Way of the Wolf: Shifter Legacies 1 (37 page)

“I see what you mean,” Lawrence said. “All that research and effort and he produces a trash book? That doesn’t make a lot of sense. This is good stuff.”

“We all have blind spots.”

Lawrence grunted noncommittally.

David finished dressing and headed up to the club with Lawrence. “Do you ever wonder where you would be if not for Farris?”

“Dead,” Lawrence said grimly.

That made him check his stride. “Dead?”

“Dead.” Lawrence sighed and glanced at his wristband. Obviously deciding they had time, he ran a hand through his hair and launched into his story. “Most of us have an attack in our past to blame lycanthropy upon right?”

David nodded. He hadn’t met anyone who didn’t.

“Not me. How long do you think I’ve been a shifter? Have a guess.”

“Five, ten years?”

“I’m thirty-five and I’ve been a shifter twenty of them.”

David’s jaw dropped.

“I wasn’t attacked. I was in a car accident. My parents didn’t make it, and I was paralysed. Broke my neck at C3.”

David winced. “Paraplegic?”

Lawrence nodded.

“I’m sorry, but they fixed you up.”

“No, they couldn’t fix me. I was on life support for almost five years slowly going mad. I begged them to let me die.
Begged!
They wouldn’t of course. Sedona loves life; those who follow her cannot kill or allow harm to come to someone under their care… blah, blah, blah. Their rhetoric is sickening.” Lawrence said bitterly. “As if forcing me to linger wasn’t harming me. The clerics tried everything, but gradually one by one they stopped coming. Then it was the turn of the doctors to try all their crackpot ideas. Eventually they gave up too, and I was left to rot in a private room paid for by the insurance company.”

“How did you become a shifter?”

“I couldn’t do anything for myself. Nothing. I would have refused food if I could have, but they put tubes into my stomach and fed me that way. I have no family. None. There was no one I could beg to kill me, and the nurses were horrified when I raged at them. They stopped listening to me long before it happened.

“One night this woman put her head into my room looking for her friend. I told her to bugger off and leave me alone, but thank the Goddess she didn’t. She said her name was Liz as if she hadn’t heard me, all smiles and charm she was. She came into the room, sat down without asking, and just started talking to me. I ignored her of course, and eventually she left. She came back to see her friend off and on and stopped by to talk with me.

“Anyway, a couple of weeks later she came by one last time to tell me her friend was being discharged and they were going home out of state. That’s when she offered to try to fix me.”

“She was a shifter.”

Lawrence nodded. “She hadn’t told me before because,” he shrugged. “You know. She didn’t want me to start yelling about monsters and causing a fuss. I wouldn’t have done that, not even back then. I was almost fifteen by then, and looked like a skeleton. All my muscles had atrophied. I was a real mess. You were a doctor, you know what happens.”

He nodded, easily imagining it. Muscles waste away from lack of use and tendons shrink causing limbs to curl up. Without regular physiotherapy, Lawrence would have curled into the foetal position eventually. The hospital staff would have worked to reduce that, but they couldn’t prevent such changes completely.

Lawrence continued. “So she offers to try, and I say I’ll do anything to get out of that place. Anything. She could do whatever she wanted; bite me, kill me and eat me… anything. So she bites me. I wanted her to smuggle me out first, but the life-support machines couldn’t go with me. She said if the bite didn’t fix me, she would turn off the machines and let me die.”

“And Farris saved you,” David said quietly.

“Yeah. The bite worked but the change was very hard. Farris and I became one, but I was a mess. I still couldn’t move as a human. Farris was mobile, but so weak that we nearly died turning wolf that first time. The change takes energy and I had none. I was the worst looking wolf ever. All skin and bone, but I could move again. I didn’t care if I never turned back. As far as I was concerned, Farris could have our body and welcome to it. He wasn’t enthusiastic about the situation.”

David grinned. “Liz took you with her?”

“I stayed wolf for weeks. I had to play nice doggy around the humans we met until she could get us into the boonies and out of sight. She fed us up. I just let Liz and Farris get on with it, and basked in the freedom of being out of that damned room. Then one morning I woke up naked without fur. Farris, the sneaky bugger, had triggered the change in the night. I was human again, and weak as a baby, but I could move. I staggered into the house and here I am twenty years later.”

“Explains all the gym time.”

Lawrence shrugged. “I’ll never let myself be helpless again,” he said grimly. “Never. As for the body building, I enjoy it, but I wasn’t kidding the other day when you asked about it. When everyone you know is strong, any edge is good to have. You should think about it.”

He shook his head. “I’ve no interest in that. Besides, Mist is strong enough for both of us.”

We are one. We are strong enough for both of us.

True enough.

“You can never be strong enough,” Lawrence said. “Ask the vamps. There’s always someone stronger. Always.”

All vamps were paranoid suckers... ha! Paranoid blood suckers! “We better get on the door before Edward comes looking for us.”

Lawrence nodded and together they headed for the elevator.

* * *

21 ~ Alley Dogs

David rolled his eyes and said it again. “Dress code.” The guy looked crushed. David checked the next in line and nodded in appreciation of the tux. “Nice. Armani?”

The guy grimaced. “It’s a knockoff, but a good one.”

“You’re in.”

“Thanks man.”

“Hey, that’s not fair!” the first guy said as the faux Armani-clad shifter side-stepped him and disappeared through the lobby doors. “Where do you get off treating a shifter better than me?”

David’s eyes ignited as he glared down the steps at the nuisance this human was fast becoming. Said nuisance swallowed and paled at the sight of the glowing orbs, but he was too stupid to leave. David sighed, reining himself in, and looked the client over again. The fool had the era all wrong; he’d chosen the worst ensemble imaginable. Stephen would have his head if he let a 70s disco wannabe in.

“I’ll tell you what I’ll do,” he said, trying for friendly and reasonable. “If you go home and change into a plain tux, even one as cheap as the junk you’re wearing now and I’m still on the door when you get back, I’ll let you in and authorise a couple of free drinks. But if you keep flapping your lips at me and making these nice people wait, I’ll have my friend here rip your goddess be head off and hide the body!”

Lawrence grinned slowly.

“Now then, I can’t say fairer than that, can I?”

The waiting shifters chuckled. Some even gave suggestions or alternative punishments. Not all were anatomically possible, and he should know. He was a doctor after all. The human finally realised he wasn’t getting in tonight, and slunk away muttering threats but keeping them low enough that David could pretend not to hear them. Stupid little man. Any one of the waiting shifters could have broken him in half. Even the weakest amongst them.

“Sorry about that,” David said to a party of four who were next in line. “We get all sorts of crazies here.” He gave them a quick once over and let them in.

The line flowed smoothly through the doors for a while before another dress code violation. David was almost on autopilot by this stage. He could have been saving lives with Andrew now. They would probably have been making rounds, or debating a new elven healing ritual, but no, here he was safeguarding the club from the horror of black shirts and white suits.

“Dress code,” he sighed.

“What?”

“The theme is 1920s speakeasy. Most of our male guests wear a tux.”

“Oh, does it really matter? Double breasted is back in, and gangsters wore them didn’t they? I’m sure I read that. Look, I even have the hat!” He put the fedora on and tweaked the brim expertly.

David smiled. He liked this one. “Put a tie on, and I’ll let you in.”

The guy’s face fell.

“No tie?”

He shook his head.

David held out a hand to Lawrence who rolled his eyes and retrieved one from a pocket. David passed it to his new best friend, but had to tie it for him. The young human hadn’t seemed feeble-minded a moment ago, but suddenly he was all flustered fingers and thumbs.

He likes you.

Oh, it was like that? The young man was a thrill-seeker and didn’t discriminate by gender. At least the guy was circumspect and didn’t try to touch. Not always a given. He allowed David to get the tie on him properly, standing silently flushing with pleasure.

“I’m going to trust you to hand this back in before you leave.”

A nod.

“Have fun. Stay out of trouble.”

Another nod.

He waved the red-faced man into the club.

Lawrence laughed. “That was so sweet.”

He grimaced. “If I took all the little things seriously, I wouldn’t have any time to stress over the big stuff.” He let the next group in. “Besides, he’s harmless.”

“They usually are at first, but thrill-seekers can turn nasty when we reject them. Some advice welcome?”

“Why not, you’re dying to lay it on me.”

“When it’s a woman, don’t reject them. Make an excuse. You’re working, you’ll lose your job, you have a jealous shifter girlfriend who would literally kill you if you stray. Those work well. When it’s a guy, you’re straight, you’re not out yet, or your boss would fire you because he doesn’t like gays. Anything like that should work. You didn’t mean to, but that guy will come on to you later because you encouraged his fantasy.”

“I didn’t!”

“In his mind you did. Ask Mist.”

Is he right?

Yes,
Mist agreed.
The manthing likes you very much now, more than before. You were kind to him.

David sighed. “Okay.”

The queue to enter the club dwindled to a trickle as late afternoon turned toward evening. The sun was touching the roofs opposite when real trouble came calling. Mist warned him of the approach of more shifters, and these weren’t interested in good music and food. They were looking for trouble. He drew Lawrence’s attention to a pair of cars entering the lot.

“Are they...?”

“
Alley Dogs
,” Lawrence said grimly as men piled out of the vehicles. “That’s their Alpha in the lead.”

So this was Stephen’s one-time ally and the current thorn in his side. Raymond Pederson; Georgie’s boss, and according to Stephen, his real enemy. He looked eagerly for a sign that Georgie was here, but all the shifters were men. The disappointment that realisation brought made him snarl. It would have made things so much simpler if he could have dealt with both his problems here and now.

Pederson was an average looking man in his early thirties, roughly six foot, and around 190lbs. Just an average white guy, brown haired, seemingly normal in every way, but his Presence marked him as a strong alpha male, and Mist didn’t like that. The wolf was hyper alert and warily tasting the air through David. That’s what it felt like, but it was more than scenting or tasting air, it was a sort of reaching out to the magic that shifters exuded. A shifter’s Presence was a form of power that they couldn’t really hide. Alphas could do more with it than others, just as they had more control over their shifting, but that control didn’t extend to making it seem more powerful than it actually was.

He tested Pederson’s Presence, rolled it around on his tongue, felt it in the back of his head where Mist resided, and knew they were stronger. He was certain they were, but Pederson hadn’t come alone. The Alley Dog’s Alpha wasn’t here for a social call and had chosen a time when the vamps were still down for the day.

He counted his would-be enemies, he was sure they were at least that, and came up with eleven shifters including Pederson. All of them were strong enough to be ranked somewhere in the middle of the pack. None was a weakling, and that right there was suggestive. They were here for trouble, another name for which was Ronnie.

“Get the others,” he said to Lawrence.

Lawrence hesitated to obey.

“Go! And make sure Ronnie stays out of sight.”

Lawrence bolted inside.

David positioned himself to block the doors. “Dress code,” he said in a bored voice.

Pederson stopped as if surprised that anyone had the audacity to block him. His men bunched up behind him. “Stand aside.”

“
Dress... code...
” he enunciated the words with exaggerated care as if talking to someone deaf or simple-minded. “You can’t come in.”

Pederson looked at a loss for a moment and then he got his hackles up, perhaps realising how it looked in front of his pack. He was being challenged, though subtly, and balked; that sort of thing didn’t happen to pack leaders, or shouldn’t.