Mate Marked: Shifters of Silver Peak (3 page)

“That little bastard’s nineteen, and he defaced my poster. Nobody defaces my poster.” Roman gestured at the wall, at a picture that was completely covered in black spray-paint. A spray-paint can lay underneath it, along with a backpack, probably abandoned by the teenager. Great. So Roman was some kind of musician or something and the kid had sprayed over his band poster. Poor, poor baby.

“That must have really upset you. Are you going to cry? I’ve got some tissues in my purse,” Chelsea said, pretending to root around in there solicitously.

“You know, I like you.” Roman was looking at her speculatively now. “I like a woman who gives me a hard time. If you know what I mean.” He favored her with a slow, sexy grin, and stood there, thumbs hooked in his belt loops, waiting for her to melt into a puddle of lust.

Chelsea remained unmelted.

Oh, her loins were heating, all right, but her mind was sending stern signals downward: “No! Bad!”

“Yes, I do, unfortunately,” she said, frost dripping from every word. “Now let me give you a word of advice. Next time, pick on someone your own size, or I swear to God I’ll shift and we’ll throw down, and you’ll find out what kind of crazy bitches they breed in backwoods Wisconsin. Toodles!” Chelsea wiggled her fingers at him and turned and sauntered off.

“Toodles?” Roman said in astonishment.

The crowd of merchants, standing at the end of the alleyway now, watched her walk back to her car with Pepper trotting along behind her.

“Oh,” Elmer Winkleman, owner of the Grocery Depot and current mayor of Silver Peak, said happily. “I think we’ve found the solution to our problem.”

“Let me get this straight,” Chelsea said again. She looked from the mayor, to Lorena, to Susan, to Calvin Castleberry, the president of the Chamber of Commerce. They had pounced on her as she was walking Pepper, several hours after her confrontation with Roman, and dragged her into the town hall, telling her it was a matter of great urgency.

She sat in an uncomfortable folding chair, surrounded by a half circle of the Silver Peak pack’s most important citizens. They were all staring at her with their hands folded in their laps and expressions of great eagerness.

“You want
me
to be your sheriff.” She said it very slowly. “You want me to enforce the law. And you understand that I have no law enforcement experience whatsoever. Half the time, I can’t even spell ‘Sheriff’ right. Is it two Rs or two Fs? Who the hell knows? I went to the Culinary Institute of Wisconsin, with a specialty in baking, and I know how to make twenty flavors of cake pops. Baking is what I’m good at.
And yet you want to deputize me.”

“Exactly!” Mayor Winkleman beamed, nodding vigorously. He seemed delighted that she was finally getting it. “You know, it was very commonly done in the 1800s. The local citizens needed someone to enforce the law, so a committee of concerned citizens would select an appropriate candidate to help keep their territory safe.”

That was true, and in many ways shifters, living on their vast, ungoverned tracts of land and making their own laws, were like the pioneers of the Old West.

However, the fact that shifters were still working the kinks out of their legal system didn’t mean they should be drafting some totally inexperienced private citizen like herself to be sheriff.

“Wouldn’t law enforcement be the kind of thing an Alpha would normally do?”

Mayor Winkleman let out a disappointed sigh. Why couldn’t she just take the job already?

“We don’t have an Alpha. He left town.” He cleared his throat. “When the paper mill folded.” He didn’t meet her eyes when he said it.

“Or the beta?”

“Also left town.”

“Or anyone else in town who actually knows the pack members and the territory?” “But that’s why you’d be so good at it. You don’t know anybody, so you’d be impartial,” Calvin Castleberry wheedled. “And you said you were looking to be a member of a pack. You’d be a registered member of our pack.”

Well, there was that. Although she had the feeling that there was some kind of catch to this; she just hadn’t figured out what yet.

“How much does it pay?”

The mayor looked at the floor. Not a good sign.

“Right now, with the town about to declare bankruptcy, five hundred dollars a month—” He saw the look on her face and quickly added, “Plus free room and board. You can live in the house at 537 Scenic View as long as you’re sheriff, and you can also have a fifty-dollar-a-week grocery allowance at my store.”

Well. Maybe that was the catch; the terrible pay. But it was better than no pay.

Given her current circumstances, this was literally an offer Chelsea couldn’t refuse. Right now she didn’t even have enough money to pay for gas to make it to another shifter territory. And this was a tiny town in the middle of nowhere. Other than some spray-paint vandalism and an arrogant, hot-tempered musician, whom she was more than capable of handling, how much serious crime could there be?

I’d love to handle him some more,
a hormone-fueled section of her brain shouted out, and she mentally chastised herself. And him. That Roman was absolutely dreadful, invading her thoughts uninvited when she was trying to talk business.

“We’d love it if you stayed here,” Lorena said eagerly. “Honestly. There’s just something that feels really good about having you around.”

Well, that was true, although if they knew why they might not be quite so eager to have her there.

“All right,” she conceded with a sharp twinge of uneasiness. “I’ll do it. Pepper, really,” she added.

Pepper had let out a lengthy blast of flatulence so loud that it echoed throughout the room and made Chelsea’s eyes water. Everyone else must have heard and smelled it too, but their eager smiles never wavered. That should have been a clue.

Two hours later, she was standing in front of a podium in the town hall, holding her hand up, repeating an oath to uphold the laws of the Silver Peak Territory, with most of the pack assembled. The mayor and town council were watching her with looks on their faces that frankly made her more than a little nervous. Erika wasn’t there; Chelsea had asked where she was, and apparently they’d finally gotten some business at the garage, so she was helping her dad fix an old Chevy Malibu.

As the Mayor quickly pinned a big five-pointed star on Chelsea’s blouse, she looked down at Pepper, who refused to meet her eyes.

What exactly have I gotten myself into?
she wondered.

* * * * *

On a small, pie-shaped wedge of land outside Silver Peak, sandwiched between shifter territory and human territory, a family of humans was dealing with their own problems.

Their house was falling down around their ears. The roof leaked, the water heater was broken, and the septic tank needed a new drain field.

Furthermore, more sheep were missing from the property of rancher Mitch Rodgers. His land bordered theirs. Sections of Rodgers’ fence had been torn down, and a wolf’s paw prints had been found in the area where the sheep had vanished. The paw prints had continued on to the Dudleys’ property, which was making the Dudleys very nervous. The mood in Juniper, a small human town located uncomfortably close to shifter territory, was turning ugly.

And to top it off, Edna Dudley was standing in the drawing room trying to have a conversation with her granddaughter Joyce, and Joyce was completely ignoring her.

“Joyce, don’t you try the silent treatment on me—it won’t work.” Edna, seventy-seven, glared at her granddaughter. “You didn’t get home until four a.m. last night, and today’s a school day. Why are you home from school? If your parents were alive, they’d tan your hide, and I’ve half a mind to do it myself.”

There was no response.

Edna folded her arms across her chest and glowered. “Not talking, eh? I can outlast you. I’ll stand here all day if I have to.”

Behind her, she heard the sound of laughter, and she whirled around to glare at her two grandsons, Ryan, ten, and Shawn, eight. They were standing in the living room, watching her chastise her granddaughter. When she turned to scowl at them, they both quickly ducked behind the sofa.

From the hallway, she heard footsteps thudding down the stairs in a big hurry. Joyce walked down the stairs, then turned to frown at her younger brothers. “How long were you going to let Grandma stand there and talk to her reflection in the mirror?” she asked.

“We were almost done,” Ryan assured her, at the same time Shawn added, “It’s his fault. I wanted to tell her.” The next moment they were slapping at each other, and Joyce crossed the room quickly, grabbing them by their collars and separating them.

Edna turned to look at the mirror.

“Oh, my, you’re right, that is my reflection. I was wondering when you got glasses,” she said, squinting at herself in the mirror.

“Also, I’m not in high school—I’m twenty,” Joyce said with exaggerated patience. “And I was at work last night. At the Hootenanny. I bartend and waitress there. Remember?”

“Well of course I remember, dear. You took that job so we wouldn’t lose the house. What do you think I am, senile?” Edna said indignantly. She looked around. “Now where are my glasses?”

“You’re wearing them,” Ryan called.

“Of course I am.” Edna fingered the stems of her glasses. “Isn’t he an angel?”

Joyce glowered down at her younger brother. She was still gripping his collar. “I’m not going to answer that question.” Then she glanced at her grandmother and her gaze softened. “Do you want to go out for a dip in the mineral springs before I start working on dinner?”

“That would be lovely. Let me just go get a towel.” Her grandmother scampered off, leaving Joyce shaking her head in frustration. Her grandmother’s mind was wandering farther and farther afield these days, and now all this business with the sheep and the fences being torn down, uncomfortably close to their house. It made her afraid to leave her family to go to work, but she had to go to work or they wouldn’t eat.

If only their house were worth a dime, she’d sell it so she could move them all out of there and go back to college. They sat on five beautiful wooded acres of property. However, they were completely landlocked between the Rodgers ranch and the wolf shifters’ territory. The quasi-legal dirt road that led to their house snaked right through shifter territory, and then onto the Rodgers ranch, and finally on to the main road. Nobody would pay them for an old, falling-apart ranch house that was practically on top of pack lands.

“I’m here!” Her grandmother hurried towards her. Wonder of wonders, she hadn’t wandered off somewhere; she’d shimmied into her bathing suit and sandals, and was holding a towel. She did love her dips in the hot springs that had opened up after last year’s earthquake; claimed they helped her “Arthur-itis”. Of course, the bad news was that she kept sneaking off to take mineral spring dips by herself; Joyce kept making her promise not to, and her grandmother kept conveniently “forgetting”.

Joyce glanced at her brothers, biting her lip. “Maybe you should come with us.”

“Wolves can’t come in our house,” Shawn told her. “We’ll be fine. And I know how to use the shotgun.”

“But they can’t come in anyway,” Ryan reassured her, then a look of doubt crossed his face. “Right? They can’t?”

“Right.” She nodded firmly. “But lock the door behind me.” They’d never locked the door before, not in her whole life.

Some people were whispering that the wolf paw prints came from the kind of wolves who could, in fact, open doors—from the shifters who owned the territory next to the Dudleys’ land.

But why would they suddenly start stealing sheep? She knew a lot of people were wary of wolf shifters, but they’d always been nice to her and her family. They were her best customers at the Hootenanny, and one of them…well, there was no point in thinking like that. He came from a pack that was moving on soon, and she was working seven nights a week to keep gas in the car and food on the table. She didn’t have time to think about a handsome wolf shifter with soft amber eyes who tipped his hat every time she walked by.

“And yet there I am thinking about him,” she muttered.

“Are you talking to yourself? Goodness, Joyce, you must be getting senile,” Edna said, looking at her with concern.

“Must be!” she agreed brightly. Then she called out to her brothers, “Keep that door locked, I mean it,” as she led her grandmother out the door.

The Sheriff’s Department was located in a small, red brick building located next to the equally tiny town hall. The jail had one cell. Apparently the citizens of Silver Peak generally stayed on the right side of the law.

Heck, anybody could do this job
, Chelsea thought as she flipped through the pages of the county’s book of criminal statutes. Why had they gotten such a bee in their bonnet about hiring a new sheriff? They barely even needed one.

“You’re a deputy,” she informed Pepper, who rolled over onto her back and waved her paws in the air to show how much she appreciated the new title. “It doesn’t come with any money, but I can promise you treats and belly rubs.”

It was five p.m. She’d already unloaded all her belongings at the small log cabin style building that would be her new home. It didn’t have an oven, just a hot plate and a microwave. She’d have to figure out how to finagle an oven out of the townspeople. Somebody must have a spare oven. She needed to keep her baking skills up, because one day, no matter how long it took, she would be opening a bakery of her own.

It was still early, and she’d already had quite the eventful day. She’d signed the papers that said she was a member of the Silver Peak pack, shifted, inked her paw print and stepped on the appropriate spot on the registration papers with her inky paw. The mayor had hurried off to fax the registration to the Council of Shifter Affairs.

There was a loud rapping on the door. “Come in,” she called.

Susan and Lorena walked in, each holding a coffee cake and arguing. Barbara was trailing behind them.

“She doesn’t need two coffee cakes,” Lorena was saying indignantly.

“Well, then you shouldn’t have copied me. This town needs a mayor who’s an original thinker,” Susan said.

“I copied you? Liar! Keep it up and you’ll get a smack.”

“Ladies! I love coffee cake,” Chelsea interrupted them quickly. “I’ll take all the coffee cake I can get.”

“You see,” Susan said triumphantly to her twin, setting the cake down on the table, “there you go stirring up trouble over nothing.”

“By the way, what does Mayor Winkleman think about you both running?” Chelsea asked. Lorena produced a plastic knife from her purse and began cutting slices of cake.

“Oh, he only became mayor because the last mayor left town in a hurry,” Lorena said. “He can’t wait to give up the job. Takes too much time away from his business and his family.”

The last mayor left town too?
Chelsea thought uneasily.
And in a hurry?
What was it about Silver Peak?

Susan set out slices of cake on paper plates that she fetched from the cupboard . As they settled in and she poured the coffee she’d just brewed, Barbara pulled out her notepad.

“Now, what’s the first thing you’re going to do as sheriff?” she asked, pencil poised above the pad.

As if in answer, they heard angry shouting coming from the street outside.

“Arrest someone?” Chelsea sighed, setting down her coffee cup.
Note to self
, she thought;
learn how handcuffs work.

She hurried outdoors, with Barbara, Susan and Lorena racing after her. To her shock, the commotion was coming from Erika, who was beating up Mayor Winkleman on the front steps of the town hall.

She ran over and grabbed Erika by the arm and hauled her off him.

“Erika! What the heck? Do you actually want to be the first person I arrest?” she demanded indignantly. “I thought we were practicing the whole ladylike thing! Beating up elected officials is
not
ladylike!”

“Tell her!” Erika yelled at the mayor. “Or I swear I’ll kick your ass from here to Billings!”

The mayor hung his head, glanced up at Chelsea and then stared down at the ground. “Well, there is one little thing that we may have forgotten to mention when we offered you the sheriff’s job.”

Oh, crud. Here it comes.

“What?” she demanded.

The mayor shuffled his feet.

The local merchants and their customers had run up and were gathered around, eagerly watching. Barbara was scribbling madly on her notepad.

The mayor opened his briefcase, pulled out a sheet of paper and held it up. It was a wanted poster of a shockingly handsome man with a sexy scowl.

It took her a moment to realize who the man was. It was Roman, the man she’d whacked with her purse the day before.

“He’s the Alpha of a gypsy pack which is camping out on our territory. There’s a warrant for his arrest that’s been sent to us from a shifter territory in Colorado, for grand theft auto. You’ve got to serve the warrant, bring him in and personally take him to Colorado,” the mayor said to her shoes, since he couldn’t meet her eyes.

So that hadn’t been a band poster the teenager had defaced. It had been a wanted poster. Awesome.

“Aren’t they trespassing, if they’re on your territory?” she asked, looking at the poster with dismay. “Couldn’t you have them all forcibly evicted?”

He sighed. “Technically, no. Gypsy packs can occupy land on any shifter territory for up to six months.”

“What happened to the last Silver Peak sheriff?” she demanded ominously.

A long, drawn-out pause and much foot-shuffling and fidgeting indicated that she really wasn’t going to like the answer.

“Mayor Winkleman. While I’m still young, please.”

“He tried to arrest Roman, and Roman broke his nose.”

“What happened to the Silver Peak Alpha?” she continued, although she really didn’t want to know.

“Roman knocked him unconscious, put a dunce cap on his head and left him on the town hall steps.”

“And the beta?”

“It had been raining a lot. Roman literally dragged him through the mud and ruined his clothing and sent him running back to town.”

“Why did the last mayor quit?”

“Roman came into town to go shopping and the mayor tried to tell him he couldn’t until he took care of the warrant and Roman gave him an atomic wedgie and hung him from a flagpole.”

“And, you think I can arrest him.” She stared at him stonily.

“I saw how you handled him with that kid!” he said. “And you’re female. I’ve never heard of him striking a woman. So you can probably arrest him without getting beaten up or killed. Maybe. Almost certainly.”

Erika shot him a look of disgust.

“Do not hit him again,” Chelsea said to Erika, who was balling her fists. “Can you go check on Pepper, please?”

“Fine,” Erika sighed, and headed off to Chelsea’s office.

“Has he killed anyone?” Chelsea asked the mayor.

“Well, a few Death Matches here and there, plus someone who came in guns blazing to try to arrest him and shot and injured one of his pack members. But that idiot didn’t use a silver bullet, so of course he didn’t stand a chance against them. We can give you silver bullets. I was going to give you ’til tomorrow to get settled in and then stop by with an assortment of weapons for you to use.”

“I don’t suppose you’ve called in the Council for Shifter Affairs on this?”

The mayor grimaced in distaste. “Good God, no.”

Not surprising. No shifter called in the council unless it was a last resort.

In an instance of serious shifter versus human crime, or vice versa, the council would be called in, but when it came to shifters having problems with other shifters, that was left entirely to the respective tribes and packs and prides. A shifter had to obey the laws of whatever pack he or she belonged to, and if they visited another pack, they had to obey those laws.

“The council’s already been out here enough recently,” he added, wincing in disgust.

“So they know about Roman’s pack?” Chelsea asked.

Mayor Winkleman shook his head. “No, no, it’s just that sheep have been disappearing from the Rodgers Ranch for the last few months, fences torn down, and there were wolf paw prints in the area. Our pack lands border the ranch. Mitch Rodgers, the ranch owner, has been lobbying to have a couple hundred acres of our property annexed, because he says that our pack members are the ones killing his sheep. He claims he needs the land as a buffer between his property and ours.”

At her look of surprise, he added, “It’s odd. He’s never had problems with us before. I mean, we don’t associate with the human town a lot, of course, but we do know all the major players over there. We do some business with them from time to time. Once a year we have a human-shifter social, and we visit each other’s towns to check out the Christmas decorations. In all the years I’ve known him, Mitch has never seemed prejudiced against shifters. Our people buy livestock and feed from his ranch. And yet all of a sudden, he’s insisting that we’re coming on to his land and stealing his sheep.

“Is the land valuable for any reason, the land that he’s asking for?”

“No, it’s just more forest land. He already owns a huge spread. Nobody’s clamoring for our property—we’re out in the middle of nowhere, not near any major roads or towns. However, we’re not going to shrink our territory and hand over a big tract of land just because he says so.”

“Well,” Chelsea mused, “I hate it say it, but times have been tight economically. And it sounds as if it’s out of character for him to just randomly accuse shifters of something without cause. Is it at all possible that he’s right, that it’s somebody from here stealing his sheep?”

“Not from here,” the mayor said, then flinched. “Don’t tell Roman I said that.”

“What do you mean by that?”

“Well,” the mayor said slowly, “the attacks started right after Roman’s pack showed up. But the council actually sent a shifter investigator out here twice because Mitch complained, and both times the investigator scented real wolves at the site where the sheep had disappeared. Not shifters. So the council declared the case closed.” He looked at her hopefully. “Maybe that problem will go away once you arrest Roman. Not that I’m saying Roman had anything to do with it,” he added hastily.

Of course you’re not saying that
, Chelsea thought.
Because it would take a set of testicles to say that, and clearly you’re lacking those.