by Holley Trent
Jackass.
Blue was hearing his father in Mason’s words—the rigidity, the callousness. He understood that Mason was fed up. Maybe Blue would have been, too, but the idea of uprooting so many families who’d been settled in the area since the town’s inception was downright Machiavellian. It was the kind of ultimatum Bruno probably would have appreciated.
The Foyes backed away.
Mason nodded to Tito, and then the brothers strode toward the pickup parked down the street.
“Shit,” Tito said under his breath.
Yeah. Shit.
“I can’t help you out on this one, man,” Tito said. He backed away from Allen, who was struggling to his feet.
Blue didn’t bother to help. No way in hell was the guy going to stay upright. Blue had poured too much juice into him for it to be possible. He’d psychically bulldozed him.
As Blue predicted, Allen plopped right back down and panted.
“I try to be as fair as I can be as a law enforcement official,” Tito said, smoothing his black hair back from his forehead, “but I’m the Cougar glaring’s de facto patron. I’m obviously going to do what’s necessary to ensure the safety and well-being of the cats. Most of the time, I stay out of the way and let Mason step in to deal with Cougar business. Foyes have been in charge for a long time around here, and for good reason, you understand me?”
Blue didn’t respond.
“Listen,” Tito said and sighed. “I like Willa a lot. She’s good people. I wish she’d reached out to us before and told us who she was. I wish she’d said something about the problems in the Coyotes, but I can’t change the past.”
Blue was certainly starting to wish that he could.
“At a certain point, if I have to step in and roll up my sleeves, I will,” Tito said. “Get me?”
Yeah, I get you.
Reluctantly, Blue nodded the best he could without a human neck.
“A’ight.” Tito knelt in front of Allen and rested his forearms on his thighs. “He gonna be okay?”
Blue made a noncommittal woofing sound.
Allen would be shambling around town, zombielike as though he’d taken a heavy sedative, for the next few days at the very least. He’d be most impressionable during that time—perfect for reprogramming. Blue didn’t want to have to do it. He hated that he was taking such a risk, but he didn’t see where he had a choice. Allen’s personality might be permanently changed by the time Blue screwed his head back on, but that was the risk he had to take to give the young man and the rest of the pack their best chance at a future. Their success meant Blue got to stay put.
No more playing around.
He sank his teeth into Allen’s fur once more and forced the canine onto four feet.
Let’s go.
Allen went, obedient because he had no choice.
Blue didn’t even want to think about what Willa would say when she found out. Somehow, though, he didn’t think she’d be gracing him with another of those cleansing laughs.
Chapter Twelve
Willa hated the mental imagery the phrase brought, but the next morning, she was truly dragging ass and couldn’t get coffee into her system fast enough.
She hadn’t been able to sleep. She’d used all of her usual tricks—keeping the lights on and playing the television on some campy teen comedy loud enough for her to hear every word of dialogue. She’d even let King sleep on her bed, which she never did. He was a cover hog.
None of that had worked. Her mind had started reeling the moment Blue and Diana had left with Lance. She kept thinking about how her father had been there and worrying he’d come back, and that she’d be there by herself when he did. And how every time he showed up in her life, he hurt her in yet another cruel way. He’d been lying to her from birth. Every breath he took in her direction was a lie.
“You’ll be safe,” he’d said after her mother had died of plague during Willa’s childhood. “I’ll see to it.”
But she hadn’t been safe. Years later, when she’d been marched through the streets of Granada and taken for interrogation, he hadn’t shown up.
He didn’t show up when she was tortured to confess things she hadn’t done or to embrace ideas she’d never held.
He didn’t show up when she was about to be burned at the stake in front of a crowd of people the church rewarded to attend, especially if they brought wood for the fire.
Willa had closed her eyes, close to losing consciousness from the plumes of smoke choking her. She’d thought that was the end, and so be it. There was no one there for her.
But that hadn’t been quite true. Her aunt Artemis had shown up, better late than never. She’d spirited Willa away right as her garments caught aflame.
Of course, he’d shown up then, after Willa was tucked safely away. Found them in Italy and the worst of her wounds had scabbed over.
That was the day he’d looked at her like inconvenient garbage and questioned her worth. And then, flippant and condescending, he’d given her money and arranged for proper schooling for her as though those things were supposed to be an adequate Band-Aid for what she’d endured.
Stop it.
She gave her eyelids an aggressive rub and tried to focus on her planner pages. Too much to do, and she didn’t know how she could say no. She was just one person, but it wasn’t fair for her students if they didn’t get the same performance opportunities as kids elsewhere.
That meant that not only did she need to prepare them for a spring concert, but also for marching band transition. She would have loved to call off the concert. She hated the attention—hated the anticipation of only a handful of people showing up and being humiliated on behalf of the kids—but she’d endure. She didn’t see where she had a choice.
The first bell rang.
She sighed, pushed her stool back from her desk, and went to unlock the doors. She’d just unfastened the bolt on the second when the classroom phone chirped.
She sprinted to it right as early bird Quinn stepped in, and grabbed the receiver on the fifth ring. “Willa here,” she said into the phone.
“Volunteers coming back to ya,” Paige in the office said. “What are you bribing them with?”
Willa didn’t have a good response to that. Absently, she hung up and wrung her hands.
Oh boy. What now?
Diana strode in two minutes later carrying an insulated lunch tote and a long flat box under one arm.
Blue followed her, carrying nothing, hands in pockets. He gave Willa a nod of greeting and leaned against the empty cubbies nearest the pencil sharpener.
“Um . . . ” Dazed, Willa took the dollar bills Sam Evans thrust at her. On autopilot, she fetched him a saxophone reed from the closet and then made her way to the alpha.
Halfway there, she slowed, pondering what she was seeing.
Blue was usually so immaculately turned out, but there in the band room, he looked the way she felt—weary to the bone. There were dark circles under his eyes, and his skin had a grayish pallor. It was a look she saw a lot on Coyotes the “morning after.” She could say a lot of things about Blue, but she’d never say he was a man prone to excess. She doubted he’d gone out and gotten wasted after leaving her house. His exhaustion had to be due to something else.
Clearing her throat, she checked where the students’ attention was—not on her, fortunately—and continued across the room.
“I’m not staying,” he said preemptively as she approached. “Diana said you needed to swap out some instruments with the guy at the high school, so I’ll run those down for you. I’m not getting in your hair today.”
Oh.
She wrung her hands in front of her belly and nodded at Jason Ellison who was holding up a tube of slide oil and a couple of dollar bills and tacitly asking if he could make the exchange.
“Looks like Diana’s hunkering down for a while,” she said to Blue.
Diana had claimed herself a cubby and was changing out of her leather flats and into
a pair of galoshes for some reason.
He grunted and scrubbed a hand across his unshaven jaw. “I guess that way, she can tell our father she’s been working without having to lie.”
“You don’t think that at some point, he’s going to get suspicious and send someone down here to watch the watcher?”
“I think we all know he will. He’s the kind of man who likes to give you enough rope to hang yourself with, and then he’ll watch you do it.”
“I’m sorry,” she said, meaning it. She could speak in platitudes and tell him things like, “Everyone goes through this with their father” or “Maybe your relationship will get better now that you’re on your own,” but given what she’d endured, she’d never been able to manufacture optimism that way.
“It is what it is.” Blue laid his head from one side to the other. The cartilage in his neck clicked. A quiet growl vibrated in his chest.
Clearing her throat, she leaned in as close as was proper and whispered, “You look wiped.”
“So do you.”
She raised her shoulders jerkily. “That’s nothing new.”
“What were you doing all night?”
“What were you doing all night?”
“Touché.” He leaned back and put his elbows against the top of the shelf, eyeing her inscrutably for long enough to make her uncomfortable, although that was usually easy enough anyway.
She looked down at her feet right as the first hard patter of rain hit the windows.
“Ha!” Diana exclaimed. “Knew it. I could feel the rain in my teeth.”
“That’s weird,” a student said.
“Mind your elders. One day, you’ll get old and your body will do weird things, too.”
Stifling a laugh, Blue pinched the bridge of his nose and said in a low voice, “I think the lady at the front desk said she needed Diana to do a background check or something if she plans to be here more than a few hours per week.”
“Does she? Plan to, I mean.”
“I think that would be best.”
“And why’s that? Because you think I need to be babysat?”
No response.
Rubbing her eyes, she sighed. “I was doing fine before you got here, you know.”
He shifted his weight and dragged in a long breath, staring at the drop ceiling. “Why do people use that word, fine? It’s an empty word. Doesn’t mean anything. Basically a placeholder in a sentence that folks use when they either don’t want to be honest or when they lack the vocabulary to tell the truth.”
You don’t need to know my truth, Alpha.
She didn’t want to argue with him. She was too tired, and he was too cranky. They could make their own storm with that mix.
She steeled her spine and gestured toward the workroom door. “I piled the instruments out there. There’s another door in the workroom that leads right out to the side parking lot, so if you want to back your SUV into the space, that’ll make loading the instruments easier. It’s a couple of tubas and some euphoniums. He’s supposed to send back two sousaphones, two mellophones, a baritone horn, and a piccolo.”
“Sounds like you’re rushing me.”
The tardy bell rang.
She blinked at him.
“Point taken.” He pushed away from the case and ferreted his keys out of the pocket of his slacks. “I’ll be back in a few hours.”
“Shouldn’t take that long. The high school is only three miles from here.”
Blue grimaced and pushed open the door. “I might need to do something on the way back.”
She followed him outside because she didn’t like the sound of that “something.” She asked, “What kind of something? Coyote something?”
He kept walking. “Don’t worry about it.”
She ran around him. She didn’t like talking to people’s backs.
He had to stop short so as not to plow into her.
“Don’t tell me not to worry about it,” she said, staring at his collar. “My job is to worry about it.”
He bent down, putting his lips close enough to her ear that she could feel the unsuppressed energy thrumming through him. He was a live wire, and she was in for a shock if she persisted.
She didn’t see where she had a choice, so she squared her shoulders, girded herself to ignore the pelting of the cold rain, and murmured, “Tell me your lie and leave.”
“No lie, just a request. Stay out of my way and let me do my job.”
“Without oversight, you mean. You want free rein to do whatever you want.”
“You’re going to have to let me have it.”
“Don’t hold your breath.”
“I don’t need to.” Slowly, he raised a hand to the side of her face.
She rolled her gaze down to watch it hover near her cheek for what seemed like infinite seconds, but probably just three. Long enough for the delicate hairs at the side of her face to stand on end and for them to catch his alpha energy like little lightning rods.
Swallowing, she put a hand to the small of her back and rubbed the electric feeling coalescing there.
He let his hand fall away and then looked toward the road. “Your hair curls when it’s wet.”
Mortified, she smoothed it down.
Time for another cut.
“I need to start class.” She walked to the door, unsettled, gut undulating in curious ways.
When she glanced back at him, he was standing in the rain, looking at her, expression grave.
She didn’t understand him one bit, except that he wasn’t anything like the last alpha, Jimenez.
Blue is too . . .
As she stepped up onto the carpeted podium at the front of the room and scanned the room for empty seats for attendance, she pondered just what Blue was.
That was hard. She only knew what he wasn’t: typical.
So what’s that mean?
Shaking her head of the distracting line of thought, she tapped her baton against the edge of her stand and tucked her feet behind the rungs of her stool.
“All right, let’s run down this fast. We’ve got a bunch of transition stuff to do today. I’ve got new music for the spring concert to hand out.”
April David’s hand sprang up, but she blurted out without waiting, “What’s the theme now?”
Willa suppressed a cringe. The theme was “Too Easy to Mess Up,” because after the grueling year they’d had, she’d decided they needed that. All of them.
She smiled, though, and said, “Pop favorites. Easy to learn in a week. We’ll get that sorted and music passed out momentarily. I’ve going to move marching drills to end of class. And because this is New Mexico, I’m pretty sure the rain will let up in the next half hour. Oh!” She gave the baton a little tap on the stand’s edge. “Speaking of marching, I’ve got more information for you about instrument transitions and also the band camp fundraiser.”
There was a collective groan from the group. Few things made Willa shudder the way a chorus of groans from thirteen-year-olds did.
“Why the long faces?” Diana asked. She was in the back of the room pulling a big white board from the box she’d brought in. With a bit of squinting, Willa made out a pile of silver hooks on the floor beside it.
Ah.
A wall-mounted coatrack.
Willa had muttered about the kids’ jackets piling up on the floor the day before, but certainly not loud enough for anyone to hear. Diana wasn’t an “anyone.” She was a full-grown Coyote with a supernatural sense of hearing and had apparently put her organizing skills to work.
The kids turned in their seats toward her, and one said, “We all know most of us won’t be able to go, and if we don’t go, we’re guaranteed to get benched next year.”
“Why can’t you go?”
“It’s expensive,” Quinn said. “It’s at the university in Albuquerque. Sleep away. Lasts a week. The high school kids can afford it because they’ve got more boosters, and they start fundraising for the next year’s camp as soon as they
get back in the summer.”
“They don’t allot funds to freshmen,” Willa added. “They say they can only pay for the ones they know are pitching in.”
“That doesn’t make sense,” Diana said, plopping her hands onto her hips. Even with her bouncy ponytail and electric pink boots, she still managed to look imposing. “You would think the freshmen would most need the immersion.”
Willa shrugged. She didn’t want to talk smack about her high school counterpart in front of the kids. She could give Diana the skinny later. If all the decision making was left up to Paul, he’d have an upperclassman-only band and use the freshmen as alternates and roadies.
“The proceeds of the ticket sales for our spring concert goes, in part, to the band camp fund, but that’s a drop in the bucket compared to how much they need. We’re going to have to supplement with the raffle again.”
Another groan from the kids.
“No one’s gonna buy them,” Sarah said. “By the time we get out there and start asking folks if they want any, they tell us they’ve already donated to the high school kids’ fundraiser, and then they ask us why we’re doing it if the money is going to the same thing anyway.”
“Still, we’ve got to try,” Willa said. The kids’ complaints were valid ones, but it was a tough situation, and Maria really was too small a town to foster simultaneous fundraisers.
Diana sidled over, leaned in close, and whispered, “How much per kid?”
Willa cleared her throat and whispered back, “Instruction, housing, transportation, and food total just under four hundred dollars per kid, and that’s what’s left after grants and subsidies that aren’t guaranteed yet. Still waiting to hear back. We’ll be at six hundred if they fall through.”
Diana grimaced and retreated.
“Okay, so moving on from that. Today, I’m going to shift some of you to instruments you’ll have a better shot at marching with next year.”