Wolf Song
A Year and a Half Earlier
JOEY CARLYLEsat on the bus and stared at his phone, wishing he was better with tech.He’d spent years in special ops—a Green Beret, nominally, but so much on the fringes, practically a killer for hire or a tracker to paint the target on the deer.
He’d spent part of his childhood on the res, learning how to hunt and track and move silently, all from his mother’s father.He’d been able to sneak out of a lover’s bed from the age of fifteen, and he’d never been caught.
But dammit, he wasn’t great at keeping his father from tracking his goddamned phone.
We know you’re stateside, Joseph.Stop fucking around and come home.
Except his father’s home had never, ever been his home.The reservation had been his home until he’d turned eight and his father had shown up, wanting to “give the boy every opportunity.”Joeyhadopportunities, he’d thought then.He had opportunities to track game, to learn the different smells of the wind, the temperature of water as it formed ice in the tracks of his prey.Opportunities to learn how to cook venison and squirrel, and how to find shelter, how to hide in knotholes so small not even badgers could find him.
So no.Stevie Carlyle’s mansion, the place Joey’s mother had been working when Stevie had knocked her up, was never going to be Joey’s home.He’d visited his grandfather as often as possible after his grandfather—pressured, Joey was sure, by Stevie threatening to take resources away from the already struggling reservation—grudgingly allowed Joey to go.
“Learn to walk in the white man’s world,” old Joseph told him gravely.“You can’t hunt prey when you don’t understand how it walks.”
And Joey had gotten it then.His father, his father’s fancy wife, their employees, the kids he went to private school with—they were prey.
It was so much easier to be alone when you could think of your tormenters, the people who exiled you to corners or to your room or to the far end of the playground, as prey.
But you did not think of your prey’s den as a home, and Joey had never, ever fallen into that trap.
A thing that had probably saved his soul as he’d learned more and more that his father was prey in the same way a venomous snake was prey.
You only hunted a cobra or a cottonmouth if they were out to kill your livestock or your family.Otherwise you simply allowed them to be—and stayed away from their den.
Joey and his father had been engaged in warfare from day one.He’d been shipped off to military school at fourteen and had joined the Army at eighteen for a reason.And while his father had stopped sending him texts during his time in the service, Joey had known it would take him a minute, maybe two, to learn that Joey was stateside again.
But not without a plan.
I have a job,he texted.LEO.Stop texting me if you don’t want them to track your phone.
He’d lucked out.“The debacle,” as his COs had called it, had happened near the end of his stint, and before it had occurred, he’d been thinking “Hey, I’ve been here for six years, and I’ve learned a lot, but I’m pretty much done.”After the debacle occurred, he’d been recovering in the hospital and a persona non grata, which was when he’d gotten a letter—an honest to God letter—at the base in Bogota where he’d spent most of his deployment.
It had been from one Clint Harding—and it hadn’t listed his rank or anything, although the man waslegend,and Joey knew he’d retired just before being promoted to colonel.That legend said it was toavoidbeing promoted to colonel, which made Joey worship him a little more.
I run a new alphabet agency, the SCTF, and your CO tells me you’d be an outstanding new addition.We need somebody with your particular skills, but somebody who can show deference to civilian well-being.Major Corrigan told me that you managed to keep an entire village safe from your own troops.He said that the US Army may not appreciate your inability to follow a bad order, but that he did, and he felt the entire human race would benefit from you having a place where your common sense and compassion are allowed precedence.I think my agency can be that place.
And Joey, who was not prone to shows of emotion, felt his eyes burn.They’d threatened tohanghim as atraitorwhen he’d come in from that op, but everything he knew about predator and prey and the evil of senseless slaughter of deer told him that those people had needed to be protected, not mown down.He didn’t give a rat’s ass that the president himself had signed the order.Everyone knew that guy was full of shit anyway.
And while Major Corrigan hadn’t said anything—other than telling the three lieutenants out for his blood that they were in the wrong and Joey was welcome in his unit anytime—the fact that he’d been keeping a quiet eye out to make sure Joey landed after he’d practically been handed his papers wasn’t lost on him.
He recognized kindness because his grandfather had been kind.His grandfather had passed before he’d enlisted, but that didn’t mean Joey wasn’t grateful.
Even predators recognized the signs of an alpha, taking care of the young in its den.
And the letter from Clint Harding indicated the same thing.They’d be the best of predators, wolves or mountain lions who didn’t kill for sport but for food, and who cared for their helpless ones.
Joey had that letter in his knapsack, along with the paperwork showing he’d passed his Federal Law Enforcement Training Center courses in the last month.
Joey Carlyle had actually been stateside for a month, but he’d only in the last week been officially exited from the Army.Oh, his father must have some deep tentacles in the information superhighway, because he wouldn’t have dared text his son at FLETC.
You’re my son, Joseph—you belong in the family business.
You may have spawned me, but I will never be your son.
And with that he decided he didn’t need technology right now.He had the address of Clint Harding’s SCTF office in Manhattan, and he’d secured an apartment there using his own money, which he’d long since divorced from his father’s, although he’d made steady withdrawals from his trust fund, which he’d placed in his own accounts.
