Wolf at the Door - By MaryJanice Davidson Page 0,1

could actually smell FunCakes™ coming off the files. “He’s busy running the (were)world. And since there’s no point in waiting for him, we might as well get started.”

So the blood-soaked nightmare that was the audit of Fritzi’s Fried Funnel Cakes, Inc. (seventeen locations nationwide) began.

One

“There’s no easy way to say this. There’s not even a cool, clever way to say this. So I’ll just come out with it. I need you to move to St. Paul indefinitely and keep an eye on the vampire queen.”

Rachael had suspected nothing when the summons came. In fact, she had assumed the Pack leader, Michael Wyndham, was wishing her a belated happy thirtieth. He was notorious for remembering significant dates about seventy-two hours too late. It was possible to time him. Sometimes he would round up all the cousins for a big b-day blowout that left the little ones in sugar comas and the adults reaching for sunglasses long before the sun rose high. Could a werewolf get a hangover? Sure. How much booze did it take? Gallons.

But he’d had his hands full with the newly discovered vampire issue (vampires! In Minnesota! Thousands! Controlled by a moron who loved designer shoes!), so she thought nothing of never hearing from him three days after her birthday. She loved her cousin, but he had many responsibilities. As, of course, did she. Tax season was nearly upon them.

So she had suspected nothing when she drove to Wyndham Manor (how too, too aristocratic East Coast!), once a monastery, now the seat of North American werewolf power and home to several generations of Pack leaders.

The monks must have had a keen eye for architecture, mood, and luxury, for the pile of deep red bricks they had abandoned (or had been turned out of and devoured . . . history was not Rachael’s gift) was truly castlelike.

It was built of enormous red bricks and stones, with a dazzling number of windows on all sides, sweeping porches, turrets, multileveled decks, swimming pools (idiotic, given that the Atlantic was right behind the mansion), miles of private beach, and even a golf course. Not that she played; it seemed too much like fetch.

She herself liked to drive out here in her blue Kia Rio when her Change was upon her. She liked to park in the private lot on the beach below the bluffs, Change, then race up the cliff until she was looking at the back of the mansion, nearly always abandoned because her Pack had all Changed and gone away.

Then she would trot around to the immense green lawn in front of the manor, a lawn so wide and deep it was like a dark green lake, one that would take her a while to swim across. She’d flop on her back, wriggle to work out some kinks (human form to wolf form left a nagging ache in her vertebrae), and look up at the bright, bright stars while the wind groaned in her ears and everywhere there was the smell of the ocean, so salty and strong and alive it was almost like the smell of fresh blood.

Now here she was, being packed off like an embarrassing relative (“Away to the sanitarium with you, crazed Aunt Petunia!”), and who knew when she’d be able to roll around on that green lawn, that lake of grass. The stars in Minnesota couldn’t be as big, or as bright, or as clear. No oceans. The Land of Ten Thousand Lakes had no oceans.

Lakes often smelled like dead fish.

And he wouldn’t be there. Michael, her Pack leader and, always more important, her cousin and friend. Her protector. Sending her away when he had many stronger and rougher and smarter—all right, maybe not smarter—but there were literally hundreds of werewolves who would leap at the chance to scout and sneak and spy. But Michael wanted her to go . . . and for what?

She opened her mouth and coughed; for the moment, her throat had been too dry to speak. She tried again. “Spy on the vampire queen?”

Michael winced a bit at spy, and from his furtive manner, he was clearly hoping his mate, Jeannie, couldn’t overhear any of this. It was also probably why the door was closed. Jeannie Wyndham hated intrigue or, as she sometimes called it, werewolf sneakiness. Also, from what Rachael had seen and heard, Jeannie liked the vampire queen. That was . . . difficult to swallow. Not that there was anything, uh, wrong with the big blond woman from