Page 38 of In the Mouth of the Wolf (Of Wolves and Kings #1)

38

NOLAN

“W hat the…”

The door to the back patio was wide open, a small snow drift accumulating inside. Several large pawprints dirtied the hardwood floor and further onto the carpet. I followed the path into the kitchen, where I found the fridge also open, half its contents spilled on the floor next to Marlowe and Elias. They were both naked and filthy.

“My lasagna,” I moaned. I had made a ton of it, looking forward to the leftovers for my next few lunches, but the pan was empty and their faces were covered in red tomato sauce.

Elias bolted up, his eyes wide. “Holy shit…”

“What the hell happened?” I demanded.

He grinned, completely unaware of how ridiculous he looked. “I shifted.”

My heart leapt all the way into my throat. “What do you mean, you shifted?”

Elias burst out a laugh, running his hand through his hair in disbelief. “Last night, Marlowe shifted again and then… so did I.”

“Impossible,” I whispered. I turned back around and inspected the pawprints again. Sure enough, there were two sets, two different sizes. Marlowe finally stirred and I faced them again. “How?”

“I don’t know,” Elias replied. “I heard Marlowe come downstairs last night and I followed her, just in time to see her shift and go outside. I watched her, pet her a bit, and then another wolf showed up. I can’t explain it, I just knew – that wolf was a shifter. An alpha male we couldn’t trust. Something inside me snapped, and I shifted to protect Marlowe.”

Unbelievable. It was too much to wrap my mind around. I wanted to go get some coffee but there wasn’t a clear path to the counter after Marlowe and Elias had destroyed the kitchen in a fit of wolf munchies.

Marlowe groaned as she sat up, clutching her midsection. “Oh my god, my stomach. I ate too much.”

I wanted to be mad and tell her it served her right, but it wasn’t like she had been in control.

Cam finally emerged from his room. Like me, he only saw the mess by the back door first. “Dammit, the housecleaner isn’t coming ‘til Tuesday. I’m not waiting til then. Someone needs to clean this up right no—What the fuck?”

He froze next to me at the sight of the kitchen.

“They shifted,” I explained, as Marlowe seemed too sick to talk and Elias was still slightly freaking out.

“ They ? As in, both of them?”

I nodded and then directed him towards the prints. “See? Two sets.”

His mouth dropped in shock, but then he quickly recovered. “Well, shit.”

“Yeah.”

Archer finally joined us, and I walked him through the situation.

His eyes lit in excitement. “This… this is amazing. I have a guess, but I don’t want to get ahead of myself. I need to get a blood sample from Elias and head to my lab right away.

“Slow down there, Professor,” Cam replied. “No one is going anywhere until this…” He gestured towards all the mess. “...is all taken care of. I’d ask these two to do it but…”

Marlowe finally stood up, one hand over her mouth as she bolted for the bathroom. We all winced at the sound of her puking her guts out.

There went my lasagna.

Elias’s eyes started to clear, and he began to take stock of the damage he and Marlowe had done to the groceries and the floor. “Um, wow, getting flashbacks of what happened here. We might want to start wolf-proofing if this becomes a regular thing.”

Cam stomped off to the closet where he kept the cleaning supplies, mumbling under his breath about how it wasn’t fair that Elias had shifted but he hadn’t.

I offered Elias a hand and helped him up. “Take a shower and then you can work on the carpet stains.”

“Right, yeah…”

Marlowe continued retching while Cam shoved bottles of kitchen cleaner into my hands and a mop into Archer’s. “And I’m not doing shit. I’m the one who pays Linda.”

Instead, he pulled the collar of his t-shirt up over his nose and knocked on the bathroom door. “Babe? I’m coming in.”

I rolled my eyes and then my sleeves, getting to work. A curse slipped its way under my breath when I saw they’d eaten all the lunch meat, too. That was almost $200 worth of food they’d gone through. And after the incident at the supermarket yesterday, I wasn’t really looking forward to going back again so soon.

I kept my mind busy thinking about how Marlowe and Elias could shift while I cleaned. It was already strange enough that Marlowe had the ability. Was it tied to her being an omega? Or perhaps she’d inherited the ability from her mom? Maybe the shifters from the communes hadn’t lost it like we had.

But then how could Elias shift? He was the one who had seen her shift twice. Maybe watching the transformation triggered his latent genes to finally react? Was it the threat to Marlowe by the other shifter?

And who even was that shifter?

“So, what are you thinking, Arch?” I called out.

“I’m not going to say yet. I don’t want to pressure Marlowe or get our hopes up.”

Ugh, I was dying to know. “Can’t even drop a hint?”

“Nope,” he replied quickly. “Too risky.”

Dammit.

I glanced up at the calendar and groaned. “Today’s her dad’s funeral. Do you think she and Elias are going to be okay?”

Marlowe appeared from the bathroom wearing Camden’s shirt, and he led her back up the stairs. “You fuckers almost finished yet?” he snapped.

“Dude, this wasn’t even us,” I yelled back, but he ignored me.

“...e ggs, ham, turkey, apples…”

Elias had finished showering, taking his sweet ass time and getting out of the majority of the clean-up. I had moved on to making a new shopping list to replace everything the two of them had eaten when he re-entered the kitchen

“At the very least you can go get the new groceries, right?” I asked him.

“Huh? Oh yeah, sure.” He poured himself a cup of coffee on autopilot, sitting down at the island and staring off into space.

I clicked my tongue against my teeth. It wasn’t fair to be jealous, but at least I could be annoyed. “That good?”

“When you slept with Marlowe, did you also feel a sense of completion? Like you’d finally done something wonderful your body had been made for, and you couldn’t imagine going back to a life before it happened?”

Walking into Cam’s cabin that first night and just smelling her sweetness had been enough to trigger a latent, biological switch that had lain dormant in my soul. A switch that, once turned on, couldn’t be turned off again. A switch that drove me to fulfill a greater purpose.

Knotting was just a confirmation of that feeling.

“Yes,” I replied softly, thinking of my fight with Marlowe. I hoped I hadn’t done irrevocable damage to our relationship.

“Yeah, shifting’s like that.”

Marlowe had to be the key to shifting, but Archer was right. Until we knew how or why or if it was something she could even awaken in all of us, we needed to give her space.

I still had to talk to her, though, the sooner the better. Nothing had been resolved last night, and now that I was thinking more clearly, I should be able to articulate my side a little better. Not that I wanted to be right, or even believed I was right. Not one hundred percent, anyway. I just wanted her to see my point of view, and understand that, while my reaction might have seemed extreme for someone who had grown up in human culture, for shifters, it was normal. Expected even.

That didn’t mean I couldn’t change, though. Especially if that was what she needed.