“They represent memories from my childhood.” I turned the rock over with my finger. “My mother. My dad. My sister.”
“It couldn’t be bad, could it?” Her bare toes curled against the grass. “The wards protect you, right?”
That was the sticking point, wasn’t it? “No one with ill intent could get close enough to reach the first step. Whatever this means, whoever is leaving the items, I don’t think they want to hurt me.” My brow puckered. “Which leaves the question of—what do they want? Why leave these items?” I checked the eggs, but there was nothing more to them. “I’ll ask Isaac if he can set up surveillance.” He kept his door locked during what he considered normal business hours except in case of emergency. Since I wasn’t sure this qualified, I shot him a quick text with my concerns and my request. “I want to know what this is about, and if it’s linked to the selection or something else.”
The something else being Bessemer, but I needed hard evidence before calling out the alpha.
“I wish Cord was here.” Her face scrunched. “I mean, really here. Not just wolf here.”
“Me too,” I admitted.
Dell’s arms were around me, squishing me with her warg strength, before it registered she meant to hug me.
“I miss him.” The admission left my throat tight. “I want him back.”
I worried that his being furry was permanent. I’d never owned a pet, and I wouldn’t own him, but he might as well be one if he never rose off four legs again.
“It will be all right.” A big squeeze. “He’ll come back to us. I know he will.” She worried her bottom lip between her teeth. “I have to go before Meemaw comes after me with a switch in her hand.” She darted toward the woods. “I’ll be back later to train with you and Isaac. We’ll talk more then.”
Training. Ugh. The session with Isaac had helped. My attack on Imogen was proof of that. I’d recalled enough warg magic to rip out her throat. The adrenaline boost had been enough that I’d completed the most intricate change I’d ever made, notwithstanding my full transformation into Lori, of course.
“See you later,” I called back, marveling that I was now the type of person who said such things and meant them, and returned my attention to the geode. It weighed heavy in my hand and on my mind.
A hard bump sent me bouncing off the doorframe as Graeson padded into the yard, and I dropped the nest and the eggs, which splattered. At first I thought he meant to follow Dell, and the tightness in my chest panicked me. I should want the wolf out of my house, shouldn’t I? Being with his pack might help him heal in ways I couldn’t.
I understand him better than they do.
It was a selfish thought, but I couldn’t shake the rightness of the sentiment once it occurred to me.
The delicate tickle of the wards caressed me as I ventured out into the sun. Aunt Dot must have dialed up their strength in the wake of Graeson’s rampage. Out here birds called. Bugs chirped. Leaves rustled. And the wolf made a slow pass, marking every major tree in the clearing before hesitating beside a clump of gnarled vines creating a jagged fence strung between two scrawny pines.
His snuffling noises drew me to him, curious what the wolf found so interesting. I slipped the geode into my pocket to add to my growing collection and followed. He glanced up and saw I had joined him, which he took as an invitation to enter the woods. I trailed after him as he wound around to the back of the brambles and entered through a narrow gap someone had hacked into the dried vines.
Graeson dipped his head to the ground then sneezed, scattering…wrappers? I shoved into the camouflaged hidey-hole and lifted one of the crinkly squares. Clear cellophane crimped on three sides with a ragged gap left in the bottom of the fourth.
“It’s a sucker wrapper.” I brought it to my nose and inhaled, the scent of artificial strawberries cloying.
Movement drew my attention toward a smudge of pink amid the shadowy greens.
A naked girl around the age of seven waved and started toward me. With a shrug to the wolf, I waved back. A few steps closer and her eyes shot wide as they bounced from me to Graeson. She squeaked and, in a burst of magic, her limbs flowed into the fluffiest, most darling puppy I had ever seen. Her pelt was the color of warm caramel, and one of her paws made it look as though she had stepped in a bucket of chocolate that dyed her front leg up to her elbow.
“Hey.” The wild look in her eye had me scrambling toward her. “Wait.”
The pup whirled and vanished in a burst of frenetic energy.
“I wonder what that was about” was my first thought. My second was that now I had an idea of where Isaac could point his security cameras. I shot him an update with a picture attached and the general direction.
Graeson kept his thoughts to himself but marked the area in case whoever was using it decided to come back. I knelt there, eyes stinging from the aroma, and peered through the crisscrossing vines into the clearing.
My trailer sat front and center.
Riffling through the wrappers at my knees, I shook off the creeping sensation that whoever had made this blind was hiding, watching as I tried to make sense their clues. As close as the shelter was to the edge of the woods, and my home, it made a perfect escape route after each delivery.
Questions pelted me like raindrops in a summer storm. Was this Bessemer’s doing? Or Aisha’s? Since they shared mental space, did it really matter? Did the wrappers indicate they had spent a significant amount of time here or simply that they had a sweet tooth?
More troubling was the possibility the girl was involved. She certainly seemed to be heading straight for the blind, and kids and candy went hand in hand. Would Bessemer stoop so low as to involve a child in his schemes? Or was she curious about the pack’s newest member, wanted to get her first glimpse of a fae, and I was being paranoid?
I had no good answers to any of my conjecture.
Standing, I dodged the wet spots and returned to the safety of the wards and my home. No challengers had arrived to petition me today. Perhaps rumors of my death had been greatly exaggerated, and I would last another day or two in blissful quiet without having to rip or tear or shred my hosts.
I needed to touch base with Thierry. Leaving an email trail was damning enough even if those were more difficult to track. Tempting as it was to dial up the anonymous number I felt certain was Thierry’s burner phone, I couldn’t be sure it didn’t belong to a friend of hers—or to Shaw—and adding phone logs into the mix would give someone looking in the right place a way to track her assistance to what some might consider a rogue agent. Me.
I imagined a cartoon light bulb flashing in the air over my head as I sat at the table, hands falling from my laptop’s keyboard.
Butler, Tennessee.
A clarion moment of recollection vibrated in my skull, and I knew why the name seemed familiar.
The divinations.
The Garzas.
Butler, Tennessee was the site where the witchy Garza brothers had predicted Charybdis would surface had we not stopped the kelpie at Sardis Lake.
The kelpie was dead. Their prediction was nulled. The paper trail leading from Wink to Butler was months old. Whatever Ayer had done there, whatever was meant to lure Charybdis there, those plans had been cancelled out.
Hadn’t they?
There was one way to find out. Time to invite myself over to the Garzas’. “This would be so much easier if you could talk,” I told the wolf snoring on the floor, his fur tickling me where his chin rested on my feet. “Wake up.” I lifted my toes, wiggled them. “We’ve got work to do.”
The wolf wasn’t impressed with my work nonsense and yawned to display sharp teeth.
“Save it.” I pulled on my shoes and grabbed my phone. “If you were going to eat me, you would have done it by now.”
He didn’t disagree, just hefted himself upright and shook out his fur. He was waiting at the door by the time I had my boots laced. I debated texting Isaac to let him know where I was going, but decided against it. He would w
ant details, and I didn’t have time to give them to him.
This would go so much quicker if I could call Dell, but wargs didn’t carry cells. Why bother when they could tap into the pack bond to relay messages? Telepathy was far more dependable than phone service out here in the boonies, which meant Graeson and I were going for a walk.
Wolf on my heels, I set out for Silverback Lane.
Today the shade-dappled path bustled with activity. How so many people had remained hidden from sight boggled the mind. There weren’t enough houses here to accommodate them, so there must be other lanes yet unexplored.
A wisp of a girl gasped as we passed, and my stride hitched. I recognized her. It was the fuzzball from the woods. Eyes wide, she bolted. My muscles tensed to follow, even as my tender calf twinged, but a fae chasing a warg child was a fae asking for a lesson in disembowelment.
Dark blond hair streamed behind her. Pale blue eyes darted a glance over her shoulder. Round face. A gap in her front teeth perfect for holding the handle of a sucker.
Dell would know the girl. I could ask her who she was and if she had a history of mischief.
“I understand congratulations are in order,” a husky voice rolled over my shoulder.
My shoulders snapped straight, and I fixed a neutral expression in place before turning. Graeson mirrored me, leaning his weight against my leg and a bit in front, as if holding me back from lunging. I hadn’t realized my hands were fisted until I noticed the wolf was the one restraining me. Who was I becoming that a wolf called rabid yesterday was today the coolheaded one?
Every instinct tingled at Bessemer’s nearness. His smugness rankled. I wanted to bare my teeth and growl at him. It wasn’t a Gemini instinct. It was pure wolf. The sting of pelt beneath my skin shocked me out of my aggression. I hadn’t tried to recall the warg shape. I hadn’t drawn on magic at all. It had leapt to me, slid under my skin and stretched it taut.
I cleared the gravel from my throat and replied, “Are they?”
The antagonistic bent of the words made me cringe. Graeson shifted his paws, placing one on my boot and leaning all of his weight to that leg as if to say, Zip it.
“Yes, they are.” Imogen joined her alpha in squaring off against me. “I told Bessemer about our fight.”
Of course she did. Tattletale. It was barely a fight.
Gods have mercy, barely a fight and I had almost killed her. Graeson would have gutted her if I’d left her behind.
Was this my life now? This casual violence? This anticipation of teeth and the sting of claws emerging from my fingertips unwelcomed?
No immediate answer came to me, so I stood there and waited for one of them to elaborate.
“Imogen is the most dominate female in our pack, aside from my own lovely Aisha.” Bessemer didn’t spare a single sideways glance at Graeson. He only had eyes for Imogen. “She tells me you bested her.” He paused, perhaps hoping I would contradict her story. I might have, if I had any idea what she’d told him. “None of the other females are willing to fight someone of your…” he rolled a few words around his mouth, “…caliber.”
Lightness spread through my limbs, a weight lifted from my shoulders. “The selection is over?”
“Yes,” he admitted with reluctance. “There’s a formal ceremony, but it requires Cord’s participation.” A smile more at home on a snake than a wolf slithered across his mouth, and it reinforced how well he was matched to his viper of a mate. “There’s also the small matter of the moon.”
“Let me guess,” I sighed, relief vanishing in a blink. “If he hasn’t shifted back to a man by the next full moon, you’ll have him mauled by rabid chipmunks or drop him in a pit of squirrels with his jaws wired shut and a nut pinned under his tongue.”
The buttery rich sound of Bessemer’s laughter disarmed me. “Nothing so barbaric.”
Clearly he and I had very different ideas of barbarism. I glanced between them. “What then?”
“He’s expelled from the pack,” Imogen said, once it became apparent Bessemer was content to keep me in the dark. “The longer a warg stays in his wolf skin the more animal he becomes until there’s no coming back. Some can last days, some weeks. A few of the more dominant wolves are capable of retaining their humanity for months. Past that…”
“Past that he’s no longer a warg,” Bessemer finished for her. “He’s a wolf, and what use do I have for a pet?”
The sting of claws piercing my skin as they curved over my fingertips anchored me. Smelling the blood welling in my palms, Graeson shifted his gaze to me. This time it was more of an urgent shut it than his earlier and more polite zip it. Clearly Graeson-as-wolf comprehended more of the subtext than I gave him credit for, but I wasn’t backing down from this.
“He’s a dominant warg,” I argued.
“He’s a broken warg.” Bessemer curled his lip. “He sits at your feet, looks to you for guidance, as if you are his master.”
That was the problem in a nutshell, and it might or might not have had something to do with me. Graeson had told me himself he’d been off even before Marie’s death. From my perspective, made stunningly clear by Bessemer’s urgency to expel, kill and/or tame him, the issue wasn’t who he looked to for guidance, but the simple fact that he no longer looked to Bessemer.
Graeson was an alpha in the making. When he returned from the place where his grief had spiraled him, and I had to believe he would, and soon, Bessemer expected retribution. He expected challenge. He expected Graeson to be out for blood. And he was wise to feel Graeson-as-wolf’s breath on his nape, hot and moist and tangy with blood as yet unspilled.
“I am no one’s master, and if Graeson is broken, it’s because you crushed his sanity beneath your boot when you stamped out the pack bond.”
“A mating should strengthen each partner. I had to act, the sooner the better, to wake him up before it was too late.” Bessemer hissed between his teeth. “This choice the two of you made will destroy you both. I won’t let it take my wolves with you.”
The snarl curling my lip caused Graeson’s ears to twitch forward, and Imogen to step back. I’d fought for him, bled for him, and he was mine. Instinct roared in my ears, and fur stung my arms as the needlelike hairs pressed through my skin.
That night, belly rounded with Graeson’s cooking and happy to be in his company, I had weighed the value of his choice against pack expectation. Later, with Imogen, I had measured duty to his race against what he might contribute to his pack—full-blooded children—and wondered if I had any right to erase those future babies with hazel eyes and wolfen souls. But then it had been me or her. In a flash of consequence where choice had been ripped asunder, I’d saved us.
My life.
His soul.
I had protected him from waking with dried blood in the corners of his mouth and the burden of knowledge that he had brought me here, to his home, as his guest, and he and his people had killed me with his jaws and their prejudice.
And I had no regrets.
Bessemer and Imogen clammed up, and I had a second to wonder why before I saw the reason dart down the hill and slam into his leg. Naked as the day she was born and covered in mud, the child who had waved at me in the forest climbed onto his hip and planted a smacking kiss on his cheek.
“Look at this.” She dangled a dead squirrel in front of his nose. “Now you don’t have to go hunting tonight. I caught dinner for us.”
“Emily, Emily, all teeth and claws. I’m impressed.” He regarded the little mud ball, pride sparking from every pore. “Take it to Aisha and tell her to clean it. We can have stew for dinner.”
“Okay, Daddy.”
Daddy?
That same cartoon light bulb was back and brighter than ever. I didn’t believe in coincidence, and this one was too good to be true. Finding the girl so near the blind wasn’t concrete evidence she was involved in leaving the gifts on my steps, but her proximity added another layer of suspicion that her parents were somehow involved. Yet another
nugget to relay to Isaac.
Done mopping up his praise, Emily turned her attention to the gathering of adults she had interrupted without hesitation. She noticed me standing there for the first time and froze halfway to the ground.
“It’s all right.” He patted her head. “This is Cord’s…mate. She won’t hurt you.” The ice in his glare rivaled lesser icebergs. “Will you, fae?”
“I don’t harm children.” I tested a smile I hoped conveyed my nonthreateningness to her in case I lucked into an opportunity to question her later. “It’s nice to meet you, Emily.”
Bessemer’s gaze scythed between us as though sensing there was more to my polite interest in his daughter. Guilty conscience speaking perhaps? His daughter thawed under his regard, wilting until her feet sank into soft grass. There would be no reaching her now, not while her dad was nearby.
“There you are.” A bony hand closed over my elbow. “Did you get turned around again? Dell’s been waiting on you half the day.” Meemaw started as if the folds covering her eyes had prevented her from spotting her alpha until this moment. “Oh dear, I didn’t interrupt?”
“Not at all,” he assured her through tight lips.
Capitalizing on the stalled-out hostilities, Imogen rested her hand on Bessemer’s forearm. “Do you have time to discuss the expansion project?” She patted Emily’s head with yearning clear in her bright eyes. “That’s what brought me to the Lane.”
“Of course,” he said, shooing his daughter ahead of him. “I’m hungry.” His gaze burned hot over Imogen. “Let’s have this conversation somewhere more private.”
A squirming sensation left my gut tight, fear that Imogen was entertaining him to deflect his interest in me. What had changed there? Why was she championing me now? Had I proven my dominance and settled that score? Or had she humored me and let me claim the victory for other reasons? Reasons that involved an opportunity with a male one rung higher on the pack’s social ladder.
The pair set out for the log cabin-style mansion on the rise, and I stared in the direction Emily had gone before a sharp tug at my elbow brought my attention back to Meemaw.
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