One week. Six days now, actually.
She had to pull herself together enough to fix this mess.
Jared should have known—the rally at 2 o’clock was an anti-shifter one.
He stood to Grace’s right, while the ex-boyfriend speechwriter stood to her left, and the coordinator girl—he thought her name was Kylie—flitted around the stage and fussed with the Senator’s microphone.
Every muscle in Jared’s body clenched.
The restless crowd that had gathered in the rented hall quietly murmured amongst themselves, waiting to hear the main speaker—two others had already spouted more hate speech than Jared wanted to hear in a lifetime. They were ordinary folk, just as he always suspected—that neighbor down the street, the guy you buy your groceries from, the mid-level manager coming down from her office for a little bigotry with her lunch. Their hatred was a pheromone that floated in the air—the scent of their anger twisted his stomach. Evil was a common enough thing in the world, but he thought he’d left most of it overseas. To see so much of it on display in Seattle chilled him deep in his bones.
He kept quiet, not blowing his cover in front of the speechwriter, but that asshole sure was flapping in his mouth.
“Would you look at the size of this crowd?” Nolan held up both hands as if embracing the lot of them.
Grace bent her head to listen, and with her hair pulled back, Jared could see the tight press of her lips. He would give anything to know what she was thinking, but that would have to wait until later. Assuming this poison didn’t seep into her system and scare her off.
Nolan kept talking. “The poll numbers are off the charts. People don’t want to say it out loud, but they’re starting to. Look at this…” He gestured to the crowd again. “This is on a Tuesday afternoon. Think about what it’ll look like when we have an evening rally, or a weekend one.”
Grace just shook her head and didn’t answer.
The Senator tapped the microphone, and the crowd quieted down. He started in on his speech, which Jared had absolutely no interest in. He watched Grace instead. Her eyes were glued to her father’s tall, commanding form. He was almost big enough to be a shifter, and a nagging doubt tugged at Jared’s mind. Was it possible? He seriously doubted it. There were plenty of alpha males in the human population who weren’t alpha because of their wolf nature. Which Jared actually counted against them. Wolves were more pure in spirit than humans—at least, Jared’s wolf nature was the good side of him, as far as he could tell. It was his human hands who had done all the killing, and humans who had given him the orders to do it. Humans made war; not wolves. Packs only fought when a member was threatened. It wasn’t as if there weren’t dark wolves—there were—but usually it was the human side corrupting the wolf, not the other way around.
No, the Senator wasn’t good enough to be a shifter.
“They’re a hidden menace among us,” he was intoning, to murmurs of agreement in the crowd. “They’re overrepresented in our criminal elements, they hide in the shadows, and by their very nature, they’re dangerous. They don’t reason or think the way humans do—they make blood vows within their packs and revel in their aggressive, animal nature. It’s not entirely their fault, I understand that. They can’t help being born what they are. But that doesn’t erase the fact that they’re a danger to the law-abiding citizens of our country.”
The crowd cheered, and the Senator paused, obviously relishing their adulation. His words made Jared wish he had pulled the trigger. But the look on Grace’s face—a scowl that grew darker with each line of the speech—reminded him why he didn’t. If only he could convince her that she could stop all this. He’d seen enough of her already to know she was strong, and she had a purity of heart about her—her wolf was hard to contain, and that brought out her righteous side. The question was whether she would be strong enough to stand up to the alpha male in her life—her father. Jared could see the dynamic: the Senator dominated everyone around him, including his daughter.
The man was still droning on with his speech. “The time is coming, my friends, very soon. We need to do something about this, take action that will ensure the safety of the good people of Seattle and Washington. Your numbers here today are heartening to me. You’ve taken time from your day, your lives, your work in making this country strong, to show your support for keeping it that way. I want you to know that I am on your side. And in the days to come, I hope you’ll be on mine.”
The Senator was wrapping up—thank God—but the crowd seemed far from ready to be done.