Shift Into Me (Werewolf Shifter Romance) (The Alpha's Kiss) (3 page)

I pulled on his hand.

“Oh, yeah, of course. I didn’t mean anything by it.”

Damon shot me a glance. “Fort Branch,” I said. “In Ariz—”

“Of course! How’s the elder alpha?” Steve looked down, and his voice took on a weird, reverent whisper.

“Poko?” Damon said, looking at me with a comically confused face. “He’s fine... I suppose?”

Thankfully, the ice cream parlor’s jingling door drew a merciful close to Steve’s overly friendly inquisition. “So what do you two want? Burgers? Good. That’s all we’ve got.”

He was gone before either of us could say anything in response.

“Well then,” Damon exhaled, sitting down in a booth that was large enough for him to comfortably slide underneath.

When I sat, I felt like a little kid. “Does this seem big to you?” I asked. “Or...”

Insistent buzzing in my purse interrupted me. I reached in, fished out my phone and stared at the number. “Huh,” I said. “Yet another California number I don’t recognize. Why won’t you get a phone?”

“Who is it?”

“I just said I—”

“Is it Hunter?”

Sighing, I handed him the phone. “They’re really cheap these days,” I mumbled. “We could get a family plan or something.”

“Hunter?” Damon said, too loudly, into the phone. “Is that you? Oh man, is it good to hear your voice.”

I’d never heard him get so excited over a phone call. Even one from me, I thought, then decided that it was probably better to bury that before it grew anywhere. As he talked – about where to go, if we could stay, all kinds of things – a growing number of people filtered into the restaurant.

At first I didn’t pay any attention. Not all of them were Skarachee, or I guessed they weren’t anyway, from their size, but they all walked past our table very slowly. Everyone made sure to get a good look at Damon, who was just chatting away, oblivious.

“Go on!” Steve pushed through the door and parted the growing crowd. “Leave these two alone.” After setting our plates down, he turned around and started waving his arms above his head. Damon finally figured out something was happening, and said his goodbyes, then slid my phone back across the table top to me.

Face up of course.

“Uh,” he said. “Is something the matter?”

“Somethin’ the matter. Is somethin’ the matter, he says.” One of the smaller, older men stepped up to the side of our table.

There was nowhere to go, nowhere to hide. I wanted to crawl inside my purse. We couldn’t stand up, couldn’t get out. Damon seemed fairly at ease though, which made me feel even more trapped, like I was the only one panicking.

I looked at Damon, but he was staring the old man in the eyes.

“Well,” he began. “
Is
something the matter? I’m not sure why I’ve drawn a crowd like this.”

Steve shook his head vehemently.

Even though there was nothing overtly wrong, not yet anyway, I began to get the sense that there was something slightly askew about all this.

“Takes a murder to get the Alpha to come to town,” the old man said. “It’s like we don’t even exist. Kin folk don’t matter when you’re living in some other town, doing whatever it is you do, is that right?”

Steve turned away from us and got surprisingly loud. “Okay, all right, you all need to leave Damon alone. He’s got other things to do that worry about you all squabbling.”

Damon put his hand on Steve’s arm. “You don’t need to defend me. I’m perfectly capable.” His voice was a little too loud for my comfort, a little too proud. This was a side of him I’d never really seen before.

“Why don’t we have any answers?” That same old man pushed past Steve and reached out to grab Damon who let him get a fist full of collar without reacting. “We deserve answers! If this cub’s our Alpha, he needs to act like it!”

A storm that only I would recognize gathered on Damon’s face. When he looked back at the man, that glance could have stopped a truck. The whole room went quiet. Seated at the booth, with an open-faced hamburger in front of him, Damon cleared his throat and grabbed the edge of the table.

“I don’t know what’s happened here,” he said softly.

Everyone leaned closer to listen.

That was when I noticed several smaller couples, two of them with babies, sitting around other parts of the restaurant. They were all just staring at the gathering in front of our table, but it was obvious from the looks on their faces that they didn’t have the slightest clue what was going on.
I wonder if they think we’re about to have a town meeting?

“Then what—”

Damon silenced the old man with another glance. “I’m here to find out. And you’ll keep your voices down about our business. The safest thing to do is keep this all quiet. At least until we know what happened.”

“But
I
know what happened,” the old man interjected. “I saw it. It was Carak—”

“You know what you
want
to have happened.” Damon’s voice was absolutely flat. The last time he talked like that was when he threw his brother out of Fort Branch.

A shiver crept through me. Damon put his hands flat on the top of the table and looked down at it before turning his eyes back to the old Skarachee. “I didn’t expect to run into this. My parents never told me anything about this place’s politics, or anything else. But I’ll say this. I’m the
leader
,” he said the word clearly and slowly, punctuating it with an arch of his eyebrow. “I was chosen, by the elder, to lead this pa— this group, and that’s what I’m going to do. What’s your name?”

“Me?” the old man asked, slightly taken aback.

Damon just glared. I could feel the power emanating from him.

“Uh, Christopher Merton, sir.” The old man’s voice shook when he replied.

“All right, Christopher. I promise you, and everyone else, that if you let me have some time, I’ll figure out what’s going on.”

“Y – yes sir,” Christopher mumbled.

The crowd started backing away, and seizing the opportunity before anything else happened, Damon grabbed my hand and urged me to my feet. “Good. Now, I also want you to stop blaming others for things we don’t know they did.”

His point was obvious. He didn’t like the way Old Christopher threw around his accusation that the Carak – Damon’s brother’s pack – was behind the murders.

“But sir,” he said, “the Ca—”

Damon laid his hand on the man’s shoulder and squeezed slightly. Then he shook his head. “We don’t know anything. We will, though. I promise. That’ll just have to be good enough.”

With that, he pulled me close to him, apologized to Steve for the uneaten burger, and we made our way to the door.

In the few steps between our table and freedom, an aged hand grabbed my shoulder. I turned, and Damon tried to wrench me away.

“Let her go,” he snarled.

“No,” I whispered. “He doesn’t mean any harm. Who are you?” I asked the man who grabbed me. “I feel like I’ve seen you before, or...”

“I’m the shaman,” he answered in a hushed tone. “I found the bodies.”

“Wilton, right?”

He nodded. His eyes were something from another world. Unearthly and so pale blue they were almost clear, as he studied my face, it felt like he was plumbing my brain. “You’ve been having the visions,” he said so low that only I could hear. “I see the marks on your soul.”

“What are you...?”

Before I could finish, Damon jerked me again, as the crowd grew tighter. The spell of Wilton’s eyes snapped off.

“We’ll speak again, green one,” he said. “Soon.”

As soon as the bell on the front door jingled, and I felt the brisk wind whip through my hair, reality hit me right in the stomach. I blinked, not sure if my speaking to the shaman was real or a hallucination. When I turned back, the Skarachee were staring at us through the store’s glass front.

There was no sign of the shaman.

“Damon,” I whispered. “They’re all just watching.”

His hand on my waist felt like fire tingling against my skin. “Let them,” he said, not turning back. “Come on. We’ve got somewhere to be. Hunter’s expecting us. I promise that won’t be quite as strange.”

“Do you know any of them? I mean, you lived here your whole life, right?”

Damon filled his lungs with a long, slow breath. “My parents always kept me a little in the dark about all this. I wasn’t lying when I said I didn’t know anything about Skarachee politics or anything else. I really didn’t. I didn’t even realize werewolf politics existed until that guy started calling me Alpha this and that.”

My phone buzzed again and when I went to reach for it, Damon stopped me with a squeeze of his fingers. “Don’t,” he said. “I know who it is anyway.”

As good as the bells on that door sounded when they signaled our exit from Steve’s ice cream parlor, it was nothing compared to how it made me feel when Damon’s motorcycle thrummed underneath me and we left that town hall in the dust.

*

“Y
ou have no idea how good it is to see you,” Damon said as his friend came out the door.

When the guy turned around, my jaw just about hit the floor.

“Better to see her,” Hunter said, turning to me. “Very nice to meet you...”

“Err, Lily,” I said.

I looked back and forth between them. Long, dark-brown-leaning-to-black hair? Check. Green eyes that glittered in the sun, and too big to be not tested for steroids at a body building contest? Check.

“What’s wrong?” he asked. “I didn’t offend you, did I? Sorry if I did.”

“No,” I said. “Not at all, it’s just that you two seem very similar.”

“Are we about to hear another inbreeding joke?” Damon looked at his friend. “She had quite a shock. First place we stopped was the middle of town. She saw—”

“So you learned our secret? We all have the same mother.”

I laughed, nervously at first, but then louder when Damon’s friend cracked a smile.

“When I saw him,” I tilted my head to Damon, “for the first time, I just figured he must be one of a kind. He’s so big that it doesn’t seem very likely many others could be around.” I took a breath. “But then we get here and the first two people we see are like fuc—sorry are like giants.”

“Lily,” Damon said, patting me on the back. “Breathe more.”

I screwed up my face and looked at him. “I was nervous rambling, huh?”

He smiled.
God I love that smile. Even when he’s telling me to shut up.

Hunter grinned. “Does she know my last name? That’ll make it even funnier.”

“No way,” I said. “Don’t tell me.”

“Hunter King,” he said. “Nice to meet you.”

Damon shrugged. “What can I say? Coincidences are hard to believe sometimes.”

After the laughing died down a little, Hunter grabbed my bag, which Damon grabbed from him. “Oh,” he said. “Alphas don’t like being upstaged, I guess. Anyway, come on. I got plenty of room.”

“We were going to get a hotel,” Damon said.

“Oh bullshit you were. You’re staying here.” Hunter led us toward the house – a small, red-brick place that looked cozy even from the outside. “My best friend, closest thing I have to a brother, comes to town for the first time in going on three years, and you’re getting a hotel? Bullshit. Come on in.”

Holding the door, he ushered us inside, into a living room that was mostly empty, save a couple of very large, plush couches, and a television that was way too big for anyone normal to own.

“It isn’t much,” he said. “But it’s what I got. You guys can have the room down the hall. Unless you can’t stand the idea of staying in the same room, in which case—”

Damon coughed then grinned.

“Right, well as I was saying, down the hall is your room. You two want something to eat? I think I’ve got some... meat or something. Maybe.”

“Yeah,” Damon said, laughing. As soon as we got here, he seemed to lighten up. I guess I could understand, even though I didn’t really have anyone like Hunter was to him. Except Grandpa Joe, I guess. “Listen, you go get us some, uh, meat or whatever,” he said in a gently mocking voice, “and we’ll get settled in.”

“Sure,” Hunter said. “Just down the hall.” He was already on the way to the kitchen, grumbling about food.

Down the hall and to the left, Damon carried our bags and tossed them on the floor before having a seat on a bed so big it almost didn’t fit in the room.

“That was quite an introduction,” I said, sitting beside him.

“Oh, Hunter? He’s always like that. He’s a lot like you, really. Definitely not all pent-up and in a shell like I am. He used to drag me to things I’d never do. He forced me to ask out the first girl I ever dated.”

For some reason, that stung. I didn’t want to admit to jealousy, especially over something that stupid, but he saw it on my face.

“Hey, what’s wrong? Sorry if that bothered you, I didn’t mean to say something that hurt.” He brushed some hair back behind my ear.

I shook my head. “No, it’s nothing,” I lied. “Just tired I think. Long day. Weird day.”

He took the bait and let me change the subject.
Thank God for the small things
.

Some urgent clanging in the kitchen made him smile. “Listen, Lily,” he said in his serious voice. “I don’t know what we’re going to find here, but I don’t want you hurt.”

“Oh no, no, no,” I said. “We’re not going back there again. You and your being overprotective is what drove us apart in the first place. We’re not gonna play that game again.”

I stood up and pulled my laptop out of the backpack I’d packed and set it on the bedside table. “I’m here because you need me, and no matter how much you don’t want to admit that, you know it’s true.”

A shadow crossed his face. I knew he didn’t want to upset me, but I could almost see him falling back on the excuse that I needed protection. But instead, he just nodded. “All right,” he said.

We sat in silence for a moment.

“That was weird, huh?” he said. “Those people at that ice cream parlor? I guess... maybe that’s why my parents kept me away from town as much as possible. I wonder if way back then, they knew I was supposed to be, well, what I am?”

“Maybe a part of moving you away from here was because of all that? Maybe aside from getting you near Poko, your parents were trying to protect you from... well, that?”