by Roxie Noir
Buck Reynolds, Trevor’s father, did a lot of talking about how the government of the U.S. was unfair to shifters. In his opinion, shifters had to stand up for their rights, and what they couldn’t take by asking nicely, they should take by force.
Trevor didn’t trust his father at all. As far as he knew, he’d never actually done anything with all those weapons, but he didn’t put it past the man.
The door was unlocked, and Trevor pushed it open, revealing the harsh fluorescent lighting inside.
To one side, a chair fell over, and Tim scrambled up off the floor. Then he stood there, guilty, his hands behind his back.
Trevor frowned.
“What’s going on, buddy?” he asked.
Tim shrugged. Trevor closed the door behind himself, then walked over to where the kid was standing, righting the chair as he did.
Tim had been sitting in front of a workbench, and he’d stood so fast that the chair tipped over.
On the workbench was a rifle.
Trevor felt rage flare through his body.
They left a gun where Tim could get it, he thought. I should just shoot Scarlet and Dad with this thing, see how they like it. How stupid can you get? Who leaves a gun out where an eight-year-old can get to it?
“Tim, were you touching this gun?” he asked, looking down at the boy.
Tim looked up, his eyes wide. Then he looked down at the ground.
“No?” he said.
“Really?” Trevor said.
“I’m sorry,” Tim whispered.
He’s going to die before his first shift and it’s going to be my goddamn idiot father’s fault, thought Trevor, even as he tried to push his fury down inside himself.
“These are very, very dangerous,” Trevor said. He knelt down in front of Tim. The boy’s misery practically radiated out from him. “I don’t want you playing with them because I don’t want you getting hurt, all right?”
“Okay,” whispered Tim.
“It’s up to me to keep you safe,” Trevor went on. “Because I love you, okay?”
Trevor knew it was a non-sequitur, but he didn’t know what the next hours held.
Unexpectedly, Tim wrapped his arms around Trevor’s neck, and held him for a few long moments. Trevor hugged him back, feeling the tears come to his eyes.
What have I done? He wondered. This is all my fault. I wish I’d never met...
The thought trailed off. He didn’t wish he’d never met Austin. That just wasn’t true.
I wish I had a different family, Trevor thought. I wish Papa and David were still alive.
Tim pulled back, and Trevor mussed his hair. The kid had the exact same gray eyes that he had.
“Are grandpa and Aunt Scarlet in the back?” he asked.
Tim nodded.
“Go play outside,” Trevor said. “It’s a beautiful day.”
Obedient because he knew he’d gotten off light, Tim ran outside. Trevor figured he’d check on him in a few minutes.
In the meantime, he grabbed the rifle by the barrel and shoved open the next door. The meeting room was empty, but when he shoved open the office door, he found his sister and his father in there, huddled over something.
The moment he came in, they flipped a piece of paper over and both glared.
Trevor held the rifle up, his hand still wrapped around the barrel.
“I just found Tim playing with this,” he said.
Scarlet and his father just looked at the gun, then back up at Trevor.
“You just left this where he could get to it,” he explained. His voice started rising.
“He knows not to touch guns,” said his father.
“He is eight,” said Trevor. He could feel himself losing control and starting to shout. “He doesn’t have a lot of self-control, because he is eight years old. You can’t leave guns out where he can get to them, because he is eight.”
Blank stares.
“If he shoots himself, it’ll be your fault,” Trevor said. He felt like his anger might take on a life of its own and simply rip through his skin to strangle the two of them. “Or do you not mind if one more person in this family dies? Is that just fine?”
His sister Scarlet clenched her jaw. She had unsettling yellow-gray eyes, dark hair and sharp cheekbones. She stood and snatched the gun from Trevor, then tossed it onto the desk and sat back down.
“It’s just a tranq gun,” she muttered.
Their father’s eyes snapped to her, glaring. Scarlet saw, and slouched down a little more in her chair.
“Oh, that’s fine then!” Trevor shouted. “Great! Your niece and nephew will just tranquilize themselves, then. No problem at all.”
She rolled her eyes.
“It’s not loaded,” she said, as if Trevor were some kind of moron.
He was so angry he felt like he couldn’t breathe.
“I hope you have kids and I hope they shoot themselves by accident when you leave a gun out,” he spat. “That’s what you deserve.”
Then he turned and stomped out of the office, out of the meeting room, and out of the workshop, back into the bright sunlight.
For a moment, he leaned against the metal workshop, feeling the ridges in his back. He took a couple of deep breaths, trying to calm himself down, but he kept flexing his hands.
How could they? He thought, over and over again. They can do whatever they want to me. I’m an adult, I can fight them, I know what’s wrong and what’s right. But how could they be so careless around the kids?
Just then, Tim came running up, holding something in his hands and shouting.
“What?” Trevor asked, bending down.
“I got a frog do you wanna see?” Tim asked.
“Sure,” Trevor said.
It didn’t hit him until later.
Trevor was packing jeans into a duffel bag when, all of a sudden, it clicked: the guy in the woods had a tranquilizer dart in his neck, and his sister had a tranq gun.
He froze, the pants still in his hands, and stared blankly at the wall.
Fuck, he thought. It wasn’t Scarlet, right?
Right?
He didn’t believe himself, not even a little. Scarlet was, in most ways, a miniature version of their father — just as ruthless, calculating, and blindly dumb. The main difference was, where Buck Reynolds had just enough charisma to actually lead a wolf pack, Scarlet had zero.
Trevor’s stomach sank, and he put his pants into the bag.
Sloane is getting questioned right now for something that Scarlet did.
He sat down on the bed and put his head in his hands.
How did it ever get to this, he thought. Why do I have to choose between my sister and my mate?
He pinched the bridge of his nose between his finger and thumb.
She’s not your mate, he berated himself. No matter how much you want her to be, it takes a little more than flirting and skinny dipping to actually make it happen.
Trevor had no idea what to do. His whole life, he’d grown up learning that, as a wolf, his priorities were family, pack, self. But how did he choose? Scarlet was family, no matter how he felt about that, but Sloane was just some girl he’d met briefly twice. Yeah, he sure wanted a lot more from her, but that didn’t make it true.
You don’t even know that Scarlet shot the kid, he thought to himself. Maybe they’ll run fingerprints or something and it’ll prove that it wasn’t her.
He didn’t even believe it himself. He wasn’t sure how he knew, but he was dead certain that his sister had shot a young man in the woods. She’d probably thought that he was dead, or close enough.
She can’t even do this right, he thought. He took a deep breath.
Family, pack, self.
Maybe we can choose our own family, he thought.
For a moment he flashed back to the moments at the lookout, sharing a sandwich with Austin and Sloane, and how utterly right that felt.
They’re my family, he thought. Fuck it. I’m going to the cops.
He tossed a few more shirts into the duffel bag, then slid it under his bed. He’d have to wait until late that night to leave, but his mind was made up.
Just as he was about to leave his bedroom and go downstairs for dinner, there was a knock at his door, and he opened it.
His father stood there. The two men were exactly the same height, and Trevor saw his own gray eyes staring back at him.
Then his father half-smiled, a smile that didn’t entirely register on his face.
“Pack meeting,” Buck said.
11
Sloane
Sloane put her head down on the metal interrogation table.
“James’s testimony puts you on the scene, with a gun in your hand,” the officer opposite her said.
Sloane raised her head slightly and just looked at him. She knew that she should probably be completely terrified right now. After all, she was getting charged with attempted murder, and apparently the victim had seen her shoot him.
True, she was starting to get nervous, but at that point, it was still hard for her to even take it seriously. She knew that she hadn’t done anything wrong, and besides, she was tired, hungry, and had been asking for a lawyer for the better part of three hours.
“I. Want. A lawyer,” she said, enunciating each word as clearly as she could.
I should probably not be so bitchy with police officers, she thought.
“Please,” she finished.
The cop just shook his head.
“The public defender’s office is closed for the night,” he said. “And you could be out of here on bail in a couple hours if you just told us what happened...”
Even as a bolt of fear shot through her heart, Sloane rolled her eyes.
The door to the interrogation room opened, and both Sloane and the officer opposite her sat upright as another officer let a very tall, very good-looking man wearing a dark gray suit through into the room.
“I’m Julius Bloom, and I’ll be representing Ms. Garcia today,” he said. “That is, if Ms. Garcia consents?”
“Yes,” she said quickly.
He must be Austin’s cousin, she thought. Are they all hot? Is there a rule? Is it genetics?
“Officer, could I have a moment with my client, please?” Julius asked.
The cop nodded, then stood and left, clearly unhappy with how things were going.
“Tell me everything,” Julius said, sitting down next to her.
She did, from the moment she’d seen the scrap of blue in the forest to getting home from the hospital and sharing cookies with Austin.
Julius seemed slightly amused about Austin, for some reason.
“You’ve never seen James Cookson before,” he said.
“No.”
“You don’t know that name, and you’ve never been here before?”
Sloane just shook her head.
He sighed.
“Well, they’re trying to pin this on you because you’re from out of town, and they want an open-and-shut case so they can get back to driving their oversized pickup trucks around town and perfecting their hog calling,” he said. “Don’t worry. You’ll be back at the ranch by midnight.”
Sloane exhaled. She hadn’t even realized she was holding her breath. Julius motioned the officers back in, and opened his briefcase.
“I’ll make this brief, officer,” he said. “I stopped by and picked up a copy of the young man’s statements before coming in here, and I agree that he claims a woman shot him,” he said. Julius pulled out a couple of papers and put them on the table. “However, there are approximately five thousand people matching that description in Ponderosa County at any given time. Furthermore, he also claims to have seen a snake with eagle wings, a monster with the body of a rhinoceros and the legs of a spider, and, if I’m reading this correctly, the Hindu god Vishnu. That’s the one with lots of arms, right?”
The officer’s mouth formed a straight line.
“Despite the absence of any of this woman’s features, you somehow got a warrant to search my client’s belongings and her room at the Double Moon Ranch,” Julius went on.
“What?” said Sloane. “You went through my stuff?”
“Noted among the items, as though it’s important, is a pocket knife and a bottle of ibuprofen,” Julius said.
He gave the officer a long, hard look.
“Are you really going to make an argument that those are unusual for someone hiking over two thousand miles?”
The officer said nothing. Sloane fought the urge to stick her tongue out at him.
“Finally,” Julius said. “You’re probably aware that the syringe itself was dusted for fingerprints,” Julius said.
The officer just nodded. He looked very much like he didn’t want to be there.
“You’re also aware that the only fingerprints found on it were James’s own?”
“I was not aware of that,” the officer said stiffly.
Julius leaned forward, across the table.
“You have no reason to continue holding my client, and if she’s not released within the hour, every media outlet in Cascadia will know that you’re holding innocent human tourists while a real attempted killer gets off scot-free.”
The two men just looked at each other for a few beats.
“Thank you,” Julius said. He sat back in his chair, and the officer grudgingly got up and left the room.
Julius looked at Sloane and winked.
“So you know Austin, huh?” he asked.
It was fairly obvious that it was a loaded question, and Sloane’s head spun with the transition from hardass laywer-Julius to nosy-question-asking Julius.
“Yeah,” she said.
“He was pretty concerned about you,” he said.
“Yeah, he’s really nice.”
Julius laughed out loud.
“Well, it’s about time,” he said, though Sloane didn’t really know what he was talking about. “When you get out of here, tell him that RSVPing to his cousin’s wedding isn’t fucking optional, will you? That thing was due two weeks ago, and we’ve got seating charts to make.”
The officer opened the door again, a scowl on his face.
“You’re free to go,” he said to Sloane. Then he left.
Julius walked her to the waiting room, where Austin was still sitting. He jumped up when he saw Sloane and wrapped her in a giant bear hug, his warm strength totally enveloping her.
Peeking around his shoulder, Sloane could see Julius grin, like he knew something that she didn’t.
As Austin drove them back to the ranch, the magnitude of what had just happened finally hit Sloane. She rested her head against the cold window of the truck.
“That was almost really bad,” she said, mostly to herself.
Austin looked over at her, concern filling his handsome face.
“You’re okay,” he said. He reached over and took her small hand in his big one, and Sloane could feel warmth and comfort radiating through him as he laced his fingers through hers.
Something else, too.
“Yeah,” she said, looking out the windshield.
Then she turned to look at Austin, his face still lined with worry, and she realized something.
“You’re worried about Trevor,” she said.
“Yeah,” Austin nodded.
“What’ll happen to him?” she asked, softly.
“I don’t know,” said Austin.
“Has this ever happened before?”
“Not that I know of,” Austin said. “Though it’s not like I can really ask. Bears and wolves aren’t supposed to be...”
He trailed off.
“Lovers?” Sloane asked.
“Yeah,” Austin said, softly. Then he looked over at her. “I’ve never admitted that before.”
Sloane just squeezed his hand.
“Are you still leaving in the morning?” he asked.
“I don’t think so,” she said. “Will Barb mind if I stay another day? I’d l
ike to sort some things out.”
“I think that’ll be fine,” Austin said.
When they parked back at the ranch, the porch light was still on, and Sloane could see Barb in the living room, watching a black-and-white movie.
Before they got out, she scooted over to Austin, and before he could do anything, she kissed him very softly on the cheek, afraid that her heart might beat clear out of her chest.
“We’ll figure out how to help Trevor,” she said.
“We?”
“If you’ll have me.”
Austin smiled.
12
Trevor
The moment his father told him there was a pack meeting, Trevor had gotten worried. Pack meetings were normally on a schedule, and they took place on Saturday mornings. They weren’t at night with no notice.
He’s found out already, Trevor thought. That was faster than I anticipated.
By now they were in the workshop, his father leading him into the big meeting room. Everyone in the pack was there, thirty or forty wolves, all sitting around quietly.
Trevor felt watched. No, more than watched. He felt like he was under a microscope, almost like he was prey. The thought made him stand up taller.
You could run, he thought. Prey would run.
There were wolves in front of the door, and the workshop didn’t have windows. Trevor was trapped and he knew that there was only one way out — through the other wolves.
This is payback for Olivia, he thought. This is what I deserve.
He sat on a stool, watching his father.
Buck stood in front of everyone. As much as Trevor didn’t agree with his father, he had to admit that the man had charisma. Who else could get this many other wolves to be here, even after getting two of their comrades killed? Who could have them all hanging on his every word?
He waited until the big, echoing metal room was totally silent before he spoke.
“As most of you know, we’re almost ready to put the plan into action,” he said.
Trevor blinked.
What?
“The time is right for the wolf to rise up and take what’s his,” he went on. “No more being under a human thumb. Wolves first, now and forever!”