The Cougar's Wish (Desert Guards)

by Holley Trent

  “Yeah.”

  “Well, let’s grab ’em.”

  Tito tugged the pair up from one side and Sean from the other.

  “Where’d you find them?” Tito asked the Coyote alpha.

  The alpha turned his head and spit as if the discussion had put a sour taste in his mouth. “Word gets around. Our kin in Oklahoma City caught them driving through.”

  “And you thought to pass them off to us because of what they’d done?”

  “No. I thought to sell them to you. They’re worth something to you, right?”

  With his dark eyes narrowed, Tito ground his teeth.

  The alpha flicked a dismissive hand in their direction. “Get ’em out of here. Thank the airhead for the gift. I wouldn’t have given you shit if I didn’t owe her.”

  “I’d say you owe her for calling her names, but that’s between you and her,” Tito said.

  He and Steven got the gagged and bound couple moving toward the trucks.

  Dr. Sheehan muttered angrily as they hustled along, his feet catching against rocks and dips in the ground as they walked because he was too busy snarling at Tito rather than watching where he was going.

  “He’s not very graceful for a cat, is he?” Steven asked.

  Tito scoffed. “Never was, best I can remember.”

  The Sheehans had missed some things since they’d been out on the run. They didn’t know what they were going home to and that their goddess had been in their glaring, watching them for the past sixty years ... or that her son was currently having a hand in their retrieval.

  Mason had no intention of telling them, figuring that if the calculating goddess lashed out at them, it was on them and that they’d deserve every blow they got.

  Belle jumped out of Hannah’s SUV, pushing her sunglasses up her nose and knitting her brows at them. “Where are you going to put them?”

  “Back of my truck,” Tito said. “Figured I’d take the scenic route. Treat them to some fresh air and a few hard knocks, you know.”

  “I’ll ride with them,” Sean said. “Belle, you can either ride with me or with those two knuckleheads.” He crooked his thumb toward the second row of the SUV where Edgar and Ralphie sat. Ralphie’s nervous gaze flitted all over.

  Then she looked at the elder Sheehans and cringed.

  “Neither sounds like a very great option. I either get pinned into close proximity with three Coyote men or two.”

  “Okay, let’s swip-swap so there won’t be any problems,” Hannah said. “Toss Mrs. Sheehan into the SUV with me, and let me have Ralphie. Steven, you drive. I’ll watch them from the third row. Belle, you take shotgun. Sean, you ride with Tito and keep an eye on Edgar and Dr. Sheehan. We cool?”

  Everyone muttered their assent, except the Sheehans, of course.

  At the sound of shuffling feet behind them, they turned, and Steven found that woman behind him—Jill—ashen-faced and watching. She looked tired. Or maybe more than that—beat down.

  “What’s up, Jill?” Sean asked.

  She cringed, seemingly on a delay—as if it had taken Sean’s words an extra second to reach her ears and then more to decide they were threatening. “I ... just wanted to tell you that I’m leaving. Tell Mason. Okay?”

  “Leaving?” Belle asked. “Where are you going?”

  The tired lady shrugged. “Anywhere that’s not here. Might go home.”

  “Home?”

  Jill nodded slowly. “New York State. Pointless to stay here. My mate’s dead, and I can’t be around Nicky right now. I’m no good for him.”

  “What happened to your mate?”

  Jill laced her fingers against her belly and took on a faraway look. She wasn’t looking at Belle, but seemingly through her.

  “Shit.” Belle let out a breath and put her hands on Jill’s shoulders, rubbing. “It’s okay. I’ll tell Mason whatever you want.”

  Steven wondered what Belle saw in Jill’s expression that he didn’t. The words must have been the right ones, though, and the touch exactly what Jill needed, because Jill’s gaze focused and her hollow cheeks suddenly flushed bright red. “And Ellery. Tell her I ...”

  “Hey. It’s okay. You don’t need to tell her anything. She’s going to take care of Nick, and she’s not going to let him forget who his mother is.”

  Jill nodded and choked back a sob. “I’ll be back, maybe. One day.”

  Belle kept rubbing, and the longer she did, the clearer Jill’s gaze became and the wetter her eyes.

  “Do you need a ride to somewhere?” Belle asked softly.

  “Bus station, maybe.”

  Hannah canted her head toward the SUV. “Go on. Get in.”

  After a moment’s hesitation, Jill climbed up into the back-most seat. Hannah closed the door almost all the way and mouthed, “Weird.”

  “Not for a Foye,” Sean said. He’d gotten the ropes around the elder Sheehans undone and tossed one to Hannah. He used the other to retie Dr. Sheehan and got him moving toward the truck. Hannah bound Mrs. Sheehan’s hands and put her up into the SUV.

  “What isn’t weird for a Foye?” Steven asked Hannah when she’d closed the door again.

  “It’s hard to explain because you’re not a shifter, so you can’t feel the energy we put out. I guess the Foyes in general put out a lot of energy. You can feel it when they walk into a room, Mason in particular because he’s alpha, but they all have the same flavor of it. For the most part, they all try to keep it drawn in close to their bodies so they don’t instigate other Cougars. Belle’s, though, is a little different.”

  “Because she’s female.”

  “I think that’s a big part of it. When Mason pushes energy around, it’s usually to get people to back away or change behavior. But Belle makes people calmer, assuming she wants to get close enough to them.”

  “People or just shifters?” Calm sure as shit wasn’t what he felt when he was around her. Perturbed? Yep. Frustrated? Plenty. Stimulated? In far too many ways.

  That last one was the worst. His romantic relationships over the past five or six years averaged about eleven hours in length. Long enough for the requisite public date, the private fuck, and the walk of shame to his truck the morning after. He wasn’t fit to be with anyone for much longer than that, and he certainly wasn’t going to do his “hit it and quit it” routine with Belle Foye. He reserved that for women he knew he never had to see again. Seeing as how his sister was almost certainly going to marry her brother, he didn’t think avoiding her would be feasible long term.

  “Okay. Shifters, I guess,” Hannah said. “I don’t really know the extent of it. She doesn’t talk about it, and she certainly doesn’t discuss her capacity with Mason, but I’ve been paying attention to her lately. Just watch her. See what happens the next time she’s around someone who’s really upset.”

  “Will do.” Steven held out his hand for the keys, and Hannah dropped them into his palm.

  “How’s your morning going?” she asked.

  “Just fine. I sure wouldn’t mind having a nap sometime today, though. Can’t close your eyes for ten seconds around that one.”

  Hannah winced. “Well, maybe I’ll come over later with the girls, and you can catch an hour of sleep.”

  “I’d be most appreciative.”

  Hannah snapped her fingers. “Oh, shit. Actually, today’s bad. As soon as we get the Sheehans stowed away, we need to meet with Ellery’s brothers-in-law about what they’re going to do about the hellmouth. Closing it is going to require some coordination with the local witches, and they want to get it right the first time.

  Steven sighed dramatically. “I guess I’ll sleep when I’m dead.”

  “That’s the spirit.” Hannah gave him a thump on the back and pulled the back door open. She climbed into the back next to Jill, and Steven shut the door.

  He took the driver’s seat and glanced over at Belle as he adjusted the mirrors and fixed the seatbelt over his body.

  She stared out the window, like
ly at the gathering of Coyotes who were huddled around their bikes chatting.

  He stabbed the key into the ignition and navigated slowly through the arid field back to the dirt road they’d taken to access the meeting point. Tito followed close behind.

  No one said anything until they were back on county-maintained road and the ride was a little less bumpy. Hannah called up from the backseat, “I got a text from Mason. He’s been in touch with the sheriff. The sheriff’s agreed to let us keep the Sheehans at the county jail.”

  Mrs. Sheehan shook her head wildly and grunted loudly.

  From the backseat, Jill scoffed and muttered something about the lady getting what was due to her.

  Mrs. Sheehan whipped her head around and glowered at Jill, whose gaze was focused out her window.

  “Come on, keep your blame. You’re a shitty person,” Jill said quietly. “I hope everybody knows that and doesn’t treat you any different just because you’re supposed to be a lady. You’re no lady.”

  Mrs. Sheehan made some more of those bleating protests, and Jill closed her eyes and settled down lower in her seat. “Not a lady at all, are ya? At least I tried to do what was right with my kid. More than I can say for you.”

  Steven looked from the rearview mirror to Belle, who simply shrugged and crossed her legs at the knees.

  “Why do I get the suspicion your sheriff has other things he wants to hold them on?” he asked.

  “He probably does. Well, for all of them except Ralphie. I don’t imagine Ralphie’s gotten into much trouble on his own besides what they’ve incited him to do.”

  Ralphie nodded hard a few times, and then shouted, “Ow!”

  Mrs. Sheehan’s arms may have been bound, but her feet were free. She’d probably given the teen’s shin a hard kick.

  “No way to know which of them is telling the truth at any given time, is there?”

  “Mmm, maybe if you put folks like Hannah and Tito in a room with them, collectively, they would be able to. They have different skills.”

  “Why Hannah?” Ralphie asked, and Steven wondered if they should have found something to gag the kid with.

  Belle turned around in her seat to look at him. “Hannah’s the glaring’s avenger.”

  Mrs. Sheehan made a noise that sounded like a muffled “Damn it.”

  “What’s an avenger?” Ralphie asked.

  Hannah chuckled in the back seat.

  Belle turned back around and crossed her legs in the other direction. “I guess you didn’t catch wind of that while you were on the run. The avenger is the glaring’s balancer. She’s the righter of wrongs.”

  Jill leaned forward and tamped down Mrs. Sheehan’s gag. “Go ahead and say what you’ve got to say, lady. Make it good.”

  “We haven’t had an avenger in fifty years,” Mrs. Sheehan said tartly. “Certainly we didn’t have one come out of the woodwork now just because Edgar was feeling a bit ambitious. It’s natural for a young man to want to lead.”

  “Oh, put the gag back,” Belle said, groaning.

  Jill fixed the gag and patted the bird’s nest of hair on top of Mrs. Sheehan’s head. The ol’ girl had probably had a rough day.

  “She didn’t come out of the woodwork, as you put it,” Belle said, “simply because your family is the gum on the bottom of the glaring’s shoes. There were other reasons, but since she has the job, she’s going to do all parts of it. You know, you’re lucky she has a soft spot for kids, or Ralphie would have been riding tied to the top of this SUV rather than inside it.”

  “I swear, I wasn’t supposed to scratch anyone!” Ralphie said. “I just panicked.”

  Hannah leaned up between the seats. “Oh, I know. But here’s the thing. You were hiding on the ranch for days, probably knowing that if Mason caught up to Edgar or your father that he was going to put a hurting on them. I understand loyalty. Really, I do. You see that guy behind the steering wheel?”

  Steven looked up into the rearview mirror in time to see Ralphie turn to glance at him.

  “That’s my brother. Well, one of them. He’s the one I like of the three.”

  Steven snorted.

  “We don’t always get along, and sometimes he does really stupid stuff, but I still love him to death. That doesn’t mean I’d go along with whatever he wanted me to do if I thought it was wrong. Family or not, sometimes you have to break free of doing the wrong thing and stick your neck out, even if it means being an outlier.”

  “Um rahytor,” Mrs. Sheehan murmured.

  A traitor, Steven thought she’d said.

  He shook his head and concentrated on the lines of the road. “Man, I thought my mother was a piece of work, but lady, you take the cake. I didn’t want to believe your family was as screwed up as Hannah made out because I like to give folks the benefit of the doubt, but there’s not a damned thing redeemable about you, is there?”

  Mrs. Sheehan muttered something that was probably vulgar behind her gag.

  “Just save it,” Belle said quietly. “You did this to yourselves. We might have had some leniency for Ralphie if he hadn’t scratched Hannah and if he’d asked us for help, but he didn’t do the right thing.”

  “You would have helped me?” Ralphie asked.

  Belle turned around yet again in her seat and said nothing for a while. She just looked back at the teen as if to determine whether he was speaking words or just garbage. “You know, even if we didn’t trust you, we would have tried to help you. That’s the way it’s supposed to work, right? Else what’s the point of there being an alpha? If you take your concerns to the alpha, he’ll find a way to correct your circumstances as much as he can.”

  “Mason hates us.”

  “Mason dislikes you, not hates you. There’s a difference. My brother isn’t a cold man, and he wouldn’t turn his back on you if you asked him for help. If you were afraid to approach him, you could have said something to Ellery.”

  “Scared of her, too.”

  “Yeah, you should be. She’s not thrilled about what you guys did, locking her up in that bunker, and we’re lucky she stuck around anyway. You tried to break the connection between her and Mason, and you failed. She’s angry that you tried, sure. If you try it again, she might do a little more than make you wet your pants.”

  Steven caught Ralphie’s flinch in the rearview mirror, and it told him that Belle wasn’t speaking in hypotheticals. “Someone’s gonna have to tell me that story,” he said to her.

  She cut him her patented breathe fumes and die look.

  He shook his head and focused on the road again.

  Obviously, negative reinforcement wasn’t working so well on him when it came to Belle. Try as he might not to look at her in that certain kind of way that could get him beaten up by a bunch of Foyes, she was just so damned pretty. And maybe he liked her a little mean. Made her fun to mess with, immature jerk that he was. Or maybe he liked that she pushed back a little and got him out of his own head. That was a lonely place to be.

  “No one wants to tell the story?” Hannah called up. “All right, then. I’ll tell it since Ellery probably won’t,” Hannah said. “Ralphie could probably give you the firsthand account. Isn’t that right, Ralphie?”

  Ralphie groaned.

  “So, Ellery’s an air witch, right? She can move certain elements around to create disturbances. Not on the scale of what Agatha as a wind goddess can do, but still, Ellery can make you hurt. Apparently, she gave Ralphie a little shock when he got in her way.”

  Ralphie groaned again, and Mrs. Sheehan made an indignant sound behind her gag.

  Hannah leaned up and gave the lady a condescending pat on the shoulder. “Hey. It’s like Sean tells me all the time. We can all do different things, and that’s what makes us special.”

  Steven somehow managed to suppress the snort clicking in his throat. He could imagine the exact voice her sister’s mate had used while making that statement. Sean had probably sounded like a cross between Mr. Rogers and the purple dinosaur
Barney. Then Steven couldn’t help it. He laughed. “Shit.”

  “I think your sense of humor could use some work,” Belle said quietly.

  She talking to me?

  He cut his gaze rightward at the cranky cat, and she was drumming her fingers atop her thigh and grinding her teeth. She wasn’t looking at him, but at the road.

  He had to assume the comment had been directed at him since no one else seemed to have heard it. At least she’s talking. Might as well talk back.

  “Your brothers are funny. If thinking so makes me lowbrow, so be it. I never promised to be classy, dewdrop.”

  “I don’t think I’ve ever heard anyone refer to them as funny.”

  “Well, maybe you don’t get to see the side of them other folks do.”

  “Maybe you’re right. They don’t terrorize you and keep you from exercising your freedom. Maybe they’re a laugh riot, and I can’t see it through all the assholery.”

  Steven sucked in some air. Shit.

  Sure, he could tell her she was probably looking at things the wrong way, but he doubted her perception of her circumstances was the only thing in need of correction. Her actual circumstances could probably do with a little work, too, though maybe not the kind she thought. He’d learned that hard lesson with Hannah. They’d both had to make compromises to mend their relationship. Hannah had been the wounded party, and Steven had to swallow his pride and stop making excuses. She was justified in having her feelings, even if she hadn’t been quite so entitled in thinking he’d done so much to cause them. He was guiltier in not standing up for her than of being the wounding party, but maybe that was just as bad.

  “I’ll just say this.” He pushed the gas pedal down, getting up to the speed of traffic on the highway. “It’s better that they care about you than don’t care.”

  “Hard to feel like that’s the truth sometimes.”

  “And you’re entitled to your skepticism. I’m just an outsider asshole who’s only going to be here for a little while, so lord knows I’m not trying to get into your business. I just have a habit of trying to solve problems wherever I go. I guess it’s the detective part of me.”

  “You could just go.”

  “Okay. Sure. Who do you think they’ll get to shadow you when I leave? Maybe Tito? Darnell? Some other cat you can’t stand?”