Raised by Wolves Read online

  Raised by Wolves

  Underdogs: Book 8

  Geonn Cannon

  Supposed Crimes LLC

  Matthews, North Carolina

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  All Rights Reserved

  Copyright © 2019 Geonn Cannon

  Published in the United States

  ISBN: 978-1-944591-67-0

  Prologue

  Dale Frye was in the middle of a lovely dream involving Anne Hathaway and a motorcycle when “Wolf Like Me” by TV on the Radio broke through and brought her back into reality. She was reaching for the phone before she was even fully aware of what was happening. The light from the screen made her squeeze her eyes shut, and she jabbed the answer button without reading the screen. Only one person called at this time of night, and that person would be calling from a payphone or unknown number anyway.

  “Anne Hathaway,” she said. “On a bike. Tight jeans, leather jacket. She was about to toss me a helmet so I could climb on the back.”

  “Oh shit,” Ariadne Willow said. “Should I let you go back to sleep?”

  Dale was already sitting up. “No, I’d never get back to it. You have to owe me, though.”

  “Consider me indebted. I’m at a Shell station on Government Way. It’s on the east side of Discovery Park.”

  She had pulled her jeans on over the underwear she’d worn to bed. “Damn, that’s far.”

  “There’s a bus stop nearby. I can...”

  “No, it’s not about that,” Dale said. “Are you okay?”

  Ari sighed, and Dale could hear the weariness creep into her voice. “I’m tired.”

  “I’m coming, puppy. I’ll be there soon. I love you.”

  “I love you, too.”

  She put on a jacket over her sleep shirt and got a bottle of water out of the fridge since Ari was usually parched after a long run. When she left their basement apartment, she saw that the lights in the upstairs portion of the house were off, which meant their landlord/neighbor was asleep. She found the address of the Shell station where Ari was waiting, entered it into her GPS, and left her headlights off until she was out of the driveway so they wouldn’t sweep across the house.

  When she first started working with Ari, getting up in the middle of the night to retrieve her after a run had been a huge trial. At some point over the past decade, her body seemed to have adjusted to the new demands, and she found sleeping straight through until dawn to be almost impossible. She liked going out at night and exploring the city when most of its residents were fast asleep. It wasn’t deserted by any stretch of the imagination; she’d grown up in Pennsylvania where she knew what a truly closed-down town looked like. But for a big city, Seattle did get relatively quiet once the clock ticked over to midnight.

  Her route took her through downtown, its glass towers reflecting streetlights that glowed serenely in the darkness. The city was quiet and calm at night. Now that Ari’s transformations didn’t hurt her as badly as they used to, there was no real need for her to play chauffeur. But Dale enjoyed the drives so much by this point that she would miss them if she had to stop, so Ari still called her if the wolf took her too far away from home and she didn’t feel like going all the way back on foot.

  The shining part of the city gave way to a grungier, “under construction” stretch of urban sprawl. Trees huddled together on one side of the road while warehouses and partially-built parking garages stood alongside a jungle of cranes and other construction equipment. The road ahead of her emptied out, and for the moment it seemed like she was the only person awake in the entire world. She reached down and turned on the radio so she wouldn’t get lulled into sleep.

  Over the past few months, they’d gotten a taste of what a normal life would be like. While Ari was in prison, she took a drug that suppressed her ability to transform. At the time, it had been a lifesaver. The only downside was that they didn’t have a way to flush it out of her system when she was released. So for six months, Ariadne was just a normal human being. No late night runs. No unexpected transformations.

  It was nice to have Ari in bed with her every night, and she liked knowing that she could roll over at any point and reach out to her. But she knew losing the wolf weighed on Ari. Most nights, Ari laid awake and stared at the ceiling. On one of those nights, Dale had reached over and glanced up to see Ari had been watching her.

  “Go back to sleep.”

  “Are you okay?”

  “Mm-hmm.” She had stroked Dale’s arm. “I was thinking... I could get used to this. If you wanted me to. I could get my hands on some more of the drug. You could have a normal girlfriend. No wolf.”

  Dale had kissed Ari’s throat. “Normal is not what I signed up for, Ariadne. And you need the wolf as much as I need you. And I need the wolf, too. It’s part of you, puppy.” She’d stretched up and kissed Ari’s lips, and then put her head on Ari’s chest. She’d gone back to sleep, and Ari had never mentioned it again.

  Her ruminations had taken her all the way to the residential area of Magnolia, way out on the far western tip of the city. The wolf had gone for an epic run, covering seven or eight miles. Of course that was nothing compared to the hundred mile trek it had taken when the drug first wore off. At least this time she hadn’t gone over any bridges. Dale tried to remember what was in their Discovery Park stash. It was so distant that they rarely refreshed it, so the clothes might have been out there for years.

  The Shell station was a shining island in the darkness. She saw Ari waiting by the payphone, her shoulder against the ice machine, and her heart stuttered against her ribs. There’s my puppy. Ari saw her coming and pushed away from the wall. She was wearing baggy sweatpants and a lime-green T-shirt.

  Ari waved to the clerk through the glass and jogged to meet their car in the middle of the parking lot. A familiar scent swept into the car when Ari climbed into the passenger seat. It was pine needles and crushed leaves, wet fur, earth, and sweat.

  “All good?” Dale asked.

  “I scraped my hand a little when I had to jump a fence,” Ari said, twisting her left hand to show Dale in the light coming in through the windshield. “No blood, but it stung a little.”

  “Poor puppy.” Dale brought the hand to her mouth and kissed it. “Do I owe the clerk any money?”

  “No, there was a little cash in the duffel bag. We need to change that out, though. Everything smells like mildew.” She pulled up the collar of her shirt, sniffed, and grunted. “I definitely need to take a shower when we get home.”

  Dale handed her the water bottle, and Ari made a sound of pure bliss as she cracked the top. She tilted it up and drank half the contents in one swallow.

  “Thank you. I already had one that I bought from the store, but the wolf did not come here in a straight line.”

  “How far do you think you ran?”

  Ari took another drink as she considered it. “I remember most of the run. How long was I gone?”

  Dale looked at the clock and realized she’d never checked the time. “Well, it’s almost half-past three now. The drive took me about twenty minutes. We were in bed by eleven, so you probably left around midnight?”

  “I think it was about twelve-thirty.” Ari was looking out the window, idly crunching the plastic bottle with her fingers. “I woke up and I could feel the wolf coming out. I barely made it to the door to let myself out. Then... yeah, ran around town. Up through Capitol Hill. Around Lake Union for a little while. When I got to Discovery Park, I kind of just let the wolf take control. Who knows how long she went crazy in there be
fore I changed back.”

  “I’ve always wondered about that part,” Dale said. “When you’re the wolf, and she’s in control, sometimes you ‘wake up’ and you’re already human.”

  “And naked.”

  “Mm-hmm,” Dale said. “So does the wolf decide it’s time to change again? Or does she feel you pushing at the edges the way she pushes at yours? And I know, I know, it’s not another entity, it’s all you. But for the sake of my sleep-addled brain, let’s simplify.”

  Ari chuckled. “Fair enough. And... I don’t know. When I’m control, I kind of tell the wolf when it’s time to change. I assume the same thing happens in the other direction. I’m just not privy to that mental conversation any more than she’s aware of the talks I have with you.”

  “Do you think there will ever be a time when she decides to... not bring you back?”

  “No,” Ari said, without hesitation. “It wouldn’t be possible, any more than if I decided to never let her out again.”

  “I know that,” Dale said, “but you did suppress her for six months. What if she decides to even things out? Is there a chance some night you’d go for a run and she’d just keep going? You got all the way to Discovery Park tonight. The first time you transformed after the drug wore off, she ran almost all the way to Port Townsend. What if...” She flexed her fingers on the steering wheel. “What if she’s trying to go far enough that I can’t come get you?”

  Ari considered the question for a long time. “How far would she have to go?” she finally asked.

  “The moon, puppy. She’d have to take you to the moon.”

  Ari reached over and touched Dale’s knee and left it there until they were almost home.

  When they arrived, Dale turned the headlights off and rolled into the driveway, being respectful of the neighbors and landlady. They walked into the apartment together, and Ari immediately stripped out of her stash clothes as soon as they were through the door. Dale took them into the laundry room and added them to the bag holding the stash clothes Ari had worn the day before. There was enough to start a load, so she would take care of that before work.

  Ari was still in the shower when Dale undressed and crawled back to bed. Some nights her feet required quite a bit of scrubbing, depending on how much mud she had to walk through to reach a stash. Dale had almost drifted back to sleep when the water shut off and Ari joined her. This time she brought a scent of shampoo and body wash, and Dale smiled as her partner crawled into bed and settled on top of her.

  “Sleeping?” Ari whispered.

  “Almost,” Dale said.

  Ari nibbled Dale’s ear and slipped her arms around Dale’s waist. Dale pressed her butt into Ari’s hips, raising up enough to make room for a hand between her and the mattress.

  “Still a little wolfy?”

  “Is that okay?” Her tongue trailed the shell of Dale’s ear.

  “Mm-hmm. You have to pay for your ride home somehow...”

  Ari chuckled and moved her hand lower. Dale spread her legs and Ari settled between them. Dale slipped her arms under the pillow and let Ari do what she wanted. She’d long ago decided they had four distinct styles in the bedroom: fooling around, making love, fucking, and rutting. The last one was more aggressive, and only happened after a transformation. It was Ari dominating, taking what she wanted from Dale, and Dale absolutely loved it. She smiled as Ari left her ear to focus on kissing, licking, and sucking her neck as her hand began to move inside Dale’s underwear.

  Dale pressed her cheek into the pillow, moaning and moving her hips to indicate “more” or “try something else.” But at this point, she and Ari had been partners long enough that neither of them had to say much of anything. Dale knew this sort of sex was all about her pleasure, so she didn’t try to reach for Ari or repay anything that was being done to her. Instead, she began to speak in a low murmur.

  “I love that, puppy... don’t stop... that feels so good, Ariadne.” Ari responded by gently biting down on Dale’s shoulder, making her groan and writhe. “Good girl, puppy...”

  She felt the tremors in Ari’s body and was pressed down into the mattress as Ari put all her weight down onto her. Her free hand moved up under Dale’s T-shirt to her breast, and the biting teeth turned into softly brushing lips which traveled up her shoulder, to her neck, to the spot behind her ear that made Dale squirm and sigh when she came. Ari stayed on top of her, idly kissing her neck and shoulder before finally rolling to one side.

  Dale repositioned herself and rested her head on Ari’s chest. Ari reached up to brush Dale’s hair with her fingers, and Dale kissed her collarbone. “Feeling human again, puppy?”

  Ari chuckled, and Dale felt it against her cheek. “A hundred percent. How long until we have to wake up and go to work?”

  “About two hours,” Dale said, already close to sleep. “Maybe three.”

  “Perfect,” Ari said.

  Dale smiled. Hearing an exhausted Ari say that under her breath was the perfect thing to hear before passing out, so she finally let sleep take her.

  ###

  The next few days were normal but, on Friday, Dale received another call that took her to Magnuson Park, a location which was so far away they’d never bothered to put stashes there. Ari found and raided a clothing donation bin, then used the phone of a security guard at a condominium complex to call for a ride. It was nearly six o’clock when they got home, and upstairs Neka was already awake and getting ready for work. Dale climbed into bed and was woken up moments later by Ari climbing on top of her.

  Dale squirmed away from her. “Really? Ari, we have to be up in an hour.”

  “The wolf just wanted to run,” Ari said.

  “The wolf has been running the show a lot lately. And not just out in the streets. I think you’ve been letting the animal out a little too much in bed.”

  She felt Ari tense beside her. “I haven’t...”

  “No,” Dale said. “But a couple of times it’s been borderline. It’s fine. If it wasn’t fine, I would have said something, and you would have stopped. I know that.”

  Ari scooted away from her. “I’m sorry.”

  “You don’t have anything to be sorry about. I like it when you get wild. But not every single time.”

  Ari remained silent so Dale rolled on top of her. Ari put her hands on Dale’s shoulders to push her off, and Dale gripped her wrists and pinned both hands on the pillow above Ari’s head. Their faces were lined up, and Dale stared into Ari’s eyes. It was too dark to really see them clearly, but she imagined she could see glinting gold in the hazel. It was the color she associated with Ari’s wolf form.

  “You and the wolf don’t seem to be talking to each other right now, so let me talk to both of you. Ariadne locked you up for a really long time, and that sucks, but she did it to keep you both safe. You’re taking it out on her now, and it’s unfair, because she would never have done it if she had a choice. Stop running her ragged. Be kind to her.”

  She bent down and kissed Ari, feeling the tension seep out of her body. She let go of Ari’s arms, sliding her hands over her arms until they were on her shoulders. Ari brought her hands down and rested them on the back of Dale’s head to hold the kiss.

  When they parted, Ari bumped her forehead against Dale’s and whispered, “Thank you. From both of us.”

  “There’s just one of you, Ari,” Dale said, “and I adore every bit of it. Let’s get some sleep, okay?”

  Ari nodded. Dale slipped back to her side of the bed, and Ari spooned against her from behind. She knew they were going to oversleep, since neither of them had bothered to set the alarm, but Dale decided work could start a little later than usual, just this once.

  Chapter One

  Ari looked at the clock from her perch on the corner of Dale’s desk. It was thirteen minutes past eleven, meaning the man with whom she had an appointment was almost fifteen minutes late. It had been a slow Monday morning so far, and it looked like her first real work of the week was a n
o-show.

  “It’s a standard societal rule,” Ari said. “If you’re this late to an appointment, you can’t expect the person to be there when and if you finally show up. Especially if it’s this close to lunchtime.”

  “No one told you to book a meeting this close to lunch,” Dale said.

  Ari rolled her eyes. “I offered earlier, but the guy said this was the only time he had free. Which means he’s probably on his lunch break.” She twisted to look at the door, as if the potential client had appeared in the fogged glass. “He probably stopped to eat somewhere on his way...”

  Dale sighed. “Okay, I’m obviously not going to get anything done with you sitting here pouting like this. Would you like me to go get us something to eat?”

  Ari’s face brightened. “I’ll take a Bandit from the Honey Hole.”

  “Ooh, I love it when you talk dirty to me.”

  Dale had just stood up when the door opened and a man stepped inside with an air of importance and impatience. He was looking at his phone and only glanced up to make sure he didn’t run into anything before he reached Dale’s desk.

  “Hello,” Dale said. “Can we--”

  “Mark Hubbard, I have an eleven o’clock with Ari Willow.”

  Ari said, “You’re a little late, Mr. Hubbard.”

  He grunted in response and twisted to look past Ari into the office. “Well, he ain’t even here, so I guess it doesn’t really matter, does it?”

  Ari and Dale looked at each other. He looked up at them and gestured impatiently.

  “Well? Do you expect him back soon?”

  Dale started to answer, but Ari spoke first. “You’re welcome to have a seat and wait for him.”

  Hubbard checked his watch and muttered, “Unbelievable,” under his breath, but he went to the orange plastic chair and sat down.

  Ari looked at Dale and said, “You can go ahead.”

  “You sure?”

  “Yeah, go on.”

  Dale smiled and headed for the door. “I’ll be back in a flash.”

  Ari took a seat behind Dale’s desk. She minimized the window and found a game, which she clicked open and started to play. She glanced at Hubbard every now and then to gauge his irritation. He looked out the window behind her as if he would recognize “Mr. Willow” on the street, looked into the office as if he’d magically manifested there, and frequently checked his watch. He was a tall man, lanky and lean in the way that some high school football players end up. He had a very high forehead and a poor attempt at a combover to hide it.