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“Coffee?” Rufus asked, looking relieved, which was odd. Rufus had been Alpha for many years, so to see him so rattled about something was unusual. It had to be bad if he needed Tanner’s help to resolve it. They had a relationship now, but it wasn’t as close as it had been. Hardly surprising given he'd kicked Tanner out of the pack.
“Yeah, thanks.” Rufus swore at the coffee machine and mashed a few buttons, and eventually it produced some reasonable coffee. Not as good as ours, but passable.
“So what’s going on, Rufus?” Cole asked, speaking for all three of us.
Rufus sipped his coffee and then cleared his throat. “In truth, I’m not sure. Girls are going missing. Three from the Snake pack, so far, a couple more from a pack over near Cedar Falls, and as of last week, one from this pack.”
“Who?” Tanner asked in surprise.
“Lily.” We all looked at each other. Lily was just 16, the daughter of one of Rufus’ trusted betas, Hamish.
“Any chance she’s just acting out?”
“That’s what we figured when she didn’t come home the first night, or the second.” He sighed. “You know the girl, she’s a terror. But she always comes home. Still, she’s been going off the rails more than ever lately, and shortly before she took off, her and Hamish had a massive row, which was why he didn’t raise the alarm straight away.”
“Does she have a boyfriend?” I asked. It was still possible she’d run away if there was a guy involved.
“Yeah, she was seeing some waste-of-oxygen human from the valley, a kid called AJ. He’s a low-level street thug. I went down there with a few of the boys and we had a chat. He swore blind he hadn’t seen her for three days before she left. He said he’d been busy, and that she was unhappy with him.”
“And you believed him?” Tanner asked. Like me, he likely thought the kid had something to do with this. If Lily was anything like her mother, Eleanor, she probably thought whatever she had with AJ was true love. Eleanor had always been a romantic, a fool for love. Which was why she ran off with the son of a preacher when Lily was one.
Talk about a cliche. Luckily for Lily, Hamish was a good man, and he didn’t step away from his responsibilities. Not having a mother around had had an effect, though.
“Not 100%, no, but without torturing the little bastard, it was all he was willing to tell me.”
“Hmm.” Tanner’s response spoke volumes. Either he knew of AJ or he was planning a fact-finding trip imminently.
“So you think the disappearances are linked?”
“Yeah, I do. I’ve been monitoring the news. No human girls have been reported missing. Only shifter girls, which suggests whoever took them is aware we live under the radar and that any girls who disappear won’t trigger a major investigation.”
He was right. The local cops never got involved with our business, and the feds definitely didn’t. Not unless something really major went down, which almost never happened because we didn’t like to draw attention to ourselves.
“What do you want from us?” Cole asked, his coffee forgotten.
“Can you talk to your contacts, Tanner? They might know something.”
The door opened and Hamish walked in. He’d aged at least ten years since we last saw him. His hair was now mostly gray, and he sported deep circles beneath his eyes. It was obvious the guy had barely slept since his daughter went missing.
“You guys gonna help?” he asked brusquely.
“Yeah, I’ll go down into the valley and have a word with this kid tonight, then speak to Carlos.”
“Don’t kill the kid,” Rufus warned. “I don’t need that kind of mess in my backyard.”
Tanner looked slightly affronted. “Rufus, I don’t casually murder teens. Give me some credit.”
Rufus shifted in his wide leather chair and fixed Tanner with a hard stare. “Yeah, well, just be careful. If he dies, the cops will start asking questions.”
Tanner huffed with irritation. “I’m not an idiot.”
Rufus just grunted. He knew as well as we did, Tanner’s temper had a nasty habit of getting the best of him sometimes. He also knew he had no control over Tanner. Not any more.
A lot of water had gone under the bridge since Rufus kicked him out of the pack, and fences had been mended. But Tanner had a long memory. While he was willing to attend social events and help out when asked, either for a good cause or a decent amount of money, there wasn’t much love lost between him and Rufus. Or any of us, for that matter.
We kept the lines of communication open, but none of us were interested in rejoining the pack. Wolves were social animals, but we had each other. And now Eva too.
It was more than enough.
