by Holley Trent
He looked away.
Thought so.
“What else did you find out about them?” he asked in a grumble.
“I found out that they travel through the Southwest selling their crafts. They take their money back to their little enclave, wherever it happens to be at the time. Sounds like they’ve been established in Oaxaca for quite a while, though. They divvy up the proceeds, and then start manufacturing crafts to sell again in four or six months.”
“Would probably be more efficient for them to have someone import the goods and sell them on their behalf.”
“Maybe so, but when they’re not selling, they spend the rest of the time they have left on their visas searching for La Dama in the U.S.”
“Why here?”
“That’s actually a good question. I didn’t think to ask.” She reached across the table and nabbed a chip.
He pushed a couple more to her and resumed eating.
“I think they’ve searched everywhere they can drive to. They have no idea where she is or if she’s even still alive, but I guess they’re compelled to search. The last time anyone in El Culto saw her was, by their reckoning, around 1540. Seems super specific, but they repeated that date again and again like it holds special significance.” Lily shrugged and popped the chips into her mouth. “Maybe it does. Even then, Lola was doing all she could to fade from public consciousness.”
“Why?”
“Hell if I know.” Lily fidgeted the cap of her water bottle, but that wasn’t enough movement to burn off her nervous energy. She got to her feet and rolled one ankle than the other. Her muscles were getting so tight. She was probably overdue to head back to the dance studio just to move her body in the old familiar ways. She wouldn’t even care so much if the owner harangued her into committing to teach a couple of spring classes. Lily had been too busy at the ranch to indulge her before, but she could probably spare a few hours each week. Getting those kids ready for spring recital was the real time-suck. She’d have to give the disturbance to her routine some more thought. There was such a thing as being too busy.
Lance tossed his phone from hand to hand. “We need to show a united front on this. Obviously, they’ve got issues with me because I’m not only a Coyote but male.”
“And they generally keep themselves so sheltered that they probably don’t have the right kind of communication strategies to resolve the conflict with discourse.”
“In my experience, all Cats are shit at communicating.”
Lily cut him a look.
He shrugged. “I said what I said. Your cousins are assholes.”
Before she could get a word out, he added, “Don’t come at me with that ‘takes one to know one’ crap. I know I have some personality flaws, but Coyotes, on the whole, aren’t all like me.”
“And thank goodness for that.”
He took a big bite of his sandwich and settled into an insouciant slouch.
He didn’t care.
Of course he didn’t care how she felt. She shouldn’t have expected more from a man who evidently had no feelings of his own. When she’d agreed to marry him, she’d hoped that all that arrogance was a curtain that hid a more considerate person.
There was no curtain. He was what he was.
And so was she.
She took her bottle of water and headed for the door.
“Where are you going?” he asked. “We need a plan.”
“And I need to get away from you for a few minutes. Don’t follow me.”
She stepped out of the trailer and slammed the door.
CHAPTER FIVE
“Hey.” Holding his phone against his ear, Lance peeled back the shades on the window facing the lake and scanned his surroundings.
“Everything’s fine,” Kenny said.
Lance’s cousin was arguably the single most efficient Coyote in existence. Lucky for Lance, Blue had seen potential in Kenny and hired him. Lucky, because where one cousin went, the other followed. Their mothers had been bundling them as a package deal since preschool. Sometimes, Coyotes needed to buddy up for safety from their own packs. Since the move to Maria, they’d given each other much more breathing room.
“I appreciate the status report,” Lance said. “Did you hear from Regina? I think my phone reception is spotty.”
Lance let go of the shade and dragged his hand down his face. He was starting to feel like a penned-in bull. Lily had been gone for an hour and it was dark out there. He didn’t know where she was or what the hell she was doing, and leaving the trailer to find her might cause some premature static with those Jaguars.
“Actually, yes,” Kenny said. “She said she’s going to be a bit delayed.”
“That’s actually good,” Lance muttered in a volume he hoped was too low for Kenny to hear. “But why?”
“Nothing ominous, and she sounded really bashful about holding you up. I think she just wanted to spend one more night in her house before the buyers take ownership.”
“She has the kid with her?”
“Yeah. According to her, he’s kind of withdrawn, but he trusts her well enough. Opened up a little when she bought him a baseball cap.”
“What team?”
“Star Wars. Team Finn.”
“Oh.”
At the creak near the front of the trailer, Lance hurried to the door just in time to see the Jaguars’ funny-looking dog skittering away. There was guilt written all over his face when he looked back.
Lance rolled his eyes, but since he was there, he pushed the door open a bit more and had a look around.
He couldn’t hear Lily or any of the Jaguars and didn’t see any either, so he stepped down and walked to the railing behind the picnic shelter.
Down on the beach, there were five women in black, one holding a baby. One sat facing the campsites.
He growled under his breath. They were a three-minute drive, and a much longer walk around a hilly winding road, away, but he suspected that if he tried to take off, they’d catch up to him lightning fast. If they were anything like Cougars, they’d overtake his ass before he’d had a chance to lose his breath.
Not that he could bounce without Lily, anyway.
Where the hell is she?
“Why are you growling?” Kenny asked.
Lance retreated to the trailer and pulled the door closed. At least he could speak candidly with the Jaguars down on the beach. “Got a little problem,” he said.
“A problem requiring my expertise? Do I need to fire up my tablet and Bluetooth keyboard to take notes or will memory suffice?”
Lance grimaced and sat to take off his boots. He figured he might as well make himself comfortable if he was going to be a prisoner in his own camper. “Maybe you oughtta take a couple of notes, but before we get to that part, I gotta tell you some things you shouldn’t write down anywhere ever.”
“What things?” Kenny asked in an ominous timbre. It was a tone he only ever used on misbehaving Coyotes or on his only cousin. Lance suspected Kenny was going to file him in both categories for the foreseeable future.
“First, promise you’ll keep your trap shut about the first part.”
“You want me to keep secrets from Blue?”
Fingers stilling in his bootlaces, Lance sucked some air through his teeth. He didn’t keep secrets from Blue. He’d never had to, but if Blue found out Lance was inadvertently courting a fresh feud with the Cougars, he was going to string him up by the balls and leave him out in the desert to fry.
Blue was at a certain age where he liked for people to not fuck with his peace. Lance felt him. Really, he did. Sometimes, though, Coyotes were messy. Lance was overdue for his turn being the epic mess.
“Okay, look.” Lance heeled the boots off and spread his toes in his socks. “Just use your discretion, okay? You know how to talk to Blue so he doesn’t jump to conclusions before you’ve had a chance to get words out.”
“What. Did. You. Do?” Kenny demanded.
“You have no faith in me at all, d
o you?”
“I swear to the gods I’ll call Aunt Cheryl and have her on standby with that clown doll she used to scare you with as a kid when you were being an ass.”
Lance shuddered at the thought of that creepy, old, dead-eyed doll. His mother had a very creative wicked streak. She would never simply lecture him when he was a kid. She’d make the clown lecture him, which added a certain level of WTF to the discipline. It’d gotten to be that the moment he started to step out of line, she could whisper, “I’ll go get Binky” and Lance would square up fast.
He let out a breath and stomped to the bed area. There were two of them. A wider on one the bottom for adults and a sort-of loft-like top bunk for smaller creatures. He’d assumed Lily would sleep there, but he had no idea where she was or if she was going to spend the night with her treacherous new friends.
He dragged a hand down his face and let out a grumble.
Should probably call her.
“Okay, look,” he said to Kenny. “Long and short of it is that Lily is here, and—”
“Lily Baxter?” Kenny interrupted.
“Yeah.”
“Mason’s cousin Lily?”
“Yeah, that Lily.”
“The Lily whose house the Cougar alpha can see from his back porch?”
“I think we’ve already established which Lily we’re talking about. No need to linger on the point.”
“I’m simply trying to ascertain if you’re actually that unwary. You shouldn’t be within a football field’s length of her.”
“Well, evidently I am that unwary, cousin, because the reason she’s here is that we got married on a lark and need to figure out how to undo it without the whole damn town finding out.”
Kenny let out one of those uptight little laughs he usually reserved for people who were foolish enough to think he wouldn’t punch them back. “No, you didn’t.”
“Yeah. I did.” Lance laid back, sighed, and draped his arm across his tired eyes. “End of August.”
“Why?” Kenny snapped.
Lance could imagine his cousin fairly thrumming with annoyance. It’d been a hell of a secret to keep. It wasn’t that Lance had been worried about him telling Blue everything that Lance shared in confidence, but more so that he hadn’t wanted to see that look of disappointment on his cousin’s face. Everyone knew that Lance was the disappointing ill-mannered slob of the two of them, but Lance did at least try to keep Kenny out of the splash zone of his bullshit.
“Remember Blue’s housewarming?” Lance asked.
“I was there.”
“Okay, well, apparently, Fate was also in attendance. Learned something interesting about Fate.”
“And what would that be?”
“That she’s a bitch, and she does her best work through her maidservant Mescal.”
“What the hell are you talking about?”
“Man, get with it. I hooked up with Lily.”
Kenny started trying to say something, but Lance just talked louder. He needed to get the words out.
“Apparently, some sciencey stuff happened. Cells collided and divided. Shit like that. A few weeks later, she texted me freaking out because she’d missed her period, and the next thing I know, I’m in my plane heading to Vegas with her.”
“This has got to be a joke.”
Lance grunted. That about summed it up.
Kenny took a deep breath, muttered something Lance couldn’t quite make out, and groaned. “Shit. I mean, I don’t know if that merits a lecture or not. Hardwired into Coyote nature is an urgency to try to sample potential fertile partners, so I imagine you weren’t thinking as rationally as you normally would. Blame it on your age.”
“Kindly go fuck yourself. You’re, what, thirteen months younger than me?”
“Anyhow,” Kenny said, unbothered, “if you had been thinking clearly, you wouldn’t have gone anywhere near Vegas given our current persona-non-grata status in the old pack.”
“Yep.”
“So…” Kenny took what sounded like a bracing breath. “When’s she due?”
“She’s not.”
“What?”
Lance didn’t want to talk about that shit. He didn’t want the understanding and the pity from Kenny. It was always so much worse coming from Kenny because Kenny was usually so stingy with his empathy. “Anyway, the important thing is that she’s here and that we’re working out how we’re going to handle the divorce since we don’t meet the requirements to get an annulment. That’s not the big problem I called you about, though.”
“What do you mean, she’s not? You forget who you’re talking to. I know that trick of yours. You can’t skim over shit and think I won’t catch it.”
“Yeah, well, I don’t want to talk about it.”
“Motherfucker, you’re going to talk about it. If I have to catch the wrath of Blue because of some shit you did, I’d at least like to know the whole story.”
“That part’s not as important as the next part, Kenny.”
“I’m afraid to ask, but what the hell is the next part, then?”
“This morning, I’d barely gotten the truck and camper parked at Elephant Butte before some bullshit started. While I was on the phone with Blue, Lily started chatting with the folks on the neighboring pad. Remember what I was telling you about Fate being a bitch? The one I pulled into was the only site left for a trailer. This place is fucking packed this week. Some kind of festival happening on the beach. Anyway, one of the ladies she was talking to saw this mark she has on her neck and identified it as being made by La Bella Dama. Apparently, she and the rest of the ladies with her are all Jaguars from Mexico, and—”
“Stop—”
“Nah, I’m not done. Start typing your notes, Ken, because it gets worse. These Jaguars? Turns out they’re a part of some kind of roving goddess cult that hates men. Me being a Coyote was just icing on the freaking shitstorm cake. They jumped me as soon as I got within smelling distance of them. I think they’re pressing Lily on what she knows about the whereabouts of their missing goddess, and in the meantime, they’re keeping me on a short leash. I suspect that if I wasn’t married to Lily, they would have shoved me, still-breathing, into their hot grill.”
“They know you have that phone you’re on?”
“Yeah, they know. I suspect they think I’m not going to cause them problems with Lily so close.”
“Yes, gods forbid your wife gets hurt,” Kenny said acidly.
“Because she’s human, man, and a Foye-adjacent.”
Lance could practically hear the rolling of his cousin’s eyes.
“Basically, you have limited options,” Kenny said. “Even if we were nearby, you can’t get backup without there being a scene, and people like us don’t make scenes around humans. We handle our own shit.”
“Exactly.”
“Is Lily safe with them?”
“They seem warm enough with her, but I suspect that’s because they want information from her.”
“Does she know that?”
“Who the hell knows?”
“Conversation is a thing.”
“Yeah, whenever she comes back from wherever she went to, we can certainly hash that out. She stormed off.”
“Why?”
“Hormones.”
Shitty thing to say, but it wasn’t a lie. He could smell that cocktail of anger spike whenever she got piqued. The incomparable aroma unsettled him. He’d never encountered anything quite the same before. It was an “Oh, you really fucked up now” scent that instilled in him the same sort of trepidation as him realizing that there were venomous snakes within striking distance.
“What are you not telling me?” came Kenny’s flat rejoinder.
“Drop it.”
“No, I’m not going to drop it. I’m not going to let you selectively dangle information in front of me and then bound off. Spit it out, or I’m not only going to be dialing Aunt Cheryl right after I end this call, but I’ll have Blue conferenced in, too
, so help me, gods.”
“Shit.” Lance pounded the top of the taut mattress and kicked the edge of the bed with his heel, making the whole trailer rock. “You want to know? Fine. Lily only got to ten weeks. Now she gets a fresh lease on life. No unwanted attachments to Coyotes.”
No much-wanted baby for his mother to cuddle and promise the sun and moon to.
He was never going to be able to tell his mother what he’d almost had. She’d be broken all over again.
No, he wasn’t going to do that to her.
He’d never tell.
CHAPTER SIX
Lily took a deep breath as she approached the door of Lance’s trailer and glanced over her shoulder at Blanca. Blanca may have been pretending to be disinterested, standing near the road’s edge and studying her chewed-short nails, but Lily knew better. Those women had a resounding skepticism about Lance and didn’t trust him as far as they could throw him.
Lily knew the feeling.
“Well. Thanks for dinner,” Lily called out to her.
“We give you food, you teach us the dance, sí?”
“If I would have known the choreography for the Cupid Shuffle could be used as currency, I would actually have enough money in my savings account right now to buy a plane ticket to see my mother. I’ve led that dance at every quinceañera, bar mitzvah, and cookout I’ve been to since 2007.”
Blanca swatted dismissively in Lily’s direction. “Ah. Put ticket on your credit card. See your mamá.”
“Gotta pay those things off, you know.”
“¿Pero de a poquite, sí?” Blanca grinned like a Cheshire cat. Or Cheshire Jaguar, rather. She had her canines deployed for heightened comical effect.
“Slowly?” Lily giggled, knowing she shouldn’t have been laughing it up with the ladies given the circumstances, but she couldn’t help herself. They were so normal and, collectively, they reminded her of her mother. Boisterous and irreverent.
Lily hadn’t been able to visit her for two years, and that was about average for them with her mother being unable to enter the country. She missed her so much.
“You okay,” Blanca said, starting for the tents and van. She tapped her temple and narrowed her eyes before disappearing from Lily’s view. “Think what we say. We watch you.”