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“That wasn’t a request, Hank. Out.”
If he’d had his tail right then, Hank would have slinked out with it between his legs. But as he passed me, our eyes met, and I knew the talking down hadn’t been enough.
Less than twenty-four hours in Louisiana and I’d already made an enemy.
Was there a prize for that?
Chapter Nineteen
Werewolves like to drink.
A lot.
We were an hour into the welcome-wagon fiesta and the Louisiana wolves had worked through enough beer and scotch to put a Sons of Anarchy biker gang party to shame. Even Amelia and Magnolia were drinking their scotch neat and could hold their liquor like troopers.
Three wolves in jean jackets with matching black beards and identical blue bandanas had loaded about seven dollars worth of quarters in the jukebox and were singing loudly and triumphantly off key to Garth Brooks’s “Friends in Low Places”.
Country music and drunk werewolves. This night couldn’t get any better.
On the other hand, when I looked past my bitterness, it was nice to see not everyone in Callum’s pack was a hateful racist like Hank. Werewolves, in that sense, were a lot like vampires. Who you were after the monster claimed you was the same person you were before, only the after picture had more fur or fangs. Hank had probably been raised by the nearest Ku Klux Klan Grand Dragon or whatever, and once that kind of hate blackens your soul, it can’t be undone.
I had to wonder, if he hated me for associating with a half-black kid, how did he deal with having a black man in his own pack? It must have been a hard pill for Hank to swallow. I hoped like hell the African-American werewolf was higher ranked because it would serve Hank right to have to follow the orders of someone he would normally treat like garbage in the street.
I was all for that kind of metaphysical justice.
Nursing my Budweiser, I tried not to draw attention to how little I was drinking. If I’d turned down the booze in a crowd of hard drinkers this close to my wedding, the immediate assumption would be that a tiny werewolf pup was taking up refuge in my womb.
Fat chance on that one.
Truth was, I was the cheapest drunk this side of a group of sixteen-year-old girls with a four-pack of Mike’s Hard Lemonade. My metabolism worked too fast, and I went from zero to drunk in as much time as it took to ask, “You wanna make it a double?” Sometimes it was great, but right now it was a huge nuisance.
So I sipped the shitty beer I’d been offered then held the nearly full bottle up every time someone new tried to get me one and said, “Sorry, so-and-so just got me a refill.”
Morgan and Jackson both appeared to be following my lead, because every time I looked over, Morgan’s whiskey was only half-empty, and Jackson’s beer bottle label was always torn in the same place. I was glad to see they weren’t immediately trusting our Southern hosts and were keeping their guards up.
Lucas, on the other hand, was taking on the task of fitting in with a certain gusto.
That is to say, he was hammered.
You can turn a twenty-seven-year-old man into a king, but you can’t take the twenty-seven-year-old out of the man. Desmond still played Xbox, and Lucas still drank with the gusto of a frat boy at social events. He was making merry with the locals like a pro.
Dominick sat beside me, using his bodyguard duties to avoid yielding to peer pressure. Too bad my pack-protector position didn’t give me a similar out. The slight blond had tipped his chair back, and his eyes were half-closed, giving him the appearance of being near sleep. I wasn’t fooled.
“He looks like he’s having fun, eh?” I asked.
“Eh.” Dominick laughed at me. “You had a wee Canadian slip-up there, McQueen.”
“Sure, sure. Watch yourself or I’ll aboot Chesterfield touque poutine.”
He dropped his chair back onto all fours and gaped at me, his cheeks flushed with amusement. “What just happened there?”
“Oh, sorry, you don’t speak Canadian.”
“Neither do you, apparently, because that wasn’t a sentence in any English dialect ever.”
“Sure it was.” I sipped my beer and smiled for real for the first time since we’d arrived in Louisiana. “I said I’ll beat your ass to a pulp if you ever insult my Canadianisms again.”
“Nonsense. Everyone knows Canadians are a peaceful people.” He was laughing now.
