Wolf and Prejudice (The Alaska Princesses Trilogy, Book 2) (28 page)

Alisha cursed as she dragged Tu along. Her sister needed to morph into wolf form, so her wounds could heal. But it was hard enough to force a daytime change when you were drug-free. There was no way Tu was going to be able to do it high on meth and nearly incoherent with pain.

Alisha tried reaching out with her mind again. “
Rafe, please, if you’re out there, come get us. I didn’t run away, Tu and I were kidnapped
!”

No answer.

And Alisha began thinking about finding a place to put Tu down. She didn’t want to leave her sister alone, especially with those Oklahoma maniacs on the prowl. But maybe she could make it to the next town and phone for some help. Wolves were strictly forbidden from going anywhere near a human hospital, but she could see mountains (maybe the Rockies?) in the distance due northwest. Maybe there was a pack town nearby, hopefully one with a doctor who could safely sedate her sister until the moon rose and Tu could easily go into wolf form and heal.

The screeching of tires and gravel flying on the road beside them made her freeze. Tu, as well. Going from lethargic to full alert, her sister stiffened inside Alisha’s hold as they both listened to the sound of someone getting out of the vehicle. It was only one man, not three… she could tell by the footsteps, even if she couldn’t quite smell the wolf. Maybe that meant it wasn’t one of the wolves who had kidnapped them. But then Tu sniffed the air and mouthed, “Oklahoma.”

The wolves from each state had a distinctive smell. If you had a good nose like Tu or Knud, you could distinguish where a wolf was from down to their pack town, just by catching even a little of his scent. So Alisha’s heart dropped to her toes when Tu added. “Same town.”

She handed Tu the tranq gun, which only had one more dart inside, and picked up a large branch lying on the ground nearby. Then, by mutual but unspoken agreement, they each scuttled to hide behind a large tree. Better to split up. That way if he went after Tu first, maybe Alisha could attack whoever it was from behind.

A few moments later, the footsteps stopped in the spot they’d just abandoned. This close, they could both smell the wolf clearly, and the scent was familiar.

Grady had found them, and once again, Alisha dared to hope. However, Tu signaled to her from behind the other tree. “Don’t go to him,” she seemed to be saying with a shake of her head.

And Alisha got it. Grady hailed from the same pack town as the wolves who had kidnapped them. For all they knew, Grady had been the one to call those bastards up to Wolf Springs and set Tu up for the kidnapping, like a gift with a bow attached.

There came a succession of soft tapping sounds. Thumbs hitting a screen. He was sending a text.

Tu and Alisha stared at each other from in back of the trees. They didn’t move. They barely breathed.

And then the footsteps started toward Tu’s tree.

Tu shook her head at Alisha, her eyes full of fear, and Alisha gripped the stick in her hands as tight as she could. There was no way they’d be able to beat off a wolf of Grady’s size, a wolf who had been specifically hired to kill any other wolf who dared challenge Rafe for the Colorado throne, especially with Tu hurt as bad as she was. But Alisha would be damned if she let him drag her sister off to Oklahoma.

Alisha raised her stick, ready to do battle. But then with a burst of meth-fueled strength, Tu darted out from behind her tree and shot the tranq gun at him.

“Aw… fuck it!” Tu yelled soon after.

Alisha peeked from behind the tree at Grady, still standing there, his eyes wide with confusion. Tu had obviously missed. And now they had nothing but a stick to protect them from being returned to the disgusting wolves who’d kidnapped them.

Oh well, Alisha thought, raising her stick in the air. She was half-Eskimo, half-black, and an honorary Viking. Might as well go out swinging.

With a warrior’s cry, she ran toward Grady with her stick held high.

“Alisha.”

She stopped in her tracks. It was Rafe’s voice inside her head.

“Rafe,”
she thought back at him.
“I was trying to reach you. I’ve been trying to reach you for so long! Where are you?”

“Right here.”

She looked toward the road to see her mate coming through the trees.

“Rafe!” She dropped the stick and ran toward him. She’d never been so happy to see anyone in her entire life.

He caught her in his arms and buried his head in her hair. “Are you okay?” he asked, running his hands over her face and down her arms. “Oh God, are you okay? Tell me you’re okay.”

“I’m fine,” she said. “They just knocked me out. They didn’t hurt me. I’m fine.”

And then she was hit with all the anger and remorse and fear he’d experienced over the last few hours.

“You thought I had run away again?” she said, reading his emotions like a book.

“Yes,” he answered.

“And you came to find me anyway?” Her face crumpled into tears. “Just like you said you would. I thought you were being ridiculous last night, but dragging Tu through this forest, I was hoping you meant all that stuff about hunting me down if I tried to leave.”

“I did.” He raised her cuffed hands to his mouth and kissed them tenderly. “I meant every word.”

She shook her head at him, feeling like she might hyperventilate she was so relieved to see him. “I meant what I said, too. I will never leave the boys or you. Never again. I swear it.”

He nodded. “I know.”

Only then did she realize the anger she could still feel radiating off of him wasn’t directed toward her but at whoever had kidnapped her. “You knew I hadn’t left on my own?”

“Not at first,” he admitted with a sheepish grimace. “But then I figured it out.”

“How?”

“They took your entire suitcase. If you’d really run away, you never would have taken those clothes your mom bought you.”

This was true. So absolutely true, she found herself laughing even though she’d been fairly sure she was about to die at the hands of a double-crossing sheriff just a few minutes ago.

Double-crossing sheriff… she’d forgotten about Tu and Grady!

Alisha turned around just in time to see Tu heave her injured arm into the air and use all of her body weight to bring her silver cuffs down on the side of the sheriff’s face. He took the hit with only a grunt of pain, even though Alisha could hear the sizzle of burning flesh where Tu hit him across the cheek.

“Take that you fucking hick!” Tu was yelling at him. “You inbred piece of shit!”

“Tu!” both Rafe and Alisha called out.

But Tu hit Grady again and again, calling him every name in the book while Grady stood there doing nothing to defend himself.

Alisha ran toward them, prepared to pull Tu off the sheriff who had obviously texted Rafe that they were here and clearly hadn’t been in league with the kidnappers.

But before she got to them, her sister deflated into ugly sobs. “This is your fault,” she said, her voice raw and open wound. “They’re
your
pack! You told them to do this to me.”

Grady was shaking his head frantically, looking like he was almost in as much physical pain as Tu as he started to sign a denial.

Tu didn’t let him finish. “Fuck. You,” she said both out loud and with her middle finger. Then she said, “Please fire him” to Rafe.

“Tu,” Rafe said to her, taking in her injuries with sympathetic eyes. “He’s the one who figured out you guys had been kidnapped by Oklahoma wolves. I wanted to get on the highway, but he’s the one who insisted we look for you guys on the back roads. We might never have found you if he hadn’t—”

“I
need
you to fire him,” Tu said, her eyes wide and fully crazed. Because of the meth or because of the pain—Alisha couldn’t tell.

Rafe looked torn between his injured soon-to-be sister-in-law, who obviously had been put through something very traumatic, and his beta, who had served him well as a sheriff and a friend.

But then Grady signed something behind Tu.

Rafe replied with a gruff nod of his head. “Okay, I accept your resignation, Grady. Effective immediately.”

Tu’s head swung around toward Grady, and she stared at him so long, Alisha wondered if her sister might recant her demand that Grady lose his job over this.

But when she finally opened her mouth again, her words were laced with acid hate. “This is your fault,” she whispered. “And I will never forgive you.”

Then she swayed on her feet. And passed out.

THE LONGEST DAY of Alisha’s life ended with her sitting cross-legged on the floor of the Wolf Springs clinic, with her her sister’s head in her lap, next to her sons, whose sleeping bodies were snuggled against Rafe’s chest and legs. The boys, having already adjusted to the mores of this time, had stayed in their human forms as they passed out, one by one, using various parts of their father as a human pillow. But Tu was in wolf form now, a process that had required Doc Fisher to shoot the youngest Alaska princess up with a medically approved stimulant in order to wake her, and then give her a huge dose of sedative once she was in wolf form so she could sleep while her external and internal wounds healed.

Five years ago, Alisha wouldn’t have dared to let a wolf lie on her lap. Even the most refined werewolf with the most genteel background would rip apart a human or wolf in human form without a second thought and then eat the carcass along with his buddies. But living in the Viking Age, where most of the wolves were trained to remain in control of themselves, even in wolf form, had made her more trusting. Also, with the amount of sedative Doc Fisher had given Tu, Alisha doubted her sister would be waking up any time soon.

“Do you think if we give her a few days to calm down, she’ll be open to letting Grady stay on as sheriff?” she whispered to Rafe, who was sitting on the floor beside her with his back against the wall, stroking the hair on Nago’s head, just as she stroked the gray and black fur on Tu’s head.

Rafe had been the one to finally tell Alisha the full story of what had happened to Tu while she had been in Old Norway, what had gone down between her sister and the former Oklahoma heir to the throne, how he had died, leaving his brother, Grady, the only person currently eligible for their mange state’s crown.

Rafe shook his head. “Truthfully, this has been a long time coming. Grady should have gone back to his kingdom town when his brother died. I think what happened to Tu was the kick in the pants he needed to finally step up. I mean, I’ll miss him. But he’s an alpha now, and he needs to get his pack in line. He knows I won’t accept anything less than the death of the wolves who kidnapped you and Tu. Either he takes care of it, or I do.”

A cold chill ran down the Alisha’s back. So either Grady took control of the Oklahoma pack or Rafe went down there with a pack army. A crown accepted. A state-to-state war avoided.

“And so the Game of Wolves continues,” she intoned with a wry twist of her lips.

“Alisha, this is all for the best. The Game of Wolves, as you call it, wasn’t invented to make our lives harder. This is our culture, these are our ways. The rules have been put in place for a reason, and when we adhere to them, they can actually make our lives easier, go more smoothly. When we don’t…”

He didn’t finish that sentence, but it wasn’t a big leap to figure out he wasn’t really talking about Grady and his hick horror show of a pack anymore.

And neither was she when she said, “Maybe it would just be nice to see a decision that went against our ways work out. Like you getting engaged to Chloe, or Grady deciding to stay your beta—it seems whenever anyone tries to make their own damn decision, it blows up it their face. I don’t like feeling like we don’t have any free will.”

She expected him to argue with her. Argue with her like he always did, but instead, he gave her a thoughtful look.

“I don’t like it either. Me coming to find you, it wasn’t just about the child I thought you’d taken from me. That was a big part of it, but it was never exclusively about that, or even because you’d pissed me off. I fought against it. Alisha, you don’t know how hard I fought against coming after you. I tried to convince myself to let the five years pass. I went to parties and stared at eligible she-wolves, willing myself to feel anything for them, even one spark of attraction, so I could prove you didn’t still have a hold over me, that just because I’d wanted you more than any other she-wolf didn’t mean I had to be with you.”

Alisha’s heart stuttered inside her chest. “You wanted to be with me more than any other she-wolf?” she said. “You mean more than any other she-wolf aside from Chloe, right?”

The look on his face was grave indeed when he answered. “Alisha. More than
any other
wolf.”

Her throat went dry and it took her a couple of tries to ask, “How long? How long have you felt… that way… about me?”

“A long time,” he said. The answer came with a flare of sadness on his part. “Right after you turned eighteen.”

“But you’d been engaged to Chloe for two years when I turned eighteen!”

He looked at her, and a new emotion crept in, an emotion she’d never before associated with Rafe. Embarrassment.

“That's why you were so angry all the time whenever I came to visit, why you were such a jerk to me and especially to Chloe,” she realized out loud.

He shook his head. “I was the opposite of a jerk to Chloe. I did my duty and I kept my promise, even after it became clear to me she was no longer the she-wolf I wanted.”

Her brow knitted in confusion. “But she told me the whole story. How crazy jealous you got when the Viking came forward to our time, how you kept sniffing her to see if she was aroused by him-even though unheated wolves don't give off arousal scents.”

“I know they don't give off arousal scents.”

“Then why did you-?”

“Because I wanted her to want someone else. Because I was that desperate for her to want someone else.” She could hear the embarrassment in his voice now, could feel in her own gut how reluctant he was to share any of this with her. “The truth was, I wanted her to give me an excuse to end our engagement, so I could make my pledge to you,” he said.