“Hey, boss,” said Warren’s casual voice, the one he used when he thought he wasn’t talking to a rational being.
I glanced over to see that the tall, lanky cowboy had taken a deliberately relaxed stance about ten feet away. It would have been more convincing if his eyes hadn’t been showing a hint of gold. A couple of yards behind him, the pack hovered in a mud-spattered, silent aggregate.
Adam looked, too.
Under the impact of Adam’s attention, the pack backed away. Warren turned his head so he wasn’t even looking in our direction.
But his voice was still calm and steady as he continued, “You sure you should be moving her around? Mary Jo should maybe see if she has a concussion.”
Mary Jo was a firefighter, and she had EMT training.
Again, Adam didn’t answer, and the tension grew. Which was exactly the opposite effect our outing to the pumpkin patch was supposed to engender.
Our pack, the Columbia Basin Pack, was unaffiliated with any other werewolves, the only one on the North or South American continent that did not belong to Bran Cornick, the Marrok. His goal was the survival of the werewolves, and he was ruthless in that pursuit—which was why we’d ended up on our own.
A wise pack, bereft of the Marrok’s protection, needed to keep its collective head down if it wanted to survive. Unfortunately, that wasn’t an option for us.
It wouldn’t be vanity to say there wasn’t another pack as well-known as ours anywhere, at least in the eyes of the mundane world. Adam, our Alpha, my mate, was recognizable on any street corner in the US. That had begun as an accident of his contacts in the military, his willingness to talk to news agencies, and the good looks that had been the bane of his life long before he’d become a werewolf.
But it was my fault that the whole pack suffered along with him.
A few years ago, the worst thing most of the people (and other sentient beings) living in the Tri-Cities of Washington State had to worry about on an epic scale was the possibility of one of the Hanford nuclear waste tanks—filled with the caustic sludge by-products of the early, experimental years of nuclear science—leaking its goop into the Columbia River. Or possibly exploding.
There were nearly two hundred of the aging tanks, some holding as much as a million gallons. Each tank contained a unique mix of very bad radioactive soup, and worse, due to the secretive nature of nuclear weapons development, no one really knew exactly what was in any of them.
There really were scarier things than monsters.
Anyway.
The Tri-Cities, in addition to being right next to a Superfund cleanup site, were about an hour’s drive from the Ronald Wilson Reagan Fae Reservation, which the fae had turned into their own seat of power in their (mostly) cold war with the US government.
Because it suited them and because I claimed the Tri-Cities to be under our pack’s protection (it was a stupid heat-of-the-moment thing), the fae let it be known that they acknowledged and respected the Columbia Basin Pack’s right to protect our territory and the people, mundane and supernatural alike, who lived within it. We had signed a bargain with them that we would do that—and, more significantly, they would not harm anyone under our protection.
We hadn’t had a choice, and neither, I am pretty sure, had they. But bargains with the fae, even when both parties entered into the agreement with the best of intentions, tended to end badly, which was why the Marrok had cut us loose.
No one wanted a war between the fae and the werewolves. If our pack stood alone, whatever happened between us and the fae—or the vampires, other werewolf packs, ancient gods, or demons—werewolfkind would not be forced into that conflict. Our pack’s demise would not start a war between the supernatural world and the human, so long as we stood alone.
Or so everyone hoped.
The bargain with the fae made the Tri-Cities a neutral zone where humans could rub shoulder to shoulder with the magical world because they were protected. We had suddenly become a point of interest in national, international, and supernatural politics—and there were consequences.
Weaker supernatural beings flocked to a place of (perceived) safety, causing, among other things, a housing shortage. Hotels were booked solid and the Airbnb market went through the roof, because there was now a “safe” place to go see fae mingling with regular folks.
More quietly, predators came here, too, creatures who did not think they had to worry about a mere pack of werewolves interfering in their plundering of the rich hunting ground the Tri-Cities had become. We’d killed two of those predators in the past week alone.
Our pack was fierce. Adam was awe-inspiringly awesome. We had support from the fae—though admittedly that was nearly as dangerous as it was useful. The local vampire seethe helped us for their own reasons. Our pack, all twenty-six of us, bore the brunt of protecting our territory, and because we were not affiliated with the Marrok, we weren’t going to get any more wolves very easily.
Adam had responded to the situation by turning us into a finely tuned fighting unit. Some of that meant training in fighting techniques. Some of it meant becoming a more tightly knit pack.
Which was why Adam had rented a giant pumpkin patch and corn maze on a Tuesday night in October so that our pack could play together.
Who knew that a pumpkin patch could be dangerous?
October is a funny month in eastern Washington. Some days are eighty degrees and sunny, some days are thirty degrees and pouring rain or sleet. Our playdate had turned out to be the latter, with the addition of forty-mile-an-hour wind gusts.
Warm in Adam’s arms despite being wet through, I tipped my chin so I could see the ground and note the growing mush of mud and icy slush. The owners of the pumpkin patch had really made bank on us because only the most desperate parents would have paid money to come out here in this weather.
Over Adam’s shoulder, the flapping of paper drew my eye to the billboard near the exit of the corn maze. On one half of the board, sodden paper hung limply or flapped from pushpins and staples, revealing a rough plywood surface that needed a new coat of paint.
On the other half, plexiglass covered a movie poster showing a shadowy figure with a sickle and the title The Harvester in old-style horror lettering. A white sheet of laminated paper taped to the plexiglass announced special showings of the movie beginning this Saturday, with an opening event that included a guest appearance by the Pasco-born screenwriter.
As I watched, the combination of wind and rain tugged the announcement free. It fluttered to the ground and landed upon something small and suspiciously orange, about the size of a softball. I wiggled to get a better look.
Oh, dear Lord, I thought, staring at the orange perpetrator of my once and future doom with dismay. I am never going to live this down.
As far as I could see, all the pack members who weren’t actively hunting in the maze had spread out across the maze exit to avoid getting too close to Adam. They saw where I looked, and several of them flinched or ducked their heads.
“Tell me,” I said, in a voice that was not whiny, or at least not very whiny, “that I didn’t just get hit in the head by a pumpkin.”