Fair Game

ponies. They love nothing so much as their own cause. Don’t get in their way without expecting to be hurt. She’d always thought Bran had been talking about himself—but she knew better, even if he didn’t. Bran was driven, but he loved his sons and he loved his pack. He was not a one-trick pony.
    “Do you remember the little girl that we hung by her braid while we—”
The lust in Heuter’s voice as he’d urged the unseen Benedict on to a greater frenzy was more real than the sincere speech he’d given her at the lunch table.
    Heuter wasn’t azealot, either, she decided. He only said he was protecting America from monsters to make himself believe that he was in the right as he satisfied his lust for power over others, his desire to cause other people pain and suffering. Murder and rape were his real cause; keeping America safe was only an excuse.
    “Can I have her first, Uncle Travis?” Benedict asked. “I like the girls better. And her husband hurt me. Can I have her first?”
    “That’s better, boy,” the older man said. “You keep your language polite. Let’s go take a look at her before we decide anything. We’ll have a while to play before you get to feed on her death. There will be time enough for everything.”
    He sounded like he was talking about going fishing instead of torturing and killing someone. The door near her cage opened and the old man turned on the light as they all walked in.
    Hail, hail, the gang’s all here,
she thought as she got her first good look at her captors.
    Even knowing what she did, Les Heuter still looked sort of all-American, like the kind of guy who helped little old ladies cross the street. The other young man, Benedict Heuter…he was big. Taller than Charles and maybe fifty pounds heavier, and Charles wasn’t a beanpole. There was something wrong with his eyes and he smelled like a deer in rut. She found it uncomfortable to meet his eyes—and she could stare down Bran. It had nothing to do with dominance and everything to do with the madness in his face.
    The features were different, but Benedict’s expression, the thoughts that lurked behind his eyes, were classic Justin, the crazy werewolf who’d Changed her and…done all the other things that no one else had particularly wanted to do to an Omega wolf. Not long after she and Charles met, Charles had killed Justin. But even years later, she had nightmares about Justin’s eyes.
    Because Benedict made her so uneasy, she turned her attention tothe other stranger in the mix. Clearly related by blood to both of the younger two, the old man—Uncle Travis, that was what Heuter had called him—showed her what Heuter would look like in forty years, assuming he didn’t die under her fangs as she hoped. Age had not so much bent this man as clarified him. Heuter still looked a little soft around the edges; it was what gave him his wholesome appearance. This man was all rawhide and leather.
    Even in his mid-sixties or early seventies, he was good-looking, with bright blue eyes unfaded by the years and sharp, clean features that might have been spectacular when he was young but had been solidified by a sense of strength and determination. If Anna thought that the strength of character in his face was slightly mad—well, she was in a better place than most to make that judgment.
    He moved like there was muscle under his skin despite his age. And from the body language of the others, she knew that here was the Alpha wolf. He ruled by fiat, by strength of character, and by their understanding that it was this one who kept them safe and gave them direction—and would kill them if he needed to.
    The body language she observed when the older man wasn’t looking at his minions also told her that Heuter chafed at his secondary position: he was ready to take over at the first sign of weakness. It had been in his voice, too. The old man should have known, and that he didn’t, signaled to Anna that he was weakening and would not rule here much longer.
    “Let’s have a look at you, darling,” the old man crooned as he came up to the cage, seemingly unfazed by her change to wolf. “Black as pitch and ice blue eyes. I’ve never seen a wolf with blue eyes before.”
    She had to fight not to back away. Close up, he smelled of pipe tobacco. Charles sometimes smelled like that after he performed one of the ceremonies his grandfather had taught him.
    Charles didn’t do one often, but she’d learned to see the signs.