by Holley Trent
“If that’ll make you feel good about yourself, go ahead and try.”
Blue put his hand up in warning to Lance. By no stretch of the imagination did Apollo deserve tender handling, but Blue wanted to keep his trusted lieutenant aboveground for as long as he could. True friends were hard to come by in their world.
“Why would you do this to her?” Blue asked Apollo. “What’s the point? Pulling that magic away from her, in spite of the reason you did it, was probably the best gift you could have given her. She’s not built for it.”
“She picked wrong, didn’t she?”
“What the hell are you even talking about?”
“She picked wrong. Astounding disrespect. Purposeless rebellion, and why? Over a dead woman?” Apollo snorted. “She picked wrong.”
“What is he talking about?” Lance asked.
“Willa,” Blue murmured. “He’s talking about Willa. I could be wrong, but I think he’s saying that she picked her mother over him. Even dead, she’s the safer bet. Isn’t that funny?”
“I would watch my mouth if I were you,” Apollo said, standing, but Blue wasn’t going to be cowed. If nothing else, he was going to make Apollo hear Willa’s side of the story. Someone needed to speak it if she couldn’t.
“He can’t possibly understand why Willa would still honor her mother after all this time,” Blue said to Lance. “He can’t possibly understand that you can’t substitute terror for love and make people believe that they’re equal forms of attention. He doesn’t know what love is.”
“Of course I do.”
“Okay, maybe you do, but you don’t have a bottomless reserve of it. You can’t make it stretch, can you? You didn’t love Ynes, did you? I’d bet my plane that you wanted to control her. She was a pretty thing that made others like you jealous while you had her, but she wasn’t the love of your life by any stretch of the imagination. She was another Daphne for you. Someone who didn’t give you what you wanted in the end. And Willa? Well, she’s no Phaëton, is she? She’s not the child you’d give the sun. She’s the one you want to snatch it away from.”
Apollo lunged at him, and his fist would have made contact with the side of Blue’s head if it weren’t for Lance yanking him away.
Blue was going to let him have the strike—he was going to let Apollo get that anger out and show every one of his true colors—but obviously, Lance had other ideas.
“Take it down a notch, Blue. Don’t forget that your new pack needs an alpha.”
Right.
His new pack. He had more people counting on him than ever before, but he needed to say those words.
“I want to know what he knew and when he knew it,” Blue said. “I want to know how long he’s been setting up this disaster, and if from the day I walked into town, this was due to happen.”
“How small-minded of you.” Evidently possessing moods as fickle as one of Willa’s middle schoolers, Apollo backed away, casually examining the adobe of the mission wall. “I didn’t set anything up.” He flicked away a bit of peeling clay from the wall and dusted his manicured hands on his jeans. “I simply used what was already there. I knew eventually Saf—”
“Don’t even say it,” Blue snapped. “I swear to any god who isn’t you that if you say that name, I’m going to hurt you.” Blue suspected that’d be a difficult feat, but he was going to make the effort anyway.
Apollo rolled his eyes and gave a dismissive flit of his hand. “Willa, then. Eventually, she’d have to find a partner. I didn’t know who it’d be. Prophecy is rarely so specific.”
“And you knew that as soon as she found someone, you’d be able to manipulate her from a distance,” Lance said. Looking to Blue with a moue of disgust, he added, “He plays the long game even better than your father.”
“Yeah, so you know better than almost anyone why I’d have a strong aversion to users.”
“You obviously summoned me here because you want something,” Apollo said, turning. “Your rude manner will certainly make any negotiations fruitless.”
“If you’re waiting for me to kiss your ass, sir, don’t hold your breath. Whatever you did to Willa, fix it, or tell me how to fix it and I’ll do the work myself.”
Raising one pristine brow, Apollo studied his nails. “So you would have me return her to her former pedestrian state?”
“There was nothing wrong with the way she was.” Nothing that he couldn’t help her with. Willa couldn’t be “fixed,” but she could be functional. She could win small battles every day and not even realize that the war she’d been having in her head since birth was still raging on.
“In my experience, alphas prefer not to take weak mates,” Apollo said. “Would you rather have a demigoddess with magic you haven’t even begun to see the extent of yet or a timid, powerless woman who can’t look strangers in the eyes?”
“If I gave a fuck what people thought of me, I would have gotten married to any-damn-body a year ago.”
“What would you sacrifice to restore her?”
“Anything.” The word slipped out of his mouth before he could give the matter proper consideration.
Even as Apollo’s lips quirked upward and he tapped his fingertips together like the perfect archetype of a villain, Blue still didn’t doubt that he’d gotten it right the first time.
He loved that woman more than he ever would have thought possible. His thoughts were consumed by her. He was driven to comfort her, provide for her, be a companion for her.
If he’d been ten or fifteen years younger, Blue wouldn’t have been ready for her. Things often had a way of unfolding on their own schedule, in spite of interference.
“Anything, then.” Apollo tapped his fingertips some more. As wide as his smile was, it didn’t reach the corners of his eyes. There was no joy in it, just the kind of satisfaction that would make a person feel like he’d won, but the win wouldn’t solve anything.
Nothing Apollo did would make Willa’s mother love him. She was gone. The book on her was closed and history couldn’t be changed.
He could pass on his humiliation to someone else, though. Blue knew he’d be the one to bear the humiliation. He knew it before the god opened his mouth and said, “You want her restored? I’ll restore her. All you need to do is pack up your things and scurry home to Nevada. I’m certain your father would be overjoyed by your homecoming.”
No.
Of all the tributes Apollo could demand, that was the worst.
Lance tightened his grip around Blue’s arm, but he didn’t need to. Blue was so stunned, he couldn’t think, much less move. A minute passed before things began to make sense.
He’d be without his mate. Willa would lose her rock. Things in Maria would be up in the air. Even if the Coyotes didn’t immediately get overtaken by a more powerful pack, they’d still be without a qualified alpha. More stress for Willa that she couldn’t negotiate on her own.
“That is . . . That’s the absolute cruelest thing you could do,” Blue said, giving his head a hard shake. “What is wrong with you? Huh? What’s got you so fucking twisted that you’d get off on making people miserable? And your own daughter, at that?”
“She has been a facet of my misery since she was six weeks old. Perhaps when you’ve had five hundred years of reminders about your mistakes, you can lecture me then. Until that time, I believe it’d be more appropriate that you toe the line.”
“I’m not leaving her.”
Apollo shrugged. “Suit yourself. Her fate is in your hands, as are those of all the people she touches on a daily basis.” He narrowed his eyes and toyed contemplatively with one of his long curls. “Odd, the impact one small person can make in a life, isn’t it?”
Lance loosened his grip on Blue’s arm as Apollo turned to examine some detail in the statute.
Shoving his hands through his hair with anger and frustration, Blue turned to his lieutenant and looked at him.
He didn’t know what to say. Didn’t know what to do.
If he’d nev
er picked up that coin, maybe they’d never be in the quandary, but that didn’t seem quite right. Apollo would have found some other way to share his misery. He would have doggedly pursued a means to spread the torment around. He would have waited as long as he needed to for a plan to play out, because he had countless years to waste.
Blue was just a sucker who’d walked into the mess. Willa was the real victim.
“All I wanted to do was protect her from him,” Blue whispered to Lance, bewildered. “I don’t know if I can.”
“This isn’t your fault. You couldn’t have known.”
Lance was right. Blue couldn’t have known. Even with years of study about ancient cultures and having read the jaw-dropping tales of the gods’ exploits, he couldn’t have prepared for such manipulation.
He was just a pawn. Apollo’s. His father’s.
He’d tried to take a stand on his own, and he’d failed.
Fuck.
“I’m going to have to let her go,” he said in a fraught undertone. “We’ll all have to go if I can’t stay.”
Blue knew the exact moment the significance of the statement settled into Lance’s brain because his expression, usually so cool and free of emotion, went stark with panic.
He didn’t want to get dragged back to Sparks any more than Blue did, but they wouldn’t have a good choice if Blue didn’t have his own pack. They’d have two options—get reabsorbed back into OG’s pack and toe the line, or to formally tender their intent to dissociate. If they did that, they’d be sitting ducks to every Coyote that crossed their paths. They’d be barred from crossing territories of OG’s allies.
A pack of four wasn’t strong enough when they’d already made so many enemies.
“I’m sorry,” he whispered to Lance.
Lance let out a humorless scoff. “Just when we were starting to get optimistic.”
“I know.”
“Take care of Willa. We’ll figure out the rest. We always figure something out.”
“Yeah. We always do.” Blue gave Lance’s shoulder an affectionate squeeze and then turned to meet his fate. “You get what you want this time,” Blue said to Apollo.
The god turned, wide-eyed, disingenuous with his hand pressed over his heart in mock surprise.
“Come off it. We’re going. You’re going to pull that magic off her, and then you’re going to stay the hell away from her. Funny how the gifts you give her tend to always break her in some new way.”
“Fine.” Apollo made a dismissive, go-away flick of his hand.
That did it. Blue hated that word, fine. He hated the lie that was almost always in it.
He could ignore a lot of slights, but having the gravity of the circumstances dismissed sent him over the edge.
His fist hit Apollo’s face more times than he could count, each swing angrier and harder than the last, and he was screaming without words, making primal noises that could have wakened the dead in the nearby cemetery. Apollo didn’t move. His face didn’t break the way Blue wanted it to. No crushing of bones. No blood.
Just a ferocious surge of heat that flared just before Lance yanked Blue back, and then back again when Apollo lunged at him, snarling with his perfect teeth bared.
And then the bastard, with not a single bruise on his face, vanished, leaving his laughter echoing in the courtyard.
I just got fucking played.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
“Where’s Diana?” Quinn asked Willa the following Wednesday morning at school.
Willa shrugged and handed the child back the sheet of concert music she’d had to edit. They had a concert in less than thirty-six hours, and everything felt up in the air.
Even more so than usual.
She’d lost some days. She’d dozed off on Saturday and had woken up on Tuesday night to find Lola Perez sitting in her living room, knitting, and Willa’s Coyotes gone.
Lola had put down her needles, cleared her throat, and said, “I am sorry. Your father made them go.”
Lola had probably meant for the candid statement to be like a Band-Aid getting ripped off. Endure the ache and then figure out how to fix what had caused the bruise, but Willa couldn’t fix anything. Evidently, she wasn’t allowed to be happy for more than a day at a time.
Blue had just up and left. He’d been communicating with her father and hadn’t said anything to her about it. She was stuck in some fragile emotional state between seething anger and crippling despair.
And he’d left a letter she hadn’t been able to read all the way through.
She’d pushed it up from the envelope and had read the first couple of lines before flinging it away.
If I’d had time to convince you, I would have told you I love you. Would you have believed you’re my mate?
Perhaps she was naive and inexperienced in such matters, but she didn’t think that was how love was supposed to work. Love wasn’t supposed to wring people out and make them hollow. What she felt was some toxic thing eating away at her heart, infecting her brain and telling her that sadness and loneliness were her birthrights.
She’d never be happy, and her grandmother had been wrong. Everything would never be all right with her.
She was never going to be fine.
Get it together. Kids are here.
Willa forced a smile onto her face and gave Quinn’s shoulder an encouraging squeeze. “Maybe we’ll hear from her soon. She must be really busy.”
“I guess so.” Quinn retreated to her seat.
And as before, Willa perched on her stool, picked up her baton, and retreated into herself.
Just keep busy, and then you’ll forget.
Believing that lie wasn’t going to be an easy thing anymore.
• • •
The following afternoon, Willa left concert setup in the capable hands of the band boosters and went home to walk King. She didn’t feel like engaging with all those chattering mothers, who were always so enthusiastic and excited, when Willa was feeling anything but.
She was heartsore. Used up.
Tired.
Unlike in the past, she hadn’t been kept up late with nightmares and from replaying memories in her head about things so far in the past that even the ghosts of them were dead. She was mentally rehashing the recent past, wondering what she could have done differently.
If she’d been more assertive in telling people who her father was, perhaps she could have asked for help sooner. If they’d known, so much of her frustration could have been prevented, but she’d crawled into her turtle shell and used her usual strategy of saying nothing.
She should have known she couldn’t live like that. It was dangerous, and there was no one else to blame.
King strained on his leash, and she looked up from the sidewalk to see Tiny’s truck and no line.
“Okay. Maybe something small.”
King took off like a bolt, and she could barely keep up in her exhausted state.
Tiny wasn’t at the window. His mother was.
“Hi, Ms. Minnie. Where’s Tiny?”
Ms. Minnie shrugged. “I’m captain of the ship tonight.” She gestured outside the window to either side. “That why no competition. See? No burrito cart.” She muttered something in Spanish about opportunistic losers and permit issues.
Willa pressed her lips tightly together and choked back a laugh. One simply didn’t laugh at Ms. Minnie. She was an institution . . . and she was the only one who knew the churro recipe.
“What you want?” Ms. Minnie asked. “Something greasy? You skinny.”
Willa looked down at her wrinkled clothes and the weary body holding them up. “I . . . guess I lost a little weight.” The fact she’d been passed out for several days likely had a little something to do with that.
“Didn’t have much to spare. Slow down a little.”
“If I slow down too much, I may stop and never start up again,” she confessed absently.
So pitiful.
Ashamed, she pressed a hand to her
eyes and rubbed away the sting. She hadn’t meant to say those words. They’d been in her brain, always in the back of her mind. Her constant dysfunction. She didn’t think a tough old broad like Ms. Minnie would understand, but when she dropped her hand, she found Ms. Minnie looking down with nothing but concern in her gaze.
“Not so good . . . to be alone.” Ms. Minnie rattled the end of her spatula against the window’s metal ledge. “You need a tribe.”
“There aren’t so many people like me.”
“Don’t need to be like you. Just need to understand you. As long as you make sense to someone, that’s what matters.”
“I thought I had that.”
Blue had tried to make sense of her, and she thought he’d actually come close to making sense of the puzzle she was. And he’d wanted to for reasons that had nothing to do with the pack. He’d wanted her. She’d been so close to having someone who was hers. She understood that he’d left to spare her from Apollo, but he hadn’t even asked. He’d cut her out of the loop yet again. She would have tried to endure him if only Blue had told her.
You didn’t have to go, Blue.
“I did have that,” she amended, accepting the paper napkin Ms. Minnie held out to her. She wiped her eyes and blew her nose. “I had that, and then he left and took his sister and lieutenants with him.”
Her own little tribe, filled with domineering dogs. She’d scorned them before, but they’d been exactly what she needed. She could trust them to do what she couldn’t. Maybe their methods weren’t hers, but they were the right ones for Maria.
“We all make mistakes, eh?” Ms. Minnie said. “You’re young. You’ll be okay.”
Willa snorted. “I’m probably five times your age.”
“You’re young here.” Ms. Minnie tapped her temple. “That’s what matters.”
“I want to believe you.”
“Mistake not to. Oye, chica. Wait there.” Ms. Minnie disappeared into the depths of the truck, and after a couple of minutes of rattling around, returned with a greasy white bag bulging at the bottom. “Last of the stewed chicken. Not for dog. Give him the runs.”
Willa was pretty sure King didn’t understand the nuances of the English language, but he must have sensed his dinner wasn’t in that bag because he let out a doleful whimper.