“Failure to thrive,” Bennett said. “Sometimes, if the kid’s not healthy, the hormones that stop the wolf mom from eating the little piglets don’t kick in. So all the wolf knows is that they want the kid, and when you’re an appetite with teeth… It’s why you should never date a wolf.”
“Date a wolfandwork Night Shift,” Marlow finished for her. He frowned at her, but she shrugged it off.
“Is that a rule?” the rookie asked.
“No,” Marlow said quickly. He thought about Cade’s sharp smile and low, rough-voiced proposition—if that was what it had been—and felt that dry catch of flustered interest in his throat… mixed with the blood and the dirt. Maybe it wouldn’t hurt to hear a reminder of precisely what that unofficial rule was about. “Just good advice. Hookups, whatever, that’s your business. A wolf, though, when the moon’s up, they can’t tell the difference between love and dinner. Someone usually gets dead.”
Bennett dropped the butt to the ground and shredded it over the pavement with her boot.
“It won’t be me,” she said. “And don’t be fooled by Marlow’s whole mild-mannered thing. It won’t be him either. So, guess who that leaves?”
Chapter Six
ON THE NIGHTShe made it out to his ranch, Cade woke up sprawled out in cornfields with dew-damp skin. In the city, he woke up in the gutter with the taste of rat in his mouth. It wasn’t an improvement.
Cade cleared his throat, spat, and pushed himself up onto the curb. His ribs ached, the faint twinge of an old bruise, and he lifted his arm to peer down at his side. New scars scraped from his armpit down to his hip, already faded to white against tanned skin as if they’d been there years.
He’d gotten in a fight.
He poked at the scars with his fingers and hoped they were bite marks. His crush on Marlow was embarrassing enough when he was the only one who knew about it. If it turned out he’d hunted Marlow down in his wolf skin, like the hapless lead in some Shakespearean play, he’d never live it down.
Rightnow, of course, that actually felt like a great idea. Cade could feel the sunny, soft-edged fantasy of it swell his chest and poison his mind with dopamine. It would absolutely end with him rescuing Marlow from another wolf and thennot quitedying in Marlow’s arms—he didn’t want to be a Shakespearean hero that much—as the sun came up.
Even for the post-change hangover, that was glowingly optimistic.
The keloid lumps under Cade’s skin mapped out the pattern of a bite mark. So not from Marlow. Although a brief fantasy about what it would be like if Marlow did fight him, someday, left the back of his neck hot and sticky. He squashed it before his cock, stuck to his naked thigh with sweat and sandy mud, could embarrass him.
So he’d got into a scuffle with another wolf last night. Close enough to dawn that he’d not had time to heal all the way. It happened. As far as Cade had pieced together over the years, the wolf version of him was the same asshole he was the rest of the month. Just happier about it. And hairier.
Cade reached up and hooked his fingers into the chain around his neck. The tags rattled as he pulled them up and checked the cold metal and glass were intact. They always were these days, but he still liked to check.
He let them drop back to his chest and rose easily to his feet. Except for the ache in his ribs, his body felt loose and light, freshly reknit back together. Energy fizzed through his muscles, and he felt like he could run back through the streets to the Cold Winds building.
Marlow probably felt, and looked, like shit.
Yeah, he didn’t buy that. Marlow had the sort of bony elegance that just sharpened under pressure, his dark hair tangled and his mouth set in that grim-edged line it fell into when he didn’t remember to soften it. Cade considered the image for a second and then tucked it away for later, when he could decide which of them was going to be shoved into a wall and kissed breathless.
He was easy that way. At least, in his daydreams.
Cade brushed grit off his ass and sniffed the air to orient himself. His nose wasn’t that much sharper than usual—people disputed whether it was a faded remnant of the wolf’s senses or a side effect of being essentially brand new—but he could pick out salt in the air and motor oil. Combined with the office blocks around him, interspersed with shuttered restaurants, he probably wasn’t that far away from the Cold Winds building.
Or he’d made it to LA overnight. But the skyline didn’t mesh with that theory.
He headed for the end of the street that was nearest to him. Halfway there, he saw a woman’s white, bloodstained leg sticking out from under an overturned, dented skip. He hesitated, a stone wedged in his throat as he tried to swallow, as the idea he’d killed someone welled up in him.
Stupid.
He’d killed before. Consciously, in full possession of his senses and morality. A tour in the army and two seasons up north in Alaska as private security at the rigs and refineries, before he’d decided the private sector would be even better if he didn’t have a boss instead of a commanding officer to tell him what to do.
It was different somehow. There was a slow dread to the idea he’d done something without any say or recourse.
Before Cade could steel himself to find out, the toes twitched, and the woman farted. The sound echoed under the skip, and after a second, a slightly amazed voice wondered out loud, “The fuck did I eat last night?”
Cade laughed and broke into a lope.
Kinnock Ave. It sounded familiar. He probably could walk. Instead, he hailed one of the vulture cabs, the back seats practically covered in plastic, that trolled the city for business at dawn.
“You’re putting a lot of the businesses resources into this… favor for the SDPD,” Lem remarked. “What will you do if the board expects a justification?”
