Free Call of the Wolf by Madelaine Montague Page A

chest before he could lunge at Cameron. “Chill, Jerico!” he snapped. “This ain't the time ... and it sure as hell ain't the place. You want to scare Abby to death?"
    Jerico subsided, but he sent Cameron a challenging glare. “We could always follow her,” he put in after a few moments.
    "We can't count on that when none of us have marked her,” Seth growled with determined patience. “Aside from that, we can't leave the gathering."
    "And, aside from that, the chances of the council givin’ any of us an ok to take her as a mate at any other time or place are virtually nil,” Cameron added irritably. “The entire focus of the international meet is to freshen the gene pool. They won't like it anyway, but they can't very well argue against it under the circumstances, particularly when the Weres will be allowed to participate and they are part human."
    Jerico glanced around at the others. “I thought you said the council would accept as long as it was a consenting human!” he growled. “Now you're saying even if she does consent and we fight for her, the council might not let any of us claim her?"
    Seth, Cameron, and Adrian exchanged a look.
    "We're Alphas,” Seth answered for all of them. “If the four of us present ourselves at the rites and lay claim to her, they'll have to allow the challenge whether they like it or not. The problem with the gene pool is, and always was, a shortage of females. She can't make the change. You know yourself there isn't one in ten that can survive it and that's why they made the laws to begin with—a human female has to enter the clan as a human. If she accepts us as we are and accepts one of us as mate, then it'll have to be allowed ... especially now that Prince Balin has taken a human, or at least, mostly human, female as mate."
    "Right!” Jerico snapped. “ If . What are we supposed to do? Just walk in there and say—By the way, Baby, I'm Wolfen and I'm real keen on the idea of you having my pup. So ... what do you think?"
    Cameron glared at him. “We woo her, mon ami ,” he growled. “Just like we would if she was Wolfen ... or a Were."
    "Well, the problem is she ain't !” Jerico snarled. “Setting aside the fact that we all just scared the pure hell out of her—and that wasn't nothing compared to the jolt she's gonna get when she learns what we are—we're gonna be fucking tripping over each other trying to woo in a damned week! And that's only with the four of us! What if some of the others look her over and decide they want her? This place is going to be crawling with Wolfen and Weres by the end of the week!"
    "Well hell!” Seth growled. “Ok, so that's another fucking problem we're going to have to work out."
    There was no getting around the fact that the situation was a total fucking mess, unfortunately, Seth thought irritably. It flickered through his mind, briefly, to wonder if such a Herculean task was even doable ... or desirable. His gut answered the latter question.
    Abby had thrown him completely for a loop the moment he set eyes on her. Granted, he was ripe for mating and on the hunt for one. He knew that and he also knew his instincts made him highly susceptible to any female that met his criteria for physical attraction at the moment. Everyone taking part in the festival was geared up and revving to find ‘the one’ that had eluded them in previous hunts—or to find ‘the one’ because they'd finally reached the point where they couldn't deny the urge to settle on a mate anymore.
    He hadn't consciously acknowledged it before—that that group included him—even after he'd found out the council was calling for an international meet to freshen the gene pool because it had been a decade since the last one and clansmen had begun to grumble over the dearth of available females. He'd felt stirrings of interest, but he'd been more concerned about keeping order from the time he'd discovered the scope of the festival than whether or not he might meet