Secret of the Wolf(22)

"Will do." She ended the call and pondered for a second whether she should call Dante, but decided against it. There wasn't anything he could do and, besides, the man himself had said he needed his beauty sleep. She'd call him later and let him know there'd been another attack. He might want to consult with his counterpart in District Four.

Dante. She shook her head and put the phone back on the nightstand. Sliding down into bed with a yawn, she couldn't keep her thoughts off him. He'd been so ready to come to her defense with Rand. It had made something inside of her melt. She'd never really had someone, a man, stand up for her like that before. It made him all the more attractive to Tori.

Her mind bounced back to the kisses they'd shared. God, that man was a good kisser. A great kisser. She got stirred up just thinking about it.

He was smart and funny. A lethal combination. She could kind of understand his reluctance for a relationship, to a point. She got that he put in a lot of hours on the job-so did she. She got that he had obligations to his family-so did she. Or, at least, she was trying to. And she got that he had a hobby, his horses, that also demanded time from him.

There they differed. She could never focus her attention on something long enough for it to become a hobby, unless you considered working off the clock to be one. And she didn't do pets, because she was all the animal she cared to look after.

For the next hour she tossed and turned, trying to get her mind to shut down long enough to fall asleep. It didn't happen.

Finally, she got up and put together a big breakfast of pancakes, hash browns, and lots of sausage. She got Rand out of bed, smiling when his grousing stopped as soon as he found out what she'd fixed. As they sat down at the dining ro [thet tom table she tried to get him to talk to her about the night before, but he remained reticent and noncommittal about his impressions of Dante, except for a snarly "The cop's human."

When had he become such a bigot? He hadn't acted this way in the other dimension. It seemed as if this planet had changed him, and not for the better. "Since when do you care if someone's human or pret?"

Rand sent her a look over his coffee mug. "You don't know me, Tori. Not really. I'm not the same person I was back on our home planet. Neither are you."

He was right about that. The personality and life experiences of her human host had changed her. For the better, she'd like to think. She wasn't so sure about Rand. "So tell me about yourself. Let me get to know you."

He forked pancake and a bit of sausage into his mouth. "Nothing to tell," he said as he chewed.

Apparently he wasn't ready. Tori could give him time. She hoped so, anyway. She never knew when she might wake up to find he'd left without saying good-bye. Thinking she could get a topic going that he would want to talk about, she said, "So, I ran into Stefan last night at the club."

Rand's face brightened. "You did? Why didn't he come over?" He squirmed like an eager puppy that had just heard its master's voice.

"I asked him to," she replied. "I guess he had other things to do. But he said he'd see us soon," she added at Rand's look of distress. "I'm sure he'll make sure he sees you while he's in town."

Using his knife and fork, her brother pushed bits of sausage around on his plate, grouping them together in neat little rows. "Well, I'd like to see him." Rand chuckled before saying, "He's so clever."

"He is." Tori drew in a breath and held it a moment. "Don't you feel even the slightest resentment toward him?"

Rand lifted startled eyes to hers. "Why should I?"

She leaned forward, resting her elbows on the table. "He killed someone. He's the reason we got sent through the rift, Rand. We lost everything." She pressed her lips together. "I should have called the council right away and let them know he was here."

"No! You can't!" Rand shoved to his feet, his chair skittering across the tile floor, banging against the wall. "Everyone agrees that being here on Earth is our second chance. Stefan deserves the same."

Tori fiddled with her fork. "I know, Rand. That's why I haven't turned him in yet." She sighed and searched his eyes. "But what if he hasn't changed? What if he's still a criminal?"

"He's not. I won't believe … " Her brother grabbed his chair and sat back down. "He's just passionate about what he believes, that's all."

Passionate. That was one way to look at it. Insane would be another. Only time would tell which way he went with his second chance.

Rand speared several small pieces of sausage and forked them into his mouth. "What do you know about the werewolf attacks up north?" He stared down at his plate as he cut into his pile of pancakes. "I think the investigators are clueless. I mean, they aren't any closer to catching the guy now than they were after the first attack, right?" He lifted his gaze to hers.

At the admiration she saw shining in his eyes, Tori's appetite fled. She put her fork down. "He's attacking innocent people." She took a sip of orange juice. "Anyway, it could be a woman, you know."

"Well, whoever it is, he or she is making more of us. That's not a bad thing, in my opinion." Rand finished his meal and pushed his plate forward. "Don't you ever feel outnumbered? Outgunned? Or are you so fond of humans that you don' [at s still t care that they might enact laws to put us in communes or, worse, behind bars?"

She frowned. "No one's even talking about doing that, Rand." Where was he coming up with all this crap?

"Really? What about the senator who's trying to microchip us? He says it's so they can have an accurate count, but the chips could have a GPS function and track us."

She shook her head. "People wouldn't let that happen."

"Are you sure? How would we know if it did?"

"We'd know. They couldn't keep something like that a secret."

"Right." He shot her a glower. "You are so na?ve sometimes."

Tori clasped her hands. "Rand, think about it. The government's too disconnected and there'd be way too many people involved for something like that to be kept under wraps. We'd know. The council would know," she stressed.

"And if they knew, would they tell?" His expression turned sly.

Now there was the million-dollar question. Some of them knew about the rift device and hadn't shared that knowledge, so it was possible, even probable, that they had other secrets they were keeping. Hell, prets were all about secrets. Up until about four years ago their very existence was a secret.

"Well, I don't think there's any kind of conspiracy going on, and you shouldn't either," she finally said. What else could she say?

"Don't tell me what to think." Rand leaned back in his chair and folded his arms over his chest, then repeated the action several times. "I'm allowed to have my own thoughts. Just because you're older than me doesn't mean you can tell me what to think."

"I never said that." She reached out a hand as if to touch him even knowing she was too far away. "I just don't want you worried about something that probably isn't happening."

He shrugged. "But it's my worry, right?"

She lifted her hands in surrender and sat back. He was right. It was his worry. He'd also been right when he'd said he wasn't the same man. He had changed, and she was afraid it wasn't for the better.

Rand got up and carried his plate to the sink. "So, tell me about your new lover. The human cop."

"He's not my-"

"Maybe not physically, yet, but I saw how you looked at him. How he looked at you."

She couldn't see his face, and the tone of his voice was neutral, like they were discussing the weather.

However, that last piece of information sparked her curiosity. "How did he look at me?"

"Like he wanted to lay you out and feast on you." He rinsed off his plate and put it in the dishwasher, then dropped his fork and knife in the utensil container.

Tori took her plate into the kitchen and scraped the leftovers into the wastebasket. When Rand held out his hand, she gave him the plate and watched while he rinsed it off. "It feels so strange talking to my brother about this," she muttered. She was heartened that he seemed interested, but she couldn't shake the uneasy feeling she had that he seemed also to be aligning himself with radicals in the preternatural community.

"But you like him."

"I like him. We're just friends, though." If she didn't think about those kisses maybe she could make herself believe they were co-workers and nothing more. It had really been that almost-kiss there right before he'd left that had her most bothered. To have him so close, to feel the rasp of his stubbled cheek against hers, his warm breath on her skin, the heat of his body radiating to hers … She fought back a shiver. "He's my co-worker."

"You've never had any of your other [of 1em"> co-workers over for pie at one o'clock in the morning." A teasing note entered Rand's voice.

"We ran into each other at Devil's Domain." She leaned one hip on the counter. "You could have met him there if you'd gone with me. Where'd you end up going, anyway?"

He shrugged. "Just … out. Went for a run. Stopped off at a gym to shower, then came on home."

She'd thought last night that his hair looked a little wet. It was hard to tell; he kept it cut so short. "That doesn't make sense. Why didn't you wait and shower here?"