by Holley Trent
“Well, first things first. Not that you asked, but there are no major injuries to report from the bar fight.”
“Oh. That’s good.” She grimaced. She’d been beating herself up over her bar performance earlier, and just that quickly, she’d forgotten all about it. She couldn’t be sure if it was a good thing.
“Matty didn’t have to discharge his shotgun?” she asked.
“Nope. The boys mostly simmered down right after I showed up. Lance had to drag a couple of drunk holdouts outside, though.”
Willa wrung her hands. “Some Coyotes just can’t hold their liquor, I guess.” And Willa could guess who. Try as she might to get them to dry out, she couldn’t help people who didn’t want to be helped.
Blue could help them, though. Dominants could force their wills on others, which in human context wasn’t a desirable thing. In shapeshifter packs, the ability was a necessary evil. Not every shifter was in complete control of his or her faculties, and packs had evolved fail-safes for that problem—people like Blue, Lance, and Kenny—but they were outsiders from Nevada. They didn’t understand the Maria culture, so of course, the Coyotes didn’t trust them. They were all angry with Willa for inviting them in the first place. She’d been trying to make it up to them and to get them to trust her again.
Trust was hard to earn back once it’d been lost.
“That sure was a lot of Coyotes in one room,” Blue said. “Too many to be coincidence.”
She nodded and made a noncommittal mmm sound. She didn’t see the need to self-incriminate.
“It didn’t happen to be a planned outing, did it?” He drummed his fingertips atop the table. Long and blunt-tipped. Forceful, not graceful.
Being a musician, she’d made a study of hands over the centuries, and could tell a lot about people by their hands. Their mouths may have lied, but their hands never did.
Blue’s knuckles were bruised, nails ragged, cuticles rough. He may have been sitting at her table looking like a stockbroker in his crisp shirt and fitted pants, but he had a brawler’s hands.
An alpha’s hands.
He was a man who worked. She should have been able to respect that, but he was Blue. Too intense. Too untamable, despite that white collar.
“Well, was it?” he asked by way of nudging.
Shaking herself free of her reverie, she tended to the whistling teakettle. She turned off the burner and poured water into her mug.
Blue growled softly. The floorboards groaned beneath his chair as he set down the legs. “We talked about this, Willa. When that many Coyotes gather, you need to have a dominant in the group or you’re going to have problems.”
She dunked the tea ball a few times and chose her words carefully. Knowing he was right, there was very little she could say in her own defense. She opted for the truth. Or at least, part of it. “They don’t trust you.”
“And do you think they’re ever going to learn to if you keep undermining my authority?”
“I’m the pack patron. With patrons, our magical binds force us to care about our groups. I’m magically bound to the Coyotes. Your authority is granted at my pleasure and can be revoked at any time.”
“Actually, no, it can’t be.” He pushed back from the table and stood. She didn’t have to turn. He loomed in her periphery like an eclipsing moon. Fortunately, he kept his distance. “Maybe we don’t know each other all that well, but I don’t think you’re the kind of lady who’d back out of a signed contract. We agreed that if I came here, you wouldn’t waste my time. You’d let me do what I needed to do to get the pack in order so the locals never find out that creatures like us exist.”
“Yes. I remember.” She also seemed to remember that the start of his tenure coincided with his aborted wedding, but that was none of her business. Giving her hot tea a cautious sip, she turned to him, keeping her gaze locked on the square centimeter of gray in his neat beard. She struggled to swallow. Again, she pored over words in her mind and tried to mold her thoughts into a sensible order before speaking. She’d always been a failure at arguing. Her mind was sound, but her thoughts always got garbled somewhere between her brain and mouth.
She sounded stupid at times, but she wasn’t.
“What . . . I’ve never been able to understand is why you’d invite this kind of frustration when you were already so busy with your work in Vegas and with your father’s pack in Sparks.” She took another sip and then, slowly, set the mug onto the counter so she could twist her pajama buttons. Little movements excused her from having to make eye contact with the alpha. Making her thoughts cohesive was harder when he bore down on her with that heated, executive gaze that would have been just as effective in a corporate boardroom as in a bar. He was a man used to getting his way, and the Coyotes were one of the few things she wouldn’t back down on.
“You’re not here out of the goodness of your heart,” she said. “Let’s not pretend otherwise.”
“I could be any place but here right now. You know how many business deals I’ve had to turn down in the past six months? How much money I’ve left on the table because I’m here cleaning up your mess?” He stalked closer, edging the counter at the adjacent side. His usual smirk was nowhere to be found, and he’d narrowed his dark brown eyes to slits. Anger poured off him like condensation from a cold beer glass, and if she—with her utter lack of magic—could sense that, she could imagine how cowed the Coyotes must have felt in his presence.
Small. They must feel so very small.
Turning to him, she lifted her chin defiantly and met his gaze.
Five hundred years old and she still couldn’t make eye contact with a man who was supposed to be a lesser being without her belly feeling like it was being wrung inside out. The Inquisitors had ruined her already-deficient ability to look at most people’s faces.
She took a deep breath through her nose and balled her hands into fists. She wasn’t going to let him plow over her. She didn’t need any more self-failures to stay up late dissecting and regretting. “I did . . . the best I could with what I had,” she said in a volume barely louder than a whisper.
“You watched as one useless alpha after another took the reins.” He took a step closer.
She reclaimed her personal space and took one back.
“For more than a hundred years, you let them drive this ship into the ground, and I think if it weren’t for the fact that so many of your Coyotes were running around town in their animal forms scaring the hell out of the humans, you still wouldn’t have done shit.”
“You don’t know that. And”—she snapped off a button and balled it in her fist—“st-st-stop swearing at me.”
She was going to have to sew that button back on. More to keep her busy. Work that required precision. She could shut her thoughts off for a little while as she fixed it.
Another quiet growl from Blue snapped her back to the here and now. “I think I do,” he said, taking one more step.
She edged backward and her heels hit King’s broad side. He nosed the backs of her knees in a “get back in that fight” sort of way, but Willa was getting damned tired of fighting. She didn’t even know why she was pushing back so hard against Blue in the first place, only that someone had to advocate for the Coyotes. No one knew them better than she did.
“Why can’t you just step back?” he asked her. “Why can’t you let me do what needs to be done? I think you’ll rest easier at night if you—”
“You have no idea how I rest,” she snapped, shaking her head frantically, “so don’t even finish that sentence. You don’t know anything about me.”
“So, tell me.” He raised his shoulders jerkily. “You accuse me of not knowing anything like that’s my fault, but it’s not me who’s being so tightlipped about everything.”
One more step. She could feel the heat of his breath on her cheeks. Tears of frustration stung at the corners of her eyes. The last time a man had managed to invade her space in such a forthright way, he’d been checking to see
if she’d swallowed her gag or suffocated.
She wasn’t ready. She knew how Blue was, and she shouldn’t have let him into her house, or into Maria.
“You’re too close!” she shouted and immediately covered her face in shame at the outburst. She was a grown woman. Grown women didn’t shriek, and most didn’t go paralyzed just from the proximity of people who overwhelmed them.
The tickle of breath on her face withdrew, as did Blue’s energy.
She peeked through her fingers. He was halfway across the room. Hands in pockets. Brow creased.
More fodder for him. One more reason to deem me unfit.
“Willa.” His voice was quiet, the tone oddly submissive for a change.
The least she could do was listen.
She let her hands fall slowly from her face and grabbed at more buttons, twisting, straining the already weakened threads.
Waiting.
“To make this mess work, I need to understand,” he said. “No blackmail. Just sharing. I’m willing to do the same. Understand?”
She did, so after a few seconds of ensuring no trap would spring, she nodded.
“Yes.”
“Good.” He pressed his hands flat onto the cluttered tabletop and stared at the backs.
Her gaze fell to them, too, and the very many scars on them.
She had scars, too, but she kept them hidden. The physical ones, anyway.
The emotional ones couldn’t be disappeared so easily.
“Tell me how you ended up with a pack of Coyotes, and maybe from there, we can figure out what to do with them.”
Chapter Three
Blue didn’t think Willa was going to speak up. She never did when he needed her to. But then she made a jerky gesture with a shaking hand toward a chair and turned her back to him.
Initially, her refusal to look him in the eye grated at him. Eye contact avoidance was something untrustworthy Coyotes did, and his job was to put them in their place. He’d had to keep reminding himself that she wasn’t a Coyote.
He also had to keep reminding himself that there were a number of reasons a woman wouldn’t look him in the eyes, many of which had nothing to do with him. Coyotes weren’t well known for empathy, but Blue tried to be better. He failed a lot, but he’d promised his mother before she’d gotten expelled from his father’s pack that he’d try.
“I thought about leaving them,” she said softly.
“Yeah?” He turned a chair around and sat backward, draping his forearms across the back. “Go on.”
She didn’t immediately speak. She paced in front of the stove, mug of tea between her hands, body practically swimming in her blousy pajamas. Her body was covered from jaw to ankles, hands excluded, and her house was warmer than it needed to be, even for a human. He would have been burning up in the same clothes, but being a shifter, he ran hotter than average. Willa was a mystery in almost every respect.
He’d been in the company of innumerable supernatural beings since arriving in Maria—angels and various shifter types and gods and demigods, and even a few fae—and almost all of them had a certain forthrightness Willa was lacking. He didn’t know what that meant about her. Actually, he didn’t know much about her at all. No one he knew did. It hadn’t mattered at first. Six months ago, he’d seen the gig in Maria as an opportunity to put his unwanted marriage on hold, and it hadn’t mattered if he and the patron didn’t see completely eye to eye. But that way of thinking wasn’t working anymore. What had started as an escape had turned into an honest obligation, and he planned on getting it right.
Blue had an opportunity to shape a pack into something better than what he had back in Sparks, where fathers regularly bartered their sons away to pay off old debts like his father did to him.
He watched the mystery fidget her buttons and shift her weight. She was stressed. He could smell her sweat, her adrenaline. He knew he was the cause, but he couldn’t change that. Leaving wasn’t an option when there was so much chaos to detangle.
“My father . . . has a tendency to give his children odd gifts,” she said haltingly, “though usually they’re a bit better suited to the recipient.”
“How so?”
“That’s . . . complicated.” She took a long sip of her tea and looked over the mug. Not at him, but just past him. It was a thinking stare, and not an avoidance one. He couldn’t recall ever seeing her so still. She was always talking, always coordinating, always producing something. She was a nonstop blur, and it was hard to get a look at her from any one angle for long.
He rubbed his beard, pondering as he watched her.
Maybe that works out in her favor.
People probably made the mistake of judging her as plain because they didn’t look long enough. He had, at first.
He had for months.
She’d pulled one over on him, whether she’d tried to or not, and he’d been pissed at himself for not paying closer attention—not only because she was so pretty, but because he’d been distracted, and distractedness meant he wasn’t doing his job.
She wore her brown hair shorn boyishly close to her head and her ears were free of jewelry, but she was unmistakably female. There was beauty in the slopes of her full lips and a certain elegance in the tapering of her face. What stood out the most, though, was the unusual clarity in her eyes. There was no good name for the color that was more yellow than amber. It wasn’t a human color, but he doubted that most humans had keen enough visual acuity to see the color the way he did. The color had been worth him making a mental note over. She might have claimed that she wasn’t especially dangerous, but he still wanted to know her parentage. Risk avoidance was what made him a smarter alpha than most.
He didn’t sense magic in her energy, but something was off about her in a way he couldn’t put a finger on.
Her gaze focused on him, finally, and lips parted.
He was on the edge of his seat, eager for those words. Desperate for information about the woman who’d been turning his damn beard grayer by the day for six months. Maria was supposed to have been an easy escape.
“I’d been in the country for about—”
The mournful howl of a nearby coyote interrupted whatever Willa had been about to say, and he slapped his hands on the tabletop.
Dammit.
Blue felt the call deep in his bones as though he were little more than a tuning rod that vibrated at the slightest provocation. Putting up a hand to ask for her silence, he listened.
He couldn’t guess if the coyote was shifter or wild, but then it howled again. The bass in the pitch marked the beast as one of his, and he or she was just a few blocks away if Blue’s desert reckoning was any good.
The beast howled again, and there was distress in the canine song. A plea for help that Blue couldn’t ignore.
“Shit.” He stood in a hurry, put the chair beneath the table, and jogged to Willa’s front door. “What the hell are they still doing out after curfew?”
“Well, um . . . ” Willa crowded behind him in the foyer where he was trying to put his boots back on. “I-I think,” she stammered breathily, “that most thought the curfew was sort of optional.”
“And what would have given them that idea?” he snapped, nearly ripping off the upper of his shoe as he tugged it on. He suspected he already knew the answer, but he wanted to hear her tell him. She was sabotaging him, and he wanted her to know that he knew.
Wringing her hands, she cringed. “You’re talking about adults, Blue. You can’t tell a bunch of grown men that they’re not allowed out after ten and expect them to not need an adjustment period. That’s unreasonable.”
“No.” He yanked the door open. “What’s unreasonable is cutting me off at the knees at every turn when I’m trying to straighten out the pack. Gods, woman. Do you seriously hate me that much?”
If she had a response to that, he didn’t hear it. He took off at a sprint, listening for more Coyote howls, and adjusting his direction as a chorus of them echoed from near wh
at sounded like Lamarr’s Garage.
Two-and-a-half blocks, and Blue was too damned unsettled to be dealing with any of Lamarr’s boys. They needed patient, sympathetic handling, and he wasn’t feeling it. He was feeling like bashing some heads together and squatting down to heckle the blockheads about their lifestyle choices as they slipped into unconsciousness.
“Damn.” He threw his hands up as he ran into the lot spying Billy Lamarr atop the garage roof, crooning pitifully at the moon as though it were a lover scorned, and his brother Ralph was on the ground providing off-key accompaniment.
They weren’t distressed. They were deranged.
Their clothes were scattered haphazardly across the asphalt along with a couple of empty bottles of MD 20/20 and a half-dozen crushed Tecate cans.
Shit.
Blue shoved his hands through his hair and watched Billy dancing on the edge of the rooftop, his moon serenade vacillating between major and minor keys in such an unpredictable order that Blue found himself shuddering with each modulation.
That idiot was going to screw around and get the sheriff’s department sent out to the property, or a pissed enough neighbor with a shotgun would scare them straight first. If the neighbor was of the human sort, they might not think twice about firing off a few warning shots, and if one of those pellets happened to hit a coyote—no harm done. After all, wild coyotes in Maria had become something of a nuisance in recent years. “Overpopulation,” the folks at animal control said.
More like oversaturation of a certain shapeshifter population’s blood alcohol levels.
Billy paused his crooning to take a breath, which meant Ralph—on the ground staring up at his big brother with wide doggy eyes—went quiet, too.
He was so busy watching Billy with his tongue lolling and trying to stay upright on his four legs that he didn’t sense Blue stalking up behind him.
Ralph took a breath, ready to join Billy in his aural assault again, but Blue made damned sure the beast couldn’t get a sound out. Blue forced him to the ground with one hand clenched into the fur of Ralph’s neck and immediately put his knee on Ralph’s belly.