They started loading groceries into her cart, and they made it all the way to the bakery aisle before they were accosted again.
“Why, Krista Park, if I never!” Pamela Busche exclaimed.
Krista turned, a fake smile plastered to her face. She and Pamela had never gotten along. Pamela, a fox shifter and distant cousin, had been a cheerleader when they were in school. She’d mocked Krista for her weight and for being such a studious little nerd. Damn straight Krista had hit the books hard. Even back then she’d known that an education was her way out.
Pamela had thought that her boyfriend’s football scholarship was her ticket out of the holler, but here she still was, pretty but a little worn around the edges. No wedding ring. Roots showing in her bleached hair, crows feet spraying out from her eyes, makeup laid on thick as spackle. Wearing a tight lyrca dress and heels, more suited for a night at the local watering hole than grocery shopping.
Krista and Pamela stood there for a long moment. Should they hug hello, which was the holler thing to do?
Pamela couldn’t decide either, which made it a little awkward. Finally, she leaned in and they did a quick, awkward half-hug, and stepped away from each other.
“What you been doin’ with yourself?” Pamela asked. “What brings you back to town? I thought you had some fancy job, and you was too good for us all now.”
Krista tamped down her temper.“I’m back for the family reunion. I work in the city, I’m a nurse practitioner. And this is… my friend Blake.” She should have said fated mate. That was petty of her. And she saw the snap of hurt in his eyes.
“Friend, huh? That’s all? So this big handsome hunk’s not spoken for?” Pamela actually walked over to him and ran her hands along his bicep. Blake jerked away from her as if her fingers were dipped in sewage, but she didn’t seem to notice, gazing up at him with eyes glowing. “He sure is a mighty fine– awwwk!” Krista had shifted faster than she’d ever shifted in her life and was flying at Pamela’s throat. Seconds later, the two of them were in fox form, rolling on the floor, shreds of clothing flying everywhere.
Blake leaped in and separated the two of them. He stood there holding the two of them on the ground by the scruffs of their necks. “Stop it!” he yelled.
Krista snarled and snapped and clawed trying to get at Pamela, who did the same until Harold, the store owner, hurried over and grabbed Pamela from him and hauled her outside.
Blake let go of Krista, and she shook herself and shifted back, her fur smoothing into her skin, her tail shrinking back into her spine.
He quickly took his shirt off and handed it to her. She pulled it over her head, and it was just long enough to cover her crotch and butt.
“Krista, I swear to God I have no interest in that… creature,” he said quickly.
She winced in embarrassment. “I know. I’m sorry. I don’t know what came over me.”
A psychotic killing haze and a sudden desire to eat Pamela’s liver, that’s what had come over her.
Harold, the store owner, hurried in through the front door. Pamela was stomping off down the street naked, which wasn’t that unusual a sight in Flowering Dogwood. He strolled over to them, smoothing his white hair down with his fingers. “Sorry ‘bout that kerfluffle,” he said cheerfully.
He didn’t look too put out. Just another day in the holler. “So, you’re back! Good to see you, good to see you. Hear you’re a nurse now. You fixin’ to open up a clinic in town?”
“Me?” she squeaked in surprise.
“We sure could use it. Like my great-nephew Roy, he went blind from bad ‘shine. Dawnie wasn’t able to find nothing to fix it, but maybe you could.”
She sucked in a deep breath. Wow. She had been experimenting with her herbs and minerals, but she couldn’t be sure if she had a solution.
“I could try,” she said. “I’ll let you know if I find anything that I thought would work. Setting up a clinic, though…” She felt a wave of panic flood through her, chilling her flesh.
She was done with Flowering Dogwood—but now she felt as if she were being pulled back in.
Harold looked around uneasily, as if afraid he’d be overhead. “Yeah, I get it, maybe not the safest thing for you to do. Dawnie might not…” He let the words trail off with a regretful frown. She might not like it, he was going to say. Which would mean that nobody would come to the clinic.
That stung, though. It made it sound as if she wouldn’t try to help because of Dawnie. She wasn’t sixteen any more, things were bad around here, and it felt like Dawnie and her family were behind most of it. Was there anything she could do?
Harold looked at her thoughtfully. “Goin’ to the reunion tomorrow?”
She nodded. Suddenly he threw his arms around her in a completely unexpected and out of character hug, and she hugged him back, startled. It felt more than a little awkward because she was half-naked, and she heard Blake growl with jealous rage. “Uh, hello.”
“Watch your back,” he whispered in her ear. “Word is that Dawnie—urgh!”
Blake had hauled him off her.
“Hands off my mate!” Blake snarled, his eyes glowing as if he was possessed.
Harold flashed him a startled look and scuttled away.
“Damn it, Blake! Really? He was…” she trailed off. The Rosemund family were pushing their cart her way to say hi, or to sniff out intel—she didn’t know which—but now she couldn’t tell Blake that Harold had been about to tell her something useful and he’d scared him off. That would have to wait for later, and the moment had probably passed. That sucked, because they were running into brick walls otherwise.
“Krista!” Mrs. Rosemund said, beaming at her. “What brings you back to town after all this time? And who is this handsome young gentleman?” Her gaze wandered over Blake’s muscular body a little too hungrily, making her woeful husband, a scrawny coyote shifter, whine and hang his head submissively. Good lord. She was easily twenty years older than Blake.
Blake threw his arm around Krista’s shoulder. “I’m her fated mate,” he said hastily as a growl rumbled up in Krista’s chest. Krista’s claws shot out and then retracted, and when she smiled, her teeth were pointy.
It was going to be a long day.
Chapter Thirteen
Dawnie Reed pulled up in front of the shabby, run-down cabin and stared out the windshield, struggling to keep her bear in her skin.
Her kids were up here at this cabin that they used as one of their bolt-holes. And they’d lied to her about it. Said they were going to be in the mines today. But there was her son Percy’s four-wheeler, hidden under a big pile of brush, and she could scent Eva-Jo and Percy and Gummi—not old scents, but fresh as daylight.
And she still wasn’t sold on Krista and her fated mate being up here for the family reunion. The timing was awfully convenient, and from what her spies were telling her, there was some weird kind of tension between them. At first, she’d questioned whether they were even really fated mates.
She’d had Bo watching them last night, and he’d seen them consummate their mating. She’d sent Pamela to test them, and when Pamela flirted with the big wolf, Krista had flipped her shit and acted exactly like a fated mate would.
So they were probably really mates, but that didn’t mean they were here with good intentions. It hurt to think that Krista might be here sniffing around to cause trouble after all Dawnie had done for her. Once upon a time, she’d planned on handing Krista the keys to her kingdom. Good thing she never told Eva-Jo that, because that ungrateful Krista had scurried out of town and abandoned her family and Dawnie, disappeared for years, broken Dawnie’s heart, and her mama’s, too.
Girl had no loyalty.
Loyalty—that was what made this holler a sanctuary. One that Krista might bring an end to. She still loved that girl, but if Krista had come here looking for trouble… well, the girl wasn’t kin. And she’d bitten the hand that fed her.
She threw open the door of her car and stomped towards th
e house, her boots crushing down the thick weeds.
The front door banged open, and Percy hurried out to meet her on the front stoop, quickly shutting the door behind him. “Momma, didn’t expect to see you here.”
“I didn’t expect to need to be here.” She glared at him. Both of her boys were a half bubble off bright, but Percy had a kind of low cunning to him.
And his daddy’s mean streak.
He tried for a kiss-ass smile, which meant that he was up to something, the little weasel. “We got all the minerals for you already. Left ‘em down at the house. Just came up here to relax. All them lion shifters, getting in’ everyone’s business—I didn’t want to have to kill none of ‘em, so we figured we’d just lay low a bit.”
“That why you weren’t answering your phone?”
“No signal up here,” he muttered.
“Bullshit. Eva-Jo! I smell you, girl, get out here!”
Eva-Jo stepped out from around the side of the house. With Krista back in town, Dawnie couldn’t help comparing the two of them. They were alike in some ways. Both full of fire, all that ambition, but Eva-Jo had loyalty, too. Krista thought she was too good for the holler. That was why Eva-Jo would be the one to take over for Dawnie someday—if they all survived whatever her stupid kids had done.
“You kids have anything to do with this missing boy? If you have, so help me, it’s your hide I’ll take it out of. You know your brothers don’t have the brains of a dead squirrel between the two of them—that’s why I left you in charge.”
Eva-Jo frowned and folded her skinny arms across her chest, her narrow, pretty face puckering in anger. “You mean did I let Percy hunt a kid after you told him to lay off it? And a rich kid at that? You think I’m some kind of idiot?”
“I hope to hell that kid hasn’t been hunted.” She let her bear show through, just in her eyes, and Eva-Jo flinched.
“He hasn’t!”
“Now, how could you know that unless you knew where he was?”
Eva-Jo stared down at the ground and muttered, “Damn it.”
She turned back to her firstborn son. “Percy, tell me what the hell you did to that child.”
“Geez, Momma, you think I’m some kind of idiot?” he whined. But his eyes slid to the side. They were up to something. Dawnie’s bear could smell it. She’d been right. Those two dipshit boys had done something and dragged her baby girl into the mess. And that blustering asshole Michael Coffman was going to set their valley on fire if she couldn’t fix things.
“Neither one of you is too big for me to give you a damn good thrashing,” she warned. “Your bones will take weeks to knit and you’ll be growin’ a new set of teeth.” It wasn’t an idle threat, either. She’d done it before to all of them more than once. In fact, some whispered that it was one of her beatings, with her mind hazed with her own ‘shine, that caused Gummi to go simple. That was when he was six. She couldn’t even remember why she’d beat on him, but after that, she stopped sampling her own wares.
But today, she was ready to put a hurt on someone. Dawnie shifted was one of the biggest bears around, and vicious with it. Not one of her three grown-up children would dare face off against her.
Eva-Jo wilted and seemed to shrink in on herself. “Momma,” she said pleadingly, “don’t lose your shit, ‘cause I got no idea how the hell to fix this.”
“Girl, you want to see me lose my shit, you just keep on stalling on me.”
Eva-Jo’s expression took on a resigned cast, and she hurried over to the door, but it was shut and locked now. “Gummi, you jackass,” she called, “let me in.”
No answer. Gummi was probably scared as hell right now, probably wetting himself. Gummi was big and strong and dumb. He had no side to him, though, not like Percy. Gummi was a big sweet idiot, like an overgrown puppy that didn’t know its own strength.
Dang her aching heart. “You’d better tell me what’s going on right now, Eva-Jo,” she warned.
“Percy decided it’d be a bright idea to snatch the kid,” Eva-Jo said primly.
“Fuck you! Tattle-tale bitch,” Percy snarled, lunging at his sister. Eva-Jo jumped to the side with a squeal of fright and rage, dark brown fur rippling all over her body. Dawnie didn’t even bother to shift, just jumped forward and punched Percy on the side of the head so hard that his eyes lost their focus for a minute.
Eva-Jo straightened up, looking at her brother resentfully. “He cooked up some scheme with Pamela to distract the kid’s bodyguards, and then Percy grabbed him and run off, covered his scent tracks and everything. I didn’t know nothing about it until the kid was already up here, and by then the whole town was swarmin’ with big angry cats and we didn’t know what to do.”
Dawnie switched her attention to Percy, who was huddled there, a pile of sullen misery.
“Why?” Dawnie grated the word, and the bones in her face rippled as her bear struggled to come out. She reached out and grabbed Percy by the throat, squeezing til his fool face turned red.
He clawed at her hands and she eased up a little bit. Then she threw him up against the cabin so hard he bounced. He staggered a few steps, his face red, tears of rage and humiliation glittering in his eyes.
“I didn’t like how that mangy cat put on airs!” he whined. “All high falutin, lookin’ down his nose at us. You saw how he was. Offering us chump change, like we was simple. Tryin’ to rip us off. And I thought if his kid disappeared, it would teach him a lesson and he’d see it was too dangerous out here and he’d just leave.”
“Without his cub?” she snapped, letting go of his neck.
He stared sullenly at the ground. “Well, I was thinkin’ of ransom. We get ransom from his dad, his dad doesn’t know it’s us that took him, and he’s so scairt that he takes his cub and never comes back here. We’d win all around. I had a hood on my head and everythin’, but then Gummi screwed it all up,” Percy said defensively. “I didn’t know he was up here. I brought the kid up here and Gummi pops out of the cabin and yells, “Hey, Percy! What you doin’ with that kid?”
He shook his head in disgust. “So then I was going to—” He stopped himself just in time.
“You were going to what?” Icicles dripped from her voice.
“Nothin’.” He kicked at the dirt like a chastened five-year-old. But he didn’t have to tell her. She knew her boys.
“You were going to hunt him once he’d heard your name, but Gummi wouldn’t let you.”
He glared at her angrily. “Gummi won’t even let us near the kid now! You got to make him give the kid to us!”
She stood there, working her jaw, wheels turning in her head. How could she use this to her advantage? How could she turn things around so that Michael Coffman went scurrying back to his fancy city house with his tail between his legs?
Because the truth was, those mines were never going to open again. Not while the Reeds ran Flowering Dogwood. Gave folks too much independence, made them too uppity, and besides, she had more use for the special minerals up there than they did. She needed them for her moonshine; it was the minerals that kept people craving more. Not just wanting it, but needing it.
She’d only been talking to Michael Coffman to feel him out, see what his plans were, and stall him. And of course, any money he wanted to give her, she was happy to take. There was nothing in writing. And he’d paid her ten grand just to meet with him.
But the money he’d offered her so she’d give her blessing to open the mines again was an insult, Percy was right about that. It wouldn’t have been near enough to make up for the loss in her ‘shine business.
She rubbed her face and groaned. “Jesus, this must be why Krista bought that fella here. I knew he smelled like some kind of law.”
“Well we know what to do about that, don’t we?” Percy gave a slow, happy grin, and Dawnie felt a sudden chill. “Same thing we did about that DEA agent. Same thing we did with those big cats who were trying to step in on our business.”
He was talking about th
e hunt. Dawnie wished she’d never told Percy about that particular tradition. She’d never been squeamish about settling scores or dealing with people who got in her way, but she’d never taken pleasure in it. It was just business. Best to get it over with as fast as possible.
Percy, though—he was addicted to the blood, the fear, the cruelty. At first, it had been a way to divert some of his vicious energy because he was beatin’ on too many people in the holler. Even with how scairt everyone was of the Reeds, it was getting to the point where they wouldn’t have put up with it much longer.
So, she’d let him start up the hunts again. Only with their enemies, of course. But now, it was becoming a problem—it was like he needed the hunt the way the people in town needed her moonshine.
“Don’t be a damn fool, boy,” she growled. “We agreed we were gonna take a break from that for a while. And especially not with all these big cats breathin’ down our necks.”
“Sure, Momma,” Percy muttered dutifully. “I was only fooling.”
She didn’t believe it, though.
She gave a heavy sigh. “We can’t give him back to his dad now. I swore I’d never harm a cub, but he’s useless to us as a bargaining chip.” She started pacing, muttering to herself. “It’s not hurtin’ him if he don’t feel a thing, though, is it? I’m gonna have to use some of my special herbs on him, the kind that don’t leave a trace. He’ll go to sleep, and not wake up” She glanced at Percy and Eva-Jo, eyes burning with determination. “We can mark up his body like a wolf did it, cast the blame somewhere else, and then leave him out where the lions will find him. Takes the heat off us. And his dad won’t want nothing to do with Flowering Dogwood, never again.”
“Jesus wept.” Eva-Jo looked as if she was about to be sick.“We gotta do that?”
“Thanks to your damn fool brother, there’s no other way to go.” Dawnie shook her head in disgust. Eva-Jo swallowed hard but nodded.
“Kin come first. Say it,” Dawnie ground out.
“Kin come first,” Eva-Jo repeated dutifully, and her face settled into a look of dull resignation.
Blackmailed By The Wolf (Shifters, Inc. Book 6) Page 10