Running Wild

protested. “Hookups, dates…” Jesus, it wasn’t possible, was it? But he admitted, “Two of them got hurt.”
“Hurt how?” The concern on Ri’s face unsettled Seamus.
“Uh…” Surely this wasn’t related. Couldn’t be. “One got a concussion, falling down the stairs in his house. He went home for the rest of the semester.” He amended quickly, “We barely had a relationship.”
Ri’s expression had this “Oh God” look to it that made Seamus’s heart beat faster. Made Seamus’s amendment seem irrelevant.
“And the other one who got hurt?”
Seamus swallowed, his throat feeling thick. “Almost drowned. Kind of a weird accident while white-water rafting. Got held down somehow.”
“Fuck.” The hard shake of Ri’s head made Seamus more alarmed.
“Are you saying Pete is responsible for this?” he burst out.
“What happened to the others?”
“Only two others.” Seamus started walking around Ri, agitated. “One stopped showing up for any dates we arranged, so I gave up on him. The other shoplifted and got charged and maintained his innocence so I believed him until he did it again… I thought I had a string of bad-luck boyfriends. What are you saying, Ri?”
“Did you know that wolves believe in mates?”
“You don’t?” Seamus said weakly, his head spinning.
Ri came up and wrapped Seamus in his arms. “Not in quite that way.” He rocked him gently before adding, “I hear the car. They’re arriving.”
“I don’t feel in any shape to see anyone right this moment.”
“Seamus, we have to hear their take on Pete. They might know something.”
“Maybe we’re jumping to the wrong conclusion. I only kissed the whitewater-rafting guy. This seems crazy.”
“Pete,” said Ri. “Pete is crazy.”
Seamus made a mental effort to pull himself together. The truth was he’d never talked over his series of boyfriends and hookups with anyone. His parents would have thought gay men were unlucky or something, and worried about him more. His friends who knew thought, rather ungenerously, that he’d made a string of poor choices. Putting it all together it appeared to be something greater than bad luck.
By the time Jonah and Trey exited the car, Ri seemed more settled, as if this theory about Pete made his world more stable, not less. They all shook hands, and Seamus asked if they’d like something to drink, then disappeared to the kitchen to calm down.
Once they were all seated with coffee on the back porch, it was Trey who took control of the conversation. He gazed at Seamus, blue eyes intent. “What do you know of Pete?”
“Not as much as I should, evidently.”
“Did you know he was supposed to go in and kill you?”
Seamus’s world spun again. Just as Pete was looking like the unhealthily obsessive ex-boyfriend, Trey had to make Pete sound worse. Or better. Since he hadn’t been killed. Seamus was finding it hard to think straight.
“Clearly not,” Trey concluded from his expression. “I’ll tell you what I think has happened over the past seven years.”
Seamus glanced at Ri who, grim-faced, placed a comforting hand on his shoulder.
“It’s rather extraordinary,” Trey continued, “that Pete found your scent, don’t you think? I mean that’s the story he tells. They sniffed you out, a day-old scent, then tracked all of Winnipeg and ran into you a year or so later after long and careful detective work.”
“Uh…” It had sounded extraordinary. But shifters themselves were extraordinary. Seamus found it hard to judge these things. Ri had seemed to accept it.
“As a wolf I’ll tell you that even if that’s possible, which technically it is, a scent is hard to remember in that way for so long. Without any other identifying features. That story made Jonah and me very suspicious about Pete and his ‘pack’.” Trey turned to Ri. “You killed one of the two men threatening Seamus that evening seven years ago when he was a teenager, correct?”
Ri nodded.
“The one who survived would have been furious. They were brothers. He would have taken over, not Pete. He would have had every intention of coming back and killing you, and finding Seamus too. He had seen Seamus, seen his ID. He knew exactly where Seamus O’Connor lived.”
Seamus paled. He’d forgotten, somehow, that the men had grabbed his ID.
Jonah took up the story. “We think that brother sent Pete in to find you, since you were about the same age and both at university. Except that fall, the new alpha