Wolfie understood what had happened before I did. I’d never heard such a stream of invective flow out of the alpha’s mouth as I did when he grabbed his keys and leaped into his truck, the rest of us still gaping in the doorway. But before Wolfie could start the engine, Chase bounded up in wolf form. Alone.
Understanding dawned on all of us at once, and I sank down to sit on the steps as Wolfie’s head dropped onto the steering wheel. His beta shifted back to two-footed humanity quickly and moved closer to the truck before he reported.
“The yahoos are okay,” Chase told his pack leader quietly. “But Keith is gone.”
Chapter 13
“A bribe,” Chase suggested.
Wolfie’s pack was sitting around the compound’s dining table, and had been for the last three hours. After stopping the hot-headed yahoos from immediately running after my father and nephew, we’d been tossing around ideas for how to bring Keith home, but we didn’t seem to be making any progress. In fact, the pack appeared to be falling apart rather than coming together. The young males were a mass of testosterone despite Tia’s best efforts at maintaining order, and even Quetzalli and Galena were bickering.
Part of the issue was the absence of our alpha. The firm hold Wolfie had maintained on his temper during my father’s little visit slipped its bounds at last when the alpha realized Keith had been snatched out from under our noses—I’d never seen such a fast involuntary shift. Chase had been forced to open the truck door to let his alpha run up the mountainside and vent his temper somewhere safe, and Oscar had quickly shifted to follow after him.
In Wolfie’s absence, Chase should have been in charge, but I could tell the beta was as worried about Wolfie as he was about my nephew. Still, his most recent suggestion was the best we’d heard so far.
“Bribe him with what?” I asked. My father’s favorite possession was power, closely followed by money to prop up that power. Unfortunately, a young pack like Wolfie’s hadn’t had time to earn either of my father’s preferred playthings. Not that I didn’t think Wolfie’s compound was whimsically appealing, but living in mobile homes made it unlikely that the pack would be able to rustle up anything that would capture my father’s attention.
“The usual,” responded an unlikely voice from the front door. “Money.”
We all turned in unison to watch Keith’s father enter, followed closely by Wolfie and Oscar. The two werewolves were dressed in jogging pants that I recognized from Dale’s running collection, and my eyebrows weren’t the only ones to rise at seeing an uninitiated human brought into our pow-wow. Tia was merely the first to voice her concern.
“Wolfie?” she asked. “You didn’t … ?” She tilted her head toward Dale in inquiry and the easy-going doctor thinned his lips.
“He did,” Dale confirmed. “It was pretty easy to convince me after two wolves shifted into neighbors on the front porch.”
One of the yahoos started swearing, and I couldn’t help but agree. Wolfie had broken a cardinal werewolf rule—outsiders weren’t to know what we were unless they moved in with the pack. In a pinch, I figured we could argue that Dale had joined the pack when he married Brooke, even though my sister hadn’t seen fit to inform her husband of her wolf nature. Still … .
“My call,” Wolfie said simply, and I could feel the pack fitting itself back together at his calm words. As pack leader, the choice had indeed been Wolfie’s call. Now, Wolfie turned his eyes toward Keith’s father, and the attention of everyone in the room shifted with him.
“I understand that bringing in the police is out of the question,” Dale said calmly, and for the first time I could imagine my brother-in-law in the emergency room sewing up a patient as quickly and efficiently as possible so the injured person wouldn’t bleed out. This was a side of Brooke’s husband that I hadn’t been aware of. “Wolfie says Keith isn’t currently in any danger because his grandfather wants him as a sort of leader in training,” Dale continued, “but I’d like to get my son back as quickly as possible. Between my retirement account and mortgaging the house, I should be able to come up with a quarter of a million dollars by tomorrow.”
My eyes bulged. Yes, that kind of money would speak even to Crazy Wilder. Especially if we added in the bargaining chip I’d been afraid to bring up but knew would sweeten the pot.
Unfortunately, now that Wolfie was back, I’d have to wait even longer to mention my contribution. This was one bargaining chip I knew the alpha would disapprove of.
***