by Holley Trent
Whatever Lance had to say, Blue didn’t hear it. He was already in his vehicle with his finger poised over the ignition button and closing the door.
As he squealed tires out of the lot, he glanced into his rearview mirror at his lieutenants watching him drive off, confusion marked on their faces.
He didn’t know what to tell them. He couldn’t explain the mess in his head or what he was feeling. They wouldn’t understand, and it didn’t make a hell of a lot of sense to him, either.
He hadn’t really needed to make that business trip so soon. He could have put it off for a couple more weeks and given the entrepreneurs more time to refine their business plan, but Willa had scared awake something in him he’d never expected to feel and that made him uncomfortable.
He didn’t like that. He needed his control. It was what set him apart from lesser beasts and let him tell himself the lie that he was better than them.
It was nearly eleven when he pulled up to the curb in front of Willa’s house in what must have been record time. Traffic was light in Maria, but it should have been. It was an unseemly hour for respectable people.
Willa was respectable, but there he was, stalking up to her door and peering into the window beside it. The front room was dark, but there was a light on somewhere in the back of the house. The hallway, maybe.
He made his way around the side of the house, moving carefully so as not to disturb the couple of mulched seedlings Willa had planted there, and also to avoid any forgotten evidence of King’s nightly walks.
At the back corner of the dwelling, the light in the window was bright and the curtains were parted just enough for him to make out the shape of a bed and the human-sized lump on it.
He couldn’t see the television, but he could hear the familiar strains of a cat litter commercial, loud enough for a Coyote to hear through a closed window, which should have been just loud enough to keep a person awake.
“You awake, lady?” He pulled his phone from his pocket and sent her a text message.
Her phone was on the nightstand. He saw the light flash as the message landed. No movement on the bed.
He sent one more message to be sure. With the television as loud as it was, she might not have heard it.
BACK IN TOWN. OPEN THE DOOR IF YOU’RE AWAKE.
Her phone flashed again.
The lump on the bed shifted slightly, but not enough to convince him of her wakefulness.
Then, out of nowhere, a squarish dog head popped up, a brown nose pressed against the window glass, and two weary eyes landed on Blue, who was standing out in the shadows of a woman’s house like a creeper.
“Hey. Get your lady,” he mouthed to the dog. “Is she up?”
King canted his head in universal canine language for, “Huh?”
Blue expelled a quiet growl and shifted to better see into the room now that King had kindly moved the curtain aside.
“Jesus, woman,” he murmured, spying more of the full picture.
The light was on and television blaring, and Willa had her head under a pillow as though she were trying to block out all the impediments from sleep instead of just shutting them off.
She wasn’t a lazy woman. He knew that, so what she was doing struck him as defensive rather than folly. Introducing new irritants to distract from the ones she didn’t like. Substituting one kind of annoyance for the kind she could swallow.
He scratched at the screen and in doing so, nudged the sash inward. It swiveled in with a bit more pressure. Apparently, she’d left the window unlatched, and with it cracked, he could hear just how loud the television really was. No one normal should have been able to sleep with that ear-splintering sound.
“Willa,” he called over the din, and then looked behind him at the neighbors’ house. Their windows were dark, but that didn’t mean no one was watching. For all he knew, they’d already called 911.
Turning back to the bedroom, he cleared his throat. “Willa.”
King pounced onto the bed like some kind of slobbering, mutant cat and immediately dashed any hopes Blue had that the dog was going to wake her when he plopped at the foot of the bed and fixed his stare on the television.
“Jerk.” Blue scratched at the screen again and called out a bit louder, “Willa!”
The light behind him snapped on.
He rolled his eyes and hung his head just as Willa started moving in his periphery.
Shit.
Willa’s neighbor snapped the window up, and an aggrieved male voice shouted, “What are you doing, idiot?”
Seriously?
Blue knew that voice. It would have been nice if someone had told him—Willa, Kenny, Lance, anyone really—that Willa lived next door to a Coyote.
“Idiot?” Blue nodded slowly a few times and lifted his head in time to see Willa reaching toward the bathrobe on the chair next to her bed. She was moving quickly, but she hadn’t been able to hide in time what she’d wanted to tie the robe over. The neckline of her sleep shirt was lower than she wore in public, and there was some kind of wicked-looking bruise starting just above her clavicle and spreading down her chest.
The hell’s that from?
“You know what time it is?” Mac barked.
Turning slowly, Blue wiped his palms on his jeans, girding himself.
He was trying to be on his best behavior. Willa already expected the worst of him, and he didn’t like that. She drove him nuts with her meddling, but she was the purest, most decent person he’d ever met, and for the first time in his life, he really wanted to impress someone. He wanted her to think good things about him, and if he had to jump that fence and beat Mac back into a decade where he’d fit in with that mullet, Willa wasn’t going to be endeared to him at all.
“It’s past your bedtime, Mac,” Blue said through a tight smile and clenched teeth. “Pay no attention here at all. Pack leader business.”
“Oh, yeah?” Mac leaned his forearms onto his windowsill and hocked . . . and then swallowed.
Blue shuddered inwardly.
“What kind of pack business?” Mac asked.
“If it’s important, you’ll find out soon enough.”
“If it’s important, you’d go in through the front door, huh? Come back at a decent hour.”
“What I’m doing when I’m standing on this side of the fence is of no concern to you.” If Mac gave a single shit about Willa personally beyond what he could eke out of her, he certainly hadn’t demonstrated it in any measurable way. He was in tight with the rest of the lowlifes who were threatening a move to Oklahoma. Blue didn’t want him living right next door to Willa.
“Like I said.” Blue grinned, but there was no mistaking the threat in the added bass to his voice or the lengthening of his canine teeth down toward his lower lip. “Go to bed. You want to talk in the morning? Call Kenny and he’ll arrange something.”
“I think we should talk it out right now.” Mac straightened up and hocked again.
Still smiling, Blue raised his chin to him. “Well, come on out, dog. You’re obviously not thinking clearly, so let me help you out. I’ll fix you up real good.”
Mac straightened up, narrowing his eyes in warning, but he couldn’t hold the stare. A lady called from within his house, “Mac, are you bothering King? Come back to bed. He’s gonna wake the whole neighborhood with that barking again. I don’t want Perez out here in the middle of the night banging on doors to see why.”
“Blue,” Willa whispered behind him.
“One moment,” Blue murmured. He didn’t want to take his eyes off Mac. As the dominant in the exchange, Blue needed to put a period on the sentence so Mac understood the power balance wasn’t ever going to shift. They weren’t done until Mac scurried away.
“Deal with you tomorrow,” Mac said, putting special emphasis on the word “deal” before slamming his window shut. The light clicked off, and Mac’s wiry figure disappeared into the bowels of his house.
“Blue,” Willa whispered again.
> “Yeah.” He turned then.
She was standing in the window, brow furrowed, pinching her robe closed at the neck. She could have survived a trek across the Sahara on camelback with bags the size of the ones under her eyes, so pronounced she almost looked like she’d been punched.
Shit.
“Let me in.” His fingers clawed into the window ledge as though he were going to dismantle the house part by part to get to her, if he had to. He could have. He had the strength to yank a door as cheap as Willa’s off its hinges without breaking a sweat, but asking to be let in was nicer.
“What are you doing here?” she asked.
“Didn’t hear from you.”
“Didn’t hear from you, either.”
“I was working. Let me in. With the way I’m feeling right now, if Mac comes back to gripe, I can’t promise he’ll survive the night. Please.”
Her eyes went wide with slow recognition. He’d made a threat, yes, and not an idle one. Blue didn’t talk a big game and then back down from execution.
Her gulp was loud even over the din of the television. She tilted her head toward the adjacent wall and dragged her tongue across her lips. “Go around to the patio door.”
He didn’t waste a second, and actually got there before she did.
The moment she pulled the sliding door open and nudged a gap between the vertical blind slats, he grabbed her and held her at arm’s length in front of him. “What. Are. You. Doing?”
He couldn’t help the growl in his voice or any magic that might have been pouring off of him in that moment. He was going to collapse under the weight of his worry for her. He didn’t worry about anyone else that way. No one else needed him to.
“I’m . . . trying to sleep?” she said, furrowing her brow. “Or trying to.”
“No, I think you’re trying to defeat me with a new tactic of doing stupid, self-sabotaging garbage until I lose my mind.”
“What did I do?” She wasn’t even struggling. Her body was a limp demigoddess noodle, her energy low, as though someone had blown her spark out.
“Doesn’t seem like you’re doing much of anything.”
“I don’t understand. You were complaining before that I was in your way of running the pack.”
Growling again, he unhanded her so he could close and lock the door. Then he turned down that damned television, closed the window, and pulled the curtains tight.
She sat on the edge of her bed, shoulders sagging, hands folded atop her lap as she watched him move around the room checking window locks.
She had windows on three walls, and the patio door in one of those. Her bedroom was a security nightmare, especially living next door to someone as unpredictable as Mac.
He took brisk strides across the room and gave her bony shoulder a poke with his index finger. “Why didn’t you tell me you lived next door to a Coyote?”
“You didn’t ask?” She shrugged. “And there are Coyotes all over Maria Heights. Cheapest housing within the city limits.”
“Does he bother you?”
She grimaced. “Define bother.”
“So, yes.”
She shrugged again.
“I don’t like that noncommittal mess, Willa. Give me an answer.”
“I don’t know what you want me to tell you. Maybe my tolerance level for being bothered has shifted a lot in the past couple hundred years. Seems silly to get upset over talk that, in the scheme of things, is just bluster.”
“You shouldn’t let people treat you like shit.”
That shouldn’t have been news to her, but the flicker of alarm on her face hinted that the statement was some sage revelation.
Dammit.
He dragged his hand down his face and moved slowly to the bed. “What have you been doing?”
“I was in bed.”
“No. I mean the past two weeks. You didn’t look like this before I left.”
“Like what?”
“Have you looked in a mirror lately?”
“I tend to avoid mirrors.”
“So, you’re a vampire now in addition to being a zombie?”
“No,” she whispered, wringing her hands and staring at the television screen. “But wouldn’t that make more sense? If I were a vampire, it would have almost been my just rewards for getting swept up in the Inquisition, right? But I’m not that. I’m just a woman who has a petty god as a father and who’s trying to navigate an immortal life-span without benefit of any magic or much extra physical durability. Sometimes, staying alive is harder than you’d think.”
“I don’t doubt it’s hard.” He sat on the edge of the bed next to her, leaving her a couple of inches of personal space for her bubble, even though he badly needed to touch her. He was wired to soothe her and prop her up, but she was almost too passive to bear. He needed to hear some words from her before his energy chased away her drive to speak and explain. And at some point, he was going to have to explain that it was okay if she touched him. She didn’t have to worry about being the other woman, because the animal part of him had decided that she was the only one that mattered. “What do you want, Willa? What’ll make things easier for you?”
She began rocking, back and forth, back and forth, brow furrowed and stare ahead on nothing in particular.
He let her have her moments of quiet contemplation, because perhaps thinking was harder for her than for others. Perhaps even simple questions elicited avalanches of memories, and she had to sort through every one before landing on a conclusion.
“Maybe having a new brain would help,” she said with a self-effacing scoff.
“What’s wrong with the one you’ve got?”
“It’s cluttered, and sometimes, all my thoughts blur. One worry blends into the next, and at a certain point, I can’t tell anymore what I’m supposed to pay attention to or what I should be afraid of. I just go through life with the same fear of everything because sometimes I can’t sort it all out. I wish I could push things to the back of my head or just dismiss them outright the way Noelle does.”
“You can’t compare yourself to Noelle. She’s an elf. In the research I’ve done, the fae are described as exceedingly practical by default.”
“Exceedingly practical,” she said, rocking some more. “That’s a good way of putting it. My father’s like that.”
“Is he?”
A clipped nod.
Blue hoped she’d elaborate, for once, but she didn’t. She turned to him, still wringing her hands, and staring at his jaw. “I keep telling myself that if I can get through tomorrow, I can hide on Saturday, but that seems to make me even more afraid of tomorrow.”
“What’s happening tomorrow, Willa?”
She gave her head a small shake and lowered her gaze to his hands.
He offered one to her in case she’d forgotten he’d given her permission before to touch him.
Her fingers made a delicate ring around his, touching, not squeezing at all. Timid.
“Nothing’s happening tomorrow,” she said. “It’s just another Friday. The same routine as always, but maybe someone will ask me to do one more thing and I’ll finally admit that I can’t. Or maybe Hank’ll show up to work with the kids and he’ll stand too close to me and I’ll just start sobbing because his energy is too big, and then I’ll have one more thing to add to my arsenal of embarrassment to cause future meltdowns from anxiety.”
“Willa . . . Why can’t you let someone help you?”
“Who?”
“Anyone.” Me.
She was going to break him. He already knew it, and he didn’t care. He’d take a turn carrying the heavy stuff if it meant she could raise her head even a half inch higher. She couldn’t go on like that.
“I’m not safe to be around.” A whispered confession. “My father would hurt people around me if that suited his end goal. He does it to people all the time.”
“Same.”
She didn’t look like she believed him, but all the same, she took a deep breath
and then another, gradually tightening her grip on his hand.
“There you go, honey. Take what you need.”
“I shouldn’t.”
“But you will. And that’s an order.”
Chapter Eighteen
Willa shouldn’t have touched him, but she was underwater and needed air. It didn’t matter if the air was potentially toxic. The pain of inhaling it would still be more soothing than suffocation. Maybe the medicine was almost as bad as the ailment, but it was the only thing that ever worked.
She hoped that if he were going to be smug about her neediness, that his words would be drowned out by the thud of her pulse in her head. She couldn’t look at him. Couldn’t wait and watch his lips move.
She didn’t know how long she sat there squeezing his hand like a timid child afraid of a shot at the doctor’s office, only that when she got control over her breathing, the television was off. She hadn’t seen him move.
“You’re burning up,” she heard him say despite the ghosts of the past crowding her thoughts. “Normally, I’d worry that was a fever, but you’re not like normal folks.”
“I’m not hot,” she said in an undertone, rocking back and forth and letting her eyelids drift downward. “So cold.”
“You may feel like you are, but you’re putting off a lot of heat. Your face is wet.”
“I’ll be fine. You can go if you want.”
“I don’t believe that.”
“You’re calling me a liar?”
“Yeah,” he rasped. The press of his other hand against the back of her neck managed to both incite her nerves so much that she practically launched off the bed and also made her head fall forward. Shocking and then soothing.
“You don’t have to be afraid of me, Willa.” He splayed his large hand at her nape, his thumb tracing a gentle line along the curve of her ear. Through the excitability she was trying to shake off, his touch was pure pleasure, and she didn’t understand why he’d bother. None of the Coyotes seemed to experience much joy when Blue touched them, just capitulation.
“Fear is how I’ve stayed alive as long as I have. I run at the first sign of trouble.”
“But isn’t it exhausting?” His hand slid slowly down her back, the press of it solid against her spine, every vertebra falling into line as his touch passed.