by Holley Trent
“Could it be an ability they get from someone else?”
Lily’s brow creased even deeper and her legs stopped moving. “She…said they, not her.”
“Who? What are you talking about?”
Lily gave her head a clearing shake. “Estela. I’m replaying the words in my head now, translating the Spanish to English instead of just thinking in Spanish. Estela said ‘su creación.’ ‘Su’ can translate to his, her, or your, depending on context, but it could also mean their.”
Lance’s belly flip-flopped in the way it did that time he was trying desperately to get his flight hours in before his instructor retired and they’d taken to the air on a day with dangerous high winds that had him white-knuckling the controls and his body threatening encopresis. “As far as I know,” he said low, “Lola Perez is just one person.”
“She has a twin,” Lily said, but she didn’t seem relieved at all by the revelation.
“You don’t think it was him.”
Lily shook her head. “No. I don’t think Shadow was there. In Mesoamerican lore, twin gods were a common enough thing. They were supposed to be each other’s counterbalance. Different sides of the same coin. It would make sense that he would create something with her, but I already know that’s not the case. Lola and Shadow were already mostly estranged by the time Europeans found America. Also, at that point, the Cougars had existed as a race for a few hundred years, and Lola’s brother had his version of them in Los Impostores. We would know if they’d made anything together.”
“And by we you mean…”
She grimaced. “I spend so much time around Cougars that I forget I’m not one. But, yeah, the Cougars and assorted company who make Lola’s lore their business.”
“There’s a possibility she’s simply not telling you everything, you know. Most patron gods don’t make themselves so available to their packs. They leave them to figure shit out on their own and meddle from afar.” No one had any idea which being was responsible for the creation of the Coyotes. Lance suspected he or she didn’t want to take credit for the mess.
“Yes, but I get the feeling Lola has been as candid as she possibly can be. She has to be because of her granddaughter. Lola is going to do everything she can to make sure the kid doesn’t run face-first into any supernatural surprises. Ellery says that little girl is always going to have a target on her head because her energy is becoming more and more like Lola’s. I can’t sense it, so I have to take statements at face value.”
“Must be so strange being the odd duck. The only one with no magical quirks.”
“I’m not the only one. Hank’s wife is normal enough. And Aunt Glenda.”
“She had four shifter kids and was married to an alpha, and she never wanted to be changed?”
Lily shrugged. “She didn’t need to be. That wasn’t important to her or to Uncle Floyd, and it didn’t really make a difference to the kids. They were going to be powerful no matter what because their father was.” She scoffed. “Sometimes I wonder if she had chosen to let him change her if my father would still be forbidding me from seeing them. Maybe I would never even know we were related.”
“Why is he so afraid of them?”
“Because my grandparents were?” She shrugged again. “It’s not something we talk about a lot over the dinner table, you know, but I have my suspicions. They lived on neighboring properties, you know that, right? The Foyes and the Baxters? The Foyes had been there longer. Old New Mexican family. Somehow, they’re descended from Lola’s first Cougars. They made their way up the continent from Mexico and settled here before the state entered the union. The Baxters came later. Staked a claim on some property that had belonged to the Foyes, but the Foyes were too wary to confront them, I guess. Things were different back then. I suspect the Baxters had more guns.”
Lily seemed pretty dispassionate about the topic, though. He couldn’t tell if she would have taken a side if she’d been around back then.
“It wasn’t until my father and aunt’s generation that the fact that there were some kind of monsters living next door became a rumor,” she said. “I think my grandparents were dismayed that in all that time, they’d been living more or less in stealth just a couple of miles away, and I guess they thought they were some kind of corrupting abomination. They banned any of the Baxter kids from ever associating with them.”
“And yet somehow your aunt ended up with a Foye.”
“You’re not going to stop being in love with someone just because your father tells you not to be. They got married in secret.”
“Oh yeah?” Lance murmured. It seemed gravitating toward illicit marriages must have been in the Baxter blood.
“Aunt Glenda didn’t tell the family until it was time for her to go home and get her stuff. She moved in with the Foyes and they were crowded, but happy.”
“And now your aunt owns both properties.”
Lily gave a grave nod. “Seems fitting, in a way. The Baxters couldn’t afford to keep the business going. Aunt Glenda managed to scrape up enough money to buy them out.”
“She paid for property that should have been the Foyes’ in the first place? That’s pretty fucked up.”
“Aunt Glenda is practical. She doesn’t spend a whole lot of time thinking about what she’s entitled to. She thinks about what’s going to be best for her and the kids in the long run and saves her indignation for what really matters.”
“Hell of a lady, I guess.”
Lily let out a long breath and smoothed a couple of errant curls back into the ponytail they’d escaped from. The first time he’d seen her with that hair, he’d assumed she was some kind of ditz—a purveyor of pep.
He’d been wrong on both counts.
What he’d known about her before that day probably hadn’t been enough to fill a sheet of loose-leaf paper.
“Never say that around my father,” she said. “He’ll start foaming at the mouth and will quickly change the subject.”
“Why?”
“I think she terrifies him. A couple of years ago, right after I’d moved onto the ranch to help Belle, I made the mistake of telling him that I hoped to be like Aunt Glenda one day. He was apoplectic for probably two weeks after that. I hate that it has to be this way, but I just don’t tell him anything anymore.”
“You were close, then? Before all that?”
She took the remote from him and changed the channel to an old sitcom. Apparently, the news wasn’t her cup of tea. “I don’t know if I’d say we were close, though we certainly spent a lot of time in each other’s company. The kids at school used to tease me for being on lockdown. I never got to go to friends’ houses after school. I didn’t get to go to dances or on Girl Scout trips. When I had dance lessons or cheerleading practice, he was always sitting right outside in the car waiting to pick me up when I could have walked, even when I was seventeen.”
“Okay, so he’s overprotective.”
Lance probably would have been, too, if he’d had a daughter who claimed to be fast and strong, and who might have been from a dancer’s perspective. But from the perspective of a grown man with more than a foot in height and probably eighty pounds on her, she was a waif. Lance wasn’t all that comfortable about Lily bumping elbows with shapeshifters, witches, and demigods, either, and he was one of those things.
She was so…fragile.
He should never have touched her. He wished it hadn’t been her in that van the day Willa had liberated Blue and the rest of them from Sparks.
Anyone but her. Lily was the kind of challenge he’d never been taught to overcome.
He didn’t know what to do with her, and he almost always knew what to do. On the rare occasion he didn’t, he was good at making shit up. For some reason, his improvisational skills went into the gutter whenever she was within ten feet of him.
“Overprotective is one thing,” Lily said quietly as the television show transitioned to a commercial break. “Fanatical is another.”
Lance
was just about to tell her to put herself in her father’s shoes when a pleading howl just outside the trailer door stirred him to his feet.
He didn’t want to wake the baby. That kid had a set of pipes that could blow out a Coyote’s eardrums. If he wasn’t so terrified of the noise, he would have given the kid props for fierceness.
He opened the door and spotted French Fry just outside.
The dog sat beside a diaper bag turned onto its side, bottles and formula cans peeking out. French Fry barked and then trotted toward the trail, tongue waving like a flag in the breeze.
Lance stepped outside and scanned his surroundings. The van and tents were still there, but unoccupied. There was no sign of the Jaguars. Not even their scent lingered, which was odd. He should have been able to smell they’d been there for at least a day after they’d gone.
“What’s going on?” Lily asked in a hoarse whisper.
He scooped up the diaper bag by the strap and carried it inside. “No idea, but something’s not right when dogs are hinting that their owners aren’t coming back anytime soon.”
“They wouldn’t just abandon her, would they?”
“You tell me,” he said. “You’re the one with the mark of the goddess. I’m a canine trash heap with a beard that frightens babies.”
CHAPTER NINE
Lily opened the door for Lance and stood back as he, in his coyote form, leaped up the step and into the trailer. Rocking Martha gently and shushing the fussy child, she stepped outside into the brisk night. The lake was quiet, the campsites all dark. Nature itself seemed to have turned in for the evening.
The chill whipped through her thin pajamas so she retreated to the sultry warmth of the camper and shut the door.
After a moment of justified petrification, she averted her eyes from Lance’s taut, naked backside. He’d already shifted back and was pulling on sweatpants.
“Anything?” she asked him over Martha’s insistent whining.
The child had her fingers in her mouth, gnawing without satisfaction, and Lily hadn’t been able to find a pacifier or teething ring in the diaper bag. She’d even tried looking through the van and a couple of the tents in search of something the baby could chew on, but nothing seemed safe enough. She’d resorted to ice chips in a washcloth, and that only lead to Martha having a soaking wet shirt and an extra layer of drool under her sweet, fat chin. Keeping her dry was becoming a challenge.
“Not a damn thing.” Lance dragged his hand down his face, jaw tense, expression worried. “Doesn’t make any sense. I can’t pick up a trail for them at all, and if they’d been here a few days like you said, their scents should be all over the place. I’ve never not been able to track someone before.”
In a fit of desperation, Lily offered Martha her knuckle. The baby chomped down hard enough to make Lily fear for her bladder control, but at least the tension in Martha’s body instantly abated.
“Go on and chew it, then,” she murmured and risked taking a seat on the sofa. Every time she sat, Martha screamed, and Lily had been pacing in the trailer for the entire two hours Lance had been out scouting.
Blessedly, Martha settled into the niche of Lily’s arms and chewed contentedly.
“She’ll chew you down to the bone if you let her,” Lance scolded. “That kid’s a shifter.”
“Well, she isn’t one yet. Not until puberty, right?”
“Constitution is the same. Shifter babies are kinda miserable to be around. Living on the ranch, you should know that.”
“My little cousins are lovely.”
“But miserable, right?”
“Are they fussier than most?” Lily shrugged. “I don’t know. I can’t say I know the difference. All of my friends are shifters, are married to shifters, or don’t have kids yet.”
“Ever spent the night with one?”
“Yeah. Every now and then I give my cousins an opportunity to do something together without a baby in tow. It’s the only time I get the kids all to myself, so I never think of complaining. I always miss them when they go home.”
Martha’s eyelids drifted downward as she gnawed. Lily swayed her legs to and fro to help her along to sleep.
“Looks like Blue called back.” Lance was squinting at his phone screen. “One o’clock. He said to call whenever I’m back in my skin, but I don’t want to wake them.”
“It could be important. Maybe text him first and see if he’s up.”
“Good idea.”
“Yeah, I have a few every now and then.”
“Don’t start that again,” he murmured.
“When should I start it, then?” she asked sweetly. “Before or after we sort out the divorce?”
“Right before. It’ll be just the impetus we need to reach for that finish line.”
She rolled her eyes.
Less than thirty seconds after Lance sent off his missive, his phone buzzed.
He grunted, then dialed. “Says he’s still up working.” He put the phone on speaker and set it on the island. “Talk softly,” he said when Blue came on the line. “Baby banshee is teething and Lily’s trying to get her to sleep.”
“Go to the big box store and get her a chew toy.”
Lily gaped but recovered quickly. “She’s not a kitten.”
Blue snorted. “Yeah, she kinda is.”
“Behave yourself, Barrett,” came a feminine voice in the background. Didn’t sound like Willa.
“Is that your mom?” Lance asked.
“Yeah. She just got back from a trip with Diana.”
“Tell them that if there’s not a big box nearby, they can find her a pacifier to chew up at the closest gas station,” Deb Blue suggested.
According to the Maria gossip mill, Deb had reverted to her maiden name after her acrimonious divorce from Blue and Diana’s mother. Blue had recently considered doing the same, but he’d been known as “Blue” for so long that he assumed people would be confused. Lily just couldn’t see him as a Barrett. Every Barrett she’d ever known wore khakis and boat shoes. Blue’s tastes tended to run a little more…corporate shapeshifter.
Apparently, in the entire time Lance had been working for him, none of Blue’s style had rubbed off on his lieutenant.
“They can hear you, Mom,” Blue said. “You’re on speaker.”
“If that doesn’t work”—Deb’s voice was closer now, as though she were speaking directly into the mic—“just keep her gums numb. Use two or three times more of that gel than the little tubes tell you. The instructions aren’t written for shifter babies. They metabolize everything faster. How heavy is the baby?”
“About a million pounds,” Lily said, stretching the kink out of her back. “Oh, I don’t know. She’s about six months old, so seventeen or eighteen pounds I guess? I can only guess based on my cousins’ milestones.”
“Eighteen pounds?” Lance said and whistled low. “What are they feeding that kid?”
Lily held up an empty bottle. “Liquid nutrition.”
“You were a cannonball at the same age, Lance,” Deb said. “Expected it. Your father is a big man.”
“Hearty peasant stock,” Lance muttered.
Lily snorted.
Lance rolled his eyes and leaned onto the narrow island. “So, what’d you find out, Blue?”
He still hadn’t put on a shirt, so Lily had to keep peeling her gaze away from him. Obviously, he had no problems with nudity being what he was, but the last time he’d been anything near naked in her company, she’d ended up pregnant and then married by an Elvis lookalike. That wasn’t an error she wanted to repeat.
“Not much, honestly,” Blue said, “and I’m still looking deeper. The information Lily gave Willa helped unlock the direction I needed to go for research. The best I can tell, these women try exceptionally hard to keep evidence of their existence suppressed.”
“That’s normal for paranormal sorts, though,” Lance said. “Secrets means safety. But that reminds me—I can’t pick up a scent for any of them.
I was out there scouting around for over an hour. Not only couldn’t I find a trail for them, but the scent that should have pervaded their campsite is gone, too. It’s like it vanishes when they’re not nearby.”
Blue whistled low. “That’s odd. Their drive for secrecy may be normal for shifters, but we generally don’t go out of our way to suppress evidence the way those Jaguars do.”
“You think they’re doing that?” Lily asked.
“That’s what the pattern looks like to me,” Blue said. “That being said, I am finding some nuggets in publications about craftswomen in Oaxaca that raise an eyebrow. They sometimes reference one particular commune in passing like it’s no big deal. Having seen it mentioned enough times and by so many distinct accounts, I’m probably looking at it from a different perspective.”
“Also because you’re an outsider.”
“Yeah. And one who studied folklore. The writers always refer to the group as an artist’s commune and there’s always some cheeky commentary about how secretive they are and how they rarely let male reporters inside the encampment.”
“Encampment?” Lance asked.
“Yeah. To me, it seems like a semi-permanent compound that the ladies move around as necessary. It’s always referenced as being in the same general area, but not quite, you know?”
“What else did you find out?”
“Well, I found this one article from about twenty years ago. There was this guy who worked on a ranch not too far from the commune. It was near Costa Chica at the time. There’s a pretty notable Afromexican population there.”
“That fits the story.”
“Yeah? The guy was kinda portrayed as a dick, you know? Laughing it up, joking with the journalist about how he hooked up with some lady from the commune. He must have thought that whatever he did was memorable because the lady looked him up for another hookup two years later. Another year down the line, he’d heard rumors about that woman having a baby, but he never saw her again after that.”
Lily grimaced. “If what you said before about them being so aggressively secretive is true, then I bet that guy wasn’t ever seen again by anyone after that story came out.”