Shifting Shadows: Stories from the World of Mercy Thompson(125)

So after his real IT job, Ben got to trail Terry around three days a week, and that’s when he found out what he’d really been sent to do. Terry didn’t just beat up the people because they weren’t quick with their money; he beat up people because he liked it. Ben’s real job was to stop him before there was a dead body. Murder was more interesting to the police than loan-sharking.

One day, as they were leaving the apartment where their last reminder call lived, a woman walked by who caught Terry’s eye.

“My old girlfriend,” he’d said, and even now Ben wasn’t sure it was true. He wasn’t sure that was the first one for Terry, or if he’d been controlling himself because Ben was a new watcher.

He didn’t kill her. But she wouldn’t be walking around in her high-heeled black boots for a few months after he finished with her. Bruises and a broken leg, the newspaper reported the next day, and two men whose faces she hadn’t been able to see in the dark.

Terry was higher-ranked in the pack, and most of the pack were afraid of him. Ben wasn’t—there wasn’t much Terry could do to him that hadn’t already been done—but he was a realist. Terry could wipe the floor with him. And . . . there had been something cathartic about watching Terry beat up the woman.

Ben had come a long way from the good little boy of his childhood. He’d gotten in more than a little trouble that his father’s money had bought him out of. He’d never hurt anyone, but he’d done about everything else. He still wondered about the fate that made him end up a werewolf instead of dead in a dark alley of an overdose or a knife in his belly. Time was he’d been convinced that he’d ended up with the worst end of that stick.

When he approached his Alpha about Terry’s transgression, the old wolf had just grunted. “Your job isn’t to police what Terry chooses to do,” he’d said. “He’s the one making the calls. You just make sure no one is killed and keep watch for the police.”

Ben went out and bought a knife, and he did as he’d been ordered. Terry went hunting with Ben as observer; sometimes it was one of the other wolves, but mostly it was Ben—and Terry liked that part of it, too—and so did some dark part of Ben. At first it had only been once every couple of months, but by the end it was weekly. Terry liked those black, high-heeled boots. He’d follow women who wore them home and wait until the lights went out, then he and Ben would break in, muffling the sound of violence with the magic of the pack.

When Ben got home from those nights, he spent the next hour or so in the bathroom until there was nothing more to throw up. It hadn’t escaped his notice that he’d taken on the role of his mother, which was bad enough. But the thing that made it nigh unbearable was that he liked it. When the woman screamed, it was his mother’s voice he heard. And he craved it as much as Terry did.

Terry always cried afterward, patting his victim’s heads and calling them darling as he blamed them for making him beat them up. They were a proper unhinged pair, he and Terry. None of their victims died because the object of Terry’s kink was not murder but pain.

And so it went for almost a year and a half, fourteen victims. The fifteenth lay unconscious on the floor, her skirt rucked up over a hip displaying a tattoo of a wolf.

“Well, my boyo, lookee there,” Terry said. “She’s marked herself for me.”

The sickness was already churning in Ben’s gut. “You’ve done what you came for,” he said. “Time to go.”

“No,” Terry said, unzipping his trousers. “Time to step up the game for you.” He smiled. “I’ve been teaching you and you’re learning pretty well. Now we get to the good stuff.”

And the woman on the ground wasn’t Ben’s mother anymore.

“Time to go,” Ben told Terry. The woman was like him, like Ben. A victim. And he could take the easy route, like his mother had, as he had been doing all this time, or he could stop it.

Terry gave him an irritated look. “Bugger off yourself, then.” He bent down and patted her tattoo. “This one’s mine.”

And Ben did what he’d told himself he was going to do when he bought the knife in the first place. He cut Terry’s throat, then ripped off his head. He left the body in the poor woman’s apartment.

He’d cleaned up and headed over to turn himself in to the Alpha for punishment only to find that there had been a change in leadership. The wolf who ruled the rest of London had decided to take over the rival pack. Ben was too freaked from killing Terry to recognize that the pack bonds had been trying to tell him the old Alpha was dead.

The new Alpha didn’t kill Ben, but the police were looking for Terry’s accomplice. So he’d exiled Ben to the good old U. S. of A., and Ben had been given to Adam to see if there was anything worth saving inside Ben’s skin. Luckily for him, Adam seemed to view him as a challenge.

And right now he needed to pull his reformed head out of his arse because he’d just left a little helpless lamb out for a man who thought himself the big bad wolf. If she’d been Mercy, he wouldn’t be worried; Duffy would be lucky if he could walk tomorrow. But if she’d been Mercy, Duffy would never have chosen her as a target.

•   •   •

Mel kept her back against the door as if that might help. “No,” she said. “I won’t.” But she knew that she would, and so did Duffy; it was in the confidence of his voice and body. For Chris, she would do anything.