by Holley Trent
“He’s not usually out this late,” she panted.
“Nope.”
They darted across the street and got in line before the scent of hot grease and cinnamon hit her nose.
There were five more people in line behind them by the time Tiny returned to the truck window. He handed down two huge churros to Tamatsu, who in turn handed one to Noelle in exchange for a paper cup of coffee.
“I like this guy’s hustle,” Blue said. “The damn coffee shop just went to summer hours this morning.”
“Tiny doesn’t even sell churros.”
Tamatsu chuckled as he and Noelle passed by them in line. “And maybe he won’t be in three weeks, but he’s selling them right now.”
“Next!” the Cougar called out from the window, and the line inched forward.
The next guy in line stepped forward and immediately thrust his pointer finger into Tiny’s placid face. “You’re full of shit, you know that? I had them first.”
Tiny twirled one end of his handlebar mustache and gave his competitor a slow blink. “So go to your cart and sell them. You’re holding up the line.”
The guy slapped five dollars onto the metal shelf in front of the window. “Give me a churro.”
“Why? So you can say I stole your recipe and spread more of that slander around?” Tiny made a flicking gesture at the bill as though it were an unwanted bug on the shelf. “Fuck out of here, man. Anybody with functioning taste buds can tell that you got yours out of the freezer at Costco and you’re just heating them up in your cart’s warmer.”
Blue rubbed his palms together and chuckled under his breath. “Ooh. Turf war.”
“It’s been going on for almost a year,” Willa whispered. “Used to be that Tiny just ignored him, but now I think he’s trolling him.”
Tiny called over his competitor’s head, “Next! What you kids want?”
Willa pushed up onto her tiptoes to see who the kids were and immediately regretted it. She looked around, pondering if she could make a stealthy escape before they spotted her. In a town as small as Maria, getting spotted by her students wasn’t especially rare, but she had no desire to get seen within a foot of Blue Shapely outside of pack gatherings. Rumors would fly, and she doubted Blue would be noble enough to douse them. She had a morality clause in her employment contract to worry about.
“You just gonna act like I’m not here?” Burrito Guy asked Tiny.
“Ma!” Tiny called into the truck. “Two more churros. You got enough batter to get through the night?”
Ms. Minnie uttered something in Spanish that was scandalous enough to make her son, a forty-something-year-old ex-trucker, blush and a demigoddess giggle.
“All you had to say was yes, Ma,” Tiny grumbled.
Blue gave Willa’s arm a nudge. “You’re fluent in Spanish, right? I only caught about a quarter of that.”
“Several dialects.”
“What’d she say?”
“I hope you don’t mind if I don’t translate it directly, but I think close enough would be ‘I told you so.’”
Two more churros handed off.
They inched forward, and Kenny made a lateral move into the line from out of nowhere.
“Hey!” the people behind them balked.
He waved them off, shouting, “I’m not ordering. Just conferring.”
Before the grumbles had even died down, Kenny said to Blue, “We’ve got a problem.”
Blue rolled his eyes. “I’d be surprised if we didn’t. What’s new?”
“Heard some rumbles from a few old heads. They’re making noise about splintering off.”
Willa stuck her head into the gaggle. “Are you talking about my old heads or the ones in Sparks?”
Kenny’s grimace was telling enough.
Oh no.
Splintering meant they had built-in enemies within the pack, and no matter what she or Blue did to quell them, there was going to be a wound to morale. They couldn’t afford to slip even deeper into the murk.
“But why?” she asked.
“That’s easy enough to guess,” Blue said. “They like chaos. I don’t.”
“But you’re supposed to get on them on board,” Willa said, and they inched up the line a bit more, putting them right next to Burrito Guy.
Blue pivoted her around him and to his right side in a half do-si-do, putting her between him and Kenny. “And I am,” he said.
“By making things worse first?”
“There’s always going to be some chaff that comes out of the threshing,” Kenny said. “That’s fine. That’s normal.”
“You want them to go away?”
“Of course not,” Blue said. To Tiny, he said, “You gonna spit in my food, man?”
Tiny cleared his throat and snapped his hair net down over his ponytail. “You feeding Willa?”
“Yes.”
“Then no. What do you want?”
“Tacos, actually. The dog ate my dinner. Lemme get a Six.”
“I want a churro,” Kenny said in a barely audible murmur.
“And a churro,” Blue said.
Burrito guy sucked his teeth. “Come on.”
“What you want, Willa?” Tiny asked.
“To rewind the last six months and do them over.” She massaged the bridge of her nose and took a deep breath. “Also, a churro.”
She was having a difficult time formulating a proper response to what Kenny had said and Blue’s relative lack of reaction to it, but she knew having a near-empty stomach wouldn’t help matters. In fact, low blood sugar was probably only going to make her snarly and irrational. She’d deal with him after she’d dealt with the churro.
Blue paid for their food and then corralled them to the side, in easy view of the window, but far enough away from Burrito Guy to avoid any potential blowback. The competitor’s ears were turning redder by the minute, and Willa worried if he was nearing a stroke.
She found herself in the middle of a Coyote sandwich with a side order of King as the men conferred, talking over her head as though she was no more sentient than a lawn ornament.
“Who?” Blue asked. “And how’d you find out?”
“Exactly who you’d suspect. Most of the bikers. The road-burners.”
“You mean the ones everyone in town thinks are a gang.”
Kenny shrugged. “They might as well be for all the shit they stir up.”
Willa folded her arms over her chest and drummed her fingertips against her biceps. “Ahem.”
“That’s nearly half the pack,” Blue said.
“How hard do you want to work to keep them?”
Willa cleared her throat again. “You’re doing that thing where you forget to include me in decisions.”
Blue pulled in a deep breath and looked down at her.
At a bit over average height, she’d never felt so short around Coyotes until the Sparks crew came into town. “I don’t want to have this argument here.”
“If it were up to you, we wouldn’t have the argument at all.”
“Come get it!” Tiny shouted from the window.
Kenny went to get the food.
Blue pulled Willa more out of the way of the amassing crowd. In the time it’d taken them to order, the line had sprawled halfway down the block.
“Park, Kenny,” Blue called out.
“Yep.”
“That’s all you do,” Willa murmured. “Bark orders.”
“Sorry if you see it that way,” Blue said. “I’m just doing what’s efficient. Efficiency is the antidote to chaos.”
Blue led both Willa and King to the small park adjacent to the coffeehouse. Really, it was more of a courtyard built up by some residents who got sick of looking at the previous eyesore that had been there. The old general store had gotten burned out, and for years, there’d been nothing in the space but the remnants of the fire. The witches had made it a community project. They were good at organizing when they had incentive.
It was a cozy spac
e about the size of the townhouse garden belonging to a London family she was governess for in 1812. Same approximate shape, but with more cacti and definitely more hipster graffiti.
Blue sat her on the one unoccupied bench, which they’d been approaching at the same exact time as a young couple.
He only had to blink at them and they scurried away.
Willa sighed.
King plopped gracelessly onto the brick path beside the bench and promptly unrolled his tongue from his mouth as though it were a red carpet and flies were his honored guests.
Blue sat oppressively close to her and said quietly through clenched teeth, “You’re not thinking rationally.”
“Don’t go there,” she said with a pound of her fist against her thigh. “Just . . . don’t. Don’t mistake me caring too much for being irrational.”
“I’m not trying to be an ass.”
She opted to hold her tongue on that one.
“You’re not thinking like a Coyote because you aren’t one. You don’t have that gut feeling about when you need to cut your losses and pare down some of the personnel in the pack.”
“We did that,” she spat back as Kenny approached with food bags in hand. “Before you came, we lost at least ten to that purge.”
Tito’s uncle, Shadow, an ancient who’d formerly been a Mexican god, had taken out his own garbage. His son and rogue shapeshifters had been infiltrating the Coyote pack for years by impersonating and replacing former pack members. Shadow had ignored them, until he couldn’t ignore them anymore. He’d cleaned up for Tito’s sake. Willa hadn’t even known the impersonators were there. If she’d had a little magic or some ability to sense disruptive energy, she might have figured out that something was amiss in the pack.
She grimaced.
Maybe Blue would have noticed.
“You can’t really count them.” Kenny perched on the edge of the bench beside Blue. He loosened his gingham-print bowtie, tugged his suspenders off his shoulders, pulled the collar of his shirt away from his neck a bit, and swallowed.
She’d seen a lot of Coyotes do that as the days inched closer to the full moon. Kenny was always in control of his faculties—he was dominant enough to know when to self-correct his behavior—but that didn’t mean that Mother Nature couldn’t make him uncomfortable. He was still at her mercy in a lot of ways.
She wondered if both he and Blue wouldn’t be a lot more comfortable if they dressed down a little. They always looked like they had a business meeting in five minutes. Lance, on the other hand, was more laidback. He wore whatever shirt matched his cleanest pants.
Kenny handed a churro to her, held his own, and handed the rest of the bag to Blue.
“I understand the compulsion to keep the number the same,” Blue said. “Trust me. What I’m doing here would look a hell of a lot better in a report to my father if the pack was a good size versus one that’s contracting. As things stand right now, he’s going to think I’m not on top of the situation here, and that’ll be a strike against me. He’s going to say ‘Come on home, boy,’ and me opting out of that edict will end up with him personally coming down here to fetch me and kick my ass down a chapel aisle.”
“I’m trying to care.” Willa broke off a pile of hot fried dough and popped it into her mouth. It practically melted against her tongue, and she slouched with pleasure against the bench back. “Ugh, the last time I had a churro was at the state fair when I was helping to chaperone the high school band a few years ago. It wasn’t as good as this.”
“You want me to get you another one?” Blue asked. He’d already made one taco disappear into his body and had the second locked and loaded in his big hand.
Yes.
But what came out of her mouth was, “Don’t do me any favors. You’re trying to distract me, and I’m not going to let you.”
“I’m not trying to distract you. I’m multitasking. That’s the only way to get things done with you.” He bit off half a taco in one go and somehow hadn’t gotten so much as a pinpoint of spillage on his crisp white shirt or even into the wrapper. If neat eating was a measurable skill, she would have never thought a Coyote would possess it.
Sourly, she dusted some cinnamon sugar off her polo shirt. “You’re not endearing yourself to me any when you behave like conferring with me is a chore. I’m so sorry that I haven’t just rolled over and become the doormat you require.”
“For God’s sake, I didn’t mean it like that.” He popped the remnant end of the taco into his mouth and his fingers along with it. A move that should have been classless and gauche somehow took on an erotic appeal when he did it. Perhaps there was something in the slow retrieval of his fingers from his mouth or the way he stared down at the slick digits before putting the side of his index finger against his lips and sucking.
As a strange heat uncurled in her belly, Willa closed her eyes and gritted her teeth in shame.
Inexperienced though she was, she knew what those flutters in her body meant—that breathless anxiousness in her core. The prickling heat creeping up her neck and cheeks.
Her body was aware of the fact that his body was male, and attractive.
White shirts aside, she tried not to pay attention to such things. Indifference kept her safe—refusing to get attached kept her and the people around her safe.
The moment she slipped up, Apollo would put whoever she’d connected to in his crosshairs. Willa had vowed after her mother’s death to never let down her guard too much for anyone. Apollo couldn’t stand the idea of anyone being loved more than him, and she didn’t buy that anyone would love her enough to endure him—not even when belonging to her meant immortality.
Having so many superficial friendships was dissatisfying, to say the least, and she avoided romance as though it were an outbreak of plague. Being related to who she was, she couldn’t afford to pick wrong. She’d had no choice but to decide not to pick at all.
To be touched at all.
Willa started at Blue’s grip around her wrist and, as always, tried to jerk away from the improper touch before she realized what he was doing.
“Easy,” he whispered, lifting her arm. “You’re going to drop it. Stay with me, okay? Lost you for a good couple of minutes there.”
She’d nearly let her churro fall when she’d been swimming around in the murk of her mind.
Dragging her tongue across her dry lips, she pried off a churro end, no longer hungry.
“You want to go home?” he whispered.
She shook her head hard. Her brain was louder at home. She didn’t want to be in a small place where her thoughts seemed to echo off the walls and always transformed into nightmares.
“Want to walk?” he murmured. “Or go into the library? It’s open for a bit longer.”
“W-walking is . . . okay.”
“All right. I know a place.”
At that moment, she couldn’t think of a better option, or better company, so she gave a consenting nod.
Dusting cinnamon sugar off his hand onto his pants, Kenny said, “If you give me your keys, I’ll walk King home.”
Keys?
For a few seconds, the vocabulary didn’t quite land, and she struggled to remember what those things were. Her brain was disordered, too many ideas ping-ponging off of each other and clamoring for equal attention. She couldn’t prioritize. She couldn’t tell what was important and what she needed to let go of.
“Here.” Blue unclipped her keychain carabiner from her belt loop—When did I put that there?—and handed them to Kenny.
He took the keys and the leash and stuffed what was left of his snack into his mouth.
“Debrief later,” Blue told him. “You know the deal.”
After a brisk nod, Kenny left and King bounded beside him, obviously recovering from his stranger aversion far faster than Willa would have preferred. Guard dogs weren’t supposed to be so social.
Blue tossed his food bag into the trashcan and pulled Willa up by the hand. “Come on. I�
��ll show you where I go when I don’t want to be bothered.”
“Being bothered isn’t my problem,” she said quietly. “Not being enough is.”
Chapter Fifteen
Blue backed through the gate and waved Willa forward. “Come on. It’s okay. Anyone can come in. They keep the gate open all night.”
Willa looked uncertain. She looked small and vulnerable standing between the towering wrought-iron posts, rubbing her arms as though she’d caught a chill.
“This is where you come?” Her gaze tracked up slowly and he followed it to the top of the old mission church, probably to the bell that never rang. Too rusted. Too cracked. It hadn’t rung once since he’d been in Maria.
“There’s a big fountain in the garden I like to sit next to. Come on.” He doubled back to take her hand and pull her onto the church property. “You scared? If I don’t get struck by lightning the moment I step onto hallowed grounds, I doubt you’ll be.”
“I was born on hallowed grounds,” she said, though she didn’t seem to be speaking specifically to him. Just speaking.
She followed behind him, taking small, cautious steps, her gaze still on the mission’s facade as she moved.
He guided her with gentle nudges to her arm, her back, keeping her from colliding into statues and tripping over large rocks.
When he stopped her in front of the fountain, she finally looked down again, blinking rapidly at him as though he’d materialized from out of the air.
“Why do you look at me like that?” he asked. He didn’t think she’d answer given her track record with telling him what he needed to know.
She passed a hand through her short hair and expelled a dry laugh. “Paranoia. I’ve never seen djinn here, but I thought saw a glimmer.”
Djinn?
He searched the air where she’d been staring looking for signs of a spirit. Nothing there, but he wasn’t entirely sure he’d recognize one. From what he’d heard, djinn didn’t look much like the genies cartoon creators had conflated them with.
“I haven’t seen them since I left Granada, but sometimes, I think I . . . ”
The words trailed off, and he wished she’d keep talking so he’d understand, but she’d already told him more than he’d expected. Every secret mattered because she dispensed them so seldom.