How to Run with a Naked Werewolf Read Free Page A

couldn’t be right.
    Taking a step back, I knocked over his duffel and saw a bottle of Bactine spray sticking out of the partially opened zipper. I arched an eyebrow and pulled the bag open. “What the—?”
    Never mind having to run to a pharmacy. The bag was filled to the brim with well-used first-aid supplies—mostly peroxide and heavy-duty tweezers. And severaldifferent types of exotic jerky. But not much in the way of clothes.
    I glanced from the shrinking bullet hole to the enormous bag of meat treats with its distinct lack of clothes . . . and back to the bullet hole.
    Oh, holy hell, this guy was a werewolf.

2
This Is What Happens When You Roughhouse
    I dropped my butt on the bed, staring down at the unconscious shape-shifter and feeling very stupid. I’d spent the last few years as the family physician for a large pack of werewolves in the Crescent Valley, several hundred miles away in southwestern Alaska. I’d recently resigned my position, if one could consider sneaking away in the dead of night a resignation.
    Yes, werewolves were real. They walked among us humans, living relatively normal lives, working normal jobs, and occasionally shifting into enormous wolves and hunting down defenseless woodland creatures. They weren’t alone in the shape-shifting animal kingdom. In my time with the valley pack, I’d met were-horses, were-bears, and even a tragically less cool were-skunk named Harold. If it was a mammal, there was a group of people out there somewhere who could shift into it. (Fish and reptiles were problematic,for some reason.) Presided over by an alpha male—or in the Crescent Valley pack’s case, an alpha female—a pack usually lived “packed together” in a limited amount of space, such as a single apartment building or a trailer park, depending on the clan’s resources.
    All major life decisions had to be approved by the alpha, from mate selection to college enrollment. Everything had to be deemed for the good of the pack.
    Accepting that (a) these creatures existed and (b) they were now my patients was a strange adjustment for me. I’d had a complete Maggie must have slipped me special mushrooms breakdown the first time she shifted in front of me.
    The scientist in me still had problems accepting the paranormal element of werewolves. I tended to think of their abilities as a genetic bonus, which was easier to accept than magic exists, but you just weren’t lucky enough to have any in your life until you stumbled upon a pack full of eccentric shape-shifters in your late twenties . But after a while, I realized that compared with living with someone whose moods shifted from moment to moment, living with people who had exclusively unstable physical forms was practically a vacation.
    I flopped back onto the bed, noting with a frown that my weight didn’t even jostle the wolf-man. Of course. Of course I would walk away from one of the largest werewolf pack settlements in North America, only to end up trapped in a run-down motel room with a wounded one. Only someone with my logic-defying bad luck could possibly defeat the unlikeliness of those odds. I was the ass-backward Red Riding Hood.
    Had Maggie Graham, my former boss, sent this guy to search for me? The big guy did have the look of the Graham family—dark, rough-hewn, and handsome, not to mention bigger than a barn door, as my gramma would say. But I’d cared for every single member of that pack, treating everything from swine flu to suspicious puncture wounds brought on by “scuffling” with porcupines. I didn’t recognize him, and I certainly would have remembered someone who looked like him.
    Not to mention that werewolves rarely strayed this far from their territory. They were genetically programmed to protect their packlands, to crave hunting within their family’s territory with an ache that went way beyond homesickness and edged into crippling obsession. The chances of some distant Graham cousin venturing this far from