by Holley Trent
“Why are you down there so early?” Blue asked.
“Um.” Lance searched for a lie. He could have kicked himself for not anticipating that question.
The lady from the van had stopped shaking the rug and had instead slung it over a rail to beat it with a stick. He knew he shouldn’t form any taste judgments yet. People who liked to camp sometimes hauled around some odd shit. He had some art in his travel trailer that not even a junk dealer would touch. Tacky, but matched the Naugahyde sofa.
“I…got here early just in case Regina’s estimate was off and she had any travel issues,” Lance said in a falsely cavalier tone. “I don’t know what kind of driver she is or how she’s going to adjust to having a young Coyote in the car with her for all that time. They fidget a lot.” He hated lying to his alpha about his decisions. Initially, Lance’s plan had been to leave Maria after the pack meeting later that night, but half the town would have been out then, cruising Main Street and looking for any-damn-thing to do. He’d needed to get Lily out sooner. Fortunately, Blue wasn’t in front of him and couldn’t smell the lie. The less Blue knew about Lily, the better. It wasn’t that he cared so much which ladies his lieutenants took home, but he did care about perceptions. The pack in Maria had a long way to go to undo the PR mess they’d created in the past hundred years. It wasn’t like he could hang out an “Under New Management” sign and expect other local shifters and paranormal sorts to take him at his word. They actually had to behave themselves.
Being impetuous sorts, behaving was hard for Coyotes. Still, Blue was an evolved kind of alpha and expected his Coyotes to keep their noses clean. If he found out Lance had potentially triggered another turf war with the Cougars, he was probably going to dig a hole in his newly landscaped backyard and bury Lance up to his neck until he got bored looking at him.
Lance sucked some air through his teeth and scratched his head through the back opening of his baseball cap. “Any updates on when Regina is supposed to arrive, by the way? She hasn’t contacted me directly.”
“I’ll check with Kenny and let you know. She was having some issues springing Gus from his group home, but Kenny said they were getting everything worked out.”
The rug lady’s climb back into the van triggered the abrupt liberation of some kind of shorthaired, high-strung dog. The animal looked around with the urgency of a carb addict on a donut bender and then took off like a bolt down the road. Lance stifled a laugh when the lady leaped back out of the van after it. She’d moved so precipitously that one of her sandals flew off her foot. She didn’t stop to put it back on. That waddling run of hers was comic gold.
“What was the problem?” he asked Blue. Lance tried to lock down his focus like the well-trained dog he was, but that effort was shot all to hell yet again because Lily chose that moment to get out of the truck. She was still bundled up in the blanket as though she were braving a trek through the Arctic wilderness and not a campsite equipped with water and electric hookups. She looked not at him, but in the direction the dog and the lady had sprinted to. If he’d been any less surprised, he wouldn’t have a pulse. She never looked at him. The little snob thought he was a waste of good organic material.
“She was having a hard time establishing her legal right to take the kid,” Blue said, drawing Lance’s attention back to his real reason for being there. “Didn’t have a lot of paperwork to show the caseworker. Too typical of Coyote kids coming out of small, disordered packs like his, though. Regina didn’t even know Gus existed until about six months ago. Her daughter had mailed her a confessional letter right before she passed and said to find Gus and put him in a pack. The daughter mentioned the only alpha’s name she could think of, which was Shapely. Fortunately, the query got forwarded to me and not to my father. Poor lady, getting thrown so slapdash into the paranormal shit like this. She hadn’t heard from her daughter in fifteen years before that letter. The daughter had run away from home with a bunch of bikers. Got turned into a Coyote by one, I guess.”
“If we’d known about Gus six months ago, we might have helped sooner. We were distracted.”
“Okay, well, distracted is putting things mildly. You don’t have to hang lace curtains around a pigsty for my sake.”
Lance snorted.
Back in May, Blue had been in the process of trying to put the brakes on the arranged marriage his father had coordinated for him. Randall Shapely was the kind of alpha who’d sell his soul for a diamond pinky ring. He didn’t give a damn about Blue’s desires. At the same time Blue had been trying to disentangle himself from his father, he’d been tasked with meeting the Maria Cougar alpha’s deadline for getting the Coyotes shaped up. The Coyotes under past alphas had squandered all the goodwill they’d had with the town’s other magic groups and the town had been fed up with their drunken antics. Blue’s options had been to get them square or get them shipped out.
Lance had been doing everything in his power to support Blue in the former so that they—along with Lance’s cousin Kenny, and Blue’s sister Diana—didn’t have to return to the Coyote hellhole known as Sparks, Nevada. It wasn’t like they could create a whole new pack somewhere else. Shit didn’t work that way. Territories had been carved out during the western expansion, and they had to respect the boundaries, even if sometimes, they seemed to be the only ones so hell-bent on following those archaic rules.
“Anyhow, we’ll get it all sorted out,” Blue said through another yawn. “Regina doesn’t know shit about Coyotes or shapeshifters in general, but she wanted to make sure Gus was around some before he started puberty.”
“Probably not how she wanted to spend her retirement. Packing up her life and moving to a new state with a culture she doesn’t know?” Lance gave his head a shake of awe. “Poor broad.”
“She’s doing what she’s gotta. I bet any of us would do the same.”
“Yeah. Probably.” Coyotes didn’t like to give up children. They were possessive when it came to kids, even the ones who weren’t technically theirs. “Finders keepers” didn’t always align so well with state and federal laws.
Another lady emerged from the van and looked in the direction the younger woman and the dog had gone.
Blue had started chatting with someone in his house, so Lance watched the spectacle in front of him with keen interest.
Lily, in her silly blanket mummy wrap, shambled over and said something to her and pointed toward the eloping duo.
The lady turned her hands over in one of those “But why?” gestures.
Laughing and adjusting her blanket so she looked less mummy and more Statue of Liberty, Lily moved toward the stranger, chatting and smiling.
He growled softly.
That snobby little fraud could make conversation with a brick wall and have it talk back, but she and he didn’t really talk. They didn’t have anything in common except for a fondness for mescal, and mescal was what had gotten them in trouble in the first place. Mescal had told him, “Go ’head. Fuck the Cougar alpha’s cousin. Nobody has to know.”
He scoffed and gave his head a hard shake. Never in his life had he fallen for such a trap before. He couldn’t believe he’d opened his mouth to suggest they get married. Marriage hadn’t even been in his twenty-year plan, but there was a baby, and then there was no baby. He couldn’t blame Lily for that, though. He blamed himself for touching her in the first place. Coyote and booze had never been a winning combination.
“You all right?” Blue asked. He sounded a little more wakeful now that he’d finished his side conversation.
“Yeah, just distracted by the scenery. People-watching and such.”
“All right. Keep your phone charged. I’ll touch base in a couple of hours.”
“Will do.” Lance disconnected.
The woman Lily had been conversing with took a space-eating step toward her. She was in her bubble, peering at something on the back of Lily’s neck, and Lily just let her. She was showing off her lack of personal safety instincts again. If a str
anger had gotten that close to Lance, they’d crawl away missing a bite-shaped chunk. Wasn’t his business, though. If she wanted to make nice-nice with a gropey stranger, that was on her.
He put his back to the scene and attempted to tactically assess his surroundings, but he was too damned curious. Even with his superior hearing, he couldn’t make out what Lily was saying. He turned back around so he could read her lips. Her forehead was creased and lips turned down into a pout, but she didn’t look distressed. She rubbed her neck and murmured something to the woman who then grabbed her wrist.
Hands off, lady, the coyote part of him thought.
She’d touched Lily, and that got Lance moving. There was only so much “wait and see” a Coyote could do, and in spite of their tenuous association at the moment, he was still the ultimate steward of her safety. He probably wouldn’t have to worry about Blue putting him in a hole if anything happened to Lily. The Cougar alpha Mason Foye would get to Lance first. The man made high-end furniture for a living and owned a lot of powerful drills, saws, and clamps. He also had access to thousands of acres of ranchland that he could “misplace” a Coyote on.
The woman pulled Lily closer to the van, and Lance picked up speed, shouting, “Hey! What are you doing?”
The stranger’s head swiveled toward Lance with robotic alacrity and her gaze immediately focused. Too late he heard the hiss and saw her pupils shrink and fangs descend.
He made a grab for Lily, but the stranger was faster. She pivoted Lily away and into the van with assistance from conspirators inside he couldn’t see.
“Shit!” he shouted.
He tried to get to the open passenger door, but he was being swarmed by a mob of women who all had shifter energy. They’d seemed to come out of nowhere. He was used to having his attention divided—he couldn’t have been so effective as one of Blue’s lieutenants if he hadn’t had experience staving off threats from multiple directions—but in the past, what he was dealing with had always made sense.
Something was off. He knew Cougars. Lily was a blood relative to a whole passel of them. The shifter odor hung heavy around that van and the woman lunging at him, but it wasn’t quite right for the cats he knew.
“Lily?” he called out as the woman’s hands became claws and her mouth opened, ready to strike.
He got his head out of the way barely a split-second before she landed on him. Being substantially heavier than her, he managed to throw her off, but it didn’t matter. There were more of whatever she was behind him. They’d likely come out of the van. There were two, maybe three of them. Wicked stealth.
Suddenly his arms were at his back with his wrists pinned together. Some sharp thing pressed against his jugular. He knew not to move, but he called out in a panic, anyway, “Lily?”
He couldn’t see her. He could barely make out the sound of her voice over the percussive thrashing of his beating heart in his ears. If they hurt her, heads were going to roll. He knew how to wing it when he had to.
He gave his arms a wild yank, but that was for naught. He didn’t need to turn and see them to know he was outnumbered. There were at least five hands on him.
“Te mueves, te mueres,” one of the women said.
“What?” He knew approximately ten words of Spanish, and many of those were types of liquor. “Lily?”
“Don’t move,” Lily called out from inside the van. “Just don’t move. I’m fine.”
He didn’t buy that. There didn’t seem to be any hints of strain in her voice, but she was a faker. She knew how to pretend to be nice.
“I can’t see you,” he said.
“Yes, um…I think there’s been a misunderstanding.”
“Yeah, well—” That sharp thing poking into his neck dug in a little deeper and Lance recoiled reflexively. “Would you get the hell off me?” he shouted at them.
Their grips tightened, the points got sharper.
Still, Lance was going to put up a fight because sitting ducks tended to become roasted ones. “‘Misunderstanding’ might the understatement of the year, shortcake.” He gave his wrists another yank to one side and then the other to pry himself a bit of breathing room. Their energy was suffocating and he needed space.
That dog that had bolted away earlier jangled past, tongue lolling, and parked its rump by the van’s front wheel. It looked from Lance to the open door, to Lance again, and then proceeded to lick itself.
Lance didn’t know whether to laugh at the ridiculousness of the situation or scream.
“Muévete.” The sharp thing at his neck dug in and Lance opted to save the fight for later. Picking up a kid and his grandma and figuring out how to file for a damn divorce were the only two things on his agenda for the day. Bleeding to death wasn’t anywhere on that list.
They pushed him into the van, barely giving him the opportunity to step up into the thing before some kind of covering was thrown over his head and tied taut at his throat.
His wrists were bound with something sharp and digging, and his feet were tied to the bottom of his seat. He wondered if his innumerable sins had caught up to him and if he was going to meet his reckoning at the hands of some funny-smelling cat shifters.
It didn’t seem a glorious way to die. Seemed kinda like hell, actually.
Well, shit.
CHAPTER TWO
Try as she might, Lily was having a hard time keeping up with the women’s rapid-fire dialect. She’d been bilingual since learning to speak and was starting to suspect that the comprehension problem wasn’t due to rusty language skills on her part. Their dialect of Spanish seemed to contain an unpredictable smattering of indigenous words she was only superficially familiar with. Further, they were speaking so quickly and with such constant verbal shorthand that the sounds were almost blurring together. She had to close her eyes and concentrate hard to pick apart the language components.
“La rubia,” they kept saying. That was how she knew they were talking about her. She was the only blond woman anywhere around them. From what she could catch, they didn’t seem to be speaking of her in ill terms, which made sense, since one of the women had thrust a baby at her the moment she’d been guided into the cluttered vehicle.
She shifted the baby to her other arm and tried to get comfortable atop the hard footlocker she sat on. All of the seats in the fifteen-seater van, save the captain’s chairs in the front and the bench immediately behind it, had been removed to make room for the women’s possessions. The bags and crates were packed tight as Jenga towers. Lily pondered how long they must have been on the road.
Lance, tied to the bench still mounted to the floor, twisted his body and tried to kick his legs out of his bindings.
Lily had watched the women tie him up and knew the futility of the movements. Those binds were secure, and that cording was unbreakable.
“What the hell is this?” he asked, though Lily didn’t know who. She’d been hoping he’d just keep his mouth shut until she could figure out what was happening.
Fat chance of that.
The woman who’d pulled her into the van poked her head into the van at his query but only stared at him with cool annoyance before returning to her conversation outside. She’d been so curious about a scar on the back of Lily’s neck, and Lily had been too taken aback to say anything about it except, “Yeah, it’s pretty wide, huh?” It seemed a random thing to her that a stranger would so boldly point out the slight disfigurement.
Lily strained to see her through the window. She’d never met anyone who looked like her before, and questions sprang out of the ether of Lily’s mind.
The woman was a dominating figure of around thirty whose incongruous features spoke of some mixed heritage that wasn’t often seen in Mexico, where the van’s license plates indicated she and her entourage were from. Her skin was dark, her hair scraped back into a single long braid had a coarse and cottony texture normally seen only in people of African descent, but her face bore a resemblance to every Mixtec sculpture Lily had seen in
museums.
“Hmm. Maybe that explains the language,” Lily mused quietly.
Holding the baby against her chest, she wriggled a path through the mounds of laundry bags piled in front of the farthest back edge of the window for a closer look at the other women. Variations on a theme. Some lighter, some darker. Some with straighter hair, some with curlier. All with dark eyes and dangerous litheness she should have recognized on sight. She’d grown up around shifters and was usually better at spotting them before she could offend them. She was praying she hadn’t.
She didn’t quite grasp what was happening, but evidently, they didn’t intend to hurt her. They wouldn’t have plopped someone’s baby on her lap if they had. If the baby was alarmed at all by the commotion, she didn’t show it. She was too busy trying to shove ever more fingers into her mouth, gnawing and drooling with all the telltale enthusiasm of the perpetually teething. Chunky-cheeked and diaper-bottomed, and wearing mismatched clothes. Missing one of her socks.
Lily’s belly lurched with yearning.
Bad medicine.
When she’d thought she was going to be the next victim of Maria’s baby boom, she hadn’t been all that put out by the idea. Her life wouldn’t have changed much with or without Lance; she would have had scads of support on the ranch. Aunt Glenda was pretty much always holding someone’s baby. Her best friend, and cousin, Belle, though aggressively swerving away from any surprises from the stork of her own, was like a bonus mom to her niece and nephews. Then there were all the ladies in the Cougar group who espoused the “it takes a community” method of childrearing.
Lily would have been fine.
It just wasn’t meant to be.
She ran a hand over the baby’s curls and smiled at those five uncovered, fat toes.
Lily had been a scrawny baby. Small and pink like a newborn bird. Not at all cute until she was around two, not even with the darling little earrings her mother had the pediatrician put in. Her father had insisted, though, that she’d been the prettiest baby in Maria. Of course, he would have. He was one of those parents whose children were the center of their universe.