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Benny-wolf showed him a picture of a knife. He frowned again. A knife? Like the one the other day? His wolf agreed. His wolf was anxious now, desperate to get there. Benny held onto control firmly. I know stop signs, he reminded the wolf. The wolf didn’t care.
Now! the wolf demanded.
Benny decided ignoring speed limits and stop signs might not be the worst thing that could happen.
The gate to Wolf’s Head was open as he pulled onto the street. Benny was grateful, although it worried him. It shouldn’t be open.
He blasted across the lawn, saw tracks to the right that went through the flower beds and followed them around the house to the backyard. An awful lot of very quiet young men stood around the edges of the lawn, watching the tableau before them. Benny considered ditching the bike, then remembered he had a passenger behind him. He stopped, steadying the bike until his passenger hopped off, and then Benny made a run for his brother and Jessie.
He saw Jason beeline toward him, but he ignored the man for now. Right now, he needed an update. “Tell me,” he ordered Duncan who was standing back a bit.
“Angus grabbed her. He had a knife. She switched her hands to claws, grabbed him, and dropped,” Duncan said succinctly. Benny blinked a bit at the description. “But he nicked her. Hardly even broke the skin. But the poison must have been more potent than what Jameson used on me — or maybe it’s the location, the jugular vein. The poison is going directly to the heart.”
“And Dennis and Michel are doing the same treatment as before?” Benny asked.
Duncan nodded. “Then Ryder got here, and they carried him to her. Titus demanded that they put Ryder practically on top of her — bare skin touching, he said. And it does seem to help.”
Now how did Titus know that? Well, he was an old wolf, and as Okami said, if you lived a long life, you could be many things — or learn many things. Benny set that thought aside for later. And he would ask, he promised himself. Well, maybe he’d remember.
“The key is to keep their heart rates steady and let them sync with each other,” Benny told the two doctors. “Michel? You weren’t in the room with Abby and Akihiro. But that was what happened. Their heart rates became erratic. We thought we were losing them, and then Abby came into the room where Akihiro was and crawled into bed with him. Their heart rates steadied, and Akihiro began to heal.”
Dennis looked up at him. “Steady the heartbeats?” he said slowly. Then he looked at Duncan. “You’re the hoarder — do you still have that metronome Julie used for piano lessons back in the day?”
Duncan shrugged. “Probably still sitting on the piano,” he said. “You want it?”
Dennis nodded, and Duncan headed toward the house. Benny watched him go, and the pieces finally clicked into place. He caught up with the man. “You’re a submissive wolf yourself, aren’t you?” he asked quietly.
Duncan looked at him. “Yes,” he said. “It’s why John wanted me to accompany him to the New World, centuries ago — I was one of the few wolves he could tolerate having around. And God help me, I thought I could moderate his worst impulses.”
“He knew?”
Duncan nodded. “Although no telling if he remembered all these years later,” he said. “Things get foggy after a while, you know? And I didn’t talk about it. But it’s why I never challenged him for Alpha. Submissive wolves don’t make good pack Alphas.”
No, they didn’t, Benny conceded. “But it’s also why people kept making their way to your table to tell you things. And why you took all the McKenzie widows and orphans in, and John didn’t.”
Duncan shrugged. He went inside another small salon off of the main entry and grabbed a metronome off the piano there. It was just a small device, that emitted a steady rhythm for pianists to master a new piece by. Would it work? Benny didn’t know, but it was an inspired idea to try. “I am what I am,” Duncan said. “But most of the time I think being a submissive wolf is a curse, not the blessing my birth pack thought it was. Maybe it will be different for Miles. A different time. And he’s got unusual gifts. He was actually able to talk to Jessie through their pack link. I can’t do that.”
“Might be Jessie who allows the telepathy,” Benny replied absently.
“Telepathy doesn’t exist,” Duncan said, the automatic response all shifters had to the word. Benny thought that was interesting.
“Then what would you call it when Ryder and Jessie talk through their mate bond?” Benny asked. “And you know they do. Or the flow of emotion from Alpha to pack? How is that not telepathy? It’s just a word, Duncan. And you’re not the only shifter who automatically denies its existence, even though they know it’s happening right before their eyes.”
Duncan glanced at him sideways but didn’t comment. They stepped out onto the back lawn, and Jason was waiting for him. “We’re going to have a flame-out like you wouldn’t believe if she doesn’t make it,” Jason murmured. “She did it, you know — she made the same links that Mei did.”
“She what?” Benny stopped and stared at the assistant security chief. Duncan just nodded at the two of them and continued on across the lawn.
“That dandelion burst?” Jason said rapidly, his eyes focused on the cluster around the two pack leaders, not on Benny. “Probably half of the men here have a link to her. She’s their lifeline, and they clutched it. What happens if she doesn’t make it? We need to be prepared.”
Benny shook his head. “No preparing for that,” he said frankly. “We don’t know what it would do to them. They felt cut adrift when Hansen died because of the loss of employment bonds. And they acted out. What that would mean in this environment? No clue. So we aren’t going to worry about that.”
Benny looked around at all the worried men. “We’re going to have faith that she’s going to pull through. Do you hear me?” Benny said fiercely. “You need to have faith, and they need to have faith. It matters. Their good will, focused on her, matters.”
“And we all clap so Tinkerbell may live?” Jason muttered. Benny stared at the man. A less likely man to quote from Peter Pan he didn’t know. “Any ideas what we do with them now?”
Benny considered that. They had roughly 80 men in squads with leaders from the security teams sent up by Hat Island. And roughly another 80 who had just been cut loose. He sighed.
“Jason?” Benny said while he thought about logistics. “We left that lodge on fire, and it worries me. Can you send a team of your security guards up to watch it? Probably ought to be Hat Islanders.” He thought about those footlockers, and grimaced. “And in the bunkrooms behind the main lodge? There were footlockers. I don’t know if there are personal items in them or not, but there could be. And it could be all the links some of these kids have to home.”
