Buffi BeCraft-Woodall: Weremones

August 13, 2007

Weremones by Buffi BeCraft-Woodall
From: New Concepts Publishing

The intense stare never wavered, making her search for something else to say.
Excuses, excuses, excuses, her conscience taunted. Chicken.
“I mean, I only started dating again. And look how that turned out.”

“I told you ….” Adam was eerily patient. He reached to pull her into his embrace. She stopped him, pushing against his chest. She couldn’t help but feel how nice it was under her hands.
Slut! Her conscience screamed. Every man in the house was not fair game.
Yes they are! Her hormones rallied.
“No. Keep your hands to yourself. You didn’t want me to date anyone.”
“No, not anyone. Just me.”

She huffed a breath and told her hormones to shut up. She’d been stabbed. She didn’t need to roll around on the mattress.
“You are so aggravating. Why me? I don’t want to be involved. Why not find a nice wolven girl to bother?”
Adam tried to process what Diana was saying. He wanted her trust so that she’d agree to do the mate’s bond. She probably wouldn’t appreciate him doing Richard Ridley bodily harm, or rapping some sense into that kid of hers either. It was getting idiotic to claim that neither she nor Mack were pack. Or Karen. The boys worshipped the ground the Ridley females walked on. And whether she admitted it or not, Diana doted on the boys. She loved them. Adam saw and felt that plainly though the pack bond.
Adam rubbed at his breastbone with the heel of one hand. He sucked in a breath of the thinning air in the room.
Trust. It all came down to trust. There was so little in his pack, he was falling victim to the effects. He hardened his resolve. Adam J. Weis was no victim.

“Adam?” Diana’s soft question brought him back to the present. Adam looked down and studied her pretty face for a moment. She had so much love to give. Selfish him, he wanted it all. He gave her a half smile before wiping his
damp hands on his jeans.
“I haven’t given you a chance. I’ve bullied and pushed at you to get what I want. Just as you haven’t given me one.” He waved at her to let him finish, his nervous steps taking him back and forth across the room. He was going out on a limb, like he’d never done before.

“Hear me out. All right?” He took a breath.
“I came here last year, looking for my fiancée, Amanda. Garrick and his pack killed her.” He held up a hand before she could interrupt. “Before you get upset, let me tell you that most wolven matings are arranged. It was all worked out long before Amanda and I met.” He looked at her for reassurance that she hadn’t completely closed from him.
Diana nodded again.

“Anyway, Garrick was a sick bastard. He did … bad things to the pack, to the boys.”
“I know. Don’t explain, please.” Her voice held a combination of anger and sorrow.
“Someone here tipped off my pack in Tarrant. So I came to find her.”
He stopped to look out the window, hands shoved in his back pockets.
“I did, eventually. Her skin was nailed to a wall, in his basement, the scent of violence and sex still on her fur.”

Diana shuddered. So much of their short relationship involved violence.
There was a mix of anger, grief, and guilt that churned in him.
“They raped and killed your fiancée. What did you do?”
“I didn’t love her. It was all arranged.” He recovered old ground. Guilt swamped him, then anger. “I killed them. I was supposed to report back. But I killed them because they touched what was mine. And because I found out what was happening to the boys.” To Brandon, but he didn’t want to go into that story. He’d pretended to be a stray
so that Garrick would allow him close enough to snoop. He’d snooped all right and found both Amanda’s pelt and the violated child in the same basement. After that Garrick and the pack wardens were as good as dead. They just didn’t know it. The sick bastards were supposed to be protecting the pack from harm, not causing it.

“Reporting back to Paul, my Pater Canis, was a technicality. I knew Paul would give the okay to clear them out. “
He looked back at the bed to gauge her reaction.
“Only he didn’t. He called it a duel for ascendancy and wouldn’t let me come back. Someone else was moved to the beta spot.”
His half-brother Dom, the lawyer, got the beta spot. Adam’s laugh was dry, humorless. Dom, who Adam had challenged and beat for the position, was back at Paul’s side.
“A moving truck arrived a week later with my stuff.”

“I knew from the first that you were an alpha.”
“No.” Adam shook his head. “I was Paul’s beta warden. I protected the pack.”
Diana smiled at the lost tone. He didn’t realize how hurt he was that his old pack leader wouldn’t let him go home.
“I think you are confusing rank with personal power. I’d bet that you were already an alpha at heart when you showed up here. You were more than ready to be on your own and your old leader knew it.”

Adam considered her insight. A heaviness in his chest lightened. Maybe Paul had tossed him from the nest, so to speak, in the only way he knew how. Paul Sheppard was a sink or swim kind of guy.
“I thought that after I cleared out Garrick and his ilk, I’d take the boys back with me.”
“Instead, he worked out a way so that you were obligated to stay here. I think your title fits you, Father Wolf. I’d bet he thought so, too.”
“He’s my father.”
Her surprise prompted him to explain.
“He didn’t raise me. My mother married a man, a psychic, named William Weis. Will’s my dad. Paul Sheppard is …” Adam made a loopy gesture with one hand. He crossed back to the bed and sat on the edge. If he didn’t finish this he’d go insane.
“As proposals go, I’m sure this one sucks.” He took her hand.
“Listen before you say no again. You give us something that is missing. Hope, I think. The boys need someone who cares enough to make birthday cakes and cookies. To fuss at them when their clothes are wrinkled.”
He was right, the proposal sucked.
“You want me to be den mother to your pack? To ride herd on a bunch of teenage werewolves? That’s why you’re proposing?”
She pulled her hand free. Not that she’d have said yes anyway. But, well…it sucked big time. A girl wanted to know that her man wanted, needed her for himself.
“Hello? I don’t get furry. And I’m not likely to either any time soon. You might try negotiating for another of your kind.”
“You’re angry,” he said.
Damn skippy she was angry. Diana narrowed her eyes. She kept her jaw locked before she told him what to do with his proposal. She did not want to marry him. Den mother indeed.

Good lord! Have you ever felt like you just ran a triathlon after reading a book? Just look at this excerpt. It’s supposed to be the tender moment in the book where our hero tells the girl of his dreams his desire to be her mate. Unfortunately it gets distracted half way through and starts providing, for no reason I can determine, exposition on stuff we read earlier about Adam. I still can not figure out how any of it helped him in expressing his current intentions with Diana.

I really wanted to like this book. The hero Adam seemed very much the alpha with a heart of gold. He has proven he is all badass after having killed the bad guys that were abusing the cubs and had violently killed his ex-fiance but the big softy then went about raising this mangy group of disturbed teenage werewolves on his own. That was sort of a touching and unique and interesting story line and it immediately worked to grab my attention and buy all three books.

The author also went about world building with a vengeance creating the heroine Diana being this quirky psychic chick with a quirky psychic teenage daughter and Mack the quirky ex-military sidekick. Fun stuff, although I started to cringe with all the other were-whatever-characters. Why do people do that? Just a few were-animals per world keeps it magic and special… Too much and it is not special anymore.

The problem was Buffi did not know where to stop or how to edit. So we have here, from what I could tell, about two and a half major plot lines stuffed into one book.

There is Adam raising the cubs and meeting Diana and there is the coyote delinquents trying to confront and run off the young werewolf pack. That had potential to be different, not many stories about coming of age werewolf teenagers growing up in a pack. There was the old psycho greasy werewolf hunter putting our heroine and her daughter in danger. That might have been OK for a run of the mill short story but at least the characters are interesting. Then there was Mack, Adam’s human sidekick, who secretly wants to be a werewolf and the two stray biker wolves that show up out of nowhere wanting to join the pack and all the pack politics that Adam our hero has to deal with without blowing a gasket.

“I think it’s beginning to work.”
Karen’s worried gaze met his.
“She feels warmer.”
Karen’s hands fluttered over her mother’s face. She checked the chest wound before tearing off her blouse for a compress. This would work, she told herself. She’d seen it done before wolven injuries. She’d heard of one human, near dead, stabilized with wolven blood. It would work.

“Now what?”
Bradley wadded the stray’s coat up into a pillow and situated Ms. Ridley so that she wouldn’t choke any more than necessary when she started coughing out the blood in her lung.

Mack had had a hell of a time with the coughing, but the man’s lungs had only received minimal damage, Brandon remembered. Garrick’s claws had ripped open Mack’s abdomen, then he had nearly chewed his arm off at the shoulder. The man’s total recovery was due to Adam sharing his blood as soon as he saw the man lived. Then Adam continued treatment over the next couple of days because he couldn’t afford to give the psychic too much of his blood in case any of Garrick’s followers had escaped to regroup.

“I’ve got to deal with … him.” With his muzzle, Brandon indicated the dead man outside the car. “Won’t take long. Then we go.”

There is also several big confrontations, two happen at the same time, confusing actions and diffusing any chance of suspense building clearly towards any sort of goal. Was there really a justifiable need for Diana to have to be dramatically attacked and healed twice in one book? Was there a need to rehash the old psycho werewolf hunter plot on top of the big territorial challenge? You could see how the writer was running into problems when we kept switching between two separate confrontations going back and forth head hopping so badly it caused me to lose track of who was doing what to whom and where.

Oh and then I read the next book… WTF? I swear so much goes on between this book and that one (Diana’s daughter has already gone through a bad marriage.) that you will swear you missed a book. I spent most of it scratching my head wondering how much these people had changed that I did not understand and trying to catch all the explanations of what I missed.

This book and it’s sequels have some great potential, fun characters and lots of thought went into them in fact I keep thinking a great editor would make these books shine. I only wish the story was more simplified down to maybe two plots with an effort to focus on the struggle with the coyotes and this crazy pack of teenagers, not to mention their father Adam along with Mack and Diana.

Grade D for distracting and disappointing because there is so much here I really want to like.