dynamite with a laser beam [part iii]
[part ii]
pushing down on me, pushing down on you | 2009
Laura doesn’t expect to ever see the hunter again, which is stupid of her. Because she wasn’t expecting him, she’s off her game when she opens the bakery on a Wednesday morning and he’s loitering outside with a collection of other businessmen who have become addicted to whatever illegal substance Frank puts in his knishes.
She stands there, one hand on the doorknob, the other on the key still turning in the lock, as he casually pushes away from an olive-colored car that screams rental, his face blandly engaged. He fakes it well, but his eyes-they can’t do anything blandly, and they’re definitely engaged.
In a half-fugue, Laura puts knishes in bags and pours out coffees and accepts twenties and tens and fives and nods thanks to the regulars who tip well in lieu of saying good morning-this is New York, after all-until the investment bankers and accountants have all vanished and it’s just the hunter, stalking forward, hands resting by his sides where he can get quick access to the knife that Laura can see strapped to his hip under his jacket.
“Seriously?” Laura demands. “And don’t spin me any bull about having a knish craving; you don’t have abs like that at your age because you eat knishes for breakfast.”
About two picoseconds later, Laura wants to stab herself for bringing his abs into this conversation; it doesn’t exactly convey that she’s a twenty-four-year-old Alpha with enough poise to watch her own back in a city filled with packs and pack wars.
“I appreciate your concern,” the hunter says, “but I’m here on business.”
“Buy something,” Laura snarls, “or leave.” She’s not even being too aggressive; it’s Frank’s policy, and it’s written in his blocky handwriting on a piece of cardstock above the register. Laura would point to it, but that would require disengaging her claws from the laminate of the counter.
“Odd for a pack to move like this,” the hunter says, leaning forward and propping an elbow on the glass display case. “I’ll take an onion and chive knish. If an Alpha decides to settle and build, she’s not going to turn tail in two years and bolt.”
Laura stops breathing; the control forces her to retract her claws, and then she calmly uses a piece of wax paper to put a chive knish in a brown bag. “Anything else?” she asks politely, shoving the bag across the counter at him.
“Small coffee,” he says, and he continues as she turns her back to pour him a cup. “Unless, of course, you’re not an Alpha, in which case you’re an Omega, and you wouldn’t last long in this city if that’s the case. No one misses a dead Omega.”
With a stiff smile, Laura slams the coffee down in front of him. “The subtlety of your threatening leaves something to be desired,” she informs him. “I have permission to be here from the Alpha of every pack on the goddamn island. If I go missing, they will all miss me.” It wouldn’t be hard for a hunter of his caliber to discover that she’s a Hale; two pointed questions at Hemmingway’s and some skulking on the BioSci department website at Pitt would’ve given him that information.
Ergo, he knows she’s a Hale and he knows she’s an Alpha. With the rest of her family dead, the loss of another Hale Alpha at the hands of a hunter would be considered a shattering of the Code; open season on every Hunter in Manhattan. He doesn’t look particularly suicidal; Laura tilts her head slightly to the right and considers him. Usually she can smell psychopaths-their inability to process emotion makes them dimensionless, boring to her nose.
Nothing about this hunter is boring to her nose. Her nose, along with the rest of her body, remembers the spiked aftertaste of his arousal, the way it had almost smelled like basil; green and spiced.
This line of questioning makes no sense.
“Is that all?” Laura asks.
He stares at her for a long time without blinking. It should make him look like a lizard, but all it does is reach inside of Laura to somewhere that needs warmth and lights a fucking fire under it. “Yes,” he finally says.
“Five ninety-two,” she tells him.
He hands her a ten; she catches sight of the Browning nestled against his side as he returns his wallet to his back pocket, the holster drawing tight along the inside curve of his shoulder. The sight of the holster on the pale grey of his Henley does more distracting things to Laura’s wolf.
“Keep the change,” he says with a small smirk, collecting his knish and his coffee and leaving, the bell on the door tinkling excitedly after him.
Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck
YES, Laura’s wolf thinks, which is not fucking helpful.
~
Laura still has the burgundy Toyota, even though driving in New York makes her want to eat most of the pedestrians and other drivers. She keeps it in the garage in the basement of their apartment building for a truly egregious fee because she needs it once a year for when she drives out to Beacon Hills to check on Peter. He smells strange; not just the burns, which are a tingly kind of sweet, but the complete absence that wreathes him. Peter doesn’t smell like pack anymore. It makes Laura’s wolf shiver and retract into itself.
She wonders if it’s her responsibility, as Alpha, to mark Peter as part of her pack. She’s visited the storage container and read through the books on pack marking, but most of them reiterate the same thing-to truly be pack again, Peter needs to submit and accept her as his Alpha. He’s not really in the best condition to be doing that.
So, in what became a yearly tradition after the shitshow that was the Hale family departure from Pittsburgh, Laura drives to Beacon Hills, timing it exactly so she arrives as visiting hours open and leaves as they end. She sees exactly one person, the primary care nurse, and she spends less than twelve hours total in Beacon Hills per trip, once you factor in how long it takes to scent-mark the edges of her territory. It’s designed to be as painless as possible, but nothing hurts as much as sitting in an uncomfortable hospital chair across from her lifeless shell of an uncle, who smells wrong.
~
Laura doesn’t make Derek come with her. If it were Imogene in that room, eyes locked on empty space, hands resting against the tops of her thighs, nothing would have been able to drag Laura within fifteen miles of Beacon Hills.
~
Two days after she gets back from Beacon Hills, after she spends approximately thirty-six hours glued to Derek’s side, smelling the top of his head and being distracting as he attempts to say something about Anna Karenina that hasn’t already been said by a hundred years of literary criticism, Laura opens the bakery on Tuesday morning and her fortieth customer of the day, during the morning lull between ten and eleven, is a Beta of the Anceris pack.
“Hey, Laura,” he says, slouching through the doorway and scuttling sideways down to the counter where Laura is replacing a stack of medium takeaway cups.
The Anceris pack controls the blocks leading up to the Hudson and out to Ellis Island; they always smell faintly of rotting fish, but that might be Laura’s own prejudices against packs that chose to build their territory in cities. She can’t help but think of them in terms of sewers and human stink and dead things sacrificed for urban development.
A Beta from the Anceris pack showing up at her place of work isn’t exactly a good prelude to anything. “Good morning, Abílio,” says Laura cautiously. The second that she opens her mouth, he cringes and begins to stink of terror. Laura tops out at about five and a half feet on a day when she remembers to maintain good posture, and even if she’s an Alpha she’s still a girl in her early twenties, so Abílio’s mind-numbing fear doesn’t make any sense. He knows Laura, and knows that she’s not the physical kind of dominating Alpha. “What’s up?” Laura asks.
Abílio shrinks even further inside of himself. It would normally be hilarious to watch a thirty-year-old bruiser of a Portuguese enforcer try to become one with Frank’s hideous 1970’s limeade wallpaper, but the reasons why just make it unnerving.
“The Alpha of the Anceris Pack would like to offer greetings to the Alpha of the Hale Pack,” Abílio begins, stuttering, and fuck, formal greetings are never a good sign.
“I accept her greetings,” Laura says, and she moves to flip the sign over the door to ‘closed.’
The folds in Abílio’s forehead smooth slightly. The razor edge of his nervousness blunts slightly, but Laura can still curl her tongue around it. Her wolf wants to taste his pulse and gobble down his terror and submission until he’s just a shaking wreck; her wolf wants to dominate, frequently, but Laura’s human knows the consequences that would follow the destruction of another pack’s Beta.
“The Alpha of the Anceris Pack sends word of a group of hunters gone Code-rogue in Brooklyn,” Abílio says. His stuttering has lessened, even if he still has his head pressed against the wall, hands trembling. “She requests assistance from all local Alphas in eradicating the hunter threat. The kill has been sanctioned by the other hunters.”
There are approximately seven million reasons why Laura should boot Abílio out the door and get on with her business. Laura’s territory is technically three thousand miles away; and, to be honest, she’s not sure she trusts the poorly-defined idea of a kill being sanctioned by other hunters. Derek is stable and doing well at NYU and Laura doesn’t want to risk that for the excitement of a hunt.
On the other hand, a sanction from New York City’s hunter population means that the band really has gone rogue-the bad kind of rogue, the kind that means dead humans and raids justified in terms of acceptable civilian losses-and Laura has a responsibility, as an Alpha, to serve as a protective body. Derek is still young and he’s all that she has left. She doesn’t want to lose him to a group of trigger-happy psychos with access to aconite-enhanced weaponry.
The kill is sweet, her wolf adds. Her mouth tingles with the remembrance of a true hunt-the snap of bone, tearing muscle into long strips, the musky taste of blood still passing through a beating heart. Laura hasn’t hunted since Beacon Hills; she buys all of her meat at Mrs. Govindarajulu’s market down the street from her and Derek’s apartment.
“Yes,” Laura says, hoping that she’s thought this through, distracted by old memories and tastes. “The Alpha of the Hale Pack will provide help in eliminating the rogue hunters.” She can see her irises turn red in the whites of Abílio’s eyes; he blinks and drops to all fours, forced by her presence and his own instinct. The born wolves always know how to respond to an Alpha’s power.
“Return to your Alpha with my message,” says Laura dismissively and Abílio bolts. He’s halfway down the block when the front door finally falls shut.
The rest of the morning is spent wrapping pies in white cardboard boxes and making new pots of coffee and telling a set of hipsters decked out in a dazzling display of poor knitting prowess that no, Frank’s never has had and never will have an espresso machine and if they want a goddamn soy latte, they can hit the Starbucks two blocks away and just deal with their desire for mainstream coffee drinks like normal people.
The door shuts behind the hipsters, two of whom Laura had verbally browbeaten into purchasing pastries, and Frank comes down the steps from his apartment, using the hem of his shirt to dry his hair. He’s kind of stupidly hot-as in the kind of hot that makes people think he’s stupid, like an Abercrombie and Fitch model-and his lips are way too big and he’s got curly black hair that goes everywhere, but he’s also a baking savant and hasn’t seriously hit on Laura the entire time that she’s worked for him, so he’s filed in her books under Pretty Okay.
“Were you raised in a barn?” Laura asks him. “I know you own towels. I’ve seen them on the people I have to Pepper Potts when you abandon them after a one-night stand.”
Frank drops his shirt and presses a hand to his heart. “Laura, darling,” he says, “your concern fairly warms the cockles of my heart. It does.”
A pair of women walking by the window stop and backtrack, fairly obviously watching Frank’s ass in thread-worn jeans as he leans over to pick up a napkin someone had let drop outside of the trashcan. They have a brief, spirited discussion that involves a lot of curling their hair around their fingers and checking their lipstick, and then they open the door, just as Frank ducks into the kitchen behind the register to check on the afternoon baking.
The one on the left visibly deflates. “Oh,” she murmurs involuntarily. Her friend looks similarly stricken. They’ve got successful young professionals written all over them, from their perfect hair to their beautiful shoes-Steve Madden and Kate Spade, good choice and better choice, and Laura may have enough money to buy Kate Spade but that doesn’t make it a practical decision for someone who spends 40 hours a week behind a cash register-and their disappointment makes them alarmingly human. Laura doesn’t want to find one of them behind a Dumpster in Carroll Gardens with a bullet hole in her forehead.
“Frank,” Laura yells over her shoulder, “I’ve got to call and check up on Derek; can you take the register for a second?”
Frank appears in the doorframe like Calvin Klein magic and the women stop looking tired and downtrodden. Laura feels like she’s earned a knish as a reward for her good deed of the day, so she grabs one covered in cheese as she shrugs on her winter coat and unearths her cell from where it’s buried in one of the pockets. New York winters are hardly a concern for a werewolf who can self-regulate her internal temperature, but Laura likes the sensation of wrapping a wool scarf around her neck and buttoning up the front of her coat.
She does, in fact, need to call Derek about the Anceris/hunter mess, so it’s not even that much of a lie. To give her feet something to do and lessen the likelihood of her being overheard, Laura sets her feet towards the children’s playground three blocks away and dials Derek’s number from memory.
He picks up the third ring. “If I fail this exam, I’m going to kill you.”
“You’ll do fine,” Laura assures him. “After you graduate they’re going to name a wing of the English department building after you.”
“19UP doesn’t have wings,” Derek says, and then he grumbles under his breath about letting himself be drawn into a useless argument. “What, Laura?”
“Abílio Anceris came by the bakery this morning. There’s a rogue hunter’s pack in Brooklyn and the packs have received sanction from the city’s other hunters to kill them.”
There’s a long, dark silence during which Laura can imagine the various unpleasant forms that Derek’s face adopts. She knows they spend too much time together-of course she knows that, and it’s probably unhealthy by human psychological standards, but they’re not human-because she can predict down to the second when he finally decides how he’s going to feel about this and takes in a breath to begin to speak again. “Did you agree to join the hunt?”
Her baby brother is the best at sounding bitchily judgey about everything, and she’s not even taking his eyebrows into account right now. “I didn’t have a lot of choice in the matter, Derek,” Laura points out. “We need to keep strong in the face of the other Manhattan packs and there’s no way in fucking hell I’m going to let a group of hunters wander around Brooklyn shooting up human bystanders.”
Derek growls back, “There are always other options, Laura,” which is not exactly unexpected coming from the king of brooding about decisions.
“You’re bad at the deference part of being a Beta,” Laura comments, picking at the fringe along the edge of her scarf. She automatically filters out the harmless noises-the children shrieking in the park, mothers and fathers and nannies whispering to each other over steaming cups of coffee, dentists and lawyers tucked away in their offices-and focuses on the sounds coming from Derek’s end of the line. It’s quiet, in a familiar way; not their apartment, probably the branch of the NYPL nearby.
Derek says, “I was always bad at that.”
“Lies,” Laura replies instantly. “Natalie and Erin were the rebellious ones. Miles was shaping up to be a little shit. You were the sweetest Beta that ever Beta’d.”
It’s one of those things that falls out of your mouth before you really think about it; it’d taken Laura two years to remember to use the proper grammar when talking about her family. In Pittsburgh there’d been a lot of ‘Michael is’ and ‘Edith always says’ that had prompted awkward confusion amongst her lab members-no one ever wants to be the one to say, But I thought your whole family died?
Derek stops breathing. It’s his defense mechanism, as if shutting down bodily functions will somehow stop the pain in his chest. Laura’s a big believer in pretending that you don’t have any issues that need work; Derek’s the one who sits and stews and reads dark, conceptually torturous Russian novels and pretends like it’s just for his degree.
“You need practice with rebellious behavior,” Derek finally says, flatly. “Starting now.” He hangs up.
It startles a laugh out of Laura, and not the good kind. A woman walking next to Laura freezes and then pulls her toddler to the other side of her body, away from Laura. For some reason, that just makes her laugh harder. As she passes by a set of glossy double-doors, she pauses to examine her reflection; she looks incredibly unthreatening, the hard line of her jaw masked by a fluffy mustard-colored scarf, her short body wrapped in a grey wool coat. Before the fire, Laura exceled at hiding in plain sight better than any other hunter or werewolf she’d ever met.
Becoming an Alpha has a way of changing things.
~
Laura had flatly told Derek that over her dead body was he going to join a dangerous scavenger hunt the night before three midterms in various classes required for graduation, and he’d sulkily acquiesced in poor grace, so Laura is (thank GOD) alone in a dark alley when she skids around a corner chasing an unfamiliar scent and runs full-body into her favorite hunter.
Everything would’ve ended more picturesquely and like a scene of a romantic comedy if Laura hadn’t responded by aiming for his throat with his claws and he hadn’t reacted by jamming an arrow towards her ribcage. They both swing to their respective lefts and therefore both miss. Laura hits a brick wall and bounces off, landing on all fours with her claws in concrete to steady her; the hunter slams into a Dumpster and uses it to prop himself up as he gets his breath back.
A second later Laura gets a mouthful of a familiar taste and straightens up with a bitter, “Oh god, it’s you.”
The hunter lowers his bow so it’s pointing at the ground between them. “You’re a little south for your grid, aren’t you?”
“Following a scent trail,” Laura says through a mouthful of canines. She hopes the hunter can see them as they distend her jaw, pushing her pretty face into an ugly place, glistening like they always are. She wants him to appreciate that she’s dangerous, because then maybe he’ll stop fucking showing up at her place of goddamn work. “Doesn’t really matter about the grid.”
“Well,” says the hunter, gesturing with his bow. “Lead the way.”
Laura shivers and settles back onto the balls of her feet, lowering herself into a familiar crouch. “Try to keep up,” she shouts over her shoulder as she leaps, clearing a pile of packing crates and dodging the hanging edge of a fire escape. His breathing is loud but focused; he’s a born hunter, she can smell it on him now like she can smell it on other wolves. The breeding always shows on the hunt.
She runs for a few blocks parallel to New York Ave, and then cuts over sharply at the Kings County Hospital Center. She’s two blocks from the part of Brooklyn that’s so bad it doesn’t even qualify as downtrodden or crime-ridden when the scent pulls up sharply, outside of an apartment complex that’s practically begging for the CDC to show up and fumigate.
In her half-human shift it’s difficult to pinpoint where she should be looking, so she melts into the shadows and transforms fully, all four paws planted to the ground, her fur rippling down her shoulder blades and ripping through her shirt and jeans. She kicks off the human clothing and concentrates on the apartment building and rooms inside, trying to cross-reference scent with familiar hunter sounds-gun safety being engaged or disengaged, the dull thunk of steel-toed boots, the rattle of ammo inside a box-and she’s narrowed it to the sixth floor when she hears the hunter come hard to her left and stop.
She comes out from the shadow and his gun is immediately in her face, safety off, his hands steady. She approves of the switch; this neighborhood sees a lot of guns, but a compound bow would raise some eyebrows.
Laura gives him two seconds to adjust to her wolf form, and then she uses her nose to nudge his gun to her left. She points her head towards the apartment building.
“Are you fucking kidding me,” the hunter whispers, eyeing the building’s general decay. “Jesus, this is embarrassing.” He pulls an ugly burner cell from his pocket and hits the second speed dial. Laura uses half of her attention to keep tabs on his conversation-“Near East 52nd and Winthrop; tag the next person in the goddamn phone tree, Jefferson, I don’t care if they have a tail or not”-and the other half to make sure that the hunters aren’t going to bolt any time soon.
“Come on,” the hunter says, tilting his head back towards a darkened corner. “If they look out the window they’re going to notice us.” Laura shifts backwards, keeping herself between him and the building until they’re sandwiched in a carved-out stoop that had looked much roomier from the other end of the street. Laura’s human has to exert a lot of effort to be heard over the pulsing roar of her wolf, which wants to tear out the throats of every hunter in that building and fuck the one sitting next to her, in that order, preferably followed by eating one of the larger predators that she’d smelled hiding in Prospect Park. Fox sounds remarkably appetizing after the four hours she’d spent running her grid in Stuyvesant.
For the seven minutes that it takes every member of their search party to make it within strike radius, Laura desperately ignores every sense that isn’t directly involved in surveying the shitty apartment filled with psycho hunters and she lies like a freaking rug to herself that she isn’t pointed towards the cool spot to her left that is the hunter. His core temperature is cooler than hers; it makes the skin along her left side bunch and the fur rustle.
Everything about this is seriously fucked up, Laura’s human tells her, as if that’s some kind of surprise.
At exactly eight minutes-the hunters had synchronized their watches; Laura had watched, disbelieving, and then rolled her eyes in the general direction of Fatima Anceris; she always knows what time it is, because the moon tells her wolf that sort of biologically necessary information-wolves and hunters melt out of the shadows and take to the sixth floor of the building. There are too many of them for the rogue hunters to stand a chance. Ten minutes and forty-three seconds after the original phone call, Laura rips out the throat of the last hunter and settles back on her haunches.
Her human has very particular feelings about blood matted into fur; she has to ignore the voice in the back of her head shouting about how unsanitary she is and how much showering she’s going to have to suffer before she’ll be fit for human consumption as the hunters quietly and efficiently work the scene, putting bricks of cocaine in obvious locations and digging knives into flesh to disguise wounds made by claws.
It’s here, when Laura licks the back of her paw and examines one of her claws for a split nail-those things are a bitch to deal with in wolf form; running on an exposed nerve feels like stepping into a vat of acid-that she learns that her hunter’s name is Chris. All of the hunters are going by first names, to avoid the stickiness of the network of blood feuds that runs between wolf and hunter families.
Laura’s not stupid enough to think taking the Brooklyn Bridge back to Manhattan as a wolf is at all a good idea. Asking a wolf from another pack for an item of clothing is a big no-no, as Laura’s as interested in getting hitched to a member of one of the New York packs as she is in a split nail. They’re pretty much universally morons, and the ones that aren’t morons are twenty-five years older than Laura on average and either ugly as sin or already mated.
This is what you get, her human points out, for not stripping before you shifted.
Well. Hopefully someone will think she’s a dog.
Laura is the last of the packs to leave the hunters to their business. She catches Chris’ eye as she slinks out onto the fire escape where-success!-someone who is clearly a new tenant has left clothing out to dry. There aren’t any pants because that would be just too kind of the universe at large, but there’s a big cardigan of the boyfriend variety tucked under a pair of bricks to keep it from blowing away. Laura decides immediately to claim it as reward for murdering the owner’s ruthless sociopathic neighbors. She nudges it with her nose; it smells like baking soda and cheap detergent and heavily chlorinated water, none of which are terribly offensive to her.
She shifts back into human form from the bottom up, shivering at the cold slaps against the sweaty skin of her back and the line of her throat that’s still covered in blood. It’s begun to dry and Laura leans over the edge of the balcony and rubs her chest vigorously with the flat of her palm, peeling away the blood and sending it like ruby-colored snowflakes down towards the alley. She licks her palm and fingers and rubs against her chin; she’s already walking back home in a sweater, there’s no need for her to look like more of a junkie.
When she comes onto her knees to move the bricks and take the sweater, she hears him; the steady heartbeat and its skyrocketing, the half-familiar smell tickling her nose. She doesn’t want to, but she can’t help herself-she looks over her shoulder, hair a tangled mess down her back, and sees Chris in the doorway to the living room, broad shoulders blocking her view in and their view out. If he’s protecting her honor from the lustful male gaze, he’s sort of late to the party-Laura’s got plenty of issues, but nudity isn’t one of them.
Besides, he’s doing enough male gazing of his own. His mouth is in a firm line that tells her all she needs to know about how much he hates himself for finding her attractive. Hunters are as monogamous as wolves in the old families; it’s another thing that comes out in the breeding. “You should go,” he says quietly. There are two layers of glass and a metal screen between them but she can hear him as if he’s speaking into her ear. She watches his lips move for the novelty of it. “Truces are tricky things.”
“Hate to be eviscerated after our victory,” Laura says cheerfully, still blood-speckled and naked. Her blood is a living thing inside her veins, pushing and pulling with the force of the moon, making her fingers tingle and her head light. She wants to break through the window and drag Chris to the floor and bite his throat until she can swallow the pepper and spice and basil freshness of his scent into her belly. Her breasts swell with the thought and her hips sag slightly as her legs part, knees biting into the grillwork of the fire escape.
Chris’ fingers slide down the barrel of his sawed-off and lock around the base, knuckles pale. If he were a wolf, he’d be able to smell her and how much she wants him. The bare March wind whistles up and slices into the gap between Laura’s legs. She imagines for a second that it’s his cold fingers, gun oil and aconite and wide palms, thumb rubbing along the top of her clit, and then she gets the reality check that she’s fantasizing about a hunter on a fire escape in the shittiest part of Brooklyn.
Laura tugs the sweater out from under the bricks and pulls it over her head without bothering to unbutton it. It falls to mid-thigh and her nipples are just hidden inside the deep V of the neck if she doesn’t let the shoulders fall. Only its lack of mesh keeps it from being the most scandalous thing Laura has ever worn.
She takes to her feet completely, curling her toes into the gaps in the iron of the fire escape, and tries to pretend that Chris isn’t still watching and that he doesn’t test her self-control in a way that defies explanation, logic, and self-possession. Laura can actually feel her wolf pounding against the inside of her ribcage, begging her to TAKE.
When she chances a look at Chris because Hales do masochism like nobody’s business, he lifts his right thumb to his chin and rubs it back and forth. Laura spends an unhealthy amount of time imagining sucking his thumb into her mouth and laving the tip with her tongue and biting against the protective layer of his nail before she licks her middle and forefinger and scrubs at the right corner of her mouth.
“Okay?” she asks, as if he’ll be able to hear.
He nods, once, and drops his hand. It falls to his gun, and then down to his side. Laura has her forefinger back in her mouth before she can really think it through, and she licks the last of the blood from the webbing between her fingers. Hunter blood is always slightly unsatisfying and vaguely moldly, as if it’s gone off.
Chris’ blood pumps faster, pushes his scent further, and nearly knocks Laura back on her heels. She tempts herself for a handful of seconds, considering Chris’ blood. Would it taste like pesto? It smells like it would. She can imagine fairly easily what licking Chris’ blood from her fingers would taste like. The groves back in Beacon Hills Preserve, where the ash trees grow in naturally protective rings, had always been peppery to Laura’s nose.
This is a series of fundamentally shitty decisions waiting to happen, and Laura’s too hopped up on the hunt to be responsible for anything, even fucking a married man who clearly wants to wrap her hair around her fist and string her out against the nearest wall.
Laura is an adult. Laura is at least half human. She’s not an animal.
Laura leaves. In the interest of self-preservation, she throws herself off of the fire escape, tucks her legs into a roll, and pops her dislocated shoulder back in before she even has time to think about the pain. She runs for Manhattan, and she doesn't stop, even when a policeman on a motorcycle pauses at a red light and says, “What the ever loving fuck,” as Laura dashes across the intersection on bare feet and in her stolen cardigan.
She throws the cardigan into one of the Dumpsters in the alley behind her apartment building, climbs to the fourth floor naked and desperately hoping that none of her neighbors are awake, and uses a claw to disengage the latch on her bedroom window. She can hear Derek studiously plodding away at his revising in his room. “I’m home,” she tells him, a useless courtesy, and then, “I’m taking a shower to get this stink off of me.”
Derek is a mess at a lot of things and he’s always been at most a half-hearted werewolf, so there’s at least 40% of a hope that he won’t be able to recognize Laura’s lust and frustrated desire. She loves her baby brother and she won’t hide it from him if he asks, but there is so much that she’s not even vaguely prepared to talk about. The parallels between the surviving Hale siblings and their attraction to unsuitable hunters will never be funny or ironic or a bonding experience-it’s just painful.
~
Chris is waiting outside of the bakery two weeks later, hands curled loosely in the pockets of his coat. “Good morning,” he says.
“Oh my fucking god, Chris,” Laura says reflexively. She’d had her nose buried in a cup of coffee and hadn’t exactly anticipated seeing Chris this morning-or at all, really, for the rest of her life. “What are you doing here?” she demands. “This has stopped being creepy and started being just plain fucking weird. You know who I am. You know why I’m here.”
There’s a long second wherein Chris wavers between continuing whatever senseless line of deceit he’d originally intended and rolling with Laura’s accusation and taking another mode of attack. She can see it in his face, because she can’t really look away from him. She swallows too much of her coffee too fast and uses the fleeting burn down the line of her esophagus to center herself before she does something especially idiotic, like shift and tackle Chris into the bakery.
“Yes, Laura,” he finally says as she throws the empty cup into a trashcan. “I know who you are.”
It wasn’t like Laura was waiting for her name out of his lips to be a revelation, but it kind of is. Her Alpha ears hear every place where his tongue rasps against the inside of his mouth. She wants to suck his tongue inside her mouth and bite bite bite every syllable out of him until he can only make breathless, wrecked noises.
Laura tries to think of the last time she was this attracted to someone to make a pithy mental comparison, but there isn’t a single name that comes to mind. Her wolf scrambles everything up inside her head and her body, pulling at her control and scattering the parts of Laura’s human that she keeps dominant for the sake of the humans with whom she lives. Her wolf wants to suck on the pulse in Chris’ neck and fuck him inside the bakery, where chives and butter and cheese make everything smell like warmth and home.
Jesus fuck. “Well,” Laura says brusquely, looking down at her keys so she doesn’t end up growing an extra set of teeth in the middle of the goddamn street. “This has been nice. Please don’t wait two years until the next time I see you-make it two decades, at least.”
Chris’ pulse flickers.
“Or,” Laura adds, tapping a fingernail against the key to the front door of the bakery, “forever. You can also do that.”
Please, her human urges, please, walk the fuck away.
“Every time I come to speak with you, something else seems to come up,” Chris comments quietly, like he’s a member of the homeowner’s association come to check up on the state of her front yard. He makes it sound so human, so benign, like Laura isn’t a blend of instinct and psychologically damaging behavior.
“That’s what happens,” Laura says, trying for airy and maybe succeeding-she can’t really judge her own voice, not over the sound of her throat trying to light itself on fire with want-“when you corner an Alpha trying to mind her own goddamn business.”
“You ran,” Chris continues, as if Laura’s interruption and thinly veiled threat is beside the point, “and left your territory unclaimed.”
If Laura moves her nail very slowly, she can hear a shift in the metal quality of the key; it’s softer in the middle, from being nestled against the heat of Laura’s hip, and there’s a series of uneven dips where she’s unwittingly bent the key with her werewolf strength. “The Hale pack still runs over that land,” she finally says. “Not that it’s any of your business, hunter.”
“Yes,” agrees Chris, fake and pleasant, so false it grits between her teeth, “once a year you go back and scratch some trees. That’s going to be very effective against migrant packs.”
Laura wants to crawl inside Chris and do lots of unsavory things to his body, but that doesn’t given him free reign over the soft, unprotected parts of her. “If you have advice on how an Alpha werewolf should run her pack,” she tells him, letting in the push of red from the corners of her eyes and the flow of saliva that prepares her mouth for her extra teeth, “why don’t you leave a comment card?”
Chris steps forward; he tries to use his body to crowd her, but she has an open street to her back and the reminder of his size, the press of his shoulders and the firmness of his chest, is counterproductive to anything except Laura latching her teeth into his collarbone and dragging him into an alley. “You have a responsibility,” he begins, and this part is clearly practiced-his heart runs smoothly into the head of the sentence-“and you can pretend to be human up and down this coast for as long as you want, but the Hales abided by the Code and I’m not going to see that land go to one of the packs from Wisconsin or Nevada because you’re too busy burying your head in the sand.”
“I am not human,” Laura snarls. Her jaw clicks and pops out; her teeth push against the top of her gums, begging to be released, and her hair tries to climb back into her head, eager to redistribute itself across her body. The pins holding her hair in a bun against the back of her head protest the sudden yank and snap. She reaches out and grabs the front of Chris’ Henley, where it gapes from underneath his winter coat and the exposed skin begs her to suck the sweat out of his pores. The door is too complicated right now; Laura turns and pulls him around the corner, into the alley down the side of the bakery. “No one will take our land, hunter.”
“It’s not exactly well-defended,” Chris says calmly, like she can’t hear his heart leap for escape, like she isn’t pushing her breasts against his chest, her fingers knotting and pulling at his shirt. The cloth of his shirt protests the intrusion of her claws.
“It is Hale land,” Laura says, “and we mourn. We’re not animals.”
What she means is, she has seven years. For the loss of the Alpha and the rest of her pack, she will receive seven years’ grace from the other packs. She is supposed to be building. She knows; she’s read it in the books in Eureka, the ones that Derek doesn’t know about, and heard it in the lore that Edith had always spun into tales for the children at Christmas. But Laura knows Derek isn’t ready for their pack to be any bigger and Derek has been and always will be her greatest priority.
“You’re not human, you’re not animal,” Chris says snidely; he’s clearly exposed to teenagers on a regular basis, because it’s such an adolescent tone. “Make a choice.”
Because Laura can recognize that kind of manipulation, it doesn’t push her over the edge. “For a born hunter,” she comments, lethal and level and low, “you don’t seem to understand how werewolves work.”
“We watch and we regulate,” Chris says. “We don’t perform psychological evaluations.”
The last thing Laura wants to do is get into a philosophical discussion with a hunter about werewolf-hunter dynamics in an alleyway at six in the morning, especially when it’s taking most of her considerable control not to rub up against him like some kind of dog in heat, but for a second, she feels tempted. Chris is clearly not a moron and he’s not got a vested interest in appearing surly and unhelpful; if the members of his family didn’t swear an oath at a young age to kill Laura’s species, she’d maybe even like him.
“Cute,” she says. The wreck of his heart is still pressing against her eardrums, but she no longer wants to remove his head from his body; she can even feel her human begin to prevail against her wolf. She retracts her claws but keeps her fingers tangled in his shirt, for leverage. “My point stands. My land is my concern; there’s no reason for you to be involved.”
Her voice has softened without conscious input; there’s silk over threat, now, and she can feel the pounding of his heart at their point of contact. A solid line is drawn between his and hers. An exhale lingers as it drifts across her forehead and rustles her hair where it’s tumbling in a half-mess over her left shoulder.
“Think of us like the IRS,” Chris quips. She can hear where it’s supposed to fall hard and flat, humor over threat, but his breathing renders the point moot.
Laura laughs. “I’m more afraid of the IRS than I am of you, Chris.”
It’s a negligible point because Laura isn’t afraid of the IRS and if she wastes time to think about hunters that she fears, Kate Argent falls higher on the list than someone who can’t keep his hands from shaking near her, but Chris takes it as a taunt. Years of training make the point of pivot unpredictable; his breathing doesn’t change at all as he plants and turns and slams Laura against the brick wall of Frank’s building.
Whatever threat he means to utter gets lost because sparks light along the fringes of her vision when Laura’s head hits brick and, for the first time in her life, Laura is knocked senseless. She rears up and uses her still-solid hold on his shirt to lever herself into his mouth and shit shit shit he tastes like basil and mint, toothpaste and coffee and stale sleep, and his teeth sink into her lip without a whisper of resistance. She bites back, pushing herself onto one toe and using the curve of her leg to yank him closer. He falls against her body with a rush and her blood all rises into her ears and she licks his mouth open and falls in further, sucking his tongue into her mouth and swallowing, compulsively, her throat working as her fingers sink into his shoulders.
His palms begin with pinning her shoulders to the wall and then they shift, lower, to her upper arms, and his thumbs brush against the outside of her breasts. For someone who kisses like he wants to fuck her mouth open, his hands stay in strictly junior high territory, and Laura is two seconds from clawing his shirt over his head and showing him that he can, in fact, put his oil-stained hands on her nipples and she won’t exactly break, when she hits his shoulder holster.
Her human thinks shit fuck because that goddamn holster is sexy as fuck, but her wolf smells the aconite in the bullets inside his Browning and she slams herself backwards, mouth peeling from his with a discomfiting sound like the release of plugged drain. His mouth is shiny from spit and red from her teeth.
“Oh my fucking god,” Laura says. “You are married.”
Chris never stops smelling peppery and fuckable as he says, “Really?” almost involuntarily, judging by the self-hate that flickers alive on his face.
“I don’t fuck married men,” Laura protests. It takes one good shove for her to dislodge him; she can smell the capillaries break under his skin as he takes two steps back to recover the momentum. “Okay, well, that never happened,” she says, to herself and to a pigeon that’s paused in where it’s pecking at the crumbs surrounding Frank’s Dumpster. “Right. Great. Okay. You need to leave and stop questioning the decisions I make as Alpha.”
Chris still looks shell-shocked-probably because he’s never even contemplated fucking someone other than his wife and now he has Laura’s scent rubbed into his clothes-but he makes a solid effort to recover. He ends up doing it better than Laura would have predicted. “We watch that area,” he finally says, his voice rough but moderately more professional. “We always have.”
Laura had assumed, from the visits in Pittsburgh and here, that he was part of a migrant hunter family, but apparently not. “The Argents watch there,” she says. Later, she’ll wonder why she said it that way-such a stupid thing to say. Of all the ways that Laura could’ve opened herself up for that conversation, The Argents watch there is at least number five on Dumbest Options, maybe even number three. They’re not even her own words; she’s lifted them from Peter’s journal, which had been the first place she’d looked when she was trembling with anger and loss and trying to figure out why the fucking hell Derek’s secret older girlfriend had set their house on fire.
“Yes,” Chris says. “We do.”
There’s a weird second where Laura stares at a particularly stubborn hair is protruding from the clenched line of Chris’ jaw; he must have missed it while he was shaving this morning. With a low whine, her stomach tries to crawl its way out of her throat. She hasn’t vomited since she accidentally swallowed mountain ash bark during a project for her Ecology lab at HSU; she wonders abstractly if this will break her record. You fucking mess, her human says as Laura tries not to gag. She presses her palm to her mouth and uses the pack scent that clings to her pulse points to center herself.
She smells like Chris. She smells like Argent.
“Go away,” Laura snarls, garbling the words. “Run now, Argent, before I kill you.” The shift sounds like a distant toll of a bell, but she can already feel it crawl across her skin in long shivers. When Chris shows no sign of moving, Laura drops her hand and the pretenses and lets her head lead the shift. “GO,” she roars, and the last of her yell is swallowed by her wolf’s snout, ill suited for vowels that don’t end in liquid Ls.
Chris unsnaps the holster on his gun and takes off. He moves away from the heavily trafficked street, deeper into the network of alleys that connect Frank’s neighborhood, and before Laura can make another stupid decision, like one that will result in a worse blood feud or her brother having no living family members, she pounces on the pigeon.
Its neck snaps with a single jerk, and then Laura is left with a mouthful of pigeon-which is disgusting-and dripping with blood and a host of human concerns that she is currently unable to deal with, like a bakery that needs to be open in twenty minutes and a scent trail that her wolf wants to follow. She can’t predict what will happen if she catches Chris, if she’ll want to kill him or fuck him or a particularly morbid combination of both, and none of those are options her human could live with.
So Laura chokes down the pigeon and then still ends up shifting back and vomiting it up, blood and little bones and the filth of Manhattan’s bird population heavy on her tongue. That’s how Frank finds her, ten minutes after she should’ve dragged him from the depths of the kitchen to man the counter for the morning rush: her clothes shredded and her surrounded by and covered in blood and a half-digested pigeon.
“Oh my god, Laura,” says Frank, shocked open and scared, and she lets him pull her to her feet and wrap her in his flannel overshirt, his human hands gentle and soft against the protruding bones of her shoulder blades. She lets him pour her into his shower and then she puts on a pair of pajama pants and a Knicks t-shirt that will send Derek into conniptions and falls into his bed. It smells like Frank and familiarity and now she does, too, like his lemon body-wash and his absurdly expensive shampoo and the sticky flour scent of everything in the building.
Frank holds her hand until she pretends to fall asleep. After he leaves, quietly shutting the door behind him, she listens with her eyes shut until his footsteps reach the bottom of the stairs and she hears the tinkle of the bell as he unlocks the front door of the bakery and lets in a string of crabby early-morning customers. He’s left her cell phone and key ring, both undamaged, on the table next to the bed, and she lifts her arm just enough out of the nest of blankets to snag her phone.
“Hey,” she croaks when Derek answers.
“What,” Derek says, voice steeped in sleep.
“Nothing,” Laura says. “Go back to sleep but leave the phone on, okay?”
Derek mumbles, “Whatever,” and does as she asks, propping his open phone against the stack of books on his bedside table and settling back down. She lets his heartbeat center her world, until everything else she hears is just an echo of it, tinny and far away and false.
[part iv]
pushing down on me, pushing down on you | 2009
Laura doesn’t expect to ever see the hunter again, which is stupid of her. Because she wasn’t expecting him, she’s off her game when she opens the bakery on a Wednesday morning and he’s loitering outside with a collection of other businessmen who have become addicted to whatever illegal substance Frank puts in his knishes.
She stands there, one hand on the doorknob, the other on the key still turning in the lock, as he casually pushes away from an olive-colored car that screams rental, his face blandly engaged. He fakes it well, but his eyes-they can’t do anything blandly, and they’re definitely engaged.
In a half-fugue, Laura puts knishes in bags and pours out coffees and accepts twenties and tens and fives and nods thanks to the regulars who tip well in lieu of saying good morning-this is New York, after all-until the investment bankers and accountants have all vanished and it’s just the hunter, stalking forward, hands resting by his sides where he can get quick access to the knife that Laura can see strapped to his hip under his jacket.
“Seriously?” Laura demands. “And don’t spin me any bull about having a knish craving; you don’t have abs like that at your age because you eat knishes for breakfast.”
About two picoseconds later, Laura wants to stab herself for bringing his abs into this conversation; it doesn’t exactly convey that she’s a twenty-four-year-old Alpha with enough poise to watch her own back in a city filled with packs and pack wars.
“I appreciate your concern,” the hunter says, “but I’m here on business.”
“Buy something,” Laura snarls, “or leave.” She’s not even being too aggressive; it’s Frank’s policy, and it’s written in his blocky handwriting on a piece of cardstock above the register. Laura would point to it, but that would require disengaging her claws from the laminate of the counter.
“Odd for a pack to move like this,” the hunter says, leaning forward and propping an elbow on the glass display case. “I’ll take an onion and chive knish. If an Alpha decides to settle and build, she’s not going to turn tail in two years and bolt.”
Laura stops breathing; the control forces her to retract her claws, and then she calmly uses a piece of wax paper to put a chive knish in a brown bag. “Anything else?” she asks politely, shoving the bag across the counter at him.
“Small coffee,” he says, and he continues as she turns her back to pour him a cup. “Unless, of course, you’re not an Alpha, in which case you’re an Omega, and you wouldn’t last long in this city if that’s the case. No one misses a dead Omega.”
With a stiff smile, Laura slams the coffee down in front of him. “The subtlety of your threatening leaves something to be desired,” she informs him. “I have permission to be here from the Alpha of every pack on the goddamn island. If I go missing, they will all miss me.” It wouldn’t be hard for a hunter of his caliber to discover that she’s a Hale; two pointed questions at Hemmingway’s and some skulking on the BioSci department website at Pitt would’ve given him that information.
Ergo, he knows she’s a Hale and he knows she’s an Alpha. With the rest of her family dead, the loss of another Hale Alpha at the hands of a hunter would be considered a shattering of the Code; open season on every Hunter in Manhattan. He doesn’t look particularly suicidal; Laura tilts her head slightly to the right and considers him. Usually she can smell psychopaths-their inability to process emotion makes them dimensionless, boring to her nose.
Nothing about this hunter is boring to her nose. Her nose, along with the rest of her body, remembers the spiked aftertaste of his arousal, the way it had almost smelled like basil; green and spiced.
This line of questioning makes no sense.
“Is that all?” Laura asks.
He stares at her for a long time without blinking. It should make him look like a lizard, but all it does is reach inside of Laura to somewhere that needs warmth and lights a fucking fire under it. “Yes,” he finally says.
“Five ninety-two,” she tells him.
He hands her a ten; she catches sight of the Browning nestled against his side as he returns his wallet to his back pocket, the holster drawing tight along the inside curve of his shoulder. The sight of the holster on the pale grey of his Henley does more distracting things to Laura’s wolf.
“Keep the change,” he says with a small smirk, collecting his knish and his coffee and leaving, the bell on the door tinkling excitedly after him.
Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck
YES, Laura’s wolf thinks, which is not fucking helpful.
~
Laura still has the burgundy Toyota, even though driving in New York makes her want to eat most of the pedestrians and other drivers. She keeps it in the garage in the basement of their apartment building for a truly egregious fee because she needs it once a year for when she drives out to Beacon Hills to check on Peter. He smells strange; not just the burns, which are a tingly kind of sweet, but the complete absence that wreathes him. Peter doesn’t smell like pack anymore. It makes Laura’s wolf shiver and retract into itself.
She wonders if it’s her responsibility, as Alpha, to mark Peter as part of her pack. She’s visited the storage container and read through the books on pack marking, but most of them reiterate the same thing-to truly be pack again, Peter needs to submit and accept her as his Alpha. He’s not really in the best condition to be doing that.
So, in what became a yearly tradition after the shitshow that was the Hale family departure from Pittsburgh, Laura drives to Beacon Hills, timing it exactly so she arrives as visiting hours open and leaves as they end. She sees exactly one person, the primary care nurse, and she spends less than twelve hours total in Beacon Hills per trip, once you factor in how long it takes to scent-mark the edges of her territory. It’s designed to be as painless as possible, but nothing hurts as much as sitting in an uncomfortable hospital chair across from her lifeless shell of an uncle, who smells wrong.
~
Laura doesn’t make Derek come with her. If it were Imogene in that room, eyes locked on empty space, hands resting against the tops of her thighs, nothing would have been able to drag Laura within fifteen miles of Beacon Hills.
~
Two days after she gets back from Beacon Hills, after she spends approximately thirty-six hours glued to Derek’s side, smelling the top of his head and being distracting as he attempts to say something about Anna Karenina that hasn’t already been said by a hundred years of literary criticism, Laura opens the bakery on Tuesday morning and her fortieth customer of the day, during the morning lull between ten and eleven, is a Beta of the Anceris pack.
“Hey, Laura,” he says, slouching through the doorway and scuttling sideways down to the counter where Laura is replacing a stack of medium takeaway cups.
The Anceris pack controls the blocks leading up to the Hudson and out to Ellis Island; they always smell faintly of rotting fish, but that might be Laura’s own prejudices against packs that chose to build their territory in cities. She can’t help but think of them in terms of sewers and human stink and dead things sacrificed for urban development.
A Beta from the Anceris pack showing up at her place of work isn’t exactly a good prelude to anything. “Good morning, Abílio,” says Laura cautiously. The second that she opens her mouth, he cringes and begins to stink of terror. Laura tops out at about five and a half feet on a day when she remembers to maintain good posture, and even if she’s an Alpha she’s still a girl in her early twenties, so Abílio’s mind-numbing fear doesn’t make any sense. He knows Laura, and knows that she’s not the physical kind of dominating Alpha. “What’s up?” Laura asks.
Abílio shrinks even further inside of himself. It would normally be hilarious to watch a thirty-year-old bruiser of a Portuguese enforcer try to become one with Frank’s hideous 1970’s limeade wallpaper, but the reasons why just make it unnerving.
“The Alpha of the Anceris Pack would like to offer greetings to the Alpha of the Hale Pack,” Abílio begins, stuttering, and fuck, formal greetings are never a good sign.
“I accept her greetings,” Laura says, and she moves to flip the sign over the door to ‘closed.’
The folds in Abílio’s forehead smooth slightly. The razor edge of his nervousness blunts slightly, but Laura can still curl her tongue around it. Her wolf wants to taste his pulse and gobble down his terror and submission until he’s just a shaking wreck; her wolf wants to dominate, frequently, but Laura’s human knows the consequences that would follow the destruction of another pack’s Beta.
“The Alpha of the Anceris Pack sends word of a group of hunters gone Code-rogue in Brooklyn,” Abílio says. His stuttering has lessened, even if he still has his head pressed against the wall, hands trembling. “She requests assistance from all local Alphas in eradicating the hunter threat. The kill has been sanctioned by the other hunters.”
There are approximately seven million reasons why Laura should boot Abílio out the door and get on with her business. Laura’s territory is technically three thousand miles away; and, to be honest, she’s not sure she trusts the poorly-defined idea of a kill being sanctioned by other hunters. Derek is stable and doing well at NYU and Laura doesn’t want to risk that for the excitement of a hunt.
On the other hand, a sanction from New York City’s hunter population means that the band really has gone rogue-the bad kind of rogue, the kind that means dead humans and raids justified in terms of acceptable civilian losses-and Laura has a responsibility, as an Alpha, to serve as a protective body. Derek is still young and he’s all that she has left. She doesn’t want to lose him to a group of trigger-happy psychos with access to aconite-enhanced weaponry.
The kill is sweet, her wolf adds. Her mouth tingles with the remembrance of a true hunt-the snap of bone, tearing muscle into long strips, the musky taste of blood still passing through a beating heart. Laura hasn’t hunted since Beacon Hills; she buys all of her meat at Mrs. Govindarajulu’s market down the street from her and Derek’s apartment.
“Yes,” Laura says, hoping that she’s thought this through, distracted by old memories and tastes. “The Alpha of the Hale Pack will provide help in eliminating the rogue hunters.” She can see her irises turn red in the whites of Abílio’s eyes; he blinks and drops to all fours, forced by her presence and his own instinct. The born wolves always know how to respond to an Alpha’s power.
“Return to your Alpha with my message,” says Laura dismissively and Abílio bolts. He’s halfway down the block when the front door finally falls shut.
The rest of the morning is spent wrapping pies in white cardboard boxes and making new pots of coffee and telling a set of hipsters decked out in a dazzling display of poor knitting prowess that no, Frank’s never has had and never will have an espresso machine and if they want a goddamn soy latte, they can hit the Starbucks two blocks away and just deal with their desire for mainstream coffee drinks like normal people.
The door shuts behind the hipsters, two of whom Laura had verbally browbeaten into purchasing pastries, and Frank comes down the steps from his apartment, using the hem of his shirt to dry his hair. He’s kind of stupidly hot-as in the kind of hot that makes people think he’s stupid, like an Abercrombie and Fitch model-and his lips are way too big and he’s got curly black hair that goes everywhere, but he’s also a baking savant and hasn’t seriously hit on Laura the entire time that she’s worked for him, so he’s filed in her books under Pretty Okay.
“Were you raised in a barn?” Laura asks him. “I know you own towels. I’ve seen them on the people I have to Pepper Potts when you abandon them after a one-night stand.”
Frank drops his shirt and presses a hand to his heart. “Laura, darling,” he says, “your concern fairly warms the cockles of my heart. It does.”
A pair of women walking by the window stop and backtrack, fairly obviously watching Frank’s ass in thread-worn jeans as he leans over to pick up a napkin someone had let drop outside of the trashcan. They have a brief, spirited discussion that involves a lot of curling their hair around their fingers and checking their lipstick, and then they open the door, just as Frank ducks into the kitchen behind the register to check on the afternoon baking.
The one on the left visibly deflates. “Oh,” she murmurs involuntarily. Her friend looks similarly stricken. They’ve got successful young professionals written all over them, from their perfect hair to their beautiful shoes-Steve Madden and Kate Spade, good choice and better choice, and Laura may have enough money to buy Kate Spade but that doesn’t make it a practical decision for someone who spends 40 hours a week behind a cash register-and their disappointment makes them alarmingly human. Laura doesn’t want to find one of them behind a Dumpster in Carroll Gardens with a bullet hole in her forehead.
“Frank,” Laura yells over her shoulder, “I’ve got to call and check up on Derek; can you take the register for a second?”
Frank appears in the doorframe like Calvin Klein magic and the women stop looking tired and downtrodden. Laura feels like she’s earned a knish as a reward for her good deed of the day, so she grabs one covered in cheese as she shrugs on her winter coat and unearths her cell from where it’s buried in one of the pockets. New York winters are hardly a concern for a werewolf who can self-regulate her internal temperature, but Laura likes the sensation of wrapping a wool scarf around her neck and buttoning up the front of her coat.
She does, in fact, need to call Derek about the Anceris/hunter mess, so it’s not even that much of a lie. To give her feet something to do and lessen the likelihood of her being overheard, Laura sets her feet towards the children’s playground three blocks away and dials Derek’s number from memory.
He picks up the third ring. “If I fail this exam, I’m going to kill you.”
“You’ll do fine,” Laura assures him. “After you graduate they’re going to name a wing of the English department building after you.”
“19UP doesn’t have wings,” Derek says, and then he grumbles under his breath about letting himself be drawn into a useless argument. “What, Laura?”
“Abílio Anceris came by the bakery this morning. There’s a rogue hunter’s pack in Brooklyn and the packs have received sanction from the city’s other hunters to kill them.”
There’s a long, dark silence during which Laura can imagine the various unpleasant forms that Derek’s face adopts. She knows they spend too much time together-of course she knows that, and it’s probably unhealthy by human psychological standards, but they’re not human-because she can predict down to the second when he finally decides how he’s going to feel about this and takes in a breath to begin to speak again. “Did you agree to join the hunt?”
Her baby brother is the best at sounding bitchily judgey about everything, and she’s not even taking his eyebrows into account right now. “I didn’t have a lot of choice in the matter, Derek,” Laura points out. “We need to keep strong in the face of the other Manhattan packs and there’s no way in fucking hell I’m going to let a group of hunters wander around Brooklyn shooting up human bystanders.”
Derek growls back, “There are always other options, Laura,” which is not exactly unexpected coming from the king of brooding about decisions.
“You’re bad at the deference part of being a Beta,” Laura comments, picking at the fringe along the edge of her scarf. She automatically filters out the harmless noises-the children shrieking in the park, mothers and fathers and nannies whispering to each other over steaming cups of coffee, dentists and lawyers tucked away in their offices-and focuses on the sounds coming from Derek’s end of the line. It’s quiet, in a familiar way; not their apartment, probably the branch of the NYPL nearby.
Derek says, “I was always bad at that.”
“Lies,” Laura replies instantly. “Natalie and Erin were the rebellious ones. Miles was shaping up to be a little shit. You were the sweetest Beta that ever Beta’d.”
It’s one of those things that falls out of your mouth before you really think about it; it’d taken Laura two years to remember to use the proper grammar when talking about her family. In Pittsburgh there’d been a lot of ‘Michael is’ and ‘Edith always says’ that had prompted awkward confusion amongst her lab members-no one ever wants to be the one to say, But I thought your whole family died?
Derek stops breathing. It’s his defense mechanism, as if shutting down bodily functions will somehow stop the pain in his chest. Laura’s a big believer in pretending that you don’t have any issues that need work; Derek’s the one who sits and stews and reads dark, conceptually torturous Russian novels and pretends like it’s just for his degree.
“You need practice with rebellious behavior,” Derek finally says, flatly. “Starting now.” He hangs up.
It startles a laugh out of Laura, and not the good kind. A woman walking next to Laura freezes and then pulls her toddler to the other side of her body, away from Laura. For some reason, that just makes her laugh harder. As she passes by a set of glossy double-doors, she pauses to examine her reflection; she looks incredibly unthreatening, the hard line of her jaw masked by a fluffy mustard-colored scarf, her short body wrapped in a grey wool coat. Before the fire, Laura exceled at hiding in plain sight better than any other hunter or werewolf she’d ever met.
Becoming an Alpha has a way of changing things.
~
Laura had flatly told Derek that over her dead body was he going to join a dangerous scavenger hunt the night before three midterms in various classes required for graduation, and he’d sulkily acquiesced in poor grace, so Laura is (thank GOD) alone in a dark alley when she skids around a corner chasing an unfamiliar scent and runs full-body into her favorite hunter.
Everything would’ve ended more picturesquely and like a scene of a romantic comedy if Laura hadn’t responded by aiming for his throat with his claws and he hadn’t reacted by jamming an arrow towards her ribcage. They both swing to their respective lefts and therefore both miss. Laura hits a brick wall and bounces off, landing on all fours with her claws in concrete to steady her; the hunter slams into a Dumpster and uses it to prop himself up as he gets his breath back.
A second later Laura gets a mouthful of a familiar taste and straightens up with a bitter, “Oh god, it’s you.”
The hunter lowers his bow so it’s pointing at the ground between them. “You’re a little south for your grid, aren’t you?”
“Following a scent trail,” Laura says through a mouthful of canines. She hopes the hunter can see them as they distend her jaw, pushing her pretty face into an ugly place, glistening like they always are. She wants him to appreciate that she’s dangerous, because then maybe he’ll stop fucking showing up at her place of goddamn work. “Doesn’t really matter about the grid.”
“Well,” says the hunter, gesturing with his bow. “Lead the way.”
Laura shivers and settles back onto the balls of her feet, lowering herself into a familiar crouch. “Try to keep up,” she shouts over her shoulder as she leaps, clearing a pile of packing crates and dodging the hanging edge of a fire escape. His breathing is loud but focused; he’s a born hunter, she can smell it on him now like she can smell it on other wolves. The breeding always shows on the hunt.
She runs for a few blocks parallel to New York Ave, and then cuts over sharply at the Kings County Hospital Center. She’s two blocks from the part of Brooklyn that’s so bad it doesn’t even qualify as downtrodden or crime-ridden when the scent pulls up sharply, outside of an apartment complex that’s practically begging for the CDC to show up and fumigate.
In her half-human shift it’s difficult to pinpoint where she should be looking, so she melts into the shadows and transforms fully, all four paws planted to the ground, her fur rippling down her shoulder blades and ripping through her shirt and jeans. She kicks off the human clothing and concentrates on the apartment building and rooms inside, trying to cross-reference scent with familiar hunter sounds-gun safety being engaged or disengaged, the dull thunk of steel-toed boots, the rattle of ammo inside a box-and she’s narrowed it to the sixth floor when she hears the hunter come hard to her left and stop.
She comes out from the shadow and his gun is immediately in her face, safety off, his hands steady. She approves of the switch; this neighborhood sees a lot of guns, but a compound bow would raise some eyebrows.
Laura gives him two seconds to adjust to her wolf form, and then she uses her nose to nudge his gun to her left. She points her head towards the apartment building.
“Are you fucking kidding me,” the hunter whispers, eyeing the building’s general decay. “Jesus, this is embarrassing.” He pulls an ugly burner cell from his pocket and hits the second speed dial. Laura uses half of her attention to keep tabs on his conversation-“Near East 52nd and Winthrop; tag the next person in the goddamn phone tree, Jefferson, I don’t care if they have a tail or not”-and the other half to make sure that the hunters aren’t going to bolt any time soon.
“Come on,” the hunter says, tilting his head back towards a darkened corner. “If they look out the window they’re going to notice us.” Laura shifts backwards, keeping herself between him and the building until they’re sandwiched in a carved-out stoop that had looked much roomier from the other end of the street. Laura’s human has to exert a lot of effort to be heard over the pulsing roar of her wolf, which wants to tear out the throats of every hunter in that building and fuck the one sitting next to her, in that order, preferably followed by eating one of the larger predators that she’d smelled hiding in Prospect Park. Fox sounds remarkably appetizing after the four hours she’d spent running her grid in Stuyvesant.
For the seven minutes that it takes every member of their search party to make it within strike radius, Laura desperately ignores every sense that isn’t directly involved in surveying the shitty apartment filled with psycho hunters and she lies like a freaking rug to herself that she isn’t pointed towards the cool spot to her left that is the hunter. His core temperature is cooler than hers; it makes the skin along her left side bunch and the fur rustle.
Everything about this is seriously fucked up, Laura’s human tells her, as if that’s some kind of surprise.
At exactly eight minutes-the hunters had synchronized their watches; Laura had watched, disbelieving, and then rolled her eyes in the general direction of Fatima Anceris; she always knows what time it is, because the moon tells her wolf that sort of biologically necessary information-wolves and hunters melt out of the shadows and take to the sixth floor of the building. There are too many of them for the rogue hunters to stand a chance. Ten minutes and forty-three seconds after the original phone call, Laura rips out the throat of the last hunter and settles back on her haunches.
Her human has very particular feelings about blood matted into fur; she has to ignore the voice in the back of her head shouting about how unsanitary she is and how much showering she’s going to have to suffer before she’ll be fit for human consumption as the hunters quietly and efficiently work the scene, putting bricks of cocaine in obvious locations and digging knives into flesh to disguise wounds made by claws.
It’s here, when Laura licks the back of her paw and examines one of her claws for a split nail-those things are a bitch to deal with in wolf form; running on an exposed nerve feels like stepping into a vat of acid-that she learns that her hunter’s name is Chris. All of the hunters are going by first names, to avoid the stickiness of the network of blood feuds that runs between wolf and hunter families.
Laura’s not stupid enough to think taking the Brooklyn Bridge back to Manhattan as a wolf is at all a good idea. Asking a wolf from another pack for an item of clothing is a big no-no, as Laura’s as interested in getting hitched to a member of one of the New York packs as she is in a split nail. They’re pretty much universally morons, and the ones that aren’t morons are twenty-five years older than Laura on average and either ugly as sin or already mated.
This is what you get, her human points out, for not stripping before you shifted.
Well. Hopefully someone will think she’s a dog.
Laura is the last of the packs to leave the hunters to their business. She catches Chris’ eye as she slinks out onto the fire escape where-success!-someone who is clearly a new tenant has left clothing out to dry. There aren’t any pants because that would be just too kind of the universe at large, but there’s a big cardigan of the boyfriend variety tucked under a pair of bricks to keep it from blowing away. Laura decides immediately to claim it as reward for murdering the owner’s ruthless sociopathic neighbors. She nudges it with her nose; it smells like baking soda and cheap detergent and heavily chlorinated water, none of which are terribly offensive to her.
She shifts back into human form from the bottom up, shivering at the cold slaps against the sweaty skin of her back and the line of her throat that’s still covered in blood. It’s begun to dry and Laura leans over the edge of the balcony and rubs her chest vigorously with the flat of her palm, peeling away the blood and sending it like ruby-colored snowflakes down towards the alley. She licks her palm and fingers and rubs against her chin; she’s already walking back home in a sweater, there’s no need for her to look like more of a junkie.
When she comes onto her knees to move the bricks and take the sweater, she hears him; the steady heartbeat and its skyrocketing, the half-familiar smell tickling her nose. She doesn’t want to, but she can’t help herself-she looks over her shoulder, hair a tangled mess down her back, and sees Chris in the doorway to the living room, broad shoulders blocking her view in and their view out. If he’s protecting her honor from the lustful male gaze, he’s sort of late to the party-Laura’s got plenty of issues, but nudity isn’t one of them.
Besides, he’s doing enough male gazing of his own. His mouth is in a firm line that tells her all she needs to know about how much he hates himself for finding her attractive. Hunters are as monogamous as wolves in the old families; it’s another thing that comes out in the breeding. “You should go,” he says quietly. There are two layers of glass and a metal screen between them but she can hear him as if he’s speaking into her ear. She watches his lips move for the novelty of it. “Truces are tricky things.”
“Hate to be eviscerated after our victory,” Laura says cheerfully, still blood-speckled and naked. Her blood is a living thing inside her veins, pushing and pulling with the force of the moon, making her fingers tingle and her head light. She wants to break through the window and drag Chris to the floor and bite his throat until she can swallow the pepper and spice and basil freshness of his scent into her belly. Her breasts swell with the thought and her hips sag slightly as her legs part, knees biting into the grillwork of the fire escape.
Chris’ fingers slide down the barrel of his sawed-off and lock around the base, knuckles pale. If he were a wolf, he’d be able to smell her and how much she wants him. The bare March wind whistles up and slices into the gap between Laura’s legs. She imagines for a second that it’s his cold fingers, gun oil and aconite and wide palms, thumb rubbing along the top of her clit, and then she gets the reality check that she’s fantasizing about a hunter on a fire escape in the shittiest part of Brooklyn.
Laura tugs the sweater out from under the bricks and pulls it over her head without bothering to unbutton it. It falls to mid-thigh and her nipples are just hidden inside the deep V of the neck if she doesn’t let the shoulders fall. Only its lack of mesh keeps it from being the most scandalous thing Laura has ever worn.
She takes to her feet completely, curling her toes into the gaps in the iron of the fire escape, and tries to pretend that Chris isn’t still watching and that he doesn’t test her self-control in a way that defies explanation, logic, and self-possession. Laura can actually feel her wolf pounding against the inside of her ribcage, begging her to TAKE.
When she chances a look at Chris because Hales do masochism like nobody’s business, he lifts his right thumb to his chin and rubs it back and forth. Laura spends an unhealthy amount of time imagining sucking his thumb into her mouth and laving the tip with her tongue and biting against the protective layer of his nail before she licks her middle and forefinger and scrubs at the right corner of her mouth.
“Okay?” she asks, as if he’ll be able to hear.
He nods, once, and drops his hand. It falls to his gun, and then down to his side. Laura has her forefinger back in her mouth before she can really think it through, and she licks the last of the blood from the webbing between her fingers. Hunter blood is always slightly unsatisfying and vaguely moldly, as if it’s gone off.
Chris’ blood pumps faster, pushes his scent further, and nearly knocks Laura back on her heels. She tempts herself for a handful of seconds, considering Chris’ blood. Would it taste like pesto? It smells like it would. She can imagine fairly easily what licking Chris’ blood from her fingers would taste like. The groves back in Beacon Hills Preserve, where the ash trees grow in naturally protective rings, had always been peppery to Laura’s nose.
This is a series of fundamentally shitty decisions waiting to happen, and Laura’s too hopped up on the hunt to be responsible for anything, even fucking a married man who clearly wants to wrap her hair around her fist and string her out against the nearest wall.
Laura is an adult. Laura is at least half human. She’s not an animal.
Laura leaves. In the interest of self-preservation, she throws herself off of the fire escape, tucks her legs into a roll, and pops her dislocated shoulder back in before she even has time to think about the pain. She runs for Manhattan, and she doesn't stop, even when a policeman on a motorcycle pauses at a red light and says, “What the ever loving fuck,” as Laura dashes across the intersection on bare feet and in her stolen cardigan.
She throws the cardigan into one of the Dumpsters in the alley behind her apartment building, climbs to the fourth floor naked and desperately hoping that none of her neighbors are awake, and uses a claw to disengage the latch on her bedroom window. She can hear Derek studiously plodding away at his revising in his room. “I’m home,” she tells him, a useless courtesy, and then, “I’m taking a shower to get this stink off of me.”
Derek is a mess at a lot of things and he’s always been at most a half-hearted werewolf, so there’s at least 40% of a hope that he won’t be able to recognize Laura’s lust and frustrated desire. She loves her baby brother and she won’t hide it from him if he asks, but there is so much that she’s not even vaguely prepared to talk about. The parallels between the surviving Hale siblings and their attraction to unsuitable hunters will never be funny or ironic or a bonding experience-it’s just painful.
~
Chris is waiting outside of the bakery two weeks later, hands curled loosely in the pockets of his coat. “Good morning,” he says.
“Oh my fucking god, Chris,” Laura says reflexively. She’d had her nose buried in a cup of coffee and hadn’t exactly anticipated seeing Chris this morning-or at all, really, for the rest of her life. “What are you doing here?” she demands. “This has stopped being creepy and started being just plain fucking weird. You know who I am. You know why I’m here.”
There’s a long second wherein Chris wavers between continuing whatever senseless line of deceit he’d originally intended and rolling with Laura’s accusation and taking another mode of attack. She can see it in his face, because she can’t really look away from him. She swallows too much of her coffee too fast and uses the fleeting burn down the line of her esophagus to center herself before she does something especially idiotic, like shift and tackle Chris into the bakery.
“Yes, Laura,” he finally says as she throws the empty cup into a trashcan. “I know who you are.”
It wasn’t like Laura was waiting for her name out of his lips to be a revelation, but it kind of is. Her Alpha ears hear every place where his tongue rasps against the inside of his mouth. She wants to suck his tongue inside her mouth and bite bite bite every syllable out of him until he can only make breathless, wrecked noises.
Laura tries to think of the last time she was this attracted to someone to make a pithy mental comparison, but there isn’t a single name that comes to mind. Her wolf scrambles everything up inside her head and her body, pulling at her control and scattering the parts of Laura’s human that she keeps dominant for the sake of the humans with whom she lives. Her wolf wants to suck on the pulse in Chris’ neck and fuck him inside the bakery, where chives and butter and cheese make everything smell like warmth and home.
Jesus fuck. “Well,” Laura says brusquely, looking down at her keys so she doesn’t end up growing an extra set of teeth in the middle of the goddamn street. “This has been nice. Please don’t wait two years until the next time I see you-make it two decades, at least.”
Chris’ pulse flickers.
“Or,” Laura adds, tapping a fingernail against the key to the front door of the bakery, “forever. You can also do that.”
Please, her human urges, please, walk the fuck away.
“Every time I come to speak with you, something else seems to come up,” Chris comments quietly, like he’s a member of the homeowner’s association come to check up on the state of her front yard. He makes it sound so human, so benign, like Laura isn’t a blend of instinct and psychologically damaging behavior.
“That’s what happens,” Laura says, trying for airy and maybe succeeding-she can’t really judge her own voice, not over the sound of her throat trying to light itself on fire with want-“when you corner an Alpha trying to mind her own goddamn business.”
“You ran,” Chris continues, as if Laura’s interruption and thinly veiled threat is beside the point, “and left your territory unclaimed.”
If Laura moves her nail very slowly, she can hear a shift in the metal quality of the key; it’s softer in the middle, from being nestled against the heat of Laura’s hip, and there’s a series of uneven dips where she’s unwittingly bent the key with her werewolf strength. “The Hale pack still runs over that land,” she finally says. “Not that it’s any of your business, hunter.”
“Yes,” agrees Chris, fake and pleasant, so false it grits between her teeth, “once a year you go back and scratch some trees. That’s going to be very effective against migrant packs.”
Laura wants to crawl inside Chris and do lots of unsavory things to his body, but that doesn’t given him free reign over the soft, unprotected parts of her. “If you have advice on how an Alpha werewolf should run her pack,” she tells him, letting in the push of red from the corners of her eyes and the flow of saliva that prepares her mouth for her extra teeth, “why don’t you leave a comment card?”
Chris steps forward; he tries to use his body to crowd her, but she has an open street to her back and the reminder of his size, the press of his shoulders and the firmness of his chest, is counterproductive to anything except Laura latching her teeth into his collarbone and dragging him into an alley. “You have a responsibility,” he begins, and this part is clearly practiced-his heart runs smoothly into the head of the sentence-“and you can pretend to be human up and down this coast for as long as you want, but the Hales abided by the Code and I’m not going to see that land go to one of the packs from Wisconsin or Nevada because you’re too busy burying your head in the sand.”
“I am not human,” Laura snarls. Her jaw clicks and pops out; her teeth push against the top of her gums, begging to be released, and her hair tries to climb back into her head, eager to redistribute itself across her body. The pins holding her hair in a bun against the back of her head protest the sudden yank and snap. She reaches out and grabs the front of Chris’ Henley, where it gapes from underneath his winter coat and the exposed skin begs her to suck the sweat out of his pores. The door is too complicated right now; Laura turns and pulls him around the corner, into the alley down the side of the bakery. “No one will take our land, hunter.”
“It’s not exactly well-defended,” Chris says calmly, like she can’t hear his heart leap for escape, like she isn’t pushing her breasts against his chest, her fingers knotting and pulling at his shirt. The cloth of his shirt protests the intrusion of her claws.
“It is Hale land,” Laura says, “and we mourn. We’re not animals.”
What she means is, she has seven years. For the loss of the Alpha and the rest of her pack, she will receive seven years’ grace from the other packs. She is supposed to be building. She knows; she’s read it in the books in Eureka, the ones that Derek doesn’t know about, and heard it in the lore that Edith had always spun into tales for the children at Christmas. But Laura knows Derek isn’t ready for their pack to be any bigger and Derek has been and always will be her greatest priority.
“You’re not human, you’re not animal,” Chris says snidely; he’s clearly exposed to teenagers on a regular basis, because it’s such an adolescent tone. “Make a choice.”
Because Laura can recognize that kind of manipulation, it doesn’t push her over the edge. “For a born hunter,” she comments, lethal and level and low, “you don’t seem to understand how werewolves work.”
“We watch and we regulate,” Chris says. “We don’t perform psychological evaluations.”
The last thing Laura wants to do is get into a philosophical discussion with a hunter about werewolf-hunter dynamics in an alleyway at six in the morning, especially when it’s taking most of her considerable control not to rub up against him like some kind of dog in heat, but for a second, she feels tempted. Chris is clearly not a moron and he’s not got a vested interest in appearing surly and unhelpful; if the members of his family didn’t swear an oath at a young age to kill Laura’s species, she’d maybe even like him.
“Cute,” she says. The wreck of his heart is still pressing against her eardrums, but she no longer wants to remove his head from his body; she can even feel her human begin to prevail against her wolf. She retracts her claws but keeps her fingers tangled in his shirt, for leverage. “My point stands. My land is my concern; there’s no reason for you to be involved.”
Her voice has softened without conscious input; there’s silk over threat, now, and she can feel the pounding of his heart at their point of contact. A solid line is drawn between his and hers. An exhale lingers as it drifts across her forehead and rustles her hair where it’s tumbling in a half-mess over her left shoulder.
“Think of us like the IRS,” Chris quips. She can hear where it’s supposed to fall hard and flat, humor over threat, but his breathing renders the point moot.
Laura laughs. “I’m more afraid of the IRS than I am of you, Chris.”
It’s a negligible point because Laura isn’t afraid of the IRS and if she wastes time to think about hunters that she fears, Kate Argent falls higher on the list than someone who can’t keep his hands from shaking near her, but Chris takes it as a taunt. Years of training make the point of pivot unpredictable; his breathing doesn’t change at all as he plants and turns and slams Laura against the brick wall of Frank’s building.
Whatever threat he means to utter gets lost because sparks light along the fringes of her vision when Laura’s head hits brick and, for the first time in her life, Laura is knocked senseless. She rears up and uses her still-solid hold on his shirt to lever herself into his mouth and shit shit shit he tastes like basil and mint, toothpaste and coffee and stale sleep, and his teeth sink into her lip without a whisper of resistance. She bites back, pushing herself onto one toe and using the curve of her leg to yank him closer. He falls against her body with a rush and her blood all rises into her ears and she licks his mouth open and falls in further, sucking his tongue into her mouth and swallowing, compulsively, her throat working as her fingers sink into his shoulders.
His palms begin with pinning her shoulders to the wall and then they shift, lower, to her upper arms, and his thumbs brush against the outside of her breasts. For someone who kisses like he wants to fuck her mouth open, his hands stay in strictly junior high territory, and Laura is two seconds from clawing his shirt over his head and showing him that he can, in fact, put his oil-stained hands on her nipples and she won’t exactly break, when she hits his shoulder holster.
Her human thinks shit fuck because that goddamn holster is sexy as fuck, but her wolf smells the aconite in the bullets inside his Browning and she slams herself backwards, mouth peeling from his with a discomfiting sound like the release of plugged drain. His mouth is shiny from spit and red from her teeth.
“Oh my fucking god,” Laura says. “You are married.”
Chris never stops smelling peppery and fuckable as he says, “Really?” almost involuntarily, judging by the self-hate that flickers alive on his face.
“I don’t fuck married men,” Laura protests. It takes one good shove for her to dislodge him; she can smell the capillaries break under his skin as he takes two steps back to recover the momentum. “Okay, well, that never happened,” she says, to herself and to a pigeon that’s paused in where it’s pecking at the crumbs surrounding Frank’s Dumpster. “Right. Great. Okay. You need to leave and stop questioning the decisions I make as Alpha.”
Chris still looks shell-shocked-probably because he’s never even contemplated fucking someone other than his wife and now he has Laura’s scent rubbed into his clothes-but he makes a solid effort to recover. He ends up doing it better than Laura would have predicted. “We watch that area,” he finally says, his voice rough but moderately more professional. “We always have.”
Laura had assumed, from the visits in Pittsburgh and here, that he was part of a migrant hunter family, but apparently not. “The Argents watch there,” she says. Later, she’ll wonder why she said it that way-such a stupid thing to say. Of all the ways that Laura could’ve opened herself up for that conversation, The Argents watch there is at least number five on Dumbest Options, maybe even number three. They’re not even her own words; she’s lifted them from Peter’s journal, which had been the first place she’d looked when she was trembling with anger and loss and trying to figure out why the fucking hell Derek’s secret older girlfriend had set their house on fire.
“Yes,” Chris says. “We do.”
There’s a weird second where Laura stares at a particularly stubborn hair is protruding from the clenched line of Chris’ jaw; he must have missed it while he was shaving this morning. With a low whine, her stomach tries to crawl its way out of her throat. She hasn’t vomited since she accidentally swallowed mountain ash bark during a project for her Ecology lab at HSU; she wonders abstractly if this will break her record. You fucking mess, her human says as Laura tries not to gag. She presses her palm to her mouth and uses the pack scent that clings to her pulse points to center herself.
She smells like Chris. She smells like Argent.
“Go away,” Laura snarls, garbling the words. “Run now, Argent, before I kill you.” The shift sounds like a distant toll of a bell, but she can already feel it crawl across her skin in long shivers. When Chris shows no sign of moving, Laura drops her hand and the pretenses and lets her head lead the shift. “GO,” she roars, and the last of her yell is swallowed by her wolf’s snout, ill suited for vowels that don’t end in liquid Ls.
Chris unsnaps the holster on his gun and takes off. He moves away from the heavily trafficked street, deeper into the network of alleys that connect Frank’s neighborhood, and before Laura can make another stupid decision, like one that will result in a worse blood feud or her brother having no living family members, she pounces on the pigeon.
Its neck snaps with a single jerk, and then Laura is left with a mouthful of pigeon-which is disgusting-and dripping with blood and a host of human concerns that she is currently unable to deal with, like a bakery that needs to be open in twenty minutes and a scent trail that her wolf wants to follow. She can’t predict what will happen if she catches Chris, if she’ll want to kill him or fuck him or a particularly morbid combination of both, and none of those are options her human could live with.
So Laura chokes down the pigeon and then still ends up shifting back and vomiting it up, blood and little bones and the filth of Manhattan’s bird population heavy on her tongue. That’s how Frank finds her, ten minutes after she should’ve dragged him from the depths of the kitchen to man the counter for the morning rush: her clothes shredded and her surrounded by and covered in blood and a half-digested pigeon.
“Oh my god, Laura,” says Frank, shocked open and scared, and she lets him pull her to her feet and wrap her in his flannel overshirt, his human hands gentle and soft against the protruding bones of her shoulder blades. She lets him pour her into his shower and then she puts on a pair of pajama pants and a Knicks t-shirt that will send Derek into conniptions and falls into his bed. It smells like Frank and familiarity and now she does, too, like his lemon body-wash and his absurdly expensive shampoo and the sticky flour scent of everything in the building.
Frank holds her hand until she pretends to fall asleep. After he leaves, quietly shutting the door behind him, she listens with her eyes shut until his footsteps reach the bottom of the stairs and she hears the tinkle of the bell as he unlocks the front door of the bakery and lets in a string of crabby early-morning customers. He’s left her cell phone and key ring, both undamaged, on the table next to the bed, and she lifts her arm just enough out of the nest of blankets to snag her phone.
“Hey,” she croaks when Derek answers.
“What,” Derek says, voice steeped in sleep.
“Nothing,” Laura says. “Go back to sleep but leave the phone on, okay?”
Derek mumbles, “Whatever,” and does as she asks, propping his open phone against the stack of books on his bedside table and settling back down. She lets his heartbeat center her world, until everything else she hears is just an echo of it, tinny and far away and false.
[part iv]