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“Nearly a dozen? Plus me?” Miles was obviously one of those young people who ended everything with a question mark. It made Benny crazy. He vowed to personally break him of the habit —probably by building up some self-confidence, he acknowledged, but he’d do it.
Benny nodded and gestured for him to continue up the stairs. Miles opened the top door, and they were out into another long hallway. Yup. Old motel. The backside of the building still had multiple doorways —bedrooms, Benny assumed. Miles was looking at the front side of the hallway where there was just one door, and down the hallway, a second. Communal rooms? Probably.
Miles hesitated. “I don’t....” He trailed off.
Benny didn’t know either. He looked at Ryder and Jessie. Jessie sighed and kicked off her shoes. Benny chuckled. She had the right of it, though. If she was going to defend the Alpha, it would be in wolf form. Actually.... “What about Jessie shifting out here?” he said softly, his words almost soundless. No point in giving their presence away.
Ryder considered it and looked at his mate. He raised an eyebrow? Jessie grimaced and nodded. She pulled off her sweats and shifted — she was getting very quick about it. Benny knew she still was uncomfortable being naked around male wolves. And that probably more than anything else told him how abused she’d been. Young wolves weren’t body shy — no wolf was, really. She’d learned to be, though.
She needs therapy. Know any good therapists around? Benny jeered to himself.
But for now, she’d solved the problem herself. Wear as few clothes as possible, strip and change in almost one move. Good enough. Ryder bent and picked up her sweats, folded them, and set them on top of her shoes.
So now they had the big bad Alpha and his werewolf companion. Benny grinned inwardly. Jessie was a smaller wolf — grays and browns except for blazing gold eyes —but she still weighed 150 pounds or so and stood thigh-high next to Ryder. Any shifter-wolf inspired caution, if not fear.
“I’m going in first,” Benny decided. “Titus, you and Miles bring up the rear.”
Ryder nodded. “Do it.”
Benny took a deep breath. This was always the most dangerous of any op —going through doors. Still, he was unlikely to die from whatever they could manage to throw at him. The door opened inward. He gave it shove and took two steps into the room.
The room was trashed. He noticed a couple of black eyes. Most of the men were shirtless, and some bore scratch marks. Although all of them were in human form right now, that obviously hadn’t been the case earlier. Not good. Not good at all.
“I am Benny Garrison, intelligencer of the Northwest Council of Alphas,” he said formally. Formality usually helped, he’d found — or at least, it never hurt. “I have the pleasure of introducing you to the new Alpha of the Penticton pack, and his Second.” He was going to avoid Jessie’s name and gender for as long as he could, he decided. And if he got 10 minutes to himself, he was going to have to craft a story about the first female Second — a companion to the story about the first female Alpha, he thought with a smile.
Ryder came into the room, and surveyed it sourly, making his disapproval obvious. Benny stepped back to watch. His brother knew how to deal with hotheads —brutally, if necessary.
“I’m Ryder,” he said. Benny noted he was using that name, not his family names like he had with the pack at the Last Chance. “I’m now the Alpha of the Penticton pack.”
“Not my Alpha,” someone muttered. “We didn’t re-enlist, apparently.”
“Do you know why not?” another voice asked, softer. “My head hurts. I hurt. Why am I no longer pack?”
“Those are good questions,” Ryder approved. “And that’s what we’re here to figure out.”
“You don’t know?” the first, rougher voice sneered. Benny singled out the speaker. A big man, but young. Well, they all were, weren’t they? That was the big mystery. The way he stood told Benny he was ready to fight, but he really didn’t look skilled at it. He was rocked back on his heels, his fists clenched.
“I just had 700 bonds transfer to me,” Ryder pointed out. “So, no, I didn’t know some didn’t, until Miles came to tell me. Smart man. As opposed to you all who have trashed this room. Does the phrase ‘don’t shit where you eat’ resonate at all?”
“Everything is irritating,” a third man said. He glanced at the bigger man next to him. “And people who are usually mildly irritating are really getting on people’s nerves.”
“No one knows what to do,” the soft voice said. Benny spotted him. He was crouched down by another man lying on the floor who looked like he’d been on the losing end of a fight. “Do we need to leave? Can we stay?”
“Those are also good questions,” Ryder said with approval. “Part of that depends upon you. What do you want to do? What do you offer the pack? But first, let’s talk about why you didn’t transfer to me like the rest of the pack did.”
“They don’t want us here,” a man said. “And truthfully, we don’t much want to be here. If I had wanted to work in a dead-end job in a podunk town I could have stayed home.”
There were some murmurs of agreement. “They promised us Vancouver,” the soft-voice man explained. “But something changed, and we’ve been in limbo. We were supposed to head to Vancouver two weeks ago. But no one tells us anything.”
Benny took over. This was his work, after all —intelligencer and therapist. He figured they all needed one or the other. “First, I think you’re hungry,” he said. “And that’s never good.” He looked at Titus. “Could you and Miles go after pizza? Miles? Surely there’s still some place open?”
Miles nodded. Titus hesitated, looking at Ryder and Benny, and then down at Jessie. Yes, Benny thought, they should have more guards. They’d have to get better at that. “Give him a card, Ryder,” Benny ordered.
Ryder rolled his eyes. “He’s my older brother,” he told the young wolves. “Some things don’t change, even when you become pack Alpha.” He pulled out his wallet and handed over another black debit card. Titus took it, glancing down at the name. His eyes widened. “He know you have this?”
Benny snickered. “He does,” Benny assured him. Cujo might be a bit bewildered about the charges that came in on it. Well, probably not. He doubted if Cujo even looked at the statements — those were debit cards to his personal accounts. He’d handed Ryder a handful of them when they’d started out from Vancouver with all of those people to care for.
And now they had more people.
