Dire Needs: A Novel of the Eternal Wolf Clan Read Online Free Page A

moon tugged at them, a terrible, awesome pull, and they were more than ready to shift. Overdue.
    But the call had come in less then twenty minutes earlier, one of the local Were bartenders telling them about rumors of a fight brewing between two different werepacks. The weretrappers were circling, and it was up to the Dires, the fucking police of the Were world by default, to stop the trappers without getting themselves captured.
    The Dires, especially Vice and Stray, had been hunting down the outlaw wolf pack for days. The Dires tried not to get too involved in the werepack wars, but when Linus, King Alpha of the New York City pack, called them back from Europe six months earlier, the Dires willingly came to help advise Linus and, if necessary, help quell the rebellion.
    Of course, that’swhen Rifter and Rogue ran into their own trouble with the weretrappers.
    Linus had been able to quiet things down since the Dires returned, but obviously not enough. The king had been murdered by his own once loyal wolves days earlier, and now chaos ensued. Manhattan was in an uproar and Linus’s son was missing, rumored to have died at the hands of the same outlaw wolves.
    But as far as Vice could see, there were no outlaws in the bar and everyone appeared to be at peace.
    Well good for fucking them.
    “There are twenty weretrappers out back,” Stray reported as he stopped to smell the air, then muttered, “Suicide mission.”
    “I wish,” Vice muttered, stomping ahead. “Just gonna hurt like hell, and in the end, we’ll all still be alive.”
    “We’ve been wanted since what feels like the dawn of time—you’d think we’d be used to it by now,” Stray grumbled.
    Vice’s eyes glowed. “Let me take care of them once and for all.”
    “Rifter’ll kill you—just do what we came to do and let’s get the hell out.”
    Stray was
never
any goddamned fun.
    Then again, neither were the weretrappers, who were humans, armed to the hilt with all kinds of silver shit, which was deadly in large quantities to regular Weres but could do nothing but cause extreme pain to the Dires. They could fight through the pain—and would—but it would be far easier to avoid contact with the stuff to begin with.
    The weretrappers targeted all wolves—especially the Dires lately—not to kill them, but to hold them for experimentation. The horrors they inflicted on wolves, the majority of whom stayed as far away from humans as they possibly could, were unspeakable.
    Vice had seen some of them firsthand on both Rifter’s and Rogue’s bodies, and his gut twisted at the thought of what they’d gone through.
    He just wanted Rogue to wake up, no matter what state he was in. Slept on the floor next to the man just in case. So it was for Rogue that Vice was on the rampage, out to destroy as many weretrappers as he could without getting himself caught or drawing too much human attention to the packs.
    Howlers was packed to the damned rafters, just the way he liked it, with wine and women and various other vices that would for sure lead a man astray.
    Vice
really liked
astray, so much so that his entire life had been molded around it. The music slammed through him—the smells of Were and sex and smoke and whiskey washed through his senses. When Stray turned back to him, his eyes had already changed.
    Vice knew his had too. It was controllable, but here, where there was no need to control, he let something be goddamned easy. And when a stripper—Were—slid by him, tits against his chest, and he smelled her want, immediate and strong, he wanted nothing more than to pick her up, carry her to the back as she wrapped around him, telling him he’d be so amazingly good.
    He would be too. Fact of life and breeding and many, many years of practice.
    But Stray the killjoy simply shook his head, reminding Vice they were just cutting through the bar and not supposed to be enjoying themselves. But hell, turning it off was never that simple.
    Misconduct,