Page 23 of Diners, Damsels & Wolves

Twenty Three

Thomas

F uck, fuck, FUCK!

Shifting to human, he sprinted after her; he could easily catch her, but she was already terrified, the spring air thick with the scent of her panic. Face white as a sheet, her eyes large as saucers. No, he had to make her stop some other way. He called to her.

Ignoring his yells, she jumped in her car and turned the key. The white car reversing down the drive, a pit fell in his stomach as he watched her retreat. The car jerked and swerved, turning off the drive. It stopped for a second before pulling forward, completing the turn, and racing off to the main road.

“Clarissa!” he bellowed.

Turning around, he sprinted back to the garage. The packs were standing, watching him. He ignored them. Grabbing his cell phone from his jeans, he called her. She didn’t answer.

He texted her.

Please call me.

He pinched the bridge of his nose. How did everything keep going so wrong?

“Sara, Nathon, Emmanuel, you’re with me,” he said. “The rest of you pair up and get going!”

He felt Atticus’s bobcat watching him. He paid no attention to him. Tom already knew Atticus’s disapproval. According to tradition, the Alpha was supposed to mate the strongest female in the pack, never a human. For his pack, that was Sara.

He’d made her third-in-command after Sam. She was a powerful wolf who deserved the position. He respected her, but he never saw her in that way.

Tom felt his own pack watching them whenever they were together, heard their whispers, waiting for it to happen. It never would. This was one of the many things Tom despised about being Alpha. But he kept his bitterness to himself. He had a family, a town, to protect.

He pulled a thick plastic bag from his car. He’d fastened elastic straps to it years ago and sometimes used it on long runs. With the popularity of smartphones, other pack members started doing it too. Securing his phone inside, he pulled the elastic over his head and down to his abdomen, adjusting the straps until they were just right. He phased.

The phone stayed squarely on his back. He started to run, he felt the others follow. None of them dared to say a word. Part of Tom felt bad for making them uncomfortable, but how much of their drama did he have to put up with on a daily basis?

No, that wasn’t fair of him. These three weren’t the ones getting into trouble. It was usually the pups. They didn’t start to phase until they were about seventeen or eighteen. It was a terrible time, if Tom was being honest.

Their emotions were a wreck and unregulated, their hormones off the freakin’ charts as they constantly fought their wolf instincts for control. Some of them struggled until they were in their twenties. He did his best to be patient with them, but sometimes they were just unfathomably stupid.

Pushing the memories of his own pup years aside, he focused on the task at hand. He was desperate to find anything that would lead him to a bear. But the chances were growing slim. He couldn’t understand why the bears were so hard to track.

* * *

Dawn had risen in the east. They’d found nothing, and Clarissa hadn’t called him. The groups of patrols made their way back to the mansion. The day patrol was awake and waiting for them.

Most of the pack was crashing at the mansion. Brittaney and the other small shifters made a breakfast large enough to feed an army. They liked to feed people when they were feeling grateful.

Atticus’s, Brittaney’s, and Tom’s packs all sat together and feasted. Meanwhile, the night patrol relayed everything to the day patrol and vice versa. The evening had been uneventful … too uneventful.

Worry they’d missed something grew in his chest. Something had slipped by them, but he had no idea what. Not yet, at least.

After seeing the day patrol team off, Tom went up to his room. Showering and brushing his teeth, he then sat on the edge of his bed. He needed to get some sleep, if only for a few hours. First, he tried to call Clarissa again. She didn’t answer.

Setting his phone to charge, he ignored the pain stabbing him in the chest, rolled over and tried to rest.

Through the fog of his sluggish mind, Tom heard whispers. They were angry. Right outside his door from the sounds of it. No, they were standing next to him in his dream.

“You don’t understand,” Sara said.

“I still think you should let him rest,” Nathon said. “Boss man’s no good to us if he’s dead on his feet. What you need to tell him will still be there when he gets up.”

“No, Nate, this is too important, he needs to know now .”

Tom blinked. His room was entirely too bright for this to be a dream. Rubbing his eyes, he got up and started pulling on his clothes. The others would be done bickering soon.

“What’s going on?” Maria asked.

“Sara wants to wake Tom up,” Nathon said.

“It’s about her,” Sara said.

“Move,” Maria said.

Tom opened the door before Maria could. Sara, Nathon, Maria, and Sam were all crammed into the hallway. Maria had some of their grandpa’s old journals in her hands and Sara was in her tan police uniform. Wasn’t today her day off?

“I appreciate your concern for my sleep schedule,” he said, “but when something happens, tell me immediately. Especially when we’re under attack.” Tom turned to Sara. “Talk.”

“Sheriff Greg called me. Clarissa never made it home last night. Her car is at The Barrel, but it was wiped clean of prints. The blonde bear’s stench is all over it.”

His vision went red. He didn’t see his family standing in front of him; he didn’t feel his feet on the ground, or his hand on the door. Every sense he had was blocked as anger, indignation, and absolute horror rolled through him.

“Maria, get back!” Sam yelled.

Something knocked into him as the wolf started to tear out, his ass slamming into the floor forced it back in. Shaking his head, he looked up to see Sam blocking the doorway, Sara covering Maria.

Tom growled, “I wasn’t going to hurt her.”

“No offense, but Emmanuel told me what happened last time. Wasn’t about to take that chance with my wife and baby,” Sam said. “You good?”

“No!” Tom said, getting to his feet.

If anyone other than his brother-in-law had done that, he’d be dressing them down in a rather violent manner. Instead, he grumbled his disdain. “What about this situation makes you think I’d be okay? We have no idea where the fuck the den is! How am I supposed to find her?!”

He paced his room, kicking his dresser. The foot broke and it fell sideways.

“Are you going to listen to me now, Thomas?” Maria asked, her face hard.

He glared at her.

“Her aunt lived in Fairville, did you never bother to look her up?” she asked. He didn’t answer. “After seeing her necklace at the picnic, I did. Tom, that’s not a normal wolf carving. Back in the day, the humans who were under the Sinclaire pack’s protection wore amulets exactly like that to signify our claim over them.”

Tom froze. He stared at Maria. This was it, the thing he’d been missing this whole time, and it was right in front of him …

“I pulled public records and I went through our grandad’s journal; he kept meticulous notes on all the humans under his control. Her aunt’s name is Rachel Jhonson, here look. There was a family named Jhonson. They had two children, one daughter, Rachel, one son, Mason. During the last bear attack, their parents died in a fire. The kids survived, one a junior in high school, the other a sophomore. When the pack interrogated them, they said they snuck out to go drinking, that’s what saved them.

“The bears were wiping out entire bloodlines, Tom. When the bear attacks were over, the son, Mason, moved out of Fairville to a town outside of our control. According to public records, he took his wife’s last name, Roberts. And they had a daughter. Do you want to guess what her name was? Clarissa.

“There’s more. This—this is something even Mom and Dad didn’t know. I found it in Grandad’s personal journal. After the war, the town was in chaos. Grandad hired a witch. He wanted her to erase people’s memories of the bears so they’d continue to trust him. He had the witch test it on five humans: four of them died, but one lived. Only the spell was deemed unsatisfactory.”

“Rachel,” Tom said. “That’s why they think she has dementia.”

“That makes sense,” Sara said. “When I was at the hospital, the doctors said her brain scan came out normal. The spell did work, just not correctly.”

“Who was the witch?” Sam asked. “We can call her and get her to undo it.”

“Grandad killed her to keep her quiet,” Maria said.

“Well shit,” Nathon whispered.

“The bears take out bloodlines,” Sara said. “They might have known who she was at The Barrel that night.”

“I don’t think so,” Maria said. “If they knew, they wouldn’t have waited weeks to come back for her. I think once they realized she was Tom’s mate, they looked into her more closely.”

“I made her the best kill, the most thrilling hunt they’ve been on,” Tom whispered, his head spinning. “She’s a missing link to an old bloodline from a war they’d lost and she’s an Alpha’s mate. An Alpha who beat and humiliated one of their members.”

“You couldn’t have known,” Maria said.

“I should have,” he growled, disgusted with himself. He’d been too busy thinking with his prick and now … now the woman who was the center of his universe was in the hands of the bears.

A heavy silence fell over them. He was thinking it, he knew the others were too, all the different ways bears loved to torture humans.

“There’s a possibility,” Maria whispered, “they are keeping her alive to torment you. They love mind games.”

“Sam, Sara, Nathon, get a group together, we’re leaving in ten minutes,” Tom said.

“I can’t,” Sara said. “Sheriff Greg is organizing a search; I have to be there or my cover is blown.”

“Go.” Tom nodded. “Report back if they find anything useful.”

“Will do.” Sara ran off. Nathon and Sam followed her.

“Maria.” He grabbed her, pulling her further into the room and shutting the door. He led her to his closet and closed them in. It was larger than any closet had the right to be, so he’d soundproofed it and put a sofa in there for private conversations.

“Maria, I can’t do this,” he said.

“We’ll find her,” she soothed.

“No, I mean I can’t be Alpha.”

“What?” she asked.

“You know I never wanted this; I’ve been trying so hard for the last year. I’m a disaster. I’ll lead the pack for now, but as soon as you give birth, I need you to take over.”

“Tom, no.”

“Maria, please. You and I both know what the bears do to humans. If Clarissa is still alive, she won’t be for much longer. I can’t—I won’t be able to survive that.” His voice broke. “I need to know you’ll lead them if anything happens to me.”

She pulled him into a hug. “Don’t let anything happen to yourself, you hear me? Alpha or not, you’re my brother. You need to come back to me.”

Pulling back, he kissed the top of her head. “Goodbye, Maria.”

Going outside, he met up with the others. A group of ten wolves were waiting for him. He was surprised to see Atticus and some of his bobcats accompanying them.

“While I do not understand your ways, wolf, I respect you,” he said. “And I cannot deny my family the chance to rid the world of these bears. They are a plague to our community and a mockery of shifters.”

“Thank you,” Tom said, before turning to the group at large. “The bear’s scent is on a white Taurus parked at The Barrel. It’s fresh, we might be able to get a trail from there. If we find a lone bear, we need it alive. Understood?”

They all nodded.

“Let’s go.” Tom put his phone in his plastic bag belt and phased. Running into the woods, he led them south toward town.

It was two in the afternoon when Sara and the others had woken him. If the bears took her on her way home last night, she’d been their captive for over twelve hours. Her chances of being alive were slim to none. The only prayer was the bears being too keen on fucking with Tom’s head to waste their time killing her. Even if she was alive, he didn’t know what state she would be in.

His only comfort was in his vow to himself. If she were dead, he would follow her after taking as many of the monsters with him as he could.