Wolver's Gold (The Wolvers) (38 page)

When the first bar of gold was d
iscovered, everyone cheered. By the thirtieth bar, everyone waved and went on visiting with their neighbors. The gravel paved lane leading up to the church had become a dance floor.

“They know what’s more important than gold,” John said when the fortieth bar was pulled from the growing hole.

The moon was rising when the last bar was found, fifty-two in all. Their Alpha exercised his new power and called his pack to him. Every head turned at his silent call and many continued to smile as they gathered around the church steps where he stood

John raised his hands in blessing and the murmuring of the crowd faded away.

“Challenger McCall came to this pack under false pretenses, though I’m happy to say as an agent for good. I choose him as my Second, not because of his power and strength of which he has plenty, but because he is my friend, because I trust him to tell me if I become pompous and lose sight of my duty to the pack.

“He has chosen us, because he wishes to enjoy the fruits of our future and that choice was made before we found the gold.” John smiled and the crowd laughed. “He sees in Gold Gulch what I see; wolvers who will become strong again and prosper as a pack. Challenger McCall,” he called out, “
"Is it your wish to join the Gold Gulch Pack?"

"It is," McCall
answered, his voice loud and clear.

"Will you swear to uphold Pack Law no matter the cost?"

"I will."

"Will you swear to place the needs of the pack above your own
, stand for them as they will for you? Will you follow your Alpha in whatever he may ask of you even unto death?"

"
I will stand for my pack and follow my Alpha, but only if where he leads me remains within the Law."

It was not the normal response of a simple “I will”, but it was one the pack was delighted to hear. They cheered.

"Fair enough,” John laughed. “Who stands for this man?"

Josephus Kincaid was the first to call out, but he wasn’t the last.

“This is a day of new beginnings,” John went on, “And it is therefore fitting that two of our own begin their future together on this day. I give you our new member and my Second, Challenger McCall, and our self-proclaimed spinster, Rachel Kincaid.”

McCall held out his hand to her and raised thei
r entwined fingers to the crowd who laughed and applauded.

“This woman is mine,” he declared. “Mine to hold, mine to cherish, mine to love.
She gives me laughter and love and hope and I swear to give her anything she desires that’s within my power to give.”

“Just don’t give her a broom!” someone called.

“If she takes a broom to me, I’ll deserve it!” he called back.

The crowd laughed
and instead of blushing, Rachel laughed, too.

“
I expect to use it often,” she told them. “Mr. McCall is like those bars over there. He needs a bit of polish. But like those bars, what you’ll find beneath the dirt and dust is pure and true and his value to me is beyond measure. He sees me in a way no one else ever has. He awakened my wolf and in doing so awakened me. I have given him my trust and my heart and he has given me his in return. There’s nothing I could desire more. In Challenger McCall, I have found my wolver’s gold.”

Rachel looked around at the smiling faces and knew that this was where she and her mate were meant to be.
The full moon, in all its golden glory shined down upon them, blessing them, calling to them, and waiting patiently for them to go over it and become what they were meant to be.

Strong.
Beautiful. Wolver. Pack.

Epilogue

McCall listened to the speeches with one ear while he scanned the crowd again. He thought once the tourists had been ushered out, he'd find her. That silly hat with the giant feathers shouldn't be hard to spot. Neither should that dress. Hell, neither should what was in that dress. He wasn't sure how she did it, but in a dress that covered her pretty much from neck to toe, Miss Rachel Kincaid or Mrs. Challenger McCall, as she preferred to be called, managed to broadcast sex appeal. McCall couldn't stop thinking about her and encasing her secrets in all that shiny blue fabric only fueled his imagination.

He saw her lying poolside in Las Vegas, in a bikini, a tiny bikini, a tiny string bikini. Or maybe one of those beaches he'd read about, where the girls didn't need…

Arthur
growled deep in his throat and a wolver standing nearby growled back. The dog ignored him and concentrated on McCall. Surprising him, his inner wolf sided with the dog, growling its agreement.

"What? She’s my mate. I can think about her any way I want," McCall muttered to the dog.

He felt his wolf roll to its back, chortling with glee. His wolf, who for thirty-six years rarely voiced an opinion other than a snarl, now chortled regularly. McCall used to think of his wolf as a sixth sense, a laidback sidekick who showed up when you needed him, but otherwise held his peace. Now the damned thing never shut up. At any mention of his mate, the animal acted like a cub his first time out.

"I give to you our newly elected Sheriff, Challenger McCall."

The wolf's chortles turned to grumbles, and then it sighed, curled up and went to sleep. It always did at these events and McCall was jealous.

McCall couldn't remember what he said. It wasn't important. All that mattered was that he kept it short and people smiled and clapped. He smiled and made eye contact with as many as he could, but the one person his eyes sought, wasn't there. Why?

She was dressed to go out, so why wasn't she here where every other wolver in town seemed to be? And what the hell was this need he had to always know where she was? And why was his wolf suddenly laughing? McCall was already halfway across the street, headed for the hotel, when he stopped dead in his tracks.

"Hey, Sheriff!
You know how to use that gun?"

McCall looked down at a cub about twelve years old with black hair, a darkly
tanned face, and intense brown eyes.

"Yep, but I don't expect to have much call to use it," he said of the old style six-shooter strapped to his thigh. He would have preferred one of the smaller, more modern automatics in his arsenal, but it would have looked out of place in the holster of the gun belt slung low on his hip. "I do a shootout three or four times a week, but they give me a special gun for that.
Wouldn't want to scare away the tourists." He gave the cub a wink.

The cub didn't react to the wink. "Will you teach me how to use one or are you like the
Alpha?"

"
Hell no, I’m not like the Alpha.” Which earned him a ghost of a smile. “And why this interest in guns? You thinking about shooting someone?"

"What if I
am?" the boy asked belligerently. "What's it to you? Folks go around shooting at other folks all the time."

“Not around here they don’t.”

McCall looked around for someone to take the cub off his hands. It wasn't that he didn't like pups. They were okay to watch from a distance, but up close, he didn't know what the hell to do with them, particularly one hell-bent on shooting someone.

“Look, cub, why don’t you stop by
the office tomorrow and we’ll talk.” The boy frowned, so McCall added, “About guns and knives and hey! Do you know how to make a cherry bomb?” He was thinking about the toilet in Washington’s office and it got him a grin from the cub.

This cub must be
from one of the new families Begley seemed to send them every other week. He fit the profile and for some reason, Washington was always sending the wild and untamed ones his way.

“Because what goes
around, comes around,” John said when asked and then he laughed like hell. McCall couldn’t see what was so funny.

Eugene Begley was forever sending them the misfits from other packs
who needed a place to belong. The Alpha had a way with incorporating their unusual talents into Gold Gulch, which was how Rachel’s father finally got his theater where he produced sappy melodramas and slapstick comedies to packed houses every weekend. McCall had never seen so much ham on one stage, but the more over-the-top the acting, the more the customers enjoyed it. There was work for everyone in Gold Gulch and everyone worked. There were no more Gentlemen of Leisure hanging about in the saloon and no more women being worked to death.

The pack was growing by leaps and bounds. The loans were paid off with the sale of the gold bars, the transactions handled by Eugene Begley. The rest was put into the expansion
of Gold Gulch. They had a train now that could take tourists on a ten mile scenic trek through the wilderness. There was a mine tour, horseback rides up into the hills, a dozen new shops, and two new restaurants, which all added up to a hundred new headaches for the Sheriff. In spite of the hassles, McCall was happy keeping the peace in Gold Gulch. He, too, liked being a part of something good.

If it wasn’t for Eustace Lode, McCall would probably
have used his gun more often. There was plenty of work and plenty of money now that no one was tapping the community till, yet some folks still felt the need to squabble. Eustace was in charge of petty grievances and sat at a desk in what used to be McCall’s bedroom. No longer the omega, those positions were filled by a few of the petty players who’d betrayed the pack, Mr. Lode now settled minor differences between neighbors. His methods were unique and often repeated down at the saloon.

“It’s not my fault my goods go over the line in front of Lester’s store. I need more room. My baskets are too big,” a storeowner once answered a complaint.

“Too big, huh?” Eustace asked. “I think I can fix that. Let me get my ax.”

The Alpha, wise in the ways of complainers,
simply shrugged and said, “It’s a solution to the problem. If you don’t like Mr. Lode’s solution, find one of your own or I’ll supply the ax.”

Eustace loved his job.

John Washington was everything they hoped for in an Alpha. He took advice from an elected Town Council of both men and women, and while the final decisions were his to make, no one ever claimed those decisions were arbitrary or without thought. He was their Alpha, not their Mayor, which was also an elected position to be served for two years.

He’d proved his abilities from the very first, not only in the takeover of the pack, but immediately afterward when tempers ran high with thoughts of revenge.

With the death of Hoffman and Holt and the revelation of all the deception and death, the pack was out for blood and many wanted to put the gallows to what they considered good use. John refused, saying there had been enough death in Gold Gulch. Instead, he banished Slocum, Fillmore, and Samuel to a permanent feral state.

“Let them be what they became, beasts of prey.”

John, leaving McCall as his Second, in charge during his absence, chose three sturdy townsmen to accompany him as he escorted the felons to a wilderness area where they would live out their lives in pure animal form. They would no longer be wolver, but wolf. Theirs would not be long lives, but as John said at their sentencing, it beat the alternative.

The General Store was awarded to Samuel’s mate, who had no knowledge of her spouse’s doings. Some were angry about that, too. She continued to run the business until her sons were old enough to take over.

“I refuse to punish the mates, or sons and daughters for the sins of the fathers.”

It was fair. It was right and the Gold Gulch pack understood it once calm returned.

Emma Samuel became the second woman in Gold Gulch to own her own business. Daisy Warren was the first. With her partner’s sudden demise, the brothel quickly became hers, but she just as quickly took on another partner, Lily, her favorite flower.

That women should be treated as equals
was one of the first directives ordered by the new Alpha. Some men liked the idea. Others did not. Some women felt the same. John said it didn’t matter. The law was there should they need it and the rest was no one’s business.

Just as what a woman wore was no one’s business
but her own. Victorian dress was required for business, but after business hours, shorter skirts, sleeveless tops and even jeans began to appear, particularly on Mondays when Gold Gulch was closed to tourists. Some, like Rachel, preferred to keep their Victorian dress, though her style changed, too, and she sometimes wore her hair down, usually after the full moon when she and Challenger ran with the pack and he kept her abed too late to pin it up.

He and R
ed were doing all right. With her money from the legacy, she was fulfilling her plans for expansion at the hotel. She’d already turned the two lounges back into one large parlor where they regularly held musical evenings and meetings of the Book Club. Now that she had money to hire more help, she became the manager in fact, as opposed to a drudge with a title. She was currently planning an expansion of their living quarters, determined to make them a home instead of ‘two rooms in the back’.

McCall thought it was cute
and as long as her “We needs” didn’t include him when it came to picking out curtains and furniture, they’d get along fine. Their bed was comfortable and as long as she was in it, he was a happy man. All the rest was frosting on the cake.

“I missed it, didn’t I?
I missed your speech.” Rachel called to her mate as she hurried up to his side. “I didn’t mean to, truly. I was helping Lenora pack and time got away.”

“So did some tears,” McCall said as he brushed the last bit of moisture from the corner of her eye. He sucked the salty essence from his thumb. “She’s really leaving?”

Rachel nodded. “She is, and while I know it’s the right thing to do, I shall miss her terribly.”

Lenora stayed on after the death of her mate, but she never fully recovered from the breaking of the magic bond that tied her to a wolver she could no longer love. It was John’s theory that it was the death of her love that began the Alpha’s loss of the mantle. Without a true Mate,
Sterling’s power waned until he was nothing but a shill for Barnabas Holt’s con game.

The Mate
couldn’t forgive herself for the role she played in shielding the pack from the truth of their lives and her historical discovery that put into motion Holt’s foul plans. No one blamed her. She was young and innocent when it all began, but the result of her acquiescence was the death of the idealistic Edmund and she couldn’t see beyond that.

She could, however, see that staying in Gold Gulch was not good for her remaining son, Randall, and finally took Jeremy Hoffman’s offer to make their home with him.

“It’s not just Lenora who breaks my heart,” Rachel told McCall as she laid her head against his chest. “It’s breaking for John, too. He loves her and I know he thought, given time to heal, she’d eventually become his Mate.”

“Maybe it’s not meant to be,” said McCall who now firmly believed his coming here was
, with the help of Eugene Begley.

“That doesn’t make it hurt any less,” Rachel admonished.

“I know, Red.” He held her to him and rubbed her back in an offering of comfort. He stopped, cocked his head and rubbed again. He held her away and looked at her curiously. “You’re not wearing a corset,” he said.

Rachel hissed and put her fingers to his lips. “There’s no need to tell the world!”

“But I like your corsets, especially the red one I bought you for Christmas.”

Rachel giggled like a young girl. “I promise I’ll wear them again, but not for several months. The Mate
told me corsets aren’t good for developing pups.”

It took him a moment to absorb what she said.

“Holy shit, Red, you’re pregnant? How did that happen?”

“The usual way, I presume. We still have a Mate
, so I don’t see why you’re so surprised.” Her smiling face turned to one of worry. “I thought you’d be happy.”

“Well hell, Red, of course I’m happy,” he told her because it was true in a way, but there was more to being a father than your mate bearing your pup. He blurted the
rest of it. “Damnit, Rachel, it scares me shitless. What if I screw him or her up? What the fuck do I know about being a father?”

“
About as much as I know about being a mother, but we’ll muddle through together with the help of the pack,” she told him and started to laugh, “But I do know where we’ll begin.”

Rachel
stood on her toes and kissed him and laughed again when she whispered against his lips, “We’ll begin with your language, Mr. McCall.”

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