by Молли Харпер
Even through the choking gray haze, I could see that my office was trashed. The filing cabinet lay on its side, drawers torn out. My shredded files were strewn across the floor like wounded birds.
Someone had put my wastebasket in the middle of my desk, crammed it full of my paperback books, and set them on fire. The plastic walls of the basket were starting to soften and melt as the flames reached toward the ceiling tiles. Covering my mouth and nose with a bandana, I grabbed the fire extinguisher from the wall and doused the whole flaming mess with white foam. The sterile-smelling chemicals sprayed across my desk and hit the wall with a muted splat. After giving the wastebasket one long, final blast, I took out my work gloves to protect my hands while I heaved the smoking remains out into the parking lot.
I left the door open and propped all of the windows to let the smoke vent. I wiped my streaming eyes with the bandana and searched the ceiling for the blinking light of the smoke detector. As the smoke cleared, I could see the frayed wires dangling from where the device had been yanked from the wall.
I moved closer to my foam-covered desk, opening the drawers and finding the petty-cash box intact and the village checkbook still locked up tight. I ran to the other rooms of the center but found that the damage was limited to my office space.
How had this happened without my hearing anything? Gah, the music. Between my too-loud worship of all things Journey and the noise of the engine, I wouldn’t have heard a Mack truck parking in my office.
Mom and a few of the aunties appeared at my door, gasping in shock at the mess and the smoke. Ignoring their murmurs, I strode out into the street, working up a decent head of steam while I worked through what might have happened. The kids were in school, and most of the adults were at work or indoors. We ran perimeter checks on occasion, but it’s not as if the valley was under twenty-four-hour guard.
I heard the school bell ring down the street, announcing the end of lunch, and paused. The high school kids were allowed to run home for lunch if they wanted. Between the werewolf stuff and the regular human adolescent roller coaster, their bodies went through more food than could be easily carried to school. It was easier for them to run home and scarf down as many calories as possible just to get through the day. “Free lunch” left them unsupervised for a good hour of the day, but we tried to emphasize trust and personal responsibility in the pack. Obviously, that had come back to bite us on the ass.
I marched to the school building and called all five high school students to the office, which was basically the supply closet at the end of the classroom. If I was going to question one of them, I would question them all. Frankly, if one of them had anything to do with the fire, their friends were smart enough to distance themselves by ratting them out. Cousin Teresa gave the little kids busy work and sat with me while I marched the teens away.
Their chatter and teasing died the minute I walked into the tiny room. The kids sat up a little straighter and put on their serious faces. They eyed me solemnly, all long, coltish limbs combined with baby cheeks and huge eyes. Of the five, only three, Ricky, Rebecca, and Benjamin, were able to phase, but they all recognized the authority of the pack leader. They knew that disrespect and sass would get them into trouble with me and then again with their parents. It was a double whammy of adult supervision.
My eyes narrowed at Benjamin and Ricky, the chewing-tobacco enthusiasts whom I’d forced to overindulge to the point of vomiting. They were good kids but had been known to cause more than their fair share of trouble. This included accidentally setting my workshop aflame with a badly timed M-80. Had their pyromaniac antics escalated to intentional damage? Were they trying to get back at me for the puking?
“Do any of you have anything to tell me? Something to do with my office?” I asked, giving each of them my best motherly glare. The kids’ eyes went wide, and their mouths clamped shut. “Look, if you did it because you thought it would be funny or you’re upset with me about something, it’s not OK, but I get it. I did a lot of stupid stuff when I was a kid. But it’s better to go ahead and fess up to it and take your licks now than to lie. Because then I’ll be pissed at you.”
Silence. “No one knows who gave my office the arsonist’s makeover?” I asked.
Teresa gasped. “Someone set fire to your office?”
Benjamin, the oldest of the group, shook his shaggy brown head. “Honest, Maggie, we wouldn’t do something like that. My dad’s still pissed at me for the chaw thing.”
“And we’re afraid of you,” Lila added.
The other kids nodded solemnly. I gnawed on the inside of my cheek, focusing all of my energy on keeping my frustration and temper in check. I believed them, which meant that my anxiety over the whole episode had just doubled. It wouldn’t do to explode all over these kids just because I didn’t get the easy answer that I wanted. Breathing slowly through my nose, and getting a nostril full of the smoky stink rising from my jacket, I sighed. “When you were on your way home for lunch, did you see anything strange or see anyone who isn’t part of the pack wandering around?”
The kids shook their heads.
“We just heard that crappy old-timer music you like blaring from the shed,” Ricky said, smirking at me. Ricky was the resident smart-ass, which sort of endeared him to me. Rebecca, his twin, elbowed him in the ribs.
My mouth twitched. That smart-ass little answer was exactly what I needed to snap my mood back into place. I kept my voice level but serious. “OK, until I say otherwise, I want you guys to keep an eye on the little kids,” I told them. “And if you see anyone you don’t recognize walking around, tell the nearest pack member. Don’t try to approach them yourselves.” I saw Benjamin bristle a little. “Even though you are all clearly bad-asses.”
Benjamin smirked, appeased.
“Well, how about we skip the history quiz this afternoon?” Teresa suggested. The kids whooped and hollered. Teresa added, “And as a community service project, you can go over to the center and help Maggie clean up her office.”
“Aww.” The kids groaned.
Teresa lifted her brow.
“I mean, yaaaay,” Ricky said in the least convincing cheerful voice ever.
I laughed. “I’d appreciate it, kids.”
“Shouldn’t you call the cops?” Teresa asked as the teens filed out of the room.
“I sort of am the cops around here,” I reminded her. Teresa had lived in Portland for a while, after getting engaged to a male from one of the local packs. She lived there for two years, an incredibly long engagement for a were, before deciding that he wasn’t a good match, and moved back home. Her mother had told my mother that the bastard had called it off and mated with a human.
City life had left Teresa a bit out of sorts. She was used to public transportation, restaurants, movie theaters, cooperating with the human authorities . . . .
“Oh, right,” she said, frowning. “It’s just been so long since we’ve had any sort of trouble. I sort of forgot the procedure.”
“It’s OK. Thanks for sending the kids over. I’m pretty sure I have a brigade of aunties helping me already, but the kids will make the job go faster. Do you need anything here at the school?” I asked as she walked me out of the schoolhouse. “Supplies? Snacks?”
“Nope, we’re pretty much covered, as long as I can get the Gilbert kids to stop chewing on the nap-time mats.”
“I miss nap-time.” I sighed.
“Who wouldn’t?” She chuckled, waving me away.
When I arrived at the office, the smoke had all but disappeared. Mom and the aunts and gathered outside the building, whispering among themselves, while the kids worked.
“What a mess.” Mom sighed, kissing my cheeks and checking me over for obvious wounds. “Are you all right?”
“I’m fine,” I promised, wiggling out of her grasp. There were people watching, for goodness sake. “And I’m not sure what happened. We might need to have a pack meeting later, OK? Can you all tell your families?” The women nodded
earnestly. “For right now, how about you go home and let the kids do the heavy lifting? Burn off a little of that energy.”
I heard my aunt Bonnie, Ricky’s mother, whisper, “Please, Lord,” as the ladies dispersed.
I walked into my office and found that Rebecca, the most organized soul in the group, had already started sorting through the papers and trying to salvage some of my ripped file folders. Ricky and Benjamin were in deep conference regarding which caustic substance would best clean the smoke marks from my ceiling.
After convincing them that hydrochloric acid was probably overkill, I directed the others to help me gather my paperbacks and throw what couldn’t be saved into the Dumpster out back. As I leaned over to right my slashed office chair, I caught the faint whiff of a familiar scent. Something clean and floral under the smoke.
Fabric softener. The same sort of April Fresh scent that had lingered on my truck.
I leaned closer, inhaling. It was new, definitely not something that had been clinging to my chair that morning. I tried to circulate through the room and subtly sniff the kids to check if maybe they’d cross-contaminated the chair with their moms’ laundry habits.
But kids today, what with the Dateline sex-predator exposés, notice when an adult sniffs them. Frankly, that made me feel better about the kids’ survival instincts. And it ended up being an exercise in unnecessarily creepy futility, because none of them smelled April Fresh. Spring Meadow? Mountain Breeze? Sure. But not a whiff of April Freshness.
I didn’t know what to make of it. I believed the kids when they said they didn’t barbecue my office. And we hadn’t had a stranger wander into town for random vandalism in, well, ever. And I couldn’t shake the odd coincidence that the undercarriage of my truck had smelled like dryer sheets. Who the hell would want to cut the brakes on my truck? Or toss my office? One act seemed rather serious, while the other just annoyed the hell out of me and cost me a new wastebasket. And who the hell used so much fabric softener that it obliterated all other traces of their natural scent?
Eli. The pack’s former alpha would have thought of something like that as he was terrorizing and attacking people near Cooper’s home in Grundy—Susie Quinn, a couple of teenage hikers, Abner Golightly. Cooper had been convinced that he was doing it himself, that he was having some sort of wolf blackout, which was exactly what Eli wanted him to think.
Cooper had a harder time remembering his time as a wolf than most of us. The more time a wolf spends with the pack, the clearer memories are during the phasing. There was a sort of collective memory among us, which could be unfortunate, given some of the stupid shit Samson pulled while on four legs. Since Cooper had spent nearly two years away from the pack, he was practically an amnesiac. When people started dying and Cooper thought it was possible that he could hurt Mo, he thought his only option was to leave.
Eli would have pulled something sneaky and backhanded like messing with my truck or setting fire to the “seat of my authority.”
But Eli was dead, which left me without a suspect list.
CHAPTER 8
Battle Scars
I CIRCULATED THROUGH THE VILLAGE, warning the older members of the pack to keep an eye out. And able-bodied pack members were going to be running perimeter a lot more often. We didn’t want the police traipsing around the valley. I couldn’t run fingerprint analysis on my own truck or my office door. So, beyond increased patrols, there wasn’t much I could do.
And that’s what had me on four legs, running along the lip of the valley on a Monday evening. Well, I was supposed to be running along the edge of the valley.
After Uncle Frank mentioned our possible intruder problem, Lee had shown up with “reinforcements,” big burly males from his pack to help run patrols. I think he saw it as some sort of courting gesture, a “see how well we will all work together when the two packs are in-laws” thing. He kept trying to organize us into pairs and send the troops to “strategic locations” in the valley, but he didn’t know where those points were. And again, he just wasn’t that smart.
The meeting spiraled into a chaotic mess, and it took Samson bellowing “Shut the hell up!” at the chattering mob of weres before I could get everyone calmed down and paired off.
Of course, Lee refused to be paired with anyone but me. But I’d managed to ditch him just outside the village while he was distracted. I took off through a tight passage under a bunch of scrub pines. He was too big to fit through and hadn’t managed to catch up to me in more than an hour.
Wandering aimlessly in the dusky, purpling woods, I wondered where Clay was. He’d been paired up with Teresa. I’d planned on partnering him with Samson, but my cousin suddenly had to pee during the assignments. He came back in just as Alicia stepped through the door, eager for a day outside since my mother had offered to watch the boys. And somehow, conveniently, Samson was the only wolf left without a partner.
My big dumb cousin could be downright devious sometimes. His interest in Alicia was an interesting development. It was a little strange, as werewolf males didn’t typically spark on widows, particularly widows with children. But if Alicia made Samson happy, I’d help negotiate for her paw myself.
On the other hand, Teresa was showing clear interest in Clay, which was a problem. Clay and I had gone on two dates so far, and we’d had a great time together. Clay could take my mind off the stresses of the pack, but I didn’t forget myself completely. It felt safer being with him than the constant emotional carnival ride I seemed to be stuck on with Nick. But how was that was going to work with Teresa? I hated to think of her seeing us and feeling jealous, upset, alone. She’d already been screwed over by Cupid once. Maybe I could try setting her up with one of Lee’s packmates. Some of them seemed smarter than he was, though not as handsome.
I was considering the various blind-date candidates when I caught the April Fresh scent of fabric softener lingering on the wind. I bolted after it blindly. Tactically, it was a stupid thing to do. But after tumbling that scent over and over in my head for nearly a week, it drew me like a beacon. My legs seemed to devour the ground as I raced through the trees, following the scent all the way to the town limits of Grundy.
I was running toward Cooper’s house, my feet crunching on the frosted ground. The faint, shadowy outline of the moon was rising high over the trees. I lost the scent somewhere near the little brook that babbled through Cooper’s backyard. It just disappeared. I slowed to a trot and tried to find some hint of it on the breeze, but I got nothing.
Suddenly, the hair on the back of my neck rose with some electric charge. The faintest trace of that smoky-moss and Sunday-lunch smell wafted around my head. Nick was somewhere near.
And he wasn’t alone.
I dashed through the underbrush, charging headlong toward Nick. I broke through the tree line to find him sitting in the clearing, talking in a conversational tone to a huge tawny male wolf that was staring at Nick as if he were on the menu.
Seriously, what does it take to keep one human alive? It was as if he was the anthropological Evel Knievel.
I growled, announcing my presence to the male timber. Keeping his eyes on Nick, the wolf rounded his body toward me. He wasn’t about to give up Nick, which had me worried. Most sane wolves try to shy away from human contact whenever possible. This one was treating Nick like prize prey. Using one last quick burst of running energy, I threw myself between man and wolf. I felt Nick retreat behind me, as if he’d finally caught on that something wasn’t quite right.
I widened my stance, making myself look as large as possible, and growled. The timber’s lip curled away from his fangs, and he grumbled back. He advanced, thinking that because I was smaller, I would back down. I stepped forward, thumping my head against his chest and throwing my shoulder into him. He snapped his jaws, trying to catch my neck, but I’d slipped back enough to give me room for another shove. He shifted his weight, feinting left and then dashing right. I held, sinking my teeth into his foreleg and dragging him away fro
m Nick, none too gently. He retreated slightly, only to rear up on his hind legs and come at me with its front. I ducked, then leaped up, pushing at his stomach until he fell onto his back.
The male leaped to his feet, gathering at his haunches to lunge at me. I braced myself for the impact and instead ended up dropping to the ground as a high-pitched shrieking noise made my head feel as if it was imploding. It was every annoying sound combined—nails scratching on a chalkboard, tires squealing, my aunt Edie singing. I pressed my head against the ground, rolling my ears against the dirt, just to try to block it out. The noise lessened just a little, allowing me to raise my head.
I looked back to see Nick, on his knees, holding what looked like an air horn. His face tensed as his eyes connected with mine. Did he recognize me? Did he know? Could I persuade him to throw that freaking horn into the woods and never use it again?
The wolf beside me rose wobbily to his feet and seemed to be trying to mount another attack. Cringing, Nick blasted the damn horn again, knocking my legs from under me. I lay there for what felt like hours, praying for the pressure in my ears to subside. The other wolf got tired of writhing on the ground in agony, shook his way to his feet, and dashed off. As soon as he was out of the clearing, Nick laid off the “pain horn.” I whirled around to find him patting the ground for his glasses.
Honestly, I could have strangled him, but at the moment, I didn’t have any thumbs. He reached his hand out, as if he was going to freaking pet me. I barked sharply at him and phased in mid-step.
“What in the name of holy hell where you thinking?” I demanded. “Do you have any idea what could have just happened to you? Do you have instincts that might not lead to your certain death?”
Nick gaped at me, a goofy look of astonishment and happiness twisting his moonlit features. “You’re a werewolf!” he exclaimed.
Damn it. I hadn’t meant to phase back in front of him. I’d just been so mad at him for putting himself in such a stupid situation that I’d put myself in the best form for yelling.