One Deadly Bite

Chapter 7

“Close the door and hang up your jacket,” Aly called the orders to me from the kitchen. She had an uncanny sense for knowing what was happening in her house even if she couldn’t see it. Before she’d bellowed, I’d been microseconds away from dumping my coat on the floor.

I followed her orders to a T and then walked into the kitchen, following the sound of Aly’s voice and the scent of cooking food. I had a good nose—a matter of necessity in the pack, human or not—but I couldn’t quite parse what I was smelling into its component parts. “Marinara sauce,” I mused out loud. “Peanut butter. Onions. And …”

“Oreos,” Aly declared, popping one into her mouth. “You want?” she asked after she’d gulped hers down.

I took the proffered Oreo and surveyed the rest of the kitchen. “Cravings?” I asked.

Aly shrugged hopelessly.

“Where’s the steak?”

It didn’t matter what Aly was craving, there was always meat involved. The baby had turned her into a carnivore, and Aly, who couldn’t stomach even the sight of a rare steak eight months ago, ate them daily now. Such was the price of a Were pregnancy. That, and the fact that instead of kicking, like normal babies, Aly’s son Shifted forms. A couple of months ago, I’d joked about selling tickets to watch her stomach during the full moon. Now, with the baby’s birth closer all the time, it really wasn’t funny anymore.

“I’m going to be fine,” Aly said, reaching up to rub my shoulder with one hand.

“You always do that. It’s like you can read my mind.” I meant it as a complaint, but it came out nostalgic, like part of me was preparing to look back fondly on that habit when she was gone.

“I’m going to be fine,” Aly said again. “You know me, Rose. Have I ever backed down from a fight?”

Never. Before Callum had thrust me into her care, she hadn’t even been a part of the pack. She’d only just found out that werewolves were real and that more often than not, they took human women as their mates. For an orphaned kid she’d never even met, Aly had abandoned her own life and risen to the challenge. She’d taken Callum’s Mark and mastered it, insulating herself—and me—from most of what it entailed. There wasn’t a Were within a hundred-mile radius that she hadn’t stood up to on my behalf, Callum included. I thought that was why he’d given me to her, instead of to one of the other Weres. He’d made her Pack so that she could take care of me, knowing that she’d be unaffected by dominance hierarchies, knowing that she wouldn’t put up with someone giving me crap just because they were dominant enough to think that they could.

“You’re going to be fine,” I said, repeating Aly’s words. I believed it. I really did. I just forgot that I did sometimes. I’d seen too many women die in childbirth. Female werewolves were extremely rare, and human bodies weren’t meant to carry werewolf pups.

“Where’s Carter?” I asked, changing the topic of conversation and hoping that my thoughts would follow suit. “It’s not like him to miss a meal.” Aly’s husband was an eater. And for the past eight months, he’d been quite the hoverer as well. Food plus Aly meant that he should be here, and even though I hadn’t quite gotten used to the fact that it wasn’t just me and Aly anymore—or the idea that when I slept, there was an adult Were sleeping down the hall—Carter’s absence struck me as fundamentally strange.

“Carter’s eating out tonight,” Aly said. “Here, taste this.”

I was so caught up in trying to figure out why Carter was “eating out” and what Aly wasn’t telling me that I almost took the bite she offered me. At the last second, I came to my senses and realized that whatever concoction Aly’s cravings had led her to create, I really, truly didn’t want any part of it.

“Your loss,” she said, spooning the goop, which definitely contained both the peanut butter and the marinara sauce I’d smelled, into her mouth. She followed it with an Oreo.

“I’m going to throw up,” I said, gagging—and not just for show.

“It’s all part of my master plan,” Aly replied. “Cravings are just the pregnant woman’s excuse for making everyone around her as nauseated as she is.”

“You’re evil, Aly.”

She smiled and serenely took another bite. “I know.”

I took refuge in the refrigerator and nosed around until I found something edible. Popping the container into the microwave, I turned my attention back to Aly, who was very good at distracting me—just not quite good enough.

“Your husband’s not home for dinner, even though he hasn’t gone more than ten feet away from you since you hit seven months. Callum decided to start enforcing my curfew and assigned an entire team to keep an eye on me. You’re making pregnancy jokes to distract me from asking questions.” I ticked the observations off on my fingers as I spoke out loud. “Something’s going on.”

“If I asked you to please, as a personal favor to me, stay out of it, would you?” Aly asked.

I busied myself by checking on my microwavable mac and cheese and didn’t reply.

“Didn’t think so,” Aly sighed. “What if I told you that I was tired and cranky and very pregnant, and that I needed you to do this for me, because I can’t take the extra stress right now?”

Now that was a low blow, and Aly knew it. I didn’t want to be worried about her, and she didn’t want me worrying about her. “You’re going to be fine,” I said, trying to respond the way I would have if I really wasn’t concerned at all. “And telling me to stay away just makes me want to know more. It’s obviously pack business, and there must be some danger involved, otherwise Callum wouldn’t be pulling his ‘trouble’s afoot’ routine. But it can’t be too dangerous, because Carter’s involved, and Callum would never risk him this close to your due date.”

Aly didn’t say a word. I tried to read her face, but she had an ability matched only by Callum’s to hide her emotions completely.

“Do you really need me to leave this alone?” I asked softly. I couldn’t risk hurting her, even if we both wanted to pretend that there was nothing—and could be nothing—wrong.

“Yeah, Rose, I think I do.”

“Fine,” I said. “I’ll leave it alone—for now. But I’m not going to like it, and once that kid is born, and you’re fine, I’m getting a tattoo, piercing my belly button, and eloping to Mexico with someone you’ve never met.”

She laughed and then stuck another Oreo in my mouth. As I was chewing, she tweaked my hair. “Rose, Callum’s got you under surveillance. You wouldn’t make it a foot into a tattoo shop before someone yanked you back out.”

“You never know,” I replied. “Tonight, my guard was Macbeth, and I happen to know for a fact that he thinks tasteful body art is quite the thing.”

Aly responded to my retort with one of her own, and we went back and forth for so long that it didn’t occur to me until much later that she had assumed that my security team would still be in place by the time the baby was born. And that really made me wonder, because our pack had a tendency to take care of trouble very quickly. Threats were eliminated the instant they were identified. Callum ran a tight ship, and I couldn’t imagine what kind of pack business would necessitate my being inside by dusk every night for a month or more.

Despite my promise to Aly, I couldn’t stop thinking about it, and by the end of the week, I’d come to the realization that the weirdest part of all of this wasn’t that something had everyone on edge. It was the fact that nobody would tell me what it was. The pack didn’t just want me safe. They wanted to keep me in the dark.

And ever since the night the Big Bad Wolf had come knocking at my parents’ door, I hadn’t been overly fond of the dark. Not metaphorically. Not actually. I liked seeing what was laid out in front me. And if Callum and Aly and Macbeth thought they could keep me blindfolded indefinitely, they were wrong.