She waved her hand. “I know, I know. Wolves don’t generally gnaw on humans.”
“And while the Hebberts might be into denying their human sides, even they’d probably get a little squeamish about cannibalism.”
She wrinkled her nose. “Yuck.”
“I keep thinking about something that happened at the end of the fight,” Colby said, wanting to get the subject as far away from cannibalistic werewolves as possible. “You had the gun pointed at them, and they both knew that by then, they were weak enough that it would be a dumb idea to risk being shot point-blank. Wolves are brave, and we’re good at accepting death, but we’re not suicidal. Eli ran when he was the only one left. Weston should have run too.”
“But he didn’t,” Aria said slowly.
“He didn’t. But I think it took him a minute. He didn’t want to fight, and then something persuaded him to go ahead and do it anyway.”
“You’re right,” she said, resting her chin on her hand. Her eyes were clouded with thought. “He was waiting, trying to figure out what to do, and then he put his tail between his legs and started whimpering. I’ve seen it before in wolves. Submissive behavior. I thought he was submitting to me.”
She offered Colby a slightly embarrassed smile.
“Because at the time, I thought I’d really tricked him with that silver bullet line. But he wasn’t submitting to me, was he? He was submitting to Eli.”
Colby nodded. “And that means Eli’s alpha skills are strong. Freakishly strong. It’s hard to get someone to walk straight to their death for you. I mean, most people, especially most criminals, wouldn’t like finding out that their brother would throw them away like used Kleenex. But Weston found out—and submitted anyway.”
“So what does that mean?”
It made an intuitive kind of sense to him, but it took a moment for him to figure out how to best explain it.
“When I’m human, I still have some wolf characteristics, even if it’s not obvious. I have a pretty heightened sense of smell—not quite up to my wolf’s standards, but better than any human would under normal circumstances. Don’t even get me started on how much it sucks to walk through a mall with one of those perfume counters.”
“I’m not the biggest fan of those either,” Aria said. “Allergies.”
He made a note of that for future gift-shopping.
“So what I’m thinking is that Eli maybe has heightened alpha powers because he spends so much of his time as a wolf. Those are the skills he’s developed.”
“He certainly hasn’t been spending his time learning how to make friends and influence people.”
“Exactly. Ninety-nine percent of Eli’s back-to-nature act is bullshit, but maybe one percent of it isn’t. So he’s even more compelling than a normal wolf would be. And I think maybe his sense of smell is even stronger than mine. I couldn’t have tracked you that quickly.”
The realization made his stomach sink like a stone.
But Aria shook her head. “It’s not just his nose. My neighborhood runs almost right up to the preserve, remember? He’s been in the area before. Susan—the jumpy neighbor who stopped by—has even seen him a few times in wolf form. He could have smelled me before.”
“Maybe. Probably. But he’d still have to find you through a whole neighborhood of other smells, and I would have had a harder time with it than he did. Between that and the sheer alpha sway he had over his brother, I think he has some advantages I don’t.”
He hated feeling like he was failing her. He didn’t want her to have any reason to be scared.
But Aria didn’t look afraid at all. If anything, she looked a little amused.
“That’s only fair,” she said. “Because we have plenty of advantages he doesn’t.”
Colby smiled. He wanted to believe that, sure. “Like what?”
“Like the fact that, between the two of us, we know wolves a hell of a lot better than Eli Hebbert knows humans. Like the fact that we have each other, and right now, as far as we know, Eli doesn’t have anyone. He ditched his cousin, and he used his brother as cannon fodder. You’ve been saying it yourself: wolves need packs. And Eli’s fresh out.”
“True.” He thought it over. “But guys like that always seem to have a gift for recruiting new blood fast. And he might bite someone—that’s what I’m really worried about.”
Aria gasped. “Wait, that actually works? Can you bite me?”
“Yes, it does, and no, I can’t.” He
felt scandalized by the suggestion. “It’s a horrible thing to do to someone. Their odds of surviving it are terrible—a body that’s been human its whole life isn’t prepared to suddenly launch into being a werewolf. Think about it like being a total couch potato three hundred and sixty-four days of the year and then trying to run a triathlon. It’s a recipe for disaster.”