Tarnished by Rhiannon Held

“Less work than a bunch of different ones.” If John wasn’t careful, he’d give Susan away with his jumpiness alone.
    “If it gives me a rest from the attention of one of the male alphas surrounding me, I’m not going to argue.” Michelle toasted the idea. “Hey, baby, wanna join territories?”
    John sputtered. “I was never that bad.”
    “You were.” Michelle shared a look of feminine communication with Silver and both grinned.
    The topics stayed lighter after that, and Andrew mostly remained silent, drinking his second beer, since he wasn’t familiar with a lot of the people they gossiped about. He listened, though. You never knew when something might be useful to know later.
    After about an hour, Michelle pushed to her feet. John followed. “We’re going hunting tonight, if you don’t want to drive back so soon?” he offered.
    Michelle shook out her thick black curls and tried to finger-comb them into some kind of order. She pointedly drew in a breath of the charged atmosphere of the dining room. “Four dominants, one hunt?” She smiled and shook her head. “I’ll take permission to run in a park down nearer your border and head out, I think, before any wrestling matches break out.”
    Andrew said his good-byes still sitting, and let John be the one to show her to the door. When the front door shut, Seattle and Portland’s voices continuing toward the driveway, he looked at Silver, who looked as frustrated as he felt. “If she’s an ally, I hate to think what the others are going to say,” he said, and she nodded.

 
    6
     
    Susan stalled in the coffee shop for a whole ten minutes after John called her with the all clear, staring at the same page in her book. She’d grabbed one of her favorite paperback spy thrillers for a reread, but she hadn’t made it past the first chapter. She read whole paragraphs several times without remembering what they said, as a campy movie delivery of “If I told you, I’d have to kill you” looped in her mind. Now that it was real for her, she couldn’t imagine why she’d once thought it would be exciting, in the days when she and her brother would chase each other around the house with water pistols when their parents weren’t home. Susan finally gave up and shut her book with a snap.
    The stubborn feeling that flooded her at the thought of giving in and letting her brother declare himself winner hadn’t changed, though. She wasn’t going to leave her son, but she also wasn’t going to abandon what she had with John so easily. So they were dangerous people. So what. She couldn’t let them bully her and John both. Susan left the coffee shop feeling slightly more settled.
    She arrived back at the house to a scene of chaos in the foyer. A hunt, she realized, pausing to watch with her hand on the shoe cubby. Predators, out to kill something. She didn’t remove her shoes yet. Better to wait until the pack was out of the way. Even without considering their true natures, they were an intimidating bunch. Around fifteen adults lived in the house, though of course not all of them were gathered here tonight. Teens made up the difference in numbers from anyone still at work. It sometimes seemed a physics anomaly to Susan that they all fit, especially with memories at the surface of her mind of rattling around with her brother in their parents’ big, showy home.
    Watching the werewolves get ready to go out was like watching any other set of people in reverse. Rather than collecting possessions and coats, they shed them, getting rid of everything they could and still be decent. Men emptied their pockets, women who were built small enough wriggled out of their bras. Several were still in business clothes from the workday, and seeing the maneuvers done with slacks and crisp shirts and blouses made them seem even more surreal. They also looked likely to get awfully cold. It must have been in the fifties outside, but Susan supposed that didn’t matter with