walk, and they turned onto a level street paralleling the Sound. Like Lake Michigan in her native Chicago, the water had a presence, a weight that she'd have felt even if she hadn't been able to see it peeking out between buildings and streets.

A red neon sign proclaiming Bubba's Basement the best barbecue in Seattle had an arrow that pointed down a wide set of steps to the basement of something that might have been some kind of bank or office building-it had that neutral upscale look.

Charles opened one side of the double-door entrance, releasing the heady combination of beef, barbecue sauce, and coffee. The restaurant was dimly lit and, to Anna's quick glance, mostly full. There was a pall over the room like the weight of a thunderstorm, so strong Anna wondered if even humans could sense it.

Charles inhaled and turned left, walking around a wall of shrubbery, through a swinging door, and into a room set apart from the rest of the place. A discreet sign above the door noted that the room could be reserved for large groups for a small fee and could hold up to sixty people. When Anna followed Charles through it, she noted that there were barely a quarter of that many people in the room right now-and it wouldn't have been large enough for them even if it had been four times as big.

Alpha wolves don't mingle well with others. Anna wondered if all of them had congregated here on purpose, or if some misguided person on the restaurant's waitstaff had decided to keep all the potentially problematic clients in one place.

Someone had made a hasty effort to clear a space for fighting because a couple of tables were lying on their sides against a wall, and chairs had been tossed wherever they landed.

"You don't have the courage of a half-bred mongrel," said one of the two men standing in the center of the room with cool deliberation. He had an accent, but it was so slight she couldn't place it immediately.

Charles looked at her, then at the door they'd just come through. Anna understood. This was private business, and they didn't need any unexpected visitors to complicate matters further. She shut the door and leaned against it.

It also gave her a quick escape-so many dominant wolves... Even with Charles, she couldn't help remembering what the dominant wolves in her first pack had done to her. And her heartbeat picked up. Not panicked. Not yet. But not comfortable either.

The room looked like nothing so much as a scene from a reenactment of West Side Story or, with slightly different props and costuming, Gunfight at the O.K. Corral. Four men stood on one side of the room, six on the other. A few paces in front of either group stood a man, ready to fight. The testosterone level was so high that she was amazed it hadn't triggered the little sprinklers in the ceiling.

There was a thirteenth man still seated in the corner of the room. He had his back to the wall and was cleaning his hands with a damp towelette. He noticed Charles's entrance first and tipped his head in a casual salute. "Ah," he said in a beautiful upper-class British accent, "I was wondering when the cavalry would arrive. Good to see you, Charles. At least the Russians aren't here, eh? Or the Turks."

Action froze for a moment as everyone realized a new player had entered the game.

"You know how to see the bright spot in a cloudy day," said a dark-skinned man in the larger group. "I've always liked that about you, Arthur." His accent made him, and therefore the group of wolves he stood with, the Spaniards.

Which meant that the man who'd been tossing insults could be none other than Jean Chastel, the Beast of Gevaudan.

He wasn't handsome, precisely, but there was a power to his features and in the way he carried himself that made her first Alpha, Leo, look like a half-grown pup. He made an impression, as most of the Alphas she'd met did; he took up more space in the room than he should, as if he were weightier, both physically and metaphysically, than he ought to be.

He was aware of Charles, but his pale eyes stayed firmly on his opponent. Neither tall nor short, Chastel had a lean build. His hair was longish and brownish, brushing his shoulders. His beard was several shades darker than his hair and close-trimmed. But the physical details didn't matter nearly as much as the force of who and what he was.

His opponent didn't stand a chance against him-and the Spaniard knew it. Anna could see it in his stance, in the way he wouldn't look at the Frenchman's eyes. She could smell it in the scent of his fear.

"Sergio, mi amigo," said the dark Spaniard who'd spoken before. "Stand down. The fight is over. Charles is here."