Page 4 of Collared Mate

“Fuck,” I curse, trying not to sound excited and probably failing.

“Yes,” he says in much the same way. Hades is the one who knows the most about me in the world. Well, for now, anyway. I’ve had closer friends, but time and fate and shifter dynamics mean that you don’t always get to keep your contacts. These days, as a mature alpha, I know I can rely on my pack.

“So she’s loose in the city now?” I’m not really asking a question. I’m talking out loud while still following the scent. I hear a little squeak of excitement from Tinker as she spots me on the same camera that Fiona got caught by. I won’t really need to track her now. There’s so much surveillance in these cities I can get Tink to tell me where she went.

“She’s killed someone, I think. Or maimed them,” I add once Tinker’s animal noises desist.

“Then someone will have to take care of her,” Hades grunts.

I know what he means by that, and it doesn’t mean a sorry for your loss gift basket. Hades likes to enforce, well, everything. Rules especially. He has one soft spot, and one soft spot only, and that is for the woman he’s with on the other end of the phone. If he were alpha, Hades would be hunting Fiona down and ending yet another young Swale life far too soon.

“We’re not going to kill a grieving widow. Besides, she’s so young.”

“She’s going to get everyone exposed,” he says. “Public displays of wolf nature are forbidden for a reason.”

“It doesn’t matter. She could shift on stage in front of the whole fucking world and nobody would believe it. We live in a post-truth world.”

“The whole world doesn’t have to be convinced for it to become dangerous for us,” he says.

“I’m going to deal with her,” I reply. “Stand by.”

He grunts and we end the call. Sometimes I think it would be a lot easier if I had a yes man for my second in command, but Hades is a solid judge of most things.

We’re not going to kill Fiona Swale, though.

I follow her for the rest of the night. I don’t have to be particularly close to her. Tinker sends me addresses on my phone every few minutes when I don’t have line of sight.

Fiona goes to a bar, kind of a dive, but not rough enough for me to genuinely worry about her wellbeing. She keeps to herself, gets a beer, and regards the crowd with a low-level hostility that mostly stops men from approaching her.

I think about going up and talking to her, but something tells me to keep my distance for the moment. I’d like to know why she smelled of blood, and why she was chasing through the park in her wolf form. But you don’t get answers to questions like those by asking them. You get them by observing.

So I observe.

Fiona is very pretty. Always has been. She’s twenty-one or so years old now, and she was married when she was eighteen. It was a big deal. Huge wedding. I didn’t attend, but it seems like most of the city did.

I’d have thought she’d have had pups, but her marriage didn’t lead to any progeny. There were rumors as to the reason for that. Some blamed her, and others blamed her husband. I didn’t pay a lot of attention at the time, but now, I watch her try to not stand out in the bar while wearing skin-tight jeans that show off an ample ass and the kind of thick thighs that ruin lives.

Her features are round and soft, almost too angelic. Her mouth is wide, and she used to smile easily. Not so much anymore, I suppose. There’s a tension in her shoulders, her brow is furrowed as she looks around the room, almost seeming to will trouble to come to her.

It doesn’t take long. Someone a little too drunk to tell he’s dinner if he’s not careful swaggers up to her and starts making obnoxious conversation. She smiles, but it’s not a pleasant smile. It’s the kind of smile that a black widow might give a male spider right before he somersaults into her jaws.

I can’t hear what’s being said. I don’t want to get close enough for her to catch my scent. In any place like this, you’re going to have a few shifters maybe. We can scent each other pretty easily. Then again, a bunch of unwashed humans can be pungent enough to provide cover if you know what you’re doing.

She leaves the bar. I follow at a distance.

So does the guy she chatted to briefly. I didn’t see anything in their interaction that suggested she wanted him to go after her, but that hasn’t dissuaded him.

“Hey!” he calls out. “Hey! I was just trying to be polite.”

She keeps walking. This part of the city has a lot of older buildings, and those older buildings have a lot of little alleyways between them. I know what she’s doing, but the drunk guy following her has no idea. Again, I think about stepping in. I can’t be sure what’s about to happen, but the writing is on the wall.

“Bitch!” he curses, speeding up to a jog after her.

I decide not to get in the way of natural justice after all.

“Just wanted to talk to you!” he shouts, closing the distance between them more. She doesn’t acknowledge his presence. Doesn’t turn around or glance over her shoulder. Doesn’t pull out her phone. She keeps walking as if he doesn’t exist. She’s giving him a chance to make a different choice, but he’s insisting on making the dumb mistake he committed to in the beginning.

Makes you wonder how many other women he’s followed out of the bar. How many other times he’s called someone a crude name while insisting they give him pleasant attention. More than once, I’d bet.