Alpha Omega 03 - Fair Game

she’d been shoving it into a pant leg. Brother Wolf padded out of the bathroom, all three hundred pounds of fox-red fur, fangs, and claws. There were bigger werewolves, but not many. Her own wolf was closer to the two-hundred-pound mark—so was Bran’s, for that matter.
    “Well,” she said slowly. The wrongness in their bond was fading, leaving behind the cool, thoughtful presence that was Brother Wolf. “I suppose it’ll help save time if one of us is already wolf when we get there.”
    Charles is worried that he will do something bad,
Brother Wolf told her.
We decided that it would be best if I take point tonight.
Brother Wolf had gotten better about speaking to her in words rather than images. She got the distinct impression that he looked upon it as baby talk, but it amused him anyway.
    She resumed dressing while she considered his words. Of all the wolves she’d known over the past few years, none but Charles could let the wolf rule without disaster. The wolf part of a werewolf was…a ravaging beast, born to hunt and kill, protect the pack at all costs, and not much else. Brother Wolf was different from other werewolves’ wolf spirits because Charles, born a werewolf, was different from other werewolves.
    Different because of you, too,
Brother Wolf told her.
    “I suppose if you—both of you—think it’s wise. You know better than I do. Let me know if there’s some way I can help. But it does mean we aren’t getting a taxi.”
    It no longer felt odd to talk to Charles and his wolf as if they were two separate people who shared the same skin, both of them beloved. She and her wolf nature were much more entwined, though she had the impression that they were still not as integrated as most werewolves were.
    Brother Wolf butted up against her, knocking her over, and licked her face thoroughly.
Yes. No taxis for werewolves. Charles doesn’t like driving in cars.
The werewolf stepped away and tilted his head, gold eyes gleaming with humor—whatever had Charles upset, it must not be too bad because his wolf wasn’t worried.
    I will take care of him.
Brother Wolf’s humor fled.
As your sister wolf took care of you when you needed her to defeat the Chicago wolves.
    “All right, then.” Anna didn’t know what to think of that because her wolf had helped her endure rape and torture. But in the optimism of the change in Charles yesterday, she decided to believe that Brother Wolf’s intervention was a positive thing. Anna dried her face on her shirt tail and got up to finish dressing.
    Shoes on, face washed, she looked up the address on her laptop. “We’re in luck,” she told him. “Only two miles from here.”
    THERE WERE PEOPLE out and about at two in the morning, but no one seemed to think it odd that she was running down the street with a three-hundred-pound werewolf. Might have been a touch of pack magic making people see a large dog—or not see them at all. Pack magic, she’d discovered, could be capricious, coming and going without any of the wolves calling for it specifically. Bran could direct it, as could Charles—but she had the feeling that pack magic mostly did what it chose to do.
    The lack of interest they were spawning might also simply have been city survival skills on the part of their observers. Anna had grown up in Chicago. In a city, you don’t look at anyone whose attention you don’t want to draw. Who wants to have a big scary wolf decide you might be interesting?
    Brother Wolf was on a leash, because Bran thought that the leash and collar made a lot of difference to the humans they ran into—andnot much difference to the werewolf. The collar was store-bought from a big-box pet store and came with the cute plastic clasp designed to make sure someone’s dog didn’t get caught and choke to death. It meant that the collar wouldn’t even slow a werewolf down before the plastic broke.
    The name on the collar he wore was Brother Wolf. Bran had disapproved. He liked the names to be less truthful, more friendly and cute. Unusually, Charles’s brother had told her, Charles had held out until his father gave in.
    The address Leslie Fisher had provided led them to one of the skyscrapers, a tall but narrow edifice squeezed in between two even taller buildings. Anna would have picked it out even without the giant black numbers tastefully etched into the glass over the main door because it was the one with police cars parked in front of it.
    No one looked at them when they