They both looked at me when I opened my door.
I was tempted to turn around and go back into my bedroom with the dead man in my closet. Now, I'm not very vain. If I'd ever been, making my living covered in various grease and dirt mixtures would have cured me quickly. Still, I wasn't up to facing two sexy men when I had one eye swollen mostly shut and half of my face black and blue.
Stefan, being dead, was unlikely to notice what I looked like-and I'd never dated Stefan. Not that I was dating either Adam or Samuel at the present.
I hadn't dated Samuel since I was sixteen.
I've known Samuel for as long as I can remember. I grew up in the Marrok's pack in northwestern Montana, a werewolf pack being as close to what I was as my teenage mother could find. It was just chance that her great uncle belonged to the Marrok. Lucky chance, I'd come to believe. A lot of werewolves would just have killed me outright-the way a wolf will kill a coyote who invades his territory.
Bran, the Marrok, in addition to being the ruler of all the North American wolves, was a good man. He placed me with one of his wolves and raised me almost as if I belonged. Almost.
Samuel was the Marrok's son. He'd been there for me as I struggled to live in a world with no place for me. I'd been raised by the pack, but I wasn't one of them. My mother loved me, but I didn't belong in her mundane human world either.
When I was sixteen, I'd believed I'd found my home in Samuel. Only when the Marrok showed me that Samuel wanted children-and not my love, did I finally understand I had to make my own path in life rather than finding someone else's to join.
I'd left Samuel and the pack and hadn't seen either again for more than fifteen years, almost half my life. All that changed last winter. Now, I had the Marrok's cell phone number on my speed dial, and Samuel had decided to move to the Tri-Cities. More specifically, he had decided to move in with me.
I still wasn't quite sure why. Fond of it as I am, my home is a single-wide trailer as old as me.
Samuel, being a doctor, is used to a slightly higher standard of housing. Granted his paperwork nightmare had taken a long time to settle. Only the month before had he at last gotten his license to practice medicine in Washington as well as Montana and Texas. He'd given up his job as a night clerk at an all night convenience store and begun working in the emergency room at the hospital in Kennewick. Despite the increase in his income, he hadn't shown any sign of leaving. His temporary stay in my house had turned into six months and some change.
I'd refused him at first.
"Why not with Adam?" I'd asked. As Alpha of the local werewolf pack, Adam was used to having short-term guests and he had more bedrooms than I did. I didn't ask why Samuel didn't buy his own house-Samuel had already told me that he'd spent too much time alone the past few years. Werewolves don't do well on their own. They need someone, pack or family, or they begin to get odd. Werewolves who get odd tend to end up dead-and sometimes take a lot of other people down with them when they go.
Samuel had raised his eyebrows and said, "Do you really want us to kill each other? Adam is the Alpha-and I'm a stronger dominant than he is. Now we've both lived long enough to control ourselves up to a point. But, if we're living together, sooner or later, we'd be at each other's throat."
"Adam's house is only a hundred yards from mine," I told him dryly. Samuel would have been right about any other wolf, but Samuel made his own rules. If he wanted to live in peace with Adam, he could manage it.
"Please." His tone was as far from pleading as it was possible to get.
"No," I told him.
There was another, longer pause.
"So how are you going to explain to your neighbors that there is a strange man sleeping on your front porch?"
He'd have done it, too-so I let him move in.
I told him that the first time he flirted with me, he'd be out on his ear. I told him that I didn't love him anymore, though it might have had more effect if I had been entirely certain of that myself. It helped that I knew that he didn't love me, hadn't loved me when he tried to elope with me when I was sixteen-and he was who-knows-how-old.
It was not really as bad as it sounded. He grew up at a time when women married much younger than sixteen. It's hard on the older werewolves to adjust to modern ways of thinking.
I wish I could hold it against him, though. It would help me keep in mind that he still only wanted me for what I could give him: children who lived.
Werewolves are made, not born. To become a werewolf, you need to survive an attack so vicious that you nearly die-which allows the werewolf's magic to defeat your immune system. Many, many of the werewolf's kin who try to become werewolves themselves die in the attempt. Samuel had outlived all of his wives and children. Those children of his who had attempted to become werewolf had all died.
Female werewolves can't have children; their pregnancies spontaneously abort during the moon's change. Human women can have children with werewolves, but they can only carry to term the babies who have only human DNA.
But I was neither human, nor werewolf.
Samuel was convinced I'd be different. Not being moon called, my changes aren't violent-or even really necessary. I once went three years without shifting to my coyote self. Wolves and coyotes could interbreed in the wild, why not werewolves and walkers?
I don't know what the biological answer to that is, but my answer is that I didn't care to be a broodmare, thank you very much. So, no Samuel for me.