Luc’s short bark of laughter barely hid the shaft of anger slicing through him. “I’d like to think you could trust me with your only daughter, boss. I—”
“Settle down. Don’t take it personally. Put yourself in my place. I’ve not been celibate since Camille’s death, though I’ve never found another life mate. Not like Camille. You didn’t know my wife. Her sexual drives were often beyond her control. Mine weren’t much better. Neither of us was faithful during our marriage, though it was by mutual choice.” Ulrich shrugged and took a sip of his brandy. “You’re aware Chanku are not monogamous by nature, though we reproduce only with our life mate. The need for sexual satisfaction runs strongly in our women and they rarely hesitate to experience relations with as many men and women as possible. Sexually transmitted human diseases don’t affect us and the woman has total control over conception, so there’s no reason not to enjoy sexual freedom.”
Ulrich flashed a self-deprecating smile at Luc. “However grand it sounds in theory, and no matter how well it works with adults, I don’t think I could have handled that overt sexuality with my daughter, nor would it have been fair for me to attempt to curtail it. The preteen years were hard enough.”
Luc relaxed as the tension went out of him.
Ulrich grinned. “Trust me, you have no idea how relieved I was when she and her friend Shannon decided they wanted to go to an all-girls boarding school. I felt like the gods had granted me a favor.”
“She doesn’t know, does she?” Luc had suspected but never asked.
Ulrich shook his head. “No. I’ve never told her, and Tianna has not been given the nutrients she needs to activate her Chanku nature. Until she adds the supplement to her diet, she is just another highly sexual human. She doesn’t know. She hasn’t got a clue who she is, what she is. I didn’t…I couldn’t…” He shook his head again, as though acknowledging there were no valid excuses or acceptable explanations.
“Do you think that’s fair to her?”
“Hell, I don’t know if it’s fair or not.” Ulrich fairly bristled. “Her mother and I felt it best to keep the truth from her until she was old enough to understand the need for secrecy. Then Camille was gone and I couldn’t find the right time. The ability to shift emerges at puberty if the child has a steady diet of the nutrients. I kept them from Tianna on purpose. How do you tell a little girl, facing her first period without her mother there to guide her, that, oh, by the way, not only are you going to bleed every month, you now have the power to shift into a wolf? I couldn’t then. Now I don’t know if I even want her to know.”
“Why? It’s her right, don’t you think?” Luc stood up and placed his hand on his friend’s shoulder. “You didn’t hesitate to tell me. Hell, you scared the crap out of me that night, shifting into a wolf without warning me what the fuck you were doing!”
Ulrich laughed out loud. “Got your attention, didn’t I?”
“I guess you could say that. I just about shit my pants.”
“Sorry, but you looked at me as if I’d lost my mind and I had to prove our existence. Besides, I didn’t care a whit about you or your psyche. All I cared about was your DNA. I needed you to start my pack. I’d dreamed about a secret force of shape-shifters ever since Camille took me through my first change from man to wolf. You were the only other Chanku I’d ever found and I hated your guts. Protecting your self-esteem was the last thing on my mind.”
Luc shook his head, sobered by the memories of how they’d met. “Okay. I guess I can accept that. So, tell me what you expect me to do?”
“There’s a major lack of good intelligence and always the risk of discovery. I am afraid I won’t have the information I need to keep my daughter safe. She’s an adult. There’s no way I can watch her every minute. Luc, I want you to protect her. The pack, as well as the true purpose of Pack Dynamics, is, so far, a well-kept secret, but at some point, somewhere, we will be found out. It’s inevitable. I have no idea how we’ll deal with that when it happens—and it will happen—but our work is too important to let fear of discovery put us out of business.”
The same concerns kept Luc awake far too many nights. “I know. Can you imagine the uproar if someone gets proof of our existence? None of us would be safe.”
“Agreed.” Ulrich raked his fingers through his white hair. “Just last month we had that reporter writing about werewolves in some tabloid. Next thing you know, he’s jumped off the Golden Gate. Might have solved our problem, except one of the cops thought he saw two wolves on the bridge, chasing the man, and he put that in his report. You get enough reports like that and someone’s going to start paying attention. One good thing about the incident is that’s how I discovered the existence of the Montana pack. I suspected others in the area; I’d sensed Chanku nearby on more than one occasion.” Ulrich paused. “I told you I made initial contact with their alpha male, Anton Cheval. He’s an amazing man with powers we can only imagine. I hope we can all meet at some point. There’s much we can learn from Cheval.”
Ulrich stared into the brandy for a moment, as though considering his words. Finally, he looked back at Luc. “There’s something I didn’t tell you at the time, that the Montana pack leader’s mate is my niece. Her mother was Camille’s sister.”
Luc felt a chill run the length of his spine. “Your niece? Why haven’t you ever mentioned her? Is the sister, her mother, still alive?”
Ulrich shook his head and set his glass down on an end table. “No. She was the victim of a hit-and-run shortly before I lost Camille. Killed near the park, in fact, not far from where Camille died. I assumed her daughter had inherited the genes, but, like an idiot, I never followed through. I’ll admit I went a little crazy when Camille died. I had Tianna to worry about. I lost track of Keisha; to be honest, I never tried to keep in touch. Developing the pack consumed my life and I honestly forgot all about her.”
Ulrich held his hands out, palms up, a helpless gesture Luc never would have associated with the man. “It was foolish. All these years, searching for more Chanku, and I never thought of my own damned niece. Then a few months ago I read the tabloid story about a werewolf attack, did some snooping, called in some markers, and got the identity of the rape victim. I recognized her name. It was all too coincidental, the werewolf-attack story and all. I figured, knowing Camille’s genetics and their relationship, she had to be Chanku.”
“How many in their pack?”
“Four. Two men, two women.”
“All Chanku? Both men have mates?” Luc felt an ache deep in his gut at Ulrich’s slow nod.
“My niece, Keisha, is a landscape architect. It appears she is the one who designed the memorial garden in Golden Gate Park.”
There was no need to wonder which memorial Ulrich described. Every one of the pack had noticed the developing garden, drawn to it by the selection of grasses native to Tibet. Grasses every Chanku needed to help him shift.
“So it wasn’t a chance selection of plants.” Luc recalled the attractive African-American woman directing the workers when the garden was under construction. Shouldn’t he have sensed her? Why hadn’t he noticed her basic nature?
“As far as I know, my niece was unaware of her ability to shift. Keisha didn’t find out until she was assaulted. She shifted and killed her attackers.”
“I remember reading about a dog attack in the Chronicle. The article said three men were killed by pit bulls, that it was some sort of gang retaliation.”
“The paper got it wrong. The only publication that was even remotely close was the tabloid that ran the werewolf story.”
Luc laughed. “You got me there. I don’t read tabloids.”
“Neither do I, usually. This particular headline caught my eye. I’ve not gotten the details from my niece, but I intend to question her next time we meet.”
“I