“No. We were looking for him when you interrupted us.”
“There’s too many for us to go searching the cabins right now,” Doc said, elbowing Hawk. “Maybe we should use them as bait to lure him into the woods? Don’t see how we can pull this off without training the whole pack—and there’s no zone line to shake ’em off, either.”
“Dude, this is worse than trying to run Onyxia. We can’t disconnect or call 50 DKP minus if someone pulls the crowd on the raid,” complained Spike.
“Many whelps! Handle it!” crowed Doc, and the three men dissolved into sniggering laughter.
Nick, Dillon, and I shared a helpless look. None of us knew what the hell they were talking about.
I cut in, speaking over their laughter. “Hey, maybe I could talk to him for you. Get him to apologize. What are you so upset about, anyway?”
Hawk shook his head, his easy grin fading into an unhappy scowl. “Oh, no way. You’d just try to get away. He needs to pay for what he did.”
“Which is?” I persisted.
“He was the popular kid. The school bully. He beat the shit out of us anytime he could corner us all through high school. Playing dominant alpha—setting the rest of the football team against us—”
“Yeah,” grumbled Spike, clenching thick fists until his knuckles popped. “As soon as we heard he was here from my granddad—” Ah, so Mr. Cassidy was covering for Spike, not for Hawk. That’s where the relation lay. “—we had to make him pay. The jockstrap headdresses and fake rubber breasts at prom were the last straw.”
I had to fight to keep from cracking a disbelieving smile. These guys were obviously pissed, though if Chaz was being a dickish jock to them in high school, I could sort of understand. Why they’d carried a grudge this long was beyond me, though.
Nick and Dillon had no such qualms. They were snorting with laughter.
Doc glared behind the thick lenses of his glasses. “We want to make him pay, just like he did to us all those times.”
“Plus, he stole my girlfriend,” Hawk insisted, gesturing impatiently at me. “He’s going to use you and leave you, too. Just like he did with her. You shouldn’t be with a guy like that.”
Right. I closed my eyes and took a deep breath to compose myself—a real task with Nick and Dillon still sputtering laughter from the kitchenette—then rose and approached the door.
“Guys, I’m sorry Chaz was mean to you in high school, but he’s a very different person now. He’s saved my life, more than once, and he’s a very caring pack leader. Why don’t we go look for him, and I’ll help you talk it out together? Maybe you can make some kind of deal, and he can make it up to you. That way nobody has to get hurt.”
Hawk regarded me dubiously, though he followed the others when Doc and Spike got to their feet and fell in beside me. The reek of Were musk, not of a breed I was familiar with, washed over me as they approached. “I don’t know. I don’t think it’s possible for someone like that to change. I really want him to pay for what he did.”
“We’ll talk it out. He’s not the same; you’ll see.”
They didn’t argue, following me as I opened the door. Nick called out plaintively. “Hey, what about us?”
“We’ll come back for you,” I promised. Considering the Nightstrikers were hefting their weapons in readiness, Nick and Dillon’s belittling laughter wouldn’t help matters any if I was going to get them—or Chaz—to talk reason.
Chapter 19
We weren’t sure where to start looking. After a bit of back and forth on it, Hawk snapped his fingers at the tall, skinny geek. Doc’s tongue flickered out, tasting the air. He pointed and took off, the others hurrying after him, not waiting to see if I was following.
“What are you, exactly?” I asked once I caught up, trailing after the unexpectedly spry trio.
“Me? Were-python,” replied Doc, his long strides eating up the ground.
That took me aback. I’d never heard of Werereptiles. Hawk glanced at me and, at my look of shock, gave me a wry grin. “I’m a Were-crow. Howard’s a Were-bear, like the rest of the Cassidy family. We all suffered the same problems in high school, so we stuck together and made our own pack—the Nightstrikers—once we got sick of facing Chaz and his cronies on our own.”