by Holley Trent
She expected a chorus of cheers to break out from the band kids, or at least some appreciative grunts, but they weren’t even looking at her. Neither was Diana.
Willa tracked their gazes over her shoulder and turned slowly on her heel.
Her brain didn’t want to make sense immediately of what she was seeing, or who rather.
But the image in her head came together in pieces. Long red hair clubbed back. One of his usual garishly bright flannel overshirts with the sleeves rolled up over the forearms. Steel-toed boots covered with sawdust and red desert clay. Faded and abused jeans that must have seen Ragnarok and survived it, and a white T-shirt beneath the flannel emblazoned with Foye Woodworks.
And there was a “volunteer” sticker plastered onto his chest.
“Ohhhhh crap,” Willa said in an undertone.
She hadn’t thought Hank would actually show up. Obviously, she owed his cousin Lily a huge favor for getting him out there.
Crap. Crap.
She had no idea what to do with him now that he was there.
A couple of Cougar kids must have tapped into formerly hidden founts of energy because they sprang to their feet and ran toward him.
“What’s he doing here?” Diana whispered.
“Um, well, he might not look like much of a musician, but that guy racked up a record number of awards for under-eighteen solo performance before graduating from high school. Natural talent. I guess he’s here to run the snare drum clinic.”
And Willa wasn’t ready.
Dealing with Foye men was something she usually needed to gird herself for. They were intense, to say the least. A little warning would have been nice.
Diana moved in close and became Willa’s shadow as Hank approached with his hands in his pockets.
His expression was its usual carefully curated blank.
“T-thanks for coming,” Willa stammered.
He grunted. Shrugged. “I don’t have a whole lot of time.”
“I’m sure she’s aware of that,” Diana snapped.
Hank turned his head slowly toward Diana, irises slitting in a catlike way that made the striations in his eyes more prominent. He didn’t look human when he did that. Fortunately, none of the kids could see his face at the moment.
“Cool your jets,” Diana said quietly.
“Stop flaring your energy like you’re looking for a fight,” he said, just as quietly and without inflection.
Diana smiled. “You gonna fight a girl?”
“I don’t think we’ll get that far. You’ll back down before you get close enough.”
“Okay, stop,” Willa whispered. She turned Diana toward the band room and got her moving, sent the kids at her heels, and then she took a deep breath and faced Hank. “We’ve got forty minutes left of class. I don’t know how you want to structure this. I’m open to suggestion.”
“Just give me the list of kids I’m supposed to be working with and I’ll figure out the rest. Have any of these kids held drumsticks before?”
“Well, we work on the practice pads in small groups every couple of weeks just for basic percussion competence, but we haven’t done anything intensive.”
“And you expect to get one of those kids on the field next year?”
“More than one. There’s a snare opening and a base drum opening, so yes. I know Paul would rather march with those spots open than to plug in freshmen, but that’s not fair. That’s . . . ” She was rambling and Hank’s eyebrows were inching closer and closer to his hairline, so she forced herself to take a breath. “I want them to have a chance, that’s all.”
“I can’t make any promises.”
“And I don’t expect you to. I just want them to be taken seriously. I know those girls can do it.”
“Girls?”
“Please, don’t go there. Please don’t.”
“This isn’t an issue of skill, Willa. It’s about weight. You want to send one of those novice waifs out with up to fifty pounds of gear when she probably can’t even sustain a steady drumroll yet?”
“Please, just . . . ” She put up her hands and closed her eyes. Her heart was beating so fast she could hardly swallow. Her own personal hell consisted of one confrontation after another, and being on the losing end of every one. “If you want to put some boys in the clinic group just to see the performance ability, fine. But I’ve thought this through. I know exactly which instruments he’s going to cull, and I’ve been doing all I can to move kids onto secondary instruments this year. There’re only so many alto saxes I can move to baritone. Only so many flutes I can move into the pit for mallet percussion, especially when they’ve got no keyboard knowledge. These are band kids, not football players. There’s no reason good enough for them to get benched.” She opened her eyes and forced down a swallow. “I’d train them myself, but I can’t. I had my left wrist violently dislocated in the sixteenth century, and it never healed properly. I struggle to even hold my viola. With or without you, I will figure out some way to do this, but I’m begging you to try this my way. Please. This is the only thing I’m good at.”
If she hadn’t been looking closely for a change, she might not have noticed the way Hank wore his capitulation. Aside from the slight press of his lips and the rounding of his pupils, his expression didn’t change.
He just started walking toward the band room and called over his shoulder, “Is the gear in the same place it’s always been?”
“Yes?”
That’s all? No more discussion?
“All right then,” he said.
Apparently, the discussion had resolved in her favor, but Willa couldn’t get her heart to slow, and she most certainly couldn’t stop the cold sweat from wicking down her back.
Taking a few deep breaths, she pinched up the fabric at the back of her shirt and flapped it for a few beats before she started walking.
If she were lucky, Hank would work independently and require limited feedback from her. Just being in the same space with him made her anxious.
And she hoped the percussion pullouts wouldn’t distract the kids from learning their concert music.
And that she’d figure out some better solution to get money into the program so those kids wouldn’t be excluded from summer band camp.
And so that Cougar parents would stop e-mailing her for more information about the Coyote in the classroom who’d been nothing but helpful, but who probably terrified the cats because the Coyotes in Maria weren’t generally so businesslike.
And that the Coyotes who had the same aversion to efficiency would stop threatening her—because Diana was right, and that was what they were doing. They needed to get with the program. Blue was alpha, and he could run the pack however he needed to so the Maria locals didn’t feel threatened by them.
She didn’t care anymore. Couldn’t care.
She was just trying to do the best she could to make everyone happy, and there wasn’t enough of her to go around, and something was going to have to give soon.
Standing at the door with her fingers looped around the handle, she couldn’t catch her breath, but she refused to break down right there.
If she could just get to the end of the day, she could go home, find a nice pillow to put her head under, and fall apart all she wanted, and her only witness would be King.
She sucked in another unsatisfying breath, plastered a smile on her face, and yanked open the door.
“Okay. Music’s at the end of rows, but don’t pass it down yet. I need to pull some of you out to work with Mr. Foye.”
Chapter Seventeen
IT’S OFF. TELL BRUNO WHATEVER YOU HAVE TO.
The following week, Blue sat still as death in his private plane, reading the message he’d sent to his father again and again, wondering if he’d started what would turn into a pack feud bloodier than anything on record. His father deserved every ounce of vitriol he got, but there were innocents in the pack, too. They wouldn’t know both sides of the story. They’d only know that Bl
ue hadn’t stepped up when it mattered—they’d think he’d been the one to cause the initial offense.
He just couldn’t do it. Couldn’t marry that woman when the beast inside him recoiled violently at the thought. She wasn’t his mate. She wasn’t the one who stirred up incurable apprehension in him and made him want to hurry back just to see that she was still in one piece. When he’d sent that message, he’d been still trying to get over the fact he had one.
He’d also been trying to get over the fact that Maria didn’t feel like a temporary layover. It was starting to feel like home, and he hadn’t felt that since he and his mother had last lived under the same roof. That was a long time to feel so unmoored.
He read the message once more, and then, finally, the belated response:
GET HERE. NOW.
Blue had ignored him . . . until he couldn’t.
Lance stepped out of the cockpit, scratched at his thick beard, and raised a pale eyebrow. “You know, I landed this thing like thirty minutes ago. You can bounce.”
Blue swallowed and slowly unclenched his fingers from around the armrests.
“Still reeling from your little run-in with Randall, huh?”
Blue grunted. He wasn’t sure if he had the right words to sum up the encounter. Grunts were all encompassing.
“When you sent me the text saying you were ready to go, you kinda took me aback. You normally give me a little more lead time. I was in the middle of a shapeshift when the phone started vibrating.”
“Sorry,” Blue said dourly.
Kenny gathered up the piles of paper he’d been sorting during the flight and gave Lance a quelling look. “Thought we were going to get out of Vegas scot-free. Blue told Randall he didn’t want to see him, but you know how it always goes. He’s got eyes everywhere. We got ambushed this morning. Walked out of a meeting near the convention center, and outside was a very familiar limousine.”
Lance dropped his hand from his beard. “Randall’s?”
“Yep.”
“Shit. I won’t bother asking how he knew you were there. Can’t go anywhere in Nevada without him finding out, I guess. What’d he say?”
“Nothing at first,” Blue said, rolling his eyes. “His bodyguard Astor was out there. Just did the usual standing-there-like-a-statue shit at the curb, staring us down for a minute like we were supposed to drop to our knees and kiss his rings or something. I guess he figured we weren’t going to play the toady roles, so he just opened the door, and there was my father in the backseat, waving us into the car.”
“Tell me you didn’t get in.”
“Hell no, we didn’t get in.” Blue cut him an incredulous look. Lance really should have known better. “We’re not stupid. We did all our yelling right there on the curb like the trash we are.”
If Blue hadn’t been in charge of his own pack—albeit conditionally—he wouldn’t have had a choice but to get in that car. The repercussions of so-called arrogance tended to be bloody, and alpha’s wounds took a long time to heal. But there was a code. No decent alpha would try to take out another without installing a surrogate leader in the affected pack. OG hadn’t done that yet, but Blue knew a challenge would come soon, especially because of how Blue had responded to OG’s statement of, “Keep your messy little pack down there if you want, whatever. Just take the bitch you’re marrying with you. No skin off my teeth.”
Blue had told him to promptly take a walk off a pier in cement shoes.
“Suffice it to say,” Blue muttered, “I won’t be taking any future meetings in Nevada. I’ll go anywhere but there. Salt Lake. LA. Houston.”
“I’ll make a note,” Kenny said.
Blue closed his eyes and pinched the bridge of his nose. “He had Sheena in the car, Lance. He trotted her out even after I told him to can it.”
Lance whistled low. “Shit, he’s nasty.”
“Yeah,” Kenny said. “I guess he thought maybe he could shame Blue into doing what he wanted, but I think he’s starting to understand that he’s going to have to solve his problem with Bruno some other way.”
“Think he can?”
“Honestly, I’m getting to the point where I don’t care if he can,” Blue said. “Do I care about the Sparks pack being dragged into this shit? Yeah. I don’t want anyone there to get hurt, but do I want to sacrifice myself?”
He grimaced.
“Sheena can’t exactly tell Randall to back off, even if she wanted to, but maybe she can tell her father she’s not into it,” Lance said. “That’ll solve a lot of problems.”
“That’s assuming she doesn’t want to marry him,” Kenny said.
“Does she want to?”
Blue shrugged. “Doesn’t matter. The fact that I don’t want to marry her should be a huge turnoff for any self-respecting woman. I’ve got nothing against arranged marriages at all, but I don’t like them like this.” And not for him. The dog in him stirred nervously at the idea he’d marry some stranger he couldn’t muster up any enthusiasm or even curiosity for.
He already had one curious woman turning him into a chickenshit, and that was plenty. The business could have waited, but Blue had needed to put some space between his inner dog and the demigoddess to figure out what the hell was happening.
He still wasn’t quite sure.
He unbuckled his seatbelt and pushed onto his numb feet. He’d been stiff as a board the entire flight and probably needed to get into his sneakers and run until the kinks fell out of his body. “Anyway, change the subject. We’ll worry about the potential threat of a hostile takeover tomorrow. Catch me up. Any problems here?”
Lance resumed the petting of his beard. “Nothing we couldn’t handle. I think Diana’s doing a really good job of corralling back in some of those ladies who were on the fence about staying. Rather than hitting them one at a time and suppressing their wills, she’s sorting them into small groups with a wide spread of ages and letting them prop each other up like teepee supports. Like, a couple of nights ago, she matched a single mom and her daughter with a couple of older ladies, met them at the marching band’s fried chicken fundraiser, and just let them run their mouths for a couple of hours. Seems the four Coyotes have a shared interest in gemstone hunting, and one of the old girls is a lonely retiree with a Winnebago. They’re going out looking for turquoise this weekend.”
“Nice,” Blue said. “Leave it to Diana to find an out-of-the-box solution.”
“It’s community-building,” Kenny said. “They’re investing in each other.”
“Exactly. Works here because there’s a vacuum of connections in the Coyote pack. No one has bonded. The same strategy wouldn’t work in Sparks.”
“Nah, it wouldn’t,” Lance said. “So, anyway, that’s coming together. Of course, there are still grumblers on the periphery who’ll do all they can to steer clear of anything that looks like rules or organization. I think right now, Diana’s in watch-and-wait mode with them. She doesn’t want to nestle them into the groups if they’re going to be hostile. The pessimism will taint everyone else’s outlooks.”
Blue grabbed his briefcase from the overhead bin. “What else?”
What about Willa?
He shifted his weight impatiently. He hadn’t heard a peep from her in a week, but he wasn’t sure why he’d expected that he would. Kind of bruised a bit that she didn’t need him when he thought he’d been uniquely useful to her that evening. He’d started thinking of it in his head as “the night of the bell,” and couldn’t stop thinking about it—about how broken down she was, and how she lived in fear of the most mundane things that he would never give a second glance or thought to.
A stinkin’ bell.
She hated church bells. She’d endured hell, and there were reminders of it all over the place. He couldn’t even begin to guess what all her triggers were.
“No biggie, but there was an incident downtown on Wednesday night. It was after everyone left the bar. Willa had gone home,” Lance said in a growly tone. “Long story sho
rt, the sheriff got called, and the sheriff dispatched Perez because I guess he had a hunch there were shifters involved.”
“Tell me there wasn’t any property damage, at least.”
The bunching of Lance’s lips and his looking-anywhere-but-at-Blue routine were answer enough.
“How much?”
“Couple thousand. I went ahead and settled up so the guy didn’t press charges or get insurance involved.”
“Do I even want to know what the fight was about?”
“It wasn’t about anything, really. Just a couple of young guys smelling themselves. Got out of hand. Typical shit, but given the pack’s history, any step out of line is a step backward.”
“Do I want to know the names of the parties involved?”
Lance shook his head. “Get a good night of sleep first. You’ll want a clear head.”
“Yes, I always like for my mind to be perfectly free of that pesky retaliatory alpha instinct before I have to go knock heads together.”
Blue bounded down from the plane with Kenny on his heels and Lance bringing up the rear after closing the door.
“And . . . the demigoddess?” Blue strode through the airport office, throwing a wave up to the lady at the desk before passing right out the front door to the parking lot.
“Busy. Quiet,” Lance said. “Other than that Wednesday night, I haven’t seen her out after school, and no one else has as far as I know, either.”
“Interesting. No other extracurricular Coyote meddling?”
“Beyond what she does with the kids she teaches, I don’t think so.”
The memory of Willa catatonic in her hallway brought Blue up short. He stopped. Turned. “But she’s been leaving the house?”
Brow furrowed, Lance nodded. “Yeah, I guess. I figure Diana would have said something if Willa hadn’t been going to work.”
“And she hasn’t had anything at all to say about Diana’s little meet and greets? She hasn’t showed up to any of them?”
Lance shook his head.
That didn’t sound like Willa. She was a hands-on kind of meddler. Blue turned on his heel and moved with purpose toward his SUV. “I’ll see you two tomorrow,” he said.