by Holley Trent
“Is it a lasting peace?” Her eyes narrowed, and she canted her head. “I hear olive branches aren’t the sturdiest things to build bridges with.”
He snorted. Couldn’t help it. She was a mess, and he loved her for it. “I’m willing to call a permanent truce if you are.”
“Because you know the Coyotes are exhausting me.”
He hadn’t known that, and the fact he didn’t pissed him off a little. She could have told him. He would have taken care of things, but she hadn’t trusted him.
He took a deep breath and rubbed her arms some more.
Later.
They could talk it out later if they needed to.
Change the subject.
“I don’t have any trips planned as far as I know, but I’ll check with Kenny to be sure. He tries not to bog me down with too many details.”
“How did he end up working for you, anyway? Did you pick him because he’s a dominant Coyote or in spite of the fact that he is?”
“Ha ha.” Blue heard the outside door shut so he peeked through the workroom door window. Diana had stepped into the band room. She was carrying a cordless drill and a rubber mallet, and he didn’t even want to know why. Still, he took Willa’s hand and walked with her into the band room.
Diana paused midswing in front of a lesser used built-in bookcase and chirped, “Oh, hi there.”
“What the hell are you doing?” Blue asked her.
“Building a better cubby system.” She propped her hand onto her cocked hip and clucked her tongue. “You know, I always thought there’d be a lot more bureaucracy in working with schools, but apparently if you’re spending your own money to make interior improvements to their property, they’ll bend over backward to get you the approvals you need.” The corners of her lips curved upward a notch. “Even offered to give me a donation receipt for my taxes at the end of the year.”
“Not sure if I even want to know the answer, but is that my shirt you’re wearing?”
She looked down at it and shrugged. “Who cares? Looks better on me.”
“At the rate you’re going, I’m not going to have any clean laundry left.”
“Best I could tell, you didn’t.” Diana smoothed the sleeve of her stolen shirt and toyed with the rhinestone cufflink. The way she bastardized his shirts made him never want them back.
Blue closed his eyes, let out a breath, and then turned to Willa. “I guess I have to add a dry-cleaning run to today’s to-do list. That’s one of many things I won’t ask Kenny to do, and to answer your question, I hired Kenny because his brain is ordered well for the work.”
“And because Lance is his cousin,” Diana said. “You got a twofer.”
Willa furrowed her brow. “They’re cousins? I wouldn’t have guessed.”
Blue grunted. He needed to head out and was just about to put his arms around her for a squeeze or—if he was being honest with himself, a fondle—but he remembered they had an audience. “Their mothers are sisters. Kenny’s a big boy and can take care of himself. He doesn’t really need an extra shadow, but his aunt insisted I take Lance on, too. I needed a pilot, so I said okay.”
“The ladies always tried to bundle the two into a single unit,” Diana said. “Can’t say I blame them. Makes the risk of solo expulsion lower.”
“Why would either of them have been expelled?” Willa asked.
Diana shook her head. “You’re so sweet and naive. Never stop being you.”
“What am I missing?”
“Don’t worry about it,” Blue said, backing toward the door. “There’s no good reason to be entrenched in the nuances of pack power politics unless you’re really bored. I don’t think you are.”
“Shouldn’t that be something I know about?”
“You don’t have enough dominants here for it to be an issue,” Diana said.
“But what if that changes?”
“You let me worry about it,” Blue said. “Okay?”
Don’t argue with me on this, sweetheart.
Willa didn’t need new shit to anticipate and stress about, especially when Blue was going to do everything in his power to make sure the Coyote culture diverged as far from Sparks as he could get it.
Willa’s gaze floated to Diana, then Blue as she fidgeted her baton at the conductor’s stand.
Normally, she argued, but for a change, she didn’t.
She nodded, set down the baton, and looked away.
He could tell she felt bad about it. He hated that she felt guilty for ceding a responsibility she’d had for so long to an outsider, but she had to start delegating for her own good.
“Make sure she has lunch,” Blue said to Diana as he pushed open the exterior door. “I think she forgets too often.”
“No worries. Today’s lunch is rectangle pizza. Brings back memories. I’ll go get a couple of trays.”
“Plain cheese or whatever isn’t ham or pepperoni,” Blue murmured to his sister when Willa retreated to the workroom. “I didn’t catch on until recently, but I don’t think she eats pork.”
If she was curious about how he’d discovered that, Diana didn’t query about it. She nodded, grabbed her wallet from the desk, and left the band room without a word.
She didn’t need to say anything, though. He read her curiosity in her narrowed eyes and the flat press of her lips. In the way she pulled her energy in tight around her so he couldn’t assess its flavor as she passed.
She always did that when she was strategizing or making discoveries, and she never wanted anyone to know she was on to them.
Of all the things Diana was, stupid wasn’t one of them.
Blue tended to plan his moves two or three steps ahead.
Diana? Four.
• • •
Lance was blowing up Blue’s phone with one text message after the next pertaining to some intel he’d rooted out about the potential pack splinters. Blue was going to have to take a couple of minutes and sit down to pore over the data, but he’d gone home to assess the laundry situation and found it at an unacceptably critical level.
Laundry first. Maria’s only dry cleaner knocked off at three every day, and pack chaos could wait a couple of hours.
Blue grabbed a laundry bag out of the bedroom closet and started stuffing it with shirts and slacks. If push came to shove, he had some grubby clothes he could find a washing machine to toss into, but he didn’t like the hassle. He hadn’t even thought to ask his landlord if the house had a washer and dryer. Most of his casual clothes were back at his place in Nevada. He was used to traveling light, and the habit was biting him in the ass.
Bag full, he tied the drawstring and slung the heavy sack over his shoulder. On the way out of the bedroom, he grabbed his keys off the dresser top and then stilled at the sight of the remaining glint atop the wood.
The golden coin.
He’d forgotten about the coin he’d found at Willa’s. He set the bag down and picked up the smooth disc, appreciating the heft of it.
His inability to identify the profile on that coin was going to contribute to him losing his mind.
He sat on the corner of the bed, rooted his phone out of his pocket, grimaced upon glancing at a few of the keywords in Lance’s texts, and then opened the browser window.
“Which engine?” he murmured, turning the coin over again and again in his left hand. He still had access to a few subscription-based databases he’d used in graduate school. There were a few perks of maintaining his membership in the alumni organization.
There was a particularly powerful engine of encyclopedic information that had once been his go-to for all things classical. He logged in and input a search for “golden coin” AND “Greek” AND profile, and typed in a few simple descriptive words about the backside.
He expected most of the hits to be false positives, but usually he found at least one that referenced what he needed at least in an oblique fashion.
He tapped the heading for Words on Greek Coins and sat up straight whe
n a page opened with a table full of historic coins, the Greek lettering on them, and the English translations.
Whistling low, he scrolled down. There were a lot of them. Not all had been in wide circulation. Some were made to commemorate specific events or as tokens of favor, so they didn’t necessarily have face values.
He didn’t see it in the main table.
“Shit. Why isn’t it there?” He was certain the lettering on his coin was Greek.
According to the scroll bar, there was still content left below the table. Having nothing to lose, Blue scanned down.
Another heading. Another table. Coins with Incomplete Data. The subheading read,
Samples of these rare coins are generally too eroded to read both sides. If you are in possession of specimens, please take photographs of front and back and e-mail to the curator at . . .
There it was, down at the very bottom with the sample quantity number of one.
“Holy shit.” Like a dog on a hunt, he went into high alert.
The note read:
No other samples of this artifact have been recorded. Found in Albania in 1922. Front is possibly a depiction of Phoebus Apollo. Lettering unclear.
“Huh.” Blue held the coin up to the light and squinted at the lettering. His Greek was about as good as his Martian, but what he could make out appeared to correspond.
He did a web search for “Apollo in Greek lettering” to be sure.
He checked three different sites to confirm, but he appeared to have found a perfect match.
“That’s fucking Apollo. Why did Willa have this?”
He might have actually had time to answer himself if he hadn’t damn near been startled into a coma by the sudden arrival in the room by a guest who had the kind of power that could make blood sizzle if he flexed it just so.
Blue stood, silently, before the man finished turning, his fingers closing over the coin.
The tall man, a golden statue in slow motion, spoke quietly as though the whole world would stop moving long enough to strain and listen, and maybe they would.
“I knew you would call me, Safya. I knew you would eventually re—”
Whatever the bastard was going to say, the sight of Blue corked it.
Blue raised a speculative eyebrow at him, the god whose golden hue retreated into his skin like ocean waves absorbed into sand. He loomed in front of Blue, golden-eyed, sporting an enviable tan, wearing his curly bronze hair loose over his shoulders, and donning the same fucking shirt as Blue, down to the subtle embroidered flame on the pocket.
It was a good brand.
Blue didn’t tend to wear his shirts unbuttoned all the way down to his chest hair, though.
“You are not Safya,” Apollo said.
Blue heard “Sophia” at first before his brain picked out the A sound at the start. He knew a couple of Sophias and Sofias, but had no idea who Safya was. He wasn’t about to show his hand to that guy, though. Blue didn’t know what Apollo was capable of. His study had shown that most old gods in the modern era only held a fraction of their recorded abilities. Whether they’d never truly had them in the first place or if they’d waned over time, he didn’t know. He’d never encountered anyone he could ask.
“I’m not Safya,” Blue said.
“You summoned me. You have her coin.”
“You mean this?” Blue held up the little disc.
Apollo snatched it in the blink of an eye and shoved it into the front pocket of his belted jeans. “You stole it.”
“You’re jumping to conclusions. I could have gotten that coin from anywhere.”
“I know where I left it.”
“Are you saying there’s only one, then?”
“You put words in my mouth. You should mind your tongue.”
Blue knew he probably should have, but for whatever reason, he had an instant dislike to the guy.
Safya.
Pieces started coming together in Blue’s head. The coin was Willa’s. Safya must have been the name she hadn’t shared, he realized—the one her mother hadn’t wanted anyone to know.
A dangerous name for a child of a Morisco, probably.
It was a pretty name. Even without knowing what it meant, it suited her better than her current, false name.
“You have been in her home,” Apollo said.
“Whose home?” Blue asked levelly.
“Safya’s.”
“Who’s Safya?”
“My daughter.”
“Ah. I see.” Blue shrugged. “Never heard of her.”
“You are a liar.”
“Well, that’s not nice. We haven’t even had a proper introduction, and you’re already calling me names. Is that where we are? Let me know if we’re taking turns, because I know lots of names.”
“I have every single one of my coins accounted for.”
“And?”
“You are impertinent for a dog.”
“And you smell nice for an asshole.”
Apollo took an aggressive step toward Blue, which Blue matched, smiling. That shit always drove Blue’s father nuts. He figured Apollo wasn’t much different. Narcissists tended to be pretty predictable.
“Stop goading him,” his mother’s voice played in his head. Before the divorce, she’d said it every time Blue and his father started arguing about stupid shit. It wasn’t that she thought Blue was wrong, but because she knew the fighting wouldn’t end productively. He who had more power always won. It didn’t matter what his stance on an issue was.
Blue didn’t really give a shit if Apollo backed down or not. He just knew he wasn’t going to let the guy show up with that “my will be done” attitude without calling him to the carpet for it. He didn’t give a damn what powers he supposedly had.
“I could have you on your knees in a whisper,” Apollo said through clenched teeth.
“And yet we still haven’t been properly introduced. I can’t wait to tell my mother I met someone with even worse manners than mine. She’ll never believe me.”
“You know who I am!” Apollo’s bellow made the overhead light flicker and his skin pulse with the same golden cast of Willa’s scars.
Like Willa . . .
Blue would have snapped his fingers with the revelation if he hadn’t been on such high alert. The asshole with the bronze chest hair must have been Willa’s unnamed father.
Shit.
Willa had said he was unpredictable and capricious, and Blue had basically been kicking a hornet’s nest.
Okay. Easy, now.
He wasn’t going to let the man see him sweat.
“You said my name when you summoned me,” Apollo said. “You held the coin and said my name.”
“All I did was read a coin. If I’d thought I’d have company, I would have cleaned up a little first.”
“You—” Apollo lunged at Blue, then stopped on a dime and threw his hands up. He closed his eyes, let out a long exhalation, and murmured something to himself in a language Blue didn’t know.
Blue turned his head and grimaced.
Hope that wasn’t a curse.
He knew he was pushing his luck, but pushing limits was how alphas got things done. He was trying to establish the pecking order, and fast. He was never going to be dominant over Apollo—that shit was impossible—but he could at least make the god understand that he wasn’t going to heel.
Apollo rolled his shoulders, massaged the back of his neck, and then opened his eyes again. Eyes like Willa’s. Safya’s, rather, but spookier. Unnaturally molten. “I am Phoebus Apollo.”
“Phoebus, is it?” Blue gave a shallow bow, keeping his eyes on Apollo’s. “I guess we’re being formal, then. Alpha Barrett Shapely. Most folks call me Blue, but I don’t think you count as folks.”
Apollo’s slow blink spoke volumes, and violent volumes at that. Blue suspected that if the god could set him on fire where he stood without burning down the entire block, he would have.
Shit. Shoulda texted for backup.
&
nbsp; Letting Kenny and Lance know they might have to dig Blue’s sorry carcass out of the ashes seemed like it would have been a wise thing to do before Blue started running off at the mouth.
His phone was on the bed. He could probably snatch it up before Apollo lunged at him again.
“I was led to believe the Coyote alpha here was mad,” Apollo said in that same soft droning as before.
“If by mad you mean totally fucked up . . . ” Blue shrugged again. “Sure, but believe it or not, I’m not who your intel was about. I’m new.”
Apollo hooked his thumbs into his belt loops and did that chastising blink again. He was still enough for Blue to get an even better look at him. He was truly a living statue. His face with its high-planed cheeks and straight nose was a study of perfect symmetry; his long curls defined and lustrous as though every strand had been magicked into compliance. Long, thick eyelashes Diana would have threatened murder to get. Wide, unsmiling mouth with full lips a hair shy of being pretty. Androgynous, sort of, but with too much testosterone to completely pull it off.
“Her brother told me,” Apollo said. “He is informed on such things.”
“Whose brother?”
“Safya’s.”
“Who’s Safya?”
Apollo closed his eyes again and exhaled one of those long-suffering breaths.
He probably spent most of his days trying to convince himself not to squash the peons. After all, who’d speak his name if they were all dead?
“You know her,” Apollo said. “I gave her the Coyotes.”
“Ahh, I see. You must be talking about Willa.”
The god made a dismissive flick of his hand and tracked to the window beside the bed. He looked outside and rehooked his thumb in his belt loop. “Whatever she calls herself now. You know her.”
“Indeed. And, so, I take it you left that coin so she’d give you a holler? My mother just leaves me voice mails asking me if I’d call her sometime, but I guess your way could work, too.”
“You were in her home.”
“Occupational hazard.”
“Did she give it to you?” Apollo turned, again a statue rotating in slow motion.