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“Why? Is someone else hurt?” Jessie asked, as she followed him in. Duncan was protesting he didn’t need any help, and Dennis was ignoring him. “Put him in his room. We left it for him. I figured we might want him here for protection.”
Dennis nodded, and steered his uncle toward his bedroom suite. “No one else has been injured,” he answered. “But there’s another house of Chen’s recruits —that’s what Benny calls them—and apparently they’ve been using the lodge up north as a training ground for the recruits. There could be 100 or more men out there, Jessie, but we just don’t know. Stands to reason someone is going to get hurt.”
Jessie considered that. They needed a base, she thought. And this would do. Their base couldn’t be the pack house itself. They didn’t control it, not yet, anyway. But there were a dozen recruits at the dorm they’d gone to last night. They were supposedly at day jobs —but some of those jobs appeared to be guarding these abused women. Where were they now? “Amanda suggested we bring Will into this place,” she said to the McKenzie men as she followed them back to Duncan’s suite. Amanda took charge of the four new women. “She says he made her feel safe.”
The two men looked at each other, but they didn’t say anything. Jessie’s eyes narrowed. “What aren’t you telling me?”
“Miles is special,” Dennis said, deflecting her. “Most people like him. But I can give him a call, sure.”
Jessie didn’t buy it. “Tell me!”
Duncan sighed. Dennis had him on the bed and was pulling a blanket over him. Had the poison been that severe?
“He’s a submissive wolf,” Duncan said bluntly. “They’re rare, and I never let John know about it. John would have turned him into his personal pet. A submissive wolf is someone to be treasured— the heart of a pack, we said back in the old country. But he’s young, yet. He doesn’t know that he’s submissive. Doesn’t know what he can do with his powers. He just thinks he doesn’t have a lot of dominance. And that’s not it at all.”
“Do you know about submissive wolves?” Dennis asked her.
“Just that they exist,” Jessie said. “Vancouver pack doesn’t have any — not that I know of.”
“It’s not about a lack of power, or about submissive behavior,” Duncan said, as if he was instructing her. “He’s quite powerful actually. But he doesn’t feel the need to challenge anyone. No dominance fights. It was obvious even when he was young. He just doesn’t need to prove himself. He doesn’t feel threatened by anyone else. I haven’t seen one since we left the old country. It took me a while to figure it out. I haven’t told him. Dennis is the only other person who knows.”
Jessie considered it. That would explain why Amanda found him safe, she decided. “Can he fight?”
Duncan nodded. “He’ll defend himself if attacked,” he said. “Or if someone else is attacked —I watched both behaviors when he was a teen. But I don’t know that he would attack first —maybe if you commanded him?”
Jessie filed that away. “Could one of you call him? If Amanda thinks he’s a safe person, we could use him.”
“I’ll call him right away,” Dennis agreed.
Jessie wandered through the house, continuing her exploration. She checked in with the new women, but Cass had all of that handled. Jessie was grateful. She’d long ago figured out that she liked psychology but she didn’t have any desire to be a nurse. And these women needed a form of care more akin to nursing. She’d talk to them later. Or maybe Benny could.
The poisoned knife worried her, so she eventually found her way up to the attic to tell Titus about it. He’d made quite the nest for himself up there. The attic wasn’t heated, so he brought up some quilts and a space heater. And he’d found the gun locker, she saw. He had several scoped rifles propped next to the window he’d chosen, and some binoculars. “Are there more weapons?” she asked.
Titus nodded and showed her where the gun locker was — in the attic. She guessed it was as good a spot as any.
Titus frowned when she told him about the poison blade. “To use a knife at all is rare for a wolf, unless they’re military,” he said. “And poison on a blade? Did Doc say what the poison was?”
Jessie shook her head. “He treated it with antihistamine and anti-venom,” she said. “So I guess he figured it was some natural thing, not chemicals, if that makes any sense.” She wasn’t sure it did. “It turned purple and started to streak outward. So Benny used a knife to open up the wound more and sucked out the blood like you do for a rattlesnake bite? I guess it worked. Now all he has to do is recover from the treatment.” She snickered.
Titus grinned too. “If you want to keep watch up here, I might go down and talk to them,” he said. “It worries me.”
Jessie nodded, and sat down on his pile of blankets. “I suspect it was the idea of one of the recruits,” she said. “They might not have the same ingrained repulsion against using human weapons, and poison.”
And that worried her too, now that she thought about it. The rules of conflict were changing.
She could watch, although shooting a gun was a whole different thing. She’d never even picked one up before. “And then maybe you can give me shooting lessons,” she said, gesturing to the gun. Impulsively, she added, “give all of us women shooting lessons.”
Titus paused and looked at her. Jessie met his eyes, expecting him to say something, but he just nodded slowly. Then he headed down the stairs to the main part of the house.
Jessie settled in to keep watch.
