“Hi. Welcome to Alphaville, home of the freaks, the losers, and the emotionally challenged. How can I help you?”

Annie had never made a habit of calling her inner wolf “Toto,” but after a greeting like that, she had to ask herself about not being in Kansas anymore. Damn the clichés.

“Um, hi.” She managed a smile. “I think I have an appointment with the mayor. John Jaeger?”

Her greeter lifted a perfectly penciled brow and took a moment to give Annie a thorough once-over, so Annie gave a mental shrug and did the same. Despite the teenaged chipperness in her short speech, the woman enthroned behind the wide counter in the lobby of Alpha, Washington’s town hall had to be pushing sixty-five. If she was a shifter, Annie would revise that upward by a good ten years. She wore a pastel plaid oxford with the collar popped high, cat-eye glasses on a chain around her neck, and makeup straight from the pages of Seventeen magazine.

By contrast, Annie’s bare face, faded jeans, and blue-striped blouse barely qualified her as dressed for public viewing, let alone meeting a mayor. No matter how small a town he governed.

She tugged at the hem of her shirt and caught her shoulders trying to hunch forward. She rolled them back, ordering herself to get a grip. If she’d had better, she’d have worn it, but living basically out of two battered suitcases for the last three years had severely limited her wardrobe choices.

Annie dropped her hand and shifted her backpack strap over her shoulder. “Is Mr. Jaeger in?”

The woman tilted her head and pursed her lips, clearly thinking about her response. After a few more seconds, she exhaled a puff of air and nodded. “Let me buzz him and tell him you’re here, honey. What’s your name?”

“Dr. Annie Cryer. I was told he’d be expecting me.”

“Well, I’m Vonnie Milner. You just have yourself a seat while I call up.” Picking up the telephone with one hand, the woman used the other to shoo Annie toward a small, old-fashioned sofa beneath the window.

As was her habit, Annie followed orders and took a seat.

Her fingers wanted to clench into fists in her lap, so she made a point of flexing them open and shut while she took a look around. The distraction might keep her brain too occupied to slip its leash.

Alpha’s town hall occupied a converted house in the center of the infamous shifter enclave in Washington’s Cascade Mountain range. The craftsman-style building featured an appealing front porch, beautiful original woodwork, and a gorgeous stairway snaking up the left-hand side of the front room-turned-lobby. Vonnie’s desk was nestled into its corner, and the large window behind Annie’s seat offered a view across the porch and onto Main Street.

A large open archway opposite lead to a dining room that looked as if it were still used for meetings, with pocket doors left intact to seal it off for privacy. Another door led to what Annie presumed was the original kitchen, and a smaller arch in the dining room wall opened into a room she couldn’t see. Maybe a study? If this were Annie’s house, she’d put her office in that back corner. Position her desk for a view of the garden behind the house. That would give her something pretty to look at, if she ever remembered to take the breaks she was supposed to from staring at her computer screen.

The clatter of the phone receiver being replaced in the cradle yanked Annie back out of her musings. She’d found herself entertaining those kind of fantasies more often in the last few months. Every time she found herself in a house or a cottage, she’d imagine how it would be if she lived there. Hazards of the nomadic life, she guessed.

“Dr. Cryer, John said you can go on up.” Vonnie leaned forward and gestured toward the stairway beside her. “Second floor, end of the hall, door on the right.”

“Thank you.”

Gathering her nerve and her backpack, Annie rose to follow the directions. She had one hand on the newel and one foot on the first tread when Vonnie spoke again.

“You going to be staying with us long, Doctor?”

Startled, Annie glanced over her shoulder. The receptionist had her gaze on her computer screen and her long, painted nails poised over her keyboard, but her attention still held Annie in place until she’d answered.

“It’s just Annie,” she said. “And, um, I doubt it. I don’t do much staying.”

Vonnie’s gaze slid to the younger woman and her lips drew into a faint moue. “Hmph. Well, I hope you take some time to look around while you’re here. We started out telling humans we were a lumber town, you know. Even had a working mill up until the sixties, before they moved it up the river to a bigger site. So we’ve got lots of trees around here. Always had an eye on replanting what got cut. It’s a good spot for planting roots.”

* * *

“What do you know about this girl?”

Jonas watched Jaeger lean back in his desk chair and shake his head. The two might be the oldest of old friends, but the mayor still did a lot of head shaking around him.

“For God’s sake, Jonas. You can’t call her a girl. Not only is she thirty years old, but she’s a doctor. Hell, she’s got two doctorates, a handful of master’s degrees, and more letters after her name than I have in mine. And since you’re about to ask her to save your clan, you might want to consider not insulting her in the first two minutes after you meet her.”

“You see her in the room right now?” Jonas deliberately swept his gaze around every corner of his friend’s office. “She hiding under your desk? Or does she shift into a bat, and she can hear us from wherever she’s parking her car right now? She won’t be here for ten minutes. So you’ve got time to answer the damn question.”

Jaeger ignored his surly tone—hell, make friends with a bear and you’d better get used to surly, especially in the winter—and shook his head.

“You got the same information I got. Genius IQ, child prodigy, scientific wonder, brilliant research career.” The cougar shifter shrugged. “Other than the brief bio I managed to pry out of Graham Winters, the only information I could find on the woman deals with her work, not her personal life.”

Jonas grumbled. “So for all you know, I’m putting the fate of my clan and my species in the hands of some arrogant egghead with a god complex and the manners of a rabid wolverine.”

“Well, if that’s true, you two sound perfect for each other,” Jaeger shot back.

“Damn it.” Jonas shoved out of his chair and stalked toward the window. “This isn’t a joke for me, John. You ought to know that. I’m trying to save lives here.”

He heard his friend sigh, chair squeaking as he spun it to face Jonas. “Of course I know it, but you gotta calm down, brother. Who cares if the woman has bad manners and a face like Old Man Pollard’s nutsack? She’s a certified genius in genetics, shifter biology, and biochemistry. Every single person I talked to on this said she is the best hope you’ve got.”

Jonas leaned a forearm against the window frame, fingers tightening into a fist. “Yeah, I know.”

“Then why are you being such a dick? She’ll be here any minute, and you can ask her any damn thing you want once she is. Okay?”

“Okay.”

“Thank God.” Jaeger rolled his eyes and spun his chair back toward his desk. “Much more whining from you, and I was gonna have to shift and kick your ass.”

Jonas snorted and turned back to face the room, shoving his hands into his pockets. “Yeah, ’cause that was gonna happen. Mountain lion versus grizzly, dude. Lion goes splat.”

“You wish.”

“You know.”

The buzz of the phone’s intercom system cut off the familiar routine. Jaeger pressed the speaker function.

“Yo, Vonnie. What’s up?”

“John, there’s a young woman here to see you. Smells like wolf. She says her name is Doctor Annie Cryer, and that you’re expecting her.”

“Yeah, Von, I am. Send her up.”

“Is Jonas still there with you?”

“Yeah, he is. He needs to meet the doctor, too.”

The woman, a seventy-two-year-old beaver who had lived in Alpha for the whole of her life, liked to consider herself the town’s unofficial mother hen. And if her nagging finally got through, she’d have Jaeger make it official. He’d seen her shopping for letterhead more than once.

Now, she sighed into her extension. “John Jacob Jaeger, what have I told you about making appointments for yourself and not entering them into the calendar where I can see them? Do we need to review the procedure again?”

Jonas rolled his eyes, but Jaeger just bowed his head. He had to work with the woman. Luckily, Jonas ran his family’s company, and his dad had been too smart to hire Vonnie back in the day.

“No, ma’am,” Jaeger mumbled.

“Because they offer night classes on the calendar software out at the community college, if you need to take another one.”

“No, ma’am.” Jaeger let a hiss escape and had to cover it up with a cough. “Um, Ms. Milner, could you send Dr. Cryer up to my office? I’d hate to keep her waiting, after all.”

“Good boy. I’ll send her right on up, but you two remember your manners, you hear me? The girl looks as nervous as a salmon at a teddy-bear picnic.”