Wolf and Soul (The Alaska Princesses Trilogy, Book 3) (4 page)

Or in this case, she. Grady had seen Tu high before. Drunk too… before the situation between her and his brother came to a head. But this time he doubted she’d volunteered for the needle. No, this was a torture job, and the meth coursing through her system was both keeping her from healing and fueling her into a crazed rage.

If it had been any other wolf, he would have pulled out his tranq gun. Drugged out wolves in pain were a danger to themselves and to anyone unlucky enough to be in their vicinity. But Tu wasn’t any other wolf, so he tried to get through to her again.

“
I no lie. Your head bad because meth. Need doctor. Let me help you
—”

A flash of sudden movement from Tu and then the impact of her cuffed wrists meeting the side of his face. Grady let out a grunt of pain, he knew because he could feel the involuntary response in his rarely used voice box right along with the sizzle of burning hurt where the silver made contact with his skin.

Tu was yelling something at him. He couldn’t quite get it all, but recognized the words “hick” and “inbred piece of shit.”

Then she hit him again. This time on his arm. Weak hits that Grady barely registered, since his brown cowhide leather sheriff’s jacket was protecting him from any damage the silver might have inflicted on him.

Full-on attacking an officer. Protocol said that he should tranq her now. However, he couldn’t bring himself to do that. She was doing her best to hurt him, but it was obvious to him who was in the most pain.

All at once the energy to keep hitting him seemed to leave her body, and she started crying. In an ugly way made all that more wretched when an image of the night they’d first met popped into his mind. The merry twinkle in her eyes, the smile that never left her face, the laughter percolating behind it, like it could come pouring out of her at any time.

“Your fault!” she said again. She was crying so hard, he couldn’t read all the words coming off her lips, but he did understand when she said, “
Your
pack!”

He raised his hands to sign another denial.

But then she gave him the middle finger and walked past him to Rafe who was now standing just a few feet away from them with her sister, Alisha. Unlike Tu, Alisha looked unharmed, the steel handcuffs on her wrists and the more crazed than usual nature of her back length curls the only indication that she’d recently been kidnapped.

Later Grady would find out it was she who had saved her and her sister, taking the tranquilizer gun off one of their kidnappers and tranqing the other two wolves when they pulled over to investigate the commotion. Pretty bad ass. But now Alisha’s face was stricken with helplessness as she listened to whatever Tu was saying to Rafe.

Rafe didn’t like it much either. He shook his head. Issuing the same denials that Grady had but better, telling her that if not for Grady’s instincts and nose, Rafe never would have found them.

But Tu just shook her head and said something else.

Now Rafe looked torn. Tu, Grady realized, must have been asking for Rafe to fire him. And Rafe who had just that morning been urging him to go back to Oklahoma and serve as his own pack’s king, was trying to figure out how to both convince Tu she shouldn’t blame Grady and get Grady to take responsibility for the kidnapping, since Tu had been right about one thing: It was
his
state pack who had done this to her. His pack members, who when left without a king, had beat and drugged Tu.

“
Don’t argue with her,”
he signed to Rafe.
“I R-E-S-I-G-N.”

Rafe looked torn, but in the end he nodded at Grady and then at Tu.

Alisha shook her head, her confusion over Rafe’s sudden acquiescence to Tu’s unreasonable demands written across her face. But Rafe nodded again and made it official. “I accept your resignation, Grady” he signed and spoke. “Effective immediately.”

Tu swung around then and stared at Grady for a very long time, meth and pain radiating from her crazed eyes. And when she finally did speak, her words were so strung out with hate, he didn’t have any trouble reading her lips.

“This is your fault, and I will never forgive you,” she said.

Then with a clumsy sway of her entire body, she passed out.

2

One year later, Thanksgiving

T
u smelled him before she saw him, and before she could stop herself, her eyes went to the doorway of the Colorado kingdom house’s large dining room. Even though her mother had put her at the children’s table, claiming she’d be more comfortable there, she could still see him above the heads of everyone at the adult table, filling up the doorway.

He was no longer wearing the brown sheriff’s uniform of the Colorado Beta, Tu noted, but he still looked like the beta she’d first met in this very house. Uptight and grumpy, like he was poised to bring the law down on anyone who crossed him.

The noisy conversation at the adult table came to an abrupt halt, and both Alisha’s and Janelle’s eyes flew straight to her. Worried. Always so worried when they looked at her.

But Rafe, the consummate king, rose from his seat as if a very special guest star had just entered the room.

“Grady, buddy” he called out and signed. “What are you doing here? Are you going to join us for dinner? We’ve got more than enough food.”

Alisha turned to Rafe then, and Tu didn’t have to be a psychic to know her middle sister was probably telepathically screaming at Rafe that he couldn’t invite Grady to dinner, because it would make Tu uncomfortable. Her poor, fragile little sister wouldn’t be able to handle his presence at dinner. Tu didn’t know what made her feel worse, that Alisha might be painting such a sad picture of her in Rafe’s mind or that it was true. If Grady stayed, she’d have to find an excuse to leave the room, even though they’d just sat down and Rafe’s father, Dale, had only finished the prayer a few minutes before Grady arrived.

But it wasn’t necessary for Rafe to rescind his invitation, because Grady signed something Tu couldn’t see from her vantage point, and Rafe’s face suddenly became very serious.

“Keep eating,” he called over his shoulder to the rest of them. “I’m going to go talk to Grady in my office for a bit.”

Of course, no one questioned him on this. Out loud at least. For all Tu knew, Alisha was asking Rafe all sorts of questions over their telepathic connection. All wolf couples were the same in Tu’s experience. There was the conversation they were having out loud and the conversation they were having with each other.

“Aunt Tu, you don’t like that guy, do you?”

Tu turned back to the children’s table to find her two nieces and three nephews all staring at her.

She smiled at them, feeling a little better just looking upon their cute little light-brown faces. They truly were the greatest joys in her life, the only things that kept her from caving into the great hole she carried around inside of her.

It had been Janelle’s youngest girl, Koko, who’d ask the question, in that quiet way of hers. Shy by nature, she rarely spoke up unless she was worried about you.

Unfortunately, none of her other nieces or nephews were nearly as reserved.

“She hates him,” Knud informed her cousin with great authority. “She gave him no words at Mama’s and Father’s wedding.”

“Why does she hate him?” Sarah asked, leaning in. Tu didn’t want to call her oldest niece a terrible gossip—but she totally was.

Knud just shrugged, the long corkscrew curls he refused to let anyone cut rustling as he did so. “Our Fenris says you can’t know what does make a she-wolf angry if you can’t mind-talk with her.”

Although this observation, from their former sovereign, walked a thin line of insult, Tu had to laugh a little. Her three nephews had spent their first few years in tenth century Norway before coming back through the Colorado time gate to modern times. They’d adjusted better than expected in the year they’d been here, taking to modern amenities, like smart tablets, television, cheap books, comfortable clothes, and processed foods, like fish to water. But despite being the sons of the King of Colorado, they still quoted King Fenris of Norway like his word was law. The Viking wolf king was up there with God as far as they were concerned.

“Maybe she hates him because he’s deaf!” said her nephew, Nago, who was cute as a chipmunk and never afraid to bust into a conversation with a totally unfounded conclusion.

Rafesson, the oldest, and the least hotheaded of the triplets—he’d been the first to request a haircut upon coming to the future—turned the cool, judging eyes of the king he was destined to become on her.

“Our Fenris says it’s not honorable to hate people for being different.”

“I don’t hate him because he’s deaf,” Tu assured him.

“Good,” said Nago, “Because Mama’s deaf, too.”

Tu looked at him, confused, and Rafesson explained, “She can’t hear us when we don’t ask for things politely.”

“She can hear you. She’s just pretending not to hear you because she doesn’t want you to whine.” Sarah was quick to let him know, the six-year-old version of snopes.com.

“No, it’s not pretend,” Nago insisted, always quick to defend his mother’s honor. “Mama’s really deaf!”

“I’m telling you, it’s a trick!” Sarah insisted right on back.

Tu gave it one, two years tops before Sarah became that kid who started informing other kids that there was no such thing as Santa Claus.

But sweet little Koko brought the conversation back from the brink of myth-busting chaos.

“Aunt Tu are you okay?” she asked. “Do you need a hug?”

Then before Tu could answer, all the children were out of their seats and hugging her anyway. And though Tu would never have confessed to them the ugly reasons why she’d had such a bad reaction to Grady entering the room, she accepted their comfort. She loved each and every one of them dearly, and these little angels somehow made everything feel better.

But they also made it hard. She thought of the gun she’d bought at a human store a few days ago, when she’d woken up by herself, with no one else’s scent on her body but her own. The scent of her former mate and baby had become undetectable for most people months ago, but not for her with her super nose. It had taken almost five years for the scent to finally completely fade.

But in going, it had left something unbearable behind… a hole so big, she could barely breathe when she wasn’t in the presence of the children she’d help raise, much less go on with the bad copy and paste job her life had become.

“That’s so sweet of you guys to give your Aunt Tu a hug!” came Janelle’s voice, light and sweet. “But we need to talk to her for a few moments.”

Tu looked up. Both her sisters were standing above the children’s table now, looming over her in a way she knew wouldn’t get much better when she stood up.

Alisha and Janelle had both inherited their mother’s height, while Tu had stalled out at five-foot-six, yanked back by their Eskimo heritage. She used to be proud of her relatively short stature, filling up the missing inches with personality, just like her dad, who only came up to his wife’s nose. But that personality was gone now and as she followed Janelle and Alisha into the hallway, she felt like a child trailing behind her taller parents.

She peeped at her actual parents as she left the room, but her father was having a low conversation with his long time best friend, Rafe’s father, Dale. And her mother—well, her mother averted her eyes when Tu passed by, as she always did, like Tu was a walking car wreck and she was too polite to stare. It occurred to Tu if she tried to tell any of her nieces and nephews that she used to be Grandma Wilma’s favorite daughter, the one she considered most like her own self, they’d laugh in her face. She could just hear Rafesson now, “Our Fenris says it’s not honorable to lie.”

As soon as they were out of earshot, behind the doors of the large ballroom, where the Colorado kingdom house hosted their larger parties, her sisters turned to her. Save for their height, they didn’t look much alike. Janelle’s was the lightest of them all with delicate features and a long willowy frame. While Alisha, who was only slightly lighter than Tu—a sienna brown to Tu’s russet—took after their mother. She was plus-sized and built like a proverbial brick house, all tits and ass to the point that it would have been hard to guess just by looking at her that she had earned her doctorate and was now one of the most respected she-wolf historians in the North American territories thanks to her time-traveling adventures. However, as different as her two older sisters appeared on the surface, they wore matching looks on their faces now. The same worry they usually had, but also something else… a distress she’d always associate with anything having to do with Oklahoma.

Tu knew before they even opened their mouths that the wolves who’d kidnapped her and Alisha the year before had finally been found.

And she was right. Alisha reported back from Rafe that after nearly a year long search through all the Oklahoma pack towns for their three kidnappers, Grady had found them outside of Wolf Hole, a pack town on the southern reaches of the state. According to Grady via Rafe, the three weres had all been found together in a trailer, needles still in their arms, a bad batch of meth in their veins. In the end, Grady hadn’t had to hunt them down and kill them, because they’d done it themselves, courtesy of their addiction.

Janelle rubbed both of her sisters’ arms when Alisha finished talking.

“Can I get you anything,” she asked them. “Anything at all?”

Alisha shook her head. “No, I just want to go back to the dining room and be with my family.” She looked at Tu. “We’re both still here and that’s all I care about. Good riddance to those assholes.”