"Are you crazy?" Javi asked. "Look at him!"
Cole's hands were partially shifted, with claws growing out of his fingers. His whole body was covered with more hair than was normal, and his mouth and nose were a bit, well, pointy. Cole must have partially shifted for whatever fight he was anticipating. Dark fur covered his forearms and thickened as it got closer to his hands while his fingers ended in nails that werealmostthick enough to be called claws.
But the fact that he hadn't reverted into one of his regular forms was concerning. It took some work to maintain a partial shift. Any man in the room could do it, even if they were hurt, but if they were unconscious, their bodies would tip over into whatever form was easiest.
Cole should have looked fully human by now. Or fully wolf. Not … this.
The alpha moaned again, and his eyes blinked open. "No human doctors." The words were muffled and groaned out in pain, but impossible to misinterpret.
"Cole, you?—"
"No. Human. Doctors." His eyes shone with the authority he carried every day. He was weak, bleeding, and mostly out of it,but still had all that alpha dominance that settled over Nico and made him want to bow his head and bare his throat.
"Yes, alpha," he said instead, and the promise burned.
Cole coughed from deep in his lungs and gasped in pain as it upset whatever was wrong with him. He flopped his head to the side until he was looking at Javi, Reece, and Hugh. "Listen to Nico. Don't be stupid." Then his eyes fluttered shut again and his breathing grew even more ragged.
The three betas looked at him.
Nico was frozen. He couldn't breathe. He could barely think. What the hell was Cole saying?
Nico didn't want to be in charge. He wasn't the alpha.
If he'd wanted to be an alpha, he would have taken the mantle of leadership in the pack he'd been born into instead of fleeing for the Southern Basin Pack and never looking back.
Cole knew that.
The motherfucker.
Javi, Reece, and Hugh were looking at him. Waiting for him to say something, he realized, tobethe alpha, at least until Cole woke up.
Fuck.
"Okay, no human doctors." That was Cole's last order before the insanity took him and he appointed Nico as interim alpha. Nico could honor that, at least. "Reece, try and get ahold of Mark. Hopefully he and his healer friend are still in contact range. Hugh, you stay in here and keep cleaning his wounds and shit. Javi?—"
"Go find Melanie?" he guessed.
That would make the most sense. But Nico's instincts cautioned him that a barely trained healer could do more harm than good. Some people knew just enough to be dangerous, and he feared she was one of them.
He shook his head. "You need to run interference for Cole. He'sgoingto get better." Nico did his best interpretation of Cole's alpha stare and met each of his fellow betas' eyes. "We don't need the rest of the pack worrying over nothing." He tried for his own version of Cole’s alpha confidence, but he wasn’t sure it made him sound authoritative rather than just gruff.
Cole groaned and coughed but didn't wake up.
Nico had to ignore that. Cole was going to get better. He had to.
"What about that transport job coming up?” Javi asked. "Do we cancel?" The Southern Basin pack was only a minor power player in the city. With fewer than fifty adult members and only a small chunk of territory, they were sitting in a precarious position.
They were too big to be ignored like the smaller, family based packs that lived throughout the city, most of them technically members of the larger packs, but that was in name only. But they weren't big enough to defend themselves in an all-out war against a pack like the Iron Runners and their allies.
Cole had spent the last two years doing his damnedest to cultivate alliances with the other small to mid-sized packs who wanted to remain free of the Iron Runners influence. It was slow work, and they had little to show for it so far. Mark's field trip to allied pack territory was all part of Cole's friendship campaign.
And so was the security work.
Dawson, the alpha of the Iron Runners, wanted a piece of every pie in the city, even if that pie was only in the city on a temporary basis. So if, for example, someone wanted to move a person or thing from Point A to Point B, the Iron Runners expected a pitstop at Point C so they could take a look and "tax" it.
The Southern Basin Pack tried to help those who were trying to avoid unfair taxation. And they especially tried to help those fleeing the Iron Runners.
"That's in three weeks," Nico said.
