Chapter 4
Henry
Henry should have just gone back to the house, given Evershaw and Deirdre a heads-up about another witch running around the neighborhood, and called it a night. He fought off the rest of the coyotes easily, although they didn’t seem inclined to fight once the witch disappeared into the darkness. He made a mental note that the girl had been their objective for whatever reason, and chalked that up to the strange happenings around witches.
He didn’t know how she did it, since she wasn’t moving particularly fast, but it was like she faded into thin air the second she started running. Not even the sound of her footsteps gave him a clue to where she went. Frustrated at the fight and not understanding who the hell she was and why she was on his territory, Henry wanted to confront her. Not that she waited to be held accountable for kicking up so much trouble.
There was no telling what the coyotes wanted with her. They’d been quiet for some time after the defeat of their leadership and the ass-kicking they got from Evershaw after siding with the BadCreek pack outside the city. Henry had been glad to see the end of all that nonsense, with the final defeat of the rich but evil pack conducting experiments on shifters and setting wolves against wolves in their fucked-up games. All the shifters in the city came together to defeat them and eventually kill their leaders. Everything had been quiet.
Maybe too quiet.
He clenched his jaw and sniffed the air, searching for a hint of her scent. The girl could be a danger to his pack, to SilverLine, and to his family—whether that was Deirdre or Evershaw or his adopted siblings didn’t matter. She was a stranger and was too powerful to be running around causing trouble on her own. She had to be working for someone or in the city for a reason. From what Deirdre said, not many witches worked by themselves.
The last thing the city needed was an evil coven of witches or a rogue witch making trouble on her own. It was bad enough Deirdre dealt with her aunt and a bunch of old crones in her old coven who hated shifters and thought themselves better than everyone else.
Henry growled in irritation and put his nose in the air, sniffing and searching for which direction she went. He needed to at least know where she’d gone to ground. Maybe Deirdre could handle her the next morning, witch to witch, and Henry wouldn’t have to deal with the girl again. His side still ached from where she’d used her magic against him.
He trotted in the direction he thought she’d gone and tried to figure out exactly what she smelled like. It wasn’t perfume or the herb-y scent that swirled around Deirdre after the witch worked magic, but the strange witch… It was something else. Something appealing, something that clung to him and worked its way into his brain. Something sweet but flowery, a little wild and untamed.
Wandering through the city gave him time to reflect on the conflict with the coyotes and what made a young woman flee through the city on her own, on foot, in the middle of the night. Particularly in a dodgy neighborhood. Maybe she’d run afoul of the new coyote alpha, a hard-ass woman named Daisy, though it didn’t seem likely that the witch would have gone out of her way to confront a full pack.
He didn’t like mysteries. At all. Henry moved faster as he caught another hint of her scent—something like honeysuckle and jasmine, sweet and tropical and wild. The wolf wanted a lungful of the scent, not just the hints and threads that teased him on the breeze. He growled in irritation as the trail brought him into the bears’ territory. Kaiser’s bears were mostly allies, although Henry had his hesitations about being around grizzlies and polar bears and their mates. Bears were unpredictable and massive enough they could fight off a full wolfpack without too much effort. Trespassing on their territory was looking for trouble when he was on his own and neck-deep in a mystery.
Maybe the witch knew the bears after all, and there was something else going on between the bears and the coyotes. Henry grumbled and shifted back to human as he approached a certain alley near the bears’ den. An ice chest abandoned near a dumpster actually contained spare clothes that were available for all shifters to use, since Kaiser and his mate grew tired of naked shifters stumbling around in their neighborhood, particularly as their young cubs grew up and knew enough to ask questions about naked people.
Henry pulled on sweatpants and a T-shirt before venturing back onto the street. The witch had been on the sidewalk, her scent strengthened with fear and perspiration, and he followed her trail down the block as it led closer and closer to the bears’ den.
“Wolf,” a gravelly voice said, and Henry jumped a foot in the air.
He whirled, ready to shift and attack, as the coldest bastard in the bears’ den appeared out of the shadows. Henry’s heart pounded against his ribs as Sasha, the Russian bear, frowned and folded his arms over his chest. “What is wolf doing here? Is late.”
For some reason, he didn’t want to share the witch with the bear, even though Sasha was head-over-heels in love with his own very pregnant mate. He would have made a joke about teddy bears but didn’t fancy getting his ass kicked by the Russian, since he was also a hell of a boxer. And Henry didn’t want to talk about the witch until he understood what she was up to. “Going for a walk.”
“Don’t make up stories,” Sasha said. His accent thickened until it became almost indecipherable. “You look like man on mission. What do you hunt?”
“I’m following someone,” he said finally. “There was…an incident over near the pack house, a girl in a run-in with the coyotes. I followed her here to make sure everything was okay.”
“Girl faced down coyotes?” Sasha smiled without humor, as though he approved of the witch. “Brave but stupid. She is safe, wolf.”
Safe? That meant the bear knew where she was. Henry’s wolf side needed to know what happened to her, whether she was actually safe. He clenched his jaw and faced off with the bear. “I’m not leaving until I see her. She ran away from them, and we need to know what caused the issue. The coyotes owe answers to Evershaw and our pack, so if she’s got issues with them, we need to know.”
Sasha didn’t look convinced. His clear eyes narrowed as a sheen of gold flashed across them. Henry stood his ground, unintimidated. He might not have been equal to the bear in terms of weight and heft when shifted, but Henry was a champion MMA fighter and could take the son of a bitch in human form without breaking a sweat. Or so he hoped.
The Russian finally heaved a sigh and tilted his head back the way he’d come. “Girl is safe at shelter. She is…very afraid. I am out searching for the trouble chasing her, so is good I found you and not… something else.”
“There’s something different about her,” Henry said. The girl was staying at the domestic violence shelter the bears managed? Was she afraid of someone for real? Could she have been dating one of the coyotes and the romance went wrong? His chest tightened at the thought. “She’s like…Deirdre. Evershaw’s mate. Or maybe like Smith.”
Sasha’s expression darkened. “Da, she is different. Smells wrong.”
Henry wanted to immediately challenge that statement—she didn’t smell wrong, she smelled… he couldn’t describe it. Intriguing. Different. Mysterious. But he clenched his jaw and swallowed back the curses that wanted to escape. He didn’t need to defend the girl. He just needed to know what the hell happened with the coyotes so he could advise Evershaw on dealing with Daisy, the coyote alpha, and her people. “Sure. Is she still at the shelter? I have to question her about what happened and how she ended up here in the city.”
The bear sighed and turned to lumber back toward the shelter’s reinforced vestibule. “Da. You can ask some questions but do not upset the girl or my girl, or we will have problem. Understand?”
Henry wasn’t stupid enough to challenge a bear bent on protecting his pregnant mate. “Yeah, I’m not going to be an asshole to either of them.”
“Must always ask with wolves,” Sasha said under his breath. “You are all assholes.”
Henry would have objected, but it was mostly true. He and the rest of the SilverLine pack had been misfits and misunderstood most of their lives, so they didn’t like outsiders showing up to judge them. If other people saw that as the pack being assholes… so be it. It was just another way to protect themselves from the rest of society, the rest of the shifters. Henry shrugged as he followed the bear. “I’d rather be an asshole than a bear.”
Sasha snorted and shook his shaggy head. He made some signal and the doors were unlocked when he reached them, a dull thunk revealing the strength of the locks. Henry followed, trying not to hold his breath as they entered a small vestibule and the doors to outside locked behind them before the door in front of them unlocked, and frowned when he caught sight of the witch sitting next to Sunny near the reception desk. He hadn’t had a chance to really see her during the confrontation, but he hadn’t thought her so young. Or beautiful. Henry clenched his jaw and shoved away his appreciation for her beauty and the graceful way she gestured as she talked to Sasha’s mate. All Henry needed to know was what her problem was with the coyotes, then he could get back to the pack house and let Deirdre deal with the other witches.
Easy. Simple.
