The old clock ticked on his desk. It was probably the only thing Kurt Parker still had from the “old days” now. He sat in his corner office of The Howling Moon, boots resting on the desk blotter as he leaned back in his chair. He still couldn’t believe what Lexi had just told him and the room’s only other occupant. His weathered brow crinkled in thought as he idly tapped the armrest with a hand. Just what the hell was Fate thinking when she dropped this crapbasket into his lap?

His mind flashed back to the previous night as he, Ayla, and Mark had run back to the main office when they heard Lexi’s voice over the com. He had been fully prepared to gut that blasted Wolf who dared to even think of hurting one of his pack. It was only when he opened his helmet’s visor and got a clear whiff of the unconscious form that he stayed his fangs. He picked up the unconscious body, gave the evac order, and raced back to the bikes. As Mark tended to Bob’s wounds, Kurt unceremoniously dumped the wolf in the sidecar Lexi normally rode in on Bob’s bike. 

He had asked the gnome if the taser would keep him out until they got back. He slightly clenched his fist as the memory replayed and Lexi just smiled that insufferable grin of hers. “Of course, Boss. It put you on your ass for how long again?” He nodded, still wishing he had never agreed to be Lexi’s test subject. There’s a damn good reason Bob wasn’t anywhere to be found, remember? He’s learned not to be that little devil’s guinea pig. He had told Ayla to get the team moving since he had some business to attend to regarding their unexpected guest. The damn kid doesn’t even know how to cover his trail. A half-blind and deaf wolf could have followed him back to his truck.  The elven woman just arched her brow slightly and nodded. Now, that same brow stared across from him and waited ever so patiently. 

“Stupid cub,” he spoke in that soft, gravelly voice she loved. “He’s more likely to get killed than anything. Kid probably read way too many comic books and thinks he’s some kind of avenging knight or some shit.”

Ayla grinned with her blond ponytail swaying as she leaned back on the loveseat against the far wall. “Oh? Remind me again just where that last name of yours came from, lover? Wasn’t it from one of your favorite heroes?”

Kurt growled softly. “You know why I changed it.” He pulled his feet off the desk and sat up straight. “What I don’t know is just what his Alpha was thinking letting him off the leash like that. He should have known better than to just take the cub at his word. I knew he was soft but he’s damn near approaching senile at this point. If it had been my cub, I’d have laid down the law, tore a couple of limbs off, waited for the regen to kick in, and then tear off a few more just to prove the point.”

Ayla just sat there silently, her face a mask. 

Kurt abruptly stood up. “Damn it, Richard! What the hell are you doing back there?! Did you forget everything?! No wolf can take down a dragon, not even a pack like yours!” He slammed his fist against the desk, causing the contents on top to bounce a few inches in the air.

“At least Kyle knew enough to gather as much information about his prey as he could before facing it. Otherwise, he’d be a very small smear right now.”

Kurt growled and pointed at her. “Not good enough Ayla and you damn well know it. When was the last time we had a dust-up with a dragon, let alone a Regent? Almost seven hundred years ago right? Even then, it took the entire guild with the full support of the Conclave, and what...three of us made it out?” 

“Yes. But those were different times. Plus, you know as well as I do that if we hadn’t, then all of Europe, and most likely the rest of the world would have died. The Black Death had to be put down. He and his followers were insane! You weren’t there but I was! I saw the lesions, the necrosis, the mass graves. Entire villages and towns were gone in a matter of days! He turned one of the Black’s greatest gifts into a waking nightmare. We still have no idea what caused him to act like he did but the results are still being taught to school children! We even have to deal with it popping up every once in a while because he still has cult followers running loose continuing to try to spread the damn thing!”

She took a calming breath to get her temper back under control. “Yes, I’m agreeing with you that Kyle is nowhere near ready for what he intends to do.” Before Kurt could utter a word about her being on his side, she whispered softly, “But would you do any different if it had been me that was killed that night?”

Kurt put his back to her, refusing to let her see the anguish in his eyes at just the mere thought of it. “No,” he replied harshly as he slightly turned his head to the side. “But I’d know just what the hell I was getting into.” 

Ayla walked over and pressed herself against him. “Oh, really? I seem to recall a lone wolf half-starved who damn near pissed himself when he saw these,” she pulled his hand to her slender, pointed ear, “for the first time. It’s not every day that you find out you’re not the only fae race out there. What was it you called me that night? Oh, right.” She chuckled. “A damn Vulcan. You apparently haven’t seen much Star Trek have you, Kurt? My ears are much longer than Nimoy’s.” Her tone turned serious once more. “So we have a choice now. Do we send him home or help him, he is…”
“I know just who he is,” Kurt interrupted. “But as far as I’m concerned, that cub is damn lucky to be breathing for what he did to Bob. No one hurts a member of my family. No one.” The room reverberated with his growl.

Ayla chuckled. “Careful lover, your wolf’s showing.” Then she leaned against the desk and crossed her legs  provocatively, “Then again, that is quite a turn-on.”  She winked as she slightly widened her stance to let her lover look down.

Kurt took a step away, mainly to clear his head from the intense scent his mate was giving off. He couldn’t think about that. Not right now. “We send him home. The cub’s already screwed up enough as it is. Amethyst will be in full lockdown now. There’s no way we’ll be able to get in there again anytime soon. Plus, now they know they’re weak. Security will be much more heavily enforced next time. Doing this the easy way just went up in smoke.”

Kurt slammed a fist against the wall.  “If he had bungled his way in just a minute later, then Lexi would have finished her download. Now? We’ll be lucky if they just change their schedules. If I were them, I’d come up with a completely different route and bypass us entirely or start using even more decoys. They’ve lost too much as it is.”

He clenched his jaw hard. “They’ve got to be feeling the pressure from somewhere down the pipeline. If it was drugs or guns, that’s one thing, Ayla. But this…” he clenched his fists so tight, they both heard his tendons snap and creak from the pressure, even without their enhanced senses. “No one runs human trafficking in my town, especially grade-school kids. No one.” Kurt was eager to find the scum behind this and sink his teeth into them. “I’ll let a lot of things slide. That’s not one of them. No forgiveness, no mercy. We find them, free the prisoners, feast on the rest.”

Ayla silently nodded. Even after all this time, all that she’d seen, some things still made her sick to her stomach. “How long before you think we can try again?”

Kurt sighed heavily. “A month, maybe two at the minimum. Damn it. Who knows how many kids are going to get past us between now and then?” He turned and looked into his lover’s dark brown eyes. “I’ll find all of them, Ayla. No matter how long it takes. I’ll save the ones I can, and avenge the ones I couldn’t.”

Ayla pushed up on her toes and brought his head down for a deep kiss. Once they parted, she caressed his cheek. “Now that’s the wolf I love.” As they embraced once more, the only sound was the ticking clock. 

 

***

 

Kyle was thoroughly enjoying his dinner. There was Pops telling some story of Kyle when he was a toddler running around the house naked to see if he could get the young man to react. As Kyle choked on a piece of lettuce from his salad, Pops grin widened even further. He turned over to face Becca, well aware that he was probably blushing as red as her hair. 

She looked back at him, her smirk that stopped his heart every time he saw it in place. She leaned over and reached out to grasp his hand. Kyle followed it to his lap and smiled as he clutched her fingers with his own. That smile then turned into horrific shock as Becca’s hand began to rot away. Skin greyed and flaked off to reveal the musculature that in turn snapped and roiled like pieces of frayed string. He couldn’t move, he couldn’t react. Kyle watched helplessly as the bones in his hand turned into powder. He finally was able to raise his head and look at his wife of only a few days, wondering why she wasn’t screaming in pain. 

Her smirk was still in place but the corruption had now spread to her face. Her auburn hair fell out in quickly silvering clumps; her ears and button nose shriveled and fell to the table in unrecognizable lumps of flesh and tissue; her eyes dissolved into streams of milky-white goo that ran down her cheeks.  The only part of her that was untouched was the area around her mouth. That perfect smile remained on the ghastly remnants of her rapidly crumbling skull. The thing that had been Becca leaned over and said: “Sweetheart, why didn’t you save me?”

 

***

 

Kyle bolted upright as he flayed wildly in an attempt to grab his lover’s body. His body was soaked in sweat as he screamed out “Becca!” He darted his gaze back and forth wildly, trying to figure out why his bedroom looked so odd and why he could barely move his limbs more than an inch or so as his brain was struggling to come to grips with the horror he had just witnessed. 

A soothing voice entered his thoughts. Easy there hotshot. It was just a dream. I know it hit like a truck but it’s ok.  Don’t struggle. You’ll have one hell of a wake-up call if you move too much.

Kyle heaved deep breaths as he tried to get his body under control. Just what the hell was that?

Best guess is survivor’s guilt followed by a hero complex. Kinda the whole reason we’re out here to begin with. 

Not funny.

Hey, you asked.

So what now hotshot? You’ve been at this revenge thing for a while and all you’ve managed to do is get your ass kicked by a woman no bigger than a preschooler and kidnapped. What’s next on the agenda? Getting shanghaied into the Foreign Legion?

Just how long is that merger thing supposed to take anyway? I don’t recall Pops ever saying he had to put up with crap like this. 

Oh, now you remember what Pops told you? I didn’t realize you were such an attentive student. Oh, wait. You kept trying to sneak out of the house to peep at Victoria Cortez in her undies or less. 

No, I wasn’t!

I’m you, hotshot. You can deny it all you want but we both know the truth. I mean it’s not her fault that God gave her a body to die for at sixteen, was two blocks over, had that wonderful hedge, and your eyesight suddenly could turn night into day. Why you never had the nerve to ask her out, I still don’t get. Lord knows I’d have been trying to get her under the bleachers.

Hey, I liked Becca long before Vickie.
Vickie? Hmm...I thought she only let her friends call her that. Last time I checked, you weren’t on her social calendar, let alone on the same planet as her. 

Before Kyle could continue to argue with himself, though, a soft knock on the closed door interrupted him. A muffled soprano issued from the wooden door. “May I come in?”

Still shaken from the nightmare, he stammered, “S-sure.” 

The door swung open silently and a tall, athletic-looking woman stood at the door frame. Judging from her platinum-blonde ponytail, Kyle assumed that this was the biker he had seen earlier. She was there holding a tray with a plate of sandwiches and a mug of something steaming. “I brought you some dinner. I thought you might have been hungry. It’s almost 8 P.M. and you haven’t eaten anything today.” The rumble of Kyle’s stomach brought a grin to her sharply-planed face. As she walked toward him, Kyle alternated trying to pry his eyes away from the long, tapering ear tips he saw poking through her pulled-back hair and blushing as his body started to react to the attractive woman. As she placed the tray on the bedside table, she sat on the stool. She frowned and looked at his restraints. “I told Bob to take those things off an hour ago. Guess I’ll have to have a talk with someone else later for countermanding me.”

She frowned a moment while pursing her lips. “It’s hard to eat when you’re all trussed up like that. Just a moment.” She stood up, crossed the room to the small dresser, opened the top drawer and picked up what must have been a key. She came back to the bed and looked at Kyle. “Don’t move. I’ll take these off.” Kyle nodded, the stink of Kurt’s burning flesh still fresh in his mind. A few moments later and Kyle was rubbing his wrists to get some of the circulation flowing. The elven woman picked up a pile of clothes from another table. “Here. I washed these and, considering how flustered you are, I think you need them more than food right now.”

Kyle sheepishly nodded as he took the clothes and the elf turned her back to give him some privacy. “I guess you aren’t used to ladies seeing you like that are you?”

Kyle slightly chuckled. “No. Not really. I tried skinny dipping once with…” he gulped hard “my girlfriend when we were kids but we both got so embarrassed that we never did that again. I was looking forward to finally getting over that hangup with her though...” His voice trailed off and the woman nodded slightly. Once dressed, he sat on the bed and picked up the tray. He began to alternate between devouring the spicy chicken sandwiches and fried potatoes while trying to keep some form of table manners. The woman smiled at him.

“Guess you’re not used to seeing elves before now, are you?”

Kyle turned beet red as he swallowed some of the steaming coffee and hoped the heat from the liquid covered his embarrassment. The woman’s soft chuckle told him it hadn’t worked. 

“Don’t worry. You’re not the first wolf I’ve met who stared at me with that deer-in-a-headlights look.” Her smile turned wistful. “It’s actually quite charming.”

She stared at him with twin sapphire-blue eyes and Kyle wondered just what was going through the mind behind him.

“So Lexi tells me that your name is Kyle. My name is Ayla. Ayla Parker. I believe you’ve already met my husband Kurt.”

Kyle’s face went deadpan and his voice grew a slight edge. “Yeah. We’ve met.” 

She waved a hand in the air. “I’ll admit he doesn’t have the most welcoming disposition but there’s no one else like him. He’s a bit rough around the edges but there’s a good man in there.”

“If he’s so good, why did he have you break into a company,” Kyle asked without realizing it.

“For a very good reason Kyle. One that is definitely much higher than risking the rap of a simple B&E.” She crossed her arms and looked disapprovingly at him. “One could ask the same question about you.” Her upraised hand held off his interruption. “Lexi told me the reason but I still couldn’t quite believe it.” She lowered her hand and her expression softened considerably. “At least until a few minutes ago, that is.” Her voice lowered to a shade above a whisper. “That must have been some nightmare. You kept saying her name over and over, each time more desperate.”

Kyle lowered the mug and gazed into the coal-black liquid. “You heard that?” He looked back up at her. “Sorry.”

“Don’t be Kyle.” She ran her left hand against her ear tip and smiled. “These are more than just for show. They can pick up quite a lot, even more than a wolf’s hearing if I concentrate.”

“I guess so.” Kyle slowly returned her smile. “Though they have to be absolute murder when trying to find a hat.”

“Oh, they’re pretty flexible. It’s not as difficult as you might think. I wouldn’t be able to wear a helmet remember? Plus, we do have a few ways to handle our more exotic features from the general public. Otherwise, Bob wouldn’t have been allowed to go anywhere except to a comic convention or Halloween party.”

Kyle nodded in agreement. “Ok. I can see that.” He let out a deep breath as he shook his head. “I just can’t believe that races like elves, orcs, and gnomes are a thing. I thought only Wolves were the only nonhuman race out there.” He shrugged and chuckled. “I feel like I just walked into a Tolkien novel.”

Her brow arched up slightly and a slightly frosty edge entered her voice. “Where do you think he got the ideas for his stories? He wasn’t exactly all human himself, no matter what he tried to present. Though, I personally think he might have been a bit of a racist. The way he portrayed the orcs and how every fantasy writer for decades who followed his tropes didn’t exactly make them big fans of his. They’re nowhere near as bloodthirsty and savage as he made them out to be, at least without a very good reason to be. Also, no orc women? They just appear out of the ground? I know at least three who would kick his butt if they could. Back when those films were coming out, some even thought of suing his estate for defamation. When cooler heads in the tribes told them just what would have to be revealed, they quickly abandoned the idea. Humanity can barely tolerate its own species. It’s certainly not ready to find out they aren’t the only intelligent life on the planet.”

Kyle nodded in agreement. He couldn’t fault the reasoning. Humanity already hated parts of itself for so many bullshit reasons in Kyle’s opinion that he could only imagine what people like the Klan would make of someone like Bob or Ayla. Ayla sat in silence while Kyle finished his meal. She picked up the tray and put it on the table then looked over the young man carefully. Her eyes locked on his and she whispered very softly, “She must have been someone very special. I know wolves usually mate for life. Still, I know it’s extremely rare for any to go to the lengths you are.”

Kyle looked down a moment before meeting her gaze once more. “Yeah. I know it’s crazy but Becca is --- was--- my entire world. Those bastards took our future away and I owe it to her and her parents to bring her home. No matter the cost.”

“Going up against a dragon alone is quite the mountain to climb you know. Most, if not all, rational beings, would call that crazy. Even Quixote wouldn’t charge that windmill and I’ve seen him do some crazy shit.”

Oh, I like her hotshot.

He looked at her, his voice determined. “You do crazy things when you’re in love.”

Ayla smiled softly but it seemed almost sad to Kyle. “You do at that. You do at that.” She stood up. “The bathroom’s down the hall on the right. I figure you really need it. I’ll change the sheets and bedding for you. Once you’re done, take the stairs leading down from the living room and head inside the tavern. Go to the bar and ask Charlie for something else if you’re still hungry.”

“Charlie?”

“The best short-order cook in the Pacific Northwest bar none. Only the best here at the Howling Moon Tavern.” 

“Thanks.” Kyle nodded and started to head out. Pausing at the doorway, he turned to the elf. “So, just to be clear, I’m still a captive right?”

Ayla paused a moment. “If I had my way, no. But until Kurt says otherwise, you should just consider yourself a permanent houseguest for the next few nights. Unless you want to give Bob a second round if he catches you sneaking out?”

Kyle shook his head. “Nope. I don’t think I will.”