Werewolf Wedding(47)

Jake stared at her. If life were slightly more cartoonish, he’d be tapping his foot or drumming his fingers on the desk.

“It’s so soft, you know? But at the same time...”

He growled.

“It’s soft, but...”

He growled again.

“Oh, fine!” she threw her hands over her head. “Yeah so we talked. What’s the harm in that? Your future wife, my future... uh... I dunno, friend in law?”

“Wait, what? When?” Jake asked.

“She called up here last week asking for you. I figured there’d only be one woman calling for you, and took a stab in the dark.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

“Forgot.”

Jake shook his head. “Anyway, sister is more like it,” Jake said with a grumble. “I’m closer to you than anyone else in my damn family.”

“We pick our friends,” she said, getting up and patting him on the shoulder. “Our families are just carefully crafted sets of problems. At least when it comes to werewolves. I’ve never understood one thing – and it’s the same thing Dilly didn’t get.”

“Which is?”

George bit her lip, trying to find the words. “Well, like with humans, if – just as a for instance – my brother decided to abandon the family for five years, go on a murder rampage across half the country and then come back to take over all the family’s assets?”

Jake arched an eyebrow. “Go on.”

“How blunt do you want me to be?” she asked, still chewing her lip. George wasn’t afraid of him by any stretch of the imagination, but he wasn’t exactly insensitive when it came to pack business.

“Has it ever mattered?” he asked.

She thought for a second. “Yeah, well fair enough. To be blunt about it, we’d just tell him to f*ck himself and go on with our lives. People don’t do that to people they care about. And if they do, it’s because they either think they can get away with it, or they’re some kind of pathological assface.”

“Wow,” Jake said, his face going blank. “Assface. Is that a technical term? Maybe some kind of psychiatric diagnosis I’m not familiar with?”

George pursed her lips and stuck her fists into her hips. “You know what I mean. If someone treated my family like that? The only thing they’d get if they decided to show up again is a restraining order.”

He began to pace. He always paced when something was bothering him, but this time the big werewolf’s head was hanging. Where he stepped, his bare feet either plopped against the marble floor, or left off-color streaks from pushing the carpet down. He was nodding, slowly, which to most people would make him look a little crazy, but George knew this was just how he processed information.

Jake glided over to his father’s desk, lifted one executive ball clacker ball, and let it snap into the others. He stooped over, elbows propped on the desktop, and watched the balls. At first just his eyes moved back and forth, back and forth, but soon his head was tilting in time with the silver orbs. A million thoughts were going through his head, although only on two subjects. First of them was Delilah. The second, his brother.

“I don’t think a restraining order would do very much against Dane and the pack idiots who think he’s some kind of second werewolf coming.”

Inadvertently, George snickered and snorted for a brief second before regaining her composure. “Sorry,” she said.

When Jake shot her a look, she lifted her shoulders in a shrug. “You said second werewolf coming,” she said apologetically. “And I’m a child.”

A puff of air escaped his nose, which was almost a laugh, but much less committed. “Anyway,” he continued, “my point is, that we can’t work within human laws. Werewolf laws – pack laws – are much older. Two thousand years, at least.”

“There’s another thing,” George cut in. “How can you not know exactly how old your laws are?”

“It gets a little fuzzy after the omegas,” omegas, George knew, were the original werewolves, “left Egypt. Not much of a trail until they showed back up in the packs we have now. But there’s a pretty good chance that our laws are as old as the pyramids, maybe older. What in the world would life be like if human laws were that old?”

“I’m sure there are more than a few politicians who wouldn’t mind being literal god-kings,” George said, sitting back down on the couch. Jake paced, she rose and sat.

After a silence that stretched to thirty seconds of glaring at silver balls, or adjusting a skirt, depending on the party in question, Jake stood up straight. “What’s that?” he asked. His ears perked – he’d heard something. “Do you hear that?”

George strained and sure enough, detected just a hint of tentative footfall coming toward the door.

“Who knows I’m here?” he asked.

“Well, aside from everyone downstairs that was listening on speaker earlier? No one.”

He rolled his eyes, shook his head. “You have to quit with the speaker phone.”

The voice, and whoever it was who owned it, were still shambling down the hall, mumbling incoherently.

“Well who the hell is that?” Jake asked, his voice pitching up.

“You could open the door, you know.”