The Luna's Vow

Chapter 6. The Burning Questions (Blake)

I seethed, while weaving my old bike between the ski-laden SUVs on the road to Seattle. Icy wind slashed my face, but it couldn't erase the imprint of Este's lips.

Leaving Este and the pack at the height of the tourist season was absurd. Winter in the mountains is great, with glittering snow and dark spruces marching up the slopes into the low clouds. Ski hills are covered in multicolored humans zipping up and down like ants. Bonfires crackle, the frost puts blush on everyone's cheeks, and laughter floats from any group one walks past. They are on vacation, duh, and we who live there both loathe them and recharge from their happiness.

I hated not kissing Este right now in front of a roaring fireplace. I hated Steinar and his new friends for sending me on this wild goose chase. I even hated Harold for turning honest.

And I loved my fated mate, and so I revved the engine and plunged the bike between wide butts of the luxury cars, deliberately risking safety for speed. The sooner I got to Seattle, the sooner I would be done.

What specifically I would get done sooner, was a question I didn't want to ponder. I'd rather tax my reflexes to the max to avoid ending up as a pile of metal and flesh in the ditch.

Not that I went at it without a plan. I liked when things were straightforward, and I planned to force this Steinar's business to go straightforward. Este deserved clarity. If the truth about her dad hurt her, I would be there to catch her. That was the only way, for we were fated mates. I'd always be there for her and our children.

Seattle in January had all the charm of a thawing turkey. Slush splattered from under my tires. Downtown towers, finally stripped from the Christmas decor, loomed in the perpetual winter twilight. Everyone in the streets looked bundled up and lonely.

Taking all this soul-crushing dreariness in, I understood the appeal of the orange glow spilling from the Muck's windows. Rogues traded the forest for the city and severed their connection to the wolves. Or, like Este, they were born outside the pack, strangers in the human world. There wasn't anyone to teach them the simple ways of winter, but the survival instinct drove them to search a den where the kin pooled their warmth, food and faith.

The Muck's was a poor substitute for a wolves' den, but it was what they had. I parked my bike between others and walked straight in.

The lights appeared bright and welcoming from the outside. Inside it was smoky. Dim. Sweltering-hot. The lamps' shadows, tables and chairs, even booths to the sides shook with deafening music and dancers' stomping, clapping and shouting in the middle. The stench was multilayered, with fried meat, onion and garlic cloaking the individuals' scents.

I squinted and focused, sorting through them as I walked around, hoping to catch Steinar's.

Cheap booze pervaded everything, scorching my nostrils worse than cigarettes and damn onions. I would have found it weird, since werewolves' metabolic rate is too high to get plastered so they rarely try, if I didn't smell the human hangers-on.

The Lupine Council would have strung me out if my pack intermingled so brazenly, but the rogues attracted the dregs of human society. If they betrayed our secret, it was on such fringe platforms, that the Council decided it helped the packs live in shadows.

There, Steinar!

The scent came from the bar, from beyond the dancing floor.

"You're cute for a pack cur." A she-wolf shoved a shot-glass into my hands. "Dance with me?"

"I don't run with no pack," I shouted over the din. I took pains to dress to cover my Alpha tattoo. There wasn't anything else to betray me in this crowd.