Page 23 of Lone Wolf
This morning I was in the Mate’s family room, putting the last stitches into a skirt to go on my baby’s bassinet. Ma and I had taken some of my apartment money and gone shopping around the enclave for things I would need. I had a nice backpack now to carry baby stuff in, a little wooden fence that could be set up to keep them in one place when he or she got older and busier, and the bassinet. Ma had bought me a dresser to keep the baby’s clothes in and my work here in the mornings was rapidly filling it with shirts and pants and thick, absorbent diapers.
This afternoon, I would go back to my new job in Love the Moon. Floor service—changing sheets, cleaning bathrooms, light maintenance. What I’d done before I’d turned twenty-one and applied to work with the clients. It was harder work in some ways, and easier in others, but my biggest complaint about it was that it didn’t pay as well and so my savings had stagnated, and even gone backwards a bit as I continued to discover new ways this pup was going to cost me.
I was working as many hours as I could scrounge now because I’d be living off savings after the baby came. Ma said it was still possible I could get my apartment once I knew what I’d be spending, but I wasn’t all that hopeful.
One of the other bearers was laughing as she talked about the argument she’d had with her mate last night. “And so, the third time I had to get up and go to the bathroom, he asked if I wanted a mattress and pillow installed on the toilet, so I could just stay there all night. And I told him that if he even thought about it, the only partner his dick would ever have again would be the toilet and it was his fault I was in this state in the first place.”
“Did he say anything after?” someone asked.
“I don’t know. I just crawled over him and went to the bathroom. He was asleep when I came back. Well, at least until I elbowed him getting back into bed.”
We all laughed.
Someone at the other end of the room asked, “Maybe you need a bigger place.”
“We do,” she said. “But credits, you know?”
We all nodded, until the only other male omega in the room looked up from the set of baby socks he was knitting and said diffidently, “My sister worked the houses during the last two months of her pregnancy, said it wasn’t too bad and paid pretty well, and now they’ve got a place out by the aloe gardens.”
My ears perked up at that. The aloe gardens were a nice, middle class neighborhood, a little bit above what I’d been looking at. “Were they saving long before they moved?” I asked.
He shrugged. “About the same as anyone, I guess. They were looking at something by the south wall, but then they heard that the owners were going to put this apartment up for sale and they were a little short. So she went back to work for a couple of months, over in the Mink.”
The Mink. It was a perfectly good house, but a little too much into the costumes and role play for my tastes. Pregnant shifters would be exactly the kind of thing I would expect to find there. “Do they do that every year?” I asked, trying to be casual about it.
“Think so,” he said, holding up the sock he was working on and comparing it to the other. “You should call them if you need the credits. It can’t be easy trying to do this on your own.”
My cheeks flamed and I looked down at my bassinet skirt, stabbing blindly at the fabric and pretending I was still sewing when really I couldn’t see past the embarrassment.
“Now, now,” Verena put in smoothly “It’s not his fault at all. The house did a procedure check and everything was done. There’s not much you can do about a feral who’s that determined to get past us. Though it would have been better for everyone if he could have chosen one of the non-omega males. I wonder sometimes how these parents can look at themselves, the way they raise their pups.”
There were nods of agreement around the room and the topic died, at least for everyone else. But I thought about the price difference between the south wall and the aloe gardens and what a difference it would mean to me, to my standing in the community, if I was a property owner.
Maybe I’d call in over there after work tonight. No harm in asking a few questions, right?
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
It was the kind of dark you only got at two in the morning, somewhere out along the country’s southernmost border. Damian wasn’t actually certain which side of it they were on, but that wasn’t his job anyway. He was wearing fur tonight, tracking their target through the scrub and dust of the landscape. His crew were on loan to the DEA, which was pretty much all he knew about their current chain of command.
The men moved again, making their way down an easy hill into a valley. Damian followed behind, wary of being seen. There were wild wolves in the hills out here, or things that a wolf might pass for. He didn’t want to get shot.
Since the night Salem’s picture had disappeared from the Nevada Ashes website, he’d thrown himself head and shoulders into his work, to a degree that had driven Oscar to sit him down one day and ask him what was wrong. He still checked the pages, though, before going to bed, reading each description and watching each video. The drinking hadn’t gotten worse, but it hadn’t gotten better either. Mixed blessings, he supposed. It did let him sleep, though the quality of that sleep was questionable.
He trotted a quarter mile to the east of the little group, thinking to get ahead of them a little. So far, they hadn’t done anything unexpected and their likely goal was somewhere in the region north and east of their current position; it was a judgment call, but a reasonable one, he thought. As he tracked across the side of the hill, he listened for the sound of their targets’ feet as they crunched over the ground, and wondered how far behind him his team was. The darn thing about wolf form was that, while it was easier to sneak-follow someone, it was impossible to check that the tracker around his neck was working. He hoped it was—once he’d followed their quarry to their main den, the rest of the team was supposed to swoop in and clean it out.
The footsteps stopped. Damian hunkered down in a clump of scrub brush halfway down the side of the valley and listened. Seconds later, the sounds of truck springs and doors closing rang through the night and an engine started.
Shit. He bolted straight for the sounds, hoping like hell his team would get the message and scramble after him.
At the bottom of the hill, he slowed to a lope, trying to look like any other wild predator in the area. Headlights crawled away in the distance and he trotted after them, watching for any signs that they were going to turn off their current straight track. He’d let them get too far away from him, though, and the lights disappeared at a speed that he wasn’t going to be able to keep up with unless he ran until his heart burst. Still, he followed them with eyes and ears as far as he could, then began walking the pattern that would tell his team that he’d lost them.
This would be the second action he’d fucked up in the past month. And he didn’t care. Not a bit. He raised his head and watched the waxing moon above him, and wondered when it would be okay to just call it quits.
“How the fuck did you lose them?” their DEA contact roared at Oscar. “There’s fuck all out there! Sage and rocks. You’re telling me your crack tracker couldn’t follow them through that?”
“I’m telling you that unless he had a motorbike, he wasn’t keeping up with them.” Oscar’s voice was low and mean, but Damian could tell he was also holding back.
The two of them were arguing in a co-opted old abandoned quonset hut of indeterminate age, about the size of a one-car garage. Damian was sitting outside in the air with his back against the end wall, wondering if he should take up smoking for times like this and fighting the desire to just go back to his wolf form and disappear into the darkness.
