Wolver's Rescue (24 page)

“
Boy, you’ve got it bad.”
The old man cackled at Bull’s sour looking response.

“
All I’ve got is a dozen
headaches and one pain in the ass.”

“
Yep,” Samuel continued,
ignoring Bull’s remark, “I remember those days. Can’t eat. Can’t
sleep. Can’t think of nothin’ but sliding between the sheets. And
other things,” he added with a wink. “It can drive a wolver crazy.
It ain’t no secret you’ve already tasted her sweetness. What’s your
wolf got to say about it?”

No, it wasn’t a secret. He was unmated and so
was she. They could sleep wherever they wanted. That didn’t mean
Bull was about to give details. It wasn’t anyone’s business but his
own.

“
My wolf doesn’t know which
end is up.” He winced when his wolf said otherwise.

“
Mate
.”

Shit. Bull bounced his forehead on the arms
that were crossed on the table, thinking they might as well be a
brick wall. There was no room in his life for a mate.

“
Well, son, for your sake
and hers, I hope you’re wrong and the Alpha don’t show tonight.
Give you one more night of sweet heaven before we all go to hell.”
Samuel snickered again.

“
Alpha. The Alpha,” Bull
groused because it beat thinking about Tommie and what he was going
to lose. “What the hell is the wolver’s name?”

Samuel shrugged. “Damned if I know. Damned if
the others do either. We’re omegas. Nobody tells us anything. They
come and go so fast, it doesn’t mean anything anyway. Easier just
to say Alpha and don’t bother with names. Won’t matter after
tonight. Either he’ll be dead, or we will.”

After looking so defeated with Bull’s
assessment of the morning’s confrontation, Samuel became almost
lighthearted when Bull explained that they had no choice but to go
to war. His excitement infected the others. Bull tried his best to
make them understand the seriousness of what would likely happen.
They listened carefully to his words and grinned anyway. He was
beginning to wonder if it wasn’t Tommie who was infectious. These
wolvers seemed to have caught a case of crazy.

“
Samuel,” Bull tried again,
but the old man held up his hand and stopped him.

“
I know what you’re going to
say, but you can save your breath. You think we don’t understand.
Well, we do. It’s you who don’t.”

“
Then make me.” The thought
of leading this unconventional bunch to their probable deaths
scared the hell out him. He should at least know why they were so
happy about it.

“
We’re probably going to die
tonight, but see, we don’t mind. Like you said, the Alpha was going
to get us one way or another. This way, and for the first time in
our lives, we’re going to go down fighting. We may get beat, but
we’ll do some beating of our own. We may lose, but we’ll do it with
our heads held high. I had some of that, before I lost this.”
Samuel held up his scarred stump. “Losing my place in the pack hurt
more than gnawing off my paw. Seeing my children grow up as omegas
hurt worse. There was no way out and no way up for me and my
family, and all I did to earn that punishment was get myself caught
in a leg hold trap.”

“
You can’t go into it
believing you’re going to die, Samuel. If you do, then the battle
will be lost before it’s begun.”

“
For you, not for us. We’ve
got nothing to lose.”

“
The pups,” Bull
argued.

“
Will be fine. I know your
woman will take good care of them. They’ll have a better chance
with her than they will with us. That’s why you gave them to her
isn’t it?”

Bull nodded, rather than lie aloud to the old
man, though he supposed what Samuel said was true. Tommie would
take good care of those pups and she would have Eugene Begley’s
number in her pocket if it all went south. Eugene might ignore
Bull’s phone calls, but he wouldn’t ignore Tommie’s, not after
Tommie told him Bull was dead. But that wasn’t the reason he’d
assigned her to their care.

There was still the question of her sanity
and whether or not she would turn feral. She was functioning well,
surprisingly well. He’d expected more fallout from her time in the
cage. So far, so good, but the final test would come when he took
her over the moon. There was a chance that once she shifted to
wolf, her wolf would take over completely, and she wouldn’t come
home. Exposure to the more aggressive side of wolver behavior, the
tearing, the ripping, the blood, would make it even harder. He
wasn’t willing to risk it.

He needed to be with her when she ran for the
first time. He couldn’t do that in the midst of a battle and he
couldn’t take the chance of having both her and Eli running wild at
the same time.

He also wouldn’t humiliate her in front of
the other wolvers by saying all this aloud, which was how he ended
up getting his ears chewed off. The sassy little bitch didn’t
understand her place in pack hierarchy. She didn’t get that when an
alpha of his stature gave her a direction, her only answer should
be “Yes, sir.”

Instead, Tommie’s answer was, "Oh no you
don’t. I’ve got a stake in this battle, too.”

He tried to give her the hint. “Been in a lot
of battles, have you?”

She didn’t take it. “Well, no,” she said, a
little hesitant, but before he could add to her doubt, she turned
to Cora. “Have you?”

And Cora, damn her, told the truth. “Not once
in my life, but I figure it’s one of those things my wolf knows how
to do and she doesn’t need any say so from me. I’ll just let her
rip.”

Tommie did that little head bobble thing.
“You see? My experience is the same as everyone else.”

So Bull had tried to take a different route.
“This isn’t your pack, spitfire. Besides, you’re skinny as a rail.
They’ll snap you like a twig.”

Tommie put her hands on her hips and stamped
her foot. At him! But then she stuck that foot in shit. “That’s not
true. I’m strong. You know I am. Why, just last night you said my
legs had such a grip on you...oops” She closed her eyes and turned
beet red.

“
Just do what you’re told,
spitfire,” he’d said without too much of a snicker.

“
Fine,” she said. The tone
wasn’t anywhere close to “Yes, sir”, but a win was a
win.

“
You think you won that
round, don’t you, son?” Samuel was chuckling again.

Bull nodded solemnly. He was a man who took
no shit from his woman.

“
You don’t know much about
women, do you, son?” Cackling like an old hen, the old man leaned
across the table. “When a woman says fine the way your woman said
it, she means anything but fine. She means this discussion is over.
For now. She’ll come back later and bite you in the ass with it
when you’re not looking.”

Bull let his head drop. “Just shoot me,” he
said as he swung it back and forth.

The nerve. The nerve! She wasn’t a part of
this pack? Like he was?

Tommie stomped down the dirt road not much
caring how ridiculous she looked to anyone who might be watching.
Each footfall was an emotional expression. She imagined each crunch
underfoot was Bull.

Snap her like a twig. Hmph. She was in a damn
sight better condition than half those women. And... and... She
poked her finger in the air. If he could snap those wolfy fingers
of his and take those women over the moon, why couldn’t he take
her? And what were all those grins and glances about among the
women? When he said he could give them the power to shift, they
looked at him like he was a rock star who’d invited them backstage.
Even Cora was impressed.

“
Yes! We got ourselves an
Alpha,” she’d whispered under her breath. Tommie didn’t think
anyone else heard or paid attention to the utterance what with all
the cheering and clapping going on.

What the hell did Cora mean? They threw that
word around a lot. Tommie knew the Alpha with a capital a meant
leader, boss, prince-of-the-pack, or whatever. The little ‘a’ alpha
was a powerful male or prime male as one of the women called it. So
yeah, she could see Bull was an alpha. He was smart and bossy and
that hunky body of his certainly was prime male flesh.

It wasn’t the word itself that bothered her.
It was how they used it. These wolvers had a lexicon of words and
phrases that were completely unfamiliar to her. It wasn’t their
definitions. It was their usage. ‘He didn’t come home’ could mean
from the store, or from ‘going over the moon’ or ‘going over’ for
short, depending on the context of the conversation. Alpha was more
complicated. ‘The Alpha’ was easy. An ‘alpha’ was harder. They
sounded the same and to some extent could be used interchangeably.
Everyone understood but her. She needed to ask them to use
bunny-ear quotation marks for capitalization.

It was all very confusing and aggravating and
throughout Bull’s tactical meeting, Tommie felt like she’d been
shoved aside. Everyone else was excited. They were going to fight
for their freedom from oppression while she was relegated to
babysitting. It was so not fair!

And now she was tramping down the hill to
find a surly teenaged girl because she’d stupidly volunteered for
the job.

“
She’s down at the
bathrooms,” one of the cubs told her.

“
She’s always down at the
bathrooms,” said another.

“
It’s like her face is stuck
to the mirror down there,” said the third.

Tommie stopped her stomping and took a deep
breath. It would be hard to be the only teenaged girl in that
group. Macey had no one to share that bathroom mirror with, no one
to talk about hair styles, clothes, or makeup, or anything else
young women her age cared about.

She took a deep breath, pasted on her most
congenial face, and immediately spied Macey in the girl’s second
favorite place. She was sitting in a tree outside the bathrooms,
legs dangling from a lower branch, and reading a paperback
book.

“
Hi, Macey. What are you
reading?” She asked it with her most nonthreatening smile in accord
with her personal Rules of Engagement when meeting new clients. Put
the client at ease with a short conversation about an innocuous
subject.

The girl looked down at her and curled her
lip. “None of your damn business and why would you care?” She
closed the book and placed her hand over the cover.

Not an auspicious start, but an opening
nonetheless. Rule two said find common ground.

“
Oh, no particular reason. I
just like to read and since I didn’t get to bring much with me, I
thought you might let me borrow it.”

The look Macey gave her said if she fell in a
well, Macey wouldn’t loan her a rope to haul herself out. When the
girl surreptitiously turned the book over to effectively hide the
cover, Tommie had an idea. Make a connection through shared
interests.

“
I like racy romances,
myself. You know what I mean, hot sex and to-die-for heroes. I
remember how my mom used to bitch about my inappropriate reading
material. Inappropriate, that’s what she called it.” Tommie’s laugh
was scornful. “The way she said it, you’d think I was reading porno
with pictures or something. I mean, it wasn’t like I was six years
old.” She shook her head at the stupidity of adults.

There was a flicker of interest in the girl’s
eyes and then, like the door closing, it was gone, but that little
opening gave Tommie hope.

Macey frowned. “Why are you here?”

“
Here talking to you or here
with your pack?”

“
Both. And it’s not my
pack.”

Tommie chose to ignore this last. Technically
it wasn’t Macey’s pack or any pack at all for that matter, and
Tommie knew how good teenagers were at what her mother called
splitting hairs. It was easier to ignore the comment than argue
about it.

“
You know why I’m here. I
was with Bull when we got Samuel and Eli out of that place. We
brought Samuel home.”

“
You didn’t bring my father
home, though, did you? And it was your fault he was in there in the
first place.”

Her fault? “Macey, they took me when I went
to see about your father. I didn’t send him there.”

“
You didn’t send him, but it
was your fault. It was because of you that doctor was looking for
us.”

“
Honey, I didn’t know what I
was. I grew up outside.” Tommie used outside as the wolvers did,
meaning outside the wolver community.

“
That’s probably why he
wants you, too. You’re an outsider,” Macey sneered.

“
Who wants me?” Surely the
girl couldn’t be jealous. Macey had only just met Bull. Tommie
smiled to herself at the thought. She’d only just met Bull, too,
and he was kind of a book-boyfriend kind of guy.

“
It doesn’t matter.” Macey
waved her off with a roll of her eyes and the same stupid-adult
look Tommie had used before. “Now, what do you really want? Because
this stupid let’s be friends routine isn’t working.”

It was a setback, but the ice was broken.
Tommie got right to the point. “It’s about what happened this
morning.”

Macey’s sneer turned into a lip curl. “You
mean how if you hadn’t stuck your nose in where it didn’t belong,
I’d be out of here?”

“
No, about how you didn’t
give me the information I needed. Someone could have been hurt and
I got in trouble for your mistake.”

“
So?” Macey’s eyes lifted to
the side, away from Tommie face.

“
So?” Tommie repeated. She
was losing what little patience she had left. “Someone could have
died.”