“Again.”
“I told you. I’m a freak. It was a one-time thing. Stress-induced.”
“Again,” Ethan drawled, leaning back in the camp chair he’d brought down from the house. The edge of the swamp was all sucking mud and buzzing flies, but he’d found a strip of firm, grassy ground that ran like a spit out into the water. We were far enough from any houses that we wouldn’t be seen by a nosy neighbor, and the area was shit for fishing, so the chances of some weekend bass master trying his luck and stumbling across a werewolf and a mad man were slim. “Try again, and I promise I’ll only make you try like ten more times before we head back for the night.”
“Only ten, huh?”
“Ish.”
“Ass.” He laughed when I turned my back and sat on the ground. It was almost too cool out for shorts and a t-shirt, but I refused to stand out there with my bits hanging out, trying to shift into wolf form again. Since the incident at the clinic, I hadn’t been able to change. I’d wanted to, but it was like a toothache. Dull and persistent need to press and bother that produced nothing but more frustration and discomfort. I’d roundly rejected Waltrip’s idea that putting me in a high-stress situation again would trigger me to change, mostly because I was afraid of what his idea of a high-stress situation would be. If the stress of having to put my change away at the checkout line while the person behind me was already having their groceries scanned wasn’t stressful enough to make me change, then nothing he could throw at me would do it. He’d just laughed and waved Ethan and me off to ‘go do our little practice in the woods’ while he caught up on work emails.
Waltrip had started visiting quite a lot since the summer, starting the day he’d brought me my missing phone with a muttered found this at the clinic in your aunt’s old desk. At first, I was worried he had a thing for Ethan, then for me. After a few visits, I decided he was just lonely. I don’t know what kind of cases he was taking other than specializing in weres, but he kept busy enough that he brought work with him. His two associates, whom I’d started referring to as Thing One and Thing Two, never came with him. After they’d taken Garrow—wherever it was, I apparently wasn’t allowed to know—I’d only seen them twice. Once, when they showed up in the middle of the night at Ethan’s house. Waltrip hadn’t been on a visit then, but they met with Ethan on the front porch for a good hour, low voices rumbling so quietly even my sharp hearing couldn’t make out what they were saying. When Ethan had come back in the house, he’d seemed lighter, somehow. Like he’d been relieved of a burden he hadn’t remembered he was carrying until it was gone.
The second time I saw them, we’d gone to Dallas. Ethan had insisted on a weekend away just after Halloween. It’d been a busy week for both of us—he’d dealt with the usual teenager bullshit in a small town during the holiday week with the additional stress of a rash of robberies and two murders which, for a town like Belmarais, was unheard of in one year much less in one week. I’d been grudgingly reinstated in my position as county coroner, but I was starting to think it was time to move on. I couldn’t do a thing without the state board breathing down my neck and sending an observer to second guess my every move. Besides, Reba had announced she was quitting after the new year. It would suck without her there.
Ethan took me to Dallas right after Halloween weekend so we could have a few days without work or people we knew bugging us for this or that. We went to a show and stopped afterward for dinner. While we were waiting for Ethan’s car to be brought back around at the valet stand, I caught a glimpse of a towering brunet in a dark suit. A second look showed me it was Thing Two, playing on his phone near the hedges lining the restaurant’s front path. He glanced up and saw me watching. After a brief hesitation, he winked and went back to his phone. Ethan followed the direction of my stare and sighed, walking over to Thing Two. They had a brief exchange, and Ethan was back, looking annoyed. “It’s my weekend off,” he said tartly. “It can wait until we get back to town.” Waltrip showed up a few days later, and I didn’t see him and Ethan for the entire weekend.
When I asked about it later, Ethan had tried to shrug it off as just a work thing. “You and Waltrip don’t work together,” I said. “Ethan, I already asked you to stop treating me like I can’t handle this, okay? Being what I am, this whole… were thing.”
He’d rolled his eyes, muttered were thing, but answered me. “Waltrip asked for some help looking for the others like you. There are some connections I have that he doesn’t, so I’m putting him in touch.”
After that, he’d clammed up on me, and did a damn good job of distracting me for a few hours after.
But back to my shifting practice. Four tries later, I flopped onto my back. “Nope. I’m done. Not doing it anymore today.”
“Okay.”
I rolled my head to one side so I could stare up at Ethan as he walked across the grass toward me. “Seriously? You’re not gonna push?”
“Do you want me to?”
Part of me wanted to say yes. The rest of me, though… “I want to go home, shower, and take a twelve-hour nap.”
He laughed and helped me to my feet. “Waltrip wants to go to that barbecue place over in Lashings.”
“Good for him,” I muttered, dusting my backside. “People who’ve spent the day trying to shift get naps, werewolves get barbecue.”
We were halfway back to his truck before Ethan asked, “Do you think of yourself as a were? I mean, after the clinic… Do you think maybe…”
I stopped walking. “Does it matter?”
“To me, or in general?”
I threw up my hands. “Both? Look, I just need to know if this is going to be what makes you decide to break things off. If I can’t change again, is that it? Or would you still want me if I was just Landry Babin, workaholic and nervous basket case?”
Ethan’s expression moved swiftly between crestfallen and determined. Jaw set, he stalked across the few yards of grass toward me. I didn’t run. That prey voice in my head was still there, but around Ethan, it was quieter. It knew he didn’t want to hurt me. I knew. It was part of me, not a piece that had been taped on somehow. Not something broken I needed to make whole. And not something shameful I needed to beat into submission, erase from my entire being That fear, that drive, it was all part of who I was. And so was my trust in Ethan. But if that wasn’t enough for him… He stopped just in front of me, towering over me like he had when we were kids. Those same flutters in my stomach and chest were there, maybe a bit more cautious now. He slid his hands up my arms to my shoulders, my jaw, and cradled my face. “If you never changed at all, you would be more than I deserved.”
“Christ.” I sighed. “Don’t be so hyperbolic. All you had to do was say yes.” I stretched up on my toes as he tipped his face down. His mouth was warm and pliant over mine, parting on a breath to let me tease the tip of my tongue along his lower lip. Ethan moved his hands down my back to cup my ass, pulling me close enough that our hardening cocks brushed. I groaned into the kiss, rocking my hips into his. He clutched me harder, pulling me up until I could barely balance and had to lean my weight against him, our bodies swaying together. He lifted me higher, my legs around his waist as he shifted, breaking the kiss so he could see where he was walking.
“I have a blanket in the back of the truck,” he murmured against my neck. “No one’s around for at least a mile in any direction.”
I buried my face in his shoulder, giving my hips a little push into his stomach. He groaned and squeezed me tighter. “Waltrip will know. When we get back, he’ll smell it on us.”
“Waltrip can—” The shrill ring of Ethan’s phone made us both groan. “Damn it,” he snarled, setting me on the ground. “Swear to God, that man’s made cock-blocking into an art form.” He answered Waltrip’s call, and I sighed, heading back to the truck with Ethan at my heels. We’d definitely be picking that up later, but for now, it was no use.
Waltrip was waiting in Ethan’s living room when we got back. He opened his mouth to say something, an amused grin on his lips, but a soft growl from Ethan shut him up. Didn’t stop him from winking at me as I went past on my way to the shower, though. “Hurry,” he called after me. “You’ll want to hear this.”
They waited until I was done, sitting in the kitchen over bottles of beer and a pizza Waltrip had ordered before we’d arrived. “Is it Justin? Did they find him?” Justin had been seen around Houston for a few weeks, then disappeared. No sign of him in wolf or human form. Tyler had been working hard to track him down before Justin crossed the wrong clan, or worse, was seen by a non-were.
“Nope. But I think you’ll still be interested.” Waltrip licked his lips nervously. “Ethan thought maybe we should wait and be sure, but I thought maybe you’d want to know as soon as I found out.” He reached for his laptop on the counter behind him and brought it over to the table, turning it so I could see. “Read it.”
I scanned the email on the screen, scrolling down to the bottom before starting over again twice more. “I… Is this one of the others?” I reached for my beer, but my hand was shaking too hard to hold it. Shoving my hands under my thighs, I read the email again. “He’s still alive?”
He nodded. “Mal Benes. Age thirty-two. Last known address was in Shootwell, Colorado. He was originally from Dallas.” Waltrip took the computer back and opened up another tab. “Elio—the one you call Thing Two—found him about a week ago. I had to make sure his records matched with the ones Lachlan was able to retrieve from the clinic before it all went tits up. Mal Benes,” he said, turning the screen back to me, “is one of the three who survived the first trials.”
A man about my age stared back at me from the screen. He was caught mid-conversation from the looks of things, mouth open slightly, eyes squinting like he was making a face at whomever he was speaking with off-camera. He looked tall, but it was hard to tell without something to compare him with. Bright blond hair and sharp features made him look like a model. I felt like I should remember him from those clinic play dates, but I had no memory of him. Then again, I had quite a few holes in my memory of those days, and some things were blurred with the fog of childhood distance. Maybe we played together, I thought, and it was so long ago it’s lost to me. “Is he okay? I mean… Does he have the same problems I do?” Admittedly, the problems weren’t as intense as they had been, not now that I’d been able to work on my focus more and get on actual anti-anxiety medication, but they were still there, percolating beneath the surface all the time. Waiting.
“I’m not sure. His medical records are pretty thin, but there’re indications he was showing some unusual traits before his family disappeared from Texas and showed up in Colorado. He’s been on the radar of the local were clan for some time, but he’s kept his head down and nose clean. They’ve mostly forgotten about him after a few changes in leadership. At least that’s what Elio says seems to have happened.” The next picture he showed me was a toddler, maybe around two years old. “This, though, is a bit of a problem.”
“Oh, shit,” Ethan groaned. “He’s got a kid.”
Waltrip nodded, grim. “I’m heading out on Tuesday. I’ll be going to Denver and from there, going up to Shootwell. Benes lives on a ranch, works as the foreman. No one there is a were,” he added before I could ask. “There’s been no indication the kid is one, either, but he’s getting to that age…”
Ethan nodded. “You know I can be there in just a few hours.”
“You do remember you have a job here, right?” Waltrip asked. “And you,” he said, turning on me before I could even offer, “are already on too many radars. I got this. It’s just a check and see situation. Letting him know he’s got options if things get hairy.” He paused. “Heh. Hairy. I made a funny.”
“Fuck’s sake.” Ethan grabbed the second to last slice of the Triple Hawaiian Fire with extra pineapple and ham. “Just for that, you get the shitty, floppy slice.”
Waltrip left late that night, citing the need to tie up some loose ends at the office and get Elio and Trey (Thing One) up to speed on a few cases before he headed to Colorado. I think he was just worried he’d hear me and Ethan going at it like rabbits. Ethan waited until I was throwing the last of the wash into the dryer before coming up behind me and wrapping his arms around my waist. “I meant it earlier. It wouldn’t change anything. It won’t change anything. If the shift at the clinic was a one-off deal just because of what was going on around us, then it was a fucking amazing one-off deal. If you wake up tomorrow as a wolf and find out you can shift back and forth like flipping a pancake, then great, we’ll go on runs together and, shit, I don’t know, get matching collars or something.”
I snorted, leaning back against his chest. “Even if I could change again, there will always be things you can’t let me know.”
“Like where we sent Garrow.”
“Mmm. And clan business. Even if I were considered a were, if they decided yeah, look at him shift, you go Landry, way to be, I’m still not a clan member. I have no clan. I’m a lab-created were in that case. As it is now, I’m just a—”
“Don’t say freak,” he growled, nipping at my ear.
“I was going to say I’m just a slightly tired but extremely horny man who wants his boyfriend to pound him into the mattress.”
“Liar.”
“Want to find out?”
Ethan pulled away, smiling as he reached past me to hit the button to start the dryer going. “Come to bed with me.”
He took my hand, and I followed.