“We’re looking for a kid named Luke. Around eighteen—or so he’d like you to believe. White, brown hair, brown eyes. Skinny, walks with a little bit of a limp.”
Mel’s face looked perfectly innocent. “And he’s supposed to be a wolf?”
“He’s definitely a wolf. Aria’s seen him in his shifted form.”
“Careless of him,” Mel said under her breath.
“Do you know him?”
“That depends. Why are you looking for him?”
“We’re hoping he can help us find his cousin. Eli Hebbert.”
Mel made a face like she’d tasted something foul.
“That’s about how we feel about him too,” Aria said.
“I don’t know much about Eli Hebbert,” Mel said, “but that doesn’t mean I don’t know more than I’d like to.”
“I need to find him,” Colby said. He flipped out his badge. “I’m a US Marshal. Hebbert’s a federal fugitive.”
Mel, to Aria’s surprise, made a kind of scoffing noise at that, like she half-suspected Colby had gotten his badge out of a cereal box.
“I don’t like Eli Hebbert, Marshal. If he fell into a ditch, I don’t know that I’d even bother to help him out of it. But if you’re Bryan Acton’s son, you were raised better than to think that any wolf is going to turn on their own just because someone waves a badge around.”
That sounded a little more like what Aria had been expecting. Most tightly knit groups—and wolf packs would certainly qualify—didn’t like someone coming in from above to interfere with them. They wanted to deal with their own problems.
Sometimes that worked out okay. But this time it meant they’d had a murderer living in their woods and hadn’t said one thing about it. Eli Hebbert and his pack hadn’t been from Sterling, they’d moved there—and by establishing themselves with the local pack leaders, they’d guaranteed that werewolf insularity would protect them from too much reprisal.
At least until Colby had gotten involved.
She could see Colby thinking the same thing. A muscle in his jaw twitched.
“I understand that,” he said, with a calm she could tell was faked. “I even sympathize with it, believe it or not, even though a big part of my job is finding people who don’t want to be found. But Eli Hebbert isn’t some wolf who’s going to be busted for poaching. He’s real trouble. He’s killed people before.”
Mel’s lips parted at that, but she still looked almost the way Luke had looked, back at the werewolf camp: as if as much as she wanted to help him, the pull of loyalty was too strong.
But they had gotten Luke to compromise on that a little, and Aria had no doubt they could get Mel to waver, too.
Mel wasn’t following Eli as her alpha, after all. She was probably something like the “first among equals” of the local alphas, so she was protecting him not as her leader but as a kind of... colleague or weird family member.
Maybe even murder couldn’t break that tie. But Aria had a hunch she knew what would.
It was wolf-to-wolf loyalty that was keeping Mel’s lips sealed, and only a betrayal of wolf principles would unlock them.
“And he’ll kill people again,” Aria said. “We know, because he sent his brother Weston to kill us last night. Weston burst through my front door, and Colby had to fight him. And when Weston thought about running, Eli made sure he stayed there to die—while Eli stayed safely out of the fight. Which means he’s not just a killer. He’s a terrible alpha too.”
“He abandoned his cousin, the runt of the pack, because the kid has a limp,” Colby said. “Luke couldn’t run fast enough for Eli’s tastes, not when Eli had brought the law down on their heads. We even think Eli might have tried to turn an old girlfriend. She was found dead right after he cleared out of his last town. Eli’s got a real pattern of choosing his own skin over his pack’s. And he’s trying to kill my mate. I need to find him and arrest him before he can even get another chance at hurting her. You’re not breaking any kind of faith with him. He doesn’t deserve your faith in the first place.”
Mel studied them, her small, heart-shaped face completely serious. Aria could see the exact moment she made up her mind.
“No,” Mel said. “No, it sounds like he doesn’t. And Luke’s not in any trouble?”
“None. We kind of like the kid.”
Mel sighed, and her perfect composure dissolved into something warmer. For the first time, Aria could see that she was a little tired, like she’d had a sleepless night.
“So do I. He just washes up on my doorstep sometimes to watch movies and use a microwave. And last night he turned up looking for a real human bed too. I gave it to him. I’d say he’s still upstairs asleep.”