On the Prowl

my father,” he said softly. “You don’t want to try the shrew act with me.”
    Fear cooled her temper—and his, too, for that matter. Her perfume might have hid her scent, but it didn’t hide her eyes or her clenched hands. He didn’t enjoy frightening people—not usually.
    “Go home, Isabelle. You’ll have to swallow your curiosity until then.”
    He shut the door gently behind her and stared at it for a moment, reluctant to face Anna—though he had no idea why he should feel so guilty for doing something long before he’d ever met her.
    “Are you going to kill her?”
    He looked at Anna then, unable to tell what she thought about it. “I don’t know.”
    Anna bit her lip. “She has been kind to me.”
    Kind? As far as he could tell kindness had been pretty far from anything that had happened to Anna since her Change. But the worry in her face had him swallowing his sharp reply.
    “There is something odd going on in Leo’s pack,” was all he said. “I’ll find out exactly what it is tonight.”
    “How?”
    “I’ll ask them,” he told her. “They know better than to think they can lie to me—and refusal to answer my questions, or refusal to meet with me is admitting guilt.”
    She looked puzzled. “Why couldn’t they lie to you?”
    He tapped a finger on her nose. “Smelling a lie is pretty easy, unless you are dealing with someone who cannot tell truth from lie, but there are other ways to detect them.”
    Her stomach growled.
    “Enough of this,” he said, deciding it was time to feed her up a little. A bagel was not enough. “Get your coat.”
    He didn’t want to take the car into the Loop, where it would be difficult to find parking, because his temper was too uncertain around her. He couldn’t talk her into a taxi, which was a new experience for him—not many people refused to listen when he told them what to do. But then, she was an Omega, and not constrained by an instinctive need to obey a more dominant wolf. With an inward sigh, he followed her down a few blocks to the nearest L station.
    He’d never been on Chicago’s elevated train before, and, if it weren’t for a certain stubborn woman, he wouldn’t have ridden one this time. Though he admitted, if only to himself, that he rather enjoyed it when a rowdy group of thugs disguised as teenagers decided to give him a bad time.
    “Hey, Injun Joe,” said a baggy-clothed boy. “You a stranger in town? That’s a foxy lady you have there. If she likes her meat brown, there’s plenty here to go ’round.” He tapped himself on his chest.
    There were real gangs in Chicago, raised in the eat-or-be-eaten world of the inner city. But these boys were imitators, probably out of school for the holidays and bored. So they decided to entertain themselves by scaring the adults who couldn’t differentiate between amateurs and the real deal. Not that a pack of boys couldn’t be dangerous under the wrong circumstances…
    An old woman sitting next to them shrank back, and the smell of her fear washed away his tolerance.
    Charles got to his feet, smiled, and watched their smugness evaporate at his confidence. “She’s foxy, all right,” he said. “But she belongs to me.”
    “Hey, man,” said the boy just behind the one who had spoken. “No hard feelings, man.”
    He let his smile widen and watched them shuffle backward. “It’s a nice day. I think that you should go sit in those empty seats up there where you see your way more clearly.”
    They scuttled to the front of the car and, after they had all taken a seat, Charles sat back down next to Anna.

    THERE was such satisfaction in his face when he sat down that Anna had to suppress a grin for fear that one of the boys would look back and think she was laughing at one of them.
    “That was a prime example of testosterone poisoning,” she observed dryly. “Are you going to go after Girl Scouts next?”
    Charles’s eyes glinted with amusement. “Now they know that they need to pick their prey more cautiously.”
    Anna seldom traveled to the Loop anymore—everything she needed she could find closer to home. He evidently knew it better than she did, despite being a visitor. He chose the stop they got off on and took her directly to a little Greek place tucked in the shadow of the L train tracks, where they greeted him by name and took him to a private room with only one table.
    He let her give her order and then doubled it, adding a few dishes on the side.
    While they