Wolver's Rescue
Authors: Jacqueline Rhoades
Tags: #romance, #paranormal romance, #shifters, #paranormal adventure romance, #wolvers, #wolves shifting, #paranormal shifter series, #paranormal wolf romance, #wolves romance
Sometimes it’s not the wolves that pose the
danger...
There’s a downside to living in a secret
society. Someone has to ensure it remains that way. ‘Bull’ Bulworth
is that someone. His current assignment: track a young man who has
an unrecognized wolf inside him and eliminate the problem before
the truth about Wolvers is exposed to the human world. It’s a
simple and straightforward assignment until he meets a woman who
makes him think crazy might be contagious.
In her own words, Tommie
Bane is nuttier than a pecan tree. There’s a voice in her head
telling her she is something other than human, and a creature she
swears is running around inside her body. Just when she’s at the
lowest point in her weird and nutty life, she meets a man who tells
her it’s all real. Should she listen to the voice of reason or to
the voice in her head that keeps shouting “
Mate
”?
What do you have to lose when you’ve already
lost your mind? For Tommie, it could be her life.
WOLVER’S RESCUE
By
Jacqueline
Rhoades
Copyright © Jacqueline Rhoades 2015
Published at Smashwords
Cover art: E-Covers by Georgi
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My Thanks
And my love
Gene Rhoades
After all these years
I still love you
More miraculously
You still love me
“
Don’t you bare your teeth
at me, young lady,” the voice admonishes; a woman’s voice, firm,
but not harsh. Her finger wags with the warning. “Bad things happen
to little girls who let their beast out. Now, here’s your bankie.
Nothing to cry about.” She smiles and blows a kiss.
The angry little girl shows her teeth again,
this time adding a curled lip and a snarl to the mix. She rubs the
little square of green cloth against her cheek for comfort.
Suddenly the world is spinning and tumbling
in a terrifying cacophony of screeching metal, screaming voices,
and thunderous booms. The little girl screams and the world turns
red.
The woman’s eyes snapped open, but she held
her body still until she could identify the source of her sudden
wakefulness. The stink of fear surrounded her and the coppery taste
of blood settled on her tongue where her teeth had nipped its tip.
She’d been dreaming again, though she had no recollection of this
recurrent nightmare.
On the far side of the room, a square of
faint fluorescent light shined though the window cut into the door
of the hated storeroom. The wire mesh imbedded in the glass
diffused the light further. It didn’t matter. A little light was
all she needed. Her night vision had always been excellent.
Shadows took form. Dark, hazy shapes became
the dreaded metal table and the chairs her tormenters used while
keeping her on hands and knees. Her knees and palms were callused
with the constant scrape of rough cement.
Her head cocked, a minute movement that freed
her ear from the arm curled up and over it. There was nothing wrong
with her hearing, either. The clock on the wall ticked off the
seconds, though the minute hand hung useless at the six. She had no
idea if the hour hand was accurate or if it was day or night. She
no longer cared. The doctor was winning. She was becoming the
shadow that stared at her with golden eyes and bared its teeth at
her in that other, and more familiar, recurring dream.
Pipes creaked somewhere beyond the door to
this basement chamber and the whir of machines vibrated in the
walls. She listened for sounds of human approach; footsteps,
voices, sometimes cruel laughter. Hearing none, she relaxed as much
as her confined space would allow. She rolled to her back and
stretched her cramped joints. A tiny twitter overhead brought her
eyes to the awkward flutter of batwings in the far corner where
high wall met ceiling.
It left the corner and flew about the
basement room, darting here and there in pretended freedom,
catching almost invisible insects and the flies that usually
hovered around the food bowl in the corner of her cage. The bat
showed no recognition of her existence, yet she considered it a
friend. It was the only living thing she’d seen in a very long time
that didn’t cause her to writhe in pain or shrink in humiliation.
Its miniscule brain had little room for thought or reason, yet some
sixth sense of preservation made it fly to its home and hiding
place each time their jailors approached. She envied her fellow
inmate’s ability to disappear. It was a valuable talent when there
was no hope of escape.
The little bat was as much a prisoner as she
was, though her captors had no idea the creature shared her
basement prison. It lived behind an ancient picture on the wall.
The filthy floor disguised its droppings. The paper behind the
cracked glass of its home was brittle and cracked in some places,
and stained with the brown marks of dampness in others. The
illustration behind the printed words had faded to an
unrecognizable wash of pale blues and greens, though the words
themselves were still clear enough.
“
Blessed
is he that
considereth
the
poor:
the
LORD
will
deliver
him in
time
of
trouble.
The
LORD
will
preserve
him, and keep him
alive
; and he shall be
blessed
upon the
earth:
and thou wilt
not
deliver
him
unto the
will
of
his
enemies
. PSALMS
41: 1-2”
The young woman would have laughed at the
sentiment if she’d remembered how.
~*~
William ‘Bull’ Bulworth took a seat in one of
the two chairs facing the mahogany desk. It was a large chair, a
comfortable chair, and it suited his long legs and broad body just
as it suited the large desk and large, comfortable office. Yet he
felt uncomfortable sitting in it, like he was on display. The three
solid walls and the bank of windows shielded from the sun by
slatted blinds reminded him of a cage. Cages and wolvers didn’t
mix. He didn’t know how Eugene Begley stood it day after day. Bull
felt the need to pace and fought it.
His Alpha, and therefore his boss, must have
sensed his discomfort because he tapped a button on the control
panel that ran along the edge of the desk and the blinds rose. Each
of the five windows consisted of wide, clear panes separated only
by a sash and looked out over an expanse of green circling an
irregularly shaped pond with trees in the background; a
landscaper’s rendition of rustic woodland.
“
You want ‘em open?” Begley
asked about the closed windows in that easy going mountain drawl of
his.
A wolver couldn’t lie to his Alpha, so Bull
didn’t try. Instead he changed the subject.
“
You got a job for me or are
we just here to shoot the breeze?”
“
Hell son, you’re pricklier
than a naked woman in a briar patch. Never known you to be mean
tempered.”
“
If you wanted touchy-feely,
you recruited the wrong wolver.”
The little wolver looked so affronted, Bull
snorted a short, humorless laugh.
“
I ain’t ever recruited the
wrong wolver,” his Alpha snapped. “Wore out a few, maybe, but never
chose a wrong one.”
There were three things that made Eugene
Begley’s small pack unique: all the members had abilities normally
found only in pack Leaders or Alphas; their pack had no females, so
only grew through recruitment; and they all followed Eugene Begley
who was half their size and twice as powerful as any Alpha any of
the pack members had ever met.
Eugene was known as a matchmaker and his
ability to locate Alpha’s Mates, those women who would guarantee
the perpetuation of the Wolver species, made him welcome in packs
all over the continent. But matchmaking was what he did for
pleasure.
“
Makes my real job easier to
swallow,” he’d told Bull years ago. He was referring to their
service to the Convocation of Wolvers, the governing body of their
part man-part wolf species.
At the time, Bull hadn’t understood. Living
among, yet separate from their human counterparts, Wolvers had kept
their secrets for hundreds of years and it was his job to see that
it remained that way. While he couldn’t claim to take pleasure in
his work, he knew what he did was necessary to protect the Wolver
community from discovery.
All these years later, Bull understood his
boss perfectly. He saw his job as a necessary evil and it was
getting harder to swallow with each passing year. He’d become the
very thing he hunted; an outlier, a statistical anomaly that
resided outside the norm.
The majority of wolvers lived in packs with
an Alpha at the head and a hierarchy of positions within the pack
as defined by its Alpha. For the most part, these packs formed
solid and supportive communities that satisfied both the human and
the wolf.
Some wolvers went rogue either because they’d
betrayed their pack in some fashion and were judged Outcast, or
because they couldn’t stand the strictures imposed by their pack.
Oddly, these wolvers tended to join up into loosely bonded
groups.
The very worst of these packs or rogue bands
still sought the primal wolver need to live in close proximity to
others of their kind. Regardless of their lifestyle choices, the
vast majority of wolvers understood the need to keep their species’
secret.
There were a few who’d never felt comfortable
in the company of others. They kept the Primal Laws, caused no
problems, and lived out their lives as lone wolvers.
Eugene Begley’s pack fell somewhere in
between and he often referred to them as his pack of lone wolvers.
When packs were disrupted or bands of outlaw rogues attracted the
attention of human authorities, Eugene Begley called his pack to
action.
There was another kind of wolver that folks
didn’t talk about much. They were William Bulworth’s specialty.
Begley held up the manila folder containing
the next assignment. “You don’t have to take it, son. You just got
back from a job.”
