Abruptly, there were growling two-leggers all around us. Gunner, Tank, even Allen sounded like they were inches away from donning fur.
Which meant I was currently the sole rational party present. So, leaving Kira where she was, I stepped between the werewolves and Stephanie, trying to tell the social worker with my eyes that now was, perhaps, not the best time for making demands. “We can hash this out tomorrow,” I offered. Because the idea of Stephanie spilling our secrets in human court was daunting...but it was better than watching her get ripped apart by my pack mates right now.
“You’ll be there?” Stephanie’s eyebrows rose while her mouth pursed pensively. I could see her point—fleeing might be wiser than continuing to fight for custody.
Yet, despite everything, I found myself nodding. “Yes. Please. Let Allen walk you to your car now and I promise that Kira and I will be there tomorrow in court.” Immediately, this new oath tugged at my belly lighter but no less virulent than the one that used to tie me to the alpha behind my back.
And after one long moment, Stephanie bent her neck in regal approval. Human or not, she knew when to accept an oath as fact.
The social worker wasn’t quite done with us, however. “You, Allen—you’re a wolf also?” she asked over my shoulder. Then, without waiting for an answer, she shook her head and glared at the least offensive werewolf present. “It doesn’t matter. I need a guide, so you will stay human until I’m safely in my car.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Allen promised, dropping the backpack but otherwise acting for all the world like a submissive werewolf obeying his alpha as he brushed past the rest of us. Then he was leading Kira’s social worker toward the encircling forest...although not quickly enough to prevent her from tossing back one last jab at those she left behind.
“I will see you all in court,” the decider of Kira’s future promised. Then Stephanie was gone, a problem for another day.
“SO,” GUNNER STARTED. And I didn’t realize we were alone and naked until I heard Kira’s receding giggle as she and Tank rooted through Allen’s backpack in search of additional clothing.
“So,” I answered, breathing in the alpha’s enticing scent. There was more granite in his aroma than I was used to, his voice rough around the edges from the difficulties of the preceding hours.
But he was here and I was here. We’d both survived the battle...and there was one thing left undone.
“You need to pull your pack together,” I told him. “Go back to clan central and talk to your people so they don’t do anything stupid.”
“Once you and Kira are settled,” Gunner started. But I reached up and placed one finger atop his lips.
The skin there was soft but prickly around the edges where the barest beginning of a beard was starting to grow in. I wanted to lean in closer and see if his taste was as good as his aroma. But instead, I merely shook my head.
“Gunner, you’re the pack leader. Kira and I can’t be your top priority. A lot of your clan members don’t have the first idea what to do around kitsunes. They’ll leave with Ransom if we return with you right now.”
“They’ll stay if I tell them to,” Gunner growled. But he didn’t look into my eyes as he said it. He knew I was right.
“They might, but they’ll resent it,” I countered. “Wasn’t that the whole point of letting Ransom take so many shifters with him just now?”
My voice wanted to break, but I instead took a deep breath and treated this like any other adulting situation. If I could force Kira to brush her teeth when she was sleep deprived, then I could make an alpha werewolf do his job.
“Kira and I will make ourselves scarce for a while,” I started.
“And then....”
“And then we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it,” I finished before Gunner started making promises he couldn’t keep.
Because this was goodbye. Somewhere deep in my heart I knew it. So, without worrying about repercussions, I ensured there would be nothing for me to regret later. Grabbing onto Gunner’s shoulders to steady myself, I eased onto tiptoes then I kissed those enticing lips.
Chapter 46
This kiss wasn’t a distraction to keep Gunner from noticing my magic. Nor was it a claiming on his part. Instead, it was a sharing, an acknowledgement that we were more than mere pack mates.
And, in response, an explosion of stars flared behind my eyelids. The air filled with so much electricity I almost expected a lightning strike. This, right here, was as natural as breathing. I couldn’t imagine why I’d fled from it for so long.
Then Gunner was pushing away from me, calling Tank toward him. “Take them back to the city. Protect them. Don’t let either Mai or Kira out of your sight.”
“Yes, pack leader.” Tank’s tone was so respectful he might as well have prostrated himself atop the bloody grass between us. And any thought I’d had of arguing that Gunner needed his faithful second as backup faded in the face of an alpha laying down the law.
Then we three were tramping back through the trees the way Kira and I had come two days earlier. It turned out that an easily traversable path paralleled our earlier bushwhacking, which—combined with Kira’s newfound vigor—meant the journey went by far too fast.
Fast but not easy. Because every step yanked at my belly. Every step increased the spear of agony throbbing beneath my forehead. I shouldn’t be leaving my pack mates. I shouldn’t be leaving Gunner. So this is what it felt like to tie myself to werewolves...then to let those same wolves go.
Sure enough, the pain worsened as we drove back toward the city, miles separating me from the place where the majority of my pack now resided. Gunner’s mansion, when we reached it, was musty even though we’d been gone for less than seventy-two hours. And while the sun had long since risen and begun fading into afternoon, the residence struck me as painfully dark.
“The death count was minimal,” Tank offered half an hour later as he came up behind me in the third-floor hallway. I was standing outside the closed door of the bathroom, listening to Kira brush her teeth and twitching every time the teenager went quiet for more than a second at a time. Because as much as it had hurt to leave Gunner, letting Kira out of my sight stung even worse....
“Minimal doesn’t mean zero,” I answered without bothering to turn and greet my minder. I knew Tank was trying to cheer me. But his words instead triggered a replay of Liam’s object lesson, the one I’d been incapable of halting in time.
Snapping fingers, snapping neck. Me allowing wolves to tear into each other to prevent another from being unceremoniously murdered....
I shivered, pushing the memory into some dark corner of my mind to be chewed over later. Only then did I finish my thought. “And what percentage of the pack left with Ransom? What will happen to the clan now that it’s been split in half?”
Tank didn’t answer verbally. Instead, his fingers touched the nape of my neck momentarily, the fleeting contact a werewolf show of support.
Then Kira was pushing out of the bathroom in pajama bottoms and that same Big, bad wolf t-shirt she’d been wearing for hours. “Nap with me,” she demanded, seemingly untouched both by the recent past and by the fact that her custody hearing began in just a few short hours.
And how could I deny her? Nodding once at Tank, I followed my sibling down the hall to her not-so-tastefully decorated bedroom. Fell into the princess-canopied bed and pulled the curtains around us before morphing into a fox.
Kira was already vulpine. Red fox tail covered her nose as she fell asleep instantly. And I curled around her slightly smaller body, completing our fluffy lump.
I didn’t sleep though. Just lay there staring at the stick-on stars on the ceiling and wondering whether Kira and I were better off now than we had been three months earlier. To find a pack then lose it—was that really better than never having belonged at all?
Only Kira and I weren’t really alone, even here in the echoing mansion. Because, two hours later, Tank tapped on the closed door betwee
n us. “Wake up, ladies,” his deep voice urged us.
It was time to go to court.
“AND YOU ARE HAPPY WITH this document, Ms. Fairchild?” The judge speared me with a gaze so piercing that it knocked my attention—for one split second—off the social workers whispering adamantly to each other two rows back.
“Yes, Your Honor,” I agreed. “I think ‘godbrother’ is a perfect representation of Gunner Atwood’s relationship to my sister, now and in the future. I’m very grateful for his offer and willingly accept.”
My voice only quavered slightly as I made the statement Tank had drilled into me during the short drive over, and not from a fox’s urge for self-determination either. Instead, my separation from said godbrother was still gnawing at my stomach, making it hard to keep a pleasant smile pasted on my lips.
Meanwhile, I caught a single word drifting forward from Simon that further chilled my body. “Werewolf,” my former social worker hissed adamantly, the mumble before and after that scathing indictment impossible to decipher. Stephanie’s response, unfortunately, was drowned beneath the judge’s subsequent statement, which boomed out to fill the entire chamber with his voice.
“If I could have your attention,” he ordered, sounding for all the world like an alpha-leaning werewolf. There was no zing to the command, though. No electricity that ran up my spine like spiders. Still, I resolutely closed my ears to the discussion behind me and apologetically bowed my head.
“Well,” the decider of Kira’s fate continued more cordially after flipping through the pages before him the way he’d already done three times previously. “Gunner Atwood’s addition to this guardianship hearing does relieve some of my concerns about Kira’s future. But...”
He paused theatrically, and it was Kira who pinched me when I raised my head and narrowed my eyes into a glare. Right. Not getting into a fight with a human official...although if the judge ruled against us, all bets were off.
“...I understand the State has some reservations,” the judge finished right about the time I’d decided strangling him wouldn’t be so inappropriate. “Mrs. Baumgartner, would you like to speak next?”
“...of the child.” Simon apparently didn’t know how to whisper, because the tail end of his final admonition was clear to all of us. The social worker’s harrumph after the judge silenced him with raised eyebrows was similarly audible, but by that point Stephanie had come forward to the witness stand.
“Yes, Your Honor,” Stephanie said, glancing at Kira out of the corner of one eye before squaring her shoulders and facing the judge directly. I could smell the human’s dilemma, could tell that she was still wavering from the slump of her spine and the cock of her head.
In my experience, time tended to make the shock of the supernatural less biting. Unfortunately, the robed male on the bench didn’t give Stephanie so much as a minute to make up her mind about the matter at hand.
“Well, put us all out of our misery,” the judge demanded. “What is your official standpoint on the adoption of Kira Fairchild?”
Chapter 47
“I think that Kira Fairchild is a strong-willed young woman with great potential, and I’m honored to have spent even a few months as part of her life,” Stephanie said after one additional, harrowing pause. Kira grabbed my right hand while Tank grabbed my left hand, and I wasn’t sure whether they were offering support or holding me down.
Then the social worker’s scent cleared and she glanced back again, this time with a smile on her lips as she met my eyes and then my sister’s. “But my advice is to remove her from my caseload,” Stephanie finished. “Kira’s best with her own family, and she deserves to have those relationships she’s created legally affirmed.”
Then it was all over except the pictures. Well, that plus the paperwork, which Tank told me would be ready the following week.
In the meantime, my pack of three filtered out to the steps of the courthouse, jostling and smiling as the sun beat down upon our faces. “I knew we’d get custody as soon as Allen gave me the t-shirt,” Kira proclaimed blithely, twisting her body as if modeling the pink sequined monstrosity that covered her torso and back. “Favorite pup,” the rear stated. And, much smaller, where a front pocket would have been located, words that I was glad the judge hadn’t noted from the bench....
“Well, Boss Bitch, where do you want your glamor shoot?” Tank asked, pulling out his ubiquitous cell phone and flipping it into photo mode.
“Over here!” my neck-risking sister answered, leaping onto a balustrade at the edge of the grand porch we’d gathered on, not appearing to notice that she now hovered above a thirty-foot drop to hard stone ground. And while a human guardian would have grabbed Kira’s foot to steady her, I was just glad to see the pack-separated sadness wiped away by her short nap.
Plus, Stephanie was walking out the front door now. So I merely mouthed “Be good” at my sister before hurrying over to thank the social worker before she could rush out of our lives.
“I really appreciate...” I started.
But the middle-aged woman interrupted me. “It’s my job to make sure foster kids end up in the best placement for the sake of the child. Kira may be surrounded by wolves and blood and scary things I’m probably not aware of. But anyone can see she thrives as part of a pack.”
Then the same human who had recently taken in the horror of a pack battle slipped out of her suit jacket, revealing unexpected words on the underlying blouse. “Honorary Werewolf,” the shirt stated. And for a moment my throat clenched up as I realized Allen had been prepared for all eventualities...except the one where he wasn’t actually present with us now.
Winning the adoption battle without the rest of our pack beside us hurt so much I had to close my eyes for one split second. And by the time I’d widened my lips back into a smile, Kira’s gaze had settled upon the human who made this entire photo shoot possible.
“Mrs. B!” my sister exclaimed. She’d been spinning in a circle atop the railing, hands out to either side like a tightrope walker. But now, she motioned Stephanie over. “Come be in the picture!” And, like a magnet, the teenager’s enthusiasm drew both me and the social worker back to the marble ground beneath our charge’s feet.
“Say cheese,” Tank told us from five feet distant. And I really would have...if the front door of the courthouse hadn’t opened at that exact same moment, sending the furry scent of stalking werewolf wafting over us all like summer heat.
I DIDN’T TURN MY STAR ball into a sword, though. Nor did I yank Kira off the ledge and push her toward Tank to hustle out of harm’s way. Instead, my fake smile morphed into a cheek-splitting grin as just the werewolves I’d been thinking of stepped out into the light.
Gunner and Allen wore lettered t-shirts just like Kira’s, but I didn’t bother trying to read the words this time around. Instead, I only had eyes for the pack leader as he snagged a random bystander with a panty-melting smile and roped her into taking over Tank’s spot as photographer of the hour.
Then the werewolf I’d missed the most was there beside me, his arm settling over my shoulder and pulling me in even closer as we all smiled for the camera’s sake. “Sorry I was late,” he murmured, his breath tickling my earlobe.
“I’m just glad you’re here now.” Then, remembering the reason I’d left him in the first place. “But your pack needs you....”
“Yes you do. And here I am.”
I punched his arm before blinking at my own physical show of affection. What...was I turning into a werewolf now?
And, as if he’d been privy to my internal monologue, Gunner’s smile went from blinding to supernova, so warm it beat against my skin.
“Everyone who hasn’t left with my brother will still be there tomorrow,” he said, answering my real concern, albeit belatedly. “But Kira’s adoption only happens once. I figured it was about time I learned to act like a fox and wiggle around the rules when necessary. Everyone who loves your sister should be here for her special day.”
And everyone was...almost.
Because the spot where Crow and Elle should have stood remained empty. Meanwhile, the stress from leaving the Atwood pack unattended at such a critical moment was visible in Gunner’s creased brow.
But all I saw when I looked at that photo days and weeks and years later was Kira’s joyous kitsune nature as she leapt off the railing without warning and was caught quite easily by five pairs of waiting hands. All I heard in my memory was Gunner’s voice whispering into my ear.
“A pack is only as weak as its strongest member.”
I could only hope he was right.
THANK YOU SO MUCH FOR joining Mai on her adventures! If you want to find out how this sword-wielding shifter handles moving in with Gunner's pack, you won't want to miss the final installment in the Moon Marked trilogy: Fox Blood.
Or why not take a quick side trip and learn more about kitsunes, how Gunner came to terms with Mai's identity, and what Kira thought of moving in with werewolves in the Moon Marked bonus pack, free to newsletter subscribers? To sweeten the pot, I’ll throw in two additional werewolf novels so you don’t have to come up for air for days.
Thanks for reading! You are why I write.
Fox Blood
“I think this is called the walk of shame,” Kira suggested, her voice cutting through the foggy evening air like a sword through warm butter. I swiveled in unconscious reaction, peering through almost-raindrops hovering around us on every side.
Between the fog and the night, I couldn’t see anything, unfortunately. Which didn’t mean we were alone...just that visibility was painfully low. Unfriendly werewolves could be hovering just out of scent range, waiting for the perfect moment to pounce upon us. Good thing I wasn’t as oblivious as my pampered younger sister to the danger we were currently walking through.
Shadow Wolf Page 16