Wolf Fur Hire (Bears Fur Hire 4) (10 page)

Vera stopped in front of a room, her chestnut brown curls twitching with agitation. “I’m sorry. This isn’t how I imagined it would be to meet you. I prayed for you, you know. I didn’t know what your face would look like, or your personality, but I prayed for a mate to come save him.” Vera’s shoulders sagged as she leaned against an open door frame to the bedroom. She slammed her head back. Her eyes were raw and rimmed with tears when she lowered them to Nicole. “Save him.”

With a heartbroken sound clawing its way up her throat, Nicole hugged Vera up tight. “We will. We have to. I need him.”

“Good, then you will stay with him as much as possible. Calm his wolf. Calm him. Be there for him. Become his anchor to this world. And whatever you do, keep him away from the other McCalls. They feed the insanity in each other. Link has lasted this long because he cut himself off from them.”

“Okay, I will. I promise.”

“The temperature is set to drop tonight, and I don’t want you traveling all the way back home in it. I need to run some tests on Link anyway. Check how his body is handling the McCall Reset.”

“Vera, there was a
lot
of blood earlier.”

Vera eased back and grasped her hands. “He can take more than you think. His inner wolf gives him the ability to heal from a great deal. Did you bring extra clothes?”

Nicole laughed thickly. “Link had me pack an overnight bag just in case we got drunk over here.”

“Ha! Good, because after the last few weeks, I think we should all let loose. Link especially. You two can have this room tonight. Tell me if you need anything. Tobias is one of those overly prepared men who hoards two of everything. You should see our extra toothbrush drawer. Two of every color, and most of them with sparkles because he knows I like girly shit.”

Nicole squeezed her hands. “Vera?”

“Yeah.”

“I’m glad you’re helping him, too. I love him more than anything.”

Vera inhaled deeply and nodded. “I know. I can see it in the way you look at him. Link is lucky to have found you. Now, let me see that claiming mark.” She turned Nicole in her hands and pulled at the neck of her sweater, then peeled the bandage off.

Nicole winced at the tug of the tape, but didn’t make a sound.

“It’s shallow,” Vera whispered thoughtfully. “If it scars, it’ll be silver and thin.”

“He did better after he marked me, like claiming me settled the darkness in him. I want his bite to scar. I want him to be reminded that I’m his mate every time he sees it. Can you fix it?”

“I have something, but it’ll burn like hellfire.”

Nicole barely resisted the urge to balk and bolt. She wasn’t awesome with pain, but the thought of his mark disappearing when it healed made her braver. Link was going through a lot more pain. She could do this for him, and if there was even a chance it would help as his anchor, it was worth a try.

“This way. You get to see my lab, you lucky ducky.”

Vera’s lab was a huge room at the back of the house. A long table took up the entire length of the space, and it was covered in vials, burners, microscopes, scattered notebooks, and against the back wall was a row of machines Nicole couldn’t even guess at.

It looked like thousands of dollars worth of equipment. “Where did you get all of this?”

“Clayton.”

That name sent a chill through her blood. Link had told her all about Clayton. He was the Silvers’ absent father who had been sending them on kill missions all these years under the guise that he was someone else. He enforced the two most important shifter laws: don’t expose shifter nature to humans and don’t hurt humans. Only Vera used to be human, and he’d hired some asshole fox shifter to Turn her against her will, and then he’d banished her to Perl Island. Apparently, Clayton thought he was above shifter laws.

“You probably think I’m crazy for working for the man who did this to me,” Vera murmured as she rifled through a cabinet full of different colored powders. She turned, clutching a jar of what looked like black sand to her stomach.

“I’m a little shocked, yeah,” Nicole admitted. “He hurt you. He hurt his sons.”

“Well, Clayton is complicated. He’s a villain and he’s good. He’s a lot like a McCall.” Vera cocked her head and narrowed her eyes, as if she was debating saying more. “We have common interests.”

“Such as?”

“Like saving the McCalls. Specifically one Lincoln McCall. Clayton bought all of this equipment. All I have to do is tell him what I need, and he has it delivered within a week. He understands time isn’t on our side. Sit down there and grip the table. No screaming or Link will be in here in a second with my throat dangling from his teeth.”

Nicole pulled her sweater off and took a seat on a stool near the table, her back to Vera. “I won’t scream,” she promised.

Vera patted the powder into her torn skin, and she had been right. It burned like she was lying down on a hot metal stove. She squeezed her eyes closed and clenched her teeth as the agony dragged on.

“A few more seconds, and it’ll be done,” Vera whispered, her hand gentle on Nicole’s other shoulder, holding her steady.

And as promised, a few more seconds and Vera was cleaning the awful powder out of her injury. She re-bandaged Nicole as she sagged heavily against the table, relieved it was done. It still hurt like a mother fluffer, but at least it wasn’t an active burn anymore.

“He must love you very much,” Vera murmured. “He didn’t want to hurt you when he made this mark. McCalls aren’t usually this gentle by nature. Elyse got one of these marks before Ian covered it up.”

“From a McCall?”

“Yeah, from Cole McCall.”

Nicole lurched from under Vera’s gentle touch. “What?”

“You knew Cole?”

Her breath was ragged as she leaned heavily on the tabletop. “Buck Lund was my dad. Cole McCall killed my dad.”

Vera’s eyebrows arched high. “Oh, my God. Is that how Link found you?”

Thoughts racing, Nicole nodded slightly. Elyse had been claimed by Cole? “Did she love him?”

Vera shook her head sadly. “Cole went after Elyse because he thought she could save him. He didn’t treat her well.”

“Elyse tried to save him from the curse?”

“Elyse didn’t know there was a curse, but even if she did, no. No one could’ve saved that man. He was too far gone and didn’t even try. Link is different from his brother. Really, he’s different from his entire damned bloodline. He’s trying really hard to stay good.”

A short yell sounded from the other room, and the clatter of glass crashing against the floor echoed through the house. The murmur of angry voices followed, and Vera arched her delicate eyebrows pointedly at Nicole. “Are you ready?”

“For what?”

“To see some fireworks.” Vera’s nostrils flared delicately. “I smell Clayton.”

Nicole bolted from Vera’s lab into the living room, but what she saw there had her skidding across a rug, legs locked so she could stay out of the north end of a loaded rifle. A tall, brawny man with silver hair and three long scars down his cheek stood at the front door, eyes bored even as the three Silver brothers aimed rifles in his direction. Link grabbed her arm and shoved her behind him defensively.

“What the fuck are you doing here,
Dad
?” Ian gritted out the last word like a curse.

“That would be my doing,” Elyse said softly from beside her mate. “I invited him.”

Ian jerked a shocked gaze to her, but it was Jenner who spoke next. “Shouldn’t you be hibernating? How are you still awake?”

Vera lifted her hand like a second-grader with the answer to a math question. “That would be my doing.”

“Vera,” Tobias gritted out. “What the hell is going on?”

“Guns down and I’ll explain, boys.”

Link snarled constantly in front of Nicole as she waited for one of the Silver brothers to either pump their asshole father full of lead or to back down.

Tobias cocked his shotgun. “Tell us you’re not here to put a kill order on Link.”

“I’m not. I want Link to be cured as much as you do. Maybe more.”

Tobias frowned, but slowly lowered his weapon. Ian and Jenner followed suit one after the other.

“You took Vera’s medicine to suppress your bear. That’s why you aren’t hibernating, right?” Tobias asked.

Clayton nodded once.

“Why?” Tobias barked out. “You were the one who said the cure would ruin us and make us weak. You
fought me
to make sure Vera went back to Perl Island.
Fought me
to make sure I stayed away from the cure.”

“I was wrong,” Clayton said low, hands clasped formally behind his back. “I was wrong about a lot of things.”

Jenner ran his hand roughly down his face and muttered, “Fuck. I need whiskey now.”

“I made pie,” Vera said cheerfully.

Tobias stared at his mate like she’d lost her mind, but after a few loaded, silent moments, he sighed and gritted out, “Clayton, won’t you come in and enjoy desert with us?” His hand was clenched around the barrel of his shotgun in a stranglehold. He lifted an empty smile to his dad. “Try anything, and we’ll happily kill you.”

“Noted,” Clayton said. Striding past them, he handed Vera an expensive looking bottle of wine.

“Oh, the fancy shit!” Vera said, hugging it close as she led Clayton into the dining room.

What the fuck?
Link mouthed to Ian, but when Nicole arched her gaze to the quietest Silver brother, he looked utterly rocked and only shrugged in response.

“Elyse, I thank you kindly for the invitation,” Clayton said, sitting down at one of the empty chairs without a plate in front of it.

Elyse offered him a vacant smile. “Please don’t make me regret it.”

“Why would you invite him here?” Ian asked, his striking blue eyes round and trained on his mate.

“Because now that we’ve decided to try for a cub, I think we should at least try to give our kid a shot at a relationship with his grandparent, don’t you?”

Jenner scrunched up his nose. “Yeah, but that said grandparent is an asshole.”

“I’m sitting right here, son,” Clayton said blandly.

Jenner’s tone turned deadly in an instant. “Don’t you fucking call me that.”

“Pie!” Vera exclaimed, setting down the pastry right between the two death-glaring men.

“Elyse and Vera have offered me the opportunity to say my piece and apologize.”

“Apology not accepted,” Tobias said, sitting at the head of the table and leaning back in his chair, a fearsome expression on his face.

Link pulled out Nicole’s chair and waited until she was settled, then asked, “Why do you care if I’m cured or not? I’ve met you in person one time, when you came after Vera, and we bled each other.”

Clayton looked at Link for a long time, then leaned forward, elbows resting on the table, hands clasped in front of him. “When I was a boy, I had a friend. He was a McCall. We grew up together. I didn’t want to turn sixteen and begin my hibernations, and he didn’t want to lose his mind. He was…” Clayton swallowed hard and leaned back in his chair. “He was the only person who really understood me. And when I began sleeping through the winters, he didn’t go join the other McCalls. He didn’t hook up with that messed up pack and rush his insanity. He stuck with me. Protected my body every winter, lived in a cabin near me in the summers, and he never once made me feel bad when I had to pull an enforcer mission and put down one of his family members for hurting humans. And when my mate left me and had my sons without me, he picked up the pieces when all I wanted to do was drink myself to death. And I was there for him at the birth of all three of his sons.”

“No,” Link whispered. He shook his head back and forth in denial, his snow-colored eyes on Clayton.

“Putting out the kill order on Cole was the hardest thing I’ve ever done, second only to putting down your father. I watched my best friend, your father, Eris McCall, slowly lose his mind, and I was the only enforcer left to end his life. And it broke something inside me to kill him.” Clayton dragged his gaze from Link to Ian. “I know I’m a shit father, but I know what you’ll endure when you’re called on to put Link down, Ian, and I don’t want that for you. It’ll haunt you forever. I thought I had to make you three tough, harder than this world. Because it was my fault. I made you. I put those bears in you, and I knew from the day you were born that you would suffer because of my decision to become a father. Eris made me promise him something. We were sitting on the porch of his cabin, watching Cole, Miller, and Link play in the yard, and they were so little. Laughing and jumping around like little grasshoppers. Good boys, destined to turn into monsters. Eris was already half-gone, growling all the time, Changing uncontrollably, eyes white, talking to himself. He made me promise to save his boys from the McCall curse. And I failed—” Clayton’s voice broke on the last word, and he swallowed over and over, his eyes on his clenched hands in his lap now. “I failed Cole, and I failed Miller, and I made questionable decisions and hurt Vera inconceivably because all I could think about was saving Eris’s boys. After Cole and Miller chased their deaths, I wanted Vera to work on the cure until she could fix Link so I could keep part of my promise to Eris. Because I thought saving Link would save a part of me that had been broken the day my best friend died under my claws.”

Link sat heavily in the chair beside Nicole and scrubbed his hands over his face, over and over. “I only remember the bad parts of my father. He died when my brothers and I were young, and we were raised by my uncles. Cole and Miller turned out just like them.”

Clayton looked exhausted as he nodded and murmured, “I hated that part. I’d hoped all three of you would be more like Eris. I couldn’t do anything for Cole and Miller, but you’re different. You’re like your dad. Good. Loyal. Redeemable.”

Link slid his hand forward and Clayton grasped it in a tight handshake. “Thank you for taking care of my father.” Link firmly shook his hand one last time, then stood and left the room. The front door opened and closed a moment later.

“Excuse me,” Nicole whispered as she stood to follow him out.

She pulled her jacket from the coat rack and went outside. She followed Link’s boot prints until she found his pile of clothes. Wolf sat in the snow watching her as she approached, zipping her jacket as she did.

Arching his head back, he let off a howl, low and quiet at first, then building—a beautiful wolf song.

Nicole fell onto her knees in the snow beside him, the closest she’d ever been to Wolf. And as he lifted his nose to the falling snow and began his song again, she wrapped her arms around his neck and rested her cheek against his coarse fur.

Link was the man of a thousand heartbreaks, yet he was still here, still trying. He was a true survivor, and for the rest of his life, she would fill as many of his moments with happiness as she could.

This was her silent promise to the man she’d fallen in love with because Clayton had been right.

Link was good.

Wolf was loyal.

And both of them were redeemable.