Wolf and Soul (The Alaska Princesses Trilogy, Book 3) (6 page)

“You solved that case,”
Rafe signed back.

“Don’t think so. Never find boss.”

Rafe shook his head. “I know Alisha said the wolves mentioned someone telling those guys to kidnap them, but she had just woken up from a tranq. She could have easily heard wrong—no Grady, let me finish,” he said when Grady began shaking his head and raised his hands to reply. “Believe me, I’m disappointed those guys OD’d before we could kill them ourselves, but it’s over. It’s time for you to let this go and concentrate on getting your kingdom in order. If you marry well, you don’t have to stay a mange state.”

But Grady kept shaking his head. It wasn’t just what Alisha had told him. It was also that things had been wrapped up too neatly. When he’d gone into the trailer after receiving the tip from the Wolf Hole’s pack leader, Grady hadn’t been surprised when he found out who was behind the kidnappings, three wolves who used to run with Luke before unofficially moving to Wolf Hole to arrange half-moon parties on Luke’s behalf. Half-moon parties had been Luke’s bright idea—though the half-moon part was just marketing. In truth, they were pop-up raves he deejayed, usually held in barns, ostensibly as a way for the alpha prince to bring a bit of fun to Oklahoma’s otherwise sleepy pack towns—but really as a way to sell drugs en masse. Luke got to act the part of rave deejay while his crew—mostly friends he’d grown up with—sold X, weed, oxycontin, meth, and other controlled substances to party goers.

And if that hadn’t been enough to seal the case, Brant, the guy who’d been one of Luke’s closest friends growing up, had left a text message to his father on his phone, ranting about what that “black bitch” had done to Luke and what a fuck in the behind it had been staying one step ahead of Grady all year, and could his dad wire him some more money.

Brant, like most of Luke’s friends, had always had more pack pride than brains, like football players who beat up a stranger wearing a rival team’s t-shirt but couldn’t do simple division. It made complete and total sense that Brant would kill himself on a bad batch of meth while hiding out from Grady because he’d tried to avenge Luke’s death with a botched kidnapping. But Grady couldn’t let it go. He’d been a sheriff for five years before accepting the Oklahoma crown, and this case did not feel closed to him.

“
Want talk to Alisha again,”
he signed to Rafe.

Rafe’s face closed.

“No,”
he signed back. “You’ve already gone over the case with her enough. She doesn’t need to relive it. Plus, she already has a lot on her plate with the research she’s doing into what happened in Old Norway after she and the boys left.”

Grady could understand why Rafe didn’t want to bring Alisha back into this. His family was finally in a good place after years of turmoil and Grady didn’t blame Rafe for not wanting to mess with it. But…

“Maybe YOU should talk Tu.”

Rafe actually laughed at him.

“Why laugh?”

“Tu doesn’t really talk to anybody these days except the boys. And never about the kidnapping. She won’t even talk about that with Alisha, and they were in it together.”

“Tu won’t answer my questions. Maybe if you ask.”

Rafe shook his head.

“Tu is an excellent nanny. The boys love her. If you think I’m going to try to do anything that makes her uncomfortable, you clearly don’t know how hard it is to find a good nanny.”

“If so good nanny. Why at cabin?”

Rafe shrugged. “It’s Thanksgiving weekend. If she wants to go to the cabin, that’s fine.”

Grady frowned.
“Storm coming.”

“Storm’s coming tonight, not right now. The cabin’s only a couple hours away. She’ll make it. And if she doesn’t come back by Sunday night, we’ll go dig her out.”

Rafe’s nonchalance chafed against Grady’s instincts. The problem with his friend was he’d had a relatively calm year after an epic five. He’d become one of those wolves who didn’t worry too much about his loved ones because life had worked out so well for him.

And maybe he was right. Tu would probably be fine, and even if she wasn’t, she wasn’t Grady’s family. Rafe and his people would take care of her.

“You should worry less about Tu and more about your pack,” Rafe instructed, pointing at the financial report. “I’ve got a lot of matchmaking aunties on my New Mexico side and my mom likes you, so she’ll be willing to help find you someone.”

Grady shook his head. He didn’t like one thing about Rafe’s plan, especially not the part where his friend’s pretty Latina mom, who’d started out as a princess herself in the New Mexico royal family, acted as his yenta.

“No, no, no, don’t bother your mom.”

“Trust me, she wants to be bothered. She loves stuff like this,” Rafe answered, steamrolling over Grady’s protest like he was still Grady’s sovereign. Grady guessed old habits died hard for the king. But still…

The smell wafted through the door just as Grady raised his hands to protest again. It was a rich and tangy smell, so potent, it felt like a living thing entering in through his nose and shooting straight up Grady’s shaft. Like an olfactory version of Viagra.

Grady immediately knew what it was. The queen, Rafe’s mate, was in second heat. And even though Grady was no longer sheriff of Wolf Springs, he sprung into action immediately.

First he got out of the way, just in time to miss a collision with Rafe who jumped over his desk and ran out the door. The tall and stately king was nowhere to be seen as his wolf rushed towards its mate. However, Grady remained calm. Save for one time five years ago, she-wolves going into heat had been the one thing that didn’t exacerbate his beast—he got a hard on, yeah, but nothing like what could happen when he let himself get too angry. Lucky for both him and Rafe, or else he might be trying to beat Rafe to get to the Queen of Colorado. A she-wolf’s heat was a primal smell, meant to attract male wolves, any male wolf still fertile enough to mate her without discrimination.

It was a good thing it had been Grady meeting with Rafe and not some other wolf. That meant the only other people in the house were Rafe’s and Alisha’s parents and Mag and Janelle. The older parents wouldn’t be a problem since they were out of age range for mating—same went for the children. But Mag and Janelle…

Crashing sounded from downstairs and Grady ran out the door.

He wasn’t surprised to find all five of the Alaska family’s prepubescent descendants huddled with their grandparents in the corner of the breakfast room. The table was knocked over and there were plates and silverware everywhere. Apparently Rafe had found Alisha at the breakfast table and carried her off. And according to Dale, Mag had done the same, picking Janelle out of her seat and hauling her from the room without a word to his daughters shortly after Alisha’s heat had erupted.

Grady shook his head surveying the mess and children his two friends had left behind. Everything was all nice and civilized in royal wolf circles until somebody went into heat. And then you got a real lesson in the differences between werewolves and humans.

Grady got everyone cleared out of the kingdom house easily enough, all while Rafe and Alisha and Mag and Janelle did what mated wolves did when a second heat came on unexpectedly. It was too late for Mag and Janelle. They’d all be fucking like bunnies until Alisha got pregnant again—hopefully not with triplets this time.

Falling back into old protocol, after he got the kids and their grandparents situated, he called in the current Wolf Springs beta sheriff to let him know what was going on so he could keep an eye on things—though the entire commercial and civil center of Wolf Springs sat between the kingdom house and the town’s residential neighborhood, so there wasn’t too much chance the smell would leak out and scramble the senses of other wolves as it sometimes did when a she-wolf went into heat in a more populated part of town. The sheriff should have an easy time keeping everyone away from the kingdom house while their state sovereigns gave into their inner beasts, and he knew Rafe’s mom would make sure food got delivered to the house so nobody starved.

Grady’s job (which was technically no longer his job) in Wolf Springs was done. And when he climbed back into his Chevy Silverado, he knew he’d have nothing to feel guilty about if he headed back to his Oklahoma kingdom town, the place he was actually in charge of. According to the newsfeed he’d read this morning, the storm had passed over and was now headed up toward the eastern part of Colorado, the part Tu was headed to.

If he took the right route, he’d probably be able to avoid it all together. However, when he got to the highway, he decided at the last minute to go north on I-25 instead of south. And though he cursed himself for the next two hours, he never once made a move to turn back or even stop.

He didn’t stop until he got out of his truck in front of the kingdom’s log cabin, which stood on a bluff overlooking the South Platte River. He knocked on the front door, feeling like an idiot. No answer, and he could only smell Tu’s scent faintly inside the house. Like she’d been there and had decided to leave again.

“Good,” he thought. Maybe she’d used her brains and decided to turn around. He might have even passed by her on his way here.

Yeah, most likely that was what happened. He should head out. If he left now, he might be able to beat the storm and get back to Oklahoma before nightfall.

However, he didn’t move. He was in human form, but he could feel the hair on his wolf standing up. Maybe he’d just check around back where he knew Rafe’s family usually parked their cars. Make sure hers wasn’t there, and then get back in his truck and drive down to Oklahoma. Where he belonged. He started around the house, feeling like a damn fool, wanting to kick his wolf for making him not only drive here but also check to make sure Tu’s car wasn’t there, even though common sense told him it definitely wasn’t.

However, common sense was wrong. There was the Audi sitting in the car deck behind the house. But if her SUV was here and Tu wasn’t in the house, where was she?

That was when a shot rang out, piercing the overcast sky like thunder and sending all the birds scattering out of the nearby trees.

5

T
u watched overhead as all the birds flew away with fearful caws while on the ground, an assortment of woodland creatures ran to get clear of whatever menace had decided to invade their abode.

Tu felt bad for frightening them. If she had been a Disney princess like the ones she’d seen while growing up, she might have told them in a high falsetto that she meant no harm to them. Only to herself.

But she wasn’t that kind of princess. In fact, in her current all-black ensemble, including a wool cap to cover her French braids, most people wouldn’t have been able to tell she was a princess at all. Right now, she wasn’t pretty or resilient or brave enough to overcome what had happened in the past with an “oh well” smile and a song.

And she definitely didn’t feel brave. At all. Just scared she’d be out here for another hour, working up the courage to pull the trigger, only to pull the gun away from her head again when she shot.

The reverberation from the Colt 45’s kickback was still ringing through the bones of her arm. She now wished she’d purchased a smaller gun, but the gun store only had the 45 caliber silver bullets in stock, so she hadn’t had much of a choice. Too bad it was daylight and only a weak crescent moon expected to appear that night. She sure could have used the extra strength that fuller moons gave weres to handle the gun.

For a moment, the fear of actually going through with her plan overtook her, but then it ebbed away, pushed out by the sorrow that had become even more constant when the scent of the pup she’d carried had disappeared. She had to do this. She couldn’t live with herself, not after what her stupidity had caused. She had to push past the religion she’d grown up with and find the strength to do this, even if it meant she might go to hell. Truth was, there was no place in the afterlife that could be worse than the hell she found herself in anyway.

She wished, not for the first time, that she could take a bottle of pills or asphyxiate or hang herself the way a human would if she wanted to shuffle off her mortal coil. Using a gun felt so violent. But she wasn’t a human, and as the princess of the state with the highest suicide rates in the union, she’d heard what happened to weres who tried to kill themselves using human methods. Sometimes they died as intended, but more often than not, they morphed into wolf form while unconscious, healing before their human bodies could die from the trauma.

She raised the gun again, let herself feel it’s heavy weight in her hands. No, if she was serious about doing this, a silver bullet was the only thing she knew for sure would do the job. She couldn’t wimp out this time. She had to do this. She had to—

The other body hit her like a mac truck, tackling her to the ground, even as two large hands took control of her gun. In the end, only Tu fell to the hard, snow covered ground while the gun remained with her attacker.

“What the f—” She broke off, when she saw Grady standing above her, his face half-covered by the shadows of the trees—the only things in this patch of forest that were bigger than him.

“Grady?” she said out loud, climbing to her feet. “What are you doing here? Why did you… ?”

This time it was Grady who ended the conversation abruptly, turning his back on her and walking toward the summer cabin, leaving her with no choice but to follow him or stay out here and freeze to death, which probably wouldn’t happen anyway because even if hypothermia set in, she’d just turn back into wolf.